The Disinherited Mind

Jede dumpfe Umkehr der Welt hat solche Enterbte, denen das Frühere nicht und noch nicht das Nächste gehört
---Rilke

I was listening to a great Radio 4 programme in the morning which featured some folk music - Ewan McColl singing of the hardships of the industrial age and the Irish fiddler, John Doherty. After that, there was a wonderful blues' song, Black, Brown and White by Big Bill Broonzy. Perhaps part of the current nostalgia for folk is understandable against the background of an England that is slowly slipping away, receding to a memory vault that is nothing but an England of the mind. *

Whether folk art or music can be sustained in essentially different social conditions is a moot point. Can a sense of "place" (Raymond Williams) survive when the frenzy of capitalism is hell-bent on undermining the very notion of stability and continuity? "All that is solid melts into air".

As is the case with religion, without a framework of reference, what Simone Weil would call "bridges", can we have anything but fragmentay experiences? The very possibility of "experience" is thrown into question and a certain shallowness comes to the fore. Experience, like character, depends ultimately on memory, transmission, and communicability; a shared set of norms, stories, and language, the things that have an inextricable, a hidden, but deep rooted affinity with the land are passed down from generation to generation as if the most precious of possessions. To the western mind, or more specifically, the modern mind, such an idea smacks of collectivism and goes against the grain of modern thought which starts with the 'I'.

But for the ancient heart existence and the world are given, as is language and the rules we work within. The "muddy centre" that is there before us. We are, therefore I can think. This is what Levinas would call the infinite being placed in us. Ours is not , then, a search for knowledge but acknowledgement.

"The epaisseur opaque of a life centred on nothing but itself, a sort of weightless irrelevance. Without testament, without tradition-which selects and names, which hands down and preserves , which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is-there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future."
-----Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future.

"Since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity."
Tocqueville

The American woodsman is interested in nothing. Any notion of sensitivity is foreign to him. Those boughs so elegantly sprouted by nature, the fine foliage, the bright colour that enlivens a part of the forest, the deeper green that darkens another part of it-all this means nothing to him. He has no memories to call upon in any particular place. His only thought is for the number of ax-strokes required to chop down a tree. He has never planted anything; he does not know such pleasures. Any tree that he plants is worthless to him, because he will never see it when it has grown sufficiently large to be chopped down. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere; hence every place suits him. He cares nothing for the field where he has done his work, because his work is only toil and no idea of sweetness is associated with it. What emerges from his hands does not pass through all the stages of growth that so touch the farmer's heart. He does not follow the destiny of his products...he has no regrets about leaving the place he has dwelled in for years.

And they [the Fishermen] have no love for any particular place and know the land only by the ugly house where they live....this man is a trigger of technical violence : his place can be any place, because his mind has lost the mnemotechnical loci from which it can hang images...Woodsman and Fisherman are ...united in their hatred for the earth that still generously envelops them. It is a hatred for all that grows and that, in growing, becomes sweet and fades. Their pace is different from everyone else's: they strike blows, they pull and tug-gestures that are a metaphor for those of the gambler who rolls the dice. And in their devotion to the blow lies their cosmopolitan mission: the blow is the same everywhere ; the plant has the flavour of a single place. ..the citoyens seemed archaic and out-of-date compared to these two new characters, who, beyond the frontier, were acting out the gestures of burgeoning history.
---Talleyrand, cited in Roberto Calasso's Ruin of Kasch

*
I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.-
But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

---Larkin

Via Negativa

I have the habit of starting my sentences with the word 'No'..."no, but..." or "no, not really." Perhaps there's a set of words or thoughts that one inherits from a particular place or from one's ancestors, a turn of phrase that encpasulates something about one's being and that is transmitted from one generation to the other, sometimes knowingly but mostly out of the reach of consciousness. Only in moments of pure stillness or exile does one "catch oneslef"- to take up that wonderfully evocative Buddhist way of speaking-using such words. Does one have to be estranged from oneself and one's times to see things clearly?

I rememeber speaking with my uncle and him saying, "I've just realised b, you're stuck in la ('negation) ". There was more truth in this than I cared to admit. And then he told me how the Allama had said that Nietzsche was only half a muslim since he had taken negation to be a final destination when it was only a stepping stone in the stream of life, a "station" that one passes through.

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing. He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling.
He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening.
He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its
primitive infinity.
------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.

But there are different things that we negate and different ways of doing so-some legitimate, some not so. No, even at the very least we can say that a complete 'nilling' is not possible since this too is our act and therefore an affirmation of existence (the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God).

But is there a way of freely praising? Rumi would say that free will itself is the ability to praise God for His Beneficence.

That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
-----W.H. Auden

What is it that we moderns want to negate. God? That goes without saying.
Part of us wants to know for oneself, to know oneself and not have a witness to our being, an acknowledgement. Escape. The old story. But wither shall I flee?
To see the world as it is, in pure contingency, from a distance: the Fall. We land with a thump and rub our heads.

All philosophy, thinking, begins with awe and wonder. But to think is "to die a little" to the world so that one does not die completely. Put negatively, is thought anything but the staving off of death? Death is the point of all points.

The philosopher does not permit his wonder stand as it is, to be released into the flow of life. Of necessity, he must "hook" the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought's "object" and "subject" from the flow of life and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates and is perpetuated in the motionless mirror of his meditation; that is in the subject. He has it well-hooked; it is securely fastened and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive, statuesque, subjugated."

The solution and dissolution of their wonder is at hand-the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a wonder to eachother; they are in the very heart of wonder. Life becomes numb in the face of death and dies. The wonder is unravelled . And it was life itself that brought the solution.
---Franz Rosenzweig.

Gnostic Nation

By mid-week do you dream of the weekend and a few days of freedom from the drudgery of work? Do you think of a holiday as an ‘escape’? And do you think that politicians are hopelessly detached from the “real world”? If so, then maybe you have, like the rest of us, Gnostic leanings.

But what does an ancient heterodox religious movement have to do with our 21st century lives and can we really draw such historical parallels? It has become fashionable to think of our lives as similar to those of the men and women of Late Antiquity. In politics it has become a commonplace to talk of the emerging system of governance in terms of “Empire” and to view America as a new hyper-power to rival Rome in terms of its cultural influence, military power and in its megalomania. It is not, however, just the current Bush administration that would have had Gibbon writing about fantasy and folly for in some sense the growth of religious fundamentalism is also a sign of the ‘virtualisation’ of politics, driven as it is by a rejection of the norms of history, tradition and community.

With the rapid emergence of China and India fears of decline are not totally misplaced. There is an uncanny feeling that we’re living in the autumn days of a civilisation, and that there are, as George Steiner points out, no new beginnings. As with the decline of Roman Empire, there’s the feeling that things are coming undone not just because of military overstretch but because there’s a loss of nerve, a radical turning inward: in short, a new Gnostic age is upon us.

The essential feature of Gnosticism according to the thinker Hans Jonas was the sense that the individual was a lonely, atomised, self “thrown into” a hostile world that is not of his own making. One consequence of this radical dualism was that Nature and the world were devoid of any intrinsic standards or values and that they were nothing but a realm of force and power.-a view that our modern scientific outlook has done little to negate. As with the first Gnosticism, we find ourselves isolated, alienated in a world from which God is utterly remote and if not dead, then at least seriously ill. For Gnostics, ancient and modern, truth and salvation come from within, from knowledge (“gnosis”) of the divine spark that is surrounded by an infernal order, the satanic mills.

One could endlessly speculate on the causes of this new mood: urbanisation, cosmopolitan rootless-ness and mutli-culturalism, globalisation, science and technology: all seem equally strong candidates. Perhaps the most important is our obsession with personal happiness and pleasure, as if the body and our raw sensations were our defining and only reality. And modern-day consumerism, with its internet shopping and the ‘no-places’ that are the shopping malls, only fuel this extreme sense of inwardness.

The surest sign that we’re living in a Gnostic age is the development of an unbridled individualism in what is coming to be called ‘the century of the self’; the coming of age of a ‘me-generation’ that is, as Simmel would say of the meteropolitans, blasé about the world around them; we seem to be bewitched by private lives-our own and that of others- and this is manifested in our fascination with celebrities and the vogue for biographies.

But perhaps the clearest indicators that we’re entering a new Gnostic age come from popular culture. One can hardly fail to escape the huge interest in ghosts, angels, near-death experiences, new age cults, Sufism and contact with the ‘spiritual world’. In all of these cases one can detect a profound dissatisfaction with organized religion which is deemed to be too politicised, ritualistic or ‘worldy’. Salvation lies within, says the prison governor in the immensely popular film, The Shawshank Redemption.

Recent television programmes and films have also captured this Gnostic feeling.
The cult programme ‘the X-files’ specialised in informing us that the world was not quite what it seemed. Phrases such as ‘trust no-one’ and ‘the truth is out there’ spoke of a deep suspicion of the world. It was as if the world itself was one big conspiracy theory. Such a view is mirrored in our penchant for all sorts of conspiracy theories-from crazy Zionist ones to staged moon landings to the current blockbuster, The Da-Vinci Code. And the Gnostic idea that reality as we know it is actually being manipulated by some alien force was a central theme of major films like the Matrix and The Truman show. But if you are truly a modern and not an ancient Gnostic, then your reaction to this article will have to be one of sheer indifference. Did I hear you say yeah, like, whatever?

62

To our minds there's something unsettling about our love of repetition, rituals, set phrases, and cliches. It is a variation on the horror we feel towards what we initially think of as random events but that gradually start to appear with a diconcerting regularity. It is as if inanimate matter pre-figured or mirrored our own state of soul, and the pattern of events said something about the meaning of our lives: a remnant of primitive thinking, animism, that must be expunged if we are to have 'clear and distinct' ideas. 62.

This world of ours, a Parmenedian block universe, has exhausted all possibilities but yet still somehow manages to point to something other than itself.

But it is not just the poets who suffer from this excess of meaning; the medieval imagination was saturated with a vast array of interconnecting, interlacing and overlapping systems of thought, feeling and sense. We, too, are haunted by the uncanny, and a half-formed thought that an invisible thread links 'habitat' with 'habitus' lingers on. In addition to the vague intuition that we're only saying and thinking what other people have already thought and said, there's an eerie sense of deja vu, a dark anxiety that in a world that is governed by a strict mechanism-where even chance follows statsitical laws-the wildest of co-incidences are something to be expected. If the universe has no beginning then we have been through an infinity of similar moments.

I think back to my English Literature teacher, the highly respected Usmaani saahib, who with his balding grey head and thick black square glasses had something of a slightly comical look about him. A person whose soul was ill at ease with the modern era, but who nevertheless was able to remain blissfully unaware of the flow of time by immersing himself in his books. He had an odd sense pride in his deep affinities with an England that only existed in the mind: Morris Minor's, cricket whites, and an idealized 1950's view of a profoundly moral and static society. "The greatest evil of our times," he once lectured the whole school , " is boiled sweets". But I also remember his keen insights when it came to Hardy.

"Isn't it weird, slightly unbelievable even, that so many things should slot into place just at the right moment?" asked on student. "It is," he continued , "as if divine Providence, and not the character of Gabriel Oak, is the main spring of action. "

"Yes, " came the reply, "it certainly looks like that at first glance. If one takes a slice of life, any life, then any event appears to be truly random, a pure co-incidence. If one were to look at the event and see it as but one of many in a whole series of occurrences then it would lose all of its strangeness and uniqueness; either that or each one would come to take on a magical, special, significance. But more than this, any life is nothing but the interweaving of the predictable with the unpredicatable. Over the span of a 'whole life' one should learn to expect the unexpected. "

I don't know how many of us understood this at the time. It was a lazy summer's day and his voice had tapered off towards the end, floating like a cloud into the empty sky.

My thoughts turn back to something else someone said but that I only now feel the urge to recall. It was an old shaykh from the deserts of Mauritannia. The lecture itself was rather dry and bland, and he spoke in a matter-of-fact, monotnous tone. I think that he himself realised that his time was running out; in a world of soundbytes and instant knowledge, there seemed to be little point to the patient, slow truth of a classically trained scholar. The painstaking examination of evidence, the analysis of ancient, dusty parchments and obscure legal rulings were hardly things that were likely to catch the imagination of a modern-day audience.

On the whole it was an uneventful talk. The Shaykh was mindful of the centuries that stood between him and us. His words on pluralism, the necessity of diversity-at a political and metaphysical level-were greeted with a shuffling of feet. This reminded me of what another shaykh had once said:

There was once a great shaykh who started to address a huge gathering by asking who knew what he was going to talk about today. Everyone raised their hands.

"Then there's no need for me to say anything more."

The following week he asked the same question and this time, aware of what had happened the previous occassion, everyone kept their hands down.

"How can I talk to you if you don't even know what I'm talking about?!"

A week later and the same question.

The crowd had now swelled, since he was one of the most reputable scholars in the whole land. This time, they thought, they would get the better of him. Half of the vast crowd raised their hands.

"Well, then I suggest the half that knows tells the half that doesn't. What need is there for me!"

Anyway, our Shaykh, the Shaykh of the desert and the flowing black robes, drew the discussion to a conclusion and looked unsatisfied with the whole experience. Then someone from the audience asked a question regarding who could legitimately interpret the Holy text. The Shaykh's eyes lit up and his whole being became animated.

"This is an obscure and technical point so I'll only give you a short answer "...and one could see his mind sifting through a library of thoughts and accumulated knowledge. although he was talking about texts quite a few of us came away with the impression that he could just as well have been talking about a chapter in our lives:

"Only someone who has an understanding of the particular text , its specific meaning- the literal as well as the allegorical , the general spirit of the whole book and how the specific is related to the universal import of the verse, how the verse is related to other verses and general spirit of the whole book; someone who has a profound knowledge of the language and of the circumstances-political, social, economic-in which each verse was revealed. somone who knew which verse was revealed when and someone who understands the times we now live in; someone who is at one with the land from which he comes...only such a person is qualified to speak. But this is the short answer...."

Omkara

I am not what I am

What drives him? Not malice or envy or hatred-these are all too conventional. What we have here is something far more ambiguous, far more interesting. It is the perennial outsider's contempt for the circle of sunshine that people find and build around themselves. The solidity of their lives, their ability to find meaning and love repulses him who lacks all seriousness, all gravitas. He views everything as if it were a game, a cosmic play. He has no desire to usurp the position of anyone else-that would only be to enter the fray. Far better to mock the certainties of life from its fringes, to weave the element of the absurd into its pattern. A trickster, a joker, becomes god-like by introducing chance, superficiality, and folly into human affairs....

I've given up trying to finish Herzog. I've started the book three times now but to no avail. It's far too rambling, disjointed. Instead, I've taken to choosing books on the quality of the print and the typeset-the most arbitrary of things. Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Bellow's Dangling Man. By a quirk of fate, all seem to be dealing with the numbness of the ordinary, the crumbling of the familiar world around us. What look like the most tangible of realities turn out to be only a cover for something else.

General Z and the Charm of Tyranny

If ever there was a demonstration of the curious, but grim and inescapable fact that the majority of mankind can easily be duped by the most absurd and fantastistical of illusions then it came in a conversation I had with a friend....
But the General was, despite all that can be said against him, a profoundly religious and humble man. Why, don't you know that he used to pray five times a day?

And as if to reconfirm my gravest fears he went on:

The Taleban have been misunderstood by the westren media and "farangis" like you; they represent "pure" Islam, a return to simplicity and a shunning of all "innovation,"of all that is friviolous and extraneous to a good life. There is, finally, tranquility and order in that war-torn country. Surely not even you can deny this? There is no fear of theft and soon, as is the case in Saudi Arabia, people will be able to leave their doors open again without any worries. People in your country are riddled with uncertainties and doubt, a meaningless existence and a scepticism towards other people; here, everyone-and especially the womenfolk- knows their place in the scheme of things.

It seemed pointless to continue. But what exactly was the allure of order, authority, tyranny, finding one's "place"- in him and in all of us? Was there something to be said for the old, closed world of narrow assurances, a charm that would partly explain our fascination with authoritative voices (Susan Sontag). Perhaps the re-emergence of conservatism and tribalism, or at least its appeal, was that in a chaotic and globalising world made up of the ceaseless flux of events and the emergence of an ever-new formless reality one could close the gates on a rapidly changing world, withdraw into one's private shell. Conformity and the creature-warmth of the crowd...perfect anonymity. We live in a shape-shifter's reality, where the stage-set is continuously being changed. Last orders, gentlemen.

Should we distinguish on the one hand the desire for authority, stability, and order-as well as the leaders who can both represent and deliver these things-and the sympathy and blind allegiance that some people can show for a tyrannical leader (Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong)? Are we talking about a difference in degree or kind here?

The strongman , the authoritative voice that knows how to make decisive decisions, whose will is the force of law, outside the bounds of reason. A pillar of strength, standing resolutely against economic dissolution, social fragmentation, moral decadence and the chaos that run amok in the cities, brought on by the cosmopolitan intellectuals, the cultural litterati and the avant garde. Amidst the collapse of, the draining away of meaning from life, the Great Leader unites us all again in these end of days: he is the body politic: l'etat, c'est moi.

But from where does he derive his strength? For some, he is a veritable force of Nature, a shaman priest-king born under an auspicious star, the representation of a mighty Will, an elemental power that is thrown up by the vortex of History...he is, in short, nothing less than the manifestation of a people's Destiny. A millenarian king, a messianic saviour who comes to redeem time, to rid the earth of corruption and impurity, whose very presence signals the beginning of a new age, a utopian moment. In the tradition of those authoritarian sages, holy saviours he commands obedience because of his ability to embody the future of his people and the land.

The Leader offers hope of a great leap forward, a dazzling and glorious existence and not the mundane, bourgeois idea of piecemeal improvement and reform that underlies democratic politics. But these are sociological explanations. Is there something in our psychological make-up that pre-disposes us to the reneging of our independence and autonomy. Do people actually desire to be slaves, to fall back into nothingness or child-like dependency?

This is a thought that is too disturbing to contemplate and must be banished. The same applies to Miligram's Stanford experiments. But the questions simply won't go away. The return of the repressed.

The Narcissist as the Great Leader: the independent self who needs no other. A shining, glamourous, luminous tyrant who is beyond all need. If we love him that can only be for our own good. The singular focus of all devotion and praise, a whole and perfect being in this world of fragmentary, incomplete and marginal selves.

It seems that the tyrant, then, is associated with a complex of ideas that one could subsume under the heading of arcadia: he is the re-incarnation of the ancestor, the giant who walked alongside the foosteps of men, a Father of the Nation. He brings us back to the mythical age, a time when the purity of the tribe was unblemished by contact with foreigners and strangers and politics was still the politics of blood, the hearth, and ancient lineages. This ability to re-establish a pattern in people's lives -social harmony-is taken to be a quasi-divine function. But he does so by turning the tables, by rebeling against the anarchy of all that precedes him; he is a Revolutionary hero, a visionary who can 'read' the spirit of the times.

But why should so many ordinary, law-abiding, fundamentally moral and decent people be drawn to such a character? How does he mesmerize the masses, what explains the unquestioning devotion that he commands? With his death people often reflect and come to the conclusion that they had been living in a dream, a trance-like state, their senses lulled by his brilliant oratorical skills, or charisma. Compared to the prosaic, middling lives obsessed with 'getting and spending' the tyrant shows up the pettiness of all such aspirations. Once again the world can be perceived in black and white, and enemies can be recognised for what they are. His popularity is energized by our love of unity, seamless order, homogeneity, and purity. To transfer all of one's responsibilities on to someone 'higher', some cause greater than oneself, the desire to be nothing exists side by side with the tyrant's desire to dominate, to project himself in countless megalomaniacal ways. And we go along with this, content that the light is shone on the Great Leader and not on us, ignoring the massacres and the purges; long-standing friendships are torn apart in amatter of days as suspicion and recrimination and simmering tensions are allowed to come to the surface. Allegiance and loyalty cannot be divided.

The emergence of the Great Leader is greeted with great fanfare. A return to the boundedness of pre-lapsarian times is heralded as a triumph. Fence in existence, the builder of walls, the distributer of power. Nomos and Polis.
He inaugurates a politics of the heroic future now, establishing heaven-on-earth. Redemption in an all or nothing world. The politics of the theatre comes to replace one of pragmatic and rational concerns; it is based on anger, fear, suspicion, cruelty, and instinct rather than reason, compromise and scepticism. It can only succeed by infantilizing large sections of the population. But, ultimately, such a possibility depends on the 'sacralization' of categories in the 19th century: race, class, nation usurp the palce of the divine. Nazism, with its neo-barbarism, has one foot in Teutionic myth.

From Kadare's ' The Successor' :

Modern tyrannical power is constructed backwards and is deliberately ambiguous (as in a dream, one has to interpret it starting from the end). Power is nothing but the signature to events. The Great Leader's strength is not determined by his ability to stand opposed to the individual as a semi-divine, superhuman 'other'. Power is not hierarchial but total and ubiquitous. The individual is enclosed in a reality from which he cannot escape, paralysed by indecision, never sure which of the myriad doors is the real way out since each one looks equally enticing. It is a world of cul-de-sacs and bridges and paths that lead nowhere. He has the snaeaking suspicion that each one, like his howls of protest are actually part of the system orf ruse and deception. The more he struggles, the more deeply embroiled he becomes in the nexus of power relations. The ultimate symbol of this type of power is the labyrinth, Piranesi's prison, sybilline and oracular, complex warren-like corridors peopled by bureaucrats, functionaries, and pen-pushers. The banality of evil.

It is not the case that knowledge is power. The hold of the Great Leader on us is predicated on our inability to say or know anything about his power; he is shrouded in a veil of mystery, his power is everywhere and nowhere. The most insignificant detail comes to be invested with the most wonderous meaning. The steel of his power lies in his ability to generate and calculate dissonance, ambiguity. We are caught in his web, bewitched by the spell he casts.

But ultimately, the true basis of his power rests in his ability to convince us , to 'fake it'. Our allegiance to a false god is what sustains the illusionist...it is our desire to believe in the spectacle before our eyes. As in Oz we are taken in by the brilliant mechanism of power itself, the dazzling display of magical thinking. But it is always because we wanted to be seduced by the splendour of the fictions of our soul that we could be so entranced.

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 )

Happy Accidents

Beauty is the promise of happiness
------Stendhal

An elusive happiness that is always just out of reach and that is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies, and that disgust with life sometimes gripping them in calm and easy circumstances.
---- De Tocqueville



Much of the current debate on happiness seems to revolve around what things go towards making a happy life. The issue becomes one of ranking the things that matter to us - meaningful relations, good health, education, job satisfaction, lots of money, the life of the mind - in order of importance, and trying to decide which institutions - the state, the market, the family - are in the best position to deliver them.

But perhaps another, more basic question gets passed over in all of this. Namely: should we think of life essentially in terms of happiness, and what exactly is this fascination with it?

Despite Nietzsche's claim that only the Englishman seeks happiness, the drive to feel good seems to be a universal preoccupation found in diverse societies over vast tracts of time. At its most basic, the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure may be hardwired into our nature, a mechanism that ensures our survival as a species.

At a more sophisticated level, for some people, happiness lies in the search for a "golden age": a time of plenty and abundance when we were not defined by what we lacked. Attempts at achieving happiness become variations on this theme of a return to lost purity, from the religious idea of "the garden", to the secular retreat, to rural idylls and even, perhaps, to our dependence on, and unity with, an authoritative figure in childhood. Could it not also be that our forward dreaming and the shape of our utopias is informed by the feeling that happiness lies in our origins: the first time, that first place?

In all these examples, happiness is another word for satiation, rest, bliss and perfection. The problem with the idea of happiness as some sort of overarching and guiding principle is that it is a projection of a very narrow view of what it is to be human. Are we really governed by this single factor, or might there be other things - respect, altruism, duty, compassion, love - that move us to act? That we attain some level of happiness in pursuing meaning, beauty and knowledge is not to say that the motivating factor is happiness; it is just to say that happiness accompanies such pursuits.

Of course, one of the main reasons that happiness has had such a long run, and why it is the current flavour of the month, is that there's a certain charm (and benefit) in reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut method of evaluation. By allowing us to assess different states of affairs, and the elements that go up to make a good life, on a single dimension that can easily be objectified, the idea of happiness provides us with a common currency, as it were.

Being hooked on happiness may at first glance look like the legacy of Romanticism; in truth, though, it is more closely linked to capitalism. We define our fundamental rights in terms of our ability to pursue - not achieve - happiness. Indeed, shopping and consumerism depend for their hold over us on cultivating this sense of being unfulfilled. It is hard to think of the endless expansion of capitalism, or the whole notion of progress and development, without this permanent lack of satisfaction and contentment. Our modern, troubled happiness is the new salvation not because it promises a perfect state of bliss but because it offers a picture of perfection that is always just out of reach: a happiness that is unlimited and therefore unattainable.

We have a sneaking suspicion that behind the shining surfaces and smiling faces - a life singularly devoted to the pursuit of happiness - there is another, more real and authentic life. Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days, said Goethe, and at least a part of us cannot but help think that there's something shallow, trivial even, in all this sun-and-wheat-consciousness. A life of perfection and of happiness is really the life of the Eloi: a life of boredom and indifference. If we are no more than "constantly moving happiness machines", is it any wonder that in these complex times it is only children who find happiness in things they do not possess: a star, a tree, a flower?

Shiny, Happy People

You are obsessed by the greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves
------(Q:102:1).

The term takathur bears the connotation of "greedily striving for an increase", i.e., in benefits, be they tangible or intangible, real or illusory. In the above context it denotes man's obsessive striving for more and more comforts, more material goods, greater power over his fellow-men or over nature, and unceasing technological progress. A passionate pursuit of such endeavours, to the exclusion of everything else, bars man from all spiritual insight and, hence, from the acceptance of any restrictions and inhibitions based on purely moral values - with the result that not only individuals but whole societies gradually lose all inner stability and, thus, all chance of happiness.

He has long ago lost all innocence, all inner integration with nature. Life has become a puzzle to him. He is sceptical, and therefore isolated from his brother and lonely within himself. In order not to perish in this loneliness, he must endeavour to dominate life by outward means. The fact of being alive can, by itself, no longer give him inner security: he must always wrestle for it, with pain, from one moment to new moment. Because he has lost all metaphysical orientation, and decided to do without it, he must continuously invent for himself mechanical allies: and thius the furious, desperate drive of his technique. He invents every day new machines and gives each of them something of his soul to make them fight for his existence. That they do indeed; but at the same time they create for him ever new needs, new desires, new fears-and an unquenchable thirst for newer, yet artificial allies. His soul loses itself in the ever bolder, ever more fantastic, ever more powerful wheelwork of the creative machine: and the machine loses its true purpose-to be a protector and enricher of human life-and evolves into a deity in its own right, a devouring Moloch of steel. The priests and preachers of this insatiable deity do not seem to be aware that the rapidity of modern technical progress is a result not only of a positive growht of knowledge but also of spiritual despair, and that the grand material achievements in the light of which Western man proclaims his will to attain to mastery over nature are, in their innermost, of a defensive character: behind the shining facades lurks the fear of the Unknown.
-----(M.Asad, Road to Mecca)

There's something of the Old Testament Holy indignation in this, something that reminds of me of Ginsberg's Moloch.

Morning Star

A fascinating combination of combative and stoical heroism with a priestly bearing conferred on Indians of the Plains and Forests a sort of majesty at once aquiline and solar; hence the powerful and irreplaceable beauty that is associated with the red man and contributes to his prestige as a warrior and martyr. Like the Japanese in the time of the Sammurai the Red Indian was in the deepest sense an artist in the outward manifestation of his personality: apart from the fact that his life was a ceaseless sporting with suffering and death, hence also of a kind of chivalrous karma yoga , the Indian knew how to impart to this spiritual style an adornment unsurpssable in its expressiveness.

...[t]he crucial importance he attaches to moral worth in men- to "character" if you will-and hence his cult of action. The heroic and silent act is contrasted with the empty and prolix talking of the coward; the Indian's love of secrecy, his reluctance to express what is sacred by means of facile speeches that weaken and disperse it, can be explained in this way.

The whole Red Indian character may be summed up intwo words, if such a condensation be allowable: the act and the secret; the act shattering if need be, and the secret impassive. Rock-like, the Indian of former times rested in his own being, his own personality, ready to translate it into action with the impetuousity of lightning; but at the same time he remained humble before the Great Mystery, whose message, he knew, could always be discerned in the Nature around him.

Wild Nature is at one with holy poverty and also with spiritual childlikeness; she is an open book containing an inexhaustible teaching of truth and beauty. It is in the midst of his own artifices that man most easily becomes corrupted, it is they that make him covetous and impious; close to virgin Nature, who knows neither agitation nor falsehood, he had the hope of remaining contemplative like Nature herself. And it is Nature, quasi-divine in her totality , who will have the final word.

-------Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds

Earth, Fire, Wind

All yours, Injun, twenty-four bucks’ worth of glass beads,
gaudy cloth. I got myself a bargain. I brandish
fire-arms and fire-water. Praise the Lord.
Now get your red ass out of here.

I wonder if the ground has anything to say.
You have made me drunk, drowned out
the world’s slow truth with rapid lies.
But today I hear again and plainly see. Wherever
you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.

I wonder if the spirit of the water has anything
to say. That you will poison it. That you
can no more own the rivers and the grass than own
the air. I sing with true love for the land;
dawn chant, the song of sunset, starlight psalm.

Trust your dreams. No good will come of this.
My heart is on the ground, as when my loved one
fell back in my arms and died. I have learned
the solemn laws of joy and sorrow, in the distance
between morning’s frost and firefly’s flash at night.

Man who fears death, how many acres do you need
to lengthen your shadow under the endless sky?
Last time, this moment, now, a boy feels his freedom
vanish, like the salmon going mysteriously
out to sea. Loss holds the silence of great stones.

I will live in the ghost of grasshopper and buffalo.

The evening trembles and is sad.
A little shadow runs across the grass
and disappears into the darkening pines.

-------Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan

Black and Blue

To my horror I find that I'm becoming a white man....

I should have realised that something was wrong by the cessation of the traffic outside. But too late, as usual. It was if the world had stopped and that this little local crisis had the power to re-enact that rarest of things: a time when English people actually stop doing things and start talking to eachother about something other than the weather. The flood- caused by something as unremarkable as the usually gentle Roding-had started.

By the time I got to the garage I could hear it thundering down the slight incline, menacingly, as if it were a slab of lead or ice. Not to be outdone by the river's maliciousness, the clouds darkened over. Inside, the water was black and up to my ankles and the musky smell of the furniture that was brought from Pakistan now mixed with that of dank wood. The rats had already scurried off with their customary good sense, as if they could sense the impending doom of this sinking ship.

It was too late to phone Bogdon -the Polish Robin Williams look-alike-and it would take too long to explain to him that we needed the services of "the Russian" (the huge Ukranian, a force of nature in his own right, who could be commanded, like a djinn, to move just about any object on earth). And I knew then that the attempt to save things was futile. With this realisation came a sense of relief. There was a perfect stillness. A cool northern breeze pushed up against my back and over the water, causing a flurry of silver ripples against the carpets and my Zen bed, the Zen bed, Zen bed.

Blessed is the man who hears the thunder
And does not think:
"it's the end of the world".

But it was hard not to think of the departure from Pakistan a year back and lost friends, a parting of ways which was at least the ending of a world. I will never forget a dusty and gloomy room in the dilapidated back streets of Lahore where I was shown a 19th century Caucasian carpet.
"But I cannot afford this [it was 30 lakhs -around 40,000 pounds] " I said to the owner. At which point he pulled up a chair, told his son to make some tea and said Khalid, let us look at it just for the beauty of it. The old ways of the east die hard...

Reluctantly our mam came down-nothing, and surely not something as inconsequetial as a flood, could tear her away from her book of poetry. She was particularly fond of reciting the lines: we asked for four days of life; two were spent in waiting, two in regret. She surveyed the damage from a distance, like a grand Ventian Doge, and said: "I hope you've saved the onions and tomatoes, I need those for tonight's dinner".

When the waters receded I could just about see from the corner of my eye that most of the albums had been destroyed. From childhood we had been taught-though taught is not the right word-that there were great benefits in 'not looking' at the world. I now knew what this meant.
Marvin and Otis, B.B. and Sam and Dave; and the reggae cassettes as well: Marley, Steel Pulse, and Toots. Miraculously, Streisand and Manilow survived. I should have read this as a sign.

A few months later I had to download some of my favourite tunes to an ipod (if you don't know what that is, it's like a walkman; if you don't know what a walkman is it's a bit like a cassette player...eventually , we'll get to human memory!) The choices were, to my great surprise, white groups from the 70's and 80's . Not Arvo Part of Bach's fugues, which might have denoted a modicum of respectability, but pop and rock for Christ's sake!

How bizarre. I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as half jewish (my grandfather was also known as 'the old Jew'-largely because, as far as I can make out, of his fine waistcoats and dandy hats-and I had always imagined that there was more than a hint of Buddhism in the lazy, pluralistic traditions of the Kashmiris, but this was going a bit too far. Of course, language and the grey clouds had already long ago entered our blood, gently shaping our thoughts like the contours of a river-bank.

But , politically at least, there was a radical refusal of system that was always muslim (shia?) To always take the weaker side, as if to redress the balance, was to be in a permanent state of opposition. But now this! Admittedly, it wasn't as serious as supporting the English cricket team but....

There is nothing left to do; it seems as if time istself is pushing us in this direction. I have to download some Louis, quick, before it's too late....

Cold empty bed...springs hurt my head
Feels like ole ned...wished I was dead
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Even the mouse...ran from my house
They laugh at you...and all that you do
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Im white...inside...but, that dont help my case
Thats life...cant hide...what is in my face

How would it end...aint got a friend
My only sin...is in my skin
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Music of Time

We live in a fragmentary age, where we can see and feel only parts of the whole picture. An era of narrow specialization and a world of fantastical, slender, and restircted vantage points. Is this because of the times we live in-times in which the world's myriad images swarm before our eyes, clamouring for our attention ? (note: already the question has to be broken down, offering up its multiple constituent modes of analysis: the psychological, the political, the sociological, each as palusible as the other, each as good a substitute for the other).

But perhaps it is because the very content of our knowledge-in distinction from our approach to it-is in itself fragmentary, incomplete, incoherent, ambivalent. What can we know of history or any process whose results lie undetermined so far ahead in the distant future? The times we live in or the Time we live in?

The turning away from the classical precludes any sense of 'totality' and maybe even the notion of order and authority are de-valued. The tension between the infinity of life and the rigidity, fixity of the mathematical and of 'structure'. However, from another perspective it is the mathematical that expresses not permanence or the absolute but an infinity that is dynamic...an unending series (and it is the biological which represents temporality and contingency).

But hasn't this always been the case? The radical insufficiency of a finite mind faced with a reality that stands apart from it; amind that stuggles to cirumscribe all that is 'other' but that also learns to come to terms with what lies beyond the realms of its comprehension, its own, as it were, 'glasses'. We see through a glass darkly and are somehow aware of this fact.

Leonardo: the mathematical and the biological, structure and universal flow. Music, as harmony, is a pattern and spontaneity.

My share in all that is happening ...I- this bundle of flesh and bone, of sensations and perceptions-have been placed within the orbit of Being, and am within all that is happening. Danger is only an illusion...for all that happens to me is part of the all-embracing stream of which I myself am a part. Could it be, perhaps, that danger and safety, death and joy, destiny and fulfillment, are but different aspects of this tiny , majestic bubdle that is I? What endless freedom, O God, has Thou granted to man.

----------Muhammad Asad, Road to Mecca.

Rats

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your Cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.

---------Isaac Rosenberg

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

--------Robert Burns, To a Mouse

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful
of screeches like torn tin,

An effective gag.
when it stops screeching, it pants.

And cannot think.
'This has no face, it must be God' or

'No answer is also an answer.'
Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth.

Are stealing its backbone
For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,

For supplanting every human brain inside is skull with a
rat-body that knots and unknots....

'Stay' says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat's head down into godhead

The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
and the sleep-soul of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow-

That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried

The horned Shadow of the rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs

While it supplants Hell.

------Ted Hughes.

Lahore is Lahore

The risk of having a port-city as your capital is that it is too open to the flow of ideas, goods, and people. Far better to imagine a new city out of nothing, an abstract glass city where none of the old mystifying powers of the land and established hierarchies can take root: the bureaucratic city par excellence, or make some provincial centre the main city, the main bulwark against modernist, dissipating forces. The capital has to be a city of desire and memory...

Lahore , like all closed or land-locked cities, has always existed. There has never been a time when it didn't and so to talk of the establishment of foundations is meaningless. Culturally conservative, she turns her back on the inspiration of the high seas and instead models herself on the slow-moving rhythms of the earth. If there is any regeneration or vigour it always comes from the north, but they too are soon lulled into her deep sleep and afternoon stillness. To live for a day there is to live for a thousand years.

The secret of its longevity is that it has retained all the charcteristics of a large village: the gossip, the landed elites, the bumpkins, the clowns and dreamers, the drunken poets and jilted lovers, ... and the intrigues are always of a small and trivial nature. In it simplicity and crudeness it has retained something of the human-whereas other cities grow by becoming more machine-like and less human.

Of the twelve or so remaining statues only a handful remain in public spaces-the others confined to the dusty backrooms of the museum. And what need would there be for such objects when the each person is a living statue? "Orr?" (And?) is the usual refrain...but what else is there to say but repeat the old stories?

Back when Lahore was a fledgling city a Lahori went for the annual Hajj to Mecca. On his return he was all praise for the holy city. The piety and holiness of the people. But the Lahoris, impatient as ever, wanted to know more: orr?
Well, fantastic food and hospitality.
Orr?
The sense of peace and tranquility, of closeness to God...
Orr?
Sensing their growing frustration he then told them what they had wanted to hear all along.
But Lahore is Lahore.

And since that day Lahore has always been the capital of the world, the only city in the world- beyond which exists only a number of smaller villages. Nothing could change her; immutable, inscrutable old Lahore.

But change she did. Some cities grow in lightness, others in extensity; Lahore doesn't grow either upwards or outwards but only in density, absorbing other people as it does foreign stories that she makes her own.

But soon a crack appeared in her heart; what was once only the wilderness now became the most inhabited part of the city; and what was originally within the confines of the "gates" was now only "the inside city". On the inside there were only decaying buidings, the fading splendour of once regal gardens and a sort of fatalism, resignation hung in the air. As the soul of Lahore drew ever more inward, attached by the thinnest of threads to the ever-growing distant memory of what she once was it was as if she was becoming a dream within a dream. But this in itself was nothing new. Lahore was always the most real of cities because she was the most unreal...

In Place

There's something almost holy, sacred even, in a person who has lived with and understood the fixed patterns of life and the land; who in the regular movements of the seasons can see the turning points, the transitions from nostalgia to hope and back again. Here one is not talking of individual poetic souls who are in touch with the mysterious -almost as if by chance -but of the sturdy recorders of history and folk tales with their rock-like memory. It is not their closeness to the elemental, raw sensations, that is unique but their heightened intuitive awareness of the intermingling of nature's and their own destiny. The stories of the people merge into the stories of the land.

Kavanagh:
the parish is not a perimeter, a limitation, a bound, but a 'space through which the world can be seen'. Parochialism is unversal...all great civilisations are based on parochialism..to know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge , a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the juncture of four small fields-these are as much as aman can fully experience.

This, of course, only 'works' for us as a kind of metaphor since there is no going back to nature or to cosmos for the latecomers that we are. The unchanging habitat is an expression of and a product of the genetic material of the species that creates it: the spider's web is without teleology. Only language and myth re-connects it with the human world..."spin a web". But our heart isn't in it. The gradations of being , the subtle threads that bind us in feeling and consciousness with nature no longer exist, or if they do cannot be found. We see only "pure extension", magnitude. There is only the "idea" of nature, which is to say: discontinuity, radical and absolute, and nothing else.

At a certain age the clothes fit. There's an equilibrium between biological and social worlds. It is as if one has grown to one's limits, being has filled us out and there is a certain peace about this, like two overlapping circles finally becoming synchronized. But from here it appears that there can only be a decline, a falling away. This perfection cannot be consciously designed by a political system or even by religion since it depends , crucially, on the awareness of our fittedness with all that has passed in the universe, a sense of not being estranged from oneself or from the times we live in. And that type of self-assuredness is fragile, temporary, and not something that can be aimed for or re-constructed once it has passed; it is pure gift.

To speak a word of love.
But there is none.
To hold a fire to the sun.
But the gods never come.

Cans't get out of myself,
No matter how hard I tries.
Always singing to myself,
My self, my 'I', never dies.

If

"If a wound hath befallen you , a wound like it hath already befallen others"
-------[ Q: 3,140].

God may reduce you,
on Judgement Day,
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
----W.H.Auden

The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.
It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen.
-----Angelus Silesius

Paragon of animals, quintessence of dust.

Winter is a thousand directions: past , future, regret and a promise; a homecoming of the heart and the death of the world. Summer is nothing but an endless horizontal.

Depaysement: nocturnl rambles, exile and disorientation; dropping out of bourgeois society,..arriving somwhere for the first time and feeling the wonder and excitement of a world that is not yours and that never will. Not reaching out to possess that otherness , but just an awareness of it: as if one were seeing the world on its very first morning.

Never read more than you can practice.

Kamikaze diaries: Of the 4,000 one quarter were unviersity graduates, studying Latin, Chinese and western philosophy. The ultimate test, the right of passage that they set themselves, was the ability to comprehend Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One wonders if they remembered any of it during those final moments....

Contra Jogulatores Obloquentes

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof beams
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise.

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.

-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing , we turn to our friends.

-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.

-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people and people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a committment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occassionally felt that way. No, the first formualtion was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God revelas His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in relaity nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is resored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:
metmorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.

Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.

The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary..only equals laugh."
Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.

Endgame

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
(W.B.Yeats)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
(T.S.Eliot)

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
(C.Milosz)

Sunday Afternoon

"Still life" means "everywhere there is an orderly way of life...a tidiness of the house and a cheerfulness of mind...domestic, everyday life" and even the life of the court is only a heightened version of this: eroticized boredom.

Arcadia and the pastoral idyll: "everlasting spring", fullness and roundedness; primitivism and childhood were the only modes of authenticity against the backdrop of a once familiar landscape that was slowly receding from our eye's view, fading into our memories. The only way in which the increasing mechanical world of routine, rationalized organisation, and production could be held at bay: pleasure, art and culture as the last bastions of relative autonomy from the markets.

Nature is re-imagined as a place of respite from the onsetting forces of capital. But even here, leisure is soon colonized, brought into the folds of the space of flows.

But there is an older, "eternal sunday" that is depicted as a land of abundance where, as in the great feasts, there is " no sign of anything beyond what can be drunk, eaten boiled or roasted" and a certain innocence prevails. Here, there is the "unobtrusive enjoyment of life and carefree seriousness...an immediate other world beyond hardship." Here humanity is reconciled with nature, at ease with itself; there is only the present and self-presence and it is full, ripe, and serene.

On the negative side, however, there soon emerges another picture, "a single mosaic of boredom...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box", intensely pre-occupied. We see a "hapless idleness" and "expressionless brooding...an [internal] infernal utopia of distance and such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon is the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself."

"Cezanne transforms even his still life in which things are rigorous and sedentary, in which happy ripeness has settled, ...into a witness to a heavy contentment."

The dullness of modern regularity beckons, stretching across the horizon like a clouded gaze, extending its grey monopoly over anything that it approaches. Sameness hangs over us like fate. Henceforward, with the road to metaphysics closed, there could only be a detached and studied idleness, or a descent to eccentricity, random spontaneity, madness even-all signifying, in one way or the other, the presence of a genuine human soul behind the mask.

To fall, to burn a path with one's own eyes...is this not infinitely preferable to the mundane, shopkeeper's mentality? An act of the will, even if misguided, indicates the shimmering of the spark more than a thousand years of this sleepwalking, of this still life....the "repose of a settled nature".

The Allama would say: the ink is not dry!

Gaugin, who in his European world-weariness seeks happiness and colour beyond the deep blue seas. To find the "remote and primitive world", far away from the rigid, familiar world of hierarchy and stratification...as if contact with the exotic would unlock some deep part of him that had long been lost; the body, the sensual, hedonistic pleasure as an escape from the monotony of industrial society. It is the dream of freedom-freedom from anxiety, guilt and responsibility.

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilising old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.

But the insipid "sunday afternoon" , with its sickly glow and peaceful slumber, its sun-and -wheat-consciousness, in so far as it expresses, with its wistful glances, rigid, well-defined personal spaces nothing but the desire for solitary contemplation, for uninterrupted being, and forgetfulness it knows nothing of real presences and connectedness-modern awareness is infinitely atomized and divided, ; in this sense, even as a negative image it carries over with it, and is structured by, the memory of the conditions it is trying to escape. Either as a temporary respite from mind-numbing routine, or as a final goal to be achieved, the afternoon is a long-drawn out realisation that the life of abundance, of the Eloi, is a shallow one.

Leisure: " a means of favouring bourgeois ends: the reproduction of working power"; the need to "kill time", to throw oneself into the whirlpools of chance through adventure, gambling, exploration, intoxicants...anything to get "out of oneself", the claustrophobia of "being" that is also an unbearable lightness of being, an eternal Sunday of sunshine. Anything can be endured except the succession of fine days. "Sociability as the form of play in a society confirms this society in even escaping it." The one-dimensional garden -as well as the desire for a dizzying escape from it in pleasure-are both marked by the closed spaces of capitalism and its work-routine.

The pressing question then becomes how can "free time" be used, "consumed", "valued". In late capitalism, leisure is either a moment of recuperation or it is a method of stupefaction: entertainment and the culture industry become a way of mesmerizing people, riveting them to series of fragmentary images and sounds, each as fleeting as the next-whether it is an image of fear or pleasure is of little import. The flight from boredom and indifference can, from now on, only be solved by the industries that manufacture dreams of escape and rebellion...the very same organizations that generated the levelled-down world in the first place!

"We have time and example neither for the grace nor the peace of happiness " because work has burnt us out. Culture: been there, done that. Tick. And move on. Only the hobby indicates " a private appearance of what activity with pleasure and love could mean."

Bourgeois presentation and administration of culture: " such cultural transmission resembles a promenade concert in small spas, and the Sunday supplement in the bourgeois conformist press."

The past then becomes "history", something to be viewed from the safe distance of behind a window plane...a museum piece. Culture is a matter for our educated tastes, our refined sensibilities, but never something that continues to inform our whole personality (rather than just the mind), rarely something that does not cease to affect our very way of thinking and living as soon as we step outside the walls of the gallery, museum, or concert hall.

"Really experienced history, namely that experienced in terms of forming history oneself, provides no legacy for ...the sunday room, instead, it is a house that has more staircases than rooms."

(Citations from J.Franzen, intro to the Gambler and from Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope, vol II)

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.]

Stray Reflections

Fragments of a fragment....
Not wanting to place these fragments in their respective places it is, perhaps, better to just assemble them here, haphazardly, without any logic; instead of trying to harmonise the others they will just remain here, displaced, discarded; that way the past will never be completed and be always open to additions, further cancelations and deletions....

The whole world is made of fire,
the whole world is fire.
----Heraclitus.

Why so downcast, my soul
why do you sigh within me
--------Psalms.

We live and dream of other lives; our life itself is part of the life and dreams of others and just as a dream only occurs within a life, so a life only occurs within that other, dream-life which is the realm of possibility.And all are contained within the orbit of that greater circle, the iris of eternity, that single moment that is the Life of God, the "blinking of an eye"....

Shamanism is a stray descendant of Sufism.
-------Ted Hughes.

Augustine.
Our desire for the world makes it , in some sense, "the world"; fleeting, because we die even if it endures. To lose oneself in the dispersion of the world, "worldliness", is a way of losing the sense of fear that the good will pass away.

Iris M.
Anything that consoles is false. We live in an age that is sceptical of happy endings (the Romantic legacy).

Anselm.
We can 'conceive' of something beyond which nothing can be conceived. Which is to say that we can know our limits and therefore have some "idea" of infinity. To affirm transcendence requires a degree of immanence.

American Artists' congress, 1936.
The individual is identified with the private ( that is, privation of other beings and the world), with the passive rather than active, with the fantastic rather than the intelligent. such an art cannot really be called free , because it is so exclusive and private...An individual art in a society where human beings do not feel themselves to be most human when they are inert, dreaming, passive, tormented or uncontrolled, would be very different from modern art.

Outside William Morris' house.
The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light and finally they disappear into the hidden depths....and then the sun is reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together again in a loving embrace...and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself, endlessly, eternally. Perhaps it is the ceaseless movement of the stream that allows such an image to form in my mind; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change it is doubtful whether there would be a reflection at all. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time because of the permanent presence of the sun?

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream return to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without its illumination the stream is nothing but a memory, a thing that exists only in the mind as a possibility, empty and alone.

Courtesy: the perfect matching of inward intentions with outward gestures.
The Gita: holiness within, selfless action without.
For the moderns courtesy will appear as something wholly artifical, superfluous and trivial. The mechanical repitition of the set phrase, the cliche, spoken at just the right time and the right place, lacks "authenticity", "individuality".
However, for an aritstocratic soul it is precisely this sense of balance and proportion that is the highest virtue since it is at one with nature; from the perspective of the 'outward eye' there is only a mindless formulaic act; but the medievals would have understood "the deed" to be a sober, outward act and a state of inner freedom, "drunkenness".

Isaiah Berlin on Naivete:

The naive , in contradistinction to the sentimentalist, is not conscious of the rupture between "thought" and "action", feeling and expression. There is a pre-lapsarian harmony and unity. This will appear to be superficial, shallow, too peaceful. the sentimentalist, on the other hand, is always searching for that lost unity..he is always outisde nature, alientated from himself and from society...2 not joy or peace but conflict with nature or society, unsatiable craving, the notorious neuroses of the modern age, with its troubled spirits, its martyrs, fanatics, and rebels...."

He comes to delight in his inability to find "home".