The Wonder Years

the past and the future. seen in our eyes, stretched out on our faces, like the shadow of a bird crossing our path. our own shadows, second selves, at home in stillness, the oblique figures like the smallness of the hours, reminding you of the ground. you look. stare at the patterns of light and shade formed by wind and leaves. the mind clear at last, shining. the darkness of the night. words are burned in the fires.

you're too tired for dreams. the animal repose of breathing. this breath. wisp of life. the short and the long of it. the force of pen on paper, ink on the blank canvas,. your hand cocked at an angle, scrawls the words, "I hate you." when truth be told.

~~~
From where did this rain in our lives come? How did red enter the world? And why so blue?

R's outstretched hand. Beautiful in the rain. Thought she could catch it. Flexed her fingers and thumb. Give me! Now! But it is only the curve of the hand that collects and re-collects. Sustains. To be human means forgetting. Breaking free from the angular. Means remembering. The circles. Even if broken.

the dance of sparks

The East-West diwan: Because God is neither of the East nor of the West.

When you come to the bridge, loosen your clothes, let down your hair. You will be asked what you remembered, and what you forgot, what you have lost, and what you have found.

my daughter, the fundamentalist

Little R, with little to show for the day, saw me reading Charles Taylor's book on secularism and attacked it with a venom (which is a pity, because it looks quite interesting). There's probably no gene for scepticism so, gosh, this is going to be a lot of hard work! [er..it could be that she just liked the shiny cover].


Some people think that secularism is the same thing as atheism; a more interesting angle would be that it opens up the space for different forms of religious/spiritual experience (along the lines chalked out by Lesley Chamberlain). If modernity was a second Fall or a "second turning inwards" (Arendt) then one doesn't have to necessarily see it as opposed to faith.

Of course, the truth is that the old religious forms and practices have fallen by the wayside: rituals are seen to be too mechanical; we have less sympathy for the authority of organized religion; and religion plays a far smaller role in determining or influencing our values, norms, and lifestyles). You can tick off the usual suspects: science, urbanization, reason, ...

Well, that may not be such a bad thing after all-even though there's no denying the something valuable has been lost in the 'demythologisation'. On the other hand, the space vacated by the traditional forms has been taken up by all sorts of crazies: evangelicals and fundamentalists, born-again zealots and revivalists. Some are dangerous, others merely silly.

And with this group there are also the free-floaters, people who pick and choose what they like in their search (Zen, Buddhism, Sufism, Kabbalah, New Age...). The 'authentic self' has got to meet truth half-way, on its own terms, and it has to speak our language. This may sound to many as something frivolous and, ultimately, futile since there have to be shared symbolic orders, widely recognized or ordained 'channels', bridges, sacraments, places of refuge. To say that there are 'chance receptacles' is surely just one of the logical outcomes of the development of Protestantism: the lawless heart searches in the dark night (a hidden affinity with Romanticism?).

The real horror for the old school is that what they call a 'loss of faith' is met with such equanimity. That for the moderns there isn't a spiritual crisis is probably a sign of how deep the crisis is! (Fenelon: indifference of the soul). The lax approach to sexuality, the worldliness of the bourgeois soul that places all value in the security afforded by objects, the inability or reluctance to ask the serious questions in life or even believe that there are answers to them...all this smacks of a profoundly a-religious and sceptical attitude to the highest possibilities in life. Or so it is argued.

At the deepest level you don't think that's true, or what truth there is in it has to be seen in the light of the terrible social rigidities and stifling narrowness of the old approach. And to paraphrase Ghazali: once you're out of Tradition, there's no going back. But even that's too negative. No-one can deny the deepening of the subjective side of things (Schuon), the 'psychological' richness (Maritain) that comes about after a fall. As the Allama tells us (relying on Rumi, I think): the fall is really the beginning of our rise...and "finitude is not a misfortune."

Maybe R was on to something: the shiny surface of humanism and secularism are important. One suspects that God does judge us by appearances. And if one must err, then surely it is better to do so on the side of freedom?

forbidden colours

before going back to sleep she stopped what she was doing, thought of him, and smiled. But once asleep she completely forgot him, and could only remember the blue in her heart, because she knew it was forbidden to show his face to anyone, even to herself.

the wounds on your hands would not heal. if only i could forget time for an hour, he thought. she said something, sent him words in a blue bottle, but it was lost in translation. how strange that none of that mattered now. something was said, and it was unknowable. he understood it, or imagined he understood it, by the tone of her voice, just as one understands a certain colour can be 'sad'.

an ordinary life

Heller:

The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh. The sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more that their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity. It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism.

~~~

an ordinary life, surrounded by ordinary objects; the hardest thing. some form of contentment in the middling, plodding way. no sudden bursts of insights or dazzling moments of awareness, no patched up mystery for you; things still don't quite fit, but have grown around you nonetheless. adjustments are made, whether out of maturity or cowardice. time will tell, has told.

you can't remember a tenth of what you've read. a few lines here and there acted as buffers, keeping reality out rather than letting it in, or deepening it. but things are more blurred now, less harsh, greyer..layers of black and white and grey.

the hunt

I found a word.
you came to me.
the hunt was on.
but i lost you
because I saw you everywhere.

answers and questions

Just been watching that blubbering idiot Mark Lawson interview Roth; the same old cliched questions, stuck in his flabby throat; the whining voice hooked on to its own self-importance, unable to disentangle itself from the grooves of his mind. The appearance of intelligence, so appealing to the beeb's middle class viewers. The questions we ask reveal who we are.

Simpson's (simple) world:

Watching Simpson, the great liberator of Afghanistan, on t.v. Depressing that this should pass as a programme on politics. There he was, pottering around the old streets of Baghdad-stuttering past his old "haunts"-in his pink shirt, full of himself, as usual.

At one stage he becomes irritated, as if the real people were disturbing his reminiscing about the good ol' days. "This man (pointing to a police officer) is becoming a bit of a pest." And then:

"But the old ways are coming back again, family and tribe."

Oh yeah, very reassuring!

He has an interpreter tagging along with him. Simpson, in his charmless way, reassures viewers: "I go out with the army..er...I meet them and it seems to me they're much better, much better than the Afghan army, say."

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the occupation, Mr. Simpson, but still, what's the death of a few hundred thousand people in the bigger scheme of things?

The interpreter, to Simpson's dismay, says there's a kind of nostalgia for Saddam. "Surely not amongst the Shias, only the Sunnis?" The interpreter says that this isn't the case, that the people he's come across prefer to have things work-no matter what the leadership is. Simpson, visibly disturbed by this turns to him and asks, " Do you mind if I ask if you're Sunni?"

Then, all of a sudden, he breaks off the 'serious' discussion to recall how he bought some ol 78's from the street corner they've just passed. And this, you feel, is what it's really all about: Simpson's world.


I'm beginning to think that a classic is something that one reads only once and not, contrary to received opinion, something that one can return to again and again; by its very nature it is incomplete and it always leaves its impression without fully being articulated. Whether one reads it once or a hundred times makes no difference: its main virtue is only to point to its unfinished nature, its ability to resist definition...

Kadare's 'Broken April' is a dream...dark and brooding and utterly simple:

His eyes were fixed on the grey sky that spread, lonely, above the mountains; it was hard to tell whether he was making them dark or if the darkness within him came from them.

Or, perhaps Bellow says it better:

And what he saw with his eyes was not even the real heavens. No, only white marks, bright vibrations, clouds of sky roe, tokens of the real thing, only as much as could be taken in through the distortions of the atmosphere. Through these distortions you saw objects, forms, partial realities. The rest was to be felt. And it wasn't only that you felt, but that you were drawn to feel and penetrate further, as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and the crystal forms inside your bones. Rocks, trees, animals, men and women, these also drew you to penetrate further, under the distortions (comparable to the atmospheric ones, shadows within shadows), to find their real being with your own. This is the sense in which you were drawn.

After reading that purple prose I feel the gloom has lifted. Minor irritants seem like so much rock dust in the orbit of being. One only has to shrug one's shoulders for the universe to take shape again...

How spacious the heavenly halls are!
Approach them on aerial stairs.
Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.

Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
---C.Milosz).

~~~
A fire that purifies is a"friend" (57:15);
the earth is nothing but a co-mingling of fire and ice.

Qantara

What force there is in fish that live their years
in the cold darks of the sea, swimming the darks

In August once, I dozed on an unused bridge
to hang in the very world, in the teeming air
...
absorbed in certainties that never fail, though blind.

---William Bronk.

~~~

The way books are randomly placed on the shelves at Readings is wonderful. Yesterday you found (and bought) Snow Country next to Malone Dies Alone. May not read either, but still, the sheer surprise of unforeseen connections, the bridges...whether we walk them or not, spanning out like blind chance in a mechanical universe.

~~~

Each person that enters the world establishes a new relation to it, sees it with new eyes; she enters the door, is the door. The last person to be born on earth will have no time, but will also, miraculously, be a record of all time, since everyone would have lived in her. The search for God is meaningless if we die alone. The last person will look on things with kindness, as if they were the last things, beautiful in themselves. And like the first person, she will be startled, knowing much, full of longing. Today, the last person lives in each one of us.

nostalgia for the particular

I see the night falling, darkening,
you see the stars shining.
Your mind blossoms, mine is withering
The words we shared dissolved as they're spoken
are worlds away from my love.

'Though I do not understand her words,
and may not know her heart
Is it not enough that one so beautiful
now speaks to me?'

She has foresworn her cruelty-but can she?
All wrath? All cruelty?
Be what you may.
I wish that all you are had been for me.

I shall write to you even without cause.
Simply to write your name fills me with love.'

---from Ghalib.

As was his language, so was his life.

---Seneca.

No man or woman can communicate their dreams; and so it is that when they recount them to the public world they lose all meaning and sense. By eleven o'clock the dreamer himself begins to wonder if there was anything to it and his uneasiness or pleasure soon dissipates like fog broken up by the penetrating rays of the sun. By evening there is only a memory of it. But this serves as material for the dreamworld in which he will be plunged again.

~~~

Some odd conversations yesterday. One with a student who said: "nothing profound has come out of Russia." It saddens me how far this country has slipped. So far students only copy from wikipedia (sorry, nabs, but you're so wrong on this one). Soon, one expects, it will be from people's twitterings!

~~~

A.r.m.'s response to Lesley Chamberlain's article was thoroughly disappointing, reactionary, even. As if to say, human spirituality can only be found in the forms of organized religion. This seems patently wrong to me and belies an inherent suspicion toward culture and life itself.

~~~

In a somewhat similar vein, I find the notion of the 'spiritual east' to be something of a fraud. And more than that, the idea that the spiritual is opposed to the material just doesn't make much sense to me. Those who say that the west is 'materialistic' haven't a) lived in the 'east' and b) understood that there are many ways to live a good life. Keynes was surely right -putting to one side the idea that goodness is only an experience in the mind- when he said: One cannot enjoy good states of mind unless things work.

arabesque

"French culture of the twelfth and thirteenth century readily adopted forms from the Islamic world, with which it was in touch, and especially those forms that were of Persian origin. This elective affinity is to be seen not least in the knightly epics of both sides..[and] is prevalent in almost all knightly forms of the medieval West; minnesingers and troubadours..."
---Titus Burckhardt.

{Was going to put Debussy up here, but not particularly fond of it. Any other suggestions, dear reader?}

"Revelation came to me from the Orient, said Matisse. The Arabesque in Islamic Art represents the tenacity but also fragility of life, which can be bestowed or withdrawn at any moment. The positive forms of the arabesque create the negative spaces of the shapes in between; these empty spaces symbolize that which 'belongs to God'-the permanent but invisible reality of the divine principle. Similarly, for Matisse, there is the complementary between negative and positive shapes: what remains belongs to God."
---Betty Cuther.


You understand that this is difficult for those reared on the importance of distinctions, on the misplaced notion that there are, when all is said and done, fundamental differences, irreconcilable differences.

But there is 'neither Greek nor Jew,' and Islam is neither of the East nor of the West.

"[In] Arab interlacement the filled spaces and the empty areas, the design and its ground, are both of strictly equivalent value and balance each other out...so that one's attention never halts on a particular element of the decor. The continuity of the interlacement invites the eye to follow it, and vision is then transformed into rhythmic experience accompanied by the intellectual satisfaction given by the geometric regularity of the whole."
---Titus Burckhardt, from his magisterial Art of Islam.

To view some examples from this book click on the following link

(and no, C, still haven't read the Matisse book!)

hush now, R.

"Not another post on religion...please!... For the love of God!, " I hear you say, dear reader (hey, that's Beckett, isn't it?). You really are too much of a joker to be religious...not quite the high-minded buffoon that is Herzog, but you're on your way up...

Feeling a bit shelled out nowadays. My mind, or what's left it, strays far too easily and I can actually sense the frame of my body aching, going through the motions. On auto-pilot, if you know what I mean.

Must read Schama's book on Rembrandt. Finally got to see 'The Jewish Bride'. And he was right: is there a finer example of delicate sensibilities in western art? The hands, of course (chiasm), but also the direction of light that catches part of us. Up close, it's just dry drabs of unexciting paint, so much so that one is reminded of the sheer materiality of not just the painting, but of our own existence. But from the right angle, if we look in the right way that is, we see the familiar in a different way, transformed into something magical: light, at any time, has the ability to pick out the gold, to bring it to the surface from the deeps. And brightness finds a pattern, makes it its own, no matter what.

Goodness:

Was thinking: is there really such thing as a good human being? A good cricketer, a good teacher, or son, or daughter maybe, but a human being? Isn't goodness fundamentally a quality of our relations to others and to the world?

It's now; always was. don't stop smiling, R.

The Bauls of Bengal

The Bauls of Bengal are like the wombles of Wimbledon: common are we, wandering free.

Dalrymple on the Bauls here

Bob's original post that pointed me this way is here

And this made me think of:

I am not disposed by fire, air, water and dust.
I am neither a Hindu nor a Turk,
my identity lies neither in the wilderness of Arabia
nor within the walls of Lahore.
I am not the secret essence strenuously revealed by creed and religion.
I was not born of Adam and Eve.
I did not adopt my name nor can I own any.
I am neither stationary nor adrift.

Can I know who I am?
It is I myself I know to be the beginning and the end. Neither do I recognize any other being.
It is nowhere else but within myself that perception and knowledge are embodied.
Then who is he that stands as the Other?
And who am I?
Can I know Bulleh?
----

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.