the sufi of suburbia

The word 'sufi' is nowhere to be found in the Qur'an. And the word 'love' or for love?

Why do you look for the word and not the thing?! Why do you spend so much time on the outskirts of the city?

But Islam is simple and clear. In the desert there is only the word and the Law. Why don't you stick to the root meanings: wool!

Wool, yes! Wool, which at the end of time flies off like clouds to an invisible centre. And in the desert is also Man, and in his heart are wild flowers, stars, abandoned camp fires, ruins, forgotten mirrors in which the beloved once looked...his wandering makes the desert the desert...the desert in man.

you found a ring in your home, whilst not even looking. you knew it was there, somewhere. you remember her speaking to your heart silently that first time. and what is time, but the attempt to find that moment again?

the red and the black

he said,

The tulip has got one scar on its heart, and the whole world knows it.
I have a hundred scars, and no-one is aware of them.

to which she replied, admonishing him:

you are the heedless tulip, o slave
with a black heart, a short life, and yet laughing...

thoughts, like silver images, like silver words, flickered between them. the soul's images glassily exposed, fading to silverpoint.

this silverwhite space where you say nothing; you place a silver coin in my palm to buy my silence.

wszedzie bylo nigdzie i nigdzie, wszedzie/ Litery ksiag srebrnialy, chwialy sie i nikly.

and so the tulip, to this day, lives in the open expanses, in the wilderness, his heart red and black for the memory of her.

Music is the flute of the devil

...and the colours entered the world, like the first rays of the spring sunshine melting the ice. and there was no east or west, though your heart was north, north by north-west. the red mingled with the blue, the grey inherited the black. yet still the beloved's colours remained unseen. this blue beneath the black you wear...is it out of sorrow, or something else? what is it that makes you flow from my heart? the mirror turns to iron again, keeps your image locked away from me.

~~~

interesting post by bob (on the overgrownpath) on the relation between music and politics. you'd like to think there's a connection between, on the one hand, a sensitivity to beauty, greatness, the tragic, and on the other, a recognition of particularity and/or an aversion to generalizations that is consonant with, fundamental to, political liberalism. you'd like to.

the title of this post comes from something obin laden said. Guardian article here

Truly, madly...

With the pain of her love, my heart is as the light of the serpent's eye in the presence of emerald.
---?

In tiefer Nacht
wenn auf dem schmalen Stege
Der Wandrer bebt

The white work
of the black heart
that makes the sky look green
has given me the blues
while lumps of snow
are melting in tulip-cups
--after Khaqani, Denise

In my dream, you dreamt of me. As if I had grasped you in a few silent moments of the universe. And then, your heart hardening, you flashed your looks somewhere else, releasing me into darkness. You said, what might be seen if mind and heart gave themselves..deeper, and deeper into the forest. Stone is a ladder. You, too, even though you wait in the dark. When you enter, you cannot know, you know.

wanderlust

Every three years or so you feel like just packing up your bags and walking away from everything. Taking leave.

Met a friend yesterday who is getting remarried. Grinning, he said: it's time to settle down now. It's a thought that fills me with dread. "Unfenced existence", the poet said...and yet its incredible how middle class everyone is in their sensibilities. No startling insights, just the dull hum of the everyday.

Peripatetic. Thinking and walking. Aristotle. Must tell R!

"They [the Sophists] were often mobile, as are many of those whose first loyalty is to ideas. It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale...

Many professions in many cultures, from musicians to medics have been nomadics...

The walker has the detachment of the traveler, but travels unadorned and unaugmented..."

She reverses the fall from grace. Walking as an unraveling, unfolding of complexity, a return to the body, to original limits, an unburdening...to be in the open, alone with one's thoughts, and make them mine without fear or restraint (Rousseau). Rootlessness, flux, breaking up: which is at the very heart of individualism...orientation, not destination.

"Walking, not as an analytical but an improvised act" [he says, writing from his chair]

Walking, solitude, wilderness. Ideal walking: grounded, experienced, engaged with the world, not just impressions or sensations on the blank screen of the mind. Present and detached. Present to who, though? "It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters..and overheard conversations"

This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing-it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant. (Kierkegaard)

"A solitary walker is unsettled, between places, drawn forth into action by desire and lack, having the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of the group"

---from Rebeca Solnit

Plato for primaries

Please forgive me anton!

I was talking to R about Aristotle today (not that I know anything about him, but I like saying the word 'Aristotelian' to her). She seemed quite charmed by it all and even concurred that he was, as the Muslims used to say, the 'divine Aristotle'. Well, she seemed quite happy at the time.

R (or Winston-a striking resemblance to Churchill!) listens very intently when we discuss her plans about attacking Japan and destroying the Japanese people.

Very soon the conversation turned to Plato. What would she say? Was he, as Popper wrote, a sort of prototype for the closed-world thinker? Or could he be seen as a mystic? The answer, I found, was simple but profound as she looked to one side sheepishly, and then back at me, and then threw up her undigested milk all over my shoulder! No use crying over this particular spilt milk when the universal Form is endless and unchanging.

So endeth R's second lesson to little man.

Thought this was fairly interesting

someone said

Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht
you want to speak of love?
then speak from the shadows,
of your love that wasn't true.

what will you have of me?
for it must be of.
this, a melancholy time between us
but what else could time be?

a shadow falls across your face.
it is not mine,and never was
speak, then, as a stranger
as someone once said.

it would not be here
if you were here.
what is remembered
is love.

I am far, but burn softly for you.
who sits in your shade is hard as wood.
your silent look glazed on my heart
whilst fruits fall into his hands.

(bits from Paul Celan and Ken Irby)

an elemental soul

went to listen to listen to some drummers at a local shrine. starts at 12 and goes on until the early morning...

just off the main road, we passed through a large rusting gate and down a gently sloping road. on both sides stalls had been set up: food, bracelets, religious pendants, drugs, tea. one side of the wall was painted shocking bright red and deep forest-green. on the other there were beggars, turbaned missionaries, and fakirs lounging about in an induced reverie...

we walked up two flights of steep stairs (no hand rails) until we came to a door that led, mysteriously, into an open rooftop courtyard-as if into another world. in the courtyard, which was quite small, a large number of people (mainly poor young men, some with fake armani t-shits) sat huddled at the feet of the drummers...

we made our way through the crowd. to one side a number of candles had been placed in a hollowed out stone wall, next to small tree. a few men stopped in front of it and put their hands together before the smoky fires, prayer-like, as we took our shoes off. the fires, protected and protecting...

a beautiful summer breeze rustled through the leaves of two huge trees nearby. s said it was a blessing. an old man with a large wooden stick gently tapped people on the shoulder to make sure they didn't stand up, as another sprayed some scented water on us. and all around was the sweet smell of drugs (hash?), generously shared...

the beat: incredible, and often piercing. the aim to induce ecstasy-ex-stasis: to get 'out of oneself'. occasionally the drummer would throw his head back and sweat would fly off in all directions. the dancers swirled around them, their movements often frenetic, crazy, semi-structured. some were spinning as if on an invisible axis whilst others vigorously moved their heads from side to side or raised their outstretched arms to heaven...

well, quite an odd experience for someone from my background, for someone with a dry, elemental, grey soul, an almost puritanical temperament that likes to think that religious intensity is not something that can be orchestrated or generated without silence and solitude. but, but, this is the religion of the land, and there are 'many mansions'...

R's lesson

'Do you love me?', he asked her.

She just looked back at him quizically, one eyebrow sarcastically raised, with that mischievous smile of hers, that twinkle in her eyes. As to be expected: silence-or a few indecipherable utterings.

What does it all mean, he wondered to himself, as if there was a meaning.

A storm picked up. Morning was approaching, but outside there was only darkness, the land engulfed in a film of unholy, unredeemed silence. Most of the objects were still sliding out of their shadowy existence. But he could still make out the old cardboard covering the hole in the wall starting to give way. He hoped it wouldn't let the crows and other birds in.

And the wind blew through the apartment, through all of the open doors, spreading itself, pushing at the lace curtains, shifting the wall clock slightly, rattling the knives and forks that had been carelessly left out the night before. It whistled into the study, bringing with it layer after layer of dust. And that was that, he thought, dust, dust from beyond the city perimeter, from God knows where, was all around us, accumulating on the unread copies of the biographies: Tolstoty and Keats, and Matisse. Bachelard, too. There was nothing to be done. This great democratizing force which didn't spare the greats and which would hardly stop for him, was like another night within the night.

For a moment, he thought she'd relented, her eyes transfixed on his. But when he turned away he saw that she was looking at the fan in the same way, as if it was a kind of god; the slow circular movement of the shadows, the early morning lights glowing without religion..all this captivated her. Those at the beginning of life, and those near the end, realize the beauty of stepping in and out of circles. Nothing is permanent, little man, she seemed to be saying.

He walked to the door.

She laughed, as if to say: bring my milk on your way back, there's a good chap.

So endeth R's first lesson.

mr. somewhere

He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.
---Mr. Palomar.

...

re-collection

Since we're talking about strange dreams...

the other day i was looking out on the Thames, near a bridge (think it was Blackfriars) and this huge wave was bubbling up just like in the picture above, but more circular in its movements. and as the waves silently fell and rose i gradually saw that that the water was actually full of sparkling rubbish-and it was incredibly beautiful, poetic, even. further down, the water had frozen over and people were sifting through russian fur coats and other stuff. nothing was wasted, if I recollect correctly.

~~~

Iris M:

stages of emancipation..seeing corresponds to objects with different degrees of reality and different levels of awareness, seeing by different parts of the soul...

K. Clark:

intuition and intellect:

'+' 'withdrawal into that hortus conclusus of the spirit'

'+' mystical unity.

'Nearly all the painters who have grown greater in old age have retained an astonishing vitality of touch. As their handling has grown freer, so the strokes of the brush developed an independent life'

'There is nothing more mysterious than the power of an aged artists to give life to a blot or a scribble'

'Then they began their furious battle with time, not staining, but scarring the white canvas of eternity'

'Beethoven's late quartets are classic examples of the old-age style in their freedom from established forms and their mixture of remoteness and urgent personal appeal'

they have arrested the moment when the body and soul fall asunder (Eliot), caught enough of the body to make the moment comprehensible, and seen how it is disintegration reveals the soul'

All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.
---Hokusai.

Remnants of hearing, seeing

when you speak there is a silence in your voice, a silence that is a kind of sadness. or was it my name on your lips? but when you are silent, there is a kind of sadness in my heart.

with a variable key
you unlock the house,
in it
drifts the snow of the unsaid.

I remain unrecognized by you, for you,alone. I must remember to forget you, and not say 'you' or 'I'. when we meet, i will have nothing to say to you, and you shall not call after me. but you will do something utterly simple and ordinary, like unfold your clothes before me, and that will be a kind of revelation.

late style

He has retreated to a point where he can see the world in an internal reflection, a very clear and penetrating simplification that he could never have achieved in the midst of the hurly-burly.
---Ted Hughes on George Mackay Brown.

Rachel's manifesto:

There will be food for every child under heaven
And no child shall have to cry
to make known what lies deep in their heart.

...

the idea of north

There is no return. There is no return because you never went away. The point of no return points both ways. And yet there are no journeys. How could it be otherwise with you?

A mirror was placed before us. You, the crackling silver by which I see myself. You, the distance of the soul's truth. If my qibla was you, then so was my infidelity. The silver inherits the black.

'In Rembrandt's Prodigal Son we feel that the whole of humanity has been enfolded in an act of forgiveness, beyond good and evil'
---Kenneth Clark.

'Spontaneity is a response to the conditions of life'
---Stokowski.

Sobornost:
from cathedral, gathering, community.

'Knowledge arises not out of confrontation with the world but a coming-together'
---Lesley Chamberlain.

Some recommendations from my friends:

book: Stoner

film: Mother and Son

music: Biber's Mystery Sonatas

One can, conceivably, do without books and films and music. First things first.

North.
When beauty is an idea, then desire is an image. Where is that imageless land where I shall find you again, and where you cease to be you? The idea of north is the absolute, the absolute future that is north of the north. There hardness is engulfed by softness and the light gently falls all around us. Then, with all seriousness, you will speak my name, in your barbarian tongue.

Benjamin and the 10,000

"Anyone, anywhere, at any time can listen to the B minor Mass upon one condition only - that they possess a machine. No qualification is required of any sort - faith, virtue, education, experience, age. Music is now free for all. If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don't mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education or study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not part of true musical experience. Regarded as such it is simply a substitute, and dangerous because deluding. Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener."

---Benjamin Britten, via the theovergrownpath

"A unique existence at the place where it happens to be"...the time and space parceled out to us.

---Walter Benjamin.

Was thinking about this the other day, how I'm storing up books and music like an undiscriminating collector, sifting and scrounging, and how little time I actually spend either listening, truly listening, or quietly reading. As if one now had to steal a few moments for oneself and cram in the experience, or 'consume' these 'products'. And yet, of course, it really isn't an experience-for that would entail some deep, committed relation to the music/books, some time to slowly reflect, connect and absorb. Stop, look, and listen, we were taught as children.

Experience is not the transfer of bits of information, something that can readily be 'downloaded' in a file. Even if one had access to 10,000 books, or a 100,000 books what difference would that make?

"Silence is necessary for the emergence of persons."
---Ivan Illich.

The Undetermined Animal, मुद्रा

What gives such disturbing power to his [Leonardo's] drawings is that 'something within him'...was analogous to an objective truth of nature...We can see from his studies of grasses and of plaited hair that their vital interlacings were all part of the pattern of his being and that the intensity with which he gazed at whirlpools was the result, rather than the cause of this pattern....

That Durer should have looked with heightened perception at the human hand is exactly what his whole work and character would lead us to expect..all his life he saw humanity through the deeds of its hands, whether carving or arguing or praying.

---Kenneth Clark.

The stylized gestures of the soul. Sangeeta explained some of her hand gestures just before the performance. The path from illusion to truth was represented by two movements: her hand swerving like a snake to a finger pointing upwards-which is quite familiar to muslims, of course.

a quiet moment

all these things can be said, but why say them?
---Thomas Merton.

me. you. "&", perhaps.

blue flowers

Real people in background.
---Penelope Fitzgerald.

What goes on unnoticed, in and around you. Vision is the illumination of solitude.

Dinner with the usual suspects, down in Affers's basement. Served at 11. These reunions are becoming terribly weird and just so slightly uncomfortable. A lost friend returns after ten or fifteen years (last month I saw someone after 23 years!) and we all get together, remember our school days fondly, laugh at the same things (has anyone really changed that much over the years?); ask the same questions: where are you now, what have you been doing?

R recalls how he was fondled by one of the teachers (this is the hardest thing to explain and I'm sure anyone who reads this will misunderstand. If you've seen the History Boys you just might). The 'conversation' turns -as it invariably does-to prostitutes and 'dancing girls' and a subset of the group that goes to Thailand and the Far East...

M.M. said something interesting: that for this subset group it's not really about the cheap booze (though I'm sure that that plays an important role); it's more that they simply enjoy being in a group...in fact, they could go for the Hajj or Umrah and still have a great time.

And the strange thing was that no-one batted an eyelid when he made that almost scandalous remark, as he swiftly moved from talking about hedonism to religion. And it's not as if there weren't religious people amongst us (Hasan is, I think, a very quiet man who practices sufism and another, R, calls himself 'Rumi,' such is his devotion to the mystic).

As I left in the early hours, driving through the backstreets to avoid the police (I don't have a licence or a valid id card), the beam of light from my car's headlights suddenly picked up a small bunch of flowers that had been carefully, lovingly, planted in a very ugly street. Rumi commented how he loved such flowers in spring. To me they looked quite unreal, but maybe the light was playing tricks. As I turned the car they were plunged back into darkness. "So it is with our lives" , I thought to myself. Increasingly, we meet people now and only have a brief snapshot view of their lives..what went on before, what goes on after, God only knows. And the same applies to my friendship with bloggers.

I asked rumi, do you remember we took a photograph of the class on the last day of class? Who would have thought-and who could have known-how things would turn out? On that sunny day, when we threw ink at eachother and signed our names, who amongst us could have even guessed what lied in store? Some have ended up in prison, others have married and divorced, and still others have had heart atatcks and heart ache. Most of our teachers have passed away and are just a memory. And as I said that, I remembered the scene from a few hours earlier, and how it was announced that the 'fondler' had also died. Some of the guys cracked open another beer and just smiled to themselves.

stray reflections

I have borrowed/stolen this stunningly beautiful picture from flowerville (I hope she doesn't mind!)

"Merton sought fullness of man's inheritance; this inclusive view made it impossible for him to deny any authentic scripture or any man of faith. Indeed, he discovered new aspects of truth in Hinduism, in the Madhyamika system, which stood halfway between Hinduism and Buddhism, in Zen, and in Sufi mysticism. His lifelong search for meditative silence and prayer was found not only in his monastic experience but also in his late Tibetan inspiration. His major devotional interests converged in what he called "constantia" where "all notes in their perfect distinctness, are yet blended in one" ... Not only in religion and religious philosophy but in art, creative writing, music..."

~~~

'the sufi is he whose thought keeps pace with his foot'

I love that saying since it not only indicates the importance of a sense of proportion, of not letting one's thoughts run wild, disjointedly into a realm of fantasy, but it also suggests that thought must be lived by the whole person, 'incarnated' or anchored in our being...that our spirit is not opposed to earth and that finding one's own pace, one's own "groove," is the same as finding out who one is-even though 'finding' is not 'knowing'. And since we always walk on, thought, in this deeper sense, cannot be fixated with an object, but is in itself an approach, a living of life, a real life that is open, creative, attentive, full of unscripted ways..a broken circle.

Stray reflections always start out from a point-and our fidelity to ourselves and to others means that they never really leave home.

When the swami turned her back, my heart turned with her.

unbeing

Lucian Blaga is silent as a swan
In his land
the snow of being stands for words.
His soul is on a quest,
a silent, centuries-long quest,
since forever
and until the last boundary mark.
It seeks that water where the rainbow drinks
It seeks that water
from which the rainbow drinks
its beauty, its unbeing.

I sit alone, now. Dreaming much, so that by mid-morning I am nowhere. And you are nowhere too. I stand by the window with my back to the door, learning of other directions. Learning off by heart. Like my silver watch kept safely in a velvet pouch, in a dark cupboard, keeping time silently.

und seh meiner Hand zu,
wie sie den einen
einzigen
Kreis zieht

Time falls all around, like golden pollen. Melts all around her. Time's in her pocket, ticking loud on a stalled hand, and time will tell, even as she wounds. But for now he stands alone, with all the time in the world, like a watch counting the hours, stuck on that first moment when he saw her, by the first light, the light before the darkness of their being.

.

A white flower grows in quietness.

ice melts in the sea, says: "I am nothing.
all images have melted in this fire!"
she said: " then why do you still talk of 'I'?
is this not a remnant of the snow?
as long as the snow remains, the red rose is hidden"

---after Rumi.

the morning snow was without blemish. quiet, like a blank page. no foot marks could be seen. there were no journeys. so followed you blindly.came to a full stop. my heart became still. near the rose garden: lost myself.fell in the infidel well. found the moon (like Li Po).saw your face, and the lovely mole above your lips. wondered: how many others had drowned in you.

End of the Line

The poet-keeper of the High Line is the photographer Joel Sternfeld. He has been taking pictures of it in all seasons for the past year, and he has a gift for seeing light and space and color-romantic possibility of every kind-where a less sensitive observer sees smudge and weed and ruin. The High Line does not offer a God’s-eye view of the city, exactly, but something rarer, the view of a lesser angel..
---Adam Gopnik.

I never quite get to the last stop but it's always there, shrouded in mystery. There, other people live. The strange lives of other people; so ordinary that your heart could break. The final stop on the central line borders an infinite white space and maybe has absorbed something of its nothingness. As we approach it the train driver announces: this train goes no further. All change, all change, please.

You won't find a new country, won't find
another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods,
will turn grey in these same houses.
You'll end up in this city. Don't hope
for things elsewhere:there is no ship for you,
there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this
small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
---Cavafy, 'The City'

Never make the mistake of dying in this city.
--Swami.

Never make the mistake of growing old, son.
---Ubo.

A path that is walked on long enough ceases to be a path.

The beaten path, the end of the line. We retrace our steps there. Just beyond the edge of the known world, the deeply familiar streets that you could run down blindly, is another place. Is it the origin or the nether land? Perhaps it is the promised land? Here one encounters reality beyond words and books, beyond the pretence of status and accumulated meanings. There's no time for that. If you speak at all, then speak plain English. Let your voice ring true.

You walk through the streets like a ghost. Things only seem vaguely different, as if the world had been displaced by a few degrees or the watches were all five minutes behind schedule. The faces are no blanker than others and yet an eerie feeling shimmers through the ordinariness reawakening the power present in all of us to become strangers to the map of places and paths that we call reality...

We, we latecomers have nothing to do but transcribe the words of others. Like the barbarians to whom we once denied entry to the city, we have dreamed with great longing for an escape. This other zone is a hidden, quiet corner of the universe. There we imagine we can undo the certainties of place and once again allow our destiny to become a direction, opening up to wide inner vistas. At last we will become comfortable in our own skin, and re-work all those settled materials; look lovingly back on all we knew and still find something unexpressed. This Late Style means becoming like one of Breughel's hunters, means returning to the world and looking at it from an angle, our unique angle, and realising that the world is not the world any more.

We go back to all that was unsaid. Return to texts we underlined, to dusty books, wondering why this page and no other has its corner turned. So much now seems unexplained. We look for other connections, those that were only dormant, like the bright veins of dazzling minerals set in stone. Try to remember all that was glossed over once again. And all this, let it be added, not to bring things to the surface, to a final resolution-for there can be none- but to deepen what we already know. Nothing is neglected. Every possibility is kept open in these acts of second-thought, re-vision....

A Late Style avoids linear narratives. The ink is not dry. To adopt it is to realise that one's life is infinitely stranger than it is. At the centre of all that strikes you as simply ordinary, plain, or mundane, is the most extraordinary of tales. In the final analysis there is no reconciliation and none is desired. An old man gently touches a flower, as he did when he was a child, and understands now that all life is precarious.

Millions have become strangers to themselves even before they reach this place. Disenchanted, they think untimely thoughts, not identifying with the place or time that has been allotted to them. This sense of lateness resonates with the promise of latent possibilities, the unfolding, ripening of certain potentialities; a trace of what was unthought, of all that was, survives. The line becomes a square, the point a circle.

Without a future, late man returns to those things he once loved. But this is not a final, homeward-bound journey. There are no more journeys, only a longing for what disappears.

Timelines.
Everything has a season. This place is run-down and for some of its inhabitants only survives as long as their memories do. With them the city will also disappear.

old age

A friend recently said to me:

A child is the purest form of humanity. He or she has no concern whatsoever with the distinctions that structure so much of our lives: those of wealth, race, colour, religion, gender, and caste. All she cares about is whether the other person she has contact with loves her or not. If they do, then all is well, and the other is a friend, the beloved. Then there is no question of who loves who more, or which of the two is more dependent on the other. Each is caught in the other's gaze, starstruck.

T chipped in: But surely that isn't the full development of our humanity because it is instinctive, not thought through.

Z, not following T's train of thought: Precisely!

Must we learn, once again, to become like little children, wise children?
~~~

Late style:

Hardy/Berger/Huxley (themes and variations)/Said (late style)...

The strange affinity between old age and conservatism, inflexibility, and pessimism. Not as a rule, of course. But it does seem fairly common nonetheless. And for many people who are morally and intellectually conservative-well, the latter is a genuinely rare phenomenon in these parts-the very word liberal suggests decadence and licentiousness.

The attitude to the west (to take up Mani's theme again) is very much like that of the maulvi's toward a beautiful woman: one may reluctantly acknowledge a noteworthy feature or two but he is led to conclude that she is, after all, only a woman!

This deep-rooted conservatism means that many reach old age prematurely. Doors are closed. Change is an inevitable falling away from some prior state of bliss. This is not the same thing, mind you, as the admirable conservatism that can be given form in Montaigne's words (roughly): "to learn how to die is to learn how to let go; to learn how to live, however, means knowing how and what to cling on to"

This is surely an inescapable human trait: the capacity to discern what is valuable and cling on to it, the reaching out into the darkness, holding on, steadfastness..all of this seems to be of a different order to that of the irritable and tired conservatism of the aged which doesn't know how or when to let go, and that is fixated by habit or instinct to one point of view-rather like a child,as Rumi once said, that only knows the breast in one way.

the lawless heart

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition, and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definition. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form.

Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe the imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.That entire philosophical and dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immaturity which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

Gombrowicz

I shall not refrain [he says] from including among these precepts a new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is none the less of great value in quickening the spirit of invention. It is this: that you should look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some setting you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills, and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, expression of faces, and clothes, and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose strokes you may find every named word which you can imagine.
---Leonardo

Moments of Vision

(photo by Roxana).

Tree, moon, sun rain.
When all was one.
Tree, moon, sun, rain.
When you were mine.

Light falling on a tree takes on its dark structure, illuminates a pattern, is opened up by it; or a tree, done with its ingazing, flows to the moon, grows in lightness. A moment of vision is born of solitude but, like a series of ripples in a pond, reaches out in an ever-expanding series of concentric circles. "One" meets "one". One on one. Rain and the sea are one. And the sea is one. Distinctions suggest indistinctions.

Outside William Morris' house.

The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light and finally they disappear into the hidden depths....and then the sun is reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together again in a loving embrace...and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself, endlessly, eternally. Perhaps it is the ceaseless movement of the stream that allows such an image to form in my mind; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change it is doubtful whether there would be a reflection at all. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time because of the permanent presence of the sun?

Or perhaps it is something more mysterious altogether..my desire for it to be so. Without that longing could there ever be rapture? The image is not nothing, nor is it a mere floating dream in a floating world; black suns exist. But they are not the sun.

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream return to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without its illumination the stream is nothing but a memory, a thing that exists only in the mind as a possibility, empty, narrow, and alone.

Art and Islam (or broken circles)

The divine is a Being whose centre is everywhere, and circumference nowhere.
---Nicolas of Cusa

Islamic art is the silent exteriorization of a contemplative state and...reflects no ideas, but transforms the surroundings qualitatively, by having them share in an equilibrium whose centre of gravity is the unseen...

Aniconism, by precluding every image inviting man to fix his mind on something outside himself and to project his soul on an 'individualizing' form, creates a void.The proliferation of decoration does not contradict this quality of contemplative emptiness; on the contrary, ornamentation with abstract forms enhances it through its unbroken rhthym and its endless interweaving.Instead of ensnaring the mind and leading it into some imaginary world, it dissolves mental 'fixations,' just as contemplation of a running stream, a flame,or leaves quivering in the wind, can detach consciousness from its inward 'idols'.
---Titus Burckhardt.

There are two ways of thinking about the relation between Islam (or religion in general) and art that are quite unsettling. The first view, often propounded by fundamentalists, 'levellers' and iconoclasts, claims that 'pure' Islam actually has nothing to do with art or the the arts. According to this dry, legalistic, puritanical view art is a distraction and, even worse, a grave error since it attempts to take away from God's unique creativity and tarnishes His utter and complete transcendence (I think the Pope alluded to this by pointing to the unfathomable essence of God (or God's apparently arbitrary Will), and the lack of relation with the world (cp. the logos).

A second, somewhat overlapping view, is sometimes made by art historians. What is suggested here is that a desert, nomadic religion is at key points at odds with the aims and driving impulses of Art (yes, with an "A"). Of course, I don't think this can completely be dismissed (though it does miss the mark), but neither can one totally ignore the bad faith and mutual hostilities between the 'civilisations' (historically speaking) that often form the backdrop to such views. If Islam produced any worthwhile art, anything beyond the minor arts of calligraphy and decoration, it was, according to this view, only grudgingly, against its "real" tendencies and better instincts. More to the point, the historical argument continues, to the extent that it did produce wonderful art, this was a borrowing from other civilisations (Byzantine) and urban centres (Hagarism). The fundamental underlying sentiment remains, it is claimed, that of a sober, puritanical disdain for complexity, ambiguity, and the unnecessary (see Iris M's brilliant The Fire and the Sun).

1. It is very odd, very odd indeed, that a religion which allegedly focuses on a rigorous transcendence, on simplicity and austerity, could be so deeply connected to poetry, architecture, handicrafts, and music. One can, of course, take Gellner's way out and claim that the 'high church' indeed represents the orthodox view whilst the 'low church' of folk culture, syncretism and heterodoxy (shi'ism) makes concessions and allows worldliness and representation to sneak back in. But, as Peter Brown says in The Cult of the Saints, such terms are often loaded and the distinctions erroneous.

In fact, it would be truly amazing if religion didn't touch on and vivify what we take to be so central to our humanity. And any muslim would immediately ask: how can there be jalal without jamal?

2. The historical argument is a weak one. I mean, it's fairly well recognized that early Christian art, for example, took on a particular form and that it took time for art to catch up and adequately express the truths it felt important. There's nothing surpising in that, or the fact that there can be borrowed elements. The Crucifixion, for instance, was not central intitially, and even when it has been it has been so in different ways (from Christ Triumphans to the Suffering Christ in the 'West'-and that too very late: Assissi?)

Ikhwan al-safa

Combine Arabic faith, Jewish intelligence, Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism and the Sufi way of life - this would be the perfection of humanity.
---The Brethren of Purity

In trying to make themselves angels, they transformed themselves into beasts.
----Montaigne

There's certainly something about you that gravitates to the simple, to slowness, silence, and starkness. A puritanical soul, lacking in all suppleness. An inflexible mind that has repetitive thoughts. Why else would you find Rothko so appealing? Why else the tangible sense of relief when looking at the everyday winter scenes at the National, away from the stuffy, overwrought, tangled sensibilities of so much before? Abstraction and ideas are, ultimately, more real to you, no?

But, you'd like to think, there's also something that pulls you to the messy pluralism and complexity of the world. Why else would you be inclined to Rembrandt's humanism or to Rothko or to Bellow? And there it is again, rearing it's head, the wahabi instinct that flinches and says: isn't "humanism" a sign of your facetiousness?

five easy pieces

Never read more than you can live.
I can't remember where I read that but it's always sounded right. All those boffs with their dry-as-dust knowledge, those technicians of the spirit. Reading, thinking, not as a way of living but as a career, a way of creating a distance between you and the plebs, a way of appearing profound in a superficial world.

What would it be like to live through a thought? A thought that we could touch, that illuminated our whole being, not just our mind. For eye, mind, hand and heart to be one. A sound thought.


~~~~~
Find your deepest instincts and then stick to them.
Nobility of soul is courage and the sublime virtue of trust. But isn't this given to us, a matter of grace? Who amongst us has the strength to live with mystery, to follow one's instincts trusting that things will work out, this animal repose? The bourgeois soul's love of security.


~~~~~~
Laugh at the whole world and the whole world will laugh at you.
Don't expect "success", don't think non-conformity is easy or complain too much that you are misunderstood. Don't expect other people to do anything but laugh at what you take seriously. "The world loves to blacken all that shines". Folly. Wisdom. Don't stop laughing-at yourself and others..and with others.



~~~~~~
Knowing isn't everything. "Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality".
Not a pleasure that loses itself in flights of imagination, but one that finds home, that is more rounded, at ease, proportional, one is tempted to say. Proportional to the good. Not the incessant compulsion to know everything. There are many things you do not know, that you will never know. It doesn't matter. Not this desire to dissect, analyse, calculate, break-up everything. But to accept the unknown, the hidden in one's life. To keep this sense of wonder that resists 'knowing'.

To understand that life is full of tragedy, farce, comedy, stoicism, good sense..that there is no 'ranking of rankings', there is no one thing. Well, maybe there is. But more than that. That life is full of blank spaces and that even the full ones also sometimes appear empty. And that that is truly a mystery. An acceptance, an awareness of what is given to us.


~~~~~
Volo ut sis.
The supreme wisdom. The quintessential, the 'queen' that moves in all directions; the openness of the hand. A fundamental openness of our being, to others, to the world. If God judges us by appearances then another name for this dazzling freedom is Beauty. But no, more than this: it is the ability to say "yes", the pure desire for the beloved.

Second Thoughts

Sometimes the mechanisms of thought are there, but the content is weak or just barely present, like a low flame, or background music. Like that of a child, all star-gazed, dreamy. Is that because of the relations between the 'I-world' are still fluid, in the process of being moored, anchored to some fixed point? The senses still coming alive, rising to the surface, as it were?

And is this unknowingness also, later, something we aspire to: a creative leap out of the mind and back to life? Not a return to an undivided condition or a pleasure that doesn't sting, but a lived experience of contradictions and distinctions? Of time.

.............The water
flashes
each time you
make it leap-
..................arching its glittering back.

---Denise.

A thought about what passes and takes leave is only a thought. It passes too. Do not give it a second thought. But we do, and that's okay. Necessary. To be human is to have second thoughts. Much is left unsaid; much, too, is unsayable.

First Light

Poplar and oak awake

all night. And through

all weathers of the days of the year.

There is a consciousness

undefined.

Yesterday's twighlight, August

almost over, lasted, slowly changing,

until daybreak. Human sounds

were shut behind curtains.

No human saw the night in this garden,

sliding blue into morning.

Only the sightless trees,

without braincells, lived it

and wholly knew it.
--Denise Levertov.

Light slips into the room. the real thing. blurred objects become clearer, well-defined, as their shadows fall...things sometimes find their shape, their true form at last, even if only briefly-for a minute or so. nothing like right-seeing, by the first light of the day, even if your heart isn't true. then the colours. the grey slowly dissipating, lifting. the weight of the world returns. squares of yellow light gently slanting on white walls like the last remnants of a sad dream.

at night a bird in a tree dreams blindly of a star and remembers nothing of it when morning breaks. you, on the other hand, are still dreaming of green and orange stars at noon.

If (ribbon bow)

If I'd never fallen
or you didn't look
no-one would know my heart

If your love was true
and my heart was yours,
No-one would know who was who.

If I never knew your name
and you didn't know mine
no-one would know my soul

If I was ever fair to thee
and your eyes were dark like mine
then no-one would know my sorrow

~~~~

Sparrows:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another. Whilst he is within, he is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.

- Bede, Ecclesiastical History: Book II

--via Celia

True Colours

She not only gets inside me, she worms her way into my heart like a snake. Deeper. All the way in. I take her in like a slave. I play my part faithfully so I, too, can get to her heart...

---adapted from Lust, Caution.

Love wears forbidden colours like the blue beneath the black. The world carries on in astonishmnet, merriment, gracefulness. The settled quality of a life at ease with itself, the splendour of abundance, of borrowed finery, the peace of not knowing. The given-ness of the world, Their love of fate knows no bounds. Your lip curls, even though you're an oriental.

But elsewhere, far away, there are hands that would know, eyes that would tell. The grey of time passed through us. For a while it seemed as if the universe itself was nothing but a series of grey lines. And it lasted but a moment, like a snowflake falling on your face. But the moment was all. The queen shed a tear, and it fell like a shard of glass into my eye. Now everything is tinged with the blueness of her soul.

the clearing

to love clearly is to see clearly-or something like that. to love, clearly. claritas and caritas. the field that simply exists, unfenced. years of pruning and paring down, fruits that fall, or a labour of love? when all is said and done you're amazed to know how little you know, how much of it was like the sleep of a child. and yet, the dreamlife holds, is sharper, more real. and when we age, we sometimes know eachother blindly, as if a few footsteps in the snow were enough.

awakened from a dream, we are closer; your breath in mine, our souls truly alive only in darkness, quickened, frightened, out of their slumber. I catch a glimpse of you in the cold mirror and am startled. I remember your face, your forehead near mine, as if you were drawing me to your nature. my heart is clear now. there was really only you.

From Denise Levertov:

....

the mirror caught in its solitude
cannot believe you as I believe.
...

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies
within something of another nature
in repose, distinct.
...

Or, to believe it's there
within you
though the key's missing
makes it enough? As if
golden pollen were falling

onto your hair from dark trees.
...

all the while
you are indwelling,
a gold ring lost in the house.
...

not even a wise man
can say, do thus and thus, that presence
will be restored.
...

[without a shadow of a difference]

Sun.
light.
Light
light light light
....

A man growing old is going
down the dark stairs
He has been speaking of the Soul
tattooed with the Law
of dreams
burnt in the bone

Starladen Babylon
buzzes in his blood, an ancient
pulse. The rivers
run out of Eden.
Before Adam
Adam blazes.

"It's alright,"answers
the man going down,
"it's alright-- there are many
avenues, many corridors of the soul
that are dark also.
Shalom."

ethics, economics, and citzenship

R.I.P. Michael.

...

Here's a very interesting collection of short pieces by different people (journalists, writers, academics, activists, politicians).

Underlying most of them is a critique of the narrow view of the self or the individual fostered by the market, the distortion it creates in how we view our relation to others and to the world.

In particular, Mark Vernon on friendship:

[Aristotle's definition of a friend]: "another self":

1. the other self remains 'other'..."unlike erotic love, in which there is a powerful desire to meld with the other, to become wholly dependent upon another...friendship wants the friend to be himself or herself"

2. the other self is a reflection of your own self. a mirror by which to see oneself more clearly. the ability to connect.

3. I-we: the other is distinct, different, but also part of one's life, and from this emerges a totally new way of seeing and being in the world.

Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark—a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.
---Robert Graves.

STAND still, and I will read to thee

A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.

These three hours that we have spent,

Walking here, two shadows went

Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd.

But, now the sun is just above our head,

We do those shadows tread,

And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.

So whilst our infant loves did grow,

Disguises did, and shadows, flow

From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so.

That love has not attain'd the high'st degree,

Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,

We shall new shadows make the other way.

As the first were made to blind

Others, these which come behind

Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.

If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,

To me thou, falsely, thine,

And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.

The morning shadows wear away,

But these grow longer all the day;

But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.

Love is a growing, or full constant light,

And his first minute, after noon, is night.

---John Donne.

new sensation