claws

I was sent these wonderful photos by Rinks and have to share them. she has them captioned as:

1. Really?

2. Go on, I'm listening old chap.

3. Don't worry, you can count on me.

4. You feel this claw?

~~~

Scruffy dog to incredibly cool cat: do you have hands or claws?

The red room

Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place?
Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask.
Originally?
And I hesitate.
--Carol Ann Duffy.

The heaviness of pears
under the late summer sun
is not a matter of weight.

The heaving amplification of space
under fateless stars,
is not a solution to lizard-time.

The heaviness of pears
is not like the mark of time on our hands,
unbeknown to the eye's downward gaze.

It is not Spring, or Autumn,
Nor is it like
the drowning of a bee in yellow dust.

This sigh for the fall,
the desire for tender hands.
The revelation of flesh,
the longing to be devoured.

All this is a kind of darkness
for pears under late summer suns.

Sunflower

Why does the princess smile?
Why does the prince weep?

---the swami.

Ah, sunflower, how distant your light seems to me today. As if it was a memory. Or a fading image. Frail light, no longer the dazzling seam of imperial robes, no longer the resplendent glory of kings. You have become something utterly simple, elemental. Neither possessed of inner strength or of intrinsic value, and unable to shrug off your weariness of time, to set hearts ablaze, and yet still we wait for you to turn your face this way, still you mean the world to us.

~~~

I think one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to was Lucio Fontana at the Hayward. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any images of his 'Harlequin' online.

But this is what I remember of it:

Fontana's harlequin, patchwork being, with a patchwork heart, like a sufi of old, ancient shaman. That golden mosaic running through him, a diagonal of burnished gold-or was it gleaming, glimmering?-that held him together, that went through his heart. The quintessential line of thought, beauty. Perhaps harlequin was struck by lightning, the golden flash of insight and intuition fused, has made its way to the surface, like the veins of gold in a rock, a truth that inheres in the body, that pierces it, a gash, a wound, the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary...

And I think to myself: what a mystery it is to ponder: who placed it there? Are you not, too, like this Harlequin, with your golden band and streak of morning sunshine in your eyes, all the time weaving a blue ribbon in the hearts of men?

Gold is a constant element, gleaming solidly in the underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the arms and regalia of warriors on the mead benches.

How far away is the black sun, she asked.
I don't know, but about this far away from home.

A sorrow dance

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

.

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

.

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

.

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

.

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

.

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying

.

(Wanted to add the sublime 'Morpheus' by Patricia Barber...if anyone has a link to it please pass it on. Danke).

Katie

Here's a clip from a wonderful old film. I think most of it is online. I love all the phrases like "my dear child", "poor girl". [Alok, if you're reading this: it is possible to be a kid again..don't let all the pointy heads convince you otherwise !]

Als das Kind Kind war, erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett und jetzt immer wieder, erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall

anton and roxana, I will translate this for you...

When the child was a child, it awoke once in a strange bed, and now does so again and again. Many people, then, seemed beautiful, and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

~~~

Last month a bat came in through our window. I know this may sound slightly blasphemous but surely God made a mistake by creating such an ugly animal ? [Perisan proverb: God made only two mistakes: creating flies and arabs]. Anyway, called someone in to get rid of it/her.

Reverence for life and being, for otherness, is something which can be taught or suggested very early. 'Don't kill the poor spider, put him out in the garden'. Even the use of 'him' or 'her' instead of 'it' may help..

Last week, the chap who did that came to my office and asked me to phone his supervisor to say what a wonderful job he and his friend had done. And make sure you tell him you're a 'doctor'. I think they get an extra 200 Rs for getting a shabash (a 'well done'). An old man, whose hair has been dyed red to remind him of his youth, Sarwar sahib, with his childish, mischievous grin and a glint in his eyes was so endearing that I had to oblige.

The supervisor was terribly puzzled.

'No, I just wanted to say what an absolutely splendid job they did..no, it was above the call of duty,..no, it wasn't "nothing it all", why, it was nothing short of heroic. I think I overdid it a bit but hey, I've finally worked out that a Ph.D isn't completely useless!

For celia, roxana, astarte, anton and folded (the famous five!)-and beth..jeez, nearly forgot!

Roxana, I can't send you these sweets but at least you can look at them

Celia, I wanted to send you some pictures of 'rallis' but realised that you've written about them and so there's not much point. Instead, I hope you like this picture of a kalash girl.

Folded, see picture above.

Sadia, have you been here?

Anton, wanted to show you this picture of some hats. They're the coolest hats in the world. I used to wear one every day in the late eighties and people would often stop me and say: that's a really cool hat, where are you from? I don't wear them any more. White people would just think I'm one of the Taliban!

Well, anyway, just wanted to show you some of the good things here (even if we don't have ready-to-eat beetroot!).

Beth, hope you like this:

Wild Blue

Out of the blue.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances..
---R.Hass.

Let us love this distance , which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.
--Simone Weil.

Nothing is given; everything is fresh, wild. Unanticipated. If the wonder is that death, the impossibility, all of a sudden becomes a possibility; if the truly amazing thing is that life emerges from the infinite silence of stone, then it is also true that we are dazzled by the fact that death itself-even though for a flickering moment-becomes an impossibility.

This earth, this sky, this place I call home. Nothing seems more beautiful to me right now. I am the space where I am.

Near Snaresbrook, on the Central Line, a young girl looked at me as I sat absorbed in Richard Ford's Sportswriter. Her mother and aunt sat there like some commanding matriarchs, stone-like in their solemnity, the world rolling off their sad blue-grey eyes, making no impression. Mountain people. One always recognizes them. They've seen it all before. The elaborate and profuse red and gold embroidered patterns on their black veils indicating the presence of a human soul. Three young white kids got on, boisterous, full of themselves. The young girl just plays with her pony tails-a dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, who sees the end in the beginning- and then places her head gently on her mother's shoulder, pulling her closer to her by the arm, nesting in that immense black assurance: 'Mother, you mean the world to me'.

I listen to the Molla and Reijseger. To listen to this is to hear the music of the earth before human beings set foot there, an earth still quivering, still holding something of the memory of the Creator's hands, the clouds still clinging to the mountains, like a dream, the stone dimly aware that a thousand images lie captive in its heart: But a voice made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream.

Or, better still, it is the soaring cry of the First Man. The infinite is placed in us finite beings (if only Descartes had been a Muslim!). This is why we break. This is why we long so much for other skies, for the wild blue. Every act of true perception takes us there.

I am not the space where I am.
I am not what I am.

All the looseness, the dispossessed details, the faint hints, of the rest of the poem settle into the firm order behind the last line. We discover in retrospect what Lowell was doing was keeping all the ingredients of the poem in a state of fluid suspension, floating in readiness for the net with which, in a single moment, he could scoop them up and contain them.
---Raban on Lowell.

The poet sees earth and sky; the scientist or philosopher: only earth-and that too through a prism. The more this earth, this sky reminds us of others, the more we come to love them.
(originally posted, Saturday, 28th of July)

~~~~~~~~~~

Today I was thinking of how little wild blueness is left; instead, we tend to speak in terrible cliches or, worse still, try to beat every ounce of "meaning" from anything we touch or come across. So, I instinctively flinch when I hear someone harp on about "class consciousness" when it comes to a film-in the same way I would if I saw a donkey being thrashed. Or the "nausea " of Hollywood, the "decadence" of the west (yesterday a student actually came up to me and said 'in the west they think freedom means you can have incest.' Yeah, like, keep on taking the pills bro')

Have you ever thought, maybe the beast was within.It's like hearing a mullah speak, or a Communist or George Bush. The same old record, stuck on the same old track. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers! (Incidentally, found Mao's the Red Book last evening. What a load of utter crap! ) Science, Freedom, Progress..keep on repeating these words enough and, hey, who knows, you might actually convince yourself to believe them! There's no place like home, there's no ...

Came across Murakami's 'South of the Border' and paid 100 Rs for it. Regretting it now, could have had a coffee for the same price. Read 8 pages and trashed it.

As with all twelve year olds ..our conversations were strained. Strained??

We listened to those fifteen records a thousand times, and even today I can recall the music-every single note.Listening to Liszt's Piano concertos: I felt elevated, lifted to another plane of existence.

Don't know. Reading over some of what I've written I can't help but cringe. So much of what's on the blogosphere-or whatever it's called-is just so fake, phoney and full of this melancholy brooding.

[dougal, this is what your friend wrote in a review of this book for The Independent: This simple prose acquires a luminosity which raises it to the height of poetry]

Of Elephants and Hats

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What I've learnt from blogging:

1.1 I used to think there were only two types of people in the world: people who wear hats and those who don't. But now I've come to realise that there is also a (small) number of people who do not wear hats and yet are still -miraculously-good people.

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1.2 Bowler hats (or the Bolivian ones) only look good on women.

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1.3.In any case, it's people who like beetroot and those who don't.

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2. Not all Americans are confrontational and defensive.

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2.1. Actually, it was just Bob.

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2.2 To utter the word 'socialism' in the States is like saying the word 'vegetarian' here.

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3. Not all mullahs are damned to hell.

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4. Blogging is a cheap form of therapy.

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5. Blogging leads to the need for therapy.

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6. The autumn of your soul does not remember; the autumn of your soul is that remembrance.

~

A discussion with a French colleague here:

'You know, back in France we sometimes have Cheddar as a novelty item because it's not really considered a proper cheese. '

Er...that put me in the incredibly awkward position of actually having to defend England and I felt like saying 'steady on, old chap' but she's so charming that I let it pass.

7. Beauty trumps Truth.

The Return

Many are stuck in la (negation); many have come to a halt there, mistaking the stepping-stones for a final destination. The negative way.

The hunters, with their fragile fellowship, look at the multitude which is 'the world' and imagine her to be empty, an illusion of dust and ashes, so many "dots or dreams". The truth of life is elsewhere. Rooted in their tracks, exhausted, they dare not retrace their steps into the wilderness, but return to the nothingness of the world, carrying the desert that is in the heart of man with them....

The hunter, with his cold exacting eye, looks on at the life that carries on without him and this only confirms to him that everything is passing, save the Face of God. Can there be love or knowledge of what is beyond the senses? The world is reduced to a place of frozen absences; devoid of human warmth and light, this no-place like home is necessary for there to be a leap of faith.

He remembers the ancient raag:
No-one is mine it seems,
This world is full of dreams.

Only the saint "knows how to bless". There are no saints. But this affirmation comes, if it comes at all, when he himself is nothing; only against the purity of the snow can one see any tracks....on the road Saint Paul was blinded and saw nothing, nothing but God.

Then the hunter wonders if he isn't mistaken: it is not only at the extremes, at the limits of finitude, when all possibilities have been exhausted, that such an awareness emerges; in the very heart of life and the ordinary one can hear the faint ringing of its arrival...the winter sun, tired but still giving in her ceaseless generosity, a bird taking flight after resting in a tree, a thought that comes to nestle in his tangled hair, and today, unseen to many, a girl smiling to herself in a dark corner of the world sighed, the brilliance of the fire spread its wings....a friend extends a hand to a stranger and a dog stops barking, content with the day's work; a tree dreams of infinity and the ice melts an inch.

In a thousand ways and more nature gives thanks for the gift of existence; only we humans-the multitude- have the freedom to accept or reject this gift, to praise or to blaspheme. But even this is not ours in an unqualified way: only through grace is it so. The more we blaspheme the more we praise God.

But Rumi said it better: Freedom is the ability to give thanks to God for His Beneficence.

And so he trudges home, weary, but glad at the sight of his loved ones, and he forgets what he was hunting for, forgets his melancholic thoughts, the search for contact in uncharted territories.

The world, the body, is no longer a prison that he must flee or escape from. He learns to live with the small fires in the cave, to care for them, to tend to them. The good life is not about contemplation, or 'knowing' goodness but enacting it, about returning to the ordinary life full of jumble and imperfections, and its pleasures: happiness, health, friendship, love, deep attachments. The correct approach to Reality is Reality. No, not Icarus.

This, which flickers at night
the thin glimmer striking down there
wasn't that of a match.
--Montale.

But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in
the rain's bright glaze,
the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

And eventually a thought comes to him: perhaps it is he who is the one who is being stalked and hunted by the Lover...and so he chants Holy, Holy, Holy....

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.
---Iris Murdoch

Wild Blue Yonder

Some of the music from the stunningly beautiful the wild blue yonder

I gave you the beautiful journey
Without her you would not have set out on your way
She has no more to give you
And if you find her poor, I did not betray you
With all your wisdom, all your experience
You understand by now what Ithaka means
---Cavafy


For the Baroque soul:

Baroque form is dynamic; an indeterminacy of effect (in its play of solid and void, light and darkness, with its curvature, its broken surfaces, its widely diversified angles of inclination; it conveys the idea of space being progressively dilated. Its search for kinetic excitement and illusionary effect leads to the situation where the plastic mass in the Baroque work of art never allows a privileged, definitive, frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation....
---Umberto Eco.

To escape the flatlands, the pettiness, boredom, and emptiness of the cycles. Who, I wonder, hasn't dreamt of moving in another dimension, of cutting diagonally through space, orthogonal to all identity, sense and meaning. Wasn't our very beginning such a zig-zag movement, the imagining of the impossible, the flash of spurs that left the animal world behind? To stray and wander, to be restless, to love and hate home at the same time...a broken circle...

You sit on the train, alone and content, with just enough warmth from the familiar world: a good book, hot coffee, a forest-green lead pencil, old tattered shoes. And then, like a child, or a horse, something in you stirs, instinctively. You move to the window. You place your warm forehead against the cold pane and seek out the open skies, the distant blue, mesmerized and lost by all that is strange. I am not the space that I occupy.

Let me run, run, and never find...

The barzakh: neither constrained nor at liberty; neither free nor bound. Like the souls in-between, stuck between memory and desire. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom.

The sea, the sky, the blue mourning the loss of the red as it is transformed into gold. Broken, breaking free. I return. We do not recognise eachother.

What money can't buy

Bob, an american desi, thinks that we can quantify things like love, friendship, loyalty and a whole host of other things. Another american coined it : time is money!

That we can go from quantification to dollarization isn't that surprising (see Bernard Williams' comments on Bentham in 'Morality'). Once we start to conceptualize things in market terms, as commodities that are alienable and cease from thinking of them in relation to notions of personhood, or duties or rights then we're on a slippery slope to what Sandel calls 'corruption'. What matters here is the narrow conception of freedom: negative liberty and, ultimately, a shallow view of happiness (wealth and material goods).

What's really being commoditised here is Time itself (Marx:"Time is everything, Man is nothing" (see the excellent online article by Barbara Adam: "When time is money: contested rationalities or E.P's 'Time-Work discipline'). The Church saw this early on with its prohibition of usury (Le Goff: no-one "owns" time, and therefore it cannot be traded).

What Bob and his like are really saying is that other pursuits like poetry or art can be thought of as leisure and valued in terms of their opportunity cost (foregone income). Again: quantification implies commensurability. This obsession with reducing all behaviour (motivations and evaluations) to a single dimension for "tractability" at the theoretical level. It goes deeper than that, though: it's a political move. As Abe Lerner said, markets solve the political problem. Once we have the measure of life do we get the emergence of a new type of politics (the bio-political)? Once everything is reduced to life and the process of consumption do we lose the world as a place where human beings dwell, meet, tell stories to one another? The decline of public man, of trust, the view of nature as a resource (pure extension), are surely linked to these developments.

Americans -and we're all americans now-reared on the myth that the pursuit of happiness is a right suddenly realise that this obsession with happiness is part of the problem: I can, therefore I must (Zizek).


Well, what's wrong with that, bob asks? Who determines which things are alienable and which aren't, and to what degree? what's the process and what are the justifications for excluding us from thinking on those terms.


I don't think that's the right question..not to start off with anyway. I think we must recognize that throughout human history there's been the idea of the sacred and the profane, of different realms (or "spheres of justice") with their own set of principles to determine allocations of the 'goods' (rights, duties, equality, fairness, happiness, security, needs, merit, capabilities and so on). So, we must start the other way round: on what grounds should we say that one principle-the market- should dominate as a distributive mechanism?


But quite frankly, someone who thinks that friendship, happiness, art or love can be thought in terms of quantities already holds such an extreme view that I really don't know how to respond. Why this perverse need to calculate everything (Sen: evaluation is not calculation) ? Can we really order life, desires, time in that way?

For the other world is like a mirror: everyone sees their own form in it.
---Ostad Elahi.

Darkest Peru, London, and Hollywood

okay, okay, I know he doesn't have any shoes on and so he can't tap like Gene but still, dougal, you have to admit that he ain't half bad for a bear.

Uniqueness

Love is never directed to this or that property of the loved one, but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of a generality: universal love; the lover wants the Loved One with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.

--Sebastian Smee

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

~~~

Okay, you know I don't give advice on this blog, especially since my own life is messed up and because I detest missionaries, "experts" and busy-bodies who feel they just have to tell you how to live your life, but I did want to say this, and it's contained in the words of this song.

Against the false universalism of the market and the boxing-in of our identities by 'the religious' today we have to-more than ever- once again learn how to speak of the 'I' in all its specificity and dazzling uniqueness. And that means we cannot stay silent, we have to speak about You. The world's shortest poem-and probably one of its best-is: Me. You.

May God preserve us from the 'intelligence' of the academics and the narrowing down of our horizons by a false, abstract notion of the individual. We can see other people clearly only to the extent that we see ourselves clearly. 'To see' is not so much an intellectual act as a moral act. To see, with awe and wonder, the awe and wonder of others, is to be at the right distance from them and ourselves; it is a matter of being attentive to what differentiates us and what unites us.

The fateful slumber floats and flows
About the tangle of the rose.
But lo the fated hand and heart
To rend the slumberous curse apart.
---William Morris.

Down in the orchard
I met my death
under the briar rose
I lie slain

I was going
to gather flowers
my love waited
among the trees

Down in the orchard
I met my death
under the briar rose
I lie slain

the leaves glint in the wind
turning their quiet song
the wings flash and are still
I sleep in the shade

when I cried out you
made no reply
tonight I shall pass
without a sound

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

---G. Hill

brier:Eurasian rose with prickly stems and fragrant leaves and bright pink flowers followed by scarlet hips

The end of religion?

[Watch this first..hilarious!]
-----------------------------------

I was sent this.

Not really my cup of tea (Charles Taylor's online 'Social Imaginary' is so much better than this plodder's crab-like thoughts)

Claim: secularization means the devaluing of religion and a religious mentality (perhaps even a contempt for it). Liberals in the States or Pakistan think of religious folks as backward, simple, naive, and/or fanatical. They don't even understand the modern world or science.

Revisionist claim: Well, no, actually, religion hasn't gone away. Look at America and the growth of conservatism everywhere (Iran, Pakistan, Algeria)

Here's what Habermas calls the resurgence of religion:
a) missionary expansion (tablighis and the Protestants are everywhere)
b) a fundamentalist radicalisation
c) "the political instrumentalisation of the potential for violence innate in many of the world religions"

This was such utter crap that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Since when are those things religion? Are we to say that the Taleban or the God-forsaken Saudi expansion, or the evangelical movement is a resurgence of religion? God forbid!!

a) these missionaries are laughed out of town when they go to the rural areas. Most of them are modernists anyway with their half-baked notions of science and modernity.

b) As many others have argued, the fundamentalists are actually just a reaction against modernity and in that sense are also a part of it. I mean, their critiques of the West -to the extent that they even have them- are just re-hashed versions of the counter-Enlightenment.

c) The "mullah regime" and violent extremists are denounced by ordinary muslims so does it make any sense to say they -and only they-define what is meant by religion?

More crap by Habermas: "In fact, Muslim immigrants cannot be integrated into western society in defiance of their religion but only with it"

What bollocks! Most of the muslim immigrants I know (my parent's generation) never even thought in those terms, nor did the majority of the people I grew up with or know indirectly. And the same holds here, in the land of the pure: identity is a mix of all sorts of factors: class, education, ethnicity, language, local religious affiliations, tribal or feudal cultural practices, etc. It's ridiculous to assume that immigrants or 'muslims' should, or can only, be thought of exclusively in terms of their 'religion'.

Does Habermas even know what religion is?

Kumayl said:

"I asked my master Ali (RA): Is there only one soul? He replied: O Kumayl, there are four souls: the vegetal, nutritive soul; the sensitive, animal soul; the rational, holy soul; and the universal, divine soul."

By another name

Unmöglich ist immer die Rose,
unbegreiflich die Nachtigall
---Goethe.

For Heaven's sake, do not talk about the rose!
Talk of the nightingale who is separated from his rose
---Rumi.

I am amazed, o rose, to see your kindness,
that you can sit together with the thorn...
---Hafiz

Joy and pain are the same shape:
you can call the rose an open heart, or a broken heart.
---Mir Dard

The nightingale read from the rose petals a word which a hundred commentators can explain only with difficulty
---Jami.

It looked to me from afar like a bouquet of roses
When I saw it from near, it was fire
---Khaqani.

And the night flowed back into the rose until the night was the night no longer. And who could say if it was the sadness in the rose or if it was the fire in the night that led one to the other. But this much is true: the rose is but an image of Beauty, and is destined to fade and die. A painted bird for a painted rose.

The nightingale still has grace as long as it remembers springtime and dreams of the fragrant rose. Even in a black sun there is the faint memory of the rose, like a single red thread. But what of crow?

If the crow were to see its own ugliness,
it would melt like snow.
---Rumi.

The Gift

God is not an accountant, but if He was I think the only things in His books would be a record of what we gave to other people and what we lovingly received from others.


C had asked what the first story was I could remember (it was the magic porridge pot, a story of how a gift is not used properly ) but this one also came to
mind. That an idea "comes" to us says what, exactly?Hyde's words are simple but profound...To give is to receive. By giving we have more, we are more.

(and now I remember that I had promised this book as a gift to someone! Sorry, I've lent it to a student, Z. Will try and get it to you. Promise.)

The gift does not stop with me-if it does then it is just a matter of private accumulation. Can market transactions be social exchanges? What do we give of ourselves (to others, to nature, to God)? One of the worst types of people, or one of the worst aspects of us all, is this miserliness of the self...as if we could store some things up against Time; this fear of emptiness means we surround ourselves with things. An american desi tells me of how americans are obsessed by this idea of "my" (my space, my life...)

What is it to live a life with an open hand, to not calculate the returns ? What would it be like to accept that some things are given to us and other things are not? Is our life only of our own making, or is it only given meaning by what is shared, by what we share?

Hazrat Ali (RA) says: you should possess your possessions, they should not possess you.

You don’t know how hard it’s been,
to find you a gift.
Nothing fits.
Why bring gold to the seam, water to the sea?
Every idea of mine seemed like hauling spice to
the East.
No good to give you my heart, soul,
you own both already.
So I got you a mirror.
Look at you.
Think of me.
---Rumi, courtesy of 'Copenhagen'

Gould, the Taleban, and Crows

I don't know why, but I find myself increasingly listening to this. Just listening to it, not seeing it. Wish I had a musical ear. At the moment it seems the more I listen to it the more I pick up on their distinctness. Perhaps later I will see the unity in it.When I first listened to it I had the semi-blasphemous thought that, you know, when one reads the Quran the text seems to be the same in different places but when you hear it each surah has its distinct flavour, tone.

The playing itself is so 'alive', as if there was a perfect meeting of structure and inspiration, spontaneity after years of dwelling in the music, rather than performing it. It's as if the technical was brought within the folds of human meaning again.

Said on Gould: order and "new thinking"..a rejection of the vertical. A 'late style' means revisiting origins.

~~~

But I mainly listen to it to blot out what's going on around me..the disintegration of the country into the chaos of poverty, lawlessness, violence, fanaticism and stupidity. Of course, art and poetry are futile, extravagances even, in the face of so much suffering (as is an academic life) but..

Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught poetry and the imaginative arts are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of the self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil-no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which the accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.

~~

oh yes, crows. Talking to KP yesterday. He's been attacked by two crows almost every day for the last two weeks.

"They only attack me, not the person I'm walking with..what do you know about crows?"

Corvidus...

"That's not much help. Why me??I need to go to some 'elder' or sage who can tell me what this means"

"Well, in England they're sometimes associated with battles and carrion"

"Here", KP says, "if one sees some crows outside one's house that's very auspicious..something good will happen to you"

And then he adds, gingerly:

"Either that or death is coming for you"

"Er...that bit of folk wisdom isn't very reassuring!"

No poetry

"There's no poetry", said Bush, the Taleban, the engineers and the accountants, shuffling the pack..."there's only the dealing out of reality".

"There's no poetry", said the poet, poetically, picking the joker...there's only the silverpoint of memory, fingers smudged with ink, the kajol running from her eyes.

Total Recall

There's something terribly sad about bloggers (or maybe it's just the ones I read are a bit melancholic). For others, though, this is the way of the future (there's always been resistance to new forms of communication). One even hears the word 'community' quite amusingly bandied about (yeah, right, whatever) and no doubt there are 'theorists' hard at work analyzing how it all ties in with late capitalism, post-modernity, Foucault or Zizek.

What interests me though is the sheer self-conceitedness of it all (for a little while, anyway. After that the interest wanes). I-am-the centre-of the -world. Please notice me. Confess! (and don't miss out the juicy bits!)

C, in her characteristically lucid way said: it's a bit obscene, having the image of someone up there long after they've passed away.

Start the week:

We may be the first civilisation that doesn't leave a trace of what we thought and felt in any memorable public monuments. Creative destruction and 'instant living.' And yet, paradoxically, it is just this rapid shifting of our background scenery that impels us to collect the fragments of our lives and hold them ever so closely to us. I think this accounts for the conservation movement but also for the vast cathedrals of the minds, the public libraries in Washington, Paris, London ...(see Steiner, 'Errata'). No matter that no one reads 'linearly' any more..as long as it's there. (So think the Eloi). And we'll soon be able to watch everything on Youtube or read everything on google books. Fantastic!

From the archives:

Does anyone actually go back over their previous blogs and think: what was the point of writing that? I have catalogued..er ..what, exactly? The life I didn't live -a bit like the archetypal Japanese tourist who enjoys the experience of watching the video of his trip to Europe more than the actual bloody thing!

New Yorker: Alec Wilkinson:
(you're going to like this, C)

Some people are now running a project so that every detail of their lives is meticulously recorded, scanned, noted, digitalized, taped, and stored. It's called lifelogging. Friends, family, former students and children: avert your eyes now. Done? Good.For fuck's sake!

Open eyes.

Of course, it could be argued that this is just an extreme form of blogging, just as blogging is the accentuated form of a diary. What is this pre-occupation with the authentic self ? A fear of death, of missing out on the lives we never had, of organizing chaos? Maybe it's the desire to weave a thread through the different pieces of our lives and say, at last, here is a coherent story.

Your lifebits could be surfaced, made present as patterns on an ambient display. Or compressed and shaped like a movie so that something emerges from the mess , the enigma, that is a human life. 'Lifebits'? You've gotta laugh.

Horwitz, president-elect of The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence:

I would like to see computers provide a fabric that would extend us in areas where we're weak. If you look at 20th century cognitive psychology what it showed was that people had vast abilities coupled with limitations and bottlenecks. ...[such as] people forgetting things, and being biased in their judgements. To create a computation that understands those grooves and nooks and crannies ..using it in places where a computer can do well in a complementary way to extend people....

It comes to understand how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you.

I kid thee not. Computer geeks may be fantastically intelligent in a limited way but there's a reason it's called artificial intelligence!

On hearing the computer fan whizzing late at night Bell (the man running the experiment) says: My system is consolidating new memories. It's like a human being dreaming.

Logging everything means we can go back and analyse our tone in an argument, re-examine our stated life-goals and see if we've met them. Then we can see what went wrong (will certainly save a lot of money on therapy). The pattern of things that happens to us is what we are. That's deep, real deep...more to the point: we should be able to make some money out of it. And like real memory we'll be able to delete those inane memories or events we don't want to recall (like me blogging about this). Forget the Madeleines.

Z. Bauman:

In Borges' story Funes, thrown from his horse, is incapable of Platonic ideas..that is, of abstracting: of putting certain aspects of what he saw in focus by leaving the rest out. Instead he was able (had to!) to perceive every grape that had been pressed into the wine, and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard where you and I, with one quick look, perceive three wine glasses on a table. Two or three times Funes reconstructed an entire day without without once erring or faltering, but each reconstruction itself had taken an entire day. Having found not only the task he had set himself was interminable, but that the whole idea of such a task was pointless, Funes complained: 'My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap'.

The Invisibles

I was thinking today of all the invisible people on blogs (readers, anons) and all those who are trying to become visible ('writers'), thinking of missed conversations, and things I've never said as well. I mean, despite all the fanfare, does blogging actually connect people in any real way? I don't know, talking with someone over coffee, hearing their voice, seeing their face (er..and bodies) just isn't the same.

I've nothing against invisibility. Growing up as an outsider/foreigner one is acutely aware of the desire to be seen and not to be seen..the freedom of not being seen, of being on the margins, roaming around there, is something the mainstream probably just doesn't get.

We all become invisible, loosed from body and duty, left to drift on the night breeze, to do as we will, to cast about for what we like to be when we next occur.That, let me promise you, is not an empty moment...Just to slide away like a whisper down the wind is no small freedom, and if we are ever lucky enough to win such a setting-free, we should use it, for it is the only naturally occurring consolation that comes to us, sole and sovereign, without props or the forbearance of others-among whom I mean to include God himself, who does not let us stay invisible long, since that is a state he reserves for himself.
---R. Ford, The Sportswriter

But even this seems so different from the forced invisibility of marginal groups (women, the poor).

In T's village over the weekend:
Wonderful hospitality,as expected. And to see the shrine of the saint who's at the head of the main Sufi order in the Punjab was something special. The saint, sick of the world, moves here to escape the prying eyes of the world, to be alone with the Alone. But I'm not religious and so wasn't really moved. What did stick, though, was this:

Standing in the fields at 1 in the morning, erecting these long nets, set in the shape of a large 'L' so that we could shoot quail in the morning. No-one around for miles-and certainly no quails-just darkness and the moonlight floating effortlessly on the swaying grass, and the recording of the quails chirping away in the background so as to attract them to this spot.

And then someone told me that an old woman, a sixty-year old woman, who had been collecting firewood had been brutally raped one mile from here. And all the ghoulish details followed. And I thought to myself : most people in this country-the rural and urban poor-are just invisible in a way that is as close to being nothing, a no-one, as is possible.

The human figure is progressively disappearing from pictorial art, as no object is present except in fragmentary form. This is one more proof that the human countenance has become ugly and outworn, and that the things which surround us have become things of revulsion.
---Hugo Ball.

The Dying Animal

Love is a shadow
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

---S. Plath



Listen: time passes.
Listen.


She held out a hand to him. His fate was entwined in that primordial gesture of woman. One falls in love or one falls out of it..but one falls...


I watched the awful 'Into the Wild'; only the last scene when his photograph is shown do we realise this was a real human being, and not the caricature we see depicted by some rather hammy acting. But the lines ring true still: it is important to give everything its proper name. He comes to realise, painfully, the great truth: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

~~~
Literature: as a diversion, a way of forgetting, a way of remembering....

'..[y]ou feel even more than you ordinarily do the poignancy of every last grace that's been lost'

The only solution to life is to live more of it, pure excess, an explosion of sensibility, the anarchic, orgiastic spirit delighting in the revelry of transgression against bourgeois conformity, norms, moral standards. Those pointy heads with their seriousness, their platitudes and worn-out cliches..Islam is peace, America is the land of the free. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Bakhtin, Bacon, the rehabilitation of Nature. The other Bacon: our ultimate reality: flesh.

One cannot "save" a life, just as one cannot "save" time. At least the devil has blood pulsing through his being, unlike this phantom being, this cardboard cut-out: man and his "limit-loving class". A rebel -with or without a cause..that does not matter..the will is all that matters-and after me the deluge...why did you climb the mountain? Because it was there. Desire is everything. You are what you desire. Books on how to assert yourself, books on how to cope when you fail to assert yourself. Greed is good. Consume your way out of terror..consumption is the terror that behind this desiring there is nothing but a dying animal.

the end of america, the beginning of america.
Small-town conservatives and red-necks. The horror of difference (witches, negroes, gays, jews, catholics, commies,towel-heads). The Puritans were the agents of rule and godly virtue. When did it end, this experiment in dictatorial intolerance? Elvis, the car, the pill, the Charleston? The empire of virtue replaced by the empire of candour. In your face. Express yourself. Kick-ass attitude.You want the truth, you can't handle the truth, bud!


The end of capitalism, the beginning of capitalism.

This wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation, this wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past. What Tawney called the mimicking of the 'divine frenzy', the moment when the world is obliterated. Laughter and nonsense against authority. Life is a cabaret, my friend. Radical dissent. Transgression = creativity. The shock of the new. The authority of the present. The normalization of the repression of guilt, the repression or forgetting of movements upwards...the only question is: how to enjoy our liberation from (drum roll) the family, society, religion, tradition, the past, the state. Free, free at last. How to liberate pleasure from reason. The Tree of Life, not the Tree of Knowledge. This dying animal is an animal. And that's that.

But why, it may be asked, was life a problem in the first place? And nowhere is it asked why this unfettered individualism has led to such pathological behaviour, so many addictions and compulsive neuroses. Is the gambler an individual at all? The settler sees wildness, emptiness to be filled with his own projections. The nomad sees an inhabited world that he shares with others. Nomadic space is about co-existence, not distance.

Do not pause-for to pause would already be a victory- to reflect on how convenient this is for late capitalism, this production of desire itself: eroticism, publicity, advertising. Bio-politics. The efficient management of life, the bringing of the life process into the public realm, subjecting it to techniques of control and manipulation and analysis. This gives way to the second-stage of capitalism: liquid modernity. The dissolution of the world since everything can be traded, is fungible, until there are no more boundaries. Global citizens! Nothing is sacred. Just this bare forked animal before you.

Do not ask why you must always escape yourself (even a holiday is called an escape!) or, politically speaking, what it means for the impossible to become possible (Arendt). Just do it! Spectators, voyeurs before the pornographic. The triumph of the surface, of trivialization, the banal, of entertainment.

(citations: Roth, Rieff)

~~~

There is great pathos in this view of us being nothing but dying animals and the fanaticism of the Puritans hardly appeals to but a rare few. But is this all we are ? (I don't mean that as an intellectual question but, rather, as a question of how do we live : joy in contingency?). Do we not knowingly, lovingly, name the world? We look to find our true name with God and know the great importance of finding the proper names for things, of speaking in the right tone. Do we not know that we are dying animals? And think , write, create in response? Even if we die alone, we do not always live alone:

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

The Moment

There is no such thing as "time"; as soon as we name it , it slips out of our hands. Serial, objective time is mechanical, cold. But there is no such thing as a time that is completely 'outside' of us, independent of our perception even though we dimly suspect that time's arrow is another name for necessity. Time, the mystery of mysteries, is the bitter wound within us, secreting its poison-ink with which we write the stories of our lives.

~~

Science, philosophy and theology only skirt around the hems of its outer garments...the truth of it lies elsewhere; the world, insofar as it is causality, is but the "veil of God", the antechamber that leads to an infinite hall of mirrors.

~~

We act, we think in time but our thoughts are "in" time not as an object like another object; they occupy the nunc stans, being neither future nor past.

~~

She fell into my arms,

and the world stood still

~~

No saint or 'thinker' reaches the same height of awareness as one who is conscious of roads that have been denied him, of the loss of a loved one at the hands of time; but time is not just memory, she is desire. We need to 'think' God and love Him (Anselm)...one wants to feel the stars and not just see them.

~~

Eternity is the style of desire.

~

Forgetting.

A terrible case of amnesia; he could only remember things he had said within the last seven seconds....beyond that was eternal silence. One is forced to think what a life without continuity and memory would be like (even the 'saved' remember how sweet the fruit on earth tasted). The complete fragmentation of a life, where one raw sensation is followed by another, is unbearable and is nothing but a description of Hell. His life is a raft beyond which is a void. To live in the fleeting moment is to live without recollection and without hope, with the sovereign becoming of a Dionysus or a Bacchus.

~

Sometimes one would like to lose oneself, to forget by finding joy in contingency. But a sober awareness always returns to the world...

~

Every time he meets his beloved it is as if he is meeting her for the first time..she is the only person he recognizes in this confusing world of images and half-fallen beings. But to live for such a moment is a curse. ..it is to live a totally closed life, one in which there can be no dreams and nothing but an empty landscape stretches behind and beyond him.

~

This man who is 'walking death' remembers only one other thing-music, the piano music that he could somehow, miraculously, still play with an intensity of feeling that was unparalleled in his life; he could draw upon this hidden reserve of emotion at will, it was the only thing that persisted, that anchored him to something in the world; it was as if this was the only home in which any feelings could survive, the rest being but a frenzied dash across a tightrope. Below the abyss, nothingness.

~

He wondered how certain notes could evoke particular states of being, how they could pull on the strings of our heart as if there was some sort of hidden relation-mathematical and spiritual-between all that was in the universe and all that was in a human heart.

~

The creation of a single self is as the creation of a whole universe.

~

It is said that all moments are the moment, each one is, if we are but open to its possibility, the time in which grace or love make their appearance; and it is only our turning away that allows the moment to fall away. And since each moment is connected to the next is anything really lost? Does not one prefigure the other, hold within its very heart a trace of the other? A heart that is broken is always receptive..is it not said that I am with those whose heart is broken for My sake (and here one wonders if there can be any other form of breaking, is not the heart always broken?)

~

But the sages and old men will tell you otherwise. There are but a few moments in life that arrive unheralded, a brief interlude amidst the cyclomania of the world...what are often called the "window of opportunity" and these are the moments that we are most desirous of. It is they that, like an invisible axis of our lives, a golden thread that runs through our being, structure all past events and all future ones too; it is that very moment in which one is awestruck by beauty, love, knowledge, that all of time collapses to this single gaze; it as if all meaning is condensed in our response to such a moment, this fork in the road. This moment does not annul all other moments but contains them in a loving embrace...the keystone of our lives.

~

Listening to Arvo Part:

There is dissonance and strife, a discontinuity in the narrative and then, as if from nowhere, a chord suddenly emerges and acts like a balm on the open wound; it draws all other voices to it, bringing them home, resolving them in what only now looks like a pre-determined harmony.

The first note emerges from the silence and carries with it something of the mystery of all that is unformed, unspoken. The first note opens up the possibility of infinite worlds...which way it goes is something beyond human comprehension. But the longer one holds that note, avoiding resolution, the longer the options remain open. Do we search to replicate such a note, do we try and elaborate its unfolding in time, seeking the pattern that is weaved around this centre?

~

This moment that starts from nothing and which disperses in no-time whatsoever, is destined to return to nothing as well. But in such a movement it tells us that there is a past, present and future since the present, the moment, never lasts and always recedes into the past and the future always breaks-up the 'now'. Such is the fate of all moments. But from amongst all the moments there is a realisation that some, more than others-and not just the first- give shape to the whole sequence.

~

There are times when we feel that everything fits: that we're in the right place at the right time, that there's been a dazzling co-incidence of fate, an alignment of the stars and the trajectory of one's life, the perfect intersection of lines of causality with one's own haphazard choices; but with this comes the apprehension of how horribly wrong things go, how for most parts we seem to be out of sorts with the turning of the heavens, out of tune with its harmony.

~

Even worse, there is an understanding that time is lost, irretrievably so, and that some choices in the decisive moment cannot be undone (could the man who rejected Christ have foreseen that this one elemental gesture would determine his eternal destiny?, had we the chance to love again would we make the same decision?, and there's the paralysing knowledge that our life which traverses but a small span of the great arc of being, had to be, could not be anything but, the way it is. Which is to say that time is a falling away from singularity , a dispersal, and from this follows the tragedy (and beauty) of life: we chose and are chosen to live but one life amongst many.

The unStranded instant

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.

---Bresson. (courtesy of anton)

From John Berger:

"His method was the antithesis of Bresson's. The photographic moment for Bresson is an instant,a fraction of a second, , and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. the photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is measured ideally not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant , but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told...

~~

His best photographs are unusually dense [where happenings are related]. The subjects are narrators.

~~

[Mr. Bennett (above)] His jacket, his shirt, the stubble on his chin, the timber of the house behind, the air around him become in this image the face of his life, of which his actual facial expression is the concentrated spirit. ..

~~

A young Rumanian peasant and his wife..above and behind them, diffused in the light, is a field and, above that, a small modern house ..Here it is not the the substantiality of surfaces which fills every square inch but a Slav sense of distance ..And, once more, it is impossible to separate this quality from the presence of the two figures; it is there in the angle of his hat..the way her hair is tied up. What informs the whole photograph-space-is part of the skin of their lives.

~~

I am as you see me.

The I am is given its time in which to reflect on the past and to anticipate its future..a life story.

northern elegy

Without Title

This is nothing compared to the mesmerizing Walden, but still...

Everything has its season-winter too. But what is Winter if not the memory of Spring? Icicles grow, imperceptibly, like your tears within. Inching their way downwards. Without title or an inheritance, sorrow becomes your name. When they break you think your heart will too. A heart, a toy, made from glass. It was bound to break, don't ask...or was it? Are there not other ways of disappearing, friend?

When ice becomes conscious of the sun, it doesn't last long:it warms and melts and flows away.

---Rumi.

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

---Penelope Fitzgerald

His gaze, contemplating the stars, remains alert, available and released from all certitude.

------Seamus Heaney on Italo Calvino's Mr.Palomar.

I heard it said.

I heard it said, there is

a stone in the water and a circle

and over the water a word

that lays the circle around the stone.

~~~~

Today, I wanted to get away from thoughts about 'black winter'. Why not ditch the 'black' in the pretentious 'black sun'? In any case, the fading autumn light here is too beautifully mellow for me write like that today-and there are other black suns out there, a lot more darker.

I just wanted to link to

this since it's one of my favourites and it's one of my favourites because so many different people contributed to it!

After word

~

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~

~

~

~

~

THERE’S a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons ……

When it comes, the landscape listens,

Shadows hold their breath;

When it goes, ’tis like the distance

On the look of death.

---Emily Dickinson.

(Courtesy of astarte)

~

~

December in Romania:

December brown set in about three...These were the shortest days. The afternoon light no sooner came in than it was on its way out. It was cold, too. Brittle scales began to show on the street puddles, a crystalline bitterness setting in. Where the light withdrew, the yellow-brown of the stucco was pocked with mild blue. On the open porches over the way-bottles, wet rags hung out to dry frozen at the points, and vine twigs. The glory of the day carried things easily when the sun shone; but when the sun passed, things seemed abandoned, they became dissociated, and you had to find a way to take them up yourself.

---

Saul Bellow

手勢令, じゃんけん, Rochambeaux

Ice and stones speak a strange language that we somehow understand.

Stone. Water.
Fire.Water.
Fire. Paper.

Acts of Resistance: nothing remains undefeated, capstones shift, everything can be trumped, every order overturned; what was "low" may be "high," that which was more solid than a mountain can, in an instant, pass away, and become a cloud again.

Stone.
For age upon age you patiently wait. A perfection that is closed-in upon itself, supremely self-contained, self-centred. Created for black sleep. A fierce inwardness, an unremitting asceticism, binds together a thousand forms so that they never take shape and then displaces the shell of imagination with abstractions. Without the will to live and die you are sunk into a grey nothingness, a mind alone in the universe vaguely remembering the colours. Yours is the strength of the boundary.

Paper.
Nothing defeats stone, unless it is weightless.Pascal, after all those dark days, finally comes to understand. It comes to him with the clarity of Revelation, and is at first blindingly obvious. It is, after all, the simplest of things. He writes it down and, lest he forget, sews it into his clothes. This great, irreducible truth, is a different type of strength. But life is not a formula, or a series of golden rules. There is always the blue unknown. Our skin ages, sags, creases. The flush of youth fades. Our bodies change; they grow and decay, and wound easily. He unfolds the paper and,as if looking back at a rather pleasant dream or a forgotten lover, wonders why it made so much sense to him then. Is there a truth beyond words, an understanding that is adequate to the senses? We want to see and feel the stars.

Fire.
You break up the intelligence of the mind and all that is solid. Some say you are life itself, the vividness of the gold in the green, the glint of light that bounces of chestnut trees. Blue and the Red. Mournful silence, exuberant spontaneity. The shape of the world is moulded by your hand. Giver of light and warmth: solar generosity. Pure excess and unconquered flame. Even 'the Fire' is called a "friend". Always changing, and yet always the same. And even though there is anarchy in your heart there is still a spacious order of the sun: volo ut sis. You help the dead across the boundary, and transmute all forms. Are you time itself?

Water.
Only what is elemental, less complex than fire can defeat it. The great redeemer, giver of second chances. The true origin. Like a stream that joins the sea, who is to say where you begin and where you end? Without you: no journeys and no longing.

'round midnight

Talking to S, a complete character, about donkeys of all things! And he said this: what a strange animal it is. He's an animal that has "life" (or power) but who is in reality without life. His life is dedicated to serving others. I sometimes see him on the way home, at three o'clock in the morning, or around midnight, and there he is, there he will always be, tethered to a small wooden post. I know there is a world inside him but he is statuesque, motionless like a sack of stones. I'm sure he has desires like me and you but he's stuck there, and he'll be there for a year, two, six. And if he feels unsettled or restless all he'll say is "ahem".

~~~~

Haven't been fasting regularly this year-for the first time in ages. Feels weird. S said to Asim, I'm fasting but could you bring some coffee..and don't forget the biscuits. The social pressures to do so makes me wonder. As Amir once said: the difference between the 'west' and the 'east' is that we know we're donkeys!

~~~

Javed said that God doesn't like two types of people: those who believe in other gods, and those who have lost hope. We, as a people, believe in Bush or money..thinking that they'll do it for us, get us there, smooth out our lives. But when one has lost hope one starts to believe in false gods.