Seize the Day

For Nichole:

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
----Herman Melville

Did that other, older place really exist or did we dream it, wish it that way? When one is young nothing is more real to us than the day we live; nothing is more real (though irrelevant) than the day that has passed. This is quite the opposite when we grow older. The past is another country.

I described Lahore to someone as a very large village of seven million people.They replied:

Don't you know it was once the capital of the Mughal Empire.

But Lahore is the centre of the world (if not the universe) and has no concern for the passing splendour of insignificant things like an Empire! She remains a ramshackle collection of villagers, acrobats, vagabonds, prostitutes, pimps, dreamers, poets, broken-hearted fools, bumpkins, fanatics, pseudo-intellectuals, and malicious gossipers (and that's just the elite!) Nowhere else will you see someone dress up in a housecoat, burn fires in the late afternoon, start the day at eleven o'clock or people sweep up rubbish in the early morning fog with such grace, one arm behind their backs. The aim always, and everywhere, is to do nothing. With wonderful indifference the Lahori will characteristically say, If not, then not.

The old, run down part of Lahore is still called the inner city-and rightly so, because what remains but memories? ; for the Lahori his city is greater than Mecca. He who hasn't seen Lahore hasn't been born, so they say.

This is the way things were, the way things are. Lahore, eternal Lahore, indestructible to the very end.
-------------------------------

Was listening to a tribute to John Arlott. Some of his famous quotes:

1. Of Derek Randall, a cricketer bursting with nervous energy:
"And he walks to the crease like an unmade bed."

2. Of a cover drive played by Wally Hammond:
"And the whole of summer was rolled into that one stroke."

I like that. Everything summarised by a single action or phrase, like volo ut sis.

When someone says something that distills the whole story down to a simple but elegant phrase, when they can say that it "all boils down to" in a poetic way then we say: he has caught the whole river in a small cup.
---Swami.

--------------------

The Dougal tells me of a Turkish man who has joined the BNP. They call him half-wog!

Was reading that there were 60,000 Mandaeans in Iraq in the 1990's; there are now just over 5,000.

Reading the story of Toni Balestra. Walking back home after appearing on University Challenge he stops, inexplicably, to help someone having trouble starting his car. The man offers him a lift. The car crashes. Toni cannot remember anything that happened after. That was 1975. Thirty two years on he has near perfect memory of events prior to the accident but nothing-not even short term memory-after. It is as if life has stopped at that precise moment, as if the whole of one's life depended on that one fatal decision. One juncture in time structuring the whole of time.

Plenty Coups says of life in the reservation: And then nothing happened.
----------------------

The more I think about Bellow's Seize the Day the more I think of its religious undertones. Reading backwards always means we read another book. The main protagonist changes his name, tries to find his real name, which is the freedom of the individual, not of the generations, the species.

And the father refuses to carry the son's burdens. He will have to suffer on his own to come to the truth: I am not going to pick up a cross. I'll see you dead, Wilks, by Christ...

On the chaos of a life with no order of the soul, a life that isn't strung together in any theme but only progresses in fits and starts: Everything was like the faces of a playing card, upside down, either way.

Wilks must learn: Bringing people into the here-and-now.The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us..Only the present is real.

And what is real, what is imaginary?
Dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects.

The worst kind of people always want to look at you in a clear mirror or a camera. But extreme beauty (and ugliness..Medusa) cannot be perceived directly. What is the right way to look?

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own which he figured out by private thinking..you had to translate and translate, explain and explain, and it was the punishment of hell not to understand or be understood and yet the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone..There sons and fathers are themselves, and a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel's mouth. There truth for everybody may be found...

the summer of '85

Or was it '86? Anyway, Amer, my cousin, the ultimate cool dude (something like 'the Swede' from Roth) showed up out of the blue, straight back from Venice Beach. Who else amongst the Paks listened to soul and blues (er, well, except for the Dougal, but then she was also listening to Rimsky-Korsakov as well).

And this was the one song of that summer.

Summer.
Victoria park, stealing a court to play tennis in, or one-touch football on the patch of grass we called 'Wembley'; lazy summer days sucking berry-flavoured icicles, or playing cricket against the old tree late, late into the evening. Bjorn Borg, the man of all seasons, beyond the seasons. Reveling in the Windies crushing the English-Welsh and immigrant sentiments swirling, taking delight in the defeat of the beast. And to this day, still find it hard to admit that white folks can be revolutionaries! Though there is E.P.

Miles: white musicians: always one beat behind the tempo.

Yes, there was the racism, the encounters with the occasional yobs (running for my life in one instance) but the strange thing about childhood is that you don't think about distinctions (Roxana: please take note!). Not Welsh, not Pakistani; neither muslim nor christian, not black or white. Not this, not that -the Hinus would say. And why do I need to read about this later: neither Greek nor Jew, neither of 'the West' or 'the East'.

Still flinch at the word 'true': a true muslim (baloney!) or a true patriot (nonsense on stilts). These are meaningless words to me. Hannah was, as always, spot on. I feel like being sick when I see people waving their little flags, all starry-eyed. Or Jewish settlers with their fake beards, 'pious' little christians with their sunday-school, Ned-Flanders drivel, or muslims with their suffocating cardboard morality.

So, how did I end up like the black sun? Listening to Chopin and Bach, for Christ's sake! This defeats me. [Answers on a postcard].

Minefield - I Level

different trains

Steve Reich - Different Trains (1988) - Europe--During the War - Kronos Quartet

On this day more than any other I want to be alone. To be alone is to be complete, she said. But sometimes one finds things, like a flower growing in the cracks of the abstract city, or a mushroom slumbering in the tall grass, lazily, aimlessly dreaming away, running down time and one is amazed that all that is incomplete is so fragile, tender, and precious. At Mile End thirty small children scramble aboard, the crackling of their laughter disturbing the serious world of the adults. They are herded in, though they don't seem to mind this. In other times,on other trains, in other places, there would be no such laughter.

as straight as the crow flies

Dark, wounded, crow sat on the rooftop, alone at last, above the world, his mind slowly turning, glistening with dark thoughts. Nothing is nothing. And nothing brings peace.

From a distance he spied her beyond the window. Sees her clearly. Surrounded by people, engaged in glittering conversation, her head tossed back now and then in convulsions of laughter, her image in the mirror like a painting; the clinking of ice, the crackling of fires, the sparkling, illumined world of humans with its light bouncing off objects, spreading fan-like through green glass; the warmth of human fellowship, the solidarity of being, of two-ness. The rich, luxurious patterned life, a life that is woven from repose and joy and deep still moments...all this was like something out of a story for Crow.

Crow. Above the world, alone at last. Spiked existence, nothing like the angular mind of the humans. Crow, God's failure, felt the warmth of his own body against the bitingly cold northern wind for a while. Then some ice fell into his eye, like a shard of glass, or stinging grey ashes.

Age after age, generation after generation, carrion-crows had survived on the morsels of the one thing necessary. A single thought and sharpened insight had seen them through the passing seasons, the thawing of the great seas, the migrations from warmer climes to the barbarian lands. But now existence was sinking into essence, his silver-pointed words inheriting the black, the summer-gold of his heart fading the more he remembered. Tongue-twisted, he would remain silent, speechless. The frenzy of a chaotic mind, the soul wandering through the endless night, the blueness that leads to blindness. He sees his lifeless shadow on the snow, like a discarded kite, paler and uglier than he imagined, and he thinks to himself: I am not me. I am another.

in the heart of the cave

A presence revealed by pleasure. Each creature here is at home in man..They are making a single sign, and they are dancing in a circle to make this sign..They were for the dark. They were hidden in the dark so that what they embodied would outlast everything visible.
--John Berger.

A hand, a smile, a sign. The sign. Of your presence. But a sign is sign of what isn't here, but there.
The name that names least is the name.

Crow asked Man what it was like to live in a cave, all alone?

You tell me, replied Man.

But the cold, the absence of light, the waiting for the sun over the horizon... how can that be endured, asked the dark one.

Yearning makes the heart grow deeper. In the darkness we do not look for footprints, but summon all our strength and wait attentively so that what was lost may be found again, and again.

Crow was exasperated: You're such a strange one, poor Man. Don't you miss the open, don't you dream of other lives, other realities? Have you no desire to break out of the circle?

You ask so many questions, dear Crow! Here, in the heart of the cave we see many things, dream much, and make many long and arduous journeys. Here, in the inside city there are many strange, exotic, and wondrous places. And is it not said:

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.

Crow could not fathom man's words: You speak with such a twisted tongue my friend and it saddens me to think of you down here, afraid and unknown.

The man laughed and Crow flew away.

Crow, you are like a black sun, soaring above the real world, with the essence of man in your heart, your flight in the white sky like a stroke of black ink from one of my brushes.

And with that Man, sad at the thought that his friend had left him, took out his knife and carved an image of the crow into the heart of the cave.

You shall always be far from me, beloved Crow. But you shall always be near as well.

Bowie 1, Taleban 0

Latest score just reaching us...

Under Pressure - Queen & David Bowie

for China girl:

China Girl - David Bowie

Life in Stone

The night is also a sun.

And for many a year thou might have seen the sun, on its rising, incline away from their cave on the right, and, on its setting, turn aside from them on the left, while they lived on in that spacious chamber.
---Q:18:17

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever,
both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space
---C. Milosz

From Celia:

Here's a poem for you, too, Billo. Anna, of course - first, last and always:

Yet somewhere life is simple, after all,
A light to warm and cheer and glisten
A neighbour there at dusk across the wall
Chats with a girl, with only trees to listen
To this, the tenderest talk of all.

The life we lead is decorous and wearing,
Our bitter trysts impend, like rites to preach,
While with its gusts a harebrained wind is tearing
The clauses off a scarcely started speech.

For nothing, though, are we prepared to lose
Our granite city great with fame and woes,
Its spreading rivers with their crystal floes,
Its gloomy gardens dusky green repose,
All those half-heard accents of the muse.

Beneath the chill roof of my empty lair
I count not the days that are hollow,
The Apostles letters I study there,
The words of the Psalmodist I follow.

But blue are the stars, the frost all lace;
New marvels each tryst heaps on,-
In the Book a red maple leaf marks the place
Of the High Song of Solomon.

Anna Akhmatova. From White Flock. 1915.

10:49 AM

out of place

Out of touch. Out of sight, ought of mind.

Previously the barbarian had always been recognisable, always hovering around the city gates, menacingly. But now, who is to say what is inner and what is outer? We live cheek by jowl with strangers and there is no place to where we could expel and confine 'the other'..we're running out of wastelands. From now on we will have to exclude the undesirables from within the city walls. The exclusion of the underclass is one template for this, one way of making the poor invisible. Millions of people may live in slum conditions in Karachi but if you live in 'Defence' chances are you will be shocked to learn that such places really exist, that people who look like us, who speak the same words for loving kindness are, in fact, real people.

How to build a city within a city.

Exclusion zones and CCTV...a surveillance society; the law itself can be used to prevent "anti-social behaviour," keep people from trespassing, strengthen immigration and naturalization laws. Apartheid is only the most blatant form of these interdictory spaces.

Virtually all cities across the world are starting to display spaces and zones that are powerfully connected to other valued spaces across the urban landscape, as well as across national, international and even global distances. At the same, though, there is a palpable and increasing sense of local disconnection in such places from physically close, but socially and economically distant, places and people.

They roam the streets like ghosts, shadows, mirror images of the virtually connected elites. The nightmares of the latter are centred around these steppenwolves: prowlers, stalkers, loiterers, beggars, travellers & gypsies, paedophiles in the community, Islamic radicals ("the Islamic threat"). Be afraid, be very afraid. Car bombs and unknown diseases, dirty bombs. According to Stephen Flusty the paramount concern of urban developers is to bar access to these undesirables, "losers".

Community living. Sure. But who, exactly, is my brother. Across these 'internal moats' one can be excused for thinking there is only Friend and Enemy.
---from Bauman, Liquid Times.

Venice.

The power of the economic contract trumps all and something the State is forced to recognise on pains of overlooking the dominant form of power; even Christian fellowship or fraternity is ineffectual in this regard. Venice is a city of strangers, a floating, shimmering world. Is the intense feeling for community a reaction to weak ties of citizenship?

The Jews represent pollution (a familiar theme in the sordid history of antisemitism). Merchants bow to them when agreeing to a contract rather than face the ignominy of bodily contact: a simple handshake. The market does, indeed, provide for the needs of strangers. The Jew is the stranger to the common (Christian) body. Venice's fear of decline, her self-loathing, is projected on to other people (a message for today, perhaps). The city cannot bind people together any more, the polis is falling away at the seams..only fear and creature comforts can produce that warm glow of belonging now. In 1397 they have to wear yellow badges. In 1416 prostitutes have to wear yellow scarves. Both are polluters and lax morals lead to moral and political decline.

The ghettos. Purity and danger: the old tribal instincts yet again. But from this separation, from within this accursed land, something holy could emerge...
--From Flesh and Stone

Night on the Sun

Hush, gentle one, the roar subsides, the seas of light settle. What was meant to be, now is. On the far side of the moon there are people identical to us living different lives, the mirror image of our own. There, black is white and in is out. And it is night on the sun.

Night has fallen on the sun, has come to rest there, give her solace. Darkness has made her visible again. And so we gaze, and gaze, intently and with ever greater longing. No more reflections or looking through the glass darkly; but eye to eye, and face to face at last-a different type of blindness at the still point of the heart.

And you walk beside the beloved, lost, and found, like the sea and the shore, when it is night on the sun. But here, here on earth, only black keys are struck, out of tune, with no reason and no rhyme. Here there was a kind of coldness in your stare even when it wasn't night on the sun. And when it is night on earth, black is still black, blue is still blue; I am still me, and you are still you.

the orientalist

Is its leaf one self-divided
Forked into a shape of strife?
Or have the two of them decided
On a symbiotic life?

I am single, I am double.
-----Ginkgo Biloba, Goethe.

This book, like its main protagonist, contains at least two stories in one. Ostensibly it is about the collapse of the old familiar European world and the birth of the historical and political movements that would shape our century. But at its heart is the tale of a wandering Jew and a love story.

Early on in this compelling book Reiss writes of how Lev Nussimbaum (aka. Essad Bey, aka. Kurban Said) despairs over the forces of revolutionary change-Bolshevism- that began by transforming the human face into a grimace. For a man so obsessed with masks and shifting identites this is a telling comment.

The life and times we are drawn into -brilliantly retold by Reiss- is the story of the escape and exile of the prolific and bizarre writer, Lev Nussimbaum. The world into which he is born into is one that will become hardly recognizable as it is increasingly determined by History and Biology (Communism and Fascism), the ideologies of class and race that would devastate the continent. Lev, like all escape artists, seeks to avoid any such fixing of identities or loyalties and this is what makes him such a complex character.

Along this journey from the 'wild west', oil-rich city of Baku to the cabaret and coffee-house culture of Weimar Germany we are introduced through a series of sketches to a whole host of strange and eccentric characters: Viereck, the writer and Nazi sympathizer, Ernst 'Putzi' , Hitler's Harvard-educated press secretary, Baron Omar-Rolf, Erika Lowendahl, a Jazz-age poetess whom Lev marries, Varian Fry whose mission it is to save two hundred of Europe's top intellectuals and artists from the grip of the Nazis and Italo Balbo, founder of the Italian Air Force who sets up a futurist experiment in the deserts of Libya.

But the real star of the story is, of course, Lev and this is in no small part due to the fact that the protean , ambiguous nature of his character deeply resonates with our modern sensibilities. Was he a Jew or a Muslim, a supporter of Mussolini or of the monarchy, a traditionalist or just a hopeless dreamer?

There is no doubt that Lev felt pangs of nostalgia for the old world; this is made clear in some intriguing chapters where his enthusiasm for the 'wild jews' of the Caucasus or his admiration for the silent infinites of the Turkmenistan desert , or his love affair with the lost splendour, the "fallen greatness" of the muslim world are made apparent.

But he was, if anything, a revolutionary conservative whose place was the "radical centre" and not on either 'side' of the 'left'/'right' divide that would tear Europe apart. In the collision of the old and new worlds, East and West, perhaps Lev's charm was in that his real loyalty was to his imagination.

As a Jew Lev must have felt the world closing in on him with the advancement of the totalitarian nightmare. Reiss doesn't cover much new ground here but it is interesting nevertheless. In some sense, Lev's partiality to monarchism was understandable. The Empires-by their sheer persistence over time- came to represent the natural order of things, a relaxed tolerance toward difference (Constantinople being the best example here) and a space where "one could be left alone". If anything, it was modern totalitarinaism with its absolute power to define people that was the 'closed world'. Indeed, Lev's nostalgia for the passing world is that for "the best face of Europe which was a radiant, carefree, cultivated countenance..light as a feather."

There a number of parallel stories running through this book and they raise issues that will strike us as of immediate relevance. For example, amongst the array of details that Reiss weaves into the narrative is the growth of the Freikorps who with their anarchic violence are the precursors to the revolutionary insurgents that we have become all too accustomed to in this day and age. We also come across Russian emigres and instinctively wonder what would have happened had the 'beautiful souls' won and not the Marxists. The latter represented, in some sense, another victory of the west (materialism) over "the East". Equally troubling is the portrait of the nihilism and aimlessness in German cities. This is a point that the anthropolgist Hugh Brody and the sociologist Z. Bauman would agree upon: in an age of liquid modernity it is the city dwellers with all of their restlessness who are the new nomads.

And when we read of the Emergency Act of 1919 to counter-act the 'threat from the East' we are immediately drawn to the State of Exception in our own times.

At the centre of this book, then, is the remarkable and captivating story of a person who has deep sympathies-like other Jewish orientalists- with the profound pluralism of the old world (European and Muslim, East and West). Perhaps this is a story for our times. In a world that is increasingly being driven into exclusivities: 'us or them', perhaps the story of Lev offers the opportunity of bridging such artifical divides...us and them perhaps?

But even if we put the politics of it to one side we are left with an account of a dazzling style of soul. It is what Reiss calls 'Zweieinsanikeit'- "grace-filled dual solitude".

I think back to those last days of Lev and imagine him writing frenetically, half-crazed by the excruciating pain of his illness, the morphine, and the desire to tell his story in his own words. Already an old man in a new world, a world where the spirit of the times looked to the past with a venomous hatred. And I picture him looking down below at the fishermen with their fixed routines and their immemorial ways that have existed since time out of mind. I can sense the growing unease, the gloom that presses heavily on his shoulders as the classical world behind him disintegrates, the centuries-old traditions of civility and restraint on the verge of going up in the blaze of collective madness that is sweeping across Europe. An unimaginable blackness that is no match to his illness.

But then he looks across the open seas and knows that there is a mystical union between sea and desert. And he is drawn to it. He feels safer here than any European does within his four walls....to get lost in the desert, to lose the way once entered upon, is impossible for infinite distances he feels a contact between himself and all the oases and clans....

-----http://www.theorientalist.info/

t

You keep your distance with your system of touch.

--Tears for Fears.

I reach for the cup of tea
Hand touches cup
I am aware of the touch.

In that momentary touch, that solitary moment, is there a 'subject' and an 'object'? Is the 'I' still I? Before this takes place I have already delineated an 'I' and a 'cup' that is independent of me, "pure extension". And yet, it is also true, on second thoughts, that I find myself in this world, at this particular moment, thinking of reaching out. So, there must have been the possibility of a person like me, a cup like that, and a desire just so. A desire to bridge the gap, a desire that would be impossible without the gap. So, the fact that I can posit an I' is itself a possibility (necessity?) of the world.

I can picture the world but does that (can that) picture also contain the act of me picturing? (Escher). Does the world create the desire or is it that the desire is what makes the world 'the world'?

End of the Road.
Thought may tell me what I can know, not how I should live. Knowledge is not understanding.

Beginning of the Road.
Now I think back to it, Mark had asked: Do you want some tea? Does the world come after language, after a question?

Do I sit there thinking whether the tea exists or not, that if I turn my face the other way it will no longer be? How self-centred! How mistrustful!

Is the relation to what is 'not- I' that which constitutes the 'I'? One could map the self by what it desires, by a series of absences. What would we be without that reaching out? Not: would we be the same person, but would we be a person at all? The tea, I note, has no such thoughts. But if I just reach out, thoughtlessly, mechanically, does this mean that I am just matter coming into contact with other matter or that I have no inner life? Everything, it might be argued, lies in having the right approach to the world.

I-It and I-Thou
Here I am; here it is. The chasm can be bridged; but other distances remain: It is not boundless space that separates us but Time..Time is the Space between me and You. And time yet for a hundred indecisions...

I reach for the cup of tea
Hand touches cup
Remembers it is hot.

~~~~

Celia writes:

Oh, Billo, This will seem facetious, but your post reminded me irresistibly of the following, which I'm sure you'll also remember:

There was a young man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
W hen there's no one about in the Quad."
"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

(Attributed to Ronald Knox, who was referring to the philosophy of George Berkley - 1685 -1753. I also seem to recall that E.MForster quotes it at the beginning of A Passage to India. Or was it Howard's End? Or? Somewhere, anyway.)

anton writes:

hi b, each time i come here i think one day i sit down and read all the stuff here. you'll see, one day i will really do that. have not read the april book by kadare but have another one here at home whose name i have forgotten and not yet read either....

"I am in no way interested in immortality,
but only in the taste of tea."
-Lu Tung

have a fine day

7:58 AM

lightness

in summer season, when soft was the sun.

snow fell, undated. light
each summer thronged the glass
...

perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
inside your head, and people in them acting...

rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
the sun-comprehending glass,
and beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

---Larkin.

At Putney station, old but busy. There's more than a hint of winter in the air tonight: hands in pockets, ice in the blood. For the first time the warm yellow lights in other people's houses look comforting, welcoming. Life returns to the interior. For the first time you want to look inside other people's windows, spy on the petty dramas that unfold. You, riddled with light, wonder how totally different lives can carry on so close and yet so oblivious to your own.

Tonight, wise mothers will tell their children not to stay out too late. The enfolding darkness and the bleak buildings have never looked so devoid of light, empty. Is it only us? Reality, whether shallow, dramatic or profound, is indoors. Living this veiled life, anything can be endured-even a cramped space-if there is light and warmth.

The sky is somehow mysteriously darker than it has ever been before-or ever will be. Suddenly, without warning, the station lights come on with a ping and a flicker and there is an audible sigh of relief. Light returns. Holds us. We measure our distance from one another by it; only our shadows criss-cross one another. The light in your eyes has grown old, become soft, sadder. Take a gentle step into this artificial light and smile. Remember summer.

But for a moment we're all sailors on the top deck. We're shipwrecked, you and me. The old man was right. Surround yourself. Keep it out. We strain our eyes, search and search in the dimming evening light. Is there a human soul out there in the silence, the sea?

I'm lost in my own thoughts for some reason and remain quiet for a long time. On the district line our train pulls into a station. I look across at another train that seems to be at a greater height than ours. Between its rusty wheels I see a shimmering arc of light. For a minute it appears as if there is another world beyond those lights and I'm nearly spirited away there. Then the train pulls away, revealing nothing but a simple and tired plastic white light. So, this is reality! Don't look too closely at it.

χαμαίμηλον

On the counter was a glass bowl green as the sea...This gentle hour, this comfortable room, this death. For everything, in fact, every plate and object, utensil, bowl, illustrated what did not exist; they were fragments borne forward from the past, shards of a vanished whole. We live untruth amid evidence of untruth. How does it accumulate, how does it occur?

--James Salter.

It was like a sledge tethered in the still of night, tethered like a wild animal becalmed. Shapes slowly crystallize, finding their form as the snow silently falls all around. The slowly accumulating ice on the window pane, frozen breath, like time itself. Only a flicker of colour remains there, the memory of the night before-sparkling conversation, the clinking of glass, discarded plates, embers and ashes, the last memories like a warm after-glow.

You dreamt of Maragall, or at least his book. Not to be found. Instead, you ask for a mirror, in 'the Catalan style'. Not for you, she said. You do not understand the world it comes from. Cannot see. For you it is a beautiful useless thing.

So, you write dark words to yourself in the dark of night. Your words your own kind of mirror. Wondering all the time what they'll look like in the morning light. It is good to write like this, without seeing oneself.

You wake because of the rattling of the door, the indecipherable stuttering cries of the birds. Some doors should be kept open. Held. You scribbled down something. And then it ended. How beautiful was the sleek blank page. How cold the shining , shimmering white page!

You hear yourself breathe again, the pulse of blood stirring; the hand quickening the heart.

The crow's voice: stifled, muffled, as if he was unsure of himself. Rhythmic measured utterances, dripping like a viscuous fluid out of the spell of the night. Crow, restless crow, has found peace again in his black heart.You realise morning has arrived when you see the curve of her back and smile.

Do flowers dream at night? The dreams of flowers at night are like the silence of things. They float effortlessly in the meadow but are not real.

Whatever I read, whatever I see radiates inwardly into a dream, like the petals of a sunflower or the hands of the sun. Tomorrow, I will keep a picture with me and gaze, and gaze at the beloved.

The Victory of Orthodoxy

The defeat of the iconoclasts is the 'Victory of Orthodoxy.' The Council of Trent in the west was a negative document in that it did not clearly set out the role of the image-only what was not considered permissible (see A. Blunt for further details). In this way, the Renaissance was consolidated. Are we, perhaps, not in the realms of the fundamental distinction: that between sound and image; or is this a disjunction within the tradition of the visual?

'Christ is describable according to his Person, remaining indescribable in his divinity.'Divinity is equally present in the image of a cross, not by virtue of identity of nature, for these objects are not the flesh of God, but by virtue of their relative participation in divinity, for they participate in the grace and the honour.'
--St. Theodore the Studite


'The honour rendered to the image passes to its prototype , for the person who venerates an icon venerates the person represented on it.'
----Basil the Great

The decisions of the 7th Ecumenical Council were signed by representatives of the entire Church including the Roman. But there was a mistranslation of "veneration" for adoration where the Council specified and emphasized that the correct attitude toward the image should be one of honour and veneration, not that of true adoration which befits God alone.

This leads to Charlemagne's Libri Carolini (see Peter Brown) that deprives the sacred image of its dogmatic basis (in the West), handing it over to the imagination of the artist.

'Through the denial of the image , Christianity became an abstract theory..it is not surprising that iconoclasm was linked to a general secularization of the Church , a de-sacralization of all aspects of its life.'

'God the Father is not incarnate and is consequently invisible and non-representable'
---From Ouspensky's Theology of Icons.

An act of humility would lead us to acknowledge that we can know something, but what is this something in comparison to higher orders of knowing, seeing?

To know and to understand is a command, is sanctioned by something that is beyond our own volition: philosophy is bound by the Law (Leo Strauss)

'The Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything. By itself it generously reveals a form , transcendentally, granting enlightenment proportionate to each being, and thereby drawing sacred minds upwards to its permitted contemplation, to participation and to the state of becoming like it'

[again, to Muslim minds, minds that are rooted in a perspective that emphasises utter transcendence, there can be no question of likeness..but then what are the Names, and what is the Law? No, the Pope was wrong on this one]

This implies a veneration of of what is beyond thought and Being and an acceptance of being guided by the light of Revelation.

Scripture tells of the Cause, Principle, Being, Life of all things and this implies two approaches: symbolic and philosophical. We can only 'know' being. We dot know God from His own nature -which remains ineffable-but from the order of beings that bear images of the divine exemplar...
..ascend both by removing all things from Him and affirming them superlatively, and through the causality of things..a ladder. Necessity is the veil of God.

The most perfect knowledge is that which binds us to God

Is the passage from the sensible to the intellectual itself an example of the move from the finite to the infinite? Creation is both a veil that reveals and hides. All points to continuity and discontinuity, similarity and distinction.

'God is known in all things and apart from all things; and God is known through knowledge and through unknowing; on the one hand He is reached by intuition, reason, understanding, appearance, name and yet on the other hand, he cannot be conceived, spoken, or named.'

Genesis: What is thy Name?

There is only a rebuke. Beyond assertion or denial, transcending them. The Divine silence which dwells in that darkness which is a superabundance of light

Divine distinction: the divine unity that overflows into a multiplicity: light of lights.

To praise God through creation: Good, Beauty, Love, Wisdom, Power, Peace..'These perfections which we discover partially in human experience..subsist in God in a distinct manner..He is there super-plenitude, Goodness unbounded'

'The affirmative mirrors the creative profusion of God, unfolding His generosity in a continuous cascade of perfections..on the other hand, the negative path recharts the ascent of finite beings , from limitation to transcendence and silence ['Verily toward God, for God is they limit'].

The negative path shows us the radical incommensurability of our capacities with the goal. 'The highest achievement of reason is to acknowledge its own inadequacy'.

He who knows the finite, knows the Infinite.

Not in a positive way, it must be added, but in a negative way of distinction, the Divine Darkness beyond the Intellect.

--citations, F. O'Rourke

the story of o

Still thou art blest compar'd wi' me!
The present only touchest thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.

---Robert Burns.

O, a letter without verticality, unlike b or p. Surprise or resignation? A number that is not a number; surrounded by 'real' numbers, searching for the one.

What's the problem?
Nothing.

There is something in us that wants to reach that nullity: to not be. To be a minimal self, an uncluttered soul, moved only by the elemental: a pure sound, not an image. The world is a concept. To smash the idols, the order of the world, which mirrors that of the ego. All is vanity.
So speaks the modern gnostic.

True, perhaps painfully true. But "we are ashes" very soon becomes "you are dirt". And if not that, the desire to lose oneself morphs into something sinister: the crowd. What happens when we lose that other image, that second space?

What's the point of living if you can't be beautiful?
----Howl's Moving Castle.

Does this place then become just another abstract space, a property to be possessed, indistinguishable, in fact, from anything else (exchange requires equivalence, a common currency, so to speak). What, then, does the earth become but a ground zero (when the Americans dispossessed the Red Man all they could muster was: this is a wilderness!) ; does time transform itself into something that can be counted, that is only a process without end? If this is true then what are we but some cosmic accident:

What was that acid spot in time
That went by the name of life?
---Leopardi.

What is the nihilist, the fanatic or the terrorist except one who searches for that ground zero, for that surface that disappears into a point, so that there is no more question of semblance and reality, no more tension between to and not to, between the 'I' and all that is 'not I'? The desire to come to a full stop, a place that is, beyond doubt, pointless, and without any weight. Nihilists live in a fantasy world (California), a virtual world, devoid of any of the rhythms of the natural world and the patterns of a human life. Texts are reduced to a pamphlet or a slogan, speech to a speech. It is almost as if one has to create nothing before reality makes us into nothing. Isn't that what that other extremist, Simone, once said? There is one truth, from that everything else follows; all else is 'innovation'.

What is this desire to be small but great at the same time, great in one's smallness? A question for the Germans?

The mouse may be blessed, but he lives in a hole. His nothingness is nothing because it is forced upon him. That is his destiny, after all. That black hole, his home, is a zero because, like hell, it is constituted by only so many fragments of time: a pure succession of moments. To live in an eternal present, de-void of memory, without regrets is, perhaps, a blessing for a mouse, but a curse for us. Man is, and lives in, a broken circle. And nothingness is only a stage, a moment, a stepping stone in the stream of time from which we return to the world and from where the presence of others, living and dead, touches our soul all the time.

Pleasure is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, and springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
----Hannah Arendt.

'Och' springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women in extremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.

Things

Slowly, steadily, who wants to win the race. As long as one gets there, what's the worry, what's the hurry...

A song from my childhood-written, no doubt, by a Kashmiri! This was not so much about doing things at the right time like the rest of the 'things' in the universe or being in the right place, sliding effortlessly into the spaces in the arc of history that were reserved for you, but a refusal of system altogether. Slowness, like lightness, as a way of avoiding the gravity of the world. Like a snail without a care in the world, aimlessly zig-zagging through life, following the tracks that no-one else sees. Or like a star that caroms through the night skies in defiance of the mathematics of an abstract universe. Were we the only ones to break out into freedom as the others slumped back into Being, are we alone in nature with a finitude and imperfection that itself is a kind of perfection?

Profiting from the reciprocal distance which prevents coasts from linking up with each other except via the sea or by torturous twists and turns, the sea allows every shore to believe that it is heading towards it in particular. In reality, the sea is courteous with all of them, actually more than courteous: it can show maximum enthusiasm and successive passions for each shore, keeping in its basin an infinite store of currents. It only ever marginally exceeds its own limits, it imposes its own restraint on its waves, and like the jelly-fish it leaves for fishermen as a miniature image or sample of itself, it does nothing but ecstatically prostrate itself before all its shores.

On trees:

They have no gestures: they simply multiply their arms, hands, fingers-like a Buddha. And in this way, doing nothing, they get to the bottom of their thoughts. They hide nothing from themselves, they cannot harbour a secret idea, they open out entirely, honestly, and without any restrictions. Doing nothing else, they spend all their time complicating their own shape, perfecting their own bodies towards greater complexity for analysis...Animate beings express themselves orally, or with mimetic gestures, which however instantly disappear. But the vegetable world expresses itself in a written form that is indelible. It has no way of going back, it is impossible have a change of mind: in order to correct something, the only thing it can do is to add . Like taking a text that has been written and already published and correcting it through a series of appendices, and so on. But one has to say that plants do not ramify ad infinitum . Each one of them has a limit.

But what counts more is ..the proportion between the shell and its mollusc inhabitant, as opposed to the disproportion of man's monuments and palaces. This is the example the snail sets us by producing its own shell' : What their work consists of does not involve anything that is extraneous to them , to their necessities or their needs. Nothing that is disproportionate to their physical being. Nothing that is not essential and necessary for them. Saintly in their precise obedience to their own nature. Know yourself, then, first of all. And accept yourself as you are. Along with your flaws. In proportion with your own measure.

(citations from Francis Ponge in Italo Calvino's 'Why Read the Classics')

My Favorite Things - John Coltrane

Fear eats the soul

On this blog I've always looked for beautiful things to post (on art, music, poetry) and in this I've been greatly helped by some readers with their own selection of wonderful images, music etc. But now and then I feel like reporting on the ugliness that I see around me.

[If you're a Muslim and reading this I would be particularly interested in your comments]

Here is one of my colleagues who, along with his group of zealots, is busy brainwashing the students. This is from a public lecture.

On Pakistan's elites:

"And here I will make a point and I’m not saying this rhetorically I say this with full confidence as an objective scholar. The elite in our country - they are amongst the most ignorant group of people on the face of this earth. It is difficult to find a group of people who are even close to being as ignorant as these people are. Not only are these people ignorant about their own country, about their own history, about their own religion, they are ignorant even about that other place which they think is the ideal. They watch fox news, cnn; they read Newsweek and Time magazine; they tell us: we know what's happening over there. They are utterly ignorant. It doesn’t take much to illustrate this."

And then this gem:

"It may very well be the case..again I will not argue this point ..that in Islam a woman is treated like a commodity…she is treated like property..I would not argue with this but what I will say in response to this that in the contemporary West a woman is less than a commodity. She is the thing to be used for you to sell your commodity. So she is less than a commodity. If you want an objective impartial discussion or description of the situation, this is the situation."

Followed by:

"I know them as classmates, as colleagues, as my boss and so on and so forth..And those of you who have had interaction with the West or similar experiences, I ask you the following question have you ever met a woman in the West who socially or culturally had the same status, the same dignity as your grandmother did? In thirty years of living there (the U.S.) I've never met anyone in that society who reached the position/honour that my grandmother got in our society. "

Similarly, a friend of mine, someone who has lived all his life in England, been to good public schools, worked in the top financial institutions, said to me: you know, K, my grandmother was very religious.

Well, what do you mean by that?

She never once took a step outside of her house.

Are you fucking serious?!

And here's some Qutb:

The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it

And all this from my colleague at arguably the best university in the country, someone who's got a book on Weber and speaks with the most awful American twang. I can't help but wonder at the delusional state some people are in. When will they realise it ain't the jews, it ain't "the west", but that the beast is within?

Common Place

{When I first posted this I was accused of being 'disingenuous', so I should clearly state that these are highly subjective and uninformed impressions-and nothing more}

There's often an overwhelming urge to revisit all that is familiar to us and a not inconsiderable charm in doing so; to tread through the paths that we have already traversed, to return again and again to the landscapes of our memory, to run our fingers over passages that dazzled us the first time we came across them...in all this the desire to repeat what is most precious in order that it doesn't slip away. At a deep and profound level a part of us wants to imitate nature's cyclomania, find solace in the ordinary, the commonplace, a ritual that leads home.

But I approach Constable's large paintings almost with a sense of dread. There's a feeling of stagnation and insipid dullness about them that reminds me of a dreary afternoon stillness. If art represents something of the spirit of a people than here is the expression of a mediocre and plodding soul.

Beyond the banks was cultivated, productive land, and he took a countryman's joy in fine weather and a good harvest. "The solitude of mountains oppresses my spirit.

What could be further from the Romantic spirit of restlessness and the striving for new and vast space than this bovine acceptance of things? Nature, not as it presents itself to man, but Nature domesticated, tamed by Man. Everywhere there is the presence of the work of Man.

There are two types of poets of nature; those who see her destructiveness, her wildness, capriciousness and utter remoteness from all that is human-the representation of a lawless Will that always remains unknowable, unfathomable- and those who see in her an image of tranquility, health, and comforting, soothing truths: a humanized Nature.

[I'm reminded of a great passage in Hugh Brody's 'Other Side of Eden' where an Innuit traveling in Suffolk with Brody finds it difficult to distinguish between town and country: "It's all built-up!"]. On the other hand,T, who had deep roots in rural Punjab, loved the Essex countryside.

Wordsworth: in these humble and limited themes, in the understanding that doesn't reach beyond itself but is content to fold itself over itself... "in them the passions of man are incorporated with beautiful and permanent forms of nature."

Personally, I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for these common places that always seem to me to be cramped and just a touch claustrophobic, teetering on the brink of collapsing into a sleep of the senses or a soulless summer afternoon. Sun-and-wheat-consciousness, a memory of all that is dead (whence the charm of them to a society that was increasingly becoming self-conscious of an England that was being lost to industrialization: an England of the mind).

But there is a reprieve. I am told (by Lops) to look at the clouds.

The whole mind may at length become something like a hemisphere of cloud scenery, filled with an ever moving train of changing, melting forms.

And then there are the small sketches which at once exhibit a type of vivacity and urgency that the finished ones do not. Here, at last, we come across nature in process. The 'Tree Trunks' appears to be at least two paintings in one; the traditional and beloved world of light and shade but then also a sort of mythical life or timeless scene as well. It is as if each is informing the other across an invisible boundary.

There is a delicacy and tentativeness in this picture-an effect that is no doubt enhanced by the shimmering light of the golden leaves. There is something both very old and very new here and the whole is charged by a mysterious atmosphere: how can nature that is so solid also be on the verge of disappearing...

postscript: Adamastor writes: ...[C]onstable is part of the iconography of England still- English culture refers across to Constable and his paintings and his way of painting so often, consciously or not, that you might say that an English childhood is a way of teaching people to look at Constable.

This is interesting because it suggests that there's an inherited way of looking at things, a deep continuity that is sustained by memory, history, and traditions; a training of the eye until it instinctively picks up on what is to be illuminated and what is to be relegated to the periphery of one's vision. What happens when those 'supports' fall away?

Stop. Look. Listen.

(quotes from K.C.'s Civilisation)