the red and the white

I do not know, whether the sun
accomplished it,
the rain or wind –
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

I listened to the rustling
of spring rain,
washing the reddish buds
of chestnut-trees, –
and a tiny spring ran down
into the valley from the hill –
and I was missing
the whiteness
and the snow.

And in the yards, and on the slopes
red-cheeked
village maidens
hung up the washings
blown over by the wind
and, leaning,
stared a long while
at the yellow tufts of sallow:

For love is like the wind,
And love is like the water –
it warms up with the spring,
and freezes over – in the autumn.
But to me, I don't know why,
whether the sun
accomplished it,
the rain or wind –
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

--Jonas Mekas

another place

For flowerville, antonia, anton...who likes to look out to the sea.

Through the blue summer evenings, I'll go down the pathways,
I'll let evening breeze bathe my bare forehead.
I'll speak not a thing: I'll think not a thing:
And, I'll go, far, far away, like a gypsy...

We stand here alone. Surrounded by wind, sand, and sea. Grey reflections, flecks of ash in the eye of God. We stand here together, alone. Motionless. Gazing for ever at the distance between us, the space within us.

From 'the consolation of the elemental', The Independent, July 1, 2005:

AG. What is the consolation that we seek into going into the elemental world?
..the rhythm of the ice forming, freezing, melting, breaking, the sense one had that those things have been going on for time out of mind...
When I think of Suffolk I think about hedgerows, trees, plantations, the amazing huge sky over and above this quilted mas;that's a relationship with a place that is qualified by human history. But what's wonderful about the sea is that it is not like that. It's an element which is endless and uninscribed.

the beach: It is also a deep memory of the early times, the sense of sun and wind on the skin. I love the way we regress at the beach...the human perceptual world is limited by a horizon but there is always that human need to imagine what's beyond it. [A place] where they witness that they themselves are part of a field of witnessing.

IM: Another Place seems to suggest the power of collective dreaming. All these figures are facing out to sea. The work has power because they're facing the same direction and thinking the same thing.

AG: I believe it has something to do with the weather being the thing that everything suffers but is also the elemental condition that carries on, and in it there is another form of consolation.

IM: To abandon all hope of progress is a meanness of spirit.

Sunflower

Why does the princess smile?
Why does the prince weep?
---the swami.

Sunflower, dream of the sun, dreams of the sun. Gladly accepting the gift, gently weaving the time of the sun into the earth. Sunflower, the heart's alchemist, transforming invisible light into a colour of the world. Measurer of the hours, of the days in the eternal life of the sun.

Sundial, made by human hands, turns gold into shadow. But what is natural absorbs, accepts, reflects, shines. Flower of the sun, radiant even in sadness, breathes in and breathes out, seeks affinity, is attentive.

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, unable to set hearts ablaze and yet still we wait for you to turn your face our 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 new york state of mind

....[c]ontrasting urban ecologies of capitalist and precapitalist cities. In the latter (he uses Naples as an example), there is no delusion of total command over Nature, just constant ecological adaptation. The city is an imperfect and carnivalesque improvisation that yields to the fluxes of a dynamic Mediterranean environment. ‘Things are allowed to remain in a halfway real condition, and delight is taken in the way things come to their own equilibrium and completion.’ Although the objective hazards (volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis) are arguably greater than for any other large European city, Naples is on familiar terms (heimisch in Freud’s sense) with the ‘old dragon’ of catastrophic nature. Anxiety does not infuse daily life on the slopes of Vesuvius.

In the ‘Americanized big city’, by contrast, the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically generated radical insecurity (Unheimlich). Indeed ‘where technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature . . . the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately.’ In part, this is because the metropolis’s interdependent technological systems—as Americans discovered in the autumn of 2001—have become ‘simultaneously so complex and so vulnerable’. More profoundly, the capitalist big city is ‘extremely dangerous’ because it dominates rather than cooperates with Nature.

The Uncanny is precisely that ‘nothingness [non-integration with Nature] that stands behind the mechanized world’. Although Bloch is acutely aware of the imminent dangers of fascism and a new World War, he insists that the deepest structure of urban fear is not Wells’s war in the air, but ‘detachment and distance from the natural landscape’.

The subject is teetering on the brink of absolute nihilism; and if this mechanization with or without purpose, this universal depletion of meaning, should come to fulfillment, then the future void may prove equal to all the death anxieties of late antiquity and all the medieval anxieties about hell.

--------From Mike Davis, 'The Flames of New York' with references to Ernst Bloch's 'The Anxiety of the Engineer'


The term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. ...Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.
------Juniper.

The static idea of perfection of the Greeks, the Doric column, proportionality compared to wabi, "deliberate imperfection". Rowan Moore, writing about how the Twin Towers stood in stark contrast to the spirit of its Japanese architect, would say that the Towers were built to last for ever, to resist the changes of Nature in a sort of timeless space. All architecture is frozen time but this perfect abstract symmetry is nothing but a product of the human mind-a mind cut off from Nature, a grey matrix that is a reflection of the squares of the mind.

The Swami, returning from NY, had nothing to say about the sky scrapers or the city, as if her memory had become a desert. The regularity of its shapes, the grid which was a map for lost lovers, seemed to stunt all thoughts. But eventually she said:

there is something oppressive about buildings that have lost the scale of the human. One may initially be impressed by them-as one is by the outward forms of a civilisation-but very soon this feeling fades away to reveal an unnameable disquiet. Logic, mathematics, without the human touch, subjectivity, turns into a totalitarian nightmare, closed to Nature. One's eyes soon grow tired. But look, and look again at a fleeting cloud. Is this not a more perfect shape? Where the human hand becomes invisible, there you will see perfection.

North by northwest

For there’s a limit to gazing.
And the gazed-at world
Wants to blossom in love.
---Rilke.

Facing the right direction, and not being in the right place, is what counts. An elemental soul and an angelic soul: the human being is the cross where they meet. By virtue of the former nature is his 'brother'; by virtue of the latter consciousness or awareness breaks out of its dream-like state.
---from Ostaad Elahi

PENDANT LES GUERRES de l'empire,
Goethe, au bruit du canon brutal,
Fit le Divan occidental,
Fraîche oasis où l'art respire.
Pour Nisami quittant Shakespeare,
Il se parfuma de çantal,
Et sur un mètre oriental
Nota le chant qu’Hudhud soupire.

Comme Goethe sur son divan
A Weimar s’isolait des choses
Et d’Hafiz effeuillait les roses,
Sans prendre garde à l’ouragan
Qui fouettait mes vitres fermées,
Moi, j'ai fait Émaux et Camées.–

Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)

DURING THE WARS of empire,
Goethe, to the cruel sound of canons,
Made The West-Eastern Divan,
A cool oasis where art respires.
For Nizami he left Shakespeare,
Scented himself in santal,
And at the feet of an oriental,
Took down the song that Hudhud sighed.

Like Goethe on his divan
In Weimar secluded himself
And plucked the roses of Hafiz,
Without thought of the hurricane
Lashing at my shutters,
I, I made Émaux et Camées.

[translation © yusuf zanella, 2006]

Borrowed from 'Traveller'

The East within the East, the place that is east of the East. When one reaches the edge of the world what happens? One falls off! When the heart reaches a certain point, then? It falls.

The Dalai Lama: there is a fundamental goodness, gentleness running through the universe. This thought is like a shiny ribbon bookmark between so many words....it allows one to close the book..and to open it again. The ultimate aim of intelligence is to have a good heart.


We live amidst a storm, but tonight, perhaps only tonight, all is peace inside.The East's mind has fallen asleep, stilled itself, and the west no longer has a heart. Too ancient and too modern by far, b! Then how to live? Not East-West, for even though I know that path my temperament, as Ghalib says, precludes me from following it. At a slight angle to the universe, then. Lean over the devastated landscape. Keep your balance. Find your orientation. North by northwest.

We live in tumultuous times..but when wasn't time just so!? Even in a casual stroll the world floats by, so many distraught faces, churning out anxieties, catch the somber mood. Everything is touched by a sense of impermanence. We are surrounded by mortal things or is it our gaze?

Why begrudge the times we live in? There was something in our soul that matched them, a kind of necessity that meant we should live here and now, not there and then. No matter how hard we deny it, we look in the glass and admit: so, this is me, this is finally me....

And yet, something stirs in our being unbeknown to us, like the flaring of the evening sun when the day is done: the hunch that we were destined for something else, another life; the hope that this straw catch fire, that the face in the mirror is not ours, that we have not found our name...Our body trembles before this silence and the mind delights once again, we are drawn to other times and other places, north of the future. The circle breaks. Like a raft precariously afloat on a vast sea, miles from land, our hopes may dwindle but familiar voices reach us, refuges are remembered, time regained. We learn to see again, to look in the right way. We must make a world of it, start again, gather ourselves once more. For this we came, always fading, always soaring....

there was a time

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.

---from Mir Dard.


What is pain itself, that is peace of the soul?

---Shah Latif.


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

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

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

There was a time when we didn't question, when the voice didn't quaver and the hand didn't hesitate to accept what was given. There was a time when the frail winter light held things together, when we measured the earth by our stride. Cricket in Victoria Park, deep into the day, the old tree serving as the wickets, the hedge as the boundary. Long summer evenings, bats criss-crossing the sky as the last traces of light left the purple clouds..the moment, from purple to grey, like a face that suddenly becomes sad for no reason...

quaver: a note of time value.

There was a time when what seemed near was very distant, when words lost their meaning and "up" meant "down", "love" meant "hate". But even here, a wisp of life survived, like a thin trace of silver in a darkening mirror, or the flash of desire in your glistening eyes-dazzling reminders, remainders, of another time, another place.


I love television in other cities, the assurance of looking up from my chair in some strange room to see a familiar newscaster talking in his familiar accent...In me it fostered an odd assurance that some things outside my life were okay still, that the same men and women...things were knowable, safe and sound. Everybody with what they need or could get. A perfect illustration of how the literal can become the mildly mysterious.

We take all the solace we can.

Only suddenly, then, you are out of it-that film, that skin of life-as when you were a kid. And you think: this must have been the way it was once in my life, though you didn't know it then, and don't even really remember it..a feeling of being released, let loose, of being light..this time you want to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it might just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time you ever feel this way again.

---Richard Ford


At a certain age the clothes fit. There's an equilibrium between biological and social worlds. It is as if one has grown to one's limits, being has filled us out and there is a certain peace about this, like two overlapping circles finally becoming synchronized. But from here it appears that there can only be a decline, a falling away. It is haunted by the thought of its own disappearance, just as the fading winter sun is burnt out by 2 o'clock, and already has a premonition of the lengthy shadows it will cast. This perfection cannot be consciously designed by a political system or even by religion since it depends , crucially, on the awareness of our fittedness with all that has passed in the universe, a sense of not being estranged from oneself or from the times we live in. And that type of self-assuredness is fragile, temporary, and not something that can be aimed for or re-constructed once it has passed; it is pure gift.

There was a time when I was and you were not, when I looked for fossils on the lot next to the library and threw stones whilst you slept in your mother's peace unaware; a time when you will say "I am" when I cannot, and you will look at photographs of your generations, perhaps throw some stones back. Is that now? Is time another name for irreducible distance? There was a time when you hopped about on the cracks in the cement, like a high-wire acrobat, ate strawberry jelly, played by the sea. If time heals all wounds then there was a time when time was not time.

loops

The first note contains the possibility of all others.

But the first is closest to the image of the last more than anything else.

One cannot play the first note unless one has in one's mind what the last one is. (Daniel Barenboim)

The one circles around itself, waiting to break, to become two.

Minimalism: to express everything in a single note or the simplest and faintest of brush strokes on a blank canvas that is at once entirely free and spontaneous and at the same time the product of great learning and technique. A single note that expresses the different worlds: the natural, the human, and the cosmic. It is reached if one slows down the passage of time , frame by frame, to a single point, the whole point.

There is nothing to say after the point has been reached. The first note emerges from silence and holds that silence within its innermost chamber; its very structure is permeated by that nothingness; and it must return to that primal state.

If one unravels the note one can hear ancient and modern tunes: the co-mingling of a timeless Japanese stillness that dreams itself into the pain of longing from a Persian poem...and then, with a slight shift of emphasis, to a Highland lament. If one is attentive one can just discern a return to 19th century classical Vienna or the onward rush of the first settlers, frontiersmen, seeking out open spaces and new futures. The first note is always old because of its relation to the origin but also always new because it contains the unexpected, all that hasn't been thought of...

The first note has all the freshness and innocence of the first times, but all of the regret and sadness of the last times as well. A sound thought: a thought without mind. Each voice is present, each vital-as in an infinite stone bridge; to take away but one would be reduce the whole to nothing....

A line of stars would be of no interest to us. But a pattern where some are bunched together and others are hopelessly isolated in the infinite distances, forlorn, as if rejected by fate, is a different matter; in other regions some burn with a scintillating brilliance whilst others quietly fade into insignificance; these fantastical differences remind us of our own fabulous story: the creation of the universes is as the creation of a single soul.

The constant star that never wavers, that is a sure guide; the star without a name; the one that dazzles all others with its white light; the blue, mournful one; the star that never stays in the same place, that one has to search and search the skies for until, by chance, it is found; the one that caroms through the night sky, zig zagging erratically through the universe. Is this not a better way of thinking of life?
---the swami.

Question me an Answer

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)



The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?---- foot-marks.....

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.
--After Rumi

Sat with Rinku and Sarmad for a while. Rinks told of her Buddhist friend who said: haven't you read enough. This struck me and reminded me of: only read as much as you can live. Not a putting away of books, no. But more like a question that is not a question, a kind of answer: what would it be like to have a practical wisdom, to not always look for fragments, or strive for completeness, answers?

At 'Readings' after that. Came across, surprisingly, W.S. Merwin's collected works, A.R. Ammons, Updike, Bellow's Ravelstein, and much more. But I didn't want to even pick up a book!
How good that felt. Even when a car crashed into the back of mine I was strangely calm.

Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said I think, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.

But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, our mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is, ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes us -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.

Most importantly, there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.

What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?

There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...

Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)

A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).

Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).

G. Bataille: To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

It is the unknown that compels us to love. The key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul
D.H.Lawrence.

God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'

between the lines

Eventually found the entrance to this rather curious gallery just off Old Street. It was a side door into a cubical building that must have once been a warehouse but now had doubled up into something else. One wonders how many layers of history lie submerged here.

Idris Khan's work is about that just that: repetition and persistence over time...simultaneity. The work is a series of overlapping, superimposed photographs of an artists work so that one can see the whole story , as it were. Above, are the scores for Bach and Beethoven and it is as if we can see a magical pattern that tells us something essential about each of them; the Bach photograph looks like a huge computer printout, a single, vast and intractable mathematical equation, or a series of functional relationships that asks us to decode it. It is as if the very structure of the universe is hidden in the truth of them, a harmony that is at once static and brilliant and one that underlies the dynamics of all that is organic and inorganic. In this way it reveals a correspondence also between matter and the spirit.

The Beethoven is a force of will and effort. There's a vibrancy and urgency about these lines that represents a striving for greatness: the heroic individual. But perhaps it is also possible to read the dark lines as the terrible silence that erases Beethoven's connection with the world. Maybe they point to the enigmatic result of the interaction of history with genius.

Mozart's indicate a return to elemental simplicity, a primordial mind or that of a child-clear and light and unencumbered by memories or history. It is as if there was only a single pattern in this case and variations of it were only so many experiments in lightness.

A great review:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1863044,00.html

Criticism sometimes achieves the condition of art; certain works of art are also a form of commentary or criticism. Roland Barthes's meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, is a classic example of the former. How to respond creatively to a book that has profoundly shaped the way the medium is regarded? A writer might feel compelled to follow George Steiner's grand advice and "write a book in reply". And if you're not a writer, but a photographer? If you do what Barthes is writing about?

Idris Khan's response was to photograph every page of the book and then digitally combine them in a single, composite image. The result of this homage to - and essay on - Camera Lucida (English edition) is a beautiful palimpsest: a series of blurred stripes of type in which the occasional word can be deciphered and one of the images reproduced by Barthes - a portrait of Mondrian by Kertész - glimpsed. Khan did the same thing with On Photography by Susan Sontag. The whole of the book can be seen in an instant, but the density of information is such that Sontag's elegant formulations add up to, and are reduced to, a humming, unreadable distillation. Already slight, the gap between texts and Khan's images will shrink further if the books are reissued with his "readings" of them - surrogate author photos? - on the covers.

It's not just books about photography; Khan also photographs photographs. Bernd and Hilla Becher compiled a comprehensive inventory of architectural building types, such as gas towers, all photographed in a stark, neutral style. Khan's composite, every . . . Bernd & Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, transforms their rigid geometries into a fuzzy, vibrating mass, more like a smudged charcoal drawing of a shivering iron jelly than a photograph.

These - the Sontag, the Barthes and the Bechers - were the first things by Khan that I came across. It was obvious he was on to something. A better sense of what that something might be can be seen at the Victoria Miro Gallery, in London, from today. Practically everything in this, Khan's first UK solo show, is a composite of some kind, but the range and depth of the idea have been extended with uncanny success.

Freud, in his famous essay, mentions "the constant recurrence of the same thing" as a symptom of "the Uncanny". In Khan's picture of every page of the recent Penguin edition, the black gutter at the centre throbs like a premonition or memory of an Optical Art void. It makes you wonder if, as well as psychoanalysis, Freud invented the Rorschach blot. In the background, two of the paintings discussed by him, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, peer through a shifting sleet of type like emanations of the unconscious or something. It's only a book - only a photo of a book - but it pulses like a living thing.

Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978. His mother, who had trained as a pianist, worked as a nurse. She converted to Islam after meeting his father, a doctor. It was his father's idea that Idris - himself a non-practising Muslim - photograph every page of the Qur'an. Since a significant part of the population believes that the complexities of the world can be resolved by this one book, there is a certain logic in taking things a stage further and reducing the book to a single manifestation of itself. The result is incomprehensible. And lovely. The patterns bordering each page are turned into a solid black frame so that the book becomes - as is often said of photography - a window on to the world. Inside this frame - rigid, unalterable, definitive - all is in flux. Fixed meaning dissolves in a blazing grey drizzle. Words, as one of Don DeLillo's narrators says when confronted by a swirl of Arabic script, are "design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation".

Working in a medium wedded to the visible, photographers, perversely and inevitably, have been preoccupied with photographing the invisible. Given his mother's training, music has an allure for Khan. Struggling to Hear . . . After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas is a picture of all of the composer's scores for piano, the impenetrable mass of black serving as a visual corollary of Beethoven's increasing deafness.

Each art form has its own advantages and limitations. Words and music unfold successively, through time. Photography is about an instant. By analogy it can ask the impossible: in this case, what if you could hear every note of Beethoven's sonatas in an instant? What would that look like? And when we think of a piece of music that we know well, don't we sometimes remember it, not phrase by phrase, but in its amorphous entirety?

It is often said that photographers freeze time, but Khan does the opposite. This can be seen most clearly in his remixes of Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies of the 1880s (a well-documented source of inspiration for Francis Bacon). Muybridge used fast-shutter speeds to break action into moment-by-moment increments, rendering movement stationary. Khan takes these sequences of isolated moments and unfreezes time by combining them in a single image. Muybridge's strictly mechanical record of a man getting out of bed becomes a vision of the unconscious lifting clear of the body, a dream of waking. It's like a photographic equivalent of Henri Fuseli's Nightmare, an out-of-body experience made flesh - and vice versa.

To learn more about artists' working methods, some paintings have been X-rayed so that preliminary versions of masterpieces are brought to the surface. Khan's photographs are a kind of reverse X-ray, laying bare by accretion. Marrying up the eyes of all Rembrandt's self-portraits, reducing them to the same size and layering them digitally together, Khan effectively photographs him with an exposure time lasting the length of the artist's life. Rembrandt by Himself offers an experience akin to the painter looking at the mirror in the moment of his death, when the evidence of a lifetime of intense self-scrutiny flashes before his grave-dark eyes in a single instant.

There are precedents for these essays in visual condensation: most recently, Fiona Banner's paintings in which a film is verbally transcribed in her own hand so that an entire movie can be seen - but not read - in an instant, on a single canvas. In the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing empty movie palaces and drive-ins. Using an exposure time equal to the duration of the film, Sugimoto reduced the contents of whatever was on screen - car chases, murders, betrayals, romance - to a single moment of radiant whiteness. The most explicit precursors, however, are also the earliest. They also enable us to view Khan's situation and methods in a broader historical and contemporary context.

In the late 19th century, photography became an important tool in an alliance between some of the "scientific" fads of the day - physiognomy, eugenics, racial taxonomy - and attempts by the police and the state to isolate types likely to commit crimes. Francis Galton believed that there could "hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomic type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture". His composites of convicted criminals duly showed "not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime". Using similar techniques, Arthur Batut, in France, made "type-portraits" to identify the defining traits of particular races, tribes or families (including his own). In a phrase that might have come from Khan himself, Batut spoke of these composites as "images of the invisible", images that shimmer with the same ghostly air that we see in Khan's.

Khan is himself a composite of artist and photographer. For more than a few current practitioners, the advantages of identifying themselves as artists rather than photographers can be summed up as a six-word hustle: Print bigger, sell less for more. For my money, Khan is as much of an artist as any other photographer currently working. He is a conceptual artist in the straightforward sense that thought is implicit in the act of looking at his work.

A lot of contemporary British art flogging itself as conceptual has the intellectual depth of a paddling pool and the gravitas of a helium balloon; Khan's work is dense, multilayered (literally) and profound.
The danger is that this composite thing could just become his shtick. He could do every page of every book, every this of every that. Every . . . Photograph Taken Whilst Travelling Around Europe in the Summer of 2002 seems a rather pointless novelty - there's nothing to see. Its relative failure suggests that Khan's method tends to work better when applied to existing works of art. You can almost hear certain books summoning him to them. It is only a matter of time, surely, before he does every page of Borges's story "The Aleph", in which the narrator discovers a spot where "all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist".

Needless to say, not everything lends itself equally fruitfully to his attention. Garry Winogrand said that he took photographs "to find out what something will look like photographed", and Khan, in his mediated way, is motivated by a similarly random curiosity about what might emerge when he opts to give an image the treatment. I'm guessing that a fair amount of stuff gets processed and then discarded once the preliminary findings are in.

In tandem with the Miro show, inIVA is showcasing Khan's six-minute film of Gabriella Swallow playing bits of six cello suites, with sound and image repeated, overlain and mixed together. It's interesting to see Khan expanding his repetition compulsion into the realm of the moving image but, for me, A Memory After Bach's Cello Suites lacks the eerie concentration of stilled works like the huge Caravaggio: His Last Years. Fifteen late works by the painter who, according to John Berger, depicted a world that "displays itself in hiding", who found a promise "in the darkness itself", are turned into a tangled kaleidoscope of disembodied bodies, a swirling knot of light.

In the course of these negative excavations a form of auto-interrogation is at work, as Khan's "discoveries" question the ways in which accumulation can both reveal and obscure essence. Every . . . William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain transforms these great paintings of light and air into a brooding soup with an amoeba-mushroom curdling in the swampy twilight. And yet something glimmers, faintly, through the murk. What could it be?

Walter Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, the process of which Tate postcards are symptoms and which Khan has pushed to an extreme, stripped artworks of their "aura". Ironically, Khan's obsessive reproduction invests works with an aura buried within them. Consistent with Barthes's notion of what makes a photograph special, this is, simultaneously, something that Khan adds to the originals and which, none the less, is already there.

lost time and the redemption of time

A moment, from many years ago. Vaguely recalled. But if the hands of time are broken, the radiant white face still yields..

the song of the fisherman

Amb quins altres sentits me'l fareu veure
aquest cel blau damunt de les muntanyes,
i el mar immens, i el sol que pertot brilla?
Deu-me en aquests sentits l'etema pau
i no voldre mes cel aquest cel blau.
----M.

Once upon a time there was a little fish who liked to swim by the side of the big fish. She even liked it when the big fish was silent, in one of his quiet moods, just contemplating Very Serious Things. Well, one day the little fish asked the big one,

You know, they say there's a vast and endless deep blue sea around here somewhere. That's what they say.

Well, what of it?

Oh, nothing in particular, she replied. Er...I was just wondering if you've seen it and if so whether you wouldn't mind telling me how to get there ?

Well, you ask too many questions little one. But, since you're a friendly little fish and a good companion in these murky waters I might as well tell you this: there is such a place, an infinite sea, but one has to be out of it before one can see it.

Oh, I see, said the little fish, somewhat disappointed since she had always set great store in knowing things. Now, she thought to herself, I shall never know this great and wondrous sea. But since she had a restless nature she continued:

Wouldn't one die like that?

That is true, my friend. But once you pass through beyond death it isn't so bad.

The little fish now thought that big fish was really quite silly after all-and he wasn't that big either! He was speaking of things he hadn't seen, speaking without thinking, as he often did.

So, where is this place, 'beyond death'?

Oh, they say it's a place around here somewhere. That's what they say.

The small fish was infuriated by big fish's general stupidity and his evasiveness. She could never catch him out. So, she swam away when he was lost in his own thoughts, delivering one of his sermons on the General State of the World Without Crows.

Then, as she swam faster and faster, she suddenly felt lighter and could see that the water had become the clearest, the most bluest and tranquil that one could ever imagine. Except, there was no-one around as far as they eye could see. Then she wondered to herself, was I really only dreaming when I was talking to big fish or is this a dream that I find myself in now.

It made her sad to think of big fish wallowing around alone like that at the bottom of the dark sea, like a fallen star. And even though it hurt her, she was very happy that she had remembered him, thought of him.

Perhaps he'd been caught in one of those nets that human beings so like to cast into the sea, so as to prevent fish from reaching the refracted light. Or maybe he had simply forgotten her. For the first time in her life she thought:

I am a fish without the Tigris
I am the Tigris without a fish.

against the world

One must hate the things that prevent one from loving.
Today, an attack on a shrine.

Meda Ishq - Supreme Ishq

the estranged soul

I fell asleep. Forgive me. Unfaithful, renouncing my heart, my city, like a bird that dreams of a star. My medieval lamp still on, glowing dimly, but glowing. When I awoke I dreamt I was somewhere else and that I was someone else. Led down brilliant white streets in Cordoba by the memory of you, the lustre of your eyes. The whole world was in flower, and you were the soul of the world. Or an unknown street in Buenos Aires, stumbling to speak the word. In Bukhara, where 'potato' means plum, and darkness falls all around me, near the 'hat bazzar'. There I saw you, and became someone else.

another day on the Titanic

Well, another day, another attack. This time off Liberty Market, which I usually pass on my way to Variety for my books. What to say? Not much that hasn't already been said, actually: the deepening sense of an impending doom; the growing fear that the country is, given a year or two of more of the same, ripe for a takeover by the apes; the slight apprehension that we might be next since we promote western decadence (read: reading!..and girls wearing jeans).

Here, European colleagues want to talk about the 'dangers' of the Enlightenment and the alienated 'I'-and that's always more exciting than the pedestrian, plodding thought of the liberal, with his leisured ambivalence. But one can't help thinking that what is needed here is more reason, and less exciting thought.

A few Lahori responses:

1.Well, that's one way of saving the match!
2. This was the hockey team's way of saying : don't forget us.
3. It was the Tamil Tigers.
4. An international conspiracy so that the World Cup isn't held in Pakistan
(yeah, I particularly like that one: cricket is the centre of the world and Brown and Obama- though neither can understand cricket- simply can't stomach the possibility that a Muslim country might win something).
5. It was the Indians. No Muslim could do this.
6. There was no security lapse. (I kid thee not)
7. There was fuck-all entertainment here before, so now what do we do?

the silence

When the words are lost, does the silence come across? You've remembered how to forget me after all. Grammars of the soul unlearnt; the wrong word in the wrong place. On a blank piece of paper write my name. No-one will understand.

Do we die of some kind of volition, even if it cannot be understood?
---James Salter.

'Is it impossible? Is the intangible in our arts and our natures, the space between our words, the things seen in between the things shown, inevitably discarded in the remaking process, and if so can it be filled up with other spaces, other visions, that satisfy or even enrich us enough so that we do not mind the loss? To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential - in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives.'
---Salman Rushdie

dunces against the world !

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality.
---Sen.

There's a tendency to think that only we are truly free, really rational and, therefore, only we can with any justification call ourselves human. Everyone else, the sages, the saints and artists, the philosophers, poets and prophets: everyone before the Enlightenment wasn't quite there-and this includes Russia, the 'otherland,' with her suspect distrust of reason. Despite the monstrous absurdity of such a thought there arises the question of what is meant by 'true humanity' and why "the west" has thought of those who weren't 'modern' as dunces, as being 'without mind' (Hugh Brody, 'The Other Side of Eden'). [The same can and has been said of women, black people etc.] Of course, it goes without saying that this confidence in reason has itself been undermined. One only has to mention the word Auschwitz to regain one's humility. And what of the Trenches, the Bomb, the Gulags-and at another level: Freud, Darwin...

No, sorry, one cannot take seriously the claims that the Enlightenment represents the only enlightenment, that humanity reached its apex in the 20 th century, or that socio-economic progress is an unequivocally good thing. That doesn't translate into: you're 'against' the world-you'd still rather live in this period rather than any other (who wouldn't?) and why always this stark choice? Might we not return to the fundamental questions, not to reproach, not to score points, but to simply ask again: what does it mean to be a human being. That we have to ask already says something...

From Jacques Maritain, 'True Humanism':

For the medievals the mysteries of man's nature were not studied for themselves (scientifically, psychologically). The focus was on the objective side, rather than on the subjective. Man was guaranteed by the 'object', so to speak. A certain richness of comprehension was foresworn in favour of a 'metaphysical modesty'. It might be said, that modern man wanted to know himself in time, and not just in space.

It would be absurd to pretend that in the Middle Ages the act of self-awareness in the creature was not implicitly accomplished, in the very movement of metaphysical or theological thought towards being and towards God, and in the movement of artistic and poetic thought towards the work of creation. It was on the side of deliberate and express reflection that this self-consciousness was lacking.

They lived these things, experienced certain interior states and did not need to reflect on them. They were known in life, more than in an act of reflective consciousness. The 'deed' is both thought and action.

The dissolution of the Middle Ages is the birth of an 'anthropocentric rehabilitation' of the creature, it is the very rehabilitation of nature. Man is the measure of all things. No longer is man a half-fallen angel; at last he can find his home, here on earth.

The three R's: Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution:

The 'Protestant discovery' is a solution of despair: the creature declares its nothingness. But this declaration is its own. Calvinism is a theology of grace without freedom. The absolute humanist theology, on the other hand, the theology of naturalism, seeks to save human freedom at the expense of divine causality: freedom without grace. Man makes his own destiny-the self-made man, the man without any qualities. The universe is given over to geometric determinism, necessity, and man barely exists as bright spark swamped by so much gloom (Gnosticism).

Humanism suggested a perfect natural wisdom independent of faith or revelation. Nature was the explanation of itself (a substance in Spinoza's terminology, rather than a mode of substance). The perspective of 'heaven and earth' becomes a mechanical dichotomy rather than an organic subordination. We now have knowledge and faith, and it is not too hard to imagine the latter's importance dwindling, shrinking to an unreachable point beyond the horizon, only to be reached by a tremendous leap. 'Heaven' becomes something heteronomous, something imposed on truth, lyingly added, and therefore something that can be rejected. What remains is natural man who is naturally good.

Hegel dissolves the whole content of religion in the supreme metaphysical enumeration of the pure reason and makes of the State the mystical body through which man attains to the liberty of the sons of God. Man, completely detached from the supernatural order, makes himself his own centre.

Pessimism cuts every connection between the creature and a higher order. Then, since the good life is necessary, the creature takes things easy and becomes himself the centre of his own lower world. A rehabilitation of the creature turned back on itself and cut off, so to say, from the transcendent principle of its life.

The incontestable enrichments of of civilisation have given entrance to the interior torture chamber of man become a prey unto himself.

He who sees Ratio sees only himself (Blake)

The polemic of rationalism condemns any outside intervention (revelation, grace) or the authority of a law which has its origins outside man.

A miracle is simply not admissible to this way of thinking.

useless knowledge

Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere.

"Difference in the community is a sign of Divine Mercy".
'This was the guiding principle of Muslim communities until their encounter with European modernity.'
--Zizek

Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life. And if God had so willed He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise]...
--Q:5:48

Faced with 'the other' there is a tendency-perhaps one might say, a natural tendency-to reduce everything to the terms of one's own self-understanding. This is my way. At the cultural level this expresses itself in such sentiments as I don't understand how [...] can believe in such and such a thing. Faced with the plurality of beliefs, ways of life, there is an inclination to simplify by positing one fundamental motivation behind our interests (power, self-interest , evolution) and/or to neglect the possibility of varied manifestations of human nature.

Of course, much of this is done in good faith; the plurality of the world is, from a certain perspective, disconcerting and we can only live in one segment of space and time, thus often finding concepts derived from other segments wyrd or flawed. One has to admit, though, that much of it stems from sheer ignorance and a poor education (and by education we mean a temperament that is fundamentally open to the world, to the wonder of its strangeness).


Here in the west the easiest target of that irreducible strangeness is, perhaps, Islam and so one often hears outrageous things said about the Prophet that bigots would not dare not utter against Judaism for fear of being tarnished with the label of anti-Semitism (and here the whirl of competing claims of victimization gets under way). And the same holds in the land of the pure: the Jew, the Hindu. Again, such an outlook is not to be wholly unexpected given that we live in an age that does not how to talk about anything that is holy and that finds it difficult imagining that some things are sacred (Cavell's wonderful essay on Kierkegaard and Authority). Everything is up for 'scholarship' or comes within the scope of the artist's freedom. To say otherwise is to return to fanaticism and obscurantism.

But what this overlooks is, first of all, our public reason which demands that we talk with others, strangers, in a reasonable way -even if we privately think their views are a bit odd. This is, of course, only a first step, one of common decency and civility. In the cartoon controversy the British press and public made what I think was the wise decision that fraternity and the desire to get along with other people was a better view of liberalism than the abstract notion of rights (the right to say something). It is a version of Gawain: courtesy is the matching of inner and outer, of knowing when to speak and when to keep quiet...reasonableness triumphs over reason in a quintessentially English way.

[In discussions with Hindu friends. Very rarely would they discuss 'controversial' matters -and if we did it would invariably be in private and with kindness and consideration. I think this has much to do with a sub-continental approach to life: there is a sort of fanaticism in a person that wants to speak openly about everything (one thinks of Oprah Winfrey and the American love of confession, the settlers' hatred of the Red Man for his 'secretive nature')]

A second point is that we surely have the capacity to understand much of what is apparently alien. 'Understand' does not mean that one adopt the other point of view but that one understands where 'the other person is coming from'; one understands how it might be possible for someone to take up a position that is not your own. Berlin, in his essay on Vico called it fantasia-imaginative insight, I think; the capacity to conceive of more than one way of categorising reality; Einfuhlung, empathy, informed imagination, something that depends on more than 'facts'. Com-passion: the ability to suffer with others, is the highest form of understanding. What would we be without the ability to get out of our own skins, imagine other selves, other ways of life as profoundly human ways of life?

It seems to me that the hypertrophy of the mind in the modern west is no substitute for this integral intelligence. Technical brilliance and a dazzling array of skills is not a compensation for a broad and humane outlook on life (George Steiner, Errata).

'What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information , but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals , and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos-all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.

Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful than the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the source of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of the intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space.'

---Bertrand Russell, 'Useless Knowledge'