the words we have lost

'There are days when
time’s lead feet do damage,
when the sea resembles
the tear of a melancholic god,
the desert a scab
on the ribs of the land,
& the sun a shower of coals.
Days when hope
crosses her arms.

But there are days
when time is just a grin
that flies away,
days when I crave
to mix the rainbow’s every color
on a pallet,
fashion a brush from a feathered cloud
to paint a world without an axis but with several poles
& throw dice with the cardinal corners.'

~~~

There are words we will never hear, as immobile as stones, rooted to one place for all their lives. There are others that are destined to cross the seas, be translated, lovingly recorded, contested, shortened, elaborated upon, analyzed.  Further, books will be written in support of (or against) them; chairs will be set up, careers made or broken on the splinter of a sentence. Eyes will be ruined, the glass will become  more opaque, its density and curvature warping to a unique calibration, the dust will inch its way into the cracks and our hair become thinner, greyer and still the secret of those words will carry on. Some words will enter the world stage, but others will become obsolete like an old love in one's heart, reduced to the memory of a moment of infatuation on a Monday morning.

The poet, like the nomad, lives in time. Most likely neither his words nor his heart will become a legend, or part of the folklore repeated by children and the old ones.  

By chance,  a fragment of what I say makes it to her before she closes the window. I slip into the cold country of her heart, my temporary visa nearly expired, my migratory impulses dashed, to underscore the point.

~~~

What existed in the inland for all those centuries? The dry heart, the set routines, unchanging like the waves that lap the shore. The millions of waves every year, each the same and yet different,  and the tens of millions of years that pass before someone speaks a single word. 

How did they navigate the seas in the old days, before technology had extended its hand? Through songs and the stars,  the placement of each word as fixed as the star, the story remembered off by heart, the mystical union of what passes on earth with that which remains imperishable.

Pearls are substituted by oil and words by the flash of a light across a screen. Interest peaked and waned, the sap in the trees settles, the heart regains its constancy. Our lives, a brief moment in the open, a boat that forgot to count the waves but remembered the words we have lost.

Madrid

On the fast train you wondered why the trains in England were so slow. Fascism was always in a rush to get to the future. You hurtled past a built-up environment: cement-trees-cement, your life flashing past you. The slowing down of a train into a platform, the muffled voices in the loudspeakers, the bustle of departures and arrivals, is a thing of beauty in the world.

Everything in Madrid seemed new, even the parks. At least compared to the south. Here you saw radiant new lovers hand in hand in the park, speaking freely with one another whereas deep down, in Cordoba, Al-andalus, all that lost country, there were only restrained glances and dark faces. The south is a dusty place, full of people sleepwalking to their death. The taxi driver stopped the car. "Why have you stopped?" I gestured. He nodded his head towards a woman crossing the street, her hips swinging wildly from side to side.

You searched out the cheapest meal, the place where you'd have to say as few as words as possible. Did con carne mean with meat, or without. 'Con', your mind told you, meant together, as you walked alone. Without any knowledge of a place, without any words, well, you could be an American or an Englishman, just another passer by, someone who will add a bit of green to the economy. Stick to the fish, even when inland. In Madrid you were told people party until 3 a.m. You went to the Prado and saw Goya's black pictures instead, choosing to be reminded of how much Spain loves the spilling of blood...

What is a kaffir? you said to yourself, looking into the mirror. The tall, elegant windows opened onto a blank wall. "It's the cheapest room we've got," said the man. You just spoke the magic words, I replied. In the lobby old men with thick moustaches and blue blazers read the newspapers with such repose, as if they were sitting in the balcony of their own homes!

Every poet/academic/ tourist/ junkie, walks around in the city in a state of bewilderment, invisible and precisely because so, the most visible. You think to yourself: the disappearance of a letter can take the plural and make it singular. Each person walks around in his own desert. It is said in an old poem of the desert that a man is half his tongue,and half his heart. And if you lose both?

~~~

You return to London and it is like being smacked in the eye. Despite all the bridges London seems like a very unromantic city. Madrid appeared formal, elegant, and far more beautiful-well, at least from the sky.

b's great adventure in the US of A.

Back in ol' blighty after a whirlwind trip to the States. You forgot just how polite and courteous the Yanks are. Really quite remarkable. Old world charm, I guess. And the lovely accents...when C said: "are we all set here?" your heart nearly melted.

Stuck at the ungodly Newark for eight hours. A very old black woman, bespectacled, chicken-necked, looked at me and said: "looks like you is stuck here, baby!". The problem was, of course, that you looked at everyone through the prism of tv. memories. So, for instance, the taxi driver at NY was really Gene Wilder. One degree or two to the side and you could have sworn this was Lukas, your German friend. You were half expecting Starsky and Hutch to show up...

Also, everyone wanted to talk to you, to confess to some failing or heartbreak. I think that's less to do with the naive gullible look I have and more to do with the fact that a considerable amount of Americans are slightly unhinged in my opinion.

Past Chicago, the lovely blazing reds and deep bronzes of Fall. The bus driver of the Lincoln Express said he'd take me right up to the hotel for "less than a taxi". When we got there I said, trying to scam him, "I'm truly overwhelmed by your generosity, Sir"(If I'd had a southern accent it would have gone down a treat). He just looked at me and said, "That'll be five bucks". Anyway, I only had two and some change and poured them into his outstretched hands. Well, there you go...East End cunningness always beats Yankee gullibility hands down. Felt quite sorry for him, actually. He looked like an old Paul Newman with his clean half-sleeve white shirt and two-shade brown sunglasses. The driver on the way back, Mr. Lewis, was a real character. Genuinely funny. I was gonna do my Paul Newman from Cool Hand Luke there...gen-u-wine

At Newark airport, outside  Dunkin' Donuts, where I spent 4 hours gulping down sweet coffee, a man wearing light blue jeans, sneakers, and baseball cap started talking to me. Here he was, the quintessential "loser". He was "on the run". He was "hot". Had left his uncle's funeral where the money from the safe had gone missing. "Family, they mess ya up". I was going to tell him the famous line from Larkin but it would have been lost on him. He delivered newspapers for 27 years and was now in Phoenix. "And what do you do in Phoenix?"

"Not'ng..ain't much to do out there"

~~~

The talk itself went okay. Met a Mr Wang who told me this old Chinese line: each child is born to be kind. "That's lovely," I said.

"Oh no, " he replied, in a thick Chinese accent. I and my wife ah baptist for 27 yeah..we Baptist...everyone born in sin! And we both laughed.

~~~

the five star empty quarter (or Buddha finds the void)

The desert is strong; it's light encompassing, all-embracing. It was like we were nothing, like nothing in the world; an image maybe, an image refracted deeply in a dark mirror...

There are reclining chairs in one section of the airport, overlooking the runway. You sit there uneasily, since you're far too accustomed to sitting on the edge of your seat, to not relaxing. the distant lights are stacked up there on the horizon; cream, light green, sage green, an arc of white spanning out into the night sky, slightly unreal, timeless. Passengers collect a token and wait, look, readjust their bodies until they've reached a perfect still moment. It's like some ancient ritual, this wandering of the mind in the dark, this looking into bright lights for some kind of solace. These lights, burning without religion...

Some look at their laptops, connected by some invisible forces to home, the past, loved ones; others just huddle together, seeking some human warmth or conversation. Sit snugly in your saffron blankets. some pull the blankets up to their chin whilst others let the blankets fall half way to their hip. Here we are, like Buddha staring into the void. This could be anywhere. We could be anyone. This is Vegas, wired up, one's senses dazed, stunned. So, here we are; we could be sitting on Brighton pier, our mouths agape in the expectation of the first lights, or our hearts saddened by the last show, the dim understanding of all that's gone wrong in our lives. So, here we are, in the dead hours, all bleary-eyed, shot through, the mind reduced to a blank functionality. Stare, and stare into the darkness. We could be anyone or no-one, a man in a Hopper painting, looking out in the small ours of Saturday night. So, here we are, 100,000 years ago, peering into our tribe's fires, fascinated and hooked to the disintegrating flames, the cooling embers' last glow. We sit in a broken circle, without names or words for one another or the world; just the spectacular display of lights, the departure and arrival of strangers like ourselves. We try to find peace. We try to forget. The wheel of desire has become unhinged.

~~~

When an Arab woman says "Khalid" it's sexy as hell; such a difference from the solid, mind-numbing and boring, no-frills English pronunciation. Almost becomes something exotic. Eastern promise, as opposed to the gravely, pragmatic, gritty, way of saying it.

~~~

You sit in the airport, closely observing everyone's face; you want to judge every one of them or stand up and preach some to them in a high-pitched tone of moral righteousness: for Christ's sake, there's gotta be more to life than Costa coffee and the scramble for duty-free goods! This is where we are. The Americans are way behind on the scene. Why, their fakeness sounds positively old fashioned in comparison, almost old world. There are no classics in the 'bookstore' (I use the word loosely). Most of it management guru stuff and silly romances for the Bedouins.

~~~

On t.v. you hear an Egyptian peasant/labourer say: "We want our freedom, we have a 50 year-old civilisation". All of a sudden the other protesters stop their shouting and turn to him, flustered: "you mean a 7,000 year-old civilisation, right?". Cut to the next scene. The Egyptian peasant/labourer: "We want our freedom, we have a 7,000 year-old civilisation." Priceless.

wanderlust

Every three years or so you feel like just packing up your bags and walking away from everything. Taking leave.

Met a friend yesterday who is getting remarried. Grinning, he said: it's time to settle down now. It's a thought that fills me with dread. "Unfenced existence", the poet said...and yet its incredible how middle class everyone is in their sensibilities. No startling insights, just the dull hum of the everyday.

Peripatetic. Thinking and walking. Aristotle. Must tell R!

"They [the Sophists] were often mobile, as are many of those whose first loyalty is to ideas. It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale...

Many professions in many cultures, from musicians to medics have been nomadics...

The walker has the detachment of the traveler, but travels unadorned and unaugmented..."

She reverses the fall from grace. Walking as an unraveling, unfolding of complexity, a return to the body, to original limits, an unburdening...to be in the open, alone with one's thoughts, and make them mine without fear or restraint (Rousseau). Rootlessness, flux, breaking up: which is at the very heart of individualism...orientation, not destination.

"Walking, not as an analytical but an improvised act" [he says, writing from his chair]

Walking, solitude, wilderness. Ideal walking: grounded, experienced, engaged with the world, not just impressions or sensations on the blank screen of the mind. Present and detached. Present to who, though? "It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters..and overheard conversations"

This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing-it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant. (Kierkegaard)

"A solitary walker is unsettled, between places, drawn forth into action by desire and lack, having the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of the group"

---from Rebeca Solnit

the restaurant at the end of the universe

The lion restaurant...

The pair, named in media reports as Leo Gao and Cara Young, could hardly believe their luck when they checked their account at Westpac bank on 5 May, hoping to find their request for a NZ$10,900 (£4,000) overdraft had been accepted.

Instead, the bank had deposited 1,000 times that amount: NZ$10m, or around £4m. With so many borrowers around the world constantly being told "no" by their creditors, here, finally, was a bank that liked to say "yes".

~~~~~~~~~~~

A serial killer:

Mahin, a heavy-built track and field athlete and mother of two [The Herald Sun] in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself...

---The Guardian.

Not to leave any trace of herself...what a story!

heartlands

For anton:

After following the Bandar Shah a little while back, we turned to the right down a track between wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an esturay, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. In other greens, of emerald jade or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengali jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland...the heavy full-blown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself.

The sun was warm, the larks singing up above. Behind rose the misty blue of the woodland Elburz. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth.

Bearing, landmarks, disappeared as they would from a skiff in the mid-Atlantic. We seemed to be always below the surrounding level, caught in the trough of a green swell. Sitting down we might see for twenty feet: standing up, for twenty miles-and even then, twenty miles away, the curve of the earth was as green as the bank that touched the wheels, so that it was hard to tell which was which. Our only chart was by things whose scale we knew, groups of white kibbitkas, dotted like mushrooms on a lawn-though even in their case it needed an effort of reason to believe they were not mushrooms; and droves of cattle, mares with their foals, black and brown sheep, kine and camels-though the camels were deceptive in the opposite sense, seeming so tall that it needed another effort to believe they were not antediluvian monsters.

As the huts and animals varied in size, we could plot their distances: half a mile, a mile, five miles. But it was not this that conveyed the size of the steppe so much as the mutliplicity of these encampments, cropping up wherever the eye rested, yet invaraibly separate a mile or two from their neighbours. There were ..of them , and the sight, therefore, seemed to embrace hundreds of miles.

As plans of cities are inset on maps of countries, another chart on a larger scale lay right beneath our wheels, there the green resolved, not into ordinary grass, but into wild corn, barley, and oats, which accounted for that vivid fire, as if a life within the green. And among these myriad bearded alleys lived a population of flowers, buttercups and poppies; pale purple irises and dark purple campanulas, and countless others, exhibiting all the colours, form and wonders that a child finds in its first garden. Then a puff of air would come , bending the corn to a silver ripple, while the flowers leaned with it; or a cloud shadow , and all grow dark, as if for a moment's sleep; so that this whole inner world of the steppe was mapped on a system of infinite minute recessions; having just those gradations of distance that the outer world lacked.

Our spirits had risen when we left the platteau. Now they effervesced. We shouted for joy, stopping the car less the minutes that were robbing us of the unrepeatable first vision should go faster. Even the larks in the paradise had lost their ordinary aloofness. One almost hit my hat in its inquisitiveness.

---------Robert Byron, Road to Oxiana

...[H]e could never have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were-a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence...a breathing without returns to a starting-point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.

Wlateau's Drapery: Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation-inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand-of tone into tone, of one indeterminate colour into another.

--------Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception

Ex-stasy: to stand outside of oneself; the urge to escape from self-hood..doors in the Wall (H.G.Wells)

The garden is the verdigris on the mirror of the spring breeze

---Ghalib.

Beyond the black night of the heart is the emerald mountain, we are told. Beyond all loss is the other life in the heartlands, a place where we shall roam, aimlessly, you and I.

At King's Cross

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

These steps were once nothing but a vague notion in someone's mind...and before that? Between the thought and the act how much time must have passed...

One day, in the distant past, they gradually took form, congealing like wax that cools in the early hours of the morning. But the form retained something of this flickering light, borrowing something of its transience. At this moment of transition between states the poet would ask: What is inward, what is outward?

Few stop to notice them though; they are the temporary home of the tramps since their shade provides much solace. The city dwellers, the new nomads, think of them -if they do at all- as a place where all journeys begin or end. Looking up, they think to themselves, where does nature end and civilisation start?

But today these stairs are mine; in the instant that I ascend them I am alive again. Without thought I climb, drawn upwards by the sun's brilliant rays, the threads of Time; the warm air that they have absorbed acts to remind one of something profoundly familiar.

Breathing the morning openness of their world, a soul can be dazzled by all that is not 'I'. A deep reverence settles for the stillness that is cut out of dreams.

Candyfloss, Sugar-Coated Dreams

"Are you going to Kuwait?" he said sheepishly, knowing full well that I was stranded, like him, in this God-forsaken airport, its roof splashed with psychedelic colours and its sad and pensive Arabs looking rather forlorn. They mulled about with that vacant stare of theirs, one that was broken only by the gold and the glitz that was reflected by the glass casings of the small booths that packed this tiny airport like so many honeycomb cells. Against my better instincts I asked him what he was reading. Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles. That opened the door and I soon learnt that he was from Harvard and Aitchison, my old school.

"Let's get out of this shiny, plastic sweet shop and see the city" he contiued. I needed no prompting since I was feeling slightly nauseous. On the way out, we bumped into A, from LUMS, my university. She was reading The Alchemist, and despite our derision claimed that it was actually a good read: "everything can be changed into something else." Three Lahoris, caught in a no-man's world. There was only one thing for it: head for the best restaurant in town...

"What is there to see?" , we asked the Indian receptionist at the hotel. He pointed to a large map which, apart from a few blue squares and miniature depictions of mosques was, as far as I could tell, largely made up of empty spaces and dotted lines. It was as if the spirit of the desert had, by some magic process of osmosis, permeated into the city as well. This went some way to enhance that uneasy feeling that tugged at us: there was something quite unreal about every experience, as if we had walked on to some stage-set of a movie. Could it be that the blue squares were really watering wells and that they, with their dark interiors, hidden from the surface realities were, like the mosques, the only solid things in this candy-flossed hallucination?

"There is being good shopping here" he said as he pointed to the outer rim of the desert within a desert.

"And over here?" we inquired, looking hopefully at what appeared like a few buildings.

"Not so cheap shopping there"

We decided to head off nevertheless, determined to walk there (when we told him we wanted to walk and get a feel of the city he laughed uncontrollably, like a child. "Yes. Feet is good".

We passed a number of tattered shops ("moving phones" read the signboard..i.e mobile phones). Very soon we found ourselves walking along an endless six-lane highway under a relentless sun and a cloudless and monotonous sky. We now understood why the Indian laughed so voraciously and when I thought of that silly , teethy grinning mouth of his I couldn't but help think that there was something sinister in it all. We passed a few motels, brightly lit with large, ghastly blue and red neon lights and an occasional 'diner' ; a number of cadillacs whizzed by, and we kept our heads down to avoid the withering gaze of the arabs. With great endeavour we tried to convince ourselves that we were not back in 1950's America. I saw A rub her eyes as if in disbelief. Had we walked into another time zone when we stepped out of the airport? How sad it was to see the Arabs living the dream of another people...

Late capitalism could never be satisfied with plain and simple desire since it always suggested the idea of proportion and was invaraibly associated with the world, which was finite. What was needed was something else, some new type of infinity: unbridled imagination, wishes and fantasies of all and any kind. A virtual reality where the mind is given free play...like Dubai, Las Vegas, where the distinction between appearance and reality dissolves to the clink clink of money, where the wilderness of the desert, the frontier, has moved inwards and pleasure, like everything else, was but the most intense and yet fleeting of sensations. Or Singapore... http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no6/frank.html

Ero, guro, nanosensu.

Murakami Takashi: Post-war Japan was givemn life and nurtured by America..We were shown that the true meaning of life is meaninglessness, and were taught to live without thought. Our society and hierarchies were dismantled . We were forced into a system that does not produce "adults"...regardless of winning or losing the war, the bottom line is that for the past sixty years, Japan has been a testing ground for an American-style capitalist economy, protected in a grrenhouse, nurtured and bloated to the point of explosion. The results are so bizarre, they're perfect. Whatever the true intentions that underlie "Little Boy, " the nickname for Hiroshima's atomic bomb, we Japanese are truly, deeply, pampered children. We throw constant tantrums while enthralled by our own cuteness.

Other Side of the Pond

"Have a nice day!"
"Er..yes. I will surely try to do so"

At first I thought that this was a one-off but very soon I realised that everyone was pleasant, beaming with confidence and optimism-except for the blacks, that is. In comparison, old world etiquette seemed just a bit shabby and contrived, a mask that covered the fissures in one's soul and that created an infinite distance between people.

At the shopping mall:
"Can I help you Sir?"
Did she say 'Sir'? No-one says "Sir" , unless they're being sarcastic: you are a cad and a scoundrel, Sir.

How different from a conversation one might expect in a store in England.
"Good morning"
"Is it?"
"Excuse me, do you work here, I'm looking..?"
"What?"
"I said, do you work here?"
with a shrug of the shoulders: "So they tell me"

No, there was something to be said for this lightly worn superficiality and new world exuberance.

I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a veritable driving-hall crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. (Grosz).

But pretty soon this relentless desire to to be in a permanent state of happiness began to oppress my melancholic soul, grate on my nerves. On the television all one could see was smiley happy people, vacuous and sickly-sweet: weathermen tracing the path of a hurricane, some floozy selling a weight-loss product or a newscaster describing a massacre, it made no difference, one and all carried with them this ridiculous Little-House-on-the Prairie naivete. Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. Let's forget the intellect bit, buddy. I began to clench my fists...unfenced existence indeed.

Back at the house the kid sat there devouring a huge tub of chocolate-chip ice-cream. I just looked at him as he wolfed it down. There was more food in their steel fridge-which I mistook for a cupboard- than in the whole of Western Africa. Eventually he stopped, looked up with one eye (the other still fixed on the spoon) and said: this is my favourite ice-cream. This was a word I heard a lot: this is my space, my rights, my life. Me, myself and I. One wondered how much of modern identity was dependent on this sense of private property. My car, my house..all extensions of my personality.

But despite the staggering abundance of goods, the unwavering supply of gadgets and fads, there was something terribly depressing, dull even, in this world of plenty. A second glance convinced me that people weren't that happy or self-confident after all; with the chants U S A... , U S A at the stadiums I sensed a profound tribalism, a desire, a need to believe in something, anything, anything but this stifling, claustrophobic, small-town, shopping-mall numbness of the spirit. The hero worship of the President was no less surprising. The desire to project all greatness on to the Leader. Freud would have understood that. And was there something in what Norman Mailer said about the war on Iraq: the re-assertion of a wounded white man's pride: first the blacks, then women and now all that post-modern crap and relativism. No, we kicked their ass!

It always comes as a surprise to learn just how religious Americans are. A mullah in Pakistan told me that they are our "natural" allies against the kufr Communists. But even the religion is a kind of do-it-youreslf, self-reliance, form of therapy, neatly packaged by a slick media machine. Jesus loves you! How reassuring. Which car would Jesus drive. Wealth was a sign of God's blessing. No wonder all those poor black people looked so miserable!

I thought back to R, that giant of a man from Washington State, a Protestant missionary in Pakistan who never had an unkind word for anyone. We had spent hours convincing him that ikons were legitimate expressions of faith. The irony of it all, a sunni and a shia arguing for Christian symbolism! God is Love. God is Peace. He gave me some books full of cartoons to prove it so as well. I am a sinner. We're all sinners...can't you see that?!? I felt like agreeing with him because he was nearly in tears. "Aw shucks, you don't think God likes it when we kill other people d'ya? Violence is a sin I tell ya" (It transpired that just about everything one did in this world was a mortal wound to our flesh and spirit).

"But what about Hiroshima and Nagasaki then?"
"No, that was different."

But the strangest moment came when K, the secretary, had a mild heart attack. R placed his hand on his shoulder and started:
"In the name of Christ our Saviour I say heal thee". This he mumbled to himself in an ever more fevered pitch until we suggested that a hospital might be, just might be, a better option. He looked forlorn. He had once, through prayer, got one of his legs -which was six inches shorter than the other-to grow to the same length as the longer one.

And then there was the love of confession, the mania for for baring one's soul. It only took two minutes before one would learn of their "relationships" (a favourite word) and how, as Larkin would say, their parents had fucked them up. I felt the gaze of all those in the room on me, as if they expected some sort of personal revelation as well. All of a sudden old world masks looked quite appealing....

Insecurity reigns. Almost everyone hates his job...books on how to be happy, how to win friends, how to obtain peace of mind, how to breathe, how to achieve a cheap sentimental humanism at other people's expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baha'i or breed chickens all sell in the millions.

In addition to this I saw reams of books on therapy, Self-fulfillment, stress management, books on how to release the inner spirit in you, Deepak Chopra and other charlatans, peddling their Oprah-like quick-fit psycho-babble for a dime: How to Find the Creative You, The Zen of Gardening, The Zen of Politics, the Zen of Everything Else, Tantric Sex, Self Assertiveness: 23 easy steps, How to Build Self-Esteem, How to Cope When you Fail to Build up Self- Esteem, Rumi for Beginners and Islam for Dummies, Shiatsu, Pooh and the Art of Philosophy. Not to mention the penchant for personal tragedies: How I had to Chop my Own Arm Off ...but I survived. Survival was big dollars. Surviving a crisis was what, it appeared, all people seemed to do: the crisis of marriage, obesity, divorce, childhood, adulthood, motherhood, nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, of finding out that one's dad is gay or one's mother is an alien.

Books on Fear and Terrorism. Fear was now an "industry". Be afraid. Be very afraid. Gone are the days of apple pie and picket fences. But it's always been like that: first the Catholics, then the witches, then the niggers and the commies, jews, beatniks and the washed-up, drugged-out sixties liberals, then the lesbians and the f-or-n-i-c-a-t-o-r-s, and these crazed towel-heads from the caves of the Middle East (Afghanistan). God, why are you doing this to us? Why do they hate us?

Democracy. Freedom. Democracy. No, fuck, it was freedom.

And the solution? don't give it a second thought. Go to Disney Land and spend your way out of it.

This preoccupation with the lonely, isolated self, this intoxication of the self, was making me feel queasy. I needed to get back to good old fashioned hypocrisy and old world deceit.

(Quotations from 'The Rush For Second Place', W.Gaddis; Norman Mailer's article can be found at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16470 )

London, c'est moi

London, the mongrel city of a thousand voices, of a thousand and one dreams....

On the tube: an African woman reading the Quran, two crackheads discussing the best drugs to take, a Russian couple in love, a banker with a deeply furrowed brow, talking to himself, calculating, calculating...the East Europeans, still free enough to laugh unconsciously, like children.

Up above: Bentham and his rationalism in the abstract city.Then from nowhere a soft breeze blows this way and a few blossoms fall on my eyelids and I remember that Blake lived here as well.

Near the church:
a hearse passes by and an old man doffs his cap and stands to attention; does he "think" about this, or is it something he has learnt from his grandfather, a custom from time out of mind that he instinctively follows, not knowing why? Moved inwardly by love or outwardly be tradition? What is "inside" here and what "outside"?

On my way home:
a tramp asks me: "did you have a good day?"
Same day, same life.
"Yeah, not bad" I say, lying through my teeth, going through the rituals "And you?"
He has the gentlest of smiles...what would I know he says in the shrug of his shoulders. His face is burnt and he stinks to high heaven. What is it like to live a day facing reality, without the pretense, without the falsity of society, alone in the universe?

I place a pound coin in his outsretched hand; the curve of it folds in on it, neither accepting nor rejecting it.
"I need twelve for a roof tonight".
So much for marginal economics!

I walk on by.

I am alive , but life without beauty seems pointless.
But no, to be alive is everything. Even if we are ashes, invisible to the world, nothing but thoughts in the underground, we still dream of being leaves and dream a thousand dreams of open spaces, of drfiting and landing softly near the beloved.

VLADIMIR: We have our reasons.
ESTRAGON: All the dead voices.
VLADIMIR: They make a noise like wings.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
VLADIMIR: Like sand.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: They all speak together.
ESTRAGON: Each one to itself.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: Rather they whisper.
ESTRAGON: They rustle.
VLADIMIR: They murmur.
ESTRAGON: They rustle.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: What do they say?
ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives.
VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: They make a noise like feathers.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
VLADIMIR: Like ashes.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
[Long silence.]

Geneve

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars-on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places

Geneva is an amlgam of the worst features of the old world along with those of the new; crass american commercialism and german insularity.

-----Ali Q

Why are they so unsure of themselves?

---Hagira

There is something pensive, melancholy, almost self-obsessed in their downcast eyes. Everywhere we go we are greeted with the formulaic and wooden "bonjour" but there is never eye contact, never an openness to the other. The nervous sideways glances, the erratic, furtive gestures suggest a form of neurosis; it is as if their bodies have become dissociated from their minds. There is something terrible and strange about the soul of the land-locked Central Europeans. They look out at the world, if at all, with Durer's eyes. Only the sea and a sense of humour has saved their cousins, the English, from such a claustrophobic inwardness. Beneath that placid temperament, the seemingly unruffled exterior, it is easy to imagine the repression of instincts, the fastidious observance of routine, the meticulous attention to detail and exactness (watchmakers), a fanatical, theocratic zeal for order and regimentation, the compelling need to take account of all the intricacies of a life (banking, accounting).

Those implacable faces-thick set, heavy-boned, the square jaws: Polish peasants with fur coats. The city seemed to be petrified into a rigid mould of 80's style and fashion. In every person there co-exists plural selves but here the disjunction between them seemed more acute. Mostly, only one possibility emerges to the fore as personality comes to be clearly delineated against the other, shadowy phantom existence. These other selves, exiles, discarded ancestral forms, are like so many broken lines that never form a pattern. But in this case, the radical alter ego has not been canceled out and lives just under the surface, always likely to re-emerge under certain strains and pressures.

There are 'communities of will' and 'communities of obedience' but in those who are of mixed descent, in whose essential nature is a compond of miscellaneous elements, both temperaments survive as they compete with one another.

The great paradox: the more an individual is uprooted, the more he escapes from 'natural' constraints, the more he craves order, repetition, rituals and the more he becomes entwined in the manacles of his own mind and its products. He veers from one extreme to the other: authority and anarchy, restraint and freedom; Luther, like the German soul, wants to escape legalistic Judaism, 'laws', rules and return to psalmic Judaism...to hear the truth, not see it, to be lost in the One but at the same time be superman. A double life, the tension between being and nothingness. This will culminate in the erasing of the very presence of the people who have made the greatest moves to the truth.

Even the prostitutes look sad here

Never before have I seen such dullness in so many faces; is it from boredom or opulence or something else? The faces of the poor are always expressive, always etched with a story but here my first impressions were of so much hidden suffering, of quiet desperation (Thoreau). The Scream. The woman strains to talk to us, but then realises that she has been too open, too casual and so abruptly brings her sentences to a close. Everywhere is the same: grey upon grey, endless and relentless buildings devoid of any charm or human warmth, of any scale of the human. Bleak beyond belief. The Lebanese immigrants, ghostly and forlorn, shuffle through the city with hunched shoulders, as if marked by the sign of servitude and dejection. They glide by, dreaming of warmer climes.

The divide in Europe is only too evident-the rich, expansive, rounded, unselfconscious, sun-lit Mediterranean world for whom beauty is truth and, on the other hand, the northern spirit whose God is bare, imageless, whose life is always derived from the elemental: tree-spirits, the sea, the bracing wind, the wilderness, the lone voice. The gothic cathedral recreates the forest (Spengler); her music is either profoundly elegaic or a pure, soaring expression of the will-revolutionary, demonic, earth-shattering..a flight of fancy into the realms of imagination perhaps, but always a music that expresses the will, not the intellect.

How to live? What would a city built on the principles of Calvin look like? Geneve, five hundred years of rigorous introspection, of tranquility and peace, a veil of snow and silence, of discipline and sobriety. The birth of psychological man. At Lake Geneve: Rousseau: I feel , therefore I am (not, I think...). The sparse, stark interior of the cathedrals-nothing must be allowed to grow here, no image can be the focus of devotion, around which a whole world might congeal. The cathedral as a cave, a refuge for hollow men in a late civilisation; the exterior world is cut off by these modern-day Manichaeans, life is held in abeyance. One must focus on the one thing needful: to deepen the spiritual life one must narrow it.

Geneve, a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police...excommunicating drunkards, dancers [the list goes on]. The first attempt at establishing the Panopticon; Genve, an experiment to convert the secular world to one cell-like monastery. But only a theocratic state can make any inroads. By a strange transmutation, the attempt is taken up by the state, by political forces. If the church cannot become a state then the state must become a church. But as it does so, the ideal becomes not a spirtual body but an efficient machine. But all this reveals a fundamental division in the psyche, a division that will manifest itself as the cultural contradiction of capitalism.

For it is will-will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent rapt adoration or straining in violent energy , but always will-which is the essence of Puritanism , and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in the tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized.


This corresponds to the conservative, authoritarian phase of capitalism when the state represents total power, solidity, and the idealized image of the individual is that of a grave, stern , conservative spirit, given to punctuality in matters of labour, practicality in public dealings, efficiency, rational clculation, constancy in prayer and deep but simple , reverential piety: ‘sober exaltation’. In this scheme of things, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are diversions, unnecessary and, ultimately, superficial; an ugly excrescence. But within this soul, and opposed to this sober prudence, is a ‘divine recklessness’, the desire to affirm an individual existence, to break free from constraints, tradition, societal norms, anything that is ‘given’: liquid modernity, the endless play of forms (culture), the destruction, devouring, of limits, the melting away of all that is solid. This strand is the root of the secular liberty as well as the Romantic lonely individual faced with a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness ..a wilderness to be subdued beneath solitary stars , the sea behind , the untamed desert ahead.

Fraternity, solidarity must be sacrificed to autonomy. The roots of utilitarianism can be found in puritanism and something of this twin legacy is transferred to america: the conservative, hell-fire nation mixed with the hegemonic ideas of freedom to contract and property.

There is no other way of explaining how a philosophy that is supremely indifferent to the world could end up in this narcotic of gold, how the iron will, the 'practical ascetic', could sanction such garish worldliness.

(quotes from R. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)