Dear God,

Dear God, give me strength. Do not withdraw your favours.

Dear God, give me strength that I may not become religious in times of trouble, not become like one of the curs-ed maulvis (mullahs-I should say, tipping my hat to my good Iranian friends), who do nothing but scratch their balls and spit on the ground like wild beasts.

Please do not take away that devilish twinkle in my eye or prevent me from laughing until there are tears in my eyes at the moral brigade and do-gooders, with their cheap two-penny sermons and fake plastic smiles, their phony humility and foaming drivel,their terrifying, absurd pomposity and Sunday-school platitudes that would bore a corpse

And please, God, do not make my readers (the pretty ones) too angry over my joshing in the last post.

Yours,

b.

~~~~~~

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.

His characters are "higher-thought clowns," people who, absurdly, lust for total explanations, for help from the realm of ideas, but whose own lives are confused and cloudy..
---James Woods on Saul Bellow.

Bellow on Spinoza, against the maulvi:

man's desire to have have others rejoice in the good in which he rejoices, not to make others live according to his way of thinking.

From Herzog:

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

..if he was so confused-both visionary and muddy.

In dusty niches bulbs burned. Without religion.

Gerbasch sighed and walked along his wall slowly, bending and straightening like a gondolier.

It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher.

his laughter becoming more frequent, wilder, uncaused.

God's veil over things makes them all riddles.

Among narrow puritans, this is lying; but with civilized people only civility.

..waiting for the ferry, he looked through the green darkness at the net of bright reflections on the bottom. He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean.

..without sufficient courage or intelligence [he] tried to be a marvelous Herzog, a Herzog who, perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.

She was in the time of life when the later action of heredity begins, the blemishes of ancestors appear-a spot, or the deepening of wrinkles, at first increasing a woman's beauty. Death, the artist, very slow, putting in his first touches.

The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life.

But modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard, theorems.

Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself. Above all himself, to the end of time.

One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.

He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities of life.

..eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed, and, to the point of death, "comical."

The Magical Orange Grove

Let the oranges
ripen, ripen above you
you are living too, one
among the dark multitude
...
Black one, black one
there was a white candle in your heart

---Denise Levertov.

And she served me tea and oranges that come all the way from China.

And it is said: All that is, is Holy.

She wore circus-orange pyjamas.But not the knobbly knees, nor the funny ankles were a sign of wonder; the person. Aye, that's the thing.Everything in the world is at an angle to you, longs to find its centre in your gaze.

He, with his artificial lights (better than none), wondered what it was about her naturalness. To be natural is to be open to the world, to know how to return. He valued the naturalness, "that exactness and that inevitable completeness which can be achieved only by those gifted with magical means" (Roth-ko)

Commons

The only true question today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? Four possible antagonisms present themselves: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums. We should note that there is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the excluded from the included, and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call ‘commons’—the shared substance of our social being, whose privatization is a violent act which should be resisted by force, if necessary.

First, there are the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of cognitive capital: primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also shared infrastructure such as public transport, electricity, post, etc. If Bill Gates were allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software tissue of our basic network of communication. Second, there are the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation—from oil to forests and the natural habitat itself—and, third, the commons of internal nature, the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. What all of these struggles share is an awareness of the destructive potential—up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself—in allowing the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons a free run. It is this reference to ‘commons’ which allows the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see their progressive enclosure as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance; a process that also points towards exploitation. The task today is to renew the political economy of exploitation—for instance, that of anonymous ‘knowledge workers’ by their companies.

It is, however, only the fourth antagonism, the reference to the excluded, that justifies the term communism. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the included and the excluded is the crucial one: without it, all the others lose their subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight for the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can formulate some of these struggles in terms of the included threatened by the polluting excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only ‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favour among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products with a progressive spin: coffee made with beans bought at ‘fair-trade’ prices, expensive hybrid vehicles, etc. In short, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian, fighting poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lack of a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, stand directly for universality: they are what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘part of no part’ of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.

---Zizek

The great Illich, SilenceasaCommons

the black heart

La beaute du corps est toute entiere dans la peau. En effet, si les hommes, doues, comme les lynx de Boeotie, d'interieure penetration visuelle, voyaient ce qui est sous la peau, la vue seule des femmes leur serait nauseabonde: cette grace feminine n'est que saburre, sang, humeur, fiel. Considerez ce qui se cache dans les narines, dans la gorge, dans le ventre: saletes partout...Et nous qui repugnons a toucher, meme du bout doigt, de la vomissure et du fumier, comment pouvons-nous desirer serrer dans nos bras le sac d'excrements lui meme?

Why so sad, black one, why does your heart sigh within?

If death is the point of all points then is life pointless? But her green eyes sparkled in the dark-even if not for him. And there were green waters in the black. For even if the way of all flesh is that beauty must wither before dawn, the order of gravity that hands must fumble, lips tremble, shoulders drop, and the law of time that our face darken, words stutter, mind grey and slow, yet there will be found at the still point of the heart the memory of you. Like a scrap of fabric with your faded image on it,it was always lost and found.

Not the obliteration of time; not the redemption of time, nor a return to the illud tempus, but a gathering of time...

Who will hold the heart of man, that it may stand still, and see how the still- standing eternity, itself neither future nor past, uttereth the times future and past?

Guess Ill Forget You - The Black Heart Procession

tea into china

I found a
weed
that had a
mirror in it
and that
mirror
looked in at
a mirror
in
me that
had a
weed in it
--Ammons


There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.

Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,

It is falling

Like leaves on the cold sea.


--Derek Mahon

Snow falls.
Falls upwards.
Drifting to the north.
Or like glass,
splintering the heart
Or like the soft tears
of the unredeemed.

I wait,
like a dark mirror,
for your image
to fall silently
Into my stillness
and rest,
lend me its colours.

I wait,
like a lake,
for time to end.
And for the rain to fall,
to draw empty circles on my being.

I wait,
like a child,
for Winter.
For fresh snow on my face,
the dazzling melting of Forms.

But you sit in your room
Alone by the window
Sip your green tea unaware
that I pour tea into china
for you.

academia and the last day

In a university publication I read these charming words by an associate professor: If your minorities are out of line then you can whip them back into line.

I don't know, maybe this is just my limited experience in academia, but there does seem to be an awful lot of stupidity around. 'Thoughtlessness', precisely.

And I can't help wondering to myself: why is that? Why is it that people who are actually very sharp in their own field, good at solving difficult problems, are also often , well, to not put too fine a point on it: arseholes?

Does it stem from all those years of a lack of contact with reality (imagination unmoored can slide into all sorts of fantasies, and technical competence can replace integral intelligence)? The inability to talk like a human being, the contempt for ordinary lives? The world is a concept. All those years of dissecting, calculating,abstracting, analyzing, and holding to scrutiny? Is it, as Edward Said once noted, the degree of specialization and the inability to see the bigger picture (understanding as seeing oneself and others in the right light, from the right distance)?

His thoughts already rove away to the more general case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself. He does not now take himself seriously and devote time to himself. He is serene, not from lack of troubles, but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing with his trouble. The habitual complaisance with respect to all objects and experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he receives everything that comes his way, his habit of inconsiderate good nature, of dangerous indifference to Yea or Nay...his mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm , no longer how to deny.
----N.

white space

The most beautiful is the object
which does not exist....
neither blindness
nor death can take away the object
which does not exist.
mark the place
where stood the object
which does not exist
it will be a simple dirge
for the beautiful absence...



Now all space swells like an ocean
a hurricane beats
on the black sail..
now you have empty space
more beautiful than the object
more beautiful than the place it leaves
it is the pre-world
a white paradise
of all possibilities
you may enter there
cry out vertical-horizontal
perpendicular lightning strikes the naked horizon....



Obey the counsels
of the inner eye
do not yield
to murmurs mutterings smackings
it is the uncreated world
crowding before the gates of your canvas
obey the counsels of the inner eye
admit no-one
extract
from the shadows of the object
which does not exist
from polar space
from the stern reveries of the inner eye
a chair.
beautiful and useless
like a cathedral in the wilderness



Place on the chair a crumpled tablecloth
add to the idea of order
the idea of adventure
let it be a confession of faith
before the vertical struggling with the horizontal
let it be quieter than angels
prouder than kings
more substantial than a whale
let it have the face of lost things.
we ask reveal o chair
the depths of the inner eye
the iris of necessity
the pupil of death



---Z.Herbert.

There is a place. Like a person. You know the name. But that is all you know. Knowing is not everything.

On a rainy day your friend asks you: but does this place exist, is it real for instance, and you just stare, then shrug your shoulders. Is this a question?

Nothing matters-except the secret. Hold it close to your breast.Say the name with your eyes closed and in time, out of time, the door will open. It exists, if at all, for you.

the ham sandwich theorem

Distinctions! Distinctions! ,she said.
Or was it: distinctions, distinctions? I forget.

After serious and profound meditation I have come to the conclusion that there are only two types of people in the world: those who like Cinnamon rolls and those who don't. That is fundamental. Okay, there's also the supremely important: those who like hats and those who don't. And, oh yes, those who are Muslims and those who are infidels. Well, also: the red and the blue. How many does that make? (Yikes! Help me here, Nabs).

Okay, the ham sandwich theorem....later, got to watch the Double Life of Veronique first.

So, here goes. It's like this.

A friend is talking on the phone about "existential questions"

I ask: "what are they?"

He laughs: "It's nothing like Camus or Sartre, it's more like..."

Drum roll, please....

The Ham Sandwich Theorem.

Take a piece of plane paper readers. On it draw six red dots. Done? Okay, now draw six blue crosses (making sure that no three things -dots or crosses- are on a straight line) Now, the idea is that there exists a line that divides the paper so that there are three dots and three crosses on either side of it. [Have you found it?]

Why is that? I've only got some of the intuition and no idea of the implications. But it was cool and it extends to areas and more than two things/objects (I think).

So, if you're cutting a ham sandwich and there's lettuce, ham, and tomatoes then if you have a sharp knife you can cut it so that there's equal amounts of the things for both of us..even if you put the tomato in the corner. Anyway, it wouldn't work because I'd have to swap you my ham for some tomatoes or mustard.

days of our lives

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one

Was there a day, a specific date when it began, when it ended? You can't get over it:we are strangers to one another now, perhaps because we were always estranged from ourselves. The hand that reached out, the outstreaming soul..this burning of our small fate blackened our faces, stung our eyes; it was like the light from a candle:a trembling nothing, a black mark before the vast destiny of the sun. It is not space that separates us, but time itself.

Yearning makes the heart grow deeper, said the Saint. But I am not a saint. We do not suffer in time. It is time herself...

As Lines so Loves oblique may well

Themselves in every Angle greet:

But ours so truly Paralel,

Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which doth us bind,

But Fate so enviously debarrs,

Is the Conjunction of the Mind,

And Opposition of Stars.

-- Andrew Marvell (courtesy of anton)

Solid Lines never meet. This much you know (unless one learns to fold paper). But the small rubbings out sometimes intermingle when the thing is done, join and rest with one another, as luck would have it. It is totally unscripted. The blank piece of paper is once again full of ways, once again a place of possibilities, stolen glances...like a white room.

Traces of erased grey lines. The lives the pencil would not write.

For a while the turning of the circle has,like compasses,

separated us and again brought us together

This is one of my favourite places, there in the far corner of the world, and this is how I will always remember it; I'm not sure if it still exists and even though I will never look for it or return there, it will always be there for me-like the faded letters I keep or the old, yellowing photographs. True places never exist on maps; never did, never do.

I can't remember what it was..it was some sort of building on the pier (some things are best left mysterious, unsayable) but there were no 'amusements' or games there. All I remember was the declining sun...'fires fragment' Akhmatova would say...and the shadows in the stones and late, late summer evenings, when one wrapped up warm or held the hands of a loved one tighter to keep the chill away.
~
Piers are universally the saddest places on earth, preserving the old ways: music no-one listens to any more, childish entertainments, a particular type of laughter...all worn-out forms in a shape-shifter's world.

It is always reassuring when one is young to come across something so old, so familiar. But that was when the child was a child...I look back now and sometimes wonder if I didn't die in the seventies, if all that followed is only a kind of dream-life. How strange to think that there were already old people then, brushing past us on that creaking platform. No arc of being intersected with another, no worlds collided, no dissolving of time's mysteries either; no, instead, just the inescapable strangeness of two remote individuals occupying the same space and time. The opaqueness of other people like a baby sleeping that one doesn't disturb, or a flower that grows by the side of a great tree but only knows its shade.

There was a time when I, in my red bow tie and white cardigan, surrounded by grown-ups, cut a chocolate birthday cake and yet you were just a thought with God, unbeknown to me. There can be no recovery of lost time. And there will be a time when you sing to your grandchildren and I shall be nothing but a dead branch of the future, a future that never was and never could be.

You, a child amongst sad blue flowers. I kept a petal or two in my pocket for you, just in case you found your way here by mistake.

Let us be grateful for what we had.

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast hollow, supported by no-one

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one,

It's face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased

The horse foams in the dust

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off the ground

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty on the way home...

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

---M, 1923

Never Tear Us Apart - INXS

Well I remember, I remember don't worry
How could I ever forget, its the first time, the last time we ever met
But I know the reason why you keep your silence up, no you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show; but the pain still grows
Its no stranger to you or me

the restaurant at the end of the universe

The lion restaurant...

The pair, named in media reports as Leo Gao and Cara Young, could hardly believe their luck when they checked their account at Westpac bank on 5 May, hoping to find their request for a NZ$10,900 (£4,000) overdraft had been accepted.

Instead, the bank had deposited 1,000 times that amount: NZ$10m, or around £4m. With so many borrowers around the world constantly being told "no" by their creditors, here, finally, was a bank that liked to say "yes".

~~~~~~~~~~~

A serial killer:

Mahin, a heavy-built track and field athlete and mother of two [The Herald Sun] in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself...

---The Guardian.

Not to leave any trace of herself...what a story!

CERN, Mice, and the Fundamental Questions

Well, this is it. CERN will be switched on tonight. The physicist said that it would help answer our "fundamental questions": who am I ? (amnesia?), what am I doing here ? (which is what my students say in my class!); where am I ? (the tourist) ; how did I get here?

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

Apart from Bulleh and Augustine I don't know anyone who asks such questions. If you are such a person I'd like to hear from you.

Okay, okay, I'm sceptical that science can even answer these questions (you knew that, didn't you!) but you've got to say that this is absolutely exhilarating..just the quest, the hunger to know. Nope, not the lilies in the fields, the sun or the moon..nowhere else is there such doubt, such incredible inquisitiveness. And isn't fundamentalism really just a rejection of this openness?

I'm a bit worried though. Having lived in London I know that rats and mice love tunnels. How will they deal with the photons? You know, every time I mention the word rat I see one (well, it's happened twice-and so I'm not saying the word again). I know some of you (Z, for instance) think that's because there's a mystic correspondence between my rat nature and theirs. But still...

You must remember this

A kiss is still a kiss,

a sigh is just a sigh.

The fundamental things apply

As time goes by.

As Time Goes By - Ibrahim Ferrer - Jaxxs Latin Collectionz

Zaid Hamid and the delusionals

One thing I've noticed over the last year is the alarming growth of conspiracy theories and the proliferation of half-baked crackpots. If that monkey, Zakir Naik, wasn't enough to put up with, there's now this ridiculous cartoon character that is 'wowing' the semi-educated urbanites with his nonsense on stilts.

Last week he came here and harped on with his delusional rhetoric: World War I was started to protect 'the Jews'; the Federal Reserve system was dominated by the Jewish Rothschilds, the first Israeli Prime Minister explicitly stated (back in the '50's) that the real threat to the State of Israel was Pakistan, how nearly everyone here is a CIA "asset" -except, of course, the army! What a fucking joke! Then the usual 'global conspiracy' by the media, run by the "liberal" elites. How many times I've heard that over the last year!

And this charlatan is now the darling of the masses. I rest my case. This country is sliding, sliding fast...

Last week graduating students celebrated their last day with a silly and mainly harmless riot in which they dressed up as dacoits ('dakus') and took money from the facutly.

One outraged faculty member wrote this:

I would request Mufti Kamaluddin Sahib and Dr. Zeeshan Ahmed Sahib to please share their views with BSc 2009 on the "permissibility" of money "collected" by them on Daku day. Also their opinion on the "consequences" of food consumed through such "income" in this world and the hereafter.

That's the level of discussion. Not what's happening in Swat, not the gross social and economic injustices, the power crisis, political instability..none of that moves our little friend to indignation. These are all "worldly"-and therefore lowly-matters for him. Far too lowly, in fact, to be the object of thought.

the wandering third

The crows are tossing themselves

recklessly in the random winds

of spring.

One friend has died, one disappeared

(for now, at least) leaving no address;

I've lost the whereabouts

of a wandering third. That seems to be,

this year, the nature of this season.

Is it a message about relinquishment?

--Denise Levertov.

Crow, who knew the colours, imagined blue to be the distance of the soul. Crow, wise to the seasons, thought of space as the absence of time.

A restless god had created crow restless in the idle hours. With His fingers he folded her destiny into that darkness, whispered her name, gently smoothing her feathers down with the blackest of Indian inks as he sharpened her tongue. The Kajol around her eyes would often smudge when she remembered.

Odd, even. She has large eyes, marked in black. And take her mouth. A wide mouth as pale as wax. It seems I am seeing everything more clearly. The details of a whole world are being opened up to me.

(--after James Salter).

But on the day of her departure a small fragment of blue glass fell into crow's eyes. And it was as if there was a whole world in that small speck of coloured dust. How crow loved to live in that blue world of hers!

But as time passed crow began to realise that her friends were disappearing one by one, and this began to weigh heavily on her heart. Many a man had tried to ensnare such a wondrous, strange creature-unique in all the world- capture her secret, but each time she would escape their nets -even if she sometimes enjoyed being bound, sometimes rested her head on their shoulders for human warmth, and even though she occasionally clawed her way into their hearts, softly craa'ed "now!" or "again !" into their ears in the early hours

out of mind

From time out of mind I have known you. Even when out of time, out of mind. Listen. The darkened conversation of the crows in the early morning light. Look out, and out, from your window. There. Perfectly framed by your gaze, but the wrong side of your eyes. The harem of your mind.

Crow, Platonic crow, said: It is the object of desire that makes that which is desired desirable. It magnetically draws you to itself, like a carrion crow is drawn to death.

But that cannot be, said crow, Romantic crow. It is the desire of the lover that makes the loved one the beloved. It is like the raven that is compelled to find his place, his rookery; at once origin and destiny, Spring and Winter.

Even when drunk you were never lost; even when sober, never found. The blurred image of the unfaithful one comes to you in sad times. Paint her image on silk. Still it fades. In this wisp of a life what else can you see but a burning, quivering flame? The puzzle, the enigma of her being, are nothing but pieces of your mind.

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

Glastonbury Avenue

One wonders how the central themes of their existence are resolved in such elegant forms, destined to repeat the same pattern, following the lines of some ancient lineage through some dark inner compulsion. No matter how far each diverged from this original plan nothing could be grafted on to this ancient stock of possibilities."------Saul Bellow, The Dean's December

Our Holy Grail: the search to identify, to define oneself, to delimit a destiny, takes place when one is already lost. It is to close the door on certain possibilities of being. Do we choose what we are or do we only try to understand the range of possibilities, keep them open?Is our lack of free choice, our finitude, such a mis-fortune and why is the singualr road such a bitter-sweet one? (Bi-location:the ability to be in two places at once) .

Merlin, my namesake, is a liminal, ambiguous figure. Someone between the stable, illuminated and familiar world of the court and its rituals, the world of the king and ceremony, and the world of nature, the wilderness and contemplation. A trickster, a stranger, who cannot decide between the city and the desert, between love and the mind.

The poet could say:
"But if I had the choice again
and stood on the headland
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart."

I sit here, at five in the morning, still with stars in my head, the last dreams in the fingertips. Outside, the tangled thoughts of the tree, the curled-up being of the snail quietly unfolding itself, the slow falling back of the shadows into hiding, the world "thirsty for wine's deep mysteries". A black bird of no particular description stomps himself to wakefulness and I throw off the last coat of the night's intoxication.

In the morning I pass the squirrels, the Kashmiris of the animal world, with their timorous souls, their tree-ascent but the aspiration to become an angel, to escape the world of choice. I see a workman, diligently gathering then sweeping sand from one pile to another;inconsequential one would have thought, until one notices the utter self-absorption on his brow, the deep intelligence that comes from knowing one's place in the world, the steadfastness of his hands, the assuredness of his movements. As if here was someone, in the diamond of the day,who was conscious of the fact that each act means something in the scheme of things, the totality of events and the showings and evasions, the meanderings and tarrying and the flashes of direct revelations that go up to make the world. There is no grace in the movements, no formal eloquence, just a thousand years of English pragmatism concentrated in those square shoulders. All extravagance, all flamboyance has been whittled away by the repetition of the essential.

On the way back, after the deluge, the sun's last rays linger on amidst the lengthening, deepening shadows, like some unwanted guest whose time has come. The train cuts through a forest about to enter a dream and the dazzling,fluttering leaves sparkle despite the evening chill, like so many emerald gems that vibrate with the sun's gold. The day's final glint of understanding hangs on them precariously,like dew drops. The earth is expectant.

And then I make my way home, my brisk walk disturbing the courtship of two pigeons. In itself of no significance, but in a previous age that could have resulted in the unborn pigeon not carrying a message to the northern king,averting the massacre of the innocents, the birth of so many Mozarts. But then, as it is now, each step is still fateful, over- brimming and fraught with consequences that span out,forming numerous causal chains in a far-flung net that catches the most unlikely of collaborators . Had my indecisive feet stepped but the other way the universe would have been remarkably different...perhaps.Infinite futures canceled out at Glastonbury Avenue. One pile of sand grows, and not the other....

are friends electric?

are friends electric? In the world of the internet, liquid modernity, and 'instant messaging' what of the weight that binds one human being to another? Can common interests, for example, survive without a common place, without the slow accumulation of time together?

He was free but in an infinite way, so that he felt weightless above the earth. He lacked that weight of human relationships that inhibits free movements, those tears and farewells, those reproaches and those joys, everything that a man strokes or tears apart every time he forms a gesture, those thousand chains that bind him to others and make him heavy.

-----Exupery.

the grey or the blue

When the forests have been burned their darkness remains.
--W.S. Merwin.

With all my thoughts I went right out of the world:
there you were,
you my gentle one,
you my open one

The reason to remember. The necessity of remembering. Lest this slant of radiant colours is taken for reality. The reason to forget. The necessity of it. Or else the silver inherits the black.

And yet each grey face is unaware of its own withering glances, the layers of ash, just as hands are innocent of their cruelty. Time in the world exists. A bare fact. Some things can be recovered, and sometimes capstones shift. But who can say? Who amongst us has the strength to imagine such things?

I must remember to forget you.
~~~~

You sit on a cold slab of concrete in the cool night, the early hours of the morning, waiting... It is good to be under the open skies, see clouds and moon and stars mingle with reflected lights. And you don't ask any more: what is real? Only the philosopher or the dead ask such questions. No thought comes to you in this city. Just the waiting, and the detached observation of other people's lives. Departures and arrivals; simple, inexhaustible huddled existence.

The dark blue lightens, softens. The re-entry of light into the world. Some old men in ragged clothes are still praying as newly married couples talk to each other tenderly, full of longing. A few people wake from their slumber, yawn like lions, then stretch and unwind as if they'd been kept in a box for an age or just been resurrected.

"Soon it will be day", you mumble to yourself, your lips uttering the unscripted. And this is enough to bring assurance. Soon it will be day.

addio

"Don't worry, my friend, I've got you as firmly as if you were a sack of turnips. But you, make sure that you do your guide's work properly... Don't send me walking into cow-shit."

the wedge

Saddened yellow came to me in a dream-in the shape of a star, not a flower. Nestling in the stillness of my heart. And words and image and colour were one. But still not the thing! In the dead of night a storm starts up, the door rattles (fixed by a slipper-come-wedge). Some ghost of the dead wants me to wake, sit up, and scribble her words down. But they're gone. Just a dream within a dream within a dream...

In the morning my eye becomes alert, fixes on everything that is yellow in the world-the soap, the plastic top, the strip of cardboard on the pack of shaving blades, the flowers strewn across the paths-as if I was seeing the colour for the first time today, fresh, quivering, vibrant, newly created. (In the same way, there is a green thread running through Bellow's Herzog-that wise fool!).

~~~~

Childhood: To be at the centre of a circle, a maze, and not know it, not be amazed by it. There is only the centre. One simply finds oneself there.

Adulthood: to renounce centre, long for boundaries, the periphery. Walk on! , said the Buddha. To wander, aimlessly.The 'knight's move'. The leap into the blue, the walk in the wild. To slow down, wait. Dream a lot. To become someone else.

Life: A broken circle.

A path is a prior interpretation..and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation or to stalk your predecessor on it..To walk the same way is to re-iterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts. It's a form of spatial theatre, but also spiritual theatre..in the hope of coming closer to them oneself.
--Rebecca Solnit.

The dream where you are always to be found

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

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

Redemption Songs

I loved the music and this scene. Somehow reminded me of something by Verdi (Triumphal March?) . Don't read many biographies-but Peter Brook's was a memorable one and I can't imagine many better (if anyone has a favourite, please do mention it). Peter Brown's Augustine, of course. I was given Lee Iaccoca (whatever) when I was a kid for some strange reason. Who reads such tosh, I wonder? Americans maybe, or perhaps the same people who read stuff like 'How to be Successful' or 'How to Make Friends'. Bizarre, utterly bizarre. Oh well, takes all sorts, I guess.

When the Taleban march in is this what they'll be singing as well? Hmm. At 'the lounge' today for breakfast. Last year they used to play good stuff-like Julie London's 'Cry me a river'. Today, it was just naats (religious songs-like choir songs, sort of).

I see.

art without boundaries

Shitao: The brush is for saving things from chaos.

All the heaped-up knowledge of modern science, all the energy of modern commerce, all the depth and spirituality of modern thought cannot reproduce so much as the handwork of an ignorant, superstitious Berkshire peasant of the 14 th century.
---William Morris.

That's too extreme, of course. But: handwork.

Christine wanted to talk about art (artefacts) in terms of the question: national or universal. Who do great works belong to? But, for me, this misses the point of how culture is related to consumption in late capitalism, how these 'things' are themselves staged as the spectacular, how they become things isolated from any living culture and practices. And yet, at the same time, they're supposed to be an antidote to the crassness of popular culture and a world governed by technology and utilitarian values. Wonderfully free from instrumentality of the market, from the authority of the political and the religious-art for art's sake or something that can exist in the mind alone. But isn't that itself synonymous with the mindset of modernity, one that is inextricably linked with capitalism? Why this need to shore up the fragments? Why now? Isn't this just another sign of worldlessness ?(Hannah)

Fragmentation as a way of subversion. But isn't that what you're doing yourself, taking quotes out of context, adding to the already disappearing world? Franzen: who reads linearly any more?

To be an escape artists without talent contradicts the meaning of art, installs things that are ugly as equal with anything beautiful and smashes up those structures of conformity from which alone art can emerge.
--P. Rieff.

Smash! Yes, how important that was for the century! (the Russians, the 'cultural revolution', the taleban). As if to say: in an age of the proliferation of the image the only response could be to destroy it. Isn't ridicule another form of this? Doesn't late capitalism itself encourage this flippant attitude to the image: the shock of the new? What does it mean to say something is an 'iconic image' today?

[Art without boundaries. Need to go back to Ouspensky/Lossky here. Blunt.]

The image without boundaries:

In fact, the necessity of postulating that an image referred to any original would be taken to be largely due to an anachronistic lack of culture and concealed metaphysical obscurity; it is precisely the image released by contemporary techniques that liberates itself...Today, the image covers the surface of the earth only insofar ..as it expands without restriction or reference.


Now appearances are volatile. Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent. And this is precisely what the present system's mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.


In the televisual order, the principal caesura between the image and reality has disappeared: the time of representation. Around the clock, 24/7, not a particular time set apart for the staging.

The unending flow of time: the irreality thus competes with the temporality of reality.

The space that instantaneously crosses the televisual flow of images gives not a single possible world but rather discord-a blur.

Is this a natural consequence of the dissolution of boundaries? Who or what can govern such a de-contextualised image but the gaze of the viewer!

A "viewer": this is defined as the one who, under the most neutral names of "spectator" or "consumer" undergoes, governs, and defines the image-all under the pretexts of access to information, the opening of the world, and "connecting"..the sole pleasure of seeing, to succumb without limit or restriction to the fascination of the libido vivendi, the pleasure of seeing without being seen. [bloggers, anons, voyeurs]


Augustine: curiositas: the "lust of the eyes" . Illich: the restraint of the gaze. Right-looking.

The image is nothing in itself (nihilism) and can only be validated by the viewers, the consensus of desire. If one abolishes reality does one abolish appearance as well?

It is better to appear than be, since to be is not to appear. An idol: the image of desire. Ex-posure, just express yourself. One must live life aesthetically. From now on, as Roth says, there is only the surface. (the Eloi).

Every perception of the world is reduced to to an expression of the monad itself...the libido vivendi, which satisfies itself with the solitary pleasure of the screen, does away with love by forbidding sight of the other face-invisible and real...We live in a relation through what we see to what we don't see.

(quotations from John Berger and Jean-Luc Marion).