C3 B4

 The end of summer..

The end of summer was like no other day. There was no time for farewells, no space to give time to what the heart had stored. The main door was left open, the gate flung back; indecision and haste wrapped around you. The moment which you breeze through without a proper accounting for-as if there ever could be one!

Through the porthole, back to this inner chamber. The light flickers, falters, and then fails. The great summer sun of your days in the open are over. All that remains are eyes that are narrower, less reliable, and hands that have darkened with time.   

N: N-W

The heat arrives, layer after layer. Search out the few feet of shade left. By 9 o'clock a breaking point has been reached; the sweeper's arms move like a mechanical pendulum. The light holds everything in perfect stillness.

Everything at this time of the year is run down, panting for breath, or some kind of relief from the fierceness of the days. There are smudged footprints on the wall and loose soil scattered on the floor. Doors manage to slimly hang on to their hinges. Mud is splattered on the side of the car. The earth is baked and won't budge an inch. A carton of milk lies abandoned next to a pile of pebbles. When you kick it it moves with a thud, some of its contents spilling on to the grass. Inside, a red toy light gets lost and found as the alternating light and shade from a curtain filters shards of light onto the floor. Our own lives flickering into and out of visibility in an ebb and flow that is as old as time itself.

The house has been turned upside down and inside out. Nothing is worth saving. A postcard, a sad and grey Japanese frog in watercolour, lies on the floor, creased, out of sorts. A model tram from San Francisco, unwatched dvds, unread books- their pages like dry hands.

The term has ended. I don't want to hear about it or talk about it. No looking back. Put on your Puritan hat and recall your sober heart. Love is north by north-west.       

Akenfield

Wendel Berry, on tobacco cutting...

'There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.And there are memories. ..The crew to which I belong is the product of friendship and kinship going far back. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance....The conversation, one feels, is ancient.

One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simple all, and is enough.'

Half way through Blythe's wonderful Akenfield. Has got me thinking about work. Much more of our work seems to take place indoors and alone with computers. That means that more often than not we're isolated from other people. It also usually means that a larger part of our work is of the eye/mind and has little feel of the world through our hands. 

Also, what kind of narrative forms around the work we do? It's not that increasingly a lot of it seems meaningless (Graeber: Bullshit Jobs!) but that there's no story accompanying it (in the final analysis these two may be the same thing). Today you work on something; tomorrow it's something else. Nothing accumulates and nothing endures. Another aspect to that lack of continuity is that we never grow into or inherit a profession (which is another way of saying that there isn't really a 'way of life' any more). Instead, isolated moments of consumption..a "constantly moving happiness machine".  

So: time and place. everyone's on the move (or act as if they are) And no-one has any time for anyone else or even for themselves! Nothing can be allowed to grow slowly. Is that why so many of us -men, especially, are so immature? 

The mad rush to get there. But then you realize, there is no there there. There, there. 

Scheffler writes that the loss of a sense of temporal continuity results in us being less interested in long-term projects. Why bother if the world is nothing but a shape-shifting agglomeration of half-formed images and styles of thinking that are redundant before you can say Jack Robinson? What stands today is pulled down tomorrow. In fact, must be pulled down. And that, perhaps, is all that modern freedom consists in: the ability to negate. 

~~~

‘The old look inward at things we cannot see’.

‘The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with the names of saints..as well as rhymes and prayers engraved on their sides.’

'Because the ringers put their whole personality into their efforts ‘ they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them’.

A wheelwright says of his work, ‘It was as much in the hand as in the eye. There was a moment when you had to say now ! Then you could breathe again.’

‘ He likes to leave everything just as it was'.

[Throughout the book there is this sense of inheriting and getting into the old ways..an idea of perfection that comes with time].

‘None of us are looking for wonderful changes’..’ If I get out of my routine I’m finished’.

‘The holy time was the harvest’.

Anywhere, any time.

At the end of time, there is no more place.

--Merton.

"The message is that surveillance capitalism’s new instruments will render the entire world’s actions and conditions as behavioral flows. Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts, and situations. In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it.”

From the vantage point of surveillance capitalism and its economic imperatives, world, self, and body are reduced to the permanent status of objects as they disappear into the bloodstream of a titanic new conception of markets. His washing machine, her car’s accelerator, and your intestinal flora are collapsed into a single dimension of equivalency as information assets that can be disaggregated, reconstituted, indexed, browsed, manipulated analyzed, reaggregated, predicted, productized, bought, and sold: anywhere, anytime."

--Zuboff.

Robinson

there isn't an anchor anywhere.
there isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

--Bronk

Before Robinson there was only Robinson. When you've lost sense of direction there is no Englishman, no Saracen.

start again. the drift of the world brought me here...

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from?, she asked 

Originally?

No, but where are you really from?, demanded the racist 

Originally?

Country of origin?, asked the pale looking official. 

I come from the land of the pure, where the purer the land the more bitter the almonds, he said, lyingly. Then Robinson looked out to the sea and remembered the colours:

"And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently..."

--Isak D. 

Rivers.

And our lives are full of rivers.

North. Winter river. The Roding down to its last thoughts. The frozen reeds like spears in its heart. Stones hold the memory of summers gone.

Where were you born, R? I don't think I ever asked you. Under which uncontrollable star?

Stay a little longer!
I know you have other faces to see.

There is a clock in every room; each strikes a different hour. So it is, the guide of the time/ is broken up. Find centre.

Sit in the morning gloom, book in hand, soft pencil dormant; the cat has awakened as I stumble in the half-light. I am fearful of the cat. A Sicilian breakfast beckons but nothing can move me: here I am, unknown by own heart/I lay there in my shadows.

The moon is somewhere. The sun is somewhere. Earth has lost its proportions. This is like Space 1999. Out there, the seas, the night, the night in the sea. And a grain of rice lit by the moon.

The winds of the comet 
are like a whirlwind.

The silent trail of a life.

~~

At the small oblong patch of gravely land they called "a beach" we set our towels down. Stepping into the sea. Is there anything more pathetic than a grown man standing in the sea, his jeans rolled up to his knees, trying to keep his balance against the sway of the world? Little r drops a unique shell and then scrambles desperately to find it. "It is gone, you have to let it go". She pauses to think and then looks again. Everything is in motion. The moon draws the shell to itself.

~~

I keep a picture of you with me. There is something dark/in this bright sun.  

Do you know how to sing?

In a foreign land the snow falls. Introductions are made. But neither you or I will be here in this cosmos. But now, now...

Love, morning, stars.

Where are you?

Nothing happens. Marooned under this fog, waiting for it to break. Like months of rain that flood our time on earth. 

Nothing moves. 

The sun that seems now
only a stone glowing
A cloud.

Is this just a dream? Sun and stone and star and cloud all within? This dark love without love. 

This last star, this ancient fish in the deeps. There is an ancientness to your walk. The old, mechanical heart whispers to itself a word that no-one knows. This song of one note and a million intonations. 

Of all the souls I could have had I had this one. I look at myself coldly, like the moon. How did I ever come in this century?

~~~

Across the border they're burning the rice. Clouds and smoke enter our lives, burning our throats, constricting our lungs, stinging our eyes. There are no forests left anywhere in the world. I would speak as another person, hidden, as you are. I imagine what is lost. A coin left under a tree for safekeeping, London's underground streams. 

The Roding slows and slows, inches its way forward. A discarded plastic bag, some leftover from a happier time, snags on one of the reeds and flutters like the flag of some unknown country. All our lives are full of rivers.

{Words by Joseph Ceravalo}





   

The loss of the world

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from? Originally?

Thought is timeless, doesn't belong anywhere. Where were you when you were thinking? Nowhere. Who were you? Nobody in particular. I'm thinking, in my own room, in a stove, cramped up. The universal condition of 'man'?

Reason, scientific procedures..a universal way of understanding reality, relegating all the other, time-worn ways to the false, to untruth. As if we could know by forgetting who we are. As if our minds were a vast and continuous continent and not a series of loosely connected islands. In the heartlands our souls are copied out in a huge ledger by a bureaucratic hand. 

With scientific thought and inventions we live in one world and one world only. If something holds it holds everywhere. I stand on a column and survey it all with perfect objectivity, a view from nowhere. With a calm spirit I note down there: two dogs fighting over a bone.

Other factors are at work in modernity, pushing us to ever-greater abstraction and 'placelessness': religion, with its universal 'brotherhood' (neither Greek nor Jew) knows of no holy land. The spirit knows no such distinctions and the local gods are in disrepute. 

The capitalist system is at heart a system that devours local attachments and bonds. Within the nexus of market exchange nothing of permanent value subsists and everything is interchangeable, a substitute for something else. 'Intrinsic worth' is an anathema. Capitalism is the exchange of represented (or abstract) values. And global capitalism just furthers that process of alienation. 

The same city centre, the same airports and, ultimately, the same mental attitudes. Place, as the locus of a distinct history, the flourishing of unique individual perspectives and collective representations, is replaced, through mechanical repetition, by "space" and abstract flows, by the undoing of real communication in favour of the exchange of equivalents.

So, in thought and in practice, the rootless, the vagabond, is held in high-esteem. Which is not surprising. This is not about investing dignity in an abstract individual (with his universal rights) but in clearing the ground so that capital can flow. 

If there are islands there are bridges. But in the land-locked homeland of our contemporary lives there is only a drab sameness. It is precisely under those circumstances that a false individuality is cultivated ("express yourself") and a false reverence for blood and soil propagated. 

At another level this symptom is expressed in a different way: the withdrawal of the man and woman of culture into their own personal aesthetic experiences; high-minded, standing above the fray, immune to the petty temptations of a shallow culture that has nothing to offer but enticements, allurements and distractions. Culture as a form of therapy, a way of disengaging from the sordid world of politics. After all, only the individual counts, says the poet (oblivious of the fact that his own sensibility has been worked upon by the capitalistic spirit). 

So, if the riff-raff are led into a self-absorbed world of spectacles and digital confusion they're not so different from the educated bourgeois, duped by their academic specialisms and cultivated sensibility of indifference. Both share in the inability to think beyond themselves. This shows up in the abuse of the language: 'the political' is now replaced, everywhere, by 'the politicized', the world can only be conceived of as 'worldliness'. One thinks of himself as rising above the world; the other sinks below it. But both are eminently products, not that they know it, of the hollowing out of the world. 

This withdrawal from the world, the loss of a sense of place, the inability to utter the word 'we'..all this in the name of a private pleasure (whether it is a 'higher' pleasure or not is to miss the point). The disappearance of the public world is effected by the proliferation of images, idle chatter, trivialities and gossip. Common sense becomes as rare as the old medieval notion of the common good in a therapeutic culture. 

With the loss of the world the space of appearances and interactions is replaced by the body and its desires (the new body politic) or by an identity politics, or the amplification of fear, personal grievances. Under such circumstances what scope is there for the development of obligations to other people and to, in fact, the continuity of the world so that future generations may participate in it?

And then there's the personal confession, the growth in widow(er)-memoirs where someone's intense suffering must be brought to light, form part of a "meditation". The loss of a brother, a mother,...it's either that or: the world is going to hell in a handcart so let's have fun, it's the only sane response after all.   

{These pictures are by Marion Post and come courtesy of Tom Clark. Do visit his fantastic page at: http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/ }.

Now it's autumn, but
you would never know.
-- J.Ceravolo.

Came across Ceravolo (like Ungaretti) thanks to Tom. It's nice to have these thick books by your side, work through them, which means not working, accepting, intuiting since you don't have the high skill or the fine perception. Reading by the evening light. Kenenth Irby, too. Where have we got to there? The early 1970s, I think.

Today I'm told it's a full eight degrees hotter than the average for this time of the year. The seasons usually turn by the 15th of the month: the dry summer days of blinding light and suffocating nights give way to the monsoon by July 15th; autumn is supposed to roll in, pinching the mornings and evenings with its cool fingers by Sept. 15th; Spring is officially declared on the 15th of February. 

But now everything is out off kilter. Everything is doing its best to break down the light, filter it to something more manageable: the dust, the tree branches, the crows dancing, human memory...

Frank speech, the Greeks said (not freedom of speech). As if to say..avoid abstractions in favour of reality. 

If there was time we'd speak; there'd be no telling. Where to start, but the middle. The words from the early years: experimental. Learn to find your own voice, rhythm,    silences. The old country lettered with arching old-stone bridges. What do you have to say for yourself? 

Begin in the middle of Ceravolo, pick out the page on which it begins. The book traveled a couple of thousand miles to reach my incomprehension. We lived a life like that, not knowing. From your house on Vere Street five roads radiating out. None took you there, for all you knew. How many miles have you walked in your life? Honestly.

There isn't an anchor anywhere, the drift of the world, the drift.   

[I'll begin again]

It was too late. The autumn light fell at wide angles on your face, revealing what you always were. In front of you, though you don't look at it, a map, an ancient forest, green time, a cafe latte. "I am in the middle of my life", am passing through it. Another summer has sunk and my heart with it, all those heavy, ripe hours now distilled to a clear moment. And I am here. You still know how to kill me, she thought, silently, the most inward of her dreamsongs always coming to her from a lofty distance-and then checked herself to make sure her lips hadn't moved. 

"I am more composed than him," she mused, as a shadow fell on her bare shoulder. There is no turning now, only one continuous season. Now it's autumn, but you'd never know. I will become a statue, and wait. I've done that before. The drift of the world, oh the drift...  

The Return

At a particular time, you lose track, things are set to return. This day, hasn't it already been lived?

At 5.20 the sky is still covered with grey clouds. A single shaft of light enters your room and taps on the door, waking you. Little H is still blissfully asleep, his head next to mine. I arise and place a pillow next to his body as I turn to leave. 

Outside there is a breeze and it has been a regular occurrence for the last two weeks. Some say it comes from Africa, sweeping in dust from thousands of miles away. What a journey! It has local name and an allotted time. Later in the morning it will faint and fade as the sun regains control, reclaims territory. You don't know the hour when this happens. 

Everything in the world seeks a mirror and every form is vying for space.

You stumble into one room forgetting why you entered it in the first place, just a vague, half-formed idea in your head, so you stand still expecting it to come to you. Instead you notice a small black bird lost in the small green and yellow leaves of a tree outside the window.

The patterns of our lives-the shape of it-that we only dimly discern in the murky light. 

The breeze is cooler by a few degrees today since it rained the previous night. You can detect the faint smell of fresh earth-grass and soil. The breeze is like a guest that has stayed over, or a brilliant conversation whose memory carries over into the next day..a few clear, jewel-like sparkling words. Summer, too, sometimes contains the sense of its own ending, its own beginning. 

In a different light we see a different world.

Without distances there would be no return. But what do you return to and who is it that returns? 

In the corridor someone rather foolishly said: "In a century we will have worked it out, we will have a better understanding of what we're about". You don't argue or dismiss him but it seems that if one is young anything can be believed.

You bump into an old friend who is lionhearted by name (but not by temperament). He's 'on' his second marriage and informs me of other break-ups and impending divorces amongst our mutual friends. No-one could have seen it and there's no telling.This is what passes for 'news', that and the onset of blood pressure, diabetes and angina. How the cards are dealt is anybody's guess. 

A returns from Thailand saying it is dirt cheap. Full of slim prostitutes and shady looking middle aged men. How that makes it more advanced than the land of the pure is beyond me. Over there, he tells me, you can see there is a kind of dynamism, people on the move. It all sounds terribly confusing. Everyone on the move, going where, one wonders, and for what purpose? ('Purpose of visit' it reads on the card). What if I were to write: 'to find myself'? Or, more accurately, 'to be in the presence of loved ones'?

Today the breeze comes and goes, rustling in the high leaves, making a discarded sweet wrapper dance for a while, whistling through the sighing windows that haven't been closed properly, shifting some red African dust, mingling with the local grey in the early hours, ruffling someone's hair, lifting the corner of someone's clothes, flowing, alighting, resting, opening and closing, laughing, murmuring to itself, until tomorrow it will not.

   

days of our lives

Piers are universally the saddest places on earth, preserving the old ways: music no-one listens to any more, childish entertainments, a particular type of laughter...all worn-out forms in a shape-shifting world.

Let us be grateful for what we had.

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast hollow, supported by no-one

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one,

It's face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased

The horse foams in the dust

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off the ground

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty on the way home...

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

---M, 1923

~

Bridges connect one place to another, so don't build a home on one. The world is a bridge, a floating bridge. Piers, on the other hand, are sad because they are beyond any question of being useful; at best they are places of mild entertainment and forgetfulness. A pier is not a space at all...

There are other 'spaces', like the threshold space, the dihliz; the places in-between, full of wonder, in which there is the possibility of movement, and insofar as a window is neither inward nor outward it, too, is such a space. Can any place take on these qualities? If I sit on the landing steps, for example, a bench in a park under some leafy shade? I am neither still nor am I on the go; neither wholly in the park like the others but nor am I totally alone with myself. Who knows who b is?

To walk out into the sea; to walk back into the sea, the ancient sway of the world holding it together. We have lived indoors for too long. 

Can you at this moment recall the particular feeling at the time, now that's it's so entangled with memory, now that childhood is well and truly over? Think of S. Name it, keep your finger on it if you can. The transience of our lives needs re-telling. The words said in order..In the beginning...our desire for the perfect sentence, form open so that we return to it again, the same, yet different. 

The same. The same
Then once, in a flash,
fresh ground...
black, grey, green and blue.

--Lowell.

Are we so different, then, from the cave dwellers who needed images to remind themselves of absences, loss, who imagined distances and the traversing of distances in the darkness? And who still could dream of finding a way back to who they were.

(photos courtesy of Roxana)

Our dwelling place, the light above, a ribbon of  warm light in the old corners of the house that are somehow found and seen again, against all the odds, after so many years of neglect. 

The centuries-old light that mysteriously returns in summer-as it always does. The warmth on your back, your hands unloosened, the deeply veined green shade cast by tall trees, the high windows in the elegant streets around London House, the library windows jarred open, the women becoming more dreamy.

The old medieval light, your exquisite, starred heart, the darkness that picks out the light and gives it shape.

'History in stone and wood and glass.'

This knowledge of the window is something that eludes you and these distances another kind of beauty in the soul. The death of the heart is not so unlike the life of the heart, though it is seldom commented upon.

This shadow that grazes the light, that snicks it, is like the last word you spoke, the filigree of absence.

take it home

"The treasure . . .lies buried. There is no need to seek it in a distant country . . .It is behind the stove, the center of the life and warmth that rule our existence, if only we knew how to unearth it. And yet – there is this strange and persistent fact, that it is only after . . .a journey in a distant region, in a new land, that . . . the inner voice . . .can make itself understood by us."

---Denise Levertov, via Zimmer, via Buber, via...

There's this line in Becket where he criticizes the Welshman (or have I got it mixed up?).."you were only looking for an animal kind of warmth," he says. The warmth of friendship, well, that's another thing, in a different league. Even loyalty to religion can seem cold, distant and mechanical. 

The nihilist/fundamentalist/academic/scientist will often say that the warmth has drained from the world. All that is left to do is to articulate how the world falls in each specific detail with utter detachment and objectivity(your old village mullah is far superior in the sense that at least he dreams up interesting stories of the decadence of women!)

But despite everything it goes on and you don't believe all that tosh for a moment. The fact that in Lahore at least ten thousand women put on lipstick each morning and/or diligently get their kids ready for school says-to me at least-that the old ways will survive. 

~~~

It is strange to think of it now but we actually saved up to buy music. There was no "instant access" or "one click buys" and, given our lack of money and our wise parents' reluctance to indulge us- we ended up with very small collections (the only other alternative was taping stuff off (or off-er, as the yanks would say)the radio. 

The dougal had this album which in its astounding brilliance was the cheez when it came to coolness. Who else could sing: "There was the Queen, looking tired,just back from a holiday..."? And then there was wonderful tape-sadly misplaced despite your best attempts to keep it safe- of Elkie Brooks'-she of the husky voice fame-selection. Janis Joplin, Peabo Bryson's Feel the Fire (yeah, Peabo!), Sam & Dave's Don't knock it. 

That tape, despite its awful quality,and despite only being only thirty minutes long, had all the warmth of our childhood in it. It is often said that music opens up new doors, extends one's understanding, enlarges sympathies, broadens our outlook, touches some mathematical truth or gives us a glimpse of some greater, finer or grander sense of meaning, harmony, "oneness", even. Without music no tribe, no civilisation. But for us, music was never about a return or about picking up the loose threads; it was and is always about this breathtakingly simple emotion: take it home.

~~~

Still haven't got much money and youtube is down and out in the land of the pure, but the music... "

The Reformation interior

"...the 17th-century Dutch painter of church interiors and perhaps the first purely architectural artist. He created beautifully complex spaces out of Reformation interiors..."

The frontier has been drawn in, the wilderness is everywhere. Your hands broke, the words slipping through them. If I could remember, I'd feel less cold. The human soul in November awaits the first light, forgiveness. You have a sense that there's another room in this room. 

Gagarin, at the frontier: "there ain't no God here". And when he got home?

~~~

'at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
[here]
low in the historical dark they disappear into.

...

desire/desire's
inside track.'

---Alan Shapiro

There was a time, there was a time when man was nothing-do you remember? Nameless, sort of. And that time is like now. But for a while we are like nothing, survivors from a golden state, the way golden pollen is older than the mountains (JB). 

Each love, each pleasure is, it seems, also a memory of something else, some older time. There is a kind of "Platonic" remembering which stretches beyond experience (as narrowly construed). But if so much is true, then something of the future, too, is with us already. It is incredible that so much of the world could find its way into such a small space. 

Somewhere, off the central line, there is a tree, a house, a room crammed to the ceiling with books, mostly unread or unfinished. There's something of my life still there. 

Now that Ariel Sharon is dead one thinks: the stark interior, if projected outwards, makes a wilderness of everything.   

the suburbs

There is a small brick station, lost, blind behind the leafy trees. If you walk hurriedly by it on a blustery Monday morning you might mistake it for a post office or a 1930's municipal building in a state of disuse or disrepair. There are so many stations like that, half in the countryside, linked to the city like an open wound. One day you will get on the central in the dark and stop at every station, walk up the stairs into the light and look at all those small worlds I'm not a part of.

The spiritual history of the suburbs: ice-cram vans prowling on empty summer roads, lemonade and ice clinking in tall glasses, cricket on the radio,  the dull aftermath after Wimbledon, the early arrival of a brief September light enough to chill us in the shade, remind us that all this cannot last. The grass growing thicker by the hour, the last war veterans sunning themselves, their facial expressions having been fixed many years ago, cats and dogs deep in their dreamworld, a young girl just breaking out of hers.

At night a drunk utters his first coherent words of the day, a silver-backed fox slinks through the broken wooden fences out into the sloping gardens and fields, the perfume of the flowers brushing against her, past the constant roaring drum of the motorway traffic. The last song is playing at the straggling party down the street, the plates heaped up next to the remains of the barbecued meat and fish, the bones, the toothpicks, the stained paper tissues that had looked so pure when tightly packed together, the clocks that have croaked, the exhausted, childish giggling, the bodies loosened, hands autonomous of the mind-and it is still not clear at this hour who will sleep with who.

"S", who has worked hard to get here, looks out of his bedroom window in partial disgust at what he sees below him. He looks out at them as would his ancestors, ancient Russian Jews, with great pity and remorse. "Is this a life?" He feels the warmth of the presence of his wife and children sleeping cozily behind his back in a parallel world.

In winter the suburb is Japanese. It is quiet and formal...The last true rituals are played out, the big metaphysical questions worked out in the tawdry details of wrong turnings,  chances that have slipped by. How did I end up like this, my hands so unsure? The summer of my childhood, it seems like a minute ago, less...these patterns, these arrangements, stitched together..what do they all mean? Here we are, a name on a map nobody wants to read. The old gods, Pan-Shiva, weigh down on us like the spirit of the dark forest. You wait, each day, for the threshold, for some great turning point in your life, an event that will draw a line under your past. Jesus-Christ.

In the late afternoon the tinkling sound on the rail tracks like the jangling of keys, the train that passes us by, floats, curves way out from the ghost station, our abandoned little frontier outpost, this temple to some forgotten god. No-one gets off, no-one gets on. We have no idea of the journeys other people make, their easy-going accommodation with the world and with risk.

My life, folded like a Japanese flower, simple and ornate,already a thing of the past.

(Lines from John Burnside. Film: The Swimmer)

~~~

The short story is a gem but the film, well, now, that's another story. As with John Huston's The Dead the film version outdoes the short story in darkness, strangeness. It's the perfect summer day, but already there is a dark cloud up above, heading this way...