A kind of blue

Bob pointed me to this a while back (if you don't know who Bob is then where have you been?! For all things music (and more) visit his page: overgrownpath.com).

~
The sea is a living organism; the sea is a cathedral as old as the sun, a house with many rooms and doors. In the sea the mountains, deep and calm. In the music, Miles Davis and Sibelius are pre-figured: the deserts of Spain, the mythic time, a hand that hasn't taken shape.

If the sea is our origin then the sea is our childhood. And when the child was the child there was no question of "before" or "after", just this dazzling moment before us where old and young are one. I am me, when I am you. There was no sentimentality, no Romantic longing in the music-because both represent distances, a human perspective- and what you felt here, indescribable though it was- was something utterly other, but also deeply familiar (if that makes any sense). But you couldn't listen to this without asking yourself: what, for Christ's sake, have we done to the sea.
  
~
'The attentive eye is both attentive and loving..the attentiveness needed is a whole and balanced thing, not allowed to skew over into mere analysis...

As to loving, it must be never left alone, at least in..context to place. Romantics of the 18th and 19th century loved rural places, but as ideas and ideals-as projections of perfection.'
--from Wendell Berry.

the sea

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
---Iris M.

Post-colonial literature. Always hated that phrase. And not too fond of thinking through the prism of gender, religion, race etc., etc. although, of course, that's not to detract from the possibility that where people are 'coming from' is sometimes important. Just don't think it's always or necessarily the case. Dislike even more people who try to draw radical distinctions, as if to say that distinctions are always a product of clear thinking and that reasonableness precludes one from saying: "I'm not sure" or "maybe I am/was wrong".

So, what are you to say of Iris, Hannah? That you like their writings because they're women, english, jewish? What poppycock. Nonsense on stilts! Or Isak D., Penelope Fitgerald.,Berberova, Denise Levertov, M. Robinson? Sparkling prose, concision of expression, deepness of thought, the gem-like simplicity of storytelling...or are you just in touch with your 'feminine self'? So strange as well, from, you know, someone from your part of the world.

'Knowledge of a value concept is something to be understood, as it were, in depth, and not in terms of switching on to some impersonal network'

'Why not consider red as an ideal end-point, as a concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love'

'grow by looking'

'contexts of attention'

'The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like obedience'

'empty moral words ('good') corresponds to the empty freedom of the will: the world is devoid of normative characteristics' the scientific view 's compatibility with existentialism

'a moral philosophy should be inhabited'

'we have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves'
'the disappearance of the permanent background: Reason, Religion, History'

'a re-orientation, a different kind of energy, from a different source'

'habitual objects of reflection' habitual acts of reflection. second takes. slowness.

'many aspects of goodness'-not a false, empty unity.

'the suppression of the self relates to the real-and what is good'

'freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision'
(you love the word experience there)

'an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism'

'a sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit'

'the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding'

'without some more positive conception of the soul as a substantial and continually developing mechanism of attachments, the purification and re-orientation of which must be the task of morals, 'freedom' is readily corrupted into self-assertion and 'right-action' into some sort of ad hoc utilitarianism'

another place

For flowerville, antonia, anton...who likes to look out to the sea.

Through the blue summer evenings, I'll go down the pathways,
I'll let evening breeze bathe my bare forehead.
I'll speak not a thing: I'll think not a thing:
And, I'll go, far, far away, like a gypsy...

We stand here alone. Surrounded by wind, sand, and sea. Grey reflections, flecks of ash in the eye of God. We stand here together, alone. Motionless. Gazing for ever at the distance between us, the space within us.

From 'the consolation of the elemental', The Independent, July 1, 2005:

AG. What is the consolation that we seek into going into the elemental world?
..the rhythm of the ice forming, freezing, melting, breaking, the sense one had that those things have been going on for time out of mind...
When I think of Suffolk I think about hedgerows, trees, plantations, the amazing huge sky over and above this quilted mas;that's a relationship with a place that is qualified by human history. But what's wonderful about the sea is that it is not like that. It's an element which is endless and uninscribed.

the beach: It is also a deep memory of the early times, the sense of sun and wind on the skin. I love the way we regress at the beach...the human perceptual world is limited by a horizon but there is always that human need to imagine what's beyond it. [A place] where they witness that they themselves are part of a field of witnessing.

IM: Another Place seems to suggest the power of collective dreaming. All these figures are facing out to sea. The work has power because they're facing the same direction and thinking the same thing.

AG: I believe it has something to do with the weather being the thing that everything suffers but is also the elemental condition that carries on, and in it there is another form of consolation.

IM: To abandon all hope of progress is a meanness of spirit.

11/11

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

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

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

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

Agony stares from each grey face.

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

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

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


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

Transformations

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

(Transformations, Hardy... for a blue star, Marh)

Marh was the first person to write a comment on my blog. Two months later she passed away. A bright kid, aged 17. May her soul rest in peace. Koss, from Lahore.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within
Like jewelry from a grave.


But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight...
The spangled sea below wants me to fall
It is hard as diamonds, it wants to destroy all.

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
through ninety dark degrees;the bureau lies on the wall
and thoughts that were recumbent in the day
rise as the others fall,
stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.
(E.B)

~~~~~~

The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
(E.B.)

~~~~~~

Alone beside the sea
like a mind alone in the universe,
her reason like man's
the sum of it how to get a meal.

A mind restless seeking,
a more restless flesh returned,
unrest and sleep without a gleam,
music delirium, and an hour of rapture

The hour of rapture is the clear hour
that comes from the darkened blind brain,
horizon-breaking to the sight,
a smile of fair weather in the illusion.

On the bare stones of the shore,
gazing at the slipperiness of the sea,
listening to the sea's swallowing
and brine rubbing on the stones.

Alone in the vastness of the univesre,
though her inaccessible kin are many,
and bursting on her from the gloom
the onset of the bright blue god.

I am with you, alone,
gazing at the coldness of the level kyle,
listening to the surge on a stoney shore
breaking on the bare flagstones of the world.

What is my thought above the heron's?
the loveliness of the moon and the restless sea
food, and sleep, and dream,
brain, and flesh, and temptation.

Her dream of rapture with one thrust
coming in its season coming without stint,
without sorrow but with one delight,
the straight, unbending laws of heron.

My dream exercised with sorrow,
broken, awry, with the gliter of temptation,
wounded, morose, with but one sparkle,
brain, heart and love troubled.
--The Heron, Sorley Maclean

~~~~~~~~~

The Choice

I walked with my reason
out beside the sea,
We were together but it was
keeping a little distance from me.

Then it turned saying:
is it true you heard
that your beautiful white love
is getting married early on monday?

I checked the heart that was rising
in my torn swift breast
and I said: most likely;
why should I lie about it?

How should I think that I should grab
the radiant golden star,
that I would catch it and put it
prudently in my pocket?

I did not take a cross's death
in the hard extremityof Spain
and how then should I expect
the one new prize of fate?

I followed only a way
that was small, low, mean, dry, lukewarm,
and how then should I meet
the thunderbolt of love?

But if I had the choice again
and stood on the headland
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart.
---Sorley Maclean

~~~~~~~~~

"...big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dark. 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 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"

~~~~~~~

Photo courtesy of Roxana

Black Bird

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfillment.

---D. Mahon

.

.

Black bird without voice

No room for you in these skies

Stone, falling, falling down

Man, no-one hears your cries.

Stone, weight of the world

Here at the bottom of the blue sea

With time for dark revenge

I'll sing your blues and think of thee

Black bird, black bird, you and me

All alone, but now so free.

---b

The Sea, the Sea

But he (Melville, M] was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships. There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human:the human of the living humus. About the real blue-eyed person there is something abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice , air , space, but not humanity. Brown-eyed people are people of the old world: 'Allzu menschlich'. Blue-eyed people tend to be too keen and abstract...like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. He cannot belong to humanity. Cannot

The great Northern cycle of which he is the returning unit has almost completed its round. The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church bell, and goes back down the shore, back into the ocean again, home into the salt water. Human life won't do. He turns back to the elements. And all the vast sun-and-wheat-consciousness of his day he plunges back into the deeps, burying the flame in the deep, self-conscious and deliberate. A blue flax and sea-poppies fall into the waters and give back their created sun-stuff to the dissolution of the flood.

So they go down to the sea, the sea-born people. The Vikings are wandering again. Homes are broken up. Cross the seas, cross the seas, urges the heart. Leave love and home. Leave love and home. Love and home are deadly illusion...the crucifixion into humanity is over. Let us go back to the fierce, uncanny elements, corrosive vast sea. Or Fire.

M was a northener, sea-born..we are most of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived.

There is something wild about a soul that has grown in the shadows of a forest, forever enchanted by mystery and wonder and phantasmogorical beings. The modern temper will avoid this question:we must fashion ourselves, write our own scripts on the blank slate; to believe that our identity is constituted from elements, from a time and space that lie outside our jurisdiction haunts us as some sort of primitive remnant of a mystical correspondence, the horror of determinsim: Freud's unheimlich. To extricate ourselves from the web of meaning, medieval symbolism where one thing stands for another, and see pure extension, a landscape shorn of memory. To rid ourselves of the music which is at once harmony and an inexpressible silence; a particular note that resonates with our innermost apprehension, that evokes a flood of memories or sounds us out, makes us feel blue. Once we were amphibious, half-fallen angels, now only transgression and metamorphosis offers a way out of a land-locked reality.

But that troubling intuition has stayed with us no matter how hard we try to remember to forget it, and sometimes with disastrous consequences: blood and soil. The huge expanses of the Russian landscape, the vast tracts of sea, both deserts of a kind, have these played no role in forming consciousness? Is there a particular style of soul that is mirrored by a type of space, the contours of one mapping out the other? Not just a figure of speech, an inherited sense of humour, the drawl of a consonant that passes from one generation to another, but the very quickening of being, the piercing gaze of the stranger, the very conception of power itself, they exist in wyrd and disparate universes, each of whose internal logic is shaped by a unique geography, a metaphysics of space.

A people without surplus will have a different idea of power and co-ercion and political organization. Of property. Tribal egalitarianism that parcels out what is sparse versus feudal hierarchy. And work: is the Protestant ethic, competitiveness, the forging of national identity, and violence a dim reflection of a lack of space, an intensity of life that turns in ever more rapid circles, a mind that needs to spiral out of its circumference of understanding? Not an eel that plummets the immense, murky depths, a "nun of water", patient, alone, at the "bottom of the nothing pool", existing like the "empty spiral of stars", but a whale who with a chaste heart and a great upward surge, desires nothing but the shattering of his prison and who dreams of open skies, emerging on the other side of the mirror that has weighed him down in his own image. Like us, his true other places do not exist in maps or charts but are the whale-lines that are analogous to the Aboriginal dream songs.

And religion? There is a desert theology that delights in wandering, in not finding 'home'; whose pleasure is in elliptical phrases and the ritual breaking-up of fixed patterns of thought, an imageless, restless void in which idols appear scattered in a broken circle. Nomadic 'thought' is
music and poetry; it is understanding without possession. The Protestant search for the truth or the Catholic possession of it. The theoretical cathedrals, the classical, bounded world of perfection for whom the sea and infinity are irrationality, madness, is something that must be institutionalized, bottled up. A people that lives in Space, Guenon would say, compensates itself with an art that is fundamentally related to time; the city, which lives in time, 'stabilizes' itself with painting, architecture, monumentality, space. The more fleeting life becomes, the lighter it becomes, the greater the need to weigh it down, to tame chance and nature.




In all this there are hidden ancestries, ancient lineages and borrowings: each one is also multiple, heterogeneous.

There is an affinity between the mountain-soul, the Romantic with his 'yearning that makes the heart grow deeper' and the wandering , semitic, restless bard and nomad. Even as the unexplored world shrinks the desert places within, the great terra incognita, grows. The wilderness, the unformed, fires the northern imagination; his religion despairs at the frozen music that is the world, so he must burn: a baptism of fire. (The curious similarities between early (Celtic) Christian art and aniconic Islam).

The world isn't what it seems. The Pacific Ocean holds the dream of immemorial centuries. It is the great blue vast twighlight of the vastest of all evenings:perhaps of the most wonderful of all dawns.

To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another.

For the northern spirit everything is a great play of forms, a dance. Never trust a god that doesn't dance. The rapid change of seasons, the drama of constantly having to re-invent oneself, politics as theatre (Aristotle)..the world is a stage (in both senses of the word), to live the truth ; in this lies the secret creativity of the west, the pact to immerse oneself in time. "Man is nothing, time is everything" said the alchemist Marx.

The northern soul accepts a life without solace; the cold hard gaze is that of the merchant, the adventurer who sets out to discover the world and its strangeness and one that learns how to calculate. The hypertrophy of the mind: rationality, dialectics, are the new and endless games that can from now on occupy his mind. Like the woodsman who is the European future, the merchants of light are detached from all place, locality, and solidarity. The modern zeitgeist is not worldliness but inwardness.

The human heart gets into a frenzy at last, in its desire to dehumanise itself.

To sink to the level of the beast, pure animality...a bundle of sensations,to feel alive (to feel the beauty of the stars and not just see them: Coleridge). Only by seeking out what is radically other can we see ourselves. But also to be distant from the world, the inanimate, is to assert one's freedom from nature's cyclomania. But this longing for a lost innocence, the golden age and arcadia are recognized as a disease of late civilisation. It is thanatos. The noble savage, primitive masks, dissonance, unpredictability, spontaneity, whirl past in the show. Consumed or stored like some great exotic ware from strange lands. Knowledge and books are but things amongst things and therefore fragile, brittle. Behind the veneer of civilisation lurks the process that will devour all. And unable to imagine goodness we will this; our will, not our intelligence, is the emblem of the spark in this gnostic universe. The lure of the abyss beckons. Modern man wants to outstare nothingness, to laugh at his own absurdity.

"Only the Englishman seeks happiness". A philosophy that seeks its own destruction, a hunger for a good that can never yield satisfaction, rest: that is what is aimed for. It is the gold-lust of the barbarian or, the absolute inverse -at a different level- of the desire for 70,000 veils, the endless affirmations and negations of the waves as they strike the shore, the quest for infinite space, to be rid, once and for all, of mirrors. But even an image, infinitely distant from its object, shares some likeness. One is an overflowing of being, the other a desperate craving for being.

But finding Home and Mother he must escape; but on escaping he must sigh for Paradise. He was born for purgatory. Some souls are purgatorial by destiny.

Indecision is the order of the day and we stand marked, perhaps, by the fatality of being unable to escape from oneself. We searched for vast open spaces, to lose and find ourselves, for unknown tracts in the other. The centre doesn't hold, seek radiality was the call. All truth is on the boundaries. But now: melancholic and riddled with doubt. Heisenberg: the great fear is that in man's explorations he will encounter only his own mind. Nature has been humanized and the centre has become the periphery. There is only life at the edge.

It is not the sea that is chaos, flux, vagueness, uncreate; the earth itself is but a flicker in the eye of eternity. The mountains are melting , everything is perishing..it always has, it always will. The mentality of the sea-farers has conquered us all. Nothing remains. We stand exposed, flat, like a vast landscape under the eye of the sun. Only in death will a few stones be able to slip back into the blue sea, unknown, as the Psalm says.




"Everything you know is put in suspension. To be exposed to the sea-world is to experience something else, something unexpected, something not quite sure.The coast is an enlarging of everything we are: what we know to be true, what we actually feel on the skin. It is a place where you leave mud, hedges, grass, and stability behind. It can be both liberating and disturbing...the sea is a form of strangenessfor which we have a deep affection. It is the realm of possibility...It is possible, I think, to trace quite a lot of our national identity to this strange, liberating sea-edge to our lives..because there is some race memory in us of leaving and coming here by sea in the first place...there is a sense, which there could not be in a country locked into the long, continuous stretches of a contintental plain, that we cannot be quite sure of how things are: always to hand are other ways of being....Perhaps it is because there is so much here that is strange to us that we have, as a nation, nurtured over many years a profoundly liberal, careful, and untheoretical frame of mind. Because of the sea, because of that mysterious margin, we are not quite sure of who we are or how things should be. The sea creates a need for contingency, for an elasticity in the way we think, and the way we arrange our affairs. Is there a sea-conscioussness in the deep English traditions of toleration and liberty? You could make a case that the habit of religious freedom, of political diversity, of an inventive and even a dreamy imaginative life, of a non-systematic constitution
habitually done are all thought patterns of a people who live on an island.

Three qualities of Englishness:The first reflects the open-mindedness , the friendly aspect of who we are: conversation, clubbability; hospitality;curiosity; familiarity; informality and liberty. In these attributes you can find the unclosed parts of our character, an availability to experience and the validity of other realities. It is an acceptance of an open , rugged edge to an island life. Second comes the opposite, a closed response to that openness , the British withdrawl from newness and strangeness, our shared and solemn understanding that the sea is a threat and that the shore itself is a place in decay: melancholy; separateness;domesticity, taciturnity; domesticity; reserve; xenophobia;exclusiveness; eccentricity and silence. Those are the qualities in which we pull back from the world, that understand that things are not fixed, that draw on the long tradition of sea melancholy, that grasp 'that stateof barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation emerged' (Auden)...this is the sea of the great Anglo-Saxon sea poems where, as the sea-farer laments,

'all I ever heard along the ice way
was sounding sea, the gannet's shanty
whooper and curlew calls and ..gull

We love that too: the beauty of the surf's 'long withdrawing roar'(Arnold), the sublime sadness of the sea, the sea of Shakespeare's 'like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end'..the fire-red sky and sea in Turner's paintings surely conscious in its echo of the end of a Viking warship, burning at sea, as a memorial to the men who lived and fought in her...not merely the open, liberal alertness to what the sea can give you, nor the eternal note of sadness but a stage beyond that, a sort of purposeful physicality; gravity; order; practicality; candour; decency; fair play;and propriety...strikingly, they might all be seen as necessary qualities of survival at sea, the constituents of good seamanship...the foundationson which a coherent life at sea must rest.

The pattern of sea-significance carries on to more recent pre-history. The great megalith culture had no equivalent in the heartland of Europe..the response to the power and drama of a coastal landscape...they seem to reflect in their architecture the natural architecture of cliff and cave.Stonehenge, whose blue stones were brought by sea from the sea-surveying mountains of the Preslis in west Wales, may itself be a form of ritual re-creation of a place thick with sea power deep in the agricultural heartland of southern England. Only the inhabitants of these islands needed, at their great power centres, thier artificial cliffs and their ritual shores.

(Quotations from D.H.Lawrence and Adam Nicolson)

I once called Jonah a gypsy and he misunderstood. But aye, that he is...

Sea Fever
John Masefield

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

-----Courtesy of Jones.