First Philosophy-or a Jewish 'thought'

In the beginning was the deed, not the word.



I can't remember if Goethe or the Allama first said this. Anyway, 'first' is not always a number.But to put it this way is not to suggest that action exists without 'thought' (what the Gita would call 'contemplation').



Holiness within, selfless action without.

----The Gita.

I see someone in pain. I stretch out a hand.
I do not ask: what is pain?
I do not think: is he really in pain, how do I know?
I do not calculate what the benefits and costs of action are, what the
overall calculus of pain and pleasure is.
I do not reflect: do I know this person,
is he my 'brother', am I his keeper?



The act is not a form of knowledge but an acknowledgement of otherness; but if it is not an 'idea', neither is it a feeling. Is it, then, out of a sense of duty that I am impelled to act or do the social norms condition me so?



Second thoughts: we enact morality.



It is tempting in this day and age to favour a conception of ethics that talks about duties and rights (the former cuts us off from happiness; the latter from political manipulation). The dominant paradigm, with its stress on consequentialism (itself part of utilitarianism), offers a rather shallow approach to life: pushpin is a as good as poetry and whether Van Gogh is a good painter or not becomes a matter of taste-and that only! The word 'taste' itself loses its older meaning, a meaning that is synonymous with 'judgement'. Instead, it is assumed to be a mere preference and that preference leads to the good (this itself is a mistake since according to Broome not even Bentham went this far). This empty freedom (what Augustine would call a 'lonely freedom') is, of course, deeply embedded in the market mentality and 'market society' (even though society is said to barely exists for the libertarians , or if it does then it does so as a constraint).



So, what do we have: an abstract individual with a narrow understanding of freedom.



Duty, then.

Immediately we must discount the notion that duty is for its own sake; instead; it is a duty to do something that is good (if there wasn't this connection with the good then the diligence of a Nazi to his duties would count as an ethical stance). But, alternatively, there must be some sort of obligation in a duty, a 'force' that doesn't stem from one's own feelings or interests: 'I am responsible to' puts an undue emphasis on the subject. A solution-if there are any such things as 'solutions'- to this quandary might be forthcoming in the requirement to understand that one's obligations must be as general as possible and addressed to the other person's humanity for them to be a universal principle.

But who has ever seen another person's 'humanity'? One can see the human gestures of a caring person, one can hear someone speak with a human voice, but 'humanity'? What is Man? Modernity struggles with this question and after Auschwitz it is not clear that it has any answer. The Rights of Man?!..the rights of an Englishman, said Berkely.

And what do we owe to the criminal who asks, like a wolf, where is my victim? Are we under any obligation to tell him the truth, no matter what the consequences? Are we not obligated to act toward this particular person, at this particular time, rather than some abstract notion: his humanity? Even the great Simone, who was kind of genius, seems to suggest this-and it is an intuitively appealing view: we can only respect or love that which is the same and what is the same is not the needs of the body but the Spirit in Man. I'm not convinced, though.

And what of tragedy? Sticking too close to principles can mean we miss out on the value of the road not taken: we may think it is right to act in a particular way, that we must act in such and such a way, but still recognize that there are trade-offs involved in doing so. The fragility of the good...



Levinas, then, offers us an approach that is far more radical since it is oriented to a startling otherness, a distance that cannot be breached but that must be acknowledged. Volo ut sis. There is nothing higher than this. Don't look for it. It is the supreme act of hospitality. I read the words of a Jew and understand something of what it is to be a Muslim. For this, an eternal debt of gratitude:



A responsibility stemming from a time before my freedom-before my beginning, before any present. A fraternity existing in extreme separation . Before, but in what past?Responsibility for my neighbour dates from before my freedom in an immemorial past, an unrepresentable past that was never present and is more ancient than consciousness of... This summons to responsibility destroys the formulas of generality by which my knowledge or acquaintance of the other man re-presents him to me as my fellow man. In the face of the other man I am inescapably responsible...



This is the anteriority and chosen nature of an excellence that cannot be reduced to the features distinguishing or constituting individual beings in the order of their world or people, in the role they play in history's social stage, as characters, that is, in the mirror of reflection or self-consciousness.

I-We

It gets a bit tiring listening to the endless diatribes against America. The other day a beard wrote how pissed off he was over American "incursions" into the land of the pure and American bombings. Fine. Agree. But you know, once, just once, I'd like to hear those same sonofabitch maulvis talk about America's role in Bosnia or Kosovo and to show a fraction of that indignation when it comes to suicide bombings by their so-called brethren.

Five women were buried alive a few weeks back in Baluchistan. Their reaction: eternal silence.

I don't know. I mean, it's like those Muslims who endlessly harp on about Palestine but will not have a word to say about the genocide of the Darfurians or Saddam's massacre of the Kurds. The Chomsky-brigade! I simply fail to understand why Pakistanis or British-Pakistanis are so obsessed by Palestine.


Fundamental assumption: the individual is the unit of analysis-groups, families, class, unions do not make decisions or the individual makes them independently of his identity, autonomously. In fact, what is society but the collection of individuals in such a view..nothing greater than the sum of its parts, certainly not a social totality.

Markets are then,by extension, nothing but the space of individualized interactions (space, not place), meeting the 'needs of strangers' in a timeless zone, free from culture, society, the polity, power relations, rather than embedded in them (Polanyi, Braudel, Granovetter).

'I' is related to a particular view of freedom. Markets and 'negative liberty'. "Anarchic" (Gauthier).

Can we then say that this shared action is good for us? Or is trust, co-operation, a matter of our own self-interest? What of deontological approaches: our commitment to shared moral values?...a 'we' rather than a self-sufficient 'I' that is independent of the world (Descartes). Group rationality? The world is, then, a constraint to unfettered thought. (Gellner: language and solitude).

On the other hand, we are reluctant to submit the 'I' to the general will or the authority of the wider community (security over freedom, the church, the state vs...)

But to say 'I and we' is already to posit two entities when in reality we chalk out different spheres all the time, and understand that they intermingle. The atomized individual hardly seems to be a person at all! [poor judgements: the gambler]. Are society, culture political affiliations, professional commitments, language etc only a constraint on the I' or is there participation ? Is the 'I' itself constituted by its relation with the 'we' (including what is excluded, the other): I-we.

Bentham (Thatcher): "community is a fictitious body". For the conservatives the anarchy of unfettered liberalism poses a threat to order that can only be stemmed by Tradition, authority, rules, the family ..the tribe. On the other hand, liberal bourgeois order is thought of as peaceful, a break away from the irrational that these forces are said to embody. Organic or mechanical solidarity?

Take two

Inventio:
re-discovering, re-turning..."take two-ness", re-vision, re-vising, re-living, creative repetition.. to draw out of a theme all the possible permutations. Look, and look again. Second-order vision.

'A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us-along with immeasurable riches-snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions but as an organic habit of recreating what has been received and is handed on. It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality...

there may be other and better ways of being original than our concern for the writer's own individuality..our self-conscious fictions

We may come to believe that, great as some authors have been , their greatness is finally surpassed by that of the craft they have served; hence whenever we reckon their contributions we should also remember their obligations; no credit need be lost if some of it is shared anonymously with others trained in the same techniques and imparting the same mythology.'

---From Albert Lord's Singer of Tales

I can't imagine this as striking our modern ears as anything short of blasphemous..."our" hard-won freedoms and individuality achieved by defying the dead, opressive weight of tradition and authority . To walk and think alone. 'I'...then the world. Creatio ex nihilo. The Romantic legacy. How can there be a 'commons of the mind' or 'group rationality'? What is this "muddy centre" before we were. I must see and make the world according to my own lights or be enslaved by those of another.

A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays, and race meetings, and seaside outings, ..in the necessities that crave expression after the church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continual of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened-all this is signified by their language.
--Englands of the Mind, Seamus Heaney.

Edward Said on Glenn Gould:

The search for order and new modes of apprehension-a "new kind of thinking". To escape the need to grab attention [but escape where?]
A rejection of 'vertical' romantic music.

Bach: anachronistic (a return to old Church forms) and daringly modern in his isolation from rituals and conventions. Bach's innermost truth is that in him the social trend which had dominated the bourgeoise (technology, rationalization?] is reconciled with the voice of humanity.

Gaddis: Not the opposition, but the overlap between artistic individualism and collectivist technology.

What's the problem? Technology.
What's the solution? Technology.

The ultimate mystery: the rational and the pleasurable.

~~~~

In the 'bringing forth' of the artisan the instrumental is detached -unlike a tree which brings forth fruit . The human way of "revealing".

Industrail techniques: not an unfolding but a "challenging" of nature (an unlocking, storming of it..see Hannah on acting "in" nature)

Modern technology turns everything into a "standing-reserve", a resource to be exploited. The loss of wonder, the truth of the thing. What is this but the demand for a constant presence. Is there, then, a link between the need for concepts, images in the human mind and technology?

Creativity: one must make something of one's own life. Is there an element of violence in this 'making'? Liquid modenrity: nothing is 'given'. Are we not looking , ultimately, at two views of freedom?

~~~

Notes from Rieff.

Wilde as the prophet of the future..the artist as the revolutionary..free from inherited inhibitions conventions , conformities, authority. Express yourself! Subversiveness. Every man is his own priest (the Protestant contribution). And now: entetainment, stimulation, liberation..the "will" is eveything. A learned rejection and acceptance, the compelling truths, is stifling, cramps my style. An artist creates his own life. No more imitation of models or ideal conceptions of the self..all that is solid...the "dissolution of restrictive shapings". To have and be everything.

The edge of the world

Where shall there be an end of old and new?
A thousand years have whirled away
in the mind.
The sounds of the ocean change to stone.
---Tu Fu.

'Although Taoist-Buddhist painting does not indicate the source of light and shade, its landscapes are nonetheless filled by a light that permeates every form like a celestial ocean of pearly luster. It is the beatitude of the Void (shunya) shining in the absence of all darkness.

[The painter does not] represent the world in the likeness of a finished cosmos, and in this respect his vision is as different as possible from that of the Western artist whose conception of the world is always more or less "architectural".

A Far Eastern painter is contemplative, and for him the world would appear to be made of snowflakes, quickly crystallized and just as quickly dissolved. The less solidified conditions, the nearer they would be to the Reality underlying all phenomenon...

Taoist painting [unlike impressionism with its subjective impressions as fleeting as can be] avoids in its methods and in its intellectual orientation, the supremacy of mind and feeling, both avid for individualistic affirmation; in its eyes the instantaneity of nature is not in the first place an emotional experience; the miracle of the instant, immobilized by a sensation of eternity, unveils the primordial harmony of things, a harmony that is ordinarily hidden under the subjective continuity of the mind. when the veil is suddenly torn aside, hitherto unobserved relationships, linking together beings and things, reveal their essential unity.'

---Titus Burckhardt.

On the edge of the world there is a place where the world is the world no more. There shall we sit and watch stars fall and the snow gently return to the earth. And the starred heart melts as well. And there, deer shall freely roam in Spring sunshine; there will be no heaviness in our steps, no second thoughts. At times I will not be I, and you will not be you, but I will be a cloak around you, and you around me. Everything in nature will be open once again, a flower in bloom. As fragile as on the First Day, without shadow.

We will clearly see our lineage, our blood-rootedness, how we were related to one another from the beginning, the blue and the red. And recall old times. Still, there will be the hint of deathly sorrow in your eye, but only because it added lustre to your beauty.

We must cross the stone bridge to get there. Remember it well!

Send in the clowns

You are a ludicrous soul, b.

Splendour in the blood carries weight.

The more I think about it-and that itself is a mistake- the more I think how superficial and light we are (Tell it, but tell it slant). Well, there you are. There's no point beating oneself over it or trying to find solace in a martyr syndrome or blaming "the times/time we live in"-there have never been so many opportunities to do things not worth doing.

But when we look back we have to ask, candidly, whether our choices were not, in the end of the day, a reflection of our innermost self. Harsh though it is. It's not easy, after all, to take in too much reality.

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.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.

Not the majority, upon whom necessity presses down like a heavy stone, but those who had some degree of freedom. The accountants, the bankers, statisticians...who thought it better to let the dust accumulate and find a kind of security, respectability in that. A timid, bovine acceptance of things that lets circumstances drown out grace. Lawrence was right: all that is important is that one find one's true instincts and hold on to them. To thine own self be true.

It is the light within that fails. Call it what you will: a lack of courage, or ability (and these may, ultimately, be the same thing). The inability to put into some from one's poetic instincts, to give shape to one's creativity with one's own hands or find joy in one's work. Our record is this: what we gave and what we lovingly received.

Ich habe stets nur alles halb gemacht!

We, we negative ones, enamoured by laughter and nonsense, "raucous negation" , radical dissent/descent. No, not even that, for that demands that one possess or love an elsewhere, an otherwise, a there, there. One must know what to take seriously, what one loves and what one hates.

The other american dream-and it ain't Glenn Miller!

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

--from J. Jones's wonderful 'Wild Ones'

C, I was listening to G. Gould the other day and although the music itself didn't move me the playing of it did seem incredibly fresh, a miraculous coming together of spontaneity and structure. Have you read Otto Friedrich's biography?

The American Dream

Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never remember it nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors-the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit...and is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being...

When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone...At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted , they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and that loved this beautiful land.

The dead are not powerless. Dead-I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.
---Chief Seattle.

~~~~

We did not think of the great open plains , the beautfil rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery...When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us that the "Wild West" began.

----Chief Standing Bear.

~~~~

Brother, continue to listen. You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great spirit agreeable to his mind..you say that you are right, and we are lost. How do we know this to be true? We understand that your religion is written in a book. If it was intended for us as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given to us-and not only to us, but to our forefathers-the knowledge of that book? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people?

Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?

We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favours we receive; to love each other, and be united. We never quarrel about religion, because it is a matter which concerns each man and the Great Spirit.

Brother, you have now heard our talk and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand , and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey, and return you safely to your friends.

---Red Jacket.

~~~~

A few points. Compare this to "America owns the skies" and the sheer emphasis on exclusive property rights and legal wrangling, the resounding use of the word "my"...

As Hugh Brody points out in his fascinating book, it is actually the agriculturalists and settlers who are the restless ones, not the "nomads". It is they who see nature and its inhabitants as "mere extension", something abstract, something to be dominated, subdued..a resource (compare this to the Islamic perspective: "they are communities like you").

And don't get me started on missionaries-muslim or christian. Always the same bad faith, the same mean-spiritedness and self-righteousness.

The American dream was built on the nightmare of the destruction of the Red Man and the enslaving and segregation of black people. Guns and religion, gold and silver...we've heard it all before.

Elmer Gantry, the Klan, and the Republican Convention

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I don't know, watching the Klan convention I couldn't help but think: are they speaking to morons, to children? How profoundly sad it is to see the self-declared "leader of the free world" , the "beacon on the hill" (yeah, I know!) put on such a sorry spectacle. Yes, spectacle is the right word here, like Elmer Gantry's histrionics...the show must go on!

The conservatives, like many conservatives in other places, are really just nasty, bitter people. Old huckleberry harping on about how the "heroes" -and who isn't a hero in the States one wonders- had earned the desks at a school for the school children. Pan shot to weeping veteran. Oh for fuck's sake. How dense can you get? Their utter naivete amazes me.

What a swell guy he is. I mean, his papa used to lift "heavy things" (ooh, ain't you impressed?). Elvis and Jesus, Jesse and the King. Dont'cha see we aints impressed by youz flip-flopping-yella-belly-nigger loving-elites. Man, these people seriously think that there's a "left-wing " media in the States (yeah, CNN, that old bastion of Marxism!) . I kid thee not. It's like the IMF chap I met who said that in his circles the World Bank is thought of as a crypto-commie organization.

Then Rudi, with his little, petty sarcastic comments. And the spin. Holey moley! We're here to change Washington, "shake it up"; McCain and Palin, great mavericks (no mention of the fact, of course , that their man Walker has been in power for 6 years, that he and his cronies are Washington). We put our country first. How very reassuring! Small town hockey mom took them on, the vested interests y'know, and won. Maybe I ain't from no big town cosmopolitan city, but heck, I sure as hell know what the definition of marriage is. "Drill baby drill" and chants of U S A . It's all so bloody predictable, so manufactured. We love our guns and our religion. Let's play to the base (al-qaeda). Oh, jeez, they're so gullible it makes me want to cry.

ubo's eyes

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free..
--Galatians:3:28
~
My heart is still, as Time will tell.
--Father Death Blues, Ginsberg.
~

I am not you, and you are not me; I am not even always me, and perhaps you are not always you. The rains have come and gone, washing away so much; we have survived the storms, though white flagpoles lie uprooted and strangely sad before us. A kind of peace returns. We look out, side by side, into the blue skies and beyond to some still, vanishing point. And when all is said and done we remember this and this is all that matters: that we looked together.

A Gilt-Edged Conservative

I couldn't stop laughing. Palin, the "hockey mom" is wheeled in. A gilt-edged conservative. Meaning? Five children. Meaning? Roll up your sleeves and get up of your ass. The old tired "debates": God, gays and guns. I don't know, I'm terrified by such desperate housewives. I'm surprised they even had any women in Alaska! More Little-House-on-the Prairie 'politics'...if that's the right word, I'm afraid.



In the meantime, Mini-me is beginning to grate on my nerves: drum roll..."the next American Vice-President..." . Well, steady on old boy, you haven't actually won the elections. But the frisson of excitement that rippled through the mob was tangible. How the mob love the thought of power. Like the journalist lackeys that instead of doing their job by questioning power become love-struck, smitten, when Walker calls them by their first name.



Here, the 'chor' of chors makes his way up the ladder as the flames continue to burn and the 'Pakistani Taliban' goes on its merry way of blowing up schools for girls. What charmers! Of course, one won't hear any of the beards here say a word. One of them told me the other day: "we're really Sufis". I nearly fell off my chair. Ha! I'd always thought you to be a sick perverted bastard. How wrong I was!

Things are going to slide here, slide in all directions.

'It was an act of spiritual gratitude to save what could be saved. For properties of such value, the essential is to protect them during the critical days.'
---Ernst Jünger

One, two

We know that one times one is one,
but an unicorn times a pear
have no idea what it is.
We know that five minus four is one
but a cloud minus a sailboat
have no idea what it is.

We know that eight
divided by eight is one,
but a mountain divided by a goat
have no idea what it is.
We know that one plus one is two,
but me and you,
oh,we have no idea what it is!

---courtesy of Roxana

the human loneliness
is the endless oneness of man. Man is one;
man is alone in his world. We are the one,
even we, who whisper together now,
closely, as though we were two,as children do,
knowing as much as we, and making believe,
even as we believe, that another is there.

---William Bronk.

Well, you've seen through the world (what else is a university degree good for..sovereign becoming, you were told. There are no anchors, they brainwashed us); you've seen through other people too (who, in their heart of hearts hasn't, you say to yourself, felt a degree of contempt for the shallowness of other people?) And now, finally, you see through your self..and my, how the light shines through! So, walk naked with me for a while, in this splendid nothingness, and neither world nor human shall see us. But only a while...

~~~~

And now for something totally different:

C, I know I promised I'd go to the Proms with you one of these days but the thought of listening to music with other people strikes me as a bit odd (and I feel nauseous at the prospect of being surrounded by people waving flags -union jacks or the green and white..it's all the same). Never did like crowds. Tribal mentality. All for one and one for all. Sod that! Oceanic feeling. No, I'm seasick.

Watching the circus (aka. the Democratic convention). The beeb is in love with the razzle -dazzle of it : "Clinton got a rock-star's reception"..a "great performer", 'Teddy' Kennedy, the last heir of Camelot. It's like the WWF-it doesn't matter if it's "true" as long as it entertains. So, as long as you can string along the familiar words: constitution, freedom, hope, change, then there you go. Show 'em you're a fighter (America hates losers) , rally the troops with any jingoism you can think of (or, rather, that the spin machine can think of). Proud to be an American, love the wife and kids..and old Biden, with tears in his eyes, telling it as it is, the homespun wisdom of grandma Biden...yeah, I think we've got the message..now where's the apple pie?

And again, the music. The frenzy. Plato saw it. When one becomes two, a 'we', then what happens to the one?

Sheltering Your Heart

I wanted to remember a sad moment; I wanted to forget it. Who is to say what writing or an image or music really are? Perhaps they're nothing but the revealing of a quietness, an absence. Music holds the silence within it, dimly aware of the beginning before the first note and even more so of the silence that remains after the last note falls back to blankness. It is not by reminders of that first place, that first time, that we are spellbound. Heaven's roots compel us not. We love ruins and all that is fragile, all that fades...

But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
---Edwin Muir

No sadness or joy can be repeated, nor should they be. But we can be reminded of our forgetfulness, of loved ones we have turned our faces from or who have turned theirs from ours, of this shadowy existence riddled with light. And we find this both bitter and sweet. It fades, it soars. Look, there is nothing like it on earth or heaven. Can we bless as we sigh? If we could, we would not be that broken circle that is a reflection of your longing to be remembered. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, said the Rabbi. Then tell me, why should I complain?

I wanted to remember a sad moment. Not to hold on to it, but to keep it with me, a symbol of my lost lives...a low black flame that burns in a dark room....

East-West

No! I refuse.

You want to think of East or West, what is open or closed, but here, here at the still point of my heart there are no such distinctions.

No. I do not think of the future and your return, nor shall I live in the present. This life is but the moment when the past became the past. Here, in dark passageways, I shall live alone with the Alone.

No, do not hold on to my image, do not remember my stone face. We must forget everything. Let the black fire consume me. I want to live, I want to die.

The swami said, 'you know, there was a time when people would hardly ever leave the place where they were born. My mother only rarely left home'.

As we walked our separate ways, one to the east, one to the west, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the saddest thing imaginable: the back of a loved as she moved towards another life...and the gaping silence between us grow, an abyss where words not spoken fall and the moments not shared rest, like a dead body in a stream or a receding image in the dark glass.

(I am told of a wonderful Jewish tradtion where on one particular day the doors are kept open so that the spirit may return)

Under a Grey Sky

Saying my farewells, ticking them off as if they were some sort of last rite that has to be performed..the sheer necessity of it dizzying, the anticipation of the final door closing leaves me slightly breathless. Walk past the South Bank under a grey sky (the best place to be alone, surrounded by joggers and the world rushing by). And wasn't this how it began....

Have to see Richter's transcendental painting again. Could sit in front of it for a while and allow it to mesmerize me and bring me back to stillness..the shimmering reflection of white light in a green world, light dissolving the cages...

I sit on a wooden bench dedicated to an "unknown husband" before the Thames and today, for some strange reason, it seems more like a sea than a river. Tranquil and becalming, a constancy to its movement that is reassuringly familiar. The waves never leaving their confines. The grey slowly slips and slides toward me. How we hunger for a crumb of meaning to our fate. I fumble in my coat pocket for the chestnut that I've kept there for the last five years. It's good to find things on the floor and keep them safe in dark places.

Monuments to every moment,

refuse of every moment, used:

cages for infinity

Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice,

pins, stamps, and glass beads:

tales of the time

Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes

fire burned in the mirror

slot machines of vision,

condensation flash for conversation

the reflector of the inner eye

Scatters the spectacle

God all alone above an extinct world

The apparitions are manifest,

their bodies weigh less than light

lasting as long as this phrase lasts.

One final look at the second-hand books under the Embankment. I turn around as I walk away: no, the world hasn't collapsed, life goes on. An old lady leafs through a book, showing it to her world-weary husband: "no, this isn't just an ordinary fashion book, it tells you why..." I lose the thread..other people's lives aren't that interesting anyway.

On the bridge a beautiful Russian (or at least East European) woman asks me where to get a 'tour bus'.

Listen to Montserrat singing those sublime lullabies that are an island of peace amidst the flux. I move on to the bookshop, not expecting to find any solace in words. An hour to kill. As if we could! And there I hear old Leonard, singing this song...

And read these words:

I dreamed that dead, and meditating,

I lay upon a grave, or bed,

..In the cold heart, its final thought

stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,

stiff and idle as I was there;

and we remained unchanged together

for a year, a minute, an hour.

I raised my head. A slight young weed

had pushed up through the heart and its

green head was nodding on the breast.(All this was in the dark.)

..the graceful head

changed its position mysteriously,

since there was neither sun nor moon

to catch its young attention.

The rooted heart began to change

... and then it split apart

and from it broke a flood of water.

A few drops fell upon my face

and in my eyes, so I could see

(or, in that black place, thought I saw)

that each drop contained a light,

a small, illuminated scene;

the weed-deflected stream was made

itself of racing images.

(As if a river should carry all

the scenes that it had once reflected

shut in its waters, and not floating

on momentary surfaces.)

The weed stood in the severed heart.

"What are you doing there?" I asked.

.."I grow," it said,

"but to divide your heart again."

Elizabeth Bishop

You unseen cathedrals,

you rivers unheard

you clocks deep in us.

~~~~

'An end to the granting of names'

There stood

a splinter of fig on your lip,

there stood,

Jersualem around us,

there stood

the bright pure scent

above the Danish skiff we thanked

I stood

in you.

~~~

We gaze at each other,

we speak of dark things,

We love one another like poppy and memory

we slumber like wine in the seashells,

like the sea in the moon's blood-jet.

~~~~

Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark

My mother's hair never turned white.

Smokin'

Well, enough of the G-minors and slouching thoughts, northern melancholy. Funk: perhaps. But when it comes to soul, step aside.

The first music the dougal listened to was soul/blues ( B.B. King's album-yes, those were the days when we bought albums!-was the ultimate cool when others were listening to Blondie). It wasn't political. Howard Jacobson recently wrote on how Jewish people and black people shared a sense of exile. But no, it wasn't that-though being an outsider would always mean that we wouldn't take authority or orthodoxy seriously. It was just that the music was so much better! Of course, the same couldn't be said for cricket. Cricket is political and nothing gave us greater pleasure in the sweltering heat of the summer of '76 than to see the Rolls Royce float in and destroy England (Sorry, Jonah!). The Welsh and Irish were black as well. How we would sit around the television and blow like mad to prevent England from converting after a try!

But this is the type of stuff I listened to:

In any case, one thing that music does is that it prevents you from being a red-neck or bigot (I can see this being taken up as some sort of marketing strategy!). Well, I'm not so sure any more (Steiner: the relation between high culture and barbarism..Wagner). But on the other hand, perhaps Barenboim was on to something: an openness, an attentiveness to what is other, to the 'who-ness' of the other. So, yeah, there were some white women who could sing with soul (Lisa Stansfield, for example). And then there was the Queen of Neasden

Ghosts (Japan)

There was a sadness that not even he knew..and besides, knowing is not everything.

The day had started well. A Chinese girl, dressed in black, had stopped him and asked him if he knew where China Town was. He paused, scratched his head, pointed, got it right. Usually, he only knew where he was going as long as no-one asked. But there was a quiet, solid, calming look to this girl (did she actually say "excuse me mister"?) and so it sorted itself out.

Corn was swarming with ravens.

Black searching out gold, as if the light could redeem us. I will not see a day like this again, thought crow, not as long as I live. Age upon age, benumbed by the terror of the stars, living in the shroud of the trees where darkness is defined, arranged, or where the moonlight slips down, cleanses the heart's mirror with a film of forgetfulness so that our thought is a dashed circle of stone. But the day...

To be attentive to the quality of light in each season, not caring for universal sun. Crow thought to himself: I am all birds in one, and none. Falcon-ancestry, undimmed loyalty, this inheres in my breast along with the white peace that is like a human hand, or the remebrance of snow, and the tearing frenzied thoughts of the eagle. We know the days, blood-scarred like a tulip; our idols free and blue, without shape. Then crow, startled, descended, his shadow before him, for he had seen something familiar in a man's eyes...and there was a kind of wisdom in his green-winter eyes.

He heard the man speak: you circle around me like a vulture around a corpse; so was your love for me: sustained by the memory of annihilation. Stones grow heavy waiting here, whilst your nail anticipates blood.

We gaze at each other,

and speak of dark things.

Crow stood, at a distance, out of sight. There stood the bright pure scent and I will stand in you for a while, thought crow. Saddened by the man's darkened face he wanted to tell him:

You know, there's no end of space

you know, you don't need to fly,

you know, what inscribed itself in your eye

deepens our depth.

But the rain fell, breaking up the hierarchies of the sun. Crow swooped and the man only saw the reflection of a black cross on dark windows, and then moving horizontally on a black plinth. Saw it everywhere. Crow, who had lived hundreds of years thinking no-one loved nobody, grasped down in the deep and plucked out his eyes, saying: you have lost sight of the beloved so now her image will live and grow within you...

For Celia

C, I know you like the other version, but I love this one. Thank you so much for drawing me to it.

I was listening to some Morten Lauridsen with Y the other day and he just said: how can the maulvis not understand this..how can one live a life without music?

You know

Y'know, over the last few weeks I've heard a lot of crap (by Americans, it has to be said) about intelligence differences between 'races' (read: the usual narrow-mindedness masquerading as 'science' or knowledge). I give up. Seriously, I do. Larkin: a desert of bigots. For those interested, here's some sublime music by one of, you know, one of 'them'.

'Take your shoes off, get comfortable, you know'

---Otis Redding.

Help! Translation anyone? Roxana?

The black and the white

Some people think that there are an irreducible core set of principles by which to live by. Fair enough. It's tempting, da stiu. But what if there is, as C says, an 'existential fluidity'. Things change, capstones shift. We would be nothing if we didn't cling on, if we didn't dream of home, but we would be nothing if we didn't, sometimes, let go... if we didn't want to be as light as air. What is 'down' is not always down..sometimes it will be up, like a balloon, empty, hollow, but on the ascent.

From a distance, the white diamond looks like a black sun. And from close up? There is no apprehending of it close up, since it blinds.

Oh, come, so that your picture be placed
within my heart-
don't go to China, for there they'll paint it
just on silk.

When the Emperor of China dies,
the porcelain will let down her hair from despair.

** 'da stiu' means 'I know' (apparently). I just like the sound of it, but for all I know it might mean oranges!

One Day

We live in one place and one place only. Now, and now, and now. But we reach out for somewhere else, beyond the blue clouds and blue flowers. That 'sweet golden clime'. Sadness doesn't flow away, but is endured. All we know is that we will not stay here long. But the heart doesn't know whether it wants to arrive or leave. Divided, split...nothing is as whole as a broken heart.

Now, I remember everything; I have been devoured by my memories. It is good. That radiant future that is the past...

Ah, my soul

Why do you sigh within me?

Purple Rain

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted to one time see you laughing
I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain.
----Prince

Words and phrases I picked up from G. Hill:

hoop, hooped, husks, ceremony, habitation

'The bones that cannot bear the light'

'Decay of blood'.

'Fierce heart, iced brain, cleansed thoughts'

'The sun's primitive renewing fury'

'Recall the wind's
Flurrying , darkness of the human mire'

'The stark ground of this pain'

Ten years without you
For so it happens
Days make their steady progress, a routine
That is merciful and attracts nobody
Already, like a disciplined scholar,
I piece fragments together, past conjecture
Establishing true sequences of pain;
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.

~~~~

She dared more love, yet her starved eyes caught
His, devouring at times

Some, finally, learn to begin
Some keep the arrangement of love
(Or similar trust) under whose auspices move
Most subjects

~~~~

In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the
return, the re-entry of transcendence into the sublunary
world. Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery riddled
by needles: the silver veining, the gold leaf , voluted grape-
vines, master-works of treacherous thread.

~~~

"One cannot lose what one hasn't possessed"
I can lose what I want. I want you.

~~~

If the night is dark
and the way is short
if the way you take
is to my heart

say though I never
see you again
touch me I shall shiver
at the unseen

the night is so dark
the way so short
yet you do not wake
against my heart

emptiness ever thronging
untenable belonging
how long until this longing
end is unending song

and soul for soul discover
no strangeness to discover
and lover keep with lover
a moment and for ever

I shall live
in grief desiring
still to grieve

I shall go down to the lover's well
and wash this wound that will not heal

beloved soul
what shall you see
nothing at all
yet eye to eye

depths of non-being
perhaps too clear
my desire dying
as I desire.

~~~
Oh my dear one, I shall grieve for you
For the rest of my life with slightly
Varying cadence; oh my dear one

But it is mere occasion or chance distance
Out of which you might move and speak my name
As I speak yours, ???
with sleep's
Miscellaneous goods for as much
As I can have, an alien landscape
The dream where you are always to be found

Love, oh my love, it will come
Sure enough. A storm
Broods over the dry earth all day

You are outside, lost somewhere
I find myself
Devouring verses of stranger passion
And exile. The exact words
Are fed into my blank hunger for you.

Conservatives and the Moderns

Perhaps there's not much to be gained from setting up such dichotomies, for conservatives can be radical and they can be traditional. And strange that I should gravitate to some conservative voices (Berlin on deMaistre, for example) when most of them are of this infuriating Sunday-school-little-house-on-the prairie- type or from the world of mullahdom or the petty lower-middle classes with their fixation on the female body, "decency" and a bovine acceptance of things. Mid-west or small town Punjab-it doesn't make that much of a difference..it's a certain one dimensional vision and narrow temperament that is horrified by literature (it's lack of "truth") and jazz ("meaningless") and the rupture of the 'fabric of society' (read: immigrants).

On the other hand, nothing grates on my nerves more that the pseudo-moderns with their fake "spirituality" (Sufism) or their blind devotion to science-explaining anything and everything by some half-baked evolutionary theory, their keenness (though perhaps compulsion would be a better word) to speak "openly" and "frankly", to argue every single issue to death, to speak of abstract, universal 'Man'-some cardboard entity on which they project all sorts of desires.

The rational, atomistic individual (or the heroic individual), solid and uncomplicated, for whom nothing is 'given', who is his own project, against the real 'authentic' self or the community, the political animal. Distinctions are set up. Reactions and counter-reactions. The Dawkins-brigade, the Chomsky-devotees, the hadith-quoters, the statistics-pushers, Americans who talk about happiness, and the morons who think Zakir Naik is an intellectual, that Saudi has pure Islam. Lord, I ask you to save me from these people...

In a conversation with a friend the other day he excitedly stands up during dinner to explain how short the dresses women wear nowadays are in Pakistan. ..what with their deep slits and revealing...

Oh dear, get a grip of yourself man!

And another, a Jordanian woman, on how she would never go to the Dead Sea because that is where God destroyed the homos.

Er..hang on, I use those Dead Sea salts for my bath!

~~~

Notes from P.Rieff:

The unalterable 'I', identity and inwardness. Theory is conforming to reality, not transforming it (Marx?)

Modernity: a movement from the dichotomy between obligation, duty, and moral commitment to inclination and desire. [only the desiring self is true, no matter how that relates to 'the good'. The modern economy: the production of spectacles, of desire itself: eroticism, publicity, advertising]

What is authority but a limiting authority, a closing down of possibilities beyond one's self's desires, the repression of the impossible..the commanding truths are prohibitive. [ you can hear the modern attack..'repression', did you say? Freedom as autonomy -and that only. A 'lonely freedom' ! (Augustine)].

Arendt: the impossible became possible..thinkable (Auschwitz)
Zizek's succinct formulation: you can, therefore you must.
The knower walking into the known...over short distances of time, short times of space.

Transgression as creative. Sacrilege. Is nothing sacred? The consumer consumes all moralities like things. We do not even fear falling...fearless, without guilt, we celebrate celebrities, delight in trashing the decadence of others.

Yeats: And fastened to a dying animal it knows not what it is.

A credal self that cannot cross boundaries (cp. the self of late capitalism that is defined by its very ability to be nowhere, to not being tied down to a 'place').

Thomas More's strength, opposition..."not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do-I, I."

The intellectualization of culture: one can, in principle, calculate everything. [the reductionism of science has helped here]. Technology as the primacy of possibility that can transform our lives and bodies..Badiou: not ideology, but technology as the radically neutral re-maker of 'man'. Everything can be known....

Sky Blue Dreams

When I was a small child, said the swami, I saw in a dream that my uncle had come from a long way off and brought chocolates for everyone and a sky-blue sari with sequins for...

Then what happened?

What is this, are you interviewing me?!

No, just want to get the details right (I'd heard this story before)

Well, the others mostly laughed and ignored it but twenty minutes later that's exactly what happened!

I don't know why the day has started with the recalling of a meaningless dream more than 60 years ago. I seem to walk much of the time in the grey squares here as if in a dream-like state; no, not the fabled absent minded teacher, thinking great things or absorbed in his/her own petty thoughts and research ideas. No, something much simpler: just absent minded. The dream of being lost, of not being me, not being me, of being found and lost again.

Life is but a dream, merrily, merrily...

Nothing haunts us like these words; nothing seems truer. Can the truth seem? (A question for the philosophers!..sorry anton, couldn't resist!)

Mongol was right, we never took anything seriously. To dream is, perhaps, another way of refusing to grow up (Exupery?), a holding on to the belief that there is an elsewhere, another time beyond time.

Today you wanted to write about Gaddis and against the moderns; no, to rant, but instead your hand strays to a book you would never have otherwise picked up-Bachelard's book on reverie.

When there falls from the hands of the serving girl
the pale round plate,
the colour of the clouds,
the pieces must be picked up.

Gentleness of seeing oneself as a child again
In the old house of stones too black.
Gentleness of recovering one's thinner face
Asa pensive child, forehead against the windowpane.

~~~~

Everything that exists today was imagined long ago
--Blake.

I love that line, Mr. Blake.

You are an image within me, a picture. I've burnt the others. I dreamt of you and you came to me. Did you really live before I was born? I find that hard to imagine. Cut birthday cakes and shoo pigeons? Ride a bike and fall off it, grazing your knee and crying without me knowing, or without me dreaming it?

To be lost in thought is the wrong kind of loss. But we live and want to live in the world, with all of its fragmentation. Only by breaking do we see ourselves..sharply, like shards of cutting glass, like sky blue dreams that are brought to us in the early morning, gift-wrapped

Words and Silence

All of us in German babbling
Paradisal words together

---Goethe.

"But you can't speak German, you cheat!"
"Ah, but there I'd have a German soul"

You think of something to say but find nothing-except for a few tired cliches. You so desired greatness of soul. But such things are only conferred, not a response to wants and human longing. And you are without title. You wanted to be silver-tongued, speak honey-dewed words with a rare eloquence, and without hesitation. More: a hand guided, a mind nimble, brain cells flashing with the fire of lightning. Instead, you look at mirrors framed by dark wood all day, stone-faced, and think of the softness that has departed from your eyes.

There are so many words in the world. You think: when will we understand the silence...

Hammershoi: Startled silence and bare interiors. Outside: everything is a haze and all voices are muffled by the snow. Like an ark in a storm. Occasionally a tree branch will tap the window or the frames will be rattled by a sudden gust of wind, but otherwise all one can hear is the grandfather clock ticking and the regular passing of time. The old wooden floorboards creak, on their own, as if the wood was remembering the forest.

There's no place for the way I feel.
--Paula Fox

Backs are turned. Don't look. The curve of the shoulders: the strange presence of classical beauty in the northern light. Angular thoughts persist. Faces are turned resolutely away but always to something we cannot see-their own private worlds or a momentary awareness of loss. Chairs pushed back, a table set for a meal for someone who will never come. The pictures on the wall are blank, the rooms are largely empty and the white doors are open (someone has just left or is expected to arrive)-a stark existence that awaits only the illumination from somewhere else.

In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornament collection of small bottles, Venetian and Swedish. They came with the house. The sun now caught them. They were pierced with the light. Herzog saw the waves, the threads of colour, the spectral intersecting bars, and especially a great blot of flaming white on the centre of the wall...

Visionary Fragments

‘A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through'
---Deluze.

'There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression the actual conditions of life'
---Penelope Fitzgerald.

Outside the law many things happen...

The desire to record everything, jot down the trivial and inessential, to bring fragments of memories to the surface. Grey within grey. Drizzling rain, the first hint of cold air on one's cheeks. Life awakening again. Wind-tousled hair, choppy water slapping brown-freckled walls. I'm a dead man walking, a few moments of reprieve, trying to cram as much in as possible, wide-eyed.: the second-hand books under Embankment, running my forefinger over the well-worn titles with cracked spines. No feverish scanning this time, just a waiting for a name to drop in the slot. Today, I'm not looking for anything..the only need is to slow things down.

The American girl with the frizzy hair and husky voice, the strap of her top slipping off her tanned shoulder as she speaks: " Have you read this?". I look up. She's talking to her friend.

Under Blackfriar's, a guitarist strumming a wonderful, simple tune, almost like a chant. And I think: what is inner, and what is outer.

Walk all the way back to St. Paul's-just to have my usual coffee at the usual place. Crusty roll, Gorgonzola cheese, salad leaves. Hard to say what heaven will be like but can't imagine it being much better than this. Perhaps slightly less milk in the latte.

On the way back past the 'wobbly bridge' : a marriage party! Tourists shout with happiness: Ole!
For once they don't get on my nerves. A man palms his camcorder and in a wide sweep arcs it my way. I'm sure I'm caught in some of his images and wonder to myself how many fragments could be found in other people's discarded photos.

I write all this down before, just for a laugh, I decide to go to Tate. At least one can get a good view of St. Paul's from there. It's good to stand in front of stone sometimes (or under a tree). I'm drawn, however, to a dark room by some lovely music. Sit down and watch Jonas Mekas's 'Walden'. Chopin seems to be following me about these days. Shimmering, flashing lights, deep winter, all rendered in a strangely hypnotic way. The chaos make sense. It makes sense. A life, a world, shared. As if seen by God. The details do not cease from being ordinary details, moments in a whirl of flux and transition. There is no exile. All life is an exile.

Only now, as I collect my thoughts, do these correspondences seem a bit freaky. But it doesn't matter either way.

For

For the people I'll never know, the places I'll never see, the lives I'll never live...

I, like a river ,

Have been turned aside by this harsh age.

I am a substitute.

My life has flowed into another channel

And I do not recognize my shores.

O, how many fine sights I have missed,

How many curtains have risen without me

And fallen too.

How many of my friends

I have not met even once in my life,

How many city skylines

Could have drawn tears from my eyes.

---Anna.

A sight for sore eyes

"Guess what"

"What?"

"I saw a fox!!"

"Are you sure it wasn't a dog?"

~

~

Oh, what does it matter. I saw it. I did. Off Snakes Lane East, just on Glastonbury Avenue. She crossed my path or I crossed hers. But useless to talk of "mine" or "hers" since when it comes to paths there are only rights of way, sidestepping or an aporia. There she was, slinking her way through suburbia, dinking her way past the debris of human lives gone awry, past the boarded fences of the Russians, who always sat in their concrete backyard, bare-chested, drinking heavily and fondly remembering frozen homelands. And then a swift turn, a scampering back to the darkness-as if to say: I can only take so much human light. Through a hole in the fence, to the open fields. And gone.

~

~

But that was many years ago now. Every time I pass that corner I stop in my tracks and point to that exact place. There! Her absence as strangely real as her fleeting presence. In that space I still see the contours of the fox, like the impression of a footprint in the snow reminds one of someone long after they've gone. As was shown in 'The Time Machine': even though you can't see or touch some things they're still there, it's just that they exist in another dimension-and that dimension is called time. Grown-ups have such difficulty in accepting what lies beyond their own limited vision. We die from a lack of imagination. Even though so many weird and wondrous things drift past us all the time, would we but notice them.

~

~

Well, what do you know! There she was, after all these years, at the train station. I was going to call out to her but didn't. But she didn't even look up and probably didn't remember me. Just turned up her snooty nose and walked away with that quick pitter-patter of hers, as silently and nonchalantly as ever. Ha! Such is the way of foxes. It's in their nature...

~

~

I stood there agape. How difficult it is to say 'we' today. But as she turned with that wonderful red coat of hers I did hear her say: "Don't you know, foxes can't be tamed!"

Beginning's End

When I left last time I scrambled for the right words, and stumbled across a book of poetry. Repeating the rituals, the ceremony of loss. A storm starting up, clouds gathering the light to themselves,rain entering the world, diagonally. Waiting to fall...if it started with a word then it could end this way as well; to find a turn of phrase that I could twist my tongue around, not understanding it but enjoying its bitter taste. So that when the storm is over and all things are done flashing it will grow and rise to the surface. And then I shall speak it.


I grasp the possible
rightness of certain things
that possess the imagination, however briefly;
the verdict of their patterned randomness.

~~

..and the great wanderers like the albatross;
the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
down on our alien shore.

~~

The end (again). It's beginning again. I find the ascribed place, the allotted time, scribbling frenetically, crazed, no longer mesmerized by darkness. Furiously, as if sparks might fly from ancient flint, the hand willing the quickening of the mind.

The good walk in step. Without knowing
anything of them. The others dance around them,
dancing the dances of the age.

~~

The tragedy of things is not conclusive;
rather, one way by which the spirit moves.

~~

Weight of the world, weight of the word, is
Take it slowly, like walking
through convalescence, the load
bearing not yet adjusted , progress
made with a slight forward tilt.

~~

Indebtedness is resolved by paying debts

~~

Scouring the text. Speed and lightness dissolving inherited meanings. You know in your heart of hearts that if you look for something, someone, they will not appear. This word. It must be here, in this book. But everything is in the approach. Like a junkie, what you're looking for is a quick fix which means it will not end. (25 minutes to go). Your eye zeroes in on something. The cold certainty of the doorknob...

Found it! The Time Machine. What else?!

If the sleep mask is a time machine
a world attends as under a strange star,
our gifts are what we owe, each to the other,
and which we give: now there's no going
back-the true fiction
set in the one frame; or the book set down
marked at that page, not closed, and not
returned to.

The Land of the Black Sun

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~He entered the black landscape, frightened and alone in the world, his shadow on the snow, not sure if these were his tears or his dreams. Only in the darkness could one find oneself, trace those footprints that led nowhere but back, back to the beginning, north of time's revolutions. Tumbling, tumbling down, until he came to a stop. And there he glimpsed something, a lonelier thing he could not imagine. He spied a small bird, blackness gleaming off its coat, hopping about amongst the tree roots, almost lost in the deep shadows of the forest. He thought to himself: some hearts beat so faintly that not even a god would hear them sigh.

~

Black be your heart,

slow-burning coal.

Black your button eyes

that are nothing but lies.

Blackly, sickly blindly promising a death.

You said.

Black your star on a bleak winter's day

Black was your voice (so your mother says)

Your wit, your bile, your humour, your style-

All this was Black, and Black and Black.

Sun darkened, memory blackened

Blackness admitted, to it you're commited

You said.

Black was my blood that thickens and clots

Black were my thoughts that decay and rots.

Black was the raven that sat by my heart

Black were her claws that tore me apart.

The White Room

A white square floating weightlessly in a white field.

I imagine a white room, stark, bare, utterly simple, hidden from the world. At eleven o'clock people in the city are busy, making phone calls, preparing, getting and spending...blind to it, unaware of it's hushed silence. It is like an attic flooded with light or a white boat on the white sea. It doesn't exist. Or perhaps it does.

What we see are reflections of it: light glinting off windscreens, dreamy summery lemony afternoons in Seville, a room overlooking San Marco where light and words float and intermingle effortlessly, reliving ancient affinities. What will convey to us that which death cannot take away?

Here, this second space, polar space, north of the future, is blank, empty, full of ways. Here, there is no talk of doors or keys, of what binds us and what keeps us free; of what is "mine" and what is "thine", nor any mention of "inner" or "outer", motion or stillness. The room opens up to a hundred others, like a dream within a dream. Restrained glances and the chase. The thief hides, laughing to herself, breathing heavily,wanting and not wanting to be found...

Here lovers hold hands freely and stroke one another's hair with tenderness and gentleness, robes fall away, introductions are made, swans glide on silvery still ponds, hearts melt but the blue-shadowed snow abides. The face of lost things, the face of last things. Lace curtains flapping, then curving softly outwards towards her, and then breathing in. Patterns of light and shade dance on the floor. Enigmatic, cryptic. In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into the sublunary world. The soft milky dew of her eyes, untouched by sorrow. The un-created world, the pre-world, a white paradise of all possibilities, where sleep is the beautiful dream of a dying man.

A single tear dissolves the circle. Tears, the traces of memory. Clouds and wind melting into all directions and into none. A bird flying by a cloud, merging, surrendering to it. But who is to say who is who? Mountains and white skies remember the secret and open up to one another. The vertical and the horizontal. Here, no image or form takes shape, no thoughts and no words divide; only the silent whispering of children into eachother' s ears up close, only a breath, a smile, a sigh...and then she is gone.

A singer once sang:

He who is close to your heart
How happy must be his fate.
Those people close to you
How blessed they are.

When the heart takes a liking to someone,
so that her nature becomes like yours
Then the days of death are near
And yet,
He who is close to you
How charmed is his fate

Those who suffer, whose hearts long for her
and yet still do not complain,
How strange their hearts must be!

~~~~

Your face is the white picture of your right hand;
your hair the one that writes the black book for my left hand

There was a dark storm all around us, or was it your tresses? There was gentle rain all around us. Or was it the sorrow in your eyes? The kajal around your eyes smudged, mine burning for yours. Black ravens flew in all directions. But here there was calm and stillness, like nothing else on earth.



She fell into his arms and time and the world stood still. And for a moment he was in her and she was in him. She said: And now, now and now! But if he held here then he knew he could never let her go. If I were blue for you...but I am black, black.



You had a mirror. I had a piece of paper. Did they help? You wrote your name for me thinking, like a child, I would forget, and it filled up the empty page. The jealous stars had broken the mirror. But then, you smiled and caressed my hair. God relented-"Okay, just once, for you, because you hurt so much"- and I saw something astoundingly beautiful in my heart. And it was a picture of you.