nolite conformari huic a seculo

There is something harsh, severe, rigid, and strict in religion. Concentrated, pure, crystalline, as hard as diamonds. To talk of freedom without limitation..one could equally talk about a heart that is constricted and knows no love. But there is something extreme in Christianity which doesn't appeal to me (this is not a judgement and far less a moral position); we are only talking here of a compatibility with one’s temperament -and that is something that is utterly beyond one’s choice. Again, one has to tread carefully here since different tendencies are present in any one tradition. Islam has its asceticism, for example. And no-one would contest that its outward sobriety in certain matters is anything but a refined detachment or that half the religion is jalal and 'awe’ and reticence. Add to this that the perspective is infused with the spirit of the ‘law’ and obedience rather than love and it is quite possible to come to just the opposite conclusion of what I am suggesting. One must also be aware that differences in perspectives narrow down considerably the more one’s actions and thoughts are centred on a truly religious life.

But be that as it is, there is something disconcerting-from the Christian perspective-about a religion that is so concerned about the good of this world and the good of the next. Behind such a concern there is always the hint of a suggestion that what we have here is a concession to worldliness and sensuality, a conformity to the strictures of an organised religion and not to the unbound spirit. Hagarism.

This confusion of perspectives is, of course, not always a result of bad faith. From a vantage point that stresses ‘the one thing needful’ or the truly singular cosmic intervention of the divine into human affairs other faiths, or rather the possibility of other faiths, are not a pressing question. To ignore other meeting places and transitional stages between nature and grace-as Gustave Thibon puts it-in favour of the cross is not wholly surprising. Islam, on the other hand, emphasises a continuity of Revelation and is therefore essentially pluralistic. From its perspective it a truth that must already contain the truth of Christianity within it whereas from the latter’s point of view Islam will necessarily always be an outsider. Perhaps it is this that accounts for Islam’s supreme flexibility-a religion that could take in not only people from many different cultural backgrounds but whose theology could express itself at once in terms of Greek metaphysics and nomadic thought, a synthesis of civilisation and the desert (Medina and Mecca); more than anything else, the ‘world’ and the body were not looked at in a negative light but were themselves ‘ladders’ or bridges leading back to the holy. It is that sense of equilibrium and balance that minimised the fissures in the soul and the extreme tension (as George Steiner has it) between flesh and spirit, Revelation and History, time and the end of time that one detects in Christianity. One only has to compare this to the sublime: "the whole earth is a mosque" to get an idea of the differences in contemplative attitudes.

But having said that, here are a few of my favourite words by an extremist-Simone Weil. I invariably find it exhausting reading her even in small doses, since it is as if one needed a superhuman effort to pay attention to a single point and that one is being made painfully aware of the inadequacies of one’s own soul; a quiet thought dawns on us: had we realised but one point, had the intelligence of mind and attentiveness of will, we would be as radically de-centred, de-created as her.

1. There is every degree of distance between the creature and God.A distance in which the love of God is impossible: matter, plants, animals. Evil is so complete there that it destroys itself: there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. We are at the point where love is just possible.

2. We can say that we exist (to be placed outside) not that we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist.


3.Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. We must also renounce the past and future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of the past and future around a present that is always falling away.


4.Time is the door to Eternity, not a substitute for it.


5. [S]in springs from the desire to appear and dominate.


6.When speaking of God’s ‘dependence’ on creatures one can say that things are true in the order of love and false in the order of being.


7. We only attain to real prayer only after we have worn down our own will by keeping rules.


8. We want the future to be there without ceasing to be the future.This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure.


9. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love Him.For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of His love , without the protection of space, of time, and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.


10. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.


11. To transfer the source of our actions outside ourselves. To be impelled. The purest of motives (or the basest: the law is always the same) appear as something exterior.


12. To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the ploughed field, between the blank page and the poem.


13. Idolatry comes from the fact that, whilst thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop.


14.It is because of this monotony [of evil] that quantity plays so great a part.


15. Necessity is God’s veil. Limitation is proof that God loves us.


16.Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.


17. We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend. All that I conceive of as true is less true than those things of which I cannot conceive the truth, but which I love. The desire to discover something new prevents people from allowing their thoughts to dwell on the transcendent, indemonstrable meaning of what has already been discovered.


18.It must be work in which the body constantly bears a part ..if this condition is not fulfilled then every change in our thinking is illusory.


19. No human being should be deprived of his metaxu , that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture etc) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.

Trench Lines

On this day we must remember not just the fallen but the wonderfully subversive, those who broke the lines, those without rank, who are always falling, falling. The Christians are complaining that the poppy should be white: there can be no redemption through blood. What an irony! They should be shot...like the muslims who want to change the name of Lawrence Gardens to Jinnah Gardens or Khuda Hafiz to Allah Hafiz.

Break of Day in the Trenches
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 (5)
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 (10)
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, (15)
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 (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
-- Isaac Rosenberg

Devil's Blues

Marriage: one year of flames, thirty of ashes.
---From The Leopard

A friend tells another : Latest research shows that married men live for longer than unmarried men .
Other Friend: no, it just feels like that!

Just spoke to Monty and his trouble with finding a woman to settle down with. As the saying goes back home: marriage is like a sweet: those who eat it suffer from regrets at tasting it and those who don't live with a constant panging for it. Everyone's got a theory on this. Some are charming, all are ridiculous.

He's now been asked for a list of appropriate characteristics:
"I feel like fucking Schindler here" he says.
"Well, you should say your preferences are for men then! And, what did you say?"
"A girl who speaks Japanese"
"Why did you say that?"
"Because I know there is no such girl"
Well, that narrows it down! What else?
A girl who wears a monocle.
Monty, this ain't the 1920's and you're sitting in some rural back sticks. Think practical for Christ's sake.
You're right. Educated, fun and sophisticated.
Now you're talking champ. What did they say to that?
They said they knew some girl who gets a French manicure!
Worse comes to worst , we can always dress the mongol up and get him to wear a skirt.
I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that!


He's got grief but we can both laugh about it. If he's listening to anything now I hope it isn't Skip James. I tell him about the indomitable Mrs. P who had eight kids but would greet each of them -even if after a long time-with a distant handshake. She saw her son was in the doldrums at not being married at such a late age: son, if you think it's bad now, wait till you get married. ..I've never seen her laugh so heartily.

Open Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

---after Umberto Eco

Wild Ones

The unsurpassable JJ:

The first Europeans to visit the atoll of Tetiaroa in the South Pacific were deserters from Captain William Bligh’s ship the Bounty in 1789. Bligh came and caught them; soon afterwards Fletcher Christian led a more successful mutiny. In 1967 Marlon Brando bought a 99-year lease on this ring of low-lying islands for $270,000. It was his own private colony, a fantasy of freedom that connected him to the 18th-century Bounty mutineers and their contemporaries, the authors of the American Declaration of Independence.Brando tried to make Tetiaroa the home of an international thinktank, to create a self-sufficient refuge from the coming nuclear catastrophe, to breed Atlantic cold-water lobsters in the warm waters of the Pacific. At one time he lived here in a single room. Some of his nine children, especially his eldest son Christian and daughter Cheyenne, spent a significant part of their lives here, and at Punaauia on neighbouring Tahiti. In 1995 Cheyenne hanged herself at Punaauia, after losing a custody battle for her son Tuki. This happened five years after Christian Brando shot dead her Tahitian boyfriend Dag Drollet at the Brando home on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. At Christian’s trial, Marlon testified, “I think perhaps I failed as a father.”

As a father, Marlon Brando improvised, if you believe his biographers. He followed his moods, his feelings. Sometimes he lavished attention on his children, and sometimes he forgot them for years. He lived in the same aleatory way that he acted.Brando was one of the grandest and most grotesque exponents of the only purely American contribution to art: improvisation. To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive - unmechanical, unpredictable. Brando was the greatest actor in the history of cinema because he would bring the complex fluency of real life to performances, despite the rewrites, cuts, endless takes.

And he did it by ignoring narrative in favour of irrelevant, inexplicable, surreal gestures - improvisations. In The Godfather, as Vito Corleone, he plays with a cat while he discusses beatings and murder. He sniffs a flower, raises his eyebrows - and these little asides dominate the film, more memorable than any of its slaughters. In On The Waterfront he picks up Eve-Marie Saint’s white glove and, instead of giving it back to her, puts it on. It’s the very redundance of Brando’s asides that made him live more intensely than any other actor, because in life we don’t only, or often, do things actors are trained to do, things that are “relevant”, “telling”, that “create a character” - we do not act, or not all the time.

Brando didn’t make a good film for a quarter of a century, but to the end he had a profound influence on modern culture. He is one of three artists who define what is distinctively American about American creativity. No American art, literature, music or performance has mattered since the late 1940s unless it accepted their influence. The two others were Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker. The American trait they epitomise better than anyone else is the compulsion to improvise. Improvisation is America’s art, its self-expression - and its disaster.

In his art, Brando created sublime images of a spontaneous, unguided, free existence. In his life, he catastrophically demonstrated the tragedy of American freedom. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness led to loneliness and injustice. Like the Bounty mutineers, like the founding fathers, Brando created a colony of chaos. His greatness and failure start to make a kind of sense only when you compare him to his peers, Parker and Pollock.
Brando, born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, was 80 when he died six months ago. Charlie “Bird” Parker, born in 1920 in Kansas City, and Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, would be 84 and 92 now. They could still be here. But the best alto saxophone player who ever lived and the painter who dripped colours on to canvases laid flat died within barely a year of each other, in 1955 and 1956.

Charlie Parker was addicted to heroin, and a lot of other things - whisky, cheap wine, anything that might substitute for heroin. He was hospitalised at Camarillo in California after a breakdown in 1946, but wasn’t drug-free for long - his trumpeter Miles Davis broke with him after Parker repeatedly spent the band’s money on drugs. Bird’s classic recordings date from 1946 to 1948. When he died, of unascertained causes, in New York on March 12 1955, watching the bandleader Tommy Dorsey on television at a Rothschild heiress’s house, the doctor who examined the body reckoned the dead man was 53 years old - an overestimate by 19 years.

Jackson Pollock started drinking when he was 15, and by the late 1930s was so dependent on alcohol that he was hospitalised in Westchester, New York, in 1937. Jungian analysis, marriage to the painter Lee Krasner, and moving out of Manhattan to the far end of Long Island freed him to paint his definitive works between 1947 and 1950. But he went back to drinking and his last years were disastrous. He crashed his car near his home on the night of August 11 1956, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger.

Marlon Brando’s own addiction was less lethal, or at least not so quickly - he was a compulsive eater. His gorging was already established when Truman Capote wrote a cruel profile of him in 1957. Capote watched the star of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One order a meal of “soup, beefsteak with french fries, three orders of vegetables, a plate of spaghetti, rolls and butter, and apple pie with ice cream”. In his latter years stories circulated about how when Brando went to health farms, he paid people to throw burgers over the fence.

For Parker, Pollock and Brando, to be a purely improvisational artist was unbearable - American freedom was unbearable. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness were attainable only in art - in life, the void had to be filled with addictions, narcotic crutches, gluttony.

The belief that America will be found in the improvised, the spontaneous, the truly free, dates to the late 19th century, to the birth of what was in effect a new nation after the civil war. The war between the northern and southern states was fought over the meaning of the American constitution: for Lincoln’s Union, the existence of slavery insulted the universal right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The north’s victory did not, of course, truly secure these things for African-Americans. But it did force a question: what was the nature of this American liberty for which young men had died? The idea of American democracy became charged and new: it gave birth to modern American culture. You feel the exhilaration of what a truly democratic America might be in the poetry of Walt Whitman and the fiction of Mark Twain. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” declares Whitman in Leaves Of Grass (1855-92), his epic poem of democracy. In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain anticipates every modern American novel, from Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye to Pynchon’s Mason And Dixon, in mapping a fluvial, free-flowing adventure - child’s play as improvisation, with Huckleberry Finn the original hero-improviser.

Twain openly associates Huck and Tom’s world with black culture, saying in the preface to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer that it describes the beliefs of “children and slaves” before the civil war. This aligns Twain with the most important cultural revolution that took place in the US. The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians. The origins of jazz are difficult to reconstruct but early composers saw the roots of the form in slaves’ work-songs. James P Johnson, “father of stride piano” in the early 20th century, said he took the call-and-response style of his Carolina Shout (1917) from listening to stevedores, whose shouts derived ultimately from west Africa. But jazz is a response to America, not a rejection of it.

After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.

In 1945 that nation was, in theory, triumphant. America had just won a war for democracy. For the first time, it knew it was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Yet racial inequalities crippled Whitman’s “Life immense in passion, pulse and power”, and social and political conformity strangled his “word Democratic”. Even jazz had been made corporate by the big bands, as the genuine jazz orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman had been eclipsed by the banality of Glenn Miller, a music devoid of black or blue, remote from improvisation; dead, mechanical.

The new music that appeared in New York, first at Minton’s in Harlem and then at clubs on 52nd Street - “The Street” - in the wake of the second world war, rejected this sterile America. It aggressively invented its own nocturnal country. It insisted more than ever before on the improvisatory nature of jazz. Bebop was played by small groups, not big orchestras, and mythologised the solo - which had to be played fast and complicated, with the most exquisite technical achievement, yet also be rough-toned, raw-sounding. This was virtuoso music. Its supreme virtuoso was Charlie Parker.

He reputedly got his nickname because he insisted on picking up a chicken that had been run over by a tour van in order to cook it, but calling him Bird conveyed what people felt about his music - it soared. Parker posed extreme challenges to the musicians who played with him because he took off on solos that were impossible to follow, somehow returning to sense when he seemed to have unleashed mere chaos.

Miles Davis, later to record the classic Kind Of Blue, began his career as a teenage trumpeter who abandoned his studies at Manhattan’s Juilliard School to play with Parker. “Bird would play the melody he wanted,” he remembers in his autobiography. “The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct … Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was ‘fuck what’s written down’.”

The similarities between the art of Charlie Parker and that of Jackson Pollock are so staggering, so deep, so unarguable, that it’s tempting to suspect Pollock of obfuscation when he claimed not to like bebop. In fact it would be a still more radical improviser, Ornette Coleman, who put a Pollock painting on the cover of his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Yet Pollock insisted that he only really loved traditional jazz - and he did love it. His surviving collection of 78s reveals an erudite and passionate fan of black music who listened constantly to early Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and his contemporaries Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. Pollock called jazz “the only other creative thing happening in this country”. Art critics have never really taken seriously its influence on him. It’s as if American modernism can’t handle the idea that Pollock’s most significant influence was black music.

The romance and myth that surround Pollock are so vulgar, critics seem to feel. The formal achievement of Pollock’s painting, they argue, is unrelated to the cheap, glamorous image of the painter dancing around his canvas to sax and drum solos before dying violently, a romantic burnout. Funnily enough, respectable jazz writers are similarly suspicious of the romantic cult of Bird. His dependence on heroin, they fear, falsely made musicians think they needed to shoot up like him to play like him.

But Pollock and Parker were what they were - they meant it. They lived and died their epics. They risked everything to find the authentic America beyond all the phoney talk.

Listen to Parker’s Scrapple From The Apple, recorded in 1947, and look at Pollock’s 1950 Number 27, today in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The best way to describe the structure of Pollock’s abstraction is to compare it to Parker’s music. There are several kinds of mark on Number 27, different in tone - like different instruments. There are percussive splashes, sharp bursts of white. There are underlying black bass notes. Over all this float curling green sensual arabesques - the sax solo.

Improvisation is what matters to both these artists. Listening to his jazz records, Pollock made paintings that are pure improvisatory expressions, with no given form, no figurative constraint. It is his instinct alone that leads him out into space. Yet, miraculously, in the great works of 1947 to 1950, he discovers a harmony in this freedom - his paintings are not a mess after all, but coherent, enigmatically so. Pollock is able to improvise structure. Parker has this same miraculous ability to take the music on a wild walk yet never lose sight of where he started. “Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time,” remembers Miles Davis. “It was like he had planned it in his mind.”

This deep sense of form is what makes Pollock and Parker of a kind. Bird sounds sweet, and Pollock’s paintings are beautiful. Tellingly, it was one of his late, romantically failed paintings, in which despair overcomes him, that Ornette Coleman reproduced on the cover of his turbulent Free Jazz. The best Pollock paintings never have that sense of breakdown. They possess a savage grace.

If they rejected cacophony and chaos, Pollock and Parker were scarcely virtuosi in the way that classical European artists and musicians were; accomplishment is not what they are about. No Raphael, no Mozart. Both deliberately roughen and dirty their surface. Pollock uses house paints. He drops cigarette butts into the drying paint. Parker rejects the harmonious tones of earlier sax soloists and introduces a raw, hoarse sound. For him, as for Pollock, American art must be rough in texture. This is part of being democratic. It’s as if they both defy themselves to produce beauty under impossible circumstances. Why do they risk themselves like this?

It is to find the true American voice. Improvisation, for Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, was the free American way. Parker and Pollock took this seriously, and tried, in a society at once conformist, racist and unequal, to find America’s lost music - the music that only ever existed in late-night smoky rooms for a few minutes, the music the Constitution promised. In place of the phoney freedom for which the Rosenbergs were executed, the new American art of the late 1940s imagined a bodily, sensual, shared freedom.

“Resist much, obey little,” urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.
It was impossible to sustain this. Neither Pollock nor Parker maintained their 1940s achievements through their final years. Almost immediately, their radical interpretation of America’s affirmation of liberty turned to cliché. Most of the art produced in its name was colossally inferior to theirs. The Beats tried and failed to translate bebop spontaneity into writing; so what if Kerouac’s On The Road was composed free-form on a single roll of paper? It’s a dutiful read.
In art and music, the best followers of Pollock and Parker deliberately reversed their terms. Miles Davis created cool jazz. Jasper Johns painted Flag. Meanwhile the authentic, non-racist, egalitarian American freedom glimpsed by two dying men just after the second world war mutated into hipster kitsch, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison … Apocalypse Now. It is hard now to believe American democracy ever inspired great, beautiful, modern art, the best of our era.

Marlon Brando seemed to forget, as much as film audiences, what that was, that lost vitality. Brando was the artistic equal of Pollock and Parker. His performance on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947-8 transformed American culture as decisively as they did - and more universally. Modern painting and modern jazz are minority arts. But after the raw, working-class, violently unpredictable American voice of Stanley Kowalski transferred from stage to screen, it became globally iconic.

Tennessee Williams was an acquaintance and drinking companion of Pollock and Lee Krasner, and spent a summer with them in Provincetown in 1944. He called Pollock “dark”. The outwardly boorish Pollock may have been a model for the character Brando was to elevate into an American myth.

Recognition that Brando was above all an improviser is sometimes obfuscated by his association with the realist postwar director Elia Kazan. Brando is seen as a realist, when in truth he is an abstract artist. This is why his best films are the ones he made for Coppola and Bertolucci in the 1970s. Neither of these directors is a realist, and the characters they gave Brando are mythic, monsters.
Brando was allowed to improvise as much as he wanted: he refused to learn lines - dialogue had to be concealed around the set of The Godfather on cue cards. Bertolucci encouraged him to improvise most of his speeches in Last Tango In Paris in their entirety. When Paul - the ageing American Brando plays - embarks on an anonymous sexual relationship with a young French woman, and remembers his childhood, it is Brando’s own childhood he describes: growing up on a farm with alcoholic parents. Paul has been a boxer, an actor, a bongo player - Brando plays bongos, and was the martyred boxer hero of On The Waterfront. When he’s helped up at the end of On The Waterfront, you can feel the weight of his body, as when you contemplate a Michelangelo pietà.

There was a mysterious grace to Brando’s best acting - just like Pollock and Parker, he seems to discover form in randomness. The reason that his playing with a cat is so hypnotic in The Godfather, rather than simply being a bit of James Bond villainy, is that instead of being held in place to prevent it squirming away, the cat genuinely loves its Godfather - it nuzzles him spontaneously. In fact it was a stray cat that Brando, whose farm childhood gave him a feel for animals, found at the studio and befriended.

As Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he reaches the end of Mark Twain’s river. He is so disintegrated into cruel, mad impulses that Martin Sheen’s character says, “I’d never seen anyone so broken up.” Apocalypse Now describes, with hallucinatory precision, how the counterculture became the mainstream. It is the hippy photojournalist Dennis Hopper who falls for Kurtz’s fascist bullshit, who calls him “a warrior-poet”. From Twain to Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando, American artists took freedom, that word America touted so emptily, and tried to find a meaning in it; an American ethic of self-expression.

Apocalypse Now is the death of this illusion. There is plenty of freedom here - nothing else except freedom, and self-expression. Americans fire from helicopters for fun. The war is a riff. When a marksman shoots into the night to the sound of an electric guitar solo, it could so easily be a sax. At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos. He lisps, “Have you ever considered any true freedoms?”

Late Thoughts

I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart.
Your eyes have grown dull, your tears cloudy,
Your hair is grey.

You don't understand the songs birds sing
Anymore, nor stars, nor summer lightning.
Don't hear it when the women strike
The tambourine; yet you fear the silence.

I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart'...

'You've come to put me in the grave.
Where is your shovel and your spade?
You're carrying just a flute.
I'm not going to blame you.

Sadly, a long time ago
My voice fell mute.

Have my clothes to wear,
Answer my fears with silence,
Let the wind blow
Through your hair, smell of the lilac.
You have come by a hard road
To be lit up by this fire.'

And one went away, ceding
The place to another, wandered,
Like a blind woman reading
An unfamilair narrow path

And still it seemed to her a flame
Was close..In her hand a tambourine
And she was like a white flag,
And like the light of a beacon.
-----Anna Akhmatova

Moments of Reprieve

I am being made to suffer for things I did not even do.

There is an element of despair in his voice. Without seeing his face I cannot place it though. Behind it is the thought: how much blacker must things become. The mongol says that he's just being his usual 'drama queen' self and not to take him seriously. This is a fantastic way of brushing off other people's-and one's own-problems but it just doesn't stick.

Is there a suffering that would make sense, and can there ever be just the right amount of suffering in the world, I ask Mongol. We can never just accept it as our fate, as something beyond the horizons of our understanding or our control;
to say that it is out of our hands now is to resign oneself to the unthinkable...

"Is this not another form of evasion?" he replies. As if thought about pain could lessen it any, as if looking at something from a distance was not looking at all. Is pain one or is it two? Questions are never answers, are they?

In a conversation with C, we wonder if anyone has written convincingly about death ...whether anyone can do so. I'm sure she'll come up with something. Khayyam doesn't work. Better to get drunk than read about it.

Finally, the stark winter days are upon us. The sun has refused ascendancy and is tired by mid-morning, lightly skimming all that it touches with its gentle spirit, never inhering in anything, unable to unite anything. The underground arteries of the world congeal, matter knots itself together, minerals age in the veins of our blood.

But before the light closes in on itself, there is a sudden flickering of sunshine on the rust leaves and they glimmer and dance for a moment; bathed in this moment of bliss they undergo some inner transformation. And then it is gone. And the darkness takes over. But there are such moments...

Dislocations

While I sat on the tiles,
and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse,
Uncle Devereux stood behind me.
He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse.
His face was putty.
His blue coat and white trousers
grew sharper and straighter.
His coat was a blue jay’s tail,
his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.
He was animated, hierarchical,
like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press.
He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease....
My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles
of earth and lime,
a black pile and a white pile....
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color
---from Uncle Devereux

This seems like an impossibly prosaic, pedestrian piece of writing but is redeemed in the last line...a 'line of necessity' that summarises being.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag
-pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad
--from Waking Early Sunday Morning

Time runs, the windshield runs with stars. The past
Is cities from a train, until at last
Its escalating and black windowed blocks
Recoil against a Gothic church. The clocks
Are tolling. I am dying. The shocked stones
Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones
That snap and splinter and descend in glass
Before a priest who mumbles through his Mass
And sprinkles holy water; and the Day
Breaks with its lightning on the man of clay
---from Between the Porch and Altar.

For sheer speed and lightness this is a gem, spiked through with a lightning charge, or a song whose meaning resides in the ability to sing it at the right tempo.

Ashes

he knows the use of ashes.

he worships god with ashes.

he knows, He knows

he worships God with ashes
---This Mortal Coil

This, which flickers at night
in the skullcap of my thought,
mother-of-pearl snail's trace,
or mica of crushed glass,
isn't light from church or factory
to nourish
red cleric or black .
All I can leave you is
this rainbow in evidence
of a faith that was contested,
a hope that burned more slowly
than hardwood on the hearth.
Keep its powder in your compact
until, when every light is out,
the sardana become infernal,
and a shadwoy Lucifer sweeps down on a prow
on the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine
flowling his pitch-black wings half-
severed from effort to tell you : it's time
It's no inheritance, no talisman
to survive the monsoon's raging
on the spider's thread of memory,
but a history lasts only as ashes
and persistence is pure extinction.
The sign was right: he who saw it
can't fail to find you again.
Everyone makes out his own: pride
wasn't flight, humility wasn't craven.
The thin glimmer striking down here
wasn't that of a match.

Montale, Little Testament

Musical Notes

In the beginning was the deed not the word. But before that was sound. Do we ever have access to that hidden origin, is it possible to speak about the impossible? Is life anything but the search for that unseen centre, anything but the attempt to translate the mystery back into words, culture? We think about it, conceptualise it but music -like life-flows on, saying everything and nothing. Life without music would be a mistake.

Is music anything more than pleasure? A way of forgetting or a way of remembering a deeper past? And she holds beauty and reticience, the enduring and the ephemeral, the physical and the metaphysical in both hands.Harmony is beauty and number, passion and discipline. A sound thought. Where does thought begin and where does it end? Music doesn’t start with the first note, but rather from the silence from which it emerges. Something always precedes the origin. What is the relation between 0 and 1 except one of strict discontinuity. But it is, paradoxically, a relation neverthe less. Is this relation a ‘law’ or does it follow its own trajectory with any freedom? who can answer such a question. All one can say is that if the note is not sustained then it will ‘fall’ back to nothingness. Without an effort of will and memory it dies and this is the beginning of a tragic story. Gravity and grace, snakes and ladders…the old themes.

Music is always in the process of becoming: it never is ; its fleetingness is an escape from the world, all that is not present, but it is also an evocation of what can be or what was and points , therefore, to hope and memory.

Possibilities: All music is generated from the same twelve notes, the same fundamental structure; the universe is composed by some combination of them. We instinctively grasp the mood of some music because we too are a series of such notes. Unity and diversity. The hands, heart and mind work together in a blessed state. Humaneness is not a completed score, but a performance. Structure and logic, without the human touch, descends into the totalitarian and all that stifles creativity. That ‘giving’ , the human quality par excellence, is what helps a note as it is about to die; it is why a note can transcend life. Is music an attempt to control time, to find that special moment, that peaceful place, and freeze it or is it a striving to be time itself, to unlock closely guarded secrets and unbind the will.
--from Daniel Banenboim

Handedness

Every great and profound experience would like to be insatiable, would like repetition and return to last until the end of all things, the restoration of an original situation from which it emerged…the transformation of the most upsetting [and joyous] experience into habit: This is the essence of play.
—-W. Benjamin.

Each people’s gestures are determined by their response to the environment they live in and are a product of the type of work they are engaged in. These gestures are carried over into all walks of life , from art to dance to language. These gestures become so internalised that one can meaningfully talk about a style of soul emanating from a particular region-a fundamental ’speech’ or set of gestures that is unique to a certain place. Through repetition the distinction between geography, history and nature gets blurred.

Could it be that there is a religious vocation or temperament, say, that orders the body and the soul? And within these fixed categories -be they determined by work, landscape, an inner constitution or some combination of these elements- is there a further stratification along family lines? (I was once recognised by a cousin who had never seen me by the way in which I kept my head in my hands). Just as a household may have a ‘taqiya kalaam’ ( a set phrase) , might it not be the same when it comes to rudimentary gestures, the way one holds one’s hands?

A distinct landscape (urban, mountains, rural etc) can be associated with a particular relation with the body. It is said of the Bedouin Arabs that their expressions (linguistic and non-verbal) had remained unchanged-like the landscape itself-for thousands of years, chiseled down to a few quintessential self-revealing gestures of the soul. One is reminded of the hand positions of Buddhist statues that depict the interior state of the soul or the hands in Leonardo’s Last Supper.

But beyond this deep continuity between the land and gesture there is the desire to re-create it , to see it before our very eyes, and this is manifested in our Utopian projects, our sense of play. The city is, in this sense, not just an ordering of the soul, a pattern for the mind to follow, but a space that reconfigures our awareness of our bodies and those of other people. A way of binding and separating: the body politic.
—–Based on Plekhanov.

I’ve started so I will not finish. I’m struggling to complete even a single book. These are the books that I am currently wading through-some half completed, others only barely a chapter old and discarded: Herzog, Three-arched Bridge, Cabaret, Philosophy and Law , Goodbye to Berlin, Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Lawrence’s Essays, Dangling Man, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Language and Solitude, What Ought I To Do?

Today I ‘ve given them all up and turned to Tallis’ Hand with its endlessly fascinating insights, though why one should renounce style in favour of ideas remains a mystery to me. The hand as the agent of action, knowledge and communication. On the handedness of the universe see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lopsided.shtml

Infinite London

London had always seemed to me to be the most prosaic of cities. Sturdy, pragmatic and not especially inclined to flights of fancy; not a city in which the imagination might be let loose, or in which dreamers dream of revolution or love, but neither is she a mathematical, abstract city. But I now increasingly come to think that London is nothing but a city of memory and desire, a thousand cities whose histories continue to exist side by side, sometimes overlapping and intersecting, at other times running parallel to one another.

There is the London that is loosely connected to the old villages that went up to make London Town-and one can still detect remnants of this in the commons and heaths. Then there are the larger historical narratives that are written on her, each leaving its indelible mark: Roman London, Medieval London, Tudor London, Victorian, Edwardian…then there is the city that has been shaped by politics and international events: war and financial speculation, the crusades. In addition to this the city is shaped by her geography-and especially the silver ribbon that runs through her heart: the Thames.

But there is also a hidden city, an underground, submerged history and this includes all those interconnecting and lost rivers and tributaries: the Trent, the Walbrook…they are like reminders of archaic words whose sense we have long forgotten, ancient by-ways that signify a truth that remains out of sight.

The city shapes and is shaped by people’s desires and memories and some of these have, in turn, been shaped by other climates, other geographies: Jews and Bangladeshis, West Indians and now the latest wave of immigrants: Poles and Lithuanians, Albanians and Russians.

And then there is a London that is fractured, splintered , along class lines: not just an affluent west end and a working class east, but also within the east or the south areas that are are thriving, confident and brash and areas that are dilapidated, in slow decline… and one feels one could continue with these subdivisions right down to a single human heart.

It is hard to envisage a metaphor for a city that is constantly in the process of escaping all definitions, a city whose past never quite dies. Perhaps it is a periodic table with each part of the city just a permutation of the other. But perhaps it really is the tube map. In this case it is reality which produces the map. At first one imagines all the terminal stations and what lies beyond; then one thinks about all of those great white circles where so many of the other lines intersect. Are all of the places on any one ‘line’ connected by some sort of mysterious idea so that, for example, places on the furthest southern and northern extremities on the northern line come to share the same history?

Yesterday the air was arid, still, the sunshine bright but somewhat tired, weak. Walking through a part of the tube system that I had never seen before I had the strange feeling that I was back in the 1970’s. There was something about the darkness of that passageway, its flickering light and quietness that made me think in such a way. There are other parts of the system that are futuristic (the Jubilee line) and still others that are decidedly 1950’s in their layout and ambiance. Could it be that the tube is really a series of worm-holes?

In the bus one could hear a cacophony of voices. As always, there is infinite pleasure to be derived in trying to match an accent, a word, to a particular place. London’s infinity is not her networks of communication but in the myriad languages that are spoken. I return to my book, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. The words weigh heavily on me -not in an oppressive way but like a great lead box whose key is slowly being turned, an unlocking of secrets. And I find myself closing it but keeping my finger on the page so as not to completely let go of the connection with the words on the paper:

The shallowness of a life of sanity.

The heart of darkness is not in social organization but in the blood.

Time Out of Mind

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

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

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

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

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.

Fear and Trembling

What is there left to be said of the remarkable and provocative speech of the Pope? That he should draw such a stark and bold line between Islam and reason is quite surprising, to say the least. A few points here. Surely each tradition acknowledges the excess of truth over reason: can one ‘know’ Christ except through Grace or the Holy Spirit (even to use the word ‘know’ shows the bias of the Islamic perspective since ‘love’ would be more appropriate); Leo Strauss has Maimonides and the medieval Jewish tradition concurring and the reservations about depicting the ‘Father’ in the Orthodox Tradition are surely an indication of the fact that the divine essence is unknown.

The whole idea of mystery and seeing through a glass darkly also points to this excess and if we are ‘being’ then God is ‘beyond-being’ , the divine darkness. So, whilst all traditions can hardly dispense with transcendence one does not have to deduce from that that there is no immanence or analogy between the divine and the human. Any religion must have both and differences can only arise as to on which there is an emphasis.

Now, to claim that Islam is essentially or fundamentally irrational in that it conceives of its God as a Will that cannot be known , that is arbitrary , is quite remarkable in itself. Firstly, it ignores the whole tradition of philosophy in general and Islamic Aristotelianism in particular. The issue here is not whether Greek philosophy is alien to the spirit of Islam and , therefore, not something that one could reasonably cite as an example of Islamic thought that contradicts the Pope. Such a claim could, with some justification, be put to all of the Semitic monotheistic faiths: is there an irreconcilable difference in outlooks, aims and motives between Athens and Jerusalem? The point is, rather, that as a matter of fact, history, there have been traditions of an incorporation of Greek philosophy into the fold of Islam. And it is fairly well recognised that Islam was a continuation and transmitter of the classical heritage.


The second point is distinct but related to the historical argument above. Is it not true that the very possibility of Revelation , the very fact that there is a revelation, indicates that there is the ’entry’ of the divine into the world? (here one must be aware of differences in perpsectives: for the muslim it is the miracle of the book that is analogous to the logos-and not the example of the Prophet) . In addition to this, the contents of the revelation-and not just the fact of revelation- also establish a relation between transcendence and human affairs. The Law id the bridge betwen the two realms and it is in this way that something of the divine will can be known. Here one could add that the Names (or Attributes) have always been another way in which we can ‘know’ something of God-even as His Transcendence remains unquestioned and unquestionable.


Another way in which reason can know something of the ultimate reality is in the aim to establish political and social justice for these must also conform to human values and aspirations -or at the very least, take into account the human margin, human nature as it is. One could also add that God is closer to us than our own self (our own “jugular veins” is the Quranic phrase) and that “he who knows the finite knows the Lord. To this one could multiply examples of the importance of seeking knowledge and of education. And as with social and political justice, knowledge of Nature and History are not thought of as radically opposed to the spiritual message of Islam. In all these senses, then, the notion that Islam is somehow less related to reason and the world of human affairs is quite an astounding one. It remains to be noted that Gnostic tendencies are far stronger in Christianity than in Islam which was , in its early days, always accused of giving too much to the world and to sensuality, the body!


I think the really intersting issue is not whether Islam is essentially anti-classical (Allama Iqbal would famously say that hsi whole work aims to demonstrate just that point); no, the interesting thing is that what seems to underlie the Pope’s words are a fear that the thread that bound reason to Christianity has come undone: there is now a chasm between the human and divine. The divine is so far off that he can only be reached by a “leap of faith”, through ‘blind faith’. The very notion that thought and faith are deeply intertwined, that there is something unconditional before thought, that we believe in order to understand , not understand in order to believe (Anselm) is a view that has progressively become unhinged from the European tradition. Reason now stands autonomous , philosophy is no longer bound by the law (Leo Strauss). In the economic, political and cultural realms what relation is there between thought and action and a Christian perspective?

-->

Autumn Thoughts

A cloud in the wind, at the corner of the world.
---Tu Fu.

Clouds in the wind above the passes
touch their shadows on the ground.

In depths of shadows frozen for centuries ..
the wind which roams without design
cleanses of passion's transient strife
and for a while the dust weighs lightly on my cloak

Useless to call this spiralling wisp of life one
strand in the the web that heaven and earth weave.

Less than a day in paradise
and a thousand years have passed among men.
While the pieces are still being laid on the board
All things have changed to emptiness.
Nothing is what it was but the stone bridge.

Where shall there be an end of old and new?
A thousand years have whirled away
in the mind.
The sounds of the ocean change to stone.
Fishes puff bubbles at the bridge of Ch'in.

The drunken eyes.
How many men grow old before the wind?
Dim, dim, the path in the twilight,
branches curl on the black oaks by the road.
Darkened torches welcome
a new kinsman:
In the most secret tomb these fireflies swarm.
Passion too deep seems like none.

They rejected life to seek the Way. Their
footprints are before us.
They offered up their minds, ripped up
their bodies; so firm was their resolution.
See it as large, and a millet-grain cheats us
of the universe.
See it as small, and the world can hide in a pin-point.

The amber, when it first sets,
remembers of a former pine.
If we trust the true and sure words
written on Indian leaves
We hear all past and future
in one stroke of the temple bell.

----Li Po.

The Unthinkable

The pebble is a perfect creature, equal to itself, mindful of its limits.
—C. Milosz

HAMM. I’ve made you suffer too much
(Pause)
Haven’t I?
CLOV. It’s not that.
HAMM (shocked). I haven’t made you suffer too much?
CLOV. Yes!
HAMM (relieved) Ah you gave me a fright!
(Pause. coldly)
Forgive me.
(Pause. Louder)
I said, Forgive me.
CLOV. I heard you.

Can there ever really be the right amount of suffering? Isn’t suffering -any suffering-meaningless and what of the attempts to explain or justify it? How can one talk about an amount of suffering? Can we ever know the cause of it? What does it mean to say that we are commanded to forgive?

Perhaps all thought is premised on the notion that we can know who we are, that we can figure out the roots of our condition. To think is to believe that we are God, that we can will ourselves into existence, that we can know ourselves perfectly and see sub specie aeternitatis: I think therefore I am. To think is also to create meaning when there may be none, to see a pattern out of contingent , haphazard events. Thought imposes order and also takes us to a timeless zone. Where are we when we think? Thought, then, is perhaps nothing but a way of staving off death, of clawing back some of our humanity from the inorganic that weighs us down. To reduce something to a thought, a concept, is to capture it, to name it. But if we did not think in the first place death would be of little concern to us.

Are there limits to what we can know? In the wake of the Pope’s recent words should we stress the harmony of thought and the world, the contours of the mind with those of the universe? Can we once again talk about the cosmos, about how everything has its own place and time, how there is the right amount of every thing under the sun?

Are there things that we simply cannot know, that lie beyond the bounds of reason? Does it make sense to claim that we know the limits of what we can know? For the Occassionalists the Divine Will is shrouded in mystery. Does it follow from this that the universe is one of chaos, arbitrariness and that only, or is it possible that there just the right amount of chance in our lives? On the other hand, the philosophers would promote where reason is completely autonomous, that the divine can be known independently of Revelation. Does this imply a limitation of divine freedom? Is God constrained to work within the laws that He himself has created as the deists would maintain?

Ebrahim Moosa: ‘Metaphysics of Belief’:

Something can suggest multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. Abu Bakr would say ‘to acknowledge the inability to comprehend somethign is itself a form of comprehending.’ Is there an intermediate position between the Aristotelian one of a fixed universe and mechanical processes and one of unbounded freedom, a universe that remains essentially open? Might not evolution with its mixture of randomness and necessity be one such position? The range of possibilities of nature may be fixed but unknown: necessity is the veil of God.

God creates our acts eternally but we acquire them (choose them) in time. Perhaps, then, the question of possibilities and the degree of freedom with which they are generated is really a question of time-and that remains a mystery. The world is a unity in so far as it is timeless. Creation is both a timeless act and an unending process, the ‘twinkling of an eye’ and something that is extended in time and space.

The opposite of the philosophers’ stance is , then, not a world of complete randomness and the negation of reason, but the admissibility of the fact that she is woven from two strands: freedom and truth. The mathematical and the biological co-exist and who is to say where one ends and the other begins? From Ghazali’s point of view the ultimate cause of things is not in nature (does this allow for other, partial causality?). The philosophical critique of philosophy is only a setting of limits of what one can conceive and what is unthinkable; it is not the negation of thought altogether. It is there being just the right amount of thought. For the philosophers, the ‘principles of existence’ cause cotton to burn whereas for Ghazali fire is only an instrumental cause, not a necessary one. For the former, temporal events follow from the principles inherent in the nature of things and God has wound the clock up, as it were, distancing himself from the laws that now govern things autonomously. God has repented.

Can there ever be a breach in such a framework, are miracles or square circles possible? Everything rests on the word ‘possible’ Is it possible to imagine or know the impossible? Is imagining and knowing (by reason) the same thing or does the heart of the problem lie along this fissure? The philospher’s critique of Ghazali rests on attributing to his position the belief that anything is indeed possible: that water can be turned into wine , that a book may be transformed into a horse had God willed it so. Is it really only our habitual experience that tells us that the book is indeed a book and is this an argument from experience or thought itself? Ghazali turns the argument on its head and says that it is they who are the nihilists by going against reason. For in the hypothetical argument it is they who are using the possibility of the impossible.

I think what Ghazali’s position is is this: One may be able to imagine anything is possible but its realisation is beyond the bounds of reason. If that is the case, how can one say that one knows that the impossible is impossible? If something impossible actually happens then it ceases to be a miracle or impossible. Their perspective cannot admit the possibility of the impossible in the first place.
Another angle to the problem is to focus on what we can perceive..i.e subjectivity. Perhaps we can only conceive of a range of possibilities and there are other beings for whom what we deem impossible is merely one of many possibilities. Can one rule out, can one know that there aren’t other levels of reality and being? In such arguments, it may be that it is our limited knowledge that rules out ‘anything’. With God all things are possible.

So, the main line of defence seems to be that there are possibilities that may or may not occur. The theoretical possibility of something (in the imagination) is distinct from it existing, from the necessity of it existing. A miracle, because it is not a habitual occurrence, is beyond the scope of reason and knowledge.

Ghazali: there are three things of value: an articulate book, an abiding tradition, and the ability to say I do not know. This allows us to create room for knowledge and wonder. There is the possibility of not-knowing, of a non-totalizing order of reality. Rationality binds us to one level of reality whereas the truth may be that there are multiple notions of time and reasoning and these co-exist contrapuntally within a single narrative. There can be different ontological levels in relation to the thinking self: what is true in the order of love may not be true in the order of being.

Might it not be said that the slight asymmetry, the minuscule preponderance of matter over anti-matter is what gives rise to the universe? Not a blotting out of existence , but only of some of its possibilities, certain lines of development? That in addition to the mathematical, the inevitable, and the realm of necessity, the streaky, the irrational and the fragmentary also work their way into the what is possible? How, it might be asked, can there be a ‘flaw’ in creation or ugliness and suffering. But at the same time we are reminded that even in the ‘garden’ there was the snake of anarchy.

As there are figures of speech are there, too, figures of speechlessness? What else is death but an inevitability that cannot be known? Death is in the heart of life and therefore a possibility and yet still we cannot experience it, still it remains unknowable. It is a private matter, private matter. Is this not a refutation of the philosophers? And this, it seems, remains unanswerable -and therefore why is it still a question: how is it that we who cannot imagine or experience death, for whom it is an impossibility, think that it is something that is made possible. If God can imagine a death for us then we imitate Him in this: the camps were nothing , nothing but the imagining and the making of the impossible. And have we not ‘killed’ God as well? We come to realise the unpalatable: that at the heart of life, the heart, the human spirit, there is the possibility of the impossible, the inhuman, the non-human.

To be able to act is human; For 'anything' to be possible is inhuman

Light of the World

Earth poetizes, field to field
with trees interlinear, and lets
us weave our own paths around
the plowed land, into the world

Blossoms rejoice in the wind
Grass stretches out to bed them so softly
Heaven goes blue and greets mildly
soft chains the sun has woven.

People go about, no one is lost-
Earth, heaven, light and forest-
Play in the play of the Almighty.
---Hannah Arendt

Anything can happen.
Those overlooked regarded.
Ground gives. The Heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
---Seamus Heaney.

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it?-Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.
--Anna Akhmatova

Black Sun
The sun's fire doesn't flare.
I think and feel it, everywhere.
Angels burnt to the core, mere silhouettes.
Forgotten lovers, darkened with regrets.

I see it on the glistening feathers of the crow.
In the shadows that make the earth go slow.
It lingers on the face of all that lives and dies,
But still it dazzles in your burning eyes.
---b.

Lord of the Flies

Why does the desert or the desert island always tell us something essential about ourselves? From the nomadic spirit of religion to fantasy islands to economic and political models. Islands are also Utopian places, spaces where nature is uncorrupted and primordial innocence is regained.

Lord of the Flies. It is the conch that unifies everyone-big ‘uns and little ‘uns alike. Sound as the unifying factor, the shell as a symbolic axis around which people can gather. This is not the simple story of what happens to society when order breaks down, when the rules are relaxed-at least that’s not the most interesting part of it. It is the little things that are equally revealing: The way in which there is a reluctance to shed blood but also how, once this has been done, this violence can be transferred to other ‘objects’. It is the frenzy of the first kill, the sheer thrill of it , the heightened sense of awareness that ensues as a result of the pursuit, the release of energy in the kill that fascinates. It is all these things that make the tearing of flesh such a memorable experience and something that stays with mankind.

But there are other themes as well. ‘Piggy’ is the first storyteller, the unsung hero who is always rejected, but who was there before everyone else. Ridicule and laughter are also something that can unite the tribe. But it is ultimately his stories that help pass the time, that soothe the nerves of all those who fear the onset of darkness. It is Piggy who can hear and relate what cannot be uttered: the presence of the Beast. What would a tribe be without its storytellers? It is he who knows how words acquired their original meaning (Camberly). Is it the storytellers who first learn how to bind men together and initiate us into the first political community? Even if their influence is sporadic and tentative, it still has its functions, and we are still spellbound by its rhythms. It is also his glasses which serve as the key to their survival: fire.

Ralph and Jack are the first estranged brothers. The election of one sows the seeds of resentment that fester in his heart until a break from the original unity is affected. From then on he is to remain a wanderer, an outcast. Ralph is the Socratic King , with his practical wisdom. He understands that the little ones must be cared for. For Jack and his pack of hunters such compassion is of little use. Other children are only important in so far as they need him, the provider, only as long as they affirm his power over them. The hunters were , it must be remembered, first of all the ‘priests’ (the choir). The original split: royal power and the power of the priest-king.

And then there is the final scene, as the elements rageand fire and water are mixed, the crowd forms, swarms, driving itself into a delirious state, into the realm of pre-consciousness; the rhythmic music reinforces this cosmic unity. They all dance around the fire-man’s first stomping grounds. Is the murder intentional or unintentional? This question can never be resolved. But perhaps, as one of the small children hesitatingly says, the true horror, the unfathomable mystery, is that the beast is in us.

Two Hands

Quintessence. n. 1. Most refined part of any substance, refined extract; purest and most perfect form, manifestation, or embodiment of some quality or class. 2. (Ancient Philosophy) Fifth substance (besides the four elements) forming heavenly bodies and pervading all things. 3. Hence quintessential [Medieval English] in sense 2., f. F, f med. L. ‘quinta essentia’ fifth essence.


The quintessential is all that eludes definition.
Als das Kind Kind war,
warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch

Each act, each act of perception, discloses something of our style of soul-whether we would know it or not. Each movement of the hand is a self-revealing gesture of the soul and bears witness to what and who we are. The poet would say:

My eyes have seen
what my hand did

There is no disjunction between thought and action, self and the world and a semblance of unity is achieved. We strive wholeheartedly to find this innermost self, this image of perfection and completion haunts us; to touch all that comes our way and imprint on it something of our unique essence. But this emphasis on knowing who we are is doomed to failure for our path, unlike that of the stars, can only be traced when it has run its course. It is a line still being drawn…the ink is not dry.

Augustine would say that we can only know what we are, not who we are; that only God can know. There are acts which the left hand should not know, that should be done in silence, that must be suffered…and lest it be forgotten: God created us with Two Hands.

Have we not darkened and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
—-A Passage to India.

But this is not a simple return to innocence-it is an achieved naivete, an ability to sustain ourselves beyond sadness. The innocence of doves and the wisdom of serpents.

Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself a space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the warp and woof of the universe, that sets us riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of that order of being but we remain, quintessentially, unknown.

Life

Is it possible to fall in love with a film on the basis of a few scenes? Can a few 'stills' be so chiseled, so jewel-like that the failings of Life can be overlooked?

This is not a commentary on post-war Japan and its interminably complicated bureaucracy. The main purpose of the film is certainly not to convey the horrors of a world that is over-run by functionaries and the impersonal. Perhaps only a modern European imagination could really talk seriously about organization and a really old one (Greek) about Labyrinths. No, the portrait of the obfuscations and willed deafness are light and almost comical-perhaps even superficial- to our eyes.

The film's central preoccupation is elsewhere. But how to make a film about life, the living...except by talking about death. There is no heroic striving for immortality against this inevitability but nor is there a passive acceptance of Necessity. Death is, and can only be, something that is ambiguous: Thanatos and Eros.

The film starts off with a depiction of a life that is not lived but simply passed.
(Back in my school days there were the following categories: distinction, merit, pass, good fail, and fail). Everyone goes through the motions and this is what qualifies as doing just enough. A good fail. The whole aim of such a life is to avoid life, to look busy and run down time. What would we do without our clocks and watches! To do nothing 'is' to be nothing. Already, one wonders how deep rooted these ideas -of death and nothingness-are in the Japanese spirit.

The main protagonist of the film devotes himself to his work (which is really making sure that no work gets done). A singular dedication to an ideal, replete with the bourgeois markers of respectability: a hat, a certificate in honour of all those of years of service, are what bind a life and its serial moments together. Otherwise, as Watana-be says in a moment of reflection, I can't remember a single day . After the death of his wife he decides to live a solitary life-ostensibly for the sake of his child , but in reality we learn that this too is a farce, an excuse. For how long can we blame external circumstances for our choices? When all is said and done we are what we choose to be. He is given the nickname of 'the mummy' and this is highly appropriate for one of the world's living dead, for someone who has tried to freeze time.

To escape from the inevitable by creating a routine for oneself. Perhaps the whole of human culture is nothing more than this. Work, too, is one such social construction, as are our intellectual endeavours. As long as one is active one is alive. But in work the aim is not just to feed the stomach. Man shall not live by bread alone. Gradually, he realises that he is being eaten up from within. He has a disease that everyone knows of, but which no-one has to courage to name...

The first sparkling moment comes when he is torn between telling his son about his stomach cancer and patiently keeping it to himself, as he has with everything else. Then in a moment of utter decisiveness (or is it desperation) he rushes up the near vertical flight of stairs, clambering on his hands and feet. But in the dark he comes to an abrupt stop. How to speak the unspeakable? Can the father ever initiate the son into the inevitable? Would it help either of them? If one has to stop to think about an emotion was it a true one in the first place? As he halts the light dramatically fades away and he is rooted to the spot, half way between different worlds, as it were, hesitant and unsure of himself. Can one unwrap the cloth that has bound a soul for so long and then expect love to still flourish? In that moment-which lasts for an eternity- he is made acutely aware of the infinite distance between himself and his own flesh and blood. It is not death but life itself that alienates us from the life of others.

He thinks back to those early years with his son. Has his life with him been anything but a catalogue of unforeseen and unpredictable departures (the death of his wife, the son going off to war, him having to miss his son's operation)? Is life itself anything but a series of departures ? Even the only moment he can remember with any pride soon turns into a reflection on his helplessness before the uncertainties that his son faces. He can, like a mummy, provide security but not love. Later, when he recalls the distance between himself and his son, he says it is like drowning, sinking in sheer darkness, reaching out to cling on to something. We fall into love and we fall out of it.

The next magical scene occurs when he is told by a co-worker over lunch that despite all of his denials he still loves his son. This is, perhaps, the most amazing shot in the whole film. He looks up, shyly, almost embarrassed, and then his face radiates with a smile as he comes to recognize the truth of this. It comes to him like a revelation, a light shone on the dark corner of his musty soul moves to the surface, illuminating the old man's face. This is the beginning of his redemption. The earlier attempt-which had seen him abandoning himself to a night of pure pleasure-was utterly futile and he had known it to be so as well. For what value can there be in fleeting sensations that live for a day then die? He may change his hat, temporarily adopt a new personality, but none of this will do: The reality of poetry is nothing if not lived. One can never drown out the pain and a life without thinking about, working for, others eventually ends up in the intoxication of the self. Melancholy, Kirk Douglas once said, is another name for egotism.

The solution-if it is as solution-comes to him at a restaurant where someone else's birthday is begin celebrated. And we are not surprised by this for we are really witnessing a new birth.

There are other stylistically interesting features-like the way in which the siren goes off at precisely the last time that we see Watana alive. Perhaps the most memorable scene , though, is when after a few frenetic songs have been played and danced to in a night cub Watana starts to sing an old song from the 1910's. Everyone stops what they are doing, at once fascinated and repelled by his hauntingly tragic voice that seems to be coming to them from elsewhere. They are transfixed by his unearthly voice but the song itself is really about the earth and life. A few people move away from him, unable to bear the telling of it. There are some truths that not even song can carry.

It is as if Death himself is singing but a death that is tired of dying and that wants to remind people of life. Up to that moment the people in the nightclub had been dancing crazily to a music that was not their own. When the real beauty of life is in accepting its transience and being finely aware of it, not an overcoming of it or a forgetting of it. But Watana also knows that the bitter-sweetness of life is that life is blind to its own end, that only death can remember what life really is....

SOS

London, AFP. A six-year old girl on the east coast of Scotland sends a message in a bottle thinking that it will reach Norway. Forty seven days later it turns up in New Zealand and is picked up, by co-incidence, by another six year-old.

What was written was of little importance-it rarely is. What remains true is the hope that the message will survive, that some deep currents will take it from the infinite green sea to a place of safety, that it will be picked up by some stranger on a far shore who will be able to decipher it, and that there is still some level of compassion out there in the wider world. What does one think before this immense expanse of unknowingness, this troubled, unpredictable sea?

Reflecting on the late Richard Pryor a co-actress said that there are some people, the 'walking wounded,' who carry their pain with them so intensely that one can only wince when one comes across them; that is, only a person who has understood what pain is himself. Wittgenstein was right here: what need, then, to say I am in pain.

But there are many such people who walk amongst us and they go unrecognized under a starless sky. It as if in a storm where one can only see and think about one's own self. V.S.P. writes about how at the age of eighty he'd almost become invisible and how only he can see other such invisible people, hanging around street corners or park benches. And Joan Didion says the same about those who carry the grief of the death of a loved one with them. She can see it in their hunched shoulders, their lost, abstract look. One has to be dead before one can see the dead. Like for like. The fire in the eye can know something of the sun. And the shadows?

There are many mad people who drift across our paths, more than we would care to imagine, and ghosts who are really people who wish they had never been born, shipwrecked on life, rub shoulders with us without our being aware of their presence. The cruelty of fate is that all these people live in different dimensions, times and places; but the universe's grace also resides in this.

Tell it but tell it slant.

Faith And Reason

Notes From the Underground: Who is to say what truths lie below the surface or how many escape, transcending our field of vision? Fides et Ratio rejects the idea that philosophy finds its end, all answers, in Revelation. If that were not the case then thought would be essentially redundant, superfluous. But what is also rejected is the idea that there can always be definitive answers. In the face of ultimate mysteries what use is thought? In this sense, philosophy is only a necessary prologue.

Revelation impels reason continually to extend the range of its knowledge. Our habitual patterns of thought are in no way able to express the wisdom of Revelation in its fullness. Faith illuminates reason, and faith is the basis of reason (Anselm). Is it not a corruption of one's self to believe that we can attain self-knowledge (He who know himself knows his Lord)? Might it not be the case that there is a higher knowledge which knows the limits of thought, that there will be whole realms of reality that remain unknown and perhaps unknowable?

To acknowledge our dependence on that law of which God is the author.

Questioning is so central to our nature ('man was created restless') that even when nature is transformed by grace it does not or should not cease from asking questions (The Allama: even if God reveals His Face I'll still take 'maybe' and 'perhaps'). Ceaseless Reward.

Truth is the adequacy of things and intellect. (Isaac Israeli). Do we assume this? Is it the infinite that is placed in us that allows such a thought in the first place? Can philosophy know this or is it itself imitated, commanded by Revelation? The question then becomes what type of questioning:

What is it to live?

or 'What is it to live well?'

No, the first question.

But this is a question that cannot be answered.

What are we compelled to ask what we cannot know? The Tree.

Who knows who I am?

To think is a curse, takes us away from the Tree of Life.

To think is a blessing, a gift.

Shall I think about this?

Do I think about it.

Pascal: we conceal from ourselves how desperate our true condition is by diversions , 'entertainments'. Court and culture. Is thought one such diversion? The philosopher protects himself from singular and the particular in favour of the abstract and the general. When we want to 'speak the answer in kind'. Can there be a philosophy that is completely autonomous? Blake: he who sees Ratio sees only himself. Philosophy must be a dialogue.

But neither in life nor in enquiry is it possible to encounter the particular except as an instance of the universal and general. As we should have learnt from Aristotle, every 'this' that we encounter is a 'thus-such'.

The finite is only finite against the invisible background of the infinite; the singular against the multiple: unity in diversity.

----borrowed from A. Macintyre, the Task of Philosophy

Limits

All truth is on the boundaries
---Tillich

'If ouch is the complaint of the ego, och is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, and on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.'
-----Seamus Heaney

Threshold:our love of boundaries and escape, of coming home and of not coming home, our thirst for strange lands, otherness, of coming up against a limit, of recognising a familiar face. Culture is nothing but a wall around nature; rituals invite and ward off the strange. Threshold: something one "treads" over but also "to rub, to turn" so that the essence is released..a turning point. Like the solstice: the highest point but also the axis around which our lives revolve, the limit or the nadir , the lowest point which at least if it points to zero, and therefore an end point, offers the hope of a return, an imminent or delayed redress of the balance, but a distinct possibility nevertheless.

As long as we can imagine the opposite shore then grief can be borne. If we see the point of it then we see that it is not the point of no return.The zero of existence is what Jonah would call the dark night of the soul. One must be able to shine through this nothingness. But is this ability ultimately ours or is it given to us and what of grief that seems endless, out of bounds?

I wonder how pervasive the idea of the frontier, the boundary is in Europe? The forest, the moors which are lawless, chaotic,spirit-infested, the wilderness and trolls..Fear, but also the lure of the transcendent is a spur to creativity: death is the point of all points, and our first glance with mortality impels us to think.

Within these phantasmal boundaries each lord's hall is a place of refuge. within: warmth and light; human solidarity and culture;rank and ceremony. a solidification of time. Outside: unredeemed time.

Perhaps we humans
have wanted God most as witness
to acts of choice made in solitude.
Acts of memory,of sacrifice.
Wanted that great single eye to see us,
steadfast as we flowed by.
Yet there are other acts
not even vanity
or anxious hope to please, knows of-bone doings,
leaps of nerves, heart-cries of communion: if there is bliss
it has been already
and will be; out-reaching, utterly.
Blind to itself, flooded
with otherness.
----Denise Levertov