Shikast

Our heart has its home in journeying,
but one does not know where its wish will lead it in the end.
---Mir Dard.


a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy..and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! ...Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
---Shakespeare (forgive me, dougal!)

The drawn out look, the withered flesh, the face, finally, fully formed, as if God were judging it for signs, or some revelation of inner trust. The defeated look, where once there was a sparkle and glimmer. How we live is what we are. There's no escaping it. This is life, and this is love.

Not the restless energy (Durer, say) or the quiet, sober, personal piety and devotion of an earlier age. What we see here is similar to his 'Dead Christ', a world without salvation, time unredeemed. From now on western man-which is to say modern men and women-must live on without consolation, must overcome his core tiredness, come to terms with finitude, his own brokenness.

Resignation, fatigue, weariness etched on his face. The world is too much with us. Asceticism is not a solution. But at the end, as at the beginning, there is an opening.

I am not the sound of the blossom's melody,
I am the sound of my own breaking.
---Ghalib.

the falling of the old wall means the wall will be renewed.

the wild blue yonder

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
From green and blue things 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 ...

~~~

Question me an Answer

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)



The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?---- foot-marks.....

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.
--After Rumi

Sat with Rinku and Sarmad for a while. Rinks told of her Buddhist friend who said: haven't you read enough. This struck me and reminded me of: only read as much as you can live. Not a putting away of books, no. But more like a question that is not a question, a kind of answer: what would it be like to have a practical wisdom, to not always look for fragments, or strive for completeness, answers?

At 'Readings' after that. Came across, surprisingly, W.S. Merwin's collected works, A.R. Ammons, Updike, Bellow's Ravelstein, and much more. But I didn't want to even pick up a book!
How good that felt. Even when a car crashed into the back of mine I was strangely calm.

Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said I think, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.

But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, our mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is, ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes us -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.

Most importantly, there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.

What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?

There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...

Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)

A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).

Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).

G. Bataille: To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

It is the unknown that compels us to love. The key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul
D.H.Lawrence.

God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'

Anabasis

For anton:

And Man was created restless
---Q:

Again, I go.

A country here, not mine. What has the world given me but this swaying of grass?

....from the moment when, for the first navigators, a new land was in sight to the moment when they set foot on the shore, from the moment when a certain learned man became convinced that he had witnessed a phenomenon hitherto unknown, to the time when he began to measure the import of his observation-all feeling of duration abolished by the intoxicating atmosphere of chance- a very delicate flame highlights or perfects life's meaning as nothing else can...

I am only counting on what comes of my own openness, my eagerness to wander in search of everything, which, I am confident, keeps me in mysterious communication with other open beings, as if were suddenly called to assemble.

-----Breton

For us moderns there is, perhaps, only this desert, this wandering: worldlessness. The world has flown away, and the land seems strange to our senses. The search is everything. Process and striving-the legacy of Romanticism, Protestantism, capitalism. To live in time (Eliade). But maybe it has always been like this. The world is not the world. We have always lived with absence, with bewilderment. Why lament it now?

Blessed is the man who hears the crash of thunder and doesn't think of home.

--Basho

Part of our soul longs for rest and peace ('the Garden') but part of our soul is anarchic, nomadic. If we 'reflect' the divine then part of us is unknown, cannot be captured by thought or image: a Jewish thought. Burckhardt has an intriguing comment on depictions of heaven: crystalline forms (perfection, completion) and plants (life, growth). A German thought: the soul is forever fading, soaring.


Notes from Badiou:

(a) Xenophon describes the collapse of the old order that gave meaning to the collective presence of the Greeks..after Cunaxa they find themselves brutally deprived of any reason for being where they are. They are nothing now but foreigners in a hostile country...a principle of lostness.

(b) They have only themselves, their own will and discipline to rely on..from now on they must invent their own destiny.

(c) The way home is not a pre-established path. Only by walking, only by wandering, is the path revealed.

Again, I begin.
The root of all politics: hope.

May I run, run, and never find.
---Shah Latif.

Love would never leave us alone

This can be read in more ways than one. Do I only imagine Marley singing this? Wasn't it: 'the past would never leave us alone'?

Why speak of the past if it is truly past?Because that is the way back. All roads lead to..But it is gone. I allow it to slowly slip through my fingers-or at least I like to think so. By doing so nothing is lost. The tree still stands outside my window, bearing witness to my fragmented self. There is no escape. No journeys. Only a return. Desire is always memorable. Creation is always a loving return to the origin..the late style, full of re-vision, open possibilities: the first note contains all others -as well as the unheard.

If we occasionally forget it is only because the pain of remembrance is all the more sweeter, delightful. If I walk in a different city to you do not think my stride has changed any, that my panache is no more. These things were always with us, from time out of mind. Love would never leaves us alone. Yes, eyes grow dim, flesh weary, hands sadder. I am not me, and you are not you. Don't let go, but don't hold on. Mirrors sigh. But still I trace your image, still I hear your voice. Even a distant echo. The walls do not lie. The unconquered flame.

I gave you the beautiful journey
Without her you would not have set out on your way
She has no more to give you
And if you find her poor, I did not betray you
With all your wisdom, all your experience
You understand by now what Ithaka means

---Cavafy

I am a stranger to myself. Is it the land, or Time itself? Is open the same as broken? My voice sounds cracked, crooked, and I speak unfamiliar, barbarian words. But still, for you, I sign my name.

---b.

wolken

The world is a bridge; pass over it but don't build a house on it.

---hadith.

~

"..along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dusk. Three days ago they had inflated over the Atlantic, had waited for a wind from the West, had set out, slowly at first then faster and faster, had flown over the phosphorescent autumn waters, straight to the continent, had unraveled on the Moroccan peaks, had gathered again in flocks on the high plateaus of Algeria, and now, at the approaches to the Tunisian frontier, were trying to reach the Tyrrhenian Sea to lose themselves in it. After a journey of thousands of kilometers over what seemed to be an immense island, shielded by the moving waters to the North and to the South by the congealed waves of the sands, passing scarcely any faster above this nameless country than had empires and peoples over the millennia, their momentum was wearing out and some already were melting into occasional large raindrops..."

What is a cloud, and how can one find one?

One would say that it is the silver dust on a Chinese mirror. By chance.

~

Where does the cloud live?

~

In a glass bottle.

~

I said: "You should dwell in my heart"

She said: " The faerie indeed belongs to the bottle!"

These clouds, silver, dragon, or grey, are all that England has given me: a reminder of other places, other times. An emblem of all that is lost. Only that which is lost lives in the open, and can be found again.

~

After the rain cleared the sunshine burst through with a radiant brilliance and brightness, as if the light had been waiting to clarify the world at that very moment. Suddenly the earth became weightless. And silent. A few birds glided on, making their way through their invisible tracks, ancient pathways that we've forgotten, and the breeze rustled through green leaves so that all was a play of shadows and light, sound and solitude. I looked up to note the clouds rolling eastwards, as if down a stream, or as if they were being drawn towards some unknown centre by a great magnetic force.

I thought of Brecht's poem. I stood there for an age, like a stone statue that sees the world passing him by but cannot say a thing. When I looked up again the clouds had disappeared.

Listening to this sublime music , guarded, reticent, reluctant to cede anything to the Will...like folded wings, a self engrossed in its own thoughts, centred on its own being, and yet here too there is the aspiration to speak with a human voice. Sometimes we feel like being human, just human, the way a cloud's a cloud. Nothing more, nothing less. Do clouds, too, dream of breaking free, of finding a language like ours?
---First written, Sunday, July 1st, 2007

The Open

For the Baroque soul:


He adds to creation what He wills.
---Q, 35:1

Every act of perception is the infinite in the finite.

God is a precept, the world is a concept.

All truth lies at the intersection of what is 'given' and the open, tradition (or continuity) and creativity, revelation and history; each person is the insertion of a new perspective into the framework of relations that is the world. Each Revelation is the breaking up of the old world.

Levi-Strauss: series and structure, the mathematical infinite and the absolute. In our cultural attitudes: structural and serial thought; the ancient quarrel: philosophy and poetry (which is "wandering"). The philosophical stance has been the archetypal, natural view since the Middle Ages: the traditional systems of expectations and formation. 'Classical' thought -against the polyvalent and an emphasis on the contingent, temporality, is based on a world defined by gravitation and abstraction; serial thought on a world that is perpetually expanding...


The classical is the definitive, the concluded message; it is the closed-like ordering of thought. The order of the work is the mirror image of an imperial and theocratic society.


Underpinning the poetics of the necessary and the univocal is an ordered cosmos, a hierarchy of essences and laws which each individual must understand in the only possible way, the way determined by the creative 'logos'.


The reception and interpretation is always modified by particular and individual interplay with, and the response to, an 'object' and this brings time and existence to it. Culture, individual tastes, inclinations, and perspectives are a prolongation of the object, an essence, into time. But this is not the same as an "unfinished work", "acts of conscious freedom". The modern is the substitution of Freedom for Truth, the Protestant search for the truth rather than the Catholic possession of it. The open is not the unfolding of a pre-conceived plan and it is not just a question of the number of new dimensions of meaning it throws open: the open belongs to a qualitatively different set of experiences, a different world-view and a different world.



The new perspectives introduce the subjective element but in a specific, predictable, closed way...from the 'outside' as it were. Allegory, for example, is a definite range of rigidly pre-established possibilities just as traditional folk songs are the weaving together of pre-fabricated materials in a number of given ways. Is complete freedom possible ? As finite beings can we even conceive of such a thing and are infinite , undetermined possibilities meaningful unless they exist against a backdrop of what is determined...the 'muddy centre'?



Whether it the classical Renaissance or Byzantium flat, inert space, the Jazz age with its creativity and soaring inventiveness is literally worlds apart from their timeless perspective. [H]ere it is precisely the static and unquestionable definiteness of the classical Renaissance form which is derived; the canons of space extend around a central axis closed in by symmetrical lines and shut angles which cajole the eye towards the centre in such a way as to suggest an "essential" eternity instead of movement . Baroque form is dynamic; an indeterminacy of effect (in its play of solid and void, light and darkness, with its curvature, its broken surfaces, its widely diversified angles of inclination; it conveys the idea of space being progressively dilated. Its search for kinetic excitement and illusionary effect leads to the situation where the plastic mass in the Baroque work of art never allows a privileged, definitive , frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation....(outside the canons of authorized responses. Not to name , but only suggest. The single direction that is dogma, values , is questioned).



An ordered world based on universally acknowledged laws is being replaced by a world of ambiguity", one without 'directional centres' and different "types of ambiguity"...an inexhaustible network of meanings.



The classical perspective: the god of the spectator: the whole world converges on him, the world is detached from him..the brain can isolate a given view, frozen in time; but its experience of the world outside the eye is more like a mosaic than a perspective set up, a mosaic of multiple relationships, none of them wholly fixed. Any sight is a sum of different glimpses..the viewer and the view are part of the same field. Reality, in short, is interaction.
---Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.



The misconception which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
---A.N.Whitehead.



Field of possibilities: not one rigid form of interplay. Devolution of authority, static order, the given, to personal choice. Multiple logics (cause and effect breaks down..dis-orientation, discontinuity, complexity).


In the modern scientific universe as in architecture and in Baroque pictorial production, the various component parts are all endowed with equal value and dignity and the whole construct expands toward a totality which is close to the infinite. It refuses to be hemmed in by any ideal normative conception of the world. It shares in a general urge towards discovery and constantly renewed contact with reality.


The spirit of Baroque: the emancipation from bounds. The background in a picture reveals its kinesis, depth-experience..the horizon is the symbol of the "unlimited space-universe"..where heaven and earth meet, music flows from it. It is the same with the fascination with clouds: the Alpine spirit that desires nothing more than to be alone with endless space, to be alone in Paradise. Personality is a soul left to its own decisions.


With the open the emphasis shifts from the essence to appearance: impression, sensation, "an empiricism which converts the Aristotelian concept of real substances into a series of objective perceptions by the viewer.

The role of the art object is one of potential mystery, to quicken his imagination. The open work offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning , different ways of being understood..a pure expression of personality
---Novalis.


To name an object is to suppress pleasure. It exists in a halo of indifference (aniconism). But the open work is still a work and not just a series of random events or experiences. Reality may be without a teleology, without a pre-determined end. But the aim is to seize the multiplicity of duration-broken up into an infinity of instants-and transform it into the organic wholeness of all synthesis.


Goethe. Often rounded, always open. A broken circle.


The universe does not have a fixed futurity, a [p]redetermined, unalterable order of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for all determined the directions of God's creative activity. In fact, divine knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more than the inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a semblance of unity on things by holding them together, a sort of mirror passively reflecting the details of an already finished structure of things which the finite consciousness reflects in fragments only..the future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole in the whole of God's creative life but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines.
----Allama Iqbal.


The discontinuity of contemporary physics , the victory of nominalism over realism..to be without a definition. Complementarity: different models describe different behaviour. A move away from solidity, habit, regularity and "matter" to events and probabilities and discontinuity ("jumps")


How can anything present itself truly to us since its synthesis is never completed? How could I gain the experience of the world since none of the views or perceptions I have of it can exhaust it and the horizons remain forever open? Open to continual renewal ...a flight from the old , solid, concept of necessity. A centre must emerge, a centre is allowed to emerge.
---Merlau -Ponty.

The open work is still a "work" and not a series of random coagulations or pure improvisation; it is a structural vitality.

The work of art..is a form, namely of movement , that has been concluded; or we can see it as an infinite contained within finiteness..the work therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just "parts" or fragments of it, because each of them containing the totality of the work , and reveals it according to a given perspective. so the variety of performances is founded both in the complex factor of the preformer's individuality and in that of the work to be performed..the infinite points of view of the performers and the infinte aspects of the work interact with eachother , come into juxtaposition and clarify eachother by a reciprocal process, in such a way that a given point of view is capable of revealing the whole work only if it grasps it in the relevant , highly personalised aspect. Analogously, a single aspect of the work can only reveal the totality of the work in a new light if it is prepared to wait for the right point of view capable of grasping and proposing the work in all its vitality.

(Citations from Umberto Eco, The Open Work; Spengler, Decline and Fall, Allama Iqbal, The Reconstruction)

All these things

Today the light is near perfect (and near perfect is perfection itself, perhaps). A dazzling, resoundingly clear day: every object is well defined-not mathematically, but as if the essence was there for all to see, without its shadows. All these things are not without sadness, but not without beauty either. Perhaps it is always like this, a gift, and it is only the light within that fails.



You cannot stop time. It is not yours to own, bind, or possess. But you cannot stop wanting to stop it-that is, after all, the definition of civilisation, and that longing for stillness speaks to us of what is human, all too human.



Today, more than any other day, I am simply thankful for the words, images, and loved ones around me, for the time that has been given to me. Autumn is over, the winter light is now upon us. Chains of frail light gently falling, in the morning silver paths traced out by my footsteps through the lawns, heavy with dew; the harshness of our faces softens, as the light glances off window panes, alights on a piece of metal and shines brilliantly. Time conserves, and then moves on. There is always this tremendous opening up of other times and other places. Keep this with you. It will be useful. The world is a broken circle. Second spaces, re-vision. Capstones shift. Remember that.



Every beautiful form you have seen, every meaningful word you have heard-be not sorrowful all this must be lost; such is not really the case. The Divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped wherefore do you lament?...from the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you...

--Rumi.



The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a movement towards selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are objects of love...The sun may be far away but its reflection in beauty is near..a sense of renewal in a particular place, a sudden vision in art and nature, joy experienced as pure, witnessing a virtuous action, a patient suffering, an absence of resentment, humble service, persistent heroism, innumerable things...Every individual has a collection of such things which might be indicated by various names and images: refuges, lights, visions, deep sources, protections, footholds, icons, starting points, sacraments, ..ritual forms, holy images. Thus may we learn that other worlds and other centres exist.

--Iris Murdoch.

Wild Blue

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]

Wild Blue Yonder

Some of the music from the stunningly beautiful the wild blue yonder

I gave you the beautiful journey
Without her you would not have set out on your way
She has no more to give you
And if you find her poor, I did not betray you
With all your wisdom, all your experience
You understand by now what Ithaka means
---Cavafy


For the Baroque soul:

Baroque form is dynamic; an indeterminacy of effect (in its play of solid and void, light and darkness, with its curvature, its broken surfaces, its widely diversified angles of inclination; it conveys the idea of space being progressively dilated. Its search for kinetic excitement and illusionary effect leads to the situation where the plastic mass in the Baroque work of art never allows a privileged, definitive, frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation....
---Umberto Eco.

To escape the flatlands, the pettiness, boredom, and emptiness of the cycles. Who, I wonder, hasn't dreamt of moving in another dimension, of cutting diagonally through space, orthogonal to all identity, sense and meaning. Wasn't our very beginning such a zig-zag movement, the imagining of the impossible, the flash of spurs that left the animal world behind? To stray and wander, to be restless, to love and hate home at the same time...a broken circle...

You sit on the train, alone and content, with just enough warmth from the familiar world: a good book, hot coffee, a forest-green lead pencil, old tattered shoes. And then, like a child, or a horse, something in you stirs, instinctively. You move to the window. You place your warm forehead against the cold pane and seek out the open skies, the distant blue, mesmerized and lost by all that is strange. I am not the space that I occupy.

Let me run, run, and never find...

The barzakh: neither constrained nor at liberty; neither free nor bound. Like the souls in-between, stuck between memory and desire. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom.

The sea, the sky, the blue mourning the loss of the red as it is transformed into gold. Broken, breaking free. I return. We do not recognise eachother.

Second Sight

Does God ever judge us by appearances? I suspect he does.

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?

---W.H. Auden

Time is the great healer.
What if it is time that inflicts the wounds?

----from Wings of Desire


From Octavio Paz's 'Double Flame':

Alienation: we are absent from our true selves, other beings, phantoms, inhabit our shells. Are we what we imagine ourselves to be? Sometimes we 'catch ourselves', and other times we are 'besides ourselves,' or we convince ourselves by saying 'I was not quite myself' . Who were we in those times?"

The Judeo-christian concept devalued nature and transformed it into an object..At the same time it broke the organic relation between man and the polis. Lastly, modern reason generated excision."

Excision: "having placed spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity in opposition, excision finally encompassed all oppositions within one: absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. "

Given alienation can one look to the state as a way of resolving the tensions? "Excision is not healed by time but by something or someone representing non time."

A human being is what he seeks, what he desires. Even when we finally catch up with ourselves we move on, separating himself again, desiring some new future. We are created restless. Man is the child of time. Will love, then, be an object out of time or someone that time itself brings forth?

Cracks: there are moments, but only moments, when the dichotomies melt away: subject/object, I/you, now /forever. Some have called this Revelation, others love...

"The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house we were born in." We are strangers, we have never left this land. All is new, all is old.

Hegel: ' In love life discovers itself in itself. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.' Living is continual separation, a series of deaths, of falls. Gravity and grace.

Breton: The intersection of two series-chance (or fate) and our own subjectivity or desire. 'Objective chance,' a 'necessary accident', is a form of outer necessity that opens a path into the unconscious'. We are determined by what is outside our will (and knowledge) and are magnetically drawn to that space where the beloved will appear. What, then , of free will? The most random of events is then invested with the most significance. As if the whole meaning of our existence would have been something else had there been a slight displacement of events or their timing. And if this is so, might it not be that the most trivial of events can lead to an unraveling of the thread as well?

We seek the completion of a pattern that we are dimly aware of. But in another sense what we desire above all is an open space that we could not possibly have imagined or foreseen. Love is blind.

'Objective chance' creates a literally magnetized space: the lovers, like sleepwalkers possessed of second sight, wander about, meet each other.' We stumble, are at a loss for words. Some things are written in the stars, but they require our complicity as well, for there can be no compulsion in such matters...we are bound and free, and that means you, and that means me.

Drift, Autumn, drift;
fall, colours, where you will

Leap of Faith

The one that held acquaintance with the stars,
And wedded man to man by purest bond
Of Nature, undisturbed by space or time;
Th' other that was a God, yea many Gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, and was
A joy, a consolation, and a hope.

Visited Chiswick House today. Mind-numbingly boring. A perfect example of 18th century classicism: rational, clear spaces and perfectly aligned columns. Too much regularity can be a form of madness. The gardens, too, were immaculately kept, planned with architectural precision and all the sobriety of a geometric mind. Only the trees seemed to resist in their own way the imposition of linearity on them. The trunk of one had managed to twist itself right around itself, as if it were trying to spiral out of control; another's branches sunk to the ground , touched the earth and then in the most bizarre and fantastical fashion surged and snaked up again so that the whole branch came to resemble a giant horizontal 'S'.

There are two ways of looking life, running throughout just about everything, marking out two temperaments or the two parts in us: the individualistic, atomistic vision that starts with 'I' , the lonely self, and the desire to find one's deepest instincts, to live one's soul. This duality, or division, has, we suspect, been with us from the very beginning: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

Stone, indestructible, everlasting, and abstract is the symbol of rational knowledge. It is an idea of perfection and boundedness, the lawlines of our culture, the first constructions of a mind that gradually awakens into self-consciousness. To place a stone on top of another one is also to initiate an act of remembrance, to imagine a temple, but also a grave (which is but a place of communication between life and what eludes it) . But an extreme rationalism can also lead to a fanaticism of thought, a hypertrophy of the mind. The stones that circumscribe the hearth's fire can, in a late civilisation, become oppressive and heavy. Totalitarianism is the extension of 'home' to everywhere. Fatherland.

The fall: the Tree of Knowledge offers the promise of immortality, or an alternative way of achieving this. But Man, who is 'hasty', must approach things one step at a time..stepping stones. The rational always binds the truth to one level -even though it gives the impression of an abstract many-sidedness- creating order, harmony, and unity. A singular truth. A calm, golden circle. But at its centre is the Tree of Life, an axial symbol of all that escapes the squares of the mind; the anarchy of the heart is like her deep roots, the branches that soar up to heaven like the wings of a prayer or love. This tree, life itself, is all that cannot be captured by our systems of thought, a muddy centre that is the mythological, chaos and intuition of the universe that precedes the rational, that fires our creativity and imagination.

Our first temples, our first politics, originate here in this sacred place; a tree encircled by stones. Nature and culture, heaven and earth. Also, our first dancing grounds. Ever since that first fall we've been trying to decreate ourselves, tear ourselves away from the rigidity of thought, convince ourselves that there is a form of understanding that lies beyond analysis and 'knowledge'. But that requires a leap of faith. A faith in the uncertainties of life itself and a trust in what is unknown. And that means returning, with a child-like naivete, to simplicity and looking once again at the world and other people without any concern for perfection or imperfection. Thought and action, inward and outward, remain distinct , but united. Then, and only then, do we feel the stone, think the tree.

Often rounded, always open.

There's something about an integral intelligence that isn't pedantic, argumentative or finicky-or at least not always so. The cleverest people always know not what to say but when to say it. More importantly, it is the style of their silence that leaves a lasting impression, as if emptiness itself required a certain artistic approach to one's personality, a learned response. Just as there are a range of voices, so are there a range of silences: one can pass over the faults one sees in one's loved ones or friends just as there is a supreme etiquette, generosity of soul, in learning to let go. Both require a sort of openness that goes beyond 'truth' or 'facts' . But always there must be an extension of the contours of our being, the ways in which we can conceive things, the depth of our perceptions, and a heightening of our awareness of the truly different.

The narrowing down of our horizons, the contraction of our hearts can, in itself, only be a phase, a possibility. Jalal cannot exist without jamal. there is a type of cleverness-an intelligence of the mind-which is like a perfect mathematical bridge, and to displace but one part of it would disrupt the whole structure. But there is another type, that of the whole person that is of sprawling nature, that sees intelligence in humour and hears music in intelligence. For a true philosopher there is no activity from which one cannot learn. The whole earth is a mosque.

The hedgehog knows one thing but the fox knows many. Fox: quick-footed, nimble, light-hearted, often out of sight, cunning. An unhoused, roaming spirit that leaves a trail of fermenta cognitionis.

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
------Thought-Fox, Ted Hughes

(First posted, Sunday, August 20, 6:31 a.m)

---------

I don't know why I wanted to re-visit this today. Some strange compulsion to find a pattern, to retrace something in one's memory. Isn't the desire to label these posts, put them in a box, also another form of fanaticism? The city and its grids of thought. Perhaps it would have been better to stay in that 'dark hole of the head'.

A Blue Star

mihi quaestio factus sum ----Augustine

.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

------Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

.

Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves.

----A Tibetan Buddhist saying

.

How would it end..

What did I do to be so black and blue?

----Louis Armstrong.

.

People, loved ones, from a distance always remain the same. On returning, though, they are not the same.

I once saw a blue star. I forget the time, it was a few years back. It was not unexpected though. In fact, the papers had been predicting a "significant" event for some time leading up to its actual appearance. Except no-one could tell where and when it would be seen, and as a result most people lost interest in it. But then it arrived, like a stranger from another vast desert that had mistakenly made its way into our corner of the universe, or like a silver fragment that has abandoned another way of life. It was so blue that the whole of the late summer evening sky took on this strangely beautiful hue. And yet the star remained the star-unique and at the same time absorbed in this infinite sea...like a guest that picks up the accent of the host but remains an outsider nevertheless...

For an ancient mind her appearance would not seem that odd, though. Perhaps this was a journey repeated every 10 million years or so? All wonder is lost in mechanism. Just as for a great oak the life and death of a flower is nothing and passes in a twinkling of its eye, so it is that the life and death of the oak is a but a flicker of time in the consciousness of the stone.

Many seasons have passed now (seven, to be precise). And I guess I'll never see that blue again, the very essence of blue itself. And perhaps it only came as a reminder: that we, too, are confused strangers here, tangled, mortal selves, surrounded by unfathomable depths but also living with a blueness that is within...

One could spend one's whole life searching to find that blue again. But it will never come. That much I know. And if it does, then who is to say that I too may too lose interest, or maybe I will not be myself then but somebody else? But that wild blue yonder will always speak to us with the tender voice of those who have long passed away. Calling us, gently reminding us, that the blue of distance can never be overcome, never become accessible, and that all our games are just a version of our childhood ones of 'lost and found'; in that startling instant, I am not I, and You are not You: Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum

So, now I look in the mirror and do not recognize myself. I smile. Yearning makes the heart grow deeper.

At the end of the day:

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, the expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment,the range of experience seemed limitless...

Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep, but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

Two Hours and a Bit

I have two hours to read on Saturday-thirty five minutes extra if one includes the tube journey. No time to absorb what I'm reading, just see what catches my eye and transcribe it like a clerk.

H.P.L.
At the intersection of these channels of communication, man has erected giant ugly metropolises where each person, isolated in an anonymous apartment, in a building identical to the others , believes absolutely that he is the centre of the world and the measure of all things. But beneath the warrens of these burrowing insects, very ancient and powerful creatures are awakening from their slumber.

(on New York):
Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flower-like and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming-golden clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies., and itself became a starry firmament of dream redolent of faery music.

This ecstasy soon gives way to:
...elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted loveliness and elder magic.; and the throngs of people who seethed through flume-like streets were squat , swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes.

And soon:
Houllebecq:
'Dressed in their rigid, rather grim clothes, accustomed to repressing their emotions and desires; the Protestant Puritans of New England may at times have succeeded in forgetting their animal origin...But in the presence of "Negroes" he [Lovecraft] experiences an irrepressible reaction of his nervous system. Their vitality, their apparent lack of complexes or inhibitions, terrifies and repulses him. They dance in the street, listen to music , they talk out loud. ..Life seems to amuse them, which is worrying. Because life is itself evil.'

One comes away from that feeling somewhat dirty, tainted. Reminds me of what K.Clark said about New York: it isn't ugly-from a distance. If all that complexity produces is darkness then a simple innocence is to be infinitely preferred. This idea of impurity and danger was to have disastrous consequences for the 20 th century...

One hour left:
Badiou on Holderin:

'And fidelity has not been given to our soul as a vain present
And not for nothing was in
Our souls loyalty fixed.'

The homeland (childhood?) is what always escapes , what one always loves, loves to escape. The homeland would be a desert if it didn't already contain the irruption of place into space or the shadows of departure; already the land foretold of those who would desert her; she contained all possibilities: wanderings and migrations, homecomings and heartaches. The land would not be the land if it did not awaken us to our own strangeness, our alienation from the earth.

'There is a yearning that seeks the unbound. But much
Must be retained. And fidelity is needed.
Forward, however, and back we will
Not look. Be lulled and rocked as
On a swaying skiff of the sea. '

A crooked path, a serpent's dream, a difficult freedom; without God are there but empty circles? Nature is not 'objective' or 'the given'-but a gift , an opening up, the very possibility of opening ..an outstretched hand.

We owe God a death.
Religio =debt, 'Day of Judgement' = Day of repayment.

From an interview with Larkin:
'What about Asherby and I'd say I prefer strawberry., that sort of thing. I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast, the rest is a desert full of bigots.

Mercifully, the tube journey is spent reading the delightfully charming Molly Hughes and all dark thoughts are dispelled once again...as simple as that. So there you are!

Rothko's Sound Thought

We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...

That we are not very securely at home
in the interpreted world.
---Rilke.

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing.

He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling. He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening. He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its primitive infinity.

------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.

Natur hat weder Kern
Noch Schale
Alles ist sie mit einem Male.

Half our story is a search for a wider world, untrodden paths to the open..but half is to find our place in it, for the cosmos and order and wholeness. It sometimes seems that all we have are other people's thoughts, the fragments of others' words..idols of the mind. But we look for those gateways, those portals that will take us away from the world or the inner world of ideas and second-hand emotions, learned responses, the soul's cliches. A passageway that is also a labyrinth where we are lost and found. A transitional place, neither outside or inside, that leads outwards but that is also connected to the familiar world of memory and human warmth: 'home'..the dihliz...

But if access to that transcendence has been blocked then we withdraw into ourselves, seeking out hidden paths, an 'Orphic descent' into our deepest past: a sub-way. But there is an air of desperation and anxiety in such a move. The air is still, heavy with resignation, and space itself is cramped and we willingly accept our slipping away out of sight...By doing so we may avoid the nausea of every-day reality, its horror and absurdity, its shallowness and theatricality. To bear witness to our suffering in an age of crass materialism and easily-worn emotions, an age in which reason sleeps and brings forth nightmares, primordial monsters from the depths...To escape the predicament of theoretical man-'Am I in pain?' is answered by 'What is pain?'.

The artists, whenever the truth is uncovered, will always cling with rapt gaze to what still means covering even after such uncovering. The philosopher wants to dispel all wonder , or hold it like an idol. He is oblivious of the mystery that inheres in every breath of life, every brain cell.

There is a sorcery in art, a magnetic pull to the unknown; by focusing on the particular totality is avoided. This human being-not the human being-is the gateway to infinity.We must learn to stop at appearance and its folded, concentrated reality. The moderns are obsessed with uncovering, revealing and purifying. The Secret is his greatest enemy.

Rothko's art is an attack on the sedative, commercial world , the world of entertainment and forgetfulness, of synthetic brightness and superficial cheerfulness . (Schama). Modern man's idol is a false infinity.

There is, perhaps, a Jewish sensibility to his work..and the interior glimmer all make looking at them an inexhaustible process. Feeling himself unable to go forward , he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown. What else is this but an aniconism that preserves the secret of God's creation from the Medusa-like gaze of the world? Art, like love and thought, can never exist solely in the realm of necessity. They are bound and free. But his is a hard-won freedom and only the adventurer, the sea-gypsy embarks on the journey for the unknown space, the terra incognita, that 'second space' that lies behind space.

The picture 'expands and quickens' in the eye. It remains unfinished, a symbol of perpetual becoming.Is Rothko really attempting to make a painting or is he trying to compose music...a sound thought? A Russian Jew: two pre-occupations: to communicate, the ethical commandment to take on responsibility, to have comapssion for other human beings ("the highest form of understanding"); but also to shatter images, to trace that invisible axis, and listen to that silence behind the music...

Question Me an Answer

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)


The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?
---- foot-marks.....

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.

--After Rumi

Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.

But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, his mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is , ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes him -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.

Most importantly , there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.
What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?

There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...

Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)
A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).

Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).

G. Bataille:
To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

It is the unknown that compels us to love [the key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul (D.H.Lawrence) ]

God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'

At One

I, who have thrice lost my tongue to the coil of time.
I give you my word.
Paradisal, sweet-sounding metaphors and then the words of my forefathers, the land. Is this, then, the same 'I' that knew the heavy silence of the stars? Why are all my answers questions? I have become a question to myself.

Become one. At one. At once. Unity of being is the unity of truth. God, Nature or Society. Instead, we are stars that have fallen, that have strayed from the path. Atone for one's digressions.

It is too late. The grey clouds have seeped into my mind. Already, I have lost my t' s and dropped my h's. And mind your p's and q's ! My lips have turned to stone at England's green vision.

And yet, and yet...something survives of my ancestor's thoughts; they radiate out from a distant past and brush lightly against me, like a gently guiding hand.
How old these bones are! In the corner of my mind I see a black ship in frozen seas, rocking to and fro, creaking. Images, if not words survive. There is a centre somewhere, not here, whose vibrations touch us even now, like ripples from a pond breaking softly on far away shores or black rain falling in the forest at night.

There is redemption only in transformations, in the metamorphosis of our selves, in a change of heart. I am what I am means that 'I' is already breaking out of Being.

As we wander in the desert we come across all sorts of discarded idols. Let us stay with them for a while. But there will be no primordial utterings, no words for home. I am finally at one with the speechless, am the letter that killeth...

K.

Open Work

Impressionism: a blurring of contours, a vibrancy and dissolution of form, a greater inter-connectedness of forms, a reaching out. But, eventually, just as an image in the water is reconstituted once the ripples have subsided , so each form becomes distinct , isolated.

Sculpture: Lippold: a continuous metamorphosis with no apprehension of totality or a unified image, but broken-up, mutually exclusive perspectives.

Ezra Pound: 'Brancusi had set out on the maddeningly difficult exploration to get all the forms into one form-this is as long as any Buddhist's contemplation of the universe. ...Or putting it another way, every one of the thousand angles of approach to a statue ought to be interesting, it ought to have a life (Brancusi might permit me to say 'divine life') of its own.

G. Mathieu, D'Aristotle a l'abstraction lyrique: 'The move from ideal to real to the abstract to the possible mirrors the changes in our perspective of the world, in our scientific concepts.'

Cubism: A rejection of the classical world (see Robert Hughes as well, Shock of the New) , of Euclidean geometries, Cartesian rationalism. Discontinuity and the lack of a coherent image of the universe, the shattering and disappearance of the familiar..vitality over form, life over thought, the biological over the mathematical. Can this be a Zen-like experience , pure consciousness without subject or object or must it necessarily be a re-presentation? Can we (the west) abandon itself to contemplating drifting clouds , the shimmer of water, sunlight on a dew drop? Do we seek a pattern, an order of the soul and the world? We take a step outside of ourselves to do so. Half of us wants to reduce everything to the mind, half of us wants to escape...

An open work is still a work, on pains of a dissolution into complete and utter randomness, a splintering of our vision , an incommunicable and unintelligible truth. Language buckles under the pressure...

---after Umberto Eco

Time Out of Mind

Everything in the universe is running down, falling away, disappearing: childhood, meaning, time: entropy. Knowledge increaseth our sorrow. Are there other beings, with wider sympathies, deeper insights, than our own limited range of perceptions? Does it matter? To us, to them? As flies to wanton boys. As we possess more unity and truth, more esse, than a stone, so may it not be the case that there are other beings whose reality escapes us, whose truth transcends our own and whose knowledge of the cosmos and her laws is greater than ours…mankind: just a stage in, not the pinnacle of, creation?

In every place where human activity is interrupted, where there is a blank on the map, those ancient gods crouch huddled waiting to take back their place. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightening position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deathly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

We have finally been able to locate ourselves, set our co-ordinates with some degree of precision. But at the same time we oscillate on the edge of an abyss. Our increased awareness of our finitude has not lessened any the sense of infinite horizons. The same holds true for time, and not just for space: things millions of years old exist side-by-side with us; through the fissures in the architecture of time we obliquely note the presence of different timescapes. And this we find compelling, monstrous, fascinating, bizarre, and repulsive in equal measure.
—-from H.P. Lovecraft

Something can represent multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. We intuit unity. Pure multiplicity, absolute contingency, is something the mind abhors. We must find a pattern to things and yet we do not know where this compulsion comes from. Is it a form of psychosis or our highest achievement?

Flashes

For me, this is one of the great paintings-and whether it has Buddhist elements to it or not can only be a question of secondary importance.

Aniconism, by precluding every image inviting man to fix his mind on something outside himself and to project his soul onto an 'individualizing' form , creates a void...the quality of a contemplative emptiness. Instead of ensnaring the mind and leading it to some imaginary world , it dissolves mental 'fixations' just as contemplation of a running stream , a flame, or leaves quivering in the wind, can detach consciousness from its inward 'idols'.

Paradise is an eternal springtime, a garden perpetually in bloom, refreshed by the living waters,; it is also a final and incorruptible state like precious crystals and gold. The crystalline state is expressed in the purity of the architectural lines, the perfect geometry of the arched surfaces and the decoration in rectilinear forms; as for the celestial springtime, it blossoms in the stylized flowers and fresh, rich and subdued colours of ceramic tiles.

This "duality" is synthesised in Islam in the city and the desert, intellect and will, each of which represents a 'pole' in our life and the universe itself: being and becoming. We need to 'see' or think of the world and God. The vast cathedral of ideas and our fascination for constructing them would be inexplicable otherwise. It is this abstraction that allows us to 'get out of ourselves' . But at the same time as we want to think the stars we want to feel them. If thought 'kills' the world , or we die a little in order to think, then there are other forms of understanding that lie beyond the desire to 'know' and these are thrown up by life and experience itself. This dynamic understanding is to hear the unfolding of reality, to grasp things in statu nasciendi. The Allama would say that he still hears 'kunfa yakun' now. God is not a concept. The 'ceaseless reward' and the constant veiling and unveiling of reality is an 'image' of this unending striving.

What is such a 'state' and can we ever get a glimpse of what is, ultimately, a nomadic thought? The miraj is one such point of focus for here the Prophet (pbuh) returns to life and the world in the 'second subsistence'. These are the green waters that lie at the heart of the darkness. If we are nothing in the Face of the Divine then the Prophet shows that Islam is truly both negation and affirmation; a final state where 'love stilleth the will' but also, and eminently a life where open possibilities still lie before it, ready to be internalised so that one can say that I and my destiny are one, where every act expresses my secret: Verily towards God, for God is thy Limit. Goethe would say towards love, soaring , fading. Another word for this is wonder.

But let us put this to one side since this is a wisdom that is reserved for the few. To retun to a more contemporary example, D.H. Lawrence has this to say :

The sheer delight of a child's apperception is based on wonder; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another. Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilisation, which is a civilsation based on knowledge , and hostile to exprerience, is boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored...because the wonder has gone out of them.

In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. ..Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystalisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves , and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood and looks around, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. ...tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.

Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don't give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream . It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this very instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative quick.

The past and the future are the two great bournes of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected. Finished beauty and measured symmetry belong to the stable, unchanging eternities. ...the bird is on the wing in the winds, flexible to every breath, a living spark in the storm, its very flickering depending on its supreme mutability and power of change. Whence such a bird came: whither it goes : from what solid earth it rose up, and upon what solid earth it will close its wings and settle, this is not the question. This is the question of before and after. Now, now, the bird is on the wing in the winds.

The most superb mystery we have hardly recognised: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. The ideal-what is the ideal? A figment. An abstraction. A static abstraction , abstracted from life. It is a fragment of the before and after. It is a crystallised aspiration, or a crystallised remembrance: crystallised, set, finsihed. It is a thing set apart, in the great storehouses of eternity, the storehouses of finished things.

---Excerpts from Titus Burckhardt's Art of Islam and D.H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism