is religion possible

An old question, but why not?

Hans Jonas
Kant
Allama

~~~

In an age dominated by reason, science, facts (the world of values shrinks)it seems barely likely. Or if it does, then it will be a very arid,abstract, 'scriptualistic'(Gellner) religion that appeals to a half-baked mind, the bazaari class: the Idea of God. Worse, much worse, it will degenerate into the kind of soppy, mind-numbing platitudes of the American Sunday-school variety, or the breathtaking silliness of the evangelicals.

Cut loose from reason, tradition, a sense of continutiy -the importance of urbanizaion and technology cannot be overestimated-it can quite easily morph into, has morphed into in many instances, a terrible fundamentalism (Gibbon was right here: the problem is not so much institutionalised religion-though that brings its own horrors-but the unhinged imagination, "fancy", that loses any connection with the world). As Christopher Hill informs us in 'The World Turned Upside Down,' this was always a possibility with the 'religion of the heart'.

After the holocaust how can there be religion? Really. If you haven't thought about that then you haven't really thought about religion very seriously.

De-mythologisation: Iris M.

Well, no more transcendental models (the cosmos, nature) and rituals, symbols, and dogma all seem too rigid (think of how pejorative these words are: dogmatic, purely symbolic, ritualistic). And if there is only contingency, what binds us, what can bind one human being to another?

Is religion possible without 'bridges' (Simone Weil), channels, receptacles, places of refuge, shared symbols (Peter Fuller), a common world, a reverence for texts, a north, north of the future?

But yes, despite this religion is possible (whence the nod to Chatwin in the title of this post).

Not simply as an impulse-as if that was a mere whim, something that wasn't fundamental to our being. But a response that is deep-rooted. Lesley Chamberlain says it better in this fascinating piece here .


'We are involved in the mystery of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. What is true is 'beyond' but its reflection is also here...spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality.'
---Iris M.

the line of beauty

The inner-what is it? If not me, if not you?

stone, star, flower, wind.

When great age becomes child-like again, joins it in simplicity. And the flame of the candle before the sun is not extinguished. The inner sense of your life unfolding: stone, star, flower, wind. The sound before the sound, the darkness of the sun. The inner is a mirror that must be polished, so that I remember, so when I look at me, I shall think of you.

"The sound of Christian bells draws man upward and leads him away from the world; but the heavy and deep sound of the Buddhist bell leaves us motionless, it makes us come down into ourselves...

Beauty is like the sun; it acts without detours, without dialectical intermediaries, its ways are free, direct, incalculable; like love, to which it is closely connected, it can heal, unloose, appease, unite, or deliver through its simple radiance...

The empirical "I" is nothing but a shifting tissue of images and tendencies; when the ego of an individual at eight years old is compared with the ego of the same individual at eighty years of age one may well ask oneself where the real "I" is. And if man could live for a thousand years what would remain of that which was his "I" in the first century of his life?Beings and events would drift around him like leaves scattered by the wind, the sky itself..."

---Frithjof Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism

There is no pluralism in the mosque

Can't stop laughing over this one...

"There is no pluralism in the mosque."
---Pamela Geller.


Yes, you know. The great entertainment value of 'religious' people and conservatives. Bob posted a picture of her in a bikini (which nearly won me over). But no, no comparison to the very attractive 'Mad Mel'.

First things first:

Well, you can be sure a lot of the brothers will be saying, 'see, I told you so, there isn't really freedom in America'. And yet, these very same people will have next to nothing to say on the lack of freedom of worship or the deplorable way in which minorities are treated in their own country.

Gosh, there are a lot of crazies out there! From the Israeli settlers to Hamas, Hindu fanatics to the homegrown Muslim nutters here. And the neo-cons too. If you thought Bush was thick, just wait-God forbid-'till God-fearing hockey mom gets in! Ooh, she'll show that pinko-muslim-gay-loving Hussein where to get off. God dammit!

All of them would be hilarious if they weren't so dangerous, if what they said didn't resonate with the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of 'ordinary folks.' Crazy people are only interesting from a safe distance. Fanaticism is, ultimately, rather one-dimensional and rather tiresome. Goodness, on the other hand, is utterly mysterious and un-nameable.

Pluralism:

an ordinary mind

Continuing with the Jonas theme...

showing, not telling. the gesture of the hand, already there in the mind's eye. don't try too hard. don't think too hard about not trying too hard. thinking is not hard. the path of least resistance. a kashmiri mantra.

'prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form'. as ubo says, better to be late in this world than early in the next. listen to this(for)now. My heart is still, as time will tell.

~~~

I wonder if anyone listening to this found the constant references to his homosexuality slightly irritating? Years back, I think I did. But then again, you'd always been a bit suspect of the obsession with gossip and the emphasis on the personal or the psychological aspects of the artist rather than the art itself, a bit wary of the blurring of the lines between the private and the public (Sennett, Arendt).

And now? Well, it's interesting, if it had been a woman telling of her liasons how many of us (men) would have actually found that in some way titillating?

miscellaneous

The word for 'Man' , insan, is derived (I think) from 'uns' (familiarity, intimacy). As if to say: to be human is to get in the inside, to connect, to be at the centre. I always find it remarkable that people cannot see any beauty in Islam-just as it is a constant source of wonder that some can see none in 'the west'.

"Arabic evolved as a dialect of nomadic herdsmen in the desert, developed into one of the great languages of the world, flexible enough to translate every shade of Greek thought and pass it back to the west...the resulting muslim civilisation was profoundly influenced by Greek thought, but while it assimilated much it was never merely imitative."

--Thesiger.

"The parable of the bee is instructive. As a matter of habit, this insect draws from a diverse variety of sources-pollen and nectar-in order to produce a synthetic product that reflects all the colors and fruits of its immediate habitat. While the honey produced is in some way aggregate of many diverse types of nectar, it is simultaneously something very new and unparalleled. In the end, the bee not only produces a delectable substance but also furthers reproduction through cross-pollination that in turn generates new flowers and restarts the cycle for the future production of honey.

Similarly, in the reconstruction of ideas from fragments, it is often the case that ideas that were once the end products of a constellation of thoughts are now deployed in the reconstructive process as means for different ends."

---Ebrahim Moosa.

Must try and dig up those passages by Burckhardt on the similarities between Celtic art and certain Islamic forms. Firstly, because of its intrinsic interest, and secondly, because it is important that idiots who keep on harping on about Said and the staging of 'the east' think about the possibility that 'the west' has actually had a genuine interest in cultures beyond its own boundaries-an interest that cannot always be reduced to the political.

Of course, you realize that this will grate on the nerves of the polemicists and puritans, for whom synctreticism implies bastardization and impurity. And yet it is worth recalling that there have been times when the East and the West have been open to one another (see Briffault's wonderful 'Making of Humanity')

Peter Brown (from 'Society and the Holy' and 'A Life of Learning')...

"Since the 18th century, we westerners have taken pleasure, and even thought to derive wisdom, from a persistent attempt to project ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of men and women whose claim to our respect was precisely that they were sensed to be profoundly different from ourselves...

[b]ut I had also been challenged by more ordinary things. I was intrigued by distinctive forms taken by the communication of learning among the Muslim 'ulema', by the tenacity of moral codes designed to embrace entire communities...and by the very real poise and decorum which is so striking a feature of so many Muslim in their relationships among themselves and to others."

In the breadth of his sympathies, the depth of his human impulses, Peter Brown offers us here a stark contrast to the nihilism of the fundamentalists and extremists, to those who are by temperament or inclination tempted to believe in only 'one book', and read it in only one way.

And here's Meyer Schapiro, from his wonderful essay, 'On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art':

"..[t]he frequent practice of western artists-in stone, wood, enamel, and paint-to reproduce bits of Arabic writing as an ornament on the borders of their own works...The same admiration for the Muslim's art obtained among the Byzantines, who also reproduced as ornament the forms of Cufic writing...

Yet there is in western art from the 7th to the 13th century an immense receptivity matched in few cultures before that time or even later; early Christian, Byzantine, Sassanian, Coptic, Syrian, Roman, Muslim,Celtic and pagan Germanic forms were borrowed then, often without regard to their context and meaning."

in a dream

to live in this horizon and no other. if the heart is destroyed, what of it? the fragments of sentences weren't yours to own, not to begin with. but you found your name spoken with a strange accent, spoken by her red-wine lips and,just as in a dream, all appeared fantastical.

'For a week my heart has pointed elsewhere...
if we leaned forward, and should dip a finger
into this river's momentary black flow,
infinite small stars would break like fish.'
---Robert Lowell.

+

...
make no memorable impact
except on your friends and dogs.

---Auden.

he recorded and commented upon "his reading, the sounds that he heard; painted the portraits of his friends; stored his impressions of the passing years; praised loneliness, nature, winter, and spring; desired to collect his impressions of fire, of water, even of hunting"; was keen to gather stones, and wood, and memories; delighted in looking at the passing world--images reflected on windowpanes, a child's hand touching a flower, clouds and shadows.
---on Jonas Mekas.

We are involved in the mystery of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. What is true is 'beyond' but its reflection is also here.
---Iris M.


There can be no religion without humanity. The horizontal dimension isn't a dispersion but a mirror that reflects the centre in every thing, leading it back (jamal and jalal); the enlarged heart sees that nothing was in vain, that every act can open on to something else, that each moment is like a star and a circle at the same time, a point in the infinite dark flow of light.

Here we are, 'bronzed by decay, by many, many suns...[ripened for night, by night], knowing one choice not two is all you're given.'

how to...

'How to live'. Well, it is hard to imagine a more embarrassing book to be seen reading or carrying. What could be more cringe-worthy-except, perhaps, Freaknomics or Eat, Live, Pray (two out of three, dear). What is that anyway? Chick lit? Is one allowed to use such phrases nowadays? Is it like that joke about the Panda bear: Eats, shoots, and leaves?

[Reminds me of rushing into Judd's secondhand bookstore, just off Russell Square...

The Mongol to Sandy, the rather sour looking Scottish owner: "Do you have any girly books?" In a bit of a hurry. Can you just point me to where they are?It's a present."

Sandy [horrified]: "I beg your pardon."

Mongol: "girly books, you know?"

Sandy, clearing his throat, putting on his sternest expression: "No, I'm afraid I don't know."

Mongol: "Books. For. Girls, " he says, spelling it out like a Red Indian. "You know, books that girls read."

By now everyone in the shop is just a bit startled and looking at us so I hastily add:

"Oh, don't mind him, he's just come from Afghanistan."

That settled them down a bit, but it came out in the wrong way, so that some thought he was, like Watson, returning from service in Afghanistan.]

~~~

"Are you okay?" N asked.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Why shouldn't I be okay? I mean, at least I think I'm okay," I replied.

"No, really, are you okay?" he repeated, but this time with an emphasis on the last word that was quite unsettling. What did he mean by that? And then, with one arm on my shoulder:

"Are you okay?"

"Hey, stop it already!" [Once, a pretty Indian girl had stopped me in the street to tell me that I was talking to myself. I ignored her, of course, and walked briskly on, lips tightly closed together. But you know, the crazy thing was that for a moment I thought, hey, maybe that's her chat-up line"]

What is the sane response you think to yourself. Feigning a bit of madness is always a good sign. At least it puts you into the mood for one of your lectures.

"You're a complex guy, K".

Well, not sure if that was a compliment but the way the conversation was going I doubted it. In any case, it's quite weird when you're already thinking of how you can fit bits of people's conversations into your next blogpost instead of answering them then and there.

"Hey, don't say that in front of the Mrs. Ammo. She'll think you're saying I've got a complex!"

"Can't you be serious for a moment?" N continued.

"Well, yes, for a moment, yes."

But back to Montaigne. Already a few people have asked me, in all earnestness, "is it one of those self-help books?"...and the tone in which it is asked means they're really saying you really need to read one.

There's a vast section on self-help at Variety Books, just off Liberty Market. Lots by that first-class charlatan and fraudster, Deepak Chopra. I don't think 'The Secret' has got here yet but there are crate loads of Cohelo -"very deep" I was told by a colleague who, when he's not reading very mathematical papers on finance or pumping iron is, quite disturbingly, into Jane Austen.

There's a lot of it about, books like: 'discover the inner me' , the spiritual me within. Lots of Osho and Krishnamurthi-though that's stored under 'philosophy', next to the very cheap photocopies of Russell. Can't help thinking, there's an awful lot of self in these self-help books. You want to find one (or a genre?) that goes something like: self-help for the anonymous self. And all this inner enlightenment can be had for less than a thousand rupees with the help of some good ol' eastern /ancient wisdom. Wheel on Mr. Rumi, Zen, Tao, or Pooh.

But, but, how to live? That's the question. The 64 million dollar question (originally, it was 64 thousand). Closely followed by 'how to walk' and 'how to breathe' (it's all in the Yin-Yang, or so I'm told). Also, on the New York Review of Book's list is 'all you wanted to know about being a muslim but were afraid to ask' (lots of pictures of muslims blowing themselves up)...nearly as popular as 'philosophy for dummies'. Gaddis, where are you when you're needed!

Lots of Chomsky, too. (No zizek, thank god). It takes its toll. One of the local maulvis told me, "we'll never succeed until we dismantle the military-industrial complex and put an end to the elite structures of power that run the show...me and you, we're the subaltern class."

"Yeah, like, whatever". Except, brother, I know you'd be the first one to string me up if you and your fellow goons ever came to power. Four legs bad, two legs good. There must be a book on how to avoid appearing rude when vomiting in response to a conversation with a fellow human being?

books., etc.

"That world has gone. The anchors have dissolved or are dissolving. There is neither a monetary nor religious anchor. The pound floats... The great visions of how one might associate with others – in an Empire, a Commonwealth, a socialist economy, a commune, a religious community, a trade union or even a company – have become implausible. We are individualists in a not very sovereign nation state being buffeted around by economic forces beyond our control. We madly find meaning in cults and celebrity, over-investing in family as the last redoubt of meaning, while reconciling ourselves to fewer public services and cynical companies."

---Will Hutton, The Observer.

~~~

"Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way."
---Anthony Grafton, NYRB.

Well, all that doom and gloom, the goodbye to all that and thanks for the fish mantra, is about par for the course. I mean, the idea of 'the end' (the end of the book, of civilisation, of innocence), the prospect of the sudden termination or disruption of settled ways, continuity, the order of things, tradition is itself as old as modernity and part of its tradition: Beckett: the end of the story is another story...The 'death of Christ' (Holbein) prefigures the 'death of God'. The end of capitalism, the end of socialism. The family as an institution is in terminal decline, the fall of the west, that sea change in political fortunes, is well and truly on its way (or so I'm told by reliable sources). The centre doesn't hold. What binds us when there is only contingency, sovereign becoming? World War one and the jolt out of the belle epoque, the Renaissance as a veritable second Fall.

Can't say I buy it. Of course there's some truth to it. There's some truth to most things. But universities produced (and produce) a lot of stuffiness and snobbery, and a fair number of interminable, self-centred, pedantic bores who masquerade as intelligent people, though in reality they're consumed by their own pettiness and vanity. Well, at least their uselessness was a good antidote to the philistines and religious conservatives, to the anti-intellectual brigade for whom the slow process of learning (replete with all its ambiguities) was to be dispensed with in a sudden gush of enthusiasm for the simple, unadorned life (Peter Brown on how the men of Greek learning looked on at horror at the Christian converts with their belief in a direct line to wisdom via revelation is insightful here).

The tree of knowledge. The tree of life. Same old, same old. But a false opposition. For in life there is no going back, only an upward and onward movement that spirals around a still centre. In the beginning was the act, not the word. And that act, which is in and of the world, that is connected to its myriad strands, is not based on opposition.

remembering, off by heart

generally speaking, we know nothing generally.

this-ness.

Not quite your old self. It takes time for you to catch up. To be oneself again. When you look into the mirror you don't look too closely. This hollow figure before you, somewhat unreal. And your voice? "You sound just like your father!" Z says. A few inherited gestures, a particular tone of voice, is all that links you to the past. What will be remembered, what can?

the swami to R's photo: " Will you remember me? No, I think you will not. What can we be to one another?"

In the early hours, when morning is just breaking, you pace up and down reading Lowell-when others are reading the Qur'an. Why this Platonic condemnation of the poets, you wonder?

The graveyard's soil was changing to stone
so many of its deaths had been midwinter
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts...

where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions...
Frost had given the names a diamond edge.

Outside, a garish light, the colour of a ripe watermelon, beams out from the darkness, like a life-buoy in a tempestuous sea. Inside, the sheltered life. Crumpled bedsheets. R blissfully asleep. Has learnt how to laugh. Which is half the trick. H, out like a drunk. Which is the other half. The starred frost on your heart, an emblem of your forgetfulness.

the ongoing moment

For Roxana:

To always resist being defined is to be defined.

Notes from Geoff Dyer's 'Ongoing Moment':

'Somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own. And yet, at the same time, Every Difference is a Likeness too.'

Arbus on photographing the blind:

He lives in an atmosphere as dense and separate as an island with its own sea so he is more autonomous and vulnerable than anyone, and the world is rendered into shadows and smells and sounds as though it was being remembered...We believe in the invisible and what he believes in is the visible.

To live, from the beginning, is to become separate.
At the same time I feel, with the light, with the lips, the heart
the anguish of being a ciego and alone for the day.
--Courtesy of Jonah

Aleph, Borges. To see everything simultaneously. But we live and write in time.

Hands have a history of their own, they have, indeed, their own civilisation, their own beauty.
----Rilke

Previously, even in Egypt, men had learned not to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn't know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their own existence singing in the darkness of other creatures.

We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness. ..We see as the All-Seeing Eye sees, with universal vision. And we are what is seen: each man to himself an identity, an isolated absolute. A picture! ..The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen. , is me.
--D.H.Lawrence, Art and Morality.

'The people in the streets, heading to shops, are emissaries of his own sadness.'

Gedney: 'Life of the solitary man is rendered bearable by a " window looking on to the street" (Kafka) ..solitude can be expressed in terms of other people : the figure on the street. '

W.Whitman: I do not doubt that interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that eyesight has another eyesight.

The door: a place-as well as a symbol- of transition, of transactions, between the inner and outer. The silent passageway, barzakh, between the inner life and the world, between one person and another.

'the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose...no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.'

'all the disturbances of the city continued outside our window, but we felt isolated and safe, as if the street were a river, and our room a raft...these small shared pleasures were, and remain, no less moving, or beautiful, or real for being so precarious.

a life whose search for meaning lies not ina faith in the past, or in after-life...

to reconcile their own habits of pleasure with the violence of the world.'

--Adam Gopnik, preface to A London Child of the 1870's.

the painted hour crumbles like chalk. the light, since the first day, has accumulated in my mind; the tree outside the window, strong and full, like the old days in Wales. return, again and again. the hand not so sure, but the heart still true.

it just ain't cricket.

books to read:
A Fan's Notes, Exley.
Netherlands, O'Neil.
Homo Ludens, Huizinga.
Man at Play, Rahner.
Swinging Away, Hise.
Rabbit Run, Updike.

books read:
Sportswriter, Ford.
American Pastoral, Roth.

~~~

Being a supporter of the Pakistani cricket team: Less Die of Heartache.

landing light

...who knows what we miss through not having spoken.
---Isaac Rosenberg.

what are we?
why do women ask questions?
who are we, then?
God knows.

after the rain there was a strange quality to the light, as if the day wanted to begin again. even the old church past Denmark street seemed holy, innocent, for once. a tourist took a photo and a few drunkards looked up; a strange girl whose hair was wavy brown with the odd strand of straying grey rode past me on a cycle, dreamily, and nearly fell off. seeing is believing, or so it is said.

the rain has gone so, remembering, you look down. at puddles and dark reflections. on the upper deck of the 176 a square of brilliant light is framed, slides away as the bus changes direction. a hint of colour and some faint images fly off into the nothingness. the ritual of departure. without a name. but a number.

light to dark to light.
words like love
dark words.
the slow movement of light across the tapestry
of your heart.
a shadow.
the clock.
the gaze, the gaze that doesn't vere
holds fast to the unspoken question
in your eyes.

~~~

'as a wanted man might slip over the border
and, believed at last, live out his days
hidden by a silent holy order.'

'like a man in his own book'

'it's a miracle I found you in all this space'

'I will know nothing of my life but its mysteries
the dead cycles of the breath and sap

I shall not know whom I loved, or love
now that in the random winds of March

I am nothing but my limbs. I fall
into myself, and the years numbered in me.'

--D. Patterson (Rain).

the quiet interior

The Tulips crash open
with Holland and Islam.

everyday objects, transformed by light, into richness.

a day before Ramadan starts. preparation for silence. some think it's a mask or self-centred-and indeed it often is (no-one can face too much reality). but also an unmasking. after the floods-fourteen million affected- there's a strangeness about it this year. do rituals count before humanity? Man was not made for the sabbath. the important thing: the right intentions. and yet, this year you hesitate...

~~~

a field of grass, slanting down from a high road bordering Victoria park. at the bottom, a parallel dusty path. and from one to the other a snaking, diagonal, well-trodden path, like a line on one's hand. the field between the school and the dark library with its deep stone walls. beyond the dusty path a mass of tangled nettles and thorns, gnarled trees and purple berries no-one ever picked-and "the pit" in which each new kid was thrown into as a sort of ritual. this field, which was full of summer days and changeless days, this field which was here in the silence before any human being was, that endured so many winters, allowed ghosts and laughing children to wander across it, that slept whilst slender moonlight fell on her with a generous constancy for thousands and thousands of years, was like the whole world, or at least like a body that contained Paris and London. or your heart.

~~~

'he tried not to see bleak things bleaky'
---on Vincent Van Gogh.

~~~

I will probably not be blogging for a while. Keep well, all.

b.

I'll name that tune in one

The first note contains the possibility of all others.

But the first is closest to the image of the last more than anything else. One cannot play the first note unless one has in one's mind what the last one is.

Is the piano central to western sensibilities the way the sitar is, say, to Indian ones? Barenboim's fascinating point: the piano itself is neutral, like a blank wall on which any colours can be painted; the piano is 'open' to the millions of variations of movement of hand and mind. Structure -of course-but a 'text' only comes alive when the human touch is introduced, the human angle...the meeting of the vertical with the horizontal.

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

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

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

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

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

It is a small step from liberty to anarchy.


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

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

(quotes by Daniel Barenboim)

“It is a negative church, and can be transformed into a church so long as one observes the conditions that govern different spheres. In both places people appear there as guests. But whereas the house of God is dedicated to the service of the one whom people have gone there to encounter, the hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one.”

“The person sitting around idly is overcome by a disinterested satisfaction in the contemplation of a world creating itself, whose purposiveness is felt without being associated with any representation of purpose.”

---Kraucer.

Met old Bon. Seen him once in 20 years. Mellowed out a good deal, much more contemplative. After dinner the mongol suggested tea. Bon. said we could get some for free at the hotel. "You just mentioned the magical word, kaka." Once there I got lost. Went round the back, through a series of narrow corridors, then opened an innocuous looking door (like Mr. Benn). And there I was, in another place, as if I'd stepped out of dense fog into a parallel world. A huge open hall with thick plush carpets, wooden panels from floor to ceiling, and real people (or were they actors?) quietly sipping their drinks at the bar. All very disorienting.

Back in the lobby Bon. said, I live a strange kind of life, traveling three days a week, sleeping five hours on average; it's been like that for ten years. I spend a lot of time in places like this (and he extended his arm, his hand sweeping out in a large circle, mocking this picture of fake comfort). It's a bit sad, really. But it pays well.

There is no judgement here. And no time. Just the semi-familiar no-places that seem to increasingly be a common feature of our lives (like the waiting rooms at airports or shopping malls or-and these are the quintessential hopeless places-the service stations on motorways)

the inheritance of grey

"Once again this is not so much about the content students prefer-Facebook, YouTube, etc.-or whether they use the Web for homework or not. It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking whatever they already want and shunning the rest they convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information to retrieve and pass along."

the end of the book, the end of words, doesn't trouble you too much. you won't be around anyway. but today, weighed down by the solid grey skies, you find an old photo album to pass the time (yeah, ironic, i know). some of the images have thinned out so much that it's as if the person's body is in the very process of dissolution, a great disappearing act if ever there was (excepting God's); in others, bright light-from god knows where-has invaded...sometimes it is a series of blotches, in others a streak of dazzling white light; the contours of some faces have become blurred, less distinct... "this is what we were, this is what we are. and you can do nothing to stop it."

the close hours before us, the days from far beyond. "tell me their Real Names." Then you learned how the silver inherited the black. the shadows, even then. car doors casually left open, hands in pockets, we look in different directions, dazed.

So, even when you've forgotten some words and the images fade to the blank background from which they once emerged, trembling and new, there'll still be gentle words, and images of loved ones, somewhere in the stillness of your heart, there to be retrieved and passed along. the things between us,

things not to be said
things for keeping, that can keep the small-hours gaze
open and steady...
that we've been true to.
a thing allowed.
---seamus heaney.

the informed heart

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."
---Holmes.

~~~
It's hard to read a poem about the desert or a flower in the desert. One should rather say: this particular desert, this specific tulip. Now! There is no room left in the heart for eternal forms, only for glimpses and fragments. Why these clouds? And why not?
~~~

You woke. Or you were in a dream. A field of bright yellow wheat, head-high, vivified by light from inner green. She withdrew to a point, drew a black veil around herself, and it was like the last strands of a late summer light fluttering in an autumn morning. She said something and the world curved around her, framing both of us, as if in a painting, until there was only green and gold. What sweet prison was this that held us without us being held? Bound and free, lost and found.

It was the giving up of all feelings, all inner reservations...the letting go of a point at which one would hold fast no matter what, that changed prisoner into muslim.
---b.b.

your sad blue smile

not being able to make the right move, to see clearly, is what makes you flawed, human after all...gives you a sort of sharpness. if all roads had been open to you, you wouldn't have been you, but someone else. and it's kind of crazy the way you wonder. but it makes your eyes gentle the way the light is gentle today. not eternity, but the changing days, and what carries through. it is now. if you hadn't spoken to me with your sad blue smile that first november day, i would never have known you were possible (and impossible), never known myself. and all the days would have passed quietly, some meaningfully.

summer has clicked over into autumn, and still you read time backwards, finding your thinner face. but i have nothing more to say, dying like a shadow, wandering in a dream.

I came to find you you were living
in a street with fences round the gardens
...
then i found you it was like
meeting myself and i said let's
plant roses and carnations and you said
how shall we set about moving these fences?
---john riley.

all the time in the world

you, with your quick and ancient eyes, returned, looked for the one thing. there was no one thing. a finger outstretched from a small hand, tentative like a rabbit, presses on the spine of each book. as if one could read by touch, find the right words, the right tense. everything packed with unread meaning. there is no time for that now.

stood on a chair and nearly fell looking for the phenomenon of life.a near fall. and late humanity is hard to find nowadays.the sagging white shelves...the books tilt towards me like a ship."bring all the mysticism books." that's left a gaping whole. via negavtiva.

scraps of paper, stored away with great care and tenderness, journal articles-their essence underlined by faint pencil marks, smudges of lead- folded neatly. old copies of the new york review of books stacked, face down, near the slanting window. the right amount of angling morning-light.your silver-grey coat waiting in the cool dark garage, waiting to find its trueness.

the missing of the c and the r

All Souls.

'The silence grew to be a noticeable thing as the minutes went on, and nobody else appeared, and not a soul moved..."Ah, when? God knows!" he said, with a light irony, and turning from her walked rapidly away'.

~~~

we see with our memory.

---David Hockney.

even though it is bewildering, staggering, we must face the facts of reality.

---the swami.

the unseen exists and has properties.

---Richard Ford.

Man in his essence is the memory of Being. Of being.

---Heidegger.

~~~

all souls are one, it is sometimes said. would it not be true to say, no, to know, that one soul is more than one, or that one soul is more than one can take? time changed, and we grew to what we were. traces were there from the start, in the old photos-if you looked hard enough.and how hard you looked. that core being, around which a flower grew. and yet sometimes the centre isn't there, still you go on, like writing on a keyboard without the c's and r's. the numbers on the phone are missing too, so you dial like a blind man,hoping you recognize the voice.

we live on an island. as time accumulates and our lives shrink, the more real our island-life seems, the more unreal others appear.and yet what needs to be seen is seen. it is all here, as if condensed in a tiny mirror you brought with you. the whole world displayed in miniature in the glass because the heart still remembers your face.

if i were

The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darken’d in the brain.

---Tennyson.

what light, what light there is falls like the shadows of stars.disappearing into the night like the faint drift of snow. everything silently crashes around us, as in a silent movie, the gravity of water a mirror to the heart. and your words are not heard. on a map great distances seem insignificant. in life, the smallest crack opens up to an unknown continent. on a map or in the mind blue is just a colour, a disturbance of atoms. but in life, in life it has the thick density of lost time.

Shit India!

Remember seeing the horrified faces of those who had just watched Paromita Vohra's Q2P at Tate Modern. Guess they'd been expecting something exotic, colourful, garish...I dunno, dancing elephants or gyrating hips from a Bollywood film. Or maybe something 'spiritual,' some austere, un-worldly Indian holy man, a swami, a sufi, telling it like it is, offering some solace for the soul in these troubled times. The Orient, after all, is full of mystique and wonderful extremes.

Quite disconcerting, really, to learn that 638 million people have to defecate in the open becasue there aren't enough toilets. Shining India? Not so sure.

Of course, goes without saying: you can't imagine Pakistan or Bangladesh being any less shittier.

~~~
Ban the Burqa?

The poor level of political debate in this country is always something that's astounded you.It's not just the staple BBC programmes with their comfortable, middle class, middle Englander platitudes and trite observations, programmes that offer a semblance of-and therefore acceptable level of-serious concern and reflection; it's not just the rantings of the dunces in the Daily Mail, The Sun, etc., etc.

No, it's the ability to repeatedly miss the fundamental point-almost at will, one is tempted to say-and concentrate, instead, on secondary issues. Apart from cases where identification is absolutely paramount (security, say)and cases where it's forced on women, does it really matter that much? I mean, of course it's distasteful and not very progressive (quite the opposite, to my mind)but does that warrant a ban? Freedom surely entails the possibility of other people choosing what to you may appear as silly or harmful options but that to them come across as meaningful and correct choices.

But, again, shouldn't the main concern be about equality in education, housing, jobs and not the burqa as a sign of difference, a sign that is only adopted by very few women? As with the BNP's focus on migrants, the more central issues of globalisation, class, and the decline of manufacturing are swept under the carpet by the BBC wallahs. If you believe in free markets then capital and labour must be free to move across borders. Eventually the cultural contradictions of capitalism will come to the fore.

~~~

Here's Will Self (which reminds me, must take some Spike back to the land of the pure)...

On the day after the catastrophic defeat, Richard Littlejohn “wrote” in the Daily Mail: “If the Few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now.” Someone in television once told me that he’d been present at a meeting where a reality show was pitched called Daily Mail Island, the conceit being that contestants were marooned on an island where the only news they had of the outside world came to them via the Daily Mail. Needless to say, the pitch failed when one of the commissioning execs observed that such a land mass already existed – and it was called “Britain”.

Richard Littlejohn..how to describe him? Not as rabid as mad Mel or as shrill as Anne Leslie, just one of the professional whingers.

second thoughts

I don't care much for the times we're living in.
--from The Time Machine.

Was on Facebook for an hour (shudder). If you're going to be seduced, it should at least be by something beautiful.One-liners are fine if you're Wilde-but even that gets tiresome after a while.

Second thoughts.

Thank God!Re-vision. Iris M.

When the child was a child old Frithjof was deep, very deep(you still love his book on the 'Red Man', The Feathered Sun-as much for the pictures as anything else).

There was this:

"...whereas in the Middle Ages novels still drew their inspiration from myths, legends, and religious and chivalrous ideals, they [novelists] became from a certain period onwards more profane, even garrulous and insignificant...

Literary realism is truly subversive because it aims at reducing reality to the vilest contingencies of nature or chance, instead of leading it back to its archetypes...in short, to the essential."

Well, all heady stuff if you're a teenager (not that you were looking for anything in particular-good ol' Kashmiri laziness saved you there!). But I guess there's a pessimistic side to life that thinks profundity goes hand in hand with sadness, suffering, or a generally negative stance to the dull, bourgeois, disenchanted world that is 'the world'. Anyone who's never dreamt of escaping hasn't, surely, lived or understood? Whither shall I flee? (Tillich seemed to make sense then, and Hesse too: 'the desire to sleep overcame all desires').

Some uneasy feeling always tugged at you, though. Something too fanatical and stark about absolutes, perfection, essence, renunciation. There was no one thing. And

Finitude is not a misfortune.
--The Allama.

All this talk of 'the spiritual'..there was only one thing worse: the search for it. Notions like the 'timeless east' were laughable, utterly fake,as was this silly veneration for 'the Past' and Tradition. Try something a bit simpler like running water, local justice,education, citizenship...'existence precedes essence'.

Not that this was anti-religious. But such talk and terminology doesn't interest me anyway. 'Religious' and conservative people are insufferable bores.

Anyways, I've come to enjoy reading fiction a lot more. Recently picked up Stoner (highly recommended by anton), Fred Exley's 'A Fan's Notes' (one of Richard Ford's top books), Updike's Rabbit Redux book.

E.M.F:

The portrayal of life by values replaced by the portrayal of life by time.

Yes, that seems to be it. Individual experience, unique, new, novel...the broken circle. God, you can't even read Ouspensky on Icons any more.

He who vilifies time, vilifies His Lord.
--a Prophetic saying (quoted in 'The Reconstruction')

What is truly subversive is how the men in hats denigrate reality, substitute the universal, the abstract, for particularities, the concrete.

+ - (or tales from the frontier)

Borders has closed. Can't get over it. Change only makes sense against an unchanging background.

Angina days, blue snow
time ticked away
in cut-out arches,
time is blue, time is snow
red sleeves, black hat...time is yellow that none can tell it.

And the block of buildings near Tottenham Court Road has been ripped up; some shops have been closed, boarded up, whilst others have simply changed hands. Everything's been reduced to the basic in this shapeshifter's world. At the corner, Dionysus fish and chip shop is no more. An age of austerity is upon us. No-one has anything to say in these Poundlands, or if they do it is unclear, muffled. Just stare vacantly between departure times,as feet shuffle along.

And the old second-hand book shop, the shady oasis, has also gone. It was always an anomaly,a throwback to the 1970's and you never really bought anything from them (except, perhaps, your unread copy of Rebecca West's Grey), but still..it was always there. Now, instead, there's the Korea Ginseng Centre. And that too has failed and folded.

You hate to think..hate to think what's happened to the Italian second-hand book shop further down, past the abandoned Church.

The walk to the reformed church
red and white surveyors' poles constitute the idea of God.

Neither God nor place survives. The light flattens everything, makes a desert of it. Flatters some faces. Grime and grimace. Dust settles, accumulates.

The wind is full of black dust
It scours the names of the gravestones
and etches this day
into us.

What is the German for 'one'. The subtractions that lead one to one.There is a right moment,and a left moment. Denise in the shadows. Pluck out a word, like an orange from a dark tree.Your hand loosens. Mark my words, father used to say.

The pencil lead

is my favourite:

by day it writes out lines

that come to me at night.

Day by day you write, without return, rhyme or reason.

between R and Z

I
.I will
leave
I will leave

....You

alone

.......I

(you alone. you, alone)

with.with your
I will leave you alone with your
thoughts

of...

[at the bookshop the assistant asked, this John Riley-Celia's poet-when was he around, then? Hard to say,to the hard of hearing: we're always 'around', never really here. Of beauty, of truth, but not beauty, not truth.]

A reader has aksed -yes, such a creature actually does exist!-who do you write for (which is better than: what are you actually trying to say in your obtuse, evasive, nonsensical way or, why on earth are you writing at all?). Well, yes. And. Or. Orr.

"Unfortunately, we didn't have the volumes from R to Z-and the want of them shows in me to this day."
--Gunter Eich.

farfetched images that made evasion a revelation.
--Lowell/Vendler.

Everything is a sign for something else. The medievals would have understood that. Excuse me whilst I put my religious hat on. The Garden. A shadow. A shadow of doubt.

~~~

Always good to have your hair cut by a woman. Very sad story though. Don't look at her directly, even her reflection in the mirror, when she tells it. Why does everyone want to confess-except me?

~~~

mad conversation overheard at Foyles:

God's a reader. God loves chaos.All the ancients knew that. Even the scientists know that. That's what I'm saying. We're vibrating modes in the universe. We may destroy ourselves before we reach the answer.

The small Inidan man, quiet, balding (very shiny head), sitting and looking up at this crazy Englishman, now and then interjected..infinity, hinduism, etc., etc. but his words were barely audible.

It went on:

Dinosaurs. Do you know why they're important? God probably got bored of dinosaurs.[Well, who wouldn't?]. God's a genius. Or whatever. Even if you don't believe in God.

Good God!For a while mumbo-jumbo is interesting...until it becomes the norm.

all you wanted

it's a kind of world that's not a world, just the pieces. so the last look isn't the last. or maybe it is. so you came back. it was here all the time. right here for you. the beauty, condensed, like a gold ring in a desert, or all summer evenings rolled into one, repeated, as if nothing had changed, even though greyer. all you wanted, needed. it wasn't a word, or a place, but a word in a mirror hidden. your face..

Radical Centre

There is a moderate temper that is mind-numbingly boring, mediocre. The quiet life that never ventures anything and never loses anything, spinning out a dull monotony; an accountant's spirit that sees only shades of grey and that deals only in the possible.

And then there is the life at the periphery, un-centred, and free-wheeling, always seeking out the impossible, taking flight from what is given. But this is equally tedious if it isn't natural, if it's forced, or a position one has to take in relation to society (Ernst Bloch saw this clearly in relation to Bergson's 'pure duration', Utopia); a mad person doesn't write down her thoughts, but lives them...burns according to her own lights. Only a voyeur or a philosopher (which amounts to the same thing) takes a step out of life: to think is to die a little.

The modern mania for newness-and after me the deluge!- has the uncanny habit of ending up in the most terrible solipsism. Is it anything but the final convulsions of a will from whom the very meaning of the word freedom is slipping away?

In a superb article Jonathan Jones asks the question that never gets asked: why does so much of modern (American) freedom end up as a compulsion?

Be not more wise than it behoveth, but be ye soberly wise.
---Romans: 12:3

'...[b]ut reason has taught me that, if you condemn anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible , you are claiming know the frontiers of the will and bounds of the will of God.'

Anything that outstrips our reason will seem 'unreasonable or monstrous'. Strangeness is taken away 'from the very things we hold in our hands' not by knowledge but by habit (Hume?).If we understand the difference between what is impossible and what is unusual , or between what is against the common opinion of mankind, then the way to observe that rule laid down by Chilo, 'Nothing to excess', would be, Not to believe too rashly: not to disbelieve too easily...not to despair over what we cannot understand...not to be so curious that we cannot leave anything unresolved or undecided.
--De Montaigne.

~~

There's a great temptation to impose some sort of conceptual and/or real order on freedom-and a considerable danger in doing so as well. Freedom is only meaningful in such a scheme of things in terms of its relation to the things we have reasons to value. The act of free choice, autonomy is, seen in this light, of instrumental value only: how far it furthers the things we 'ought to' want ('ought to' means have reason to). The market, for example, is supposed to offer both types of freedom: process and opportunities freedom (opportunities to achieve valuable outcomes, and process freedoms in terms of the lack of constraints imposed by society, religion, tradition).

Seen in this light, the market can promote frivolous (or even harmful) desires since there is no second-order evaluation of those desires.Freedom cannot be bogged down by reason, responsibility or the interests of society. To the detractors of modernity (and the market) such freedom is a 'lonely freedom' (Augustine?), an abyss..the unstructured will, flights of fancy that know no borders, desire driven into the wilderness by the imagination (or, worse, by the manufacturers of dreams and false consciousness).

On the other hand, though, it is only too evident that freedom would be quite meaningless without individualism (being given what one wants, what is best for one, is not the same as choosing the good for oneself). Also, part of the charm of market freedoms is not that it satisfies given wants/desires but that it leads to new, unexpected ones, and that through the continued process of choice (and education) one could make more refined choices.Manipiulation is only one way of thinking about preference change.

a little testament

from a great distance the sea doesn't move. just a crumpled piece of blue cloth feckled with small white cloth dots. from a distance, a human being, a fire, a spark...

"Can I get a window seat?," he asked.

"Why, of course," came the reply from behind the counter.

"And a seat as far away from the toilets as possible...if it isn't too much trouble, that is."

"Sir, just wait and see, I'll get you a seat away from the whole world.God willing, the seat next to yours will be empty as well."

How quickly he was to recognize him, surprisingly so for somone with such a round and amiable face. He sat quietly waiting before Z, along with husband and child, walked straight past him; a furtive glance his way but nothing more. He made to get up but decided against it. It was her though. Two minutes later she walked towards him, alone, walked like someone coming out of the sea, an image that suddenly appears out of the fog. Her hips were full, her curves accenuated by the tight jeans she was wearing.

"So it was you!"

"Yes. "

[Silence]

"And how've you been?"

"Good"

....

Redux:Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin, returning, from reducere to lead back
Date: 1860.

...

Scribbled in the book: a name,a date (light blue ink): BaRbaRa Bodenheimer, 1973.Who the fuck? And why the pronounced R's? Her considered assessment: Good.

...

Who owns the rights to a heart, the various pathways that very rarely converge, some being more ancient than others, some in a state of disrepair?

Always the same. The locked jaw, the frozen words, the failing of the light.This remarkable reluctance or inability to just come out and say it. Tell it, but tell it slant.Old world reticence-or so he liked to think. In reality it was charming only in small doses and women were too savvy to give it a chance to flower into something else.

His hand reached out to touch the pram handle, the exact same spot she had just moved her hand from. Unconsciously, of course, but it led to a half-second awkwardness.

"So?" she said, shrugging her shoulders, raising her eyebrows, trying her best to make him feel comfortable. "Are you happy?"

He resented the question. "No. Yes. But not in an ecstatic way, I guess." He really didn't understand what he was saying but continued: "Just your run-of-the-mill sort of floating, mid-afternoon mild happiness." What was he saying, he thought to himself. His mind was all blubber and empty grey spaces.Maybe she'd wanted to hear something else.

There she was, with those sweet dreamy eyes, desert eyes, veiled in sadness.On her mother's side she was from the same tribe as his. He looked at the two small silver rings that studded her earlobe.

Even as she was speaking he misunderstood her, looked away, downwards, found all sorts of directions and angles. She, on the other hand, found her own inwardness by speaking at an ever quickening pace. His name was too solid, too square-ish. That was the problem. Your parents, they fuck you up.

He tilted his head to her. He liked being at a slight angle to the universe.She rattled away. The supreme confidence of short people. 'Just listen,' he thought, 'let them confess.' He was like Charon, helping people across, letting them find their own words for loss, the words they thought were worth remembering.

"Catch you some other time then?"

"Yeah, some other time"