They lived in squares and loved in triangles.
(The Bloomsbury set).
India beat England today. What could be worse? England beating India!
Swami: A mouse's eyes are so sad. Of course, one cannot see this when they are alive -because he is always running around and is never still enough for you to get a good look. But when he dies, then look. There is an indescribable sadness there, deep shadow where there should be light.
And why is that?
Who is to say? Perhaps it is because even as he plays, even as he dances in a frenzy, forgetting himself, still he remembers that one day he too must die.
Cluniac Style:
"Swirling drapery, twisting line, as if the restless impulses of the wandering craftsmen, the goldsmiths of the Viking conquerors, still had to be expressed in stone. Bright primary colours. A Tibetan fierceness".
The Mullion at Souillac: " It is an epitome of forest fears, a kind of totem-pole of western man at the end of his wanderings"
----K. Clark, Civilisation..
"That by the 11th and 12th centuries there had emerged in western Europe within Europe a Church art a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in colour and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art."
---Schapiro.
Geoffrey Hill: wilderness revives, fierceness of the heart.
Pent up into a region of pure force
Made subject to the pressure of the stars
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyes
And fell, until I found the world again
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?'
--------
For so it is proper to find value
In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored:
The long-lost words of choice and valediction'
--------
We are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God.
---Kafka.
The equivocal, oblique way of God: a detour:'Writing is the moment of the desert as the moment of separation..God no longer speaks to us...we must take words upon ourselves. We must be separated from life and communities, and must entrust ourselves to traces, must become men of vision because we have ceased hearing the voice from within the immediate proximity of the Garden..Writing is displaced on the broken line between lost and promised speech. The difference between writing and speech is sin. The Garden is speech, the Desert is writing..Speech is presence, writing is making present the absent...
A white sheet of paper is full of ways.
Sacrifice of existence by the word and consecration of it by the word...In God's name.
'The caesura, the discontinuity, does not simply furnish and fix meaning..the letter is also solitude, distance, separateness, respect, the letter of the law.'Is the choice that of a natural and an institutionalised solitude, desert or city, tree or the ship's mast?
Like the sailor who grafts a name
On that of the mast
Is the sign you are alone
'Every exit from the book is made within the book. Indeed, the end of writing keeps itself beyond writing..the world is in the book.'
---Notes from Writing and Difference, Derrida.
There's no remaking reality.
---P. Roth.
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Weight of the World
No! I refuse! My heart shall be a tower
and I must set myself upon its edge
and in that nothingness must be once more
all world, all pain, all that cannot be said.
A solitary thing, still lost in huge excess
time after time darkening and lightening-
the last surviving image of all yearning,
cast out into infinite restlessness.
And still this fixed, ultimate stone face,
consenting to endure its heaviness...
---Rilke
It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod.... And to drink and eat.... [i]t would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper.... To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'
--Wings of Desire.
They have been set there as if left behind
by the gigantic forces of the tides
which carved them out and then again retreated
but generous and lavish, openhanded,
left attributes to them which were the sea's ;
they are distinguished from the natural
configurations from the rock because
they wear a bishop's mitre or a halo
or, like a clock with its own time to tell,
a face will sometimes even show a smile-
the sum of all its hoarded, peaceful hours:
once, intricate as ears and listening,
they caught the city's sounds, heard every groan:
they guard the entrance now and keep its shadows.
A whole dimension is intended here
as in a stage whose backdrop and whose boards
are understood to represent the World-
which, clothed within his part, the Hero enters.
Their hearts are motionless. They stand so tall,
removed from time and in Eternity.
Sometimes a gesture upwards, vertical
as they , emerges from the drapery
but is abandoned, only half complete
and overtaken by the centuries
while they stay poised above the carved stone brackets
on which a teeming world they cannot see
swarms with a wildness till not trodden down
----------------------------------------------
Singing and silence. But mostly it is silence. Every day the same. What does it mean to say 'day'? We learn nothing, and forget nothing. We accumulate and store things up. Everything that could have happened has. Plenty Coups was right after all: after that nothing happened. How strange, how strange our life here. What do we want: heaviness or lightness?
Saturday, May 17, 2008
How Google Saved A Girl From Melting Away
A cloud in the wind, at the corner of the world.
---Tu Fu.
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.
---Li Po
---Tu Fu.
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.
---Li Po
From Cassiel's notebook.
In a strange village called Karachi (sorry, astarte, couldn't resist!) a man climbs a pole, vowing to never come down. At last, he thinks to himself, like a Baron in the Trees, I can breathe. Fed up with the world, he will never look another human being in the eye again. He clings onto that pole for all his life, but one day he will let go and fly from here into the wild blue yonder, like a bird that melts into the clouds.
In a remote corner of the universe a girl types something into google and is assured that she hasn't floated away. A thousand flowers still blaze away, like a fire searching out a form, or a sun that burns with an untold brilliance: I want to live, I want to die. Meanwhile, the blue mourns the loss of the Red.
Memory is neither a melting away nor a crystalization; neither Spring nor Autumn, neither what we know nor what we will know; it is but a trace of what we once knew. The rose, like the ripples of light on a stream, gathers itself in to from an image, and then disappears. And who is to say whether this image is fading away or soaring? You do exist, you do not exist: the image is not nothing, precisely, but neither is it the Real.
Khayyam, this Red you see before you, is it not the same as that of the blush of the girl's face you once knew, or the lips longing for wine's deep mysteries?
Only the philosopher asks, dumbfoundedly: what is red?
You do not know me.
No, I do.
You will never know me.
I will.
You have never known me.
There you are wrong.
All is fleeting, all is vanishing. Why do we cling on, then, so tightly? What else can we do?
Useless to call this spiralling wisp of life one strand in the the web that heaven and earth weave.--Li Po
In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. ..Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystalisation.
The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves , and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood and looks around, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. ...tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.
---D.H. Lawrence
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Odds and Ends (zdreanţă, bucată)
O.E. screade "piece cut off," from W.Gmc. *skraudas (cf. M.L.G. schrot "piece cut off," O.H.G. scrot, "a cutting, piece cut off," Ger. Schrot "small shot," O.N. skrydda "shriveled skin"), from PIE base *skreu- "to cut, cutting tool" (cf. L. scrutari "to search, examine," from scruta "trash, frippery;" O.E. scrud "dress, garment;" see shroud). The verb is from O.E. screadian "prune, cut" (cf. M.Du. scroden, Du. schroeien, O.H.G. scrotan, Ger. schroten "to shred").
The orientalist:
Deposited, once again, on the fringes of a well regulated society, with its coherent and self-sustaining stories, its archives and stone-like memory, its official histories and endless, rambling reconstructions of its past; all resting on on the surest of foundations, the strongest of footholds-even if imaginary or sunk deep into the reservoirs of the collective unconscious. He, on the other hand, lingered and tarried like some medieval beast on the periphery of the known: a shadowy figure, clinging to the borderlands; a creature known only through village gossip and folklore, distant and as ephemeral as the morning mist. A fleeting, insubstantial shape of a man; the breathless condition of inner revulsion-a revulsion for the myriad lives that were and were not his; a classical fanatic for whom ideas were incarnated in his eternal gaze.
The old man was no longer the mediator of an experience, because the experience ended with him each time. But in this way he became something still more mysterious and impressive: a stone abandoned in a field, cut by an unknown hand, according to unknown rules. Such survivors, deprived of descendants, have faces that are striking in their isolation. Their uselessness is majestic and the wisdom they possess and surely do not wish to hand on gazes at us in silence, like every memory that agrees to destroy itself.
---Roberto Calasso.
One must either be a monk or thoroughly absorbed in the world to not be concerned about its business.
Ammons: Snow poems: plenitude and nothingness. A self that stopped, that never became, was aborted. "The name nearest the name, names least." Mountains, where 'gigantic motions have been summarized into stillness'. A life, where all possibilities of escape are open; life that "fastens into order enlarging groups of disorder...no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."
All the zeroes running through my heart,
Looking for the one.
---b
What is b but the meeting of 0 and 1?
Life, no matter hard you stare at it,
is but a moment.
I close my eyes
And the world disappears.
---Swami
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise
-----W.H.Auden
Eden is more interesting as starting point than as a destination; alienation and the fall are a spectacle worth recording. Fallen time is where all the action takes place.
Home is where the heart is
But where is the heart?
A path well trodden ceases to be a path. Is all philosophizing nothing but the trick of the body? Its inward movement the awe from which wisdom begins, the sigh the withdrawal from the world; pain the awareness of love lost, the realisation that this awakening is only a lonely thought, a tardy replacement for what is no more? Second thoughts.
The romantic genius is one-sided, his truth that of an extremist; the Renaissance genius, or the humanist par excellence, is more rounded, a man for all seasons, a polymath. Also, the former is a man of action whilst the latter is an artist. How one perceives genius is an indicator of the temper of the age we live in. Can there be a poetic genius in the prosaic times we live in, now that language has lost its fluency and naivete? Or a religious genius when faith is grounded on the shores? Who today holds our attention, catches our gaze? The mathematician and scientist speak in tongues...
One sidedness is a sign of greatness, but second rank. The one sidedness of the intellectual creates the illusion of having everything-an abstract all-sided individual
---from Soren K.
A description of faith is not faith. Understanding is not a concept.
Any man's death diminishes me
--Donne
Noh: Zemi motokyio:
Forget the theatre and look at the actor.
Forget the actor and look at the heart.
Forget the heart and only then will you understand Noh
A burnt-out angel that has exhausted all possibilities within; only a silhouette remains.
Orientation:
Facing the right direction, not being in the right place. An elemental soul and an angelic soul: the human being is the cross where they meet. By virtue of the former nature is his 'brother'; by virtue of the latter consciousness or awareness breaks out of its dream-like state
---from Ostaad Elahi
Sheltering your heart from the heat of the day
--D.Mahon
"The best way to escape one's life is to quote: to live in a parallel world that is not yours"
---?
Dada: empty language of meaning ...the world already has too much meaning and must grow light again: the heavy burden of the word must be destroyed in a counter-culture. Iconoclasm.
To live in paradise alone.
--Marvell.
The loneliness which is the truth about things. Socially sanctioned communication has nothing to say.
--from V.Woolf
The paradox: those who are most alone have most trust in the world [the ascetics love the world with a love that outshines the hatred of those who are in love with the world]
--Hohl.
The politics of the sea.
The orientalist:
Deposited, once again, on the fringes of a well regulated society, with its coherent and self-sustaining stories, its archives and stone-like memory, its official histories and endless, rambling reconstructions of its past; all resting on on the surest of foundations, the strongest of footholds-even if imaginary or sunk deep into the reservoirs of the collective unconscious. He, on the other hand, lingered and tarried like some medieval beast on the periphery of the known: a shadowy figure, clinging to the borderlands; a creature known only through village gossip and folklore, distant and as ephemeral as the morning mist. A fleeting, insubstantial shape of a man; the breathless condition of inner revulsion-a revulsion for the myriad lives that were and were not his; a classical fanatic for whom ideas were incarnated in his eternal gaze.
The old man was no longer the mediator of an experience, because the experience ended with him each time. But in this way he became something still more mysterious and impressive: a stone abandoned in a field, cut by an unknown hand, according to unknown rules. Such survivors, deprived of descendants, have faces that are striking in their isolation. Their uselessness is majestic and the wisdom they possess and surely do not wish to hand on gazes at us in silence, like every memory that agrees to destroy itself.
---Roberto Calasso.
One must either be a monk or thoroughly absorbed in the world to not be concerned about its business.
Ammons: Snow poems: plenitude and nothingness. A self that stopped, that never became, was aborted. "The name nearest the name, names least." Mountains, where 'gigantic motions have been summarized into stillness'. A life, where all possibilities of escape are open; life that "fastens into order enlarging groups of disorder...no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."
All the zeroes running through my heart,
Looking for the one.
---b
What is b but the meeting of 0 and 1?
Life, no matter hard you stare at it,
is but a moment.
I close my eyes
And the world disappears.
---Swami
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise
-----W.H.Auden
Eden is more interesting as starting point than as a destination; alienation and the fall are a spectacle worth recording. Fallen time is where all the action takes place.
Home is where the heart is
But where is the heart?
A path well trodden ceases to be a path. Is all philosophizing nothing but the trick of the body? Its inward movement the awe from which wisdom begins, the sigh the withdrawal from the world; pain the awareness of love lost, the realisation that this awakening is only a lonely thought, a tardy replacement for what is no more? Second thoughts.
The romantic genius is one-sided, his truth that of an extremist; the Renaissance genius, or the humanist par excellence, is more rounded, a man for all seasons, a polymath. Also, the former is a man of action whilst the latter is an artist. How one perceives genius is an indicator of the temper of the age we live in. Can there be a poetic genius in the prosaic times we live in, now that language has lost its fluency and naivete? Or a religious genius when faith is grounded on the shores? Who today holds our attention, catches our gaze? The mathematician and scientist speak in tongues...
One sidedness is a sign of greatness, but second rank. The one sidedness of the intellectual creates the illusion of having everything-an abstract all-sided individual
---from Soren K.
A description of faith is not faith. Understanding is not a concept.
Any man's death diminishes me
--Donne
Noh: Zemi motokyio:
Forget the theatre and look at the actor.
Forget the actor and look at the heart.
Forget the heart and only then will you understand Noh
A burnt-out angel that has exhausted all possibilities within; only a silhouette remains.
Orientation:
Facing the right direction, not being in the right place. An elemental soul and an angelic soul: the human being is the cross where they meet. By virtue of the former nature is his 'brother'; by virtue of the latter consciousness or awareness breaks out of its dream-like state
---from Ostaad Elahi
Sheltering your heart from the heat of the day
--D.Mahon
"The best way to escape one's life is to quote: to live in a parallel world that is not yours"
---?
Dada: empty language of meaning ...the world already has too much meaning and must grow light again: the heavy burden of the word must be destroyed in a counter-culture. Iconoclasm.
To live in paradise alone.
--Marvell.
The loneliness which is the truth about things. Socially sanctioned communication has nothing to say.
--from V.Woolf
The paradox: those who are most alone have most trust in the world [the ascetics love the world with a love that outshines the hatred of those who are in love with the world]
--Hohl.
The politics of the sea.
The Mysterious Magician
Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely. Neither when I was alone, nor with others. I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means at last I am whole. Now I can say it because today I am finally lonely. No more coincidence...
--from Wings of Desire
Is it me? The things people take seriously are the things I laugh at. That can sound terribly condescending, as if one is proud that that is just so. But it's not that. Seriously. And the things people laugh at are the things I think are stupid (would be great to wheel in St. Paul here: "be not conformed to the world" but even that is setting oneself up: as if one had to be eccentric...)
Here, I feel like scampering for my books, see what Iris has to say, but what could be more ridiculous?!
Someone asked me: "Do you think you were a clown in a former life?"
Me: "Er..former?"
Today, early morning, I found this card on the windscreen of my car:
MASTER OF MAGICIANS
Awarded Bawa Magicians
Prof. Bawa Amil Husnain Shah's Message
For My Brothers and sisters..wishes can be fulfilled success within wiwcle of an eye
AFTER THE SUCCESS FUL VISIT IN EUROPE NOW IN PAKISTAN FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Open Challenge for all magicians that they cannot over power on my action, If you are suffering from any difficulty for eg. Love Marriage-failure in love-to make merciless beloved in your possession-every kind of lottery-Non-unity in husband wife relationship-Raw in Laws-to make husband on the right path-stoppage in business-any physical and psychological diseas-fear of anemey-ceasuare of children forever-failurein vist forgin country etc
Ladies and Gentleman who can not come themselves-Contact on Mobile phone.
...(some Multan number)
Now, I'm wondering: why was I the only one who got this card? Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Was it a sheer coincidence? Perhaps the sun is getting to me. How I miss England's black sun...
Crone, crow, scarecrow
On the edge of everything
Like a burnt-out angel
Raising petitionary hands
~~~
There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.
Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.
--Derek Mahon
--from Wings of Desire
Is it me? The things people take seriously are the things I laugh at. That can sound terribly condescending, as if one is proud that that is just so. But it's not that. Seriously. And the things people laugh at are the things I think are stupid (would be great to wheel in St. Paul here: "be not conformed to the world" but even that is setting oneself up: as if one had to be eccentric...)
Here, I feel like scampering for my books, see what Iris has to say, but what could be more ridiculous?!
Someone asked me: "Do you think you were a clown in a former life?"
Me: "Er..former?"
Today, early morning, I found this card on the windscreen of my car:
MASTER OF MAGICIANS
Awarded Bawa Magicians
Prof. Bawa Amil Husnain Shah's Message
For My Brothers and sisters..wishes can be fulfilled success within wiwcle of an eye
AFTER THE SUCCESS FUL VISIT IN EUROPE NOW IN PAKISTAN FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Open Challenge for all magicians that they cannot over power on my action, If you are suffering from any difficulty for eg. Love Marriage-failure in love-to make merciless beloved in your possession-every kind of lottery-Non-unity in husband wife relationship-Raw in Laws-to make husband on the right path-stoppage in business-any physical and psychological diseas-fear of anemey-ceasuare of children forever-failurein vist forgin country etc
Ladies and Gentleman who can not come themselves-Contact on Mobile phone.
...(some Multan number)
Now, I'm wondering: why was I the only one who got this card? Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Was it a sheer coincidence? Perhaps the sun is getting to me. How I miss England's black sun...
Crone, crow, scarecrow
On the edge of everything
Like a burnt-out angel
Raising petitionary hands
~~~
There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.
Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.
--Derek Mahon
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Garden
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We stood a moment so, in a strange world.And the Blue flames of love
Mourned the loss of the Red.
So close the book now,
For what be, let be unsaid.
Indestrucitible stars,coldest of flames.
A frost-starred heart
still spells out your name.
To whom shall I speak,
Then what shall I write?
Is it still day
Or is it now night?
Each mortal thing has its own double,and each its own law
But in love's dark mirror,I perceived its one flaw.
Gentle moonlight sighs
And peach-blossoms wait.
Disappear to eternity,
remembering their fate.
Their true life, then
This brief moment's fall.
My heart breaks too
In the heart of these walls.
-----b
~~
~~~
You ask me why I am sad
I do not answer
For my thoughts are carried
like peach blossoms down a stream
Far away from the world.
---After Li Po
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Not So Strange Case of Dr. Robin
A doctor in small place not far from here has been accused of blasphemy. Apparently, he had made light of someone's very long beard and that person took that as an attack on the religion. I'm not quite sure how that translates into blasphemy but the fact that Dr. Robin was surrounded by a mob and that his family has had to flee speaks volumes about the level of fanaticism.
~~~
Ali writes an interesting post on the Islam 'smear' against Obama in the NYT. Speaks volumes about...
~~~
The Dougal told me a true story about how a maulvi was caught setting the Quran on fire in Faisalabad a few years back. The mob tied him to the back of a motorcycle and dragged him through the town. After that they chopped him into bits and set his body on fire. Then, realizing that he was 'one of their own' (i.e from the same religious group), the mob promptly turned up at his house. "What do you want now?", asked the tearful wife.
"Oh, we've come for the funeral prayers".
I kid thee not.
~~~
Two Sundays back a woman kills herself by throwing herself in front of a train. Out of sheer desperation. Tragic, no doubt, but perhaps not something so strange in the scheme of things. But the report also had this to say: The woman walked (walked??) with her two kids in front of it. And passers by noted that she kept her hands over their eyes so as to not frighten them.
Outstretched hands of mothers have been protecting us from evil for a long time.
~~~
You know, I would have loved to have written about Charles Taylor's fantastic 'Social Imaginary' or read up on the baroque, or on Kierkegaard, but instead my mind is occupied by the sheer absurdity of it all, of what some people with a rather peculiar sense of humour call 'the real world'. The 'best of Creation'? Not so sure, not so sure.
On this crooked timber nothing straight ...
~~~
Ali writes an interesting post on the Islam 'smear' against Obama in the NYT. Speaks volumes about...
~~~
The Dougal told me a true story about how a maulvi was caught setting the Quran on fire in Faisalabad a few years back. The mob tied him to the back of a motorcycle and dragged him through the town. After that they chopped him into bits and set his body on fire. Then, realizing that he was 'one of their own' (i.e from the same religious group), the mob promptly turned up at his house. "What do you want now?", asked the tearful wife.
"Oh, we've come for the funeral prayers".
I kid thee not.
~~~
Two Sundays back a woman kills herself by throwing herself in front of a train. Out of sheer desperation. Tragic, no doubt, but perhaps not something so strange in the scheme of things. But the report also had this to say: The woman walked (walked??) with her two kids in front of it. And passers by noted that she kept her hands over their eyes so as to not frighten them.
Outstretched hands of mothers have been protecting us from evil for a long time.
~~~
You know, I would have loved to have written about Charles Taylor's fantastic 'Social Imaginary' or read up on the baroque, or on Kierkegaard, but instead my mind is occupied by the sheer absurdity of it all, of what some people with a rather peculiar sense of humour call 'the real world'. The 'best of Creation'? Not so sure, not so sure.
On this crooked timber nothing straight ...
Eckstein
NOT, I'll not, carrion comfort,
Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
-----
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
---Gerald Manley Hopkins
At bottom every human being knows quite well that, as a unique being, he is but once in the world and that no imaginable chance will for a second time bring together such a wonderfully variegated assortment as he is into one. [...] that every human being is a one-time wonder, they dare to show us the human as it is, uniquely itself right down to every moment of the muscles, and what is more, that in this strict consistency of its uniqueness, it is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, new and incredible like every work of nature, and not the least tedious.
--Nietzsche (courtesy of anton)
And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that what we are is what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and with thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if only we would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.
Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
-----
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
---Gerald Manley Hopkins
At bottom every human being knows quite well that, as a unique being, he is but once in the world and that no imaginable chance will for a second time bring together such a wonderfully variegated assortment as he is into one. [...] that every human being is a one-time wonder, they dare to show us the human as it is, uniquely itself right down to every moment of the muscles, and what is more, that in this strict consistency of its uniqueness, it is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, new and incredible like every work of nature, and not the least tedious.
--Nietzsche (courtesy of anton)
And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that what we are is what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and with thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if only we would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.
Friday, May 09, 2008
In Our Time
And I wondered to myself if the loneliness of Man in the world could be overcome by the love of one person for another.
---(from memory) Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca.
Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
--Hannah.
We live in this time, this place, no matter how much you begrudge fate. There is no stepping out of what has been allotted to you. But the desire remains. No-one can accept 'joy in contingency' or sovereign becoming. No-one can live without bridges (here the Catholics, as in so many other things, understood things better: Auden: Catholicism: the possession of the Truth; Protestantism: the search for it). And yet all that seems deep to us is this longing. Poets can wander; philosophers must sit at home.
The human condition: to escape, to leap, to fall.
Beware false infinities, Simone would say. Or an empty freedom. And yet time and time again we long for that emptiness, to break the desert-idols.
Why I'm not a muslim:
I don't know what a muslim is, haven't seen one. Anyway, they bore me to death with their crab-like behaviour, backwardness, and repetitiveness. 'Outwardly sober' is fine, but inwardly sober is to merely accumulate dust. To be a muslim can surely only mean becoming one? And even here identity would not be the subsuming of other things (class, education, culture, ethnic affinities) to some sort of monistic idea or formula but, rather, a heightening or deepening of those things, and in some cases a leaving open of the tensions between them. Render unto Caesar...But it would also be asking why we need the question of identity in the first place.
Faith: to live in contradiction, to acknowledge the unknown. A leap of faith is not to leave the circle, but to see it as a broken circle, not a recollection but a turning, an orientation, a move to the open and new, unscripted possibilities of the self. To lose oneself and find oneself. To not be one-self. To give and give up, let go, is also to receive.
Possession is only to live, here, right now, with other possessions without claiming or owning them, understanding that they can slip away, can be lovingly passed on. In our own time we understand that:
If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like it hath already befallen others.
---Q: 3:140
---(from memory) Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca.
Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
--Hannah.
We live in this time, this place, no matter how much you begrudge fate. There is no stepping out of what has been allotted to you. But the desire remains. No-one can accept 'joy in contingency' or sovereign becoming. No-one can live without bridges (here the Catholics, as in so many other things, understood things better: Auden: Catholicism: the possession of the Truth; Protestantism: the search for it). And yet all that seems deep to us is this longing. Poets can wander; philosophers must sit at home.
The human condition: to escape, to leap, to fall.
Beware false infinities, Simone would say. Or an empty freedom. And yet time and time again we long for that emptiness, to break the desert-idols.
Why I'm not a muslim:
I don't know what a muslim is, haven't seen one. Anyway, they bore me to death with their crab-like behaviour, backwardness, and repetitiveness. 'Outwardly sober' is fine, but inwardly sober is to merely accumulate dust. To be a muslim can surely only mean becoming one? And even here identity would not be the subsuming of other things (class, education, culture, ethnic affinities) to some sort of monistic idea or formula but, rather, a heightening or deepening of those things, and in some cases a leaving open of the tensions between them. Render unto Caesar...But it would also be asking why we need the question of identity in the first place.
Faith: to live in contradiction, to acknowledge the unknown. A leap of faith is not to leave the circle, but to see it as a broken circle, not a recollection but a turning, an orientation, a move to the open and new, unscripted possibilities of the self. To lose oneself and find oneself. To not be one-self. To give and give up, let go, is also to receive.
Possession is only to live, here, right now, with other possessions without claiming or owning them, understanding that they can slip away, can be lovingly passed on. In our own time we understand that:
If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like it hath already befallen others.
---Q: 3:140
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
(
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
---T.S. Eliot
No-one knows what lies beyond the curve. The ancients have said that all truth moves in a circle; but would it not have been better to say a spiral, a broken circle? Something that returns and departs. Without the brokenness can we even see the circle? Mirrors darken, let in so much darkness. We see through a glass darkly. Tell me, the curve of the hand, does it give or withhold?
The fanaticism of the human soul: my space, my country, my tribe, my life. Crows and stones are better, recognizing their imperfection, their ugliness; they do not lunge out at the emptiness, do not try to re-create it in outward forms, but sit still and wonder at the passing spiral of time
The sure, strong curve, the rise and run
are as though to contain us, are right, are what we want.
Where does it go?
Does the curve contain us? It does more than that.
It offers to hold more than we were, more
than we ask-it asks of us, and asking gives.
We are enlarged.
Where do we go? Nowhere, nowhere. Live
on the stairs? No, not that...But anyway, the stairs
As though they might take us. As though they might.
--W. Bronk.
Larkin: apart from the east and west coast a "desert full of bigots". You said it our lad. You crossed the dark sea and brought those fears, that annihilating blackness with you. As if the desert-sea was part of you now. But even if you come to own the whole world, even if the whole world is America, still much will escape you. That's the way it works. For you, who follow linear time, will not know the first place or the first time. Or second spaces, second thoughts. Only by getting out of the curve of one's own existence can we understand what might have been, what might be.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
---T.S. Eliot
No-one knows what lies beyond the curve. The ancients have said that all truth moves in a circle; but would it not have been better to say a spiral, a broken circle? Something that returns and departs. Without the brokenness can we even see the circle? Mirrors darken, let in so much darkness. We see through a glass darkly. Tell me, the curve of the hand, does it give or withhold?
The fanaticism of the human soul: my space, my country, my tribe, my life. Crows and stones are better, recognizing their imperfection, their ugliness; they do not lunge out at the emptiness, do not try to re-create it in outward forms, but sit still and wonder at the passing spiral of time
The sure, strong curve, the rise and run
are as though to contain us, are right, are what we want.
Where does it go?
Does the curve contain us? It does more than that.
It offers to hold more than we were, more
than we ask-it asks of us, and asking gives.
We are enlarged.
Where do we go? Nowhere, nowhere. Live
on the stairs? No, not that...But anyway, the stairs
As though they might take us. As though they might.
--W. Bronk.
Larkin: apart from the east and west coast a "desert full of bigots". You said it our lad. You crossed the dark sea and brought those fears, that annihilating blackness with you. As if the desert-sea was part of you now. But even if you come to own the whole world, even if the whole world is America, still much will escape you. That's the way it works. For you, who follow linear time, will not know the first place or the first time. Or second spaces, second thoughts. Only by getting out of the curve of one's own existence can we understand what might have been, what might be.
Hollow Men
The great language animal is running out of things to say, running out of being. There's something grotesque about not being able to speak, something terrifying in this silence.Know the times we live in. Mark it down. Or up. It is the dry season. It accumulates. We have but dry thoughts in a dry season. And it lasts for ever. Or at least no-one knows for how long. The world has been turned upside down. Something gnaws at our heart, sticks in our throat like a bone. A prickly pear. Only the ugly have any resilience
"The greatest are believed to be 1,000 years old, but it's their surreal shapes as much as their presumed ages that have always marked them out. The Senegalese trees in Mimi Mollica's portraits seem to be chimeras, hybrids between plant, animal and rock. They're alabaster columns, lava streams, desert boulders, cave mouths.
A related story tells that the primordial baobab was too beautiful for its own good, so the gods punished it by turning it topsy-turvy. In Senegal, villagers once buried their dead in the hollow trunks. It's not that the trees are seen as gods or wreathed by taboos. They are accepted as members of the community, arboreal village elders.
Baobabs share many of the qualities of their human compatriots. They're citizens of the arid lands, frugal, resilient, inventive. The tree originated in Madagascar, where there are seven indigenous species; 10 million years ago.
They grow quickly and soon become hollow, at which point they may be dragooned into use as village reservoirs: a water tank inside a watery shell. But the biggest and oldest baobabs become places. Their characterful bulk makes them landmarks, meeting points, shrines.
Humans have anciently had intimate and affectionate relationships with huge trees. Not just because they so surpass us in size and longevity, but because they stir empathy. One of the awesome South African baobabs, the Hoedspruit giant, is a writhing mass more than 30m in circumference. It has horizontal trunks, immense supporting buttresses, huge fatty calluses.
Its history is impenetrable. It may have been knocked down by an elephant in its youth, blown apart by storms, set on fire by honey-hunters. Yet it's still vivaciously alive, and growing back towards the light.
All trees react positively to damage. They don't repair wounds, they transcend them, creating a new kind of tissue called "reaction wood". This is the sinewy material that edges scars, that supports wind-warped trunks as they begin their slow climb back to the vertical.
We recognise this. In ancient baobab or beech we instinctively understand the tree's response to a challenge shared by all living things: of staying upright, holding the centre in a disorderly world. "
-----From The Guardian
"The greatest are believed to be 1,000 years old, but it's their surreal shapes as much as their presumed ages that have always marked them out. The Senegalese trees in Mimi Mollica's portraits seem to be chimeras, hybrids between plant, animal and rock. They're alabaster columns, lava streams, desert boulders, cave mouths.
A related story tells that the primordial baobab was too beautiful for its own good, so the gods punished it by turning it topsy-turvy. In Senegal, villagers once buried their dead in the hollow trunks. It's not that the trees are seen as gods or wreathed by taboos. They are accepted as members of the community, arboreal village elders.
Baobabs share many of the qualities of their human compatriots. They're citizens of the arid lands, frugal, resilient, inventive. The tree originated in Madagascar, where there are seven indigenous species; 10 million years ago.
They grow quickly and soon become hollow, at which point they may be dragooned into use as village reservoirs: a water tank inside a watery shell. But the biggest and oldest baobabs become places. Their characterful bulk makes them landmarks, meeting points, shrines.
Humans have anciently had intimate and affectionate relationships with huge trees. Not just because they so surpass us in size and longevity, but because they stir empathy. One of the awesome South African baobabs, the Hoedspruit giant, is a writhing mass more than 30m in circumference. It has horizontal trunks, immense supporting buttresses, huge fatty calluses.
Its history is impenetrable. It may have been knocked down by an elephant in its youth, blown apart by storms, set on fire by honey-hunters. Yet it's still vivaciously alive, and growing back towards the light.
All trees react positively to damage. They don't repair wounds, they transcend them, creating a new kind of tissue called "reaction wood". This is the sinewy material that edges scars, that supports wind-warped trunks as they begin their slow climb back to the vertical.
We recognise this. In ancient baobab or beech we instinctively understand the tree's response to a challenge shared by all living things: of staying upright, holding the centre in a disorderly world. "
-----From The Guardian
Monday, May 05, 2008
Quincunx
Was leafing through a book yesterday and came across a diagram of a quincunx. Twenty minutes later, at the cafe, I open the newspaper-one that I never read-and see a picture of a group of people from Madrid in exactly the same formation. Jeez. If there are going to be co-incidences at least make them meaningful! What else but 62! ?
~~~
Strange that academics should talk so loosely when it comes to politics or fields other than their own. Uusally, they're very reserved about making a statement without qualifying it, looking at the evidence or citing references. Even then there's a degree of tentativeness, openness to other possibilites. But when it comes to politics or religion, no, sweeping generalizations are par for the course: Iran: a "shame culture"; the mid-east: "sharia culture". It's the same type of polemical mindset of a Pilger or a Chomsky and though I can see why that might appeal to certain groups-teenagers, mainly-it does strike me as quite odd. Ah! Certainty at last.
But then again, we live in an ideological age and think in slogans. How I cringe when I hear the word "we"-as if this could only mean identity with my country, my religion. More shoddy thinking. Nationalism: sickness and unreason.
Reasonableness over rationality, I think Russell once said.
~~~
Came across one of my favourite songs
~~~
Strange that academics should talk so loosely when it comes to politics or fields other than their own. Uusally, they're very reserved about making a statement without qualifying it, looking at the evidence or citing references. Even then there's a degree of tentativeness, openness to other possibilites. But when it comes to politics or religion, no, sweeping generalizations are par for the course: Iran: a "shame culture"; the mid-east: "sharia culture". It's the same type of polemical mindset of a Pilger or a Chomsky and though I can see why that might appeal to certain groups-teenagers, mainly-it does strike me as quite odd. Ah! Certainty at last.
But then again, we live in an ideological age and think in slogans. How I cringe when I hear the word "we"-as if this could only mean identity with my country, my religion. More shoddy thinking. Nationalism: sickness and unreason.
Reasonableness over rationality, I think Russell once said.
~~~
Came across one of my favourite songs
~~~
Browne identifies this structure everywhere, in animate and inanimate matter: incertain crystalline forms, in starfish, sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbone of birds and fish..in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds..in the pyramids of Egypt..Examples might be multiplied without end.
On the one hand the study of Nature today aims to describe a system governed by immutable laws, on the other hand it delights in drawing our attention to creatures noteworthy for their bizarre physical form...
~~~~
We seek a song that is all songs; we seek a song that is uniquely ours.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Daphne
To hide from the mountains in the mountains. Sometimes we must grow still to save ourselves, become something utterly ordinary to be unseen, like a tree. But he waits, age upon age, for the moment when her hair will be let down, when the fruit shall fall into his lap. And in this way he becomes even more mesmerized, dazed. He thinks to himself, who is bound, who is free? The hunter has become the hunted!
Must something in us die before it can be loved? Which is to say, can there be the black and the red?
Wood holds together better
than sea or cloud or sand or cloud
much better than real sea or sand or cloud
It chose that way to grow and not to move
..while the light goes around it
like a prowling animal..
It may be solid, may be hollow
But it can shelter what is within (which after all
cannot have been intended to be seen).
---
Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood.I'll go to Hallaig,
To the sabbath of the dead,
Down to where each departed generation has gathered
Hallaig is where they survive.
Love's loaded gun will take aim.
It will bring down the lightheaded deer
As he sniffs the grass round the wallsteads
And his eyes will freeze: while I live,
His blood won't be traced in the woods
--Hallaig.
Must something in us die before it can be loved? Which is to say, can there be the black and the red?
Wood holds together better
than sea or cloud or sand or cloud
much better than real sea or sand or cloud
It chose that way to grow and not to move
..while the light goes around it
like a prowling animal..
It may be solid, may be hollow
But it can shelter what is within (which after all
cannot have been intended to be seen).
---
Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood.I'll go to Hallaig,
To the sabbath of the dead,
Down to where each departed generation has gathered
Hallaig is where they survive.
Love's loaded gun will take aim.
It will bring down the lightheaded deer
As he sniffs the grass round the wallsteads
And his eyes will freeze: while I live,
His blood won't be traced in the woods
--Hallaig.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Primrose Hill
You have never seen the Spiritual Sun.
I have - I saw him on Primrose Hill
--Blake
The entangled web of our lives. How we seek clarity! Are these not the marks of your absence, like so many scars? Is that our destiny-to be defined by what we lack?
~
~
I do not miss the land, Jonah, I am not English after all! There are no mystical correspondences between the land and my soul. No words bind me to a place. Northerners like us cannot speak with a sun-and-wheat consciousness. Jerusalem is elsewhere, not here. If you look for it you will not find it. If it comes it will be like a flash of lightning, a dark hieroglyph that breaks up the whiteness. But if not, then not (as the Lahoris say!)
~
~
I remember walking in Lawrence Gardens with the swami once and she stopped at a tree and said: this is where my father used to sit. And for a moment no other tree in the whole world mattered. It was as if everything of value was concentrated in this one place. Trees hold so many voices. As if we could lend them some of ours to make up for their silence. And they could repeat them to us when our faces grow dark, and our voices falter.
~
~
We walked on. And this is the place where it was declared that the second world war was over. And we thought to ourselves: what was that?! And this is where the British used to dance and this is where we would see them strolling with their dogs.
~
~
What else is a place but a bundle of memories? What else is the heart but a rag-and-bone shop? Who is the collector, who the buyer? No, I do not miss London, the grey skies or the darkness before the rain-for that is still with me somewhere. No, today more than any other day what I remember is not London but the loved ones there. And though they seem to be the most distant of dreams, as if a dream within a dream, still I know that in life that is what is most real. I have seen the Sun.
~
~
It is the moon that disappears
It is the stars that hide not I
It's the City that vanishes
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Torschlusspanik
Chi m'a tolto a me stesso
Ch'a me fusse piu presso
O piu di me potessi, che poss' io.
Bulleh, who knows who I am?
I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment- perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it has gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twighlight world one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
------Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Before one knows it one gets the feeling that certain lives have slipped away, as if from the dense knot of being one had only unraveled a certain thread, leaving the other, cancelled versions of our selves, in a state of cold limbo. Bi-location: the desire to be in more than one place at the same time, to be more than one-self, to surpass the narrow horizons of time that delimit a particular style of soul. We desire contradictory things: often rounded, always open (Goethe)...a broken circle, a script that is continuously being re-written. Nothing oppresses us more than the idea that things had to be the way they are, that certain doors will forever be closed to us.
The modern sensibility is nothing but a revolt against all that is 'given,' of any notion of a fixed identity. But we delight in and mourn the fact that we are unknown to ourselves and others. And this in itself is not so strange: Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.
The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me. And in acknowledging so much that is part of ourselves (since our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons...) we make an act of recognition which actualises what was inherent in us from the start...recognising our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us from the 'outside' events through the course of time can be recognised as belonging to our own particular pattern only when it has happened.
---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.
Ch'a me fusse piu presso
O piu di me potessi, che poss' io.
Bulleh, who knows who I am?
I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment- perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it has gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twighlight world one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
------Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Before one knows it one gets the feeling that certain lives have slipped away, as if from the dense knot of being one had only unraveled a certain thread, leaving the other, cancelled versions of our selves, in a state of cold limbo. Bi-location: the desire to be in more than one place at the same time, to be more than one-self, to surpass the narrow horizons of time that delimit a particular style of soul. We desire contradictory things: often rounded, always open (Goethe)...a broken circle, a script that is continuously being re-written. Nothing oppresses us more than the idea that things had to be the way they are, that certain doors will forever be closed to us.
The modern sensibility is nothing but a revolt against all that is 'given,' of any notion of a fixed identity. But we delight in and mourn the fact that we are unknown to ourselves and others. And this in itself is not so strange: Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.
The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me. And in acknowledging so much that is part of ourselves (since our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons...) we make an act of recognition which actualises what was inherent in us from the start...recognising our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us from the 'outside' events through the course of time can be recognised as belonging to our own particular pattern only when it has happened.
---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Other Adam Smith
The unbearableness in the unbearable lightness is that we do not find it unbearable.
On the other hand, I find all the hand wringing over our alienation or 'atomisation' just a bit odd-as if there was some originary community, tribal unity, that in the beginning there was an order of being, an order of the soul. And yet, the poet and the metaphysician in us cannot ignore that nostalgia either. The shadow of the Garden falls across our face. The desire for something absolute, not fragmentary. And yet, in the beginning wasn't there a fundamental openness to the world, to other people, to all that was strange? As if that was what beginning meant? The Fall is also our freedom. So we live our unreconciled, amphibious lives-neither here nor there, like so many broken circles...
Nussbaum on commensurability
There's some strong motive to reduce things to a system, to see a coherent pattern, to intuit unity. As if we could reduce everything to our own terms of self-understanding. Which is really our lack of negative capability, our lack of grace: to keep things open, to accept mystery. So, we want to see Beauty, Truth, not this particular instance of beauty, this specific truth. As if what we could love is only Love itself. The economist and the fanatic alike think in this way: there is only one source of value, there are no discontinuities. The strong poet, however, wanders amongst ruins, lives with disruptions-not with the cold eye of reason but with sorrow and regret and fear. But if we live in the flatlands, as children of God, then what of our specificity, our panache.
Adam Smith
We see ourselves through the eyes of the others and our mirrors to each other.
If you've been reared on the libertarian caricature of Smith you're not going to like this. All I can suggest is that you go back to bed and dream it all away. Isn't that what you've been doing anyway?
Without the mediation of the other, we have no determinate moral selves.. we do not have a moral self outside of the human community. Spectatorship is the condition for the possibility of agency since we are aware of ourselves through being aware that others are aware of us. What does it mean to be truly aware of another human being? What is this ability to take a step outside of ourselves, our capacity for second thoughts?
The chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved...We are incomplete-not relative to a higher being-but relative to each other
Of course, if you're of a religious persuasion you might think that that 'horizontality' is itself a reflection of the dependence of the 'I' on a higher being ( 'height' is a height beyond height, like the darkness beyond darkness, the silence before the word). But this 'dependence' is based on an absence, a sacrifice. Without that second space, without God saying 'I want you to be', there would be no awareness of it. If we are an 'image' of God then part of us is an image of radical otherness. There is another Adam Smith, just as there is another b, another you. Black suns.
On the other hand, I find all the hand wringing over our alienation or 'atomisation' just a bit odd-as if there was some originary community, tribal unity, that in the beginning there was an order of being, an order of the soul. And yet, the poet and the metaphysician in us cannot ignore that nostalgia either. The shadow of the Garden falls across our face. The desire for something absolute, not fragmentary. And yet, in the beginning wasn't there a fundamental openness to the world, to other people, to all that was strange? As if that was what beginning meant? The Fall is also our freedom. So we live our unreconciled, amphibious lives-neither here nor there, like so many broken circles...
Nussbaum on commensurability
There's some strong motive to reduce things to a system, to see a coherent pattern, to intuit unity. As if we could reduce everything to our own terms of self-understanding. Which is really our lack of negative capability, our lack of grace: to keep things open, to accept mystery. So, we want to see Beauty, Truth, not this particular instance of beauty, this specific truth. As if what we could love is only Love itself. The economist and the fanatic alike think in this way: there is only one source of value, there are no discontinuities. The strong poet, however, wanders amongst ruins, lives with disruptions-not with the cold eye of reason but with sorrow and regret and fear. But if we live in the flatlands, as children of God, then what of our specificity, our panache.
Adam Smith
We see ourselves through the eyes of the others and our mirrors to each other.
If you've been reared on the libertarian caricature of Smith you're not going to like this. All I can suggest is that you go back to bed and dream it all away. Isn't that what you've been doing anyway?
Without the mediation of the other, we have no determinate moral selves.. we do not have a moral self outside of the human community. Spectatorship is the condition for the possibility of agency since we are aware of ourselves through being aware that others are aware of us. What does it mean to be truly aware of another human being? What is this ability to take a step outside of ourselves, our capacity for second thoughts?
The chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved...We are incomplete-not relative to a higher being-but relative to each other
Of course, if you're of a religious persuasion you might think that that 'horizontality' is itself a reflection of the dependence of the 'I' on a higher being ( 'height' is a height beyond height, like the darkness beyond darkness, the silence before the word). But this 'dependence' is based on an absence, a sacrifice. Without that second space, without God saying 'I want you to be', there would be no awareness of it. If we are an 'image' of God then part of us is an image of radical otherness. There is another Adam Smith, just as there is another b, another you. Black suns.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Hermit
....The aniconic spirit is restless in its search for the immediate, the primitive and direct experience of reality..the anarchic. It desires, above all else, to be free of nostalgia, memory, legend, myth, and history: to escape itself, to break free from time...Is such an unmediated experience even possible , or is it merely a dream for those who live in these particular times? Is the pursuit of Utopia bound to lead to a catastrophic disaster, to despair and fanaticism?
Schama: the frayed seams that connect and separate two spaces (dihliz)...not boundaries but a visible glimpse of some glowing seal of light over which everything else is unstably superimposed. His 'black on grey', for example, was still soaked with light and yet still somehow tethered to the known world.
Human beings are halfway between nothing and infinity: therein lies his majesty, therein his tragedy. Is it the human being that is this wild horizon, this barzakh, this thin glimmering band of light that separates the black from the white? But why talk only of separation? Are we not bound and free , is there not continuity and discontinuity? Where does night begin and day end?
Rosenberg: In sum, what the new American artists sought was ...the formal sign language of the inner kingdom-equivalents in paint of a flash, no matter how transitory, or what had been known throughout the centuries as spiritual enlightenment.
Perhaps we should, then, think of the intervening light in a different way: as the light within the light, the 'divine darkness'? What is it that Rothko is looking for? The silence of the deserts, the glaciers? But, then, what of his commitment to the human angle? To look to the skies, to leave the cave, must we neglect what lies behind our backs, under our noses?
Gregory of Nazianus: The world is held together by the power and reason of God; one soul, united...["and the creation of the universe is as a single soul"]..creation is a system and compound of earth and sky and all that is in them...more worthy of admiration when we consider the harmony and unison of the whole, tending to the perfect completion of the whole. Outward beauty, as with the moon, is a ladder...'Beauty is the splendour of the True' .
Rothko: The urgency fro transcendent experience was understood , and given official status. The importance of channels, tradition, bridges, ladders. Can we, those without an inheritance, live up to that task?
Heller: The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh.the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more than their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity. It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism.
It is sometimes possible to think of Rothko's paintings as the moment just after the first creation but just as easy to think of them as the afterglow of the final explosion....the absence from our lives of commonly accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade empty shells of fragmentary memories, ..hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning. We may yet reach the moon..
---Heller
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision.
___________
The hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mention of it, “phenomenological reverberation” obliterates all mediocre resonances. The hermit’s hut is an engraving that would suffer from any exaggeration of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb “to inhabit.” The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches “of this world.” It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.
---From anton, via Bachelard
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Quintessential
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.
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, and 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. It is the thisness of this human being that is the intersection of beauty and the idea.
We may know something of that order of being but we remain, quintessentially, unknown, unknowable... We trace the footprints, search for clues, chase shadows, hang around your old haunts..as if by finding your true name we would find ours. How old I have grown looking for your signs!
But I have become a question to myself, not an answer. There's no time for that. Dark flowers bloom without asking why. In city gardens and deep forests alike. Dark flowers bloom, fed by the light of a black sun.
The quintessential is all that eludes definition.
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, and 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. It is the thisness of this human being that is the intersection of beauty and the idea.
We may know something of that order of being but we remain, quintessentially, unknown, unknowable... We trace the footprints, search for clues, chase shadows, hang around your old haunts..as if by finding your true name we would find ours. How old I have grown looking for your signs!
But I have become a question to myself, not an answer. There's no time for that. Dark flowers bloom without asking why. In city gardens and deep forests alike. Dark flowers bloom, fed by the light of a black sun.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
First Hand
(with apologies to those who may find this image somewhat sacrilegious)
Much of what we know is secondhand, derivative. Much of what we comprehend is lovingly passed down to us, from one hand to the other, and taken on trust. The first hand groped in the evening dark for something strange. Not a shape or form, nor a particular face either.
One hand reaches out for the stars; the other jots thoughts down and in doing so creates the human world. The hand tries to grasp what it's all about: the tree of knowledge. But the first hand is also a registering of a presence, as in the first cave paintings. This is me. I was here. It is more than this. The wall is the membrane that divides worlds, it is a veil that separates the beloved.
And on that first cold night the first hand searched and searched and it was the search itself that made it utterly mysterious, wholly unforeseeable; and he finally understood that what he was looking for all this time came from the tree of life; it was nothing else but the simple hand of another human being.
Monday, April 21, 2008
It's Blowy Out Here
Every time we pass his house he says the same thing, It's blowy out here.
He's an old, frail man, more bone than flesh. Only the white shock of hair reminds you that he was young once. He was okay last year, Ubo informs me, until his fall. And is there no recovery from a fall, I ask. No, once the cells start to degenerate there is no way back.Those words, 'no way back', haunt me since there's something menacing about things that aren't irreversible.
He walks gingerly to the garden gate, shuffling his feet as he does so. And each time he taps the gate three times with his trowel. And those same words. It is as if the needle of a record has come stuck. How strange that we say "in the groove" when this means precisely the opposite in this case. I wonder, is this ritual a form of senility or is it the ritual that staves off its onset? There is something unkempt about his appearance and the hint of wildness in his eyes, untamed, defiant, though not quite the 'unconquered fire'. He has lost his mind -how ordinary language reveals so much!- and seems to wander back and forth in his little cemented garden like a jilted lover or an exile.
The storm strikes up at it's appointed hour. There is something mechanical, predictable about its arrival. It must be 2 or 4. Why always an even hour? The wind is in a revengeful mood tonight, tearing through the trees' outstretched arms, howling across the empty fields. It has come from the north to destroy us, like a barbarian king or a trowl. I imagine it picking up its strength across vast, undefined seas, sucking in the blackness around it. When man's activity comes to a grinding halt then, and only then, does one hear the great silences that allow us to perceive the striking up of nature's forces. And it takes a kind of strength to face all that loneliness on one's own. And I think to myself, maybe it wasn't madness I saw in the old man's eyes...
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
---Ted Hughes
(Photo: courtesy of Roxana. Thanks!)
Friday, April 18, 2008
Tulip in the Desert
And men loved darkness rather than the light
---John, III:19
Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed--
You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak,
And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress:
I but a shadow--you a radiance fair!
---Cyrano to Roxanne
I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.
---Leopardi (or Roxanne to Cyrano)
Why so downcast, my soul
why do you sigh within me
---Psalms.
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.
---Anna Akhmatova
Autumn drifts by, but the heart is not sad. I hear the voice of loved ones calling me all the time. And though the blue flames of love mourn the loss of the red still blossoms fall, spring arrives, ice melts. I am lost but have made a home here! And still, within the ashes of the world a spark may be found. In the desert of the heart are hidden many gardens, and deer roam freely and aimlessly, guided not by your footprints, but by your scent. In the spent clouds lies dormant, to this very day, many a flash of lightning. In the wilderness is a tulip, scarred but at peace.
--after Iqbal
---John, III:19
Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed--
You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak,
And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress:
I but a shadow--you a radiance fair!
---Cyrano to Roxanne
I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.
---Leopardi (or Roxanne to Cyrano)
Why so downcast, my soul
why do you sigh within me
---Psalms.
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.
---Anna Akhmatova
Autumn drifts by, but the heart is not sad. I hear the voice of loved ones calling me all the time. And though the blue flames of love mourn the loss of the red still blossoms fall, spring arrives, ice melts. I am lost but have made a home here! And still, within the ashes of the world a spark may be found. In the desert of the heart are hidden many gardens, and deer roam freely and aimlessly, guided not by your footprints, but by your scent. In the spent clouds lies dormant, to this very day, many a flash of lightning. In the wilderness is a tulip, scarred but at peace.
--after Iqbal
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Lives of Others
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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
We gaze and gaze, sometimes dreamily, sometimes with an intense longing. We fear the closing of doors, the flame cooling, our bodies taking form. Behind the right door is the star prize, if only we would know it. As if the truth was just around the corner. But so many go unopened...the lives we did not live, that were cancelled out. Had we but taken a step to the left instead of the right the universe would have been like this, not like that.
Sometimes we come across an old building, or a particular face and think to ourselves: my life must have once been part of her story, I must have lived in this place once before. As if we could hum a tune without knowing the words. The memory of you real but fading, disappearing, like a photograph kept in a chest in the attic for assurance, a room within the room of the heart...
Every word is a doorway to a meeting.
But only one word takes us there, only one unlocks the door. Then, and only then, do we unfasten our hair, loosen up our being, unfold our hands. And then there is no door, no inner or outer. Then, when everything silently falls away, how shall we speak face to face?
1
On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.
2
Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what's happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can't remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can't recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.
3
And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.
-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927) (S.H. transl.)(Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232)
The Black and the Blue
Multitude of the skies,
golden riddle of millions of stars,
cold, distant, lustrous, beautiful,
silent, unfeeling, unwelcoming.
Fulness of knowledge is their course,
emptiness of chartless ignorance,
a universe moving in silence,
a mind alone in its bounds.
Not they moved my thoughts,
not the marvel of their chill course;
to us there is no miracle but love,
lighting of a universe in the kindling of your face.
Sorley Maclean, Multitude
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Second Sight
Does God ever judge us by appearances? I suspect he does.
When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?
---W.H. Auden
Time is the great healer.
What if it is time that inflicts the wounds?
----from Wings of Desire
From Octavio Paz's 'Double Flame':
Alienation: we are absent from our true selves, other beings, phantoms, inhabit our shells. Are we what we imagine ourselves to be? Sometimes we 'catch ourselves', and other times we are 'besides ourselves,' or we convince ourselves by saying 'I was not quite myself' . Who were we in those times?"
The Judeo-christian concept devalued nature and transformed it into an object..At the same time it broke the organic relation between man and the polis. Lastly, modern reason generated excision."
Excision: "having placed spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity in opposition, excision finally encompassed all oppositions within one: absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. "
Given alienation can one look to the state as a way of resolving the tensions? "Excision is not healed by time but by something or someone representing non time."
A human being is what he seeks, what he desires. Even when we finally catch up with ourselves we move on, separating himself again, desiring some new future. We are created restless. Man is the child of time. Will love, then, be an object out of time or someone that time itself brings forth?
Cracks: there are moments, but only moments, when the dichotomies melt away: subject/object, I/you, now /forever. Some have called this Revelation, others love...
"The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house we were born in." We are strangers, we have never left this land. All is new, all is old.
Hegel: ' In love life discovers itself in itself. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.' Living is continual separation, a series of deaths, of falls. Gravity and grace.
Breton: The intersection of two series-chance (or fate) and our own subjectivity or desire. 'Objective chance,' a 'necessary accident', is a form of outer necessity that opens a path into the unconscious'. We are determined by what is outside our will (and knowledge) and are magnetically drawn to that space where the beloved will appear. What, then , of free will? The most random of events is then invested with the most significance. As if the whole meaning of our existence would have been something else had there been a slight displacement of events or their timing. And if this is so, might it not be that the most trivial of events can lead to an unraveling of the thread as well?
We seek the completion of a pattern that we are dimly aware of. But in another sense what we desire above all is an open space that we could not possibly have imagined or foreseen. Love is blind.
'Objective chance' creates a literally magnetized space: the lovers, like sleepwalkers possessed of second sight, wander about, meet each other.' We stumble, are at a loss for words. Some things are written in the stars, but they require our complicity as well, for there can be no compulsion in such matters...we are bound and free, and that means you, and that means me.
When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?
---W.H. Auden
Time is the great healer.
What if it is time that inflicts the wounds?
----from Wings of Desire
From Octavio Paz's 'Double Flame':
Alienation: we are absent from our true selves, other beings, phantoms, inhabit our shells. Are we what we imagine ourselves to be? Sometimes we 'catch ourselves', and other times we are 'besides ourselves,' or we convince ourselves by saying 'I was not quite myself' . Who were we in those times?"
The Judeo-christian concept devalued nature and transformed it into an object..At the same time it broke the organic relation between man and the polis. Lastly, modern reason generated excision."
Excision: "having placed spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity in opposition, excision finally encompassed all oppositions within one: absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. "
Given alienation can one look to the state as a way of resolving the tensions? "Excision is not healed by time but by something or someone representing non time."
A human being is what he seeks, what he desires. Even when we finally catch up with ourselves we move on, separating himself again, desiring some new future. We are created restless. Man is the child of time. Will love, then, be an object out of time or someone that time itself brings forth?
Cracks: there are moments, but only moments, when the dichotomies melt away: subject/object, I/you, now /forever. Some have called this Revelation, others love...
"The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house we were born in." We are strangers, we have never left this land. All is new, all is old.
Hegel: ' In love life discovers itself in itself. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.' Living is continual separation, a series of deaths, of falls. Gravity and grace.
Breton: The intersection of two series-chance (or fate) and our own subjectivity or desire. 'Objective chance,' a 'necessary accident', is a form of outer necessity that opens a path into the unconscious'. We are determined by what is outside our will (and knowledge) and are magnetically drawn to that space where the beloved will appear. What, then , of free will? The most random of events is then invested with the most significance. As if the whole meaning of our existence would have been something else had there been a slight displacement of events or their timing. And if this is so, might it not be that the most trivial of events can lead to an unraveling of the thread as well?
We seek the completion of a pattern that we are dimly aware of. But in another sense what we desire above all is an open space that we could not possibly have imagined or foreseen. Love is blind.
'Objective chance' creates a literally magnetized space: the lovers, like sleepwalkers possessed of second sight, wander about, meet each other.' We stumble, are at a loss for words. Some things are written in the stars, but they require our complicity as well, for there can be no compulsion in such matters...we are bound and free, and that means you, and that means me.
Drift, Autumn, drift;
fall, colours, where you will
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The Dying Animal
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what is was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that man dying.
---Larkin.
You've changed.
What did you expect?
But you're not the same person I once knew?
True. Today the skies are grey, yesterday they weren't. And who knows of tomorrow?
I'm not sure I know you any more.
Same here!
Does the past, then, not count for anything?
Of course it does, but it does more than count: it lives. We are undetermined animals, remember?
We seek a pattern. Who is it amongst us who hasn't searched to make sense of it all, to put one's name on the things and people that have streamed in from the future to meet us? Isn't there something in us that intuits unity, that is besotted by the origin, the symbol of order in that first time, first space, something fundamental that recoils at the possibility of discontinuity? Anarchy is only a falling away from the order of the sun, a black spot. Essence precedes existence.
But sometimes we also want the heart to break; sometimes we want nothing more than to break free, to fall, to fly. We want what cannot be achieved-except by grace: to be a broken circle.
Why bring up the ancient quarrel again? Do we find our name or make a name for ourself?
But we are not mind alone. Nor is our mind a mere reflection of a Parmenedian universe, something fixed, static, timeless. Kunfayakun is not over! Still the world trembles, still the mountains flow. Capstones shift.
I am dying. You, like the earth, are dying too. Even if I say we is it not true that we die alone? What solace is there to be had? Philosophy won't take you there. Nor will art or science. We live amongst shadows. But at least we can say not the dying animal but a dying animal, dazzlingly unique in all her distinctiveness, truly aware of all the colours: black, blue, green....
Just what is was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that man dying.
---Larkin.
You've changed.
What did you expect?
But you're not the same person I once knew?
True. Today the skies are grey, yesterday they weren't. And who knows of tomorrow?
I'm not sure I know you any more.
Same here!
Does the past, then, not count for anything?
Of course it does, but it does more than count: it lives. We are undetermined animals, remember?
We seek a pattern. Who is it amongst us who hasn't searched to make sense of it all, to put one's name on the things and people that have streamed in from the future to meet us? Isn't there something in us that intuits unity, that is besotted by the origin, the symbol of order in that first time, first space, something fundamental that recoils at the possibility of discontinuity? Anarchy is only a falling away from the order of the sun, a black spot. Essence precedes existence.
But sometimes we also want the heart to break; sometimes we want nothing more than to break free, to fall, to fly. We want what cannot be achieved-except by grace: to be a broken circle.
Why bring up the ancient quarrel again? Do we find our name or make a name for ourself?
But we are not mind alone. Nor is our mind a mere reflection of a Parmenedian universe, something fixed, static, timeless. Kunfayakun is not over! Still the world trembles, still the mountains flow. Capstones shift.
I am dying. You, like the earth, are dying too. Even if I say we is it not true that we die alone? What solace is there to be had? Philosophy won't take you there. Nor will art or science. We live amongst shadows. But at least we can say not the dying animal but a dying animal, dazzlingly unique in all her distinctiveness, truly aware of all the colours: black, blue, green....
Friday, April 11, 2008
Second Thoughts
Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.
the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.
Against a leonine summer- putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
from W.H. Auden
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The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
---Marvell
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The End of Islam, the End of Lahore
Yesterday was, without doubt, one of the most depressing days here. What was termed a 'debate' was really a farcical show, another attempt to lampoon the "decadent" west. And here we had two teachers, both with their fucking American twang, quoting Nietzsche-the nihilism of the west-and Plato (the noble lie.."they didn't teach you that, did they?") and Chomsky. A heady brew. The west is in crisis, it has no moral foundations. Pornography, incest...what's your problem with that?This university is funded by amriki money, to produce 'brown saahibs' (Macaulay was wheeled in). And all this in front of the students.
"But how should we respond to the cartoons?"
Follow the will of God. And for that you need to go to the best interpreter, and that is mufti K-A...
More than that, other colleagues were attacked on the platform. The social sciences themselves were irrational, an eye-wash. The social scientists themselves devoid of any logic. We can essentialize, we must. In our tradition we talk of the kaffir and the muslim. Why should we even be concerned with words like freedom, peace, tolerance. They're out to get us. Look at Bosnia, look at Chechnya. And all this from people who teach Business Studies and Sociology! Oh, the irony.
Now, you might think I'm making this up given that it's so absurd. But that's exactly how it was. And this ain't no crummy university but supposedly the best or one of the best in the country. But what was really shocking was the way in which the vast majority of the students lapped this up, laughing and stomping their feet like clowns.
A few dissenting voices, old Lahore speaking. But I can't but help feel the game is over. I felt like saying, but have you actually ever listened to Bach. No, it won't do. This place is buggered. There's no two ways about it. Fanatics everywhere want people to take sides. But I prefer not to. Let us remain true to our roots and be unsure. As the Allama once said:
Even if the Divine reveals His Face
I'll still take "perhaps" and "maybe".
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Conversations with the swami
This spiral of stars is a riddle of the universe, not its answer.
This wisp of a life lasts no longer.
If we knew how many years lie between us and the stars, would that lessen our pain any?
This moon that shines so brightly for the poet and the broken-hearted alike, for one and all, that is so generous and even-handed, it burns not for me.
The Hindu, the swami, would turn up at eleven in the morning, the busiest part of the day, when the world is just beginning to be absorbed in itself, barefoot and clad in orange robes; on his forehead were three white lines and he had a very creased and sun-worn face. No child had seen his eyes and whenever he approached they scuttled in all directions; it was said that he put muslim children into the sack cloth that was slung around his shoulder.
What, all children?
No, just those who were sad.
But did you 'actually' see him do this?
I am one such child.
He who has the power owns the truth, but whoever is without it lives the truth.
Life is a dream; within that dream we have one special dream and that dream is what is, ultimately, the most real in life.
Never try what you don't like.
Never like what you don't try.
A stone never tries to be anything but itself.
To see the beauty in a garden of wild flowers is no different from taking an ethical stance-in both one perceives different 'colours' and unity; each human heart is such a garden, each contains a universe of its own. We see and know but one infintesimal part, mistaking whatever catches our eye for the sum of her being.
Perfection. If you look for it you will never find it but if you don't you will see it everywhere and all around you: in a simple flower or a great tree; in an old dog with his greying hair no less that in a meandering stream glinting in the light of a spring morning. And then the Swami, seeing that I was unconvinced pointed upwards and said: look at the clouds and see that wherever there is no human being , there one sees the hand of God.. and that is perfection. Take away the 'mim' and there is only the One.
I will be a bird; one day I will fly from here and never look at the decietful eyes of a human being; I will never look down, only up. I will burn in the sun's presence but still will I be Bird, lost and found. Let me fly, let me fly, and never find....
Sometimes, I could go in anywhere, not
to see the stars, not to be as we
are always, not only under them
but in them.
This wisp of a life lasts no longer.
If we knew how many years lie between us and the stars, would that lessen our pain any?
This moon that shines so brightly for the poet and the broken-hearted alike, for one and all, that is so generous and even-handed, it burns not for me.
The Hindu, the swami, would turn up at eleven in the morning, the busiest part of the day, when the world is just beginning to be absorbed in itself, barefoot and clad in orange robes; on his forehead were three white lines and he had a very creased and sun-worn face. No child had seen his eyes and whenever he approached they scuttled in all directions; it was said that he put muslim children into the sack cloth that was slung around his shoulder.
What, all children?
No, just those who were sad.
But did you 'actually' see him do this?
I am one such child.
He who has the power owns the truth, but whoever is without it lives the truth.
Life is a dream; within that dream we have one special dream and that dream is what is, ultimately, the most real in life.
Never try what you don't like.
Never like what you don't try.
A stone never tries to be anything but itself.
To see the beauty in a garden of wild flowers is no different from taking an ethical stance-in both one perceives different 'colours' and unity; each human heart is such a garden, each contains a universe of its own. We see and know but one infintesimal part, mistaking whatever catches our eye for the sum of her being.
Perfection. If you look for it you will never find it but if you don't you will see it everywhere and all around you: in a simple flower or a great tree; in an old dog with his greying hair no less that in a meandering stream glinting in the light of a spring morning. And then the Swami, seeing that I was unconvinced pointed upwards and said: look at the clouds and see that wherever there is no human being , there one sees the hand of God.. and that is perfection. Take away the 'mim' and there is only the One.
I will be a bird; one day I will fly from here and never look at the decietful eyes of a human being; I will never look down, only up. I will burn in the sun's presence but still will I be Bird, lost and found. Let me fly, let me fly, and never find....
Sometimes, I could go in anywhere, not
to see the stars, not to be as we
are always, not only under them
but in them.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Life Insurance.
Duns Scotus is now a dunce !
What you once thought was the cheez now seems idiotic, childish. Elmer Gantry! You hear so many people make such grandiose claims and you don't know whether to laugh and cry. I started the lecture by saying we're only trying to give shape to our ignorance: Rumsfeld: we don't know what we don't know.
Rationality binds us to one truth, or to one level. Freedom of thought, real freedom, would mean we could talk about rationalities. Even better, we would not talk with so much certainty, would understand when to talk, and when to be silent. To say I don't know is to liberate oneself, is to be able to dance lightly again. Bloggers, of course, will not understand this.
God is not a concept.
---Ibn Arabi.
The wonder, the utter strangeness of the world, reduced to a formula, an equation. The universe behind your eyes, unknowable. Science, too: all that causality! Like the bourgeoisie, enamoured by boxes, labels, insurances against the uncertainties of life, or the philosopher who makes a technique out of knowing. But how strange that a child can talk and smile and love without knowing!
God is not a mathematician.
I do not know you.
I have never known you.
I will never know you.
Perhaps because I have never known myself.
The dark before the dark, the silence before the first note. Black, black to the core, which is really the light beyond the light. The night is also a sun. Perhaps we will cross paths and then, like a stranger, I will tip my hat to you, and I will steal a glance. But don't bank on it. There are no assurances.
But I have spent too long, relied
too much on understanding, not
to be ashamed to call a helper in
because it fails, or shut my mind
to what the mind receives...
I plead the permanence
of ignorance, that we acknowledge it.
It goes where we goes, gets there first, and waits
to be the find we make wherever we think
to have gone: the day's adventure, the same surprise...
Belief, which visas us our entry there ,
comforts our incoherence, offers to teach
some simple terms, the easy speech of the land..
We hear this language spoken and understand,
but it remains the special speech of the place,
resisting translation , unable to say what we mean.
Reality is what we are ignorant of.
Let me not have a life to look at, the way we look
at a life we build to look at, in the world belief
gives us to understand, a snowman life:
hurry to pack it solid, buttons on
and a proper hat, finished before dark,
before the rain to wash it away. We dress
our lives as we might dress a doll self,
getting and giving...
--William Bronk.
What you once thought was the cheez now seems idiotic, childish. Elmer Gantry! You hear so many people make such grandiose claims and you don't know whether to laugh and cry. I started the lecture by saying we're only trying to give shape to our ignorance: Rumsfeld: we don't know what we don't know.
Rationality binds us to one truth, or to one level. Freedom of thought, real freedom, would mean we could talk about rationalities. Even better, we would not talk with so much certainty, would understand when to talk, and when to be silent. To say I don't know is to liberate oneself, is to be able to dance lightly again. Bloggers, of course, will not understand this.
God is not a concept.
---Ibn Arabi.
The wonder, the utter strangeness of the world, reduced to a formula, an equation. The universe behind your eyes, unknowable. Science, too: all that causality! Like the bourgeoisie, enamoured by boxes, labels, insurances against the uncertainties of life, or the philosopher who makes a technique out of knowing. But how strange that a child can talk and smile and love without knowing!
God is not a mathematician.
I do not know you.
I have never known you.
I will never know you.
Perhaps because I have never known myself.
The dark before the dark, the silence before the first note. Black, black to the core, which is really the light beyond the light. The night is also a sun. Perhaps we will cross paths and then, like a stranger, I will tip my hat to you, and I will steal a glance. But don't bank on it. There are no assurances.
But I have spent too long, relied
too much on understanding, not
to be ashamed to call a helper in
because it fails, or shut my mind
to what the mind receives...
I plead the permanence
of ignorance, that we acknowledge it.
It goes where we goes, gets there first, and waits
to be the find we make wherever we think
to have gone: the day's adventure, the same surprise...
Belief, which visas us our entry there ,
comforts our incoherence, offers to teach
some simple terms, the easy speech of the land..
We hear this language spoken and understand,
but it remains the special speech of the place,
resisting translation , unable to say what we mean.
Reality is what we are ignorant of.
Let me not have a life to look at, the way we look
at a life we build to look at, in the world belief
gives us to understand, a snowman life:
hurry to pack it solid, buttons on
and a proper hat, finished before dark,
before the rain to wash it away. We dress
our lives as we might dress a doll self,
getting and giving...
--William Bronk.
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