life, the universe, ...42.

Now, what was the question again?

The problem with academics is that they think they know the answer to every question and, perhaps more importantly, that that is what ultimately counts in life. The 'view from nowhere', 'Knowing', 'truth', or a knowing doubt, truthfulness..that's what it's all about. What is "it"? What cannot be known cannot and should not be spoken of.

What I did hate, though, and what finally set me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term..without turning in my grades, was that the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core,-all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence.


Invariably it's the technician's spirit, the algebraic soul lurking in the background. Universal causality. This for that. What, exactly, is the first philosophy?

F. Rosenzweig:

"My life has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...

Everyday life, it is clear, cannot possibly be ignored; one cannot exist entirely in the sublime realm of theory, no matter how "essential" it may seem when compared to dull, tedious reality."

Are you a philistine, then?

Perhaps. But it is a sign of good health to find that the most ordinary is worthy of attention and respect, and that some things must be passed over in silence. Not only is it that you cannot know everything; it is that you do not want to anyway.

{I think that's why, from a personal point of view, the comments section has been more enjoyable than writing the posts or, perhaps one should say, it's offered a different type of enjoyment, one that doesn't necessitate any comparisons}

What was that Russian term again, the one for 'thinking with others'? When so much of life is already confrontational, is there any need to add to it?

The double negation:
I am, therefore I think
We are, therefore...

khalwa...

That's it,
that's joy, it's always
a recognition, the known
appearing fully itself, and
more itself that one knew.
---Denise.

and knowing isn't everything. this you always knew.

someone asked me: with regards to the things that you are instinctively drawn to: do you always make them your own? but surely such a thing is neither possible, nor desirable? for the desirable comes to us (or it doesn't)...all one can do is be open to it, not will it or possess it. a question to myself.

but, also, to 'make something one's own' requires an incredible amount of creativity, inward concentration, human generosity, or 'expansiveness'. does it also mean one ceases to be oneself? and even then, the beautiful is never owned and never fully comprehended. mysteries are only deepened; there are always veils and there is a thirst that is never quenched (he says, putting his jewish hat on).

the following was shared with me by flowerville. you can read the full chapter online.

slow learning:

We have to learn to give up more and more of what we have accomplished, what we have gathered in and what we cherish. Getting old means giving up something forever at every stage of the process. The trick is to learn how to give up things gracefully and without despair...

We must accept what is and prepare to let go of it...

As long as we are alive, we have the capacity to develop compensatory skills and seek new insights...

Living consciously...one strives to make new relationships in order to stay rooted in life...

Much more than at any previous stage of life, the old person has to be flexible...

Old age is the ripening of the fruit, the preparation for the harshness of winter, when the roots grow and strengthen, a time when leaf mold decays, making a seedbed for the new growth of mushrooms. It is the closing of the circle...'

---Gerda Lerner.

but, also, the opening of another circle...

the black moon

Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed--
You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak,
And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress: I but a shadow--
you a radiance fair!
Know you what such a moment holds for me?
...If ever I were eloquent. . .
---Rostand

(), )

Turned our backs to one another...bound by the empty space ( )

A life in parenthesis...the moment before, the moment after:

Wie kann es sein, daB ich, der ich bin,
bevor ich wurde, nicht war,
und daB einmal ich, der ich bin,
nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?

5:21 In order to give prominence to these internal relations we can adopt the following mode of expression:)

'How to live'..breathe in, and out. Breathe in...

Coming to the end of the book on Montaigne. Quite good, dear C. Can't remember a word, though! Which is probably just as well. There is no formula. The digression is the path.

Would never say 'God save England' (May the Lord protect me!) but might, just might, be tempted to say God save England from the Europeans (and vice versa!) All that long-winded theorizing. For Christ's sake! When all is said and done, the time has come to speak in plain English, ma cherie.

The ontological argument can be saved by a comma. Can others be saved by a " ) "

Compassion, not knowledge. "Walk on," said the Buddha.

five or six

"Every hour has sixty minutes, every minute has sixty seconds. But on one given day, I might film only twenty seconds. So, of course, that doesn’t represent my life - but it presents something that was important to me. A moment. Why did I film that moment? For some reason, I felt I should film it, without knowing, without rationalising. I just had to do it, and that’s all. Therefore, in essence, maybe those twenty seconds define me, you see – not the other twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and forty seconds. Maybe that little moment is essentially me. Who knows?"

The element of chance is a definite artistic category in your work.

"Again, you can go back to Dostoevsky in that respect. It is all about the moment when two people meet, that one second when they really click and understand. So seconds can be very important...

Film is not eternal. Everything is fleeting. How much is left of 12th century art?..

Well, [a] misfit ... I’m an outsider. I’m a monk. I’m somewhere else, I have my own life, my own small set of friends...I live in Brooklyn these days. So I have my own village, my own small town. New York consists of one hundred villages, you know?"

---Jonas Mekas, interviewed by Grisseman, 2008.

London, as everyone knows, consists of five or six villages. I forget. The Commons, the village greens, etc., etc. In each place, at each moment, there are a thousand histories, a thousand mirrors, carrying on without you. And in just one, there was a hidden moment with you. But I forget where it was. As chance would have it. Isn't the city, with its myriad images, a reflection of that lost time?

a digression on jews and muslims

late 14c., from L. digressionem (nom. digressio) "a going away, departing," noun of action from pp. stem of digredi "to deviate," from dis- "apart, aside" (see dis-) + gradi "to step, go"

Jean Weir in his 'De Praestigis daemonum' (1564) had calculated that 7, 409, 127 demons were working for Lucifer.

You find this fascination for detail laughably ridiculous. Slightly more serious, though, is the religious fanaticism that lies behind it. Of course, not 'counting' can sometimes also be diabolical ("we don't do body counts," they said about Iraq).

What's disturbing about certain aspects of religion is the flights of fancy it can inspire. The mind, unmoored, unrestrained by facts, veers off into all sorts of useless directions. The fanatic, unaware of his own humanity or that of others, disparages the ordinary and the complex and opts for the "heroic" and the simple. The springs of motivation are clear-cut and elementary; the end is dazzlingly self-evident and irreducible, and the possibility of a revision of one's ideas of how to live are ruled out from the beginning, which is another way of saying that he never allows his ideas and values to brush up against the social fabric of reality.

But the 'anti-religious' types are no less boring and predictable. Those who can't see any beauty or truth in religion or other cultures are often, to my mind at least, as closed-in and narrow in their outlook as the conservatives (and possibly the fundamentalists as well).

So, when E-k writes about the dispersion of jewishness in America I can understand that at a personal level ('understanding' is already once removed from feeling perhaps). I mean, to lose one's identity is,no doubt, a personal tragedy. Politically, of course, it might not be such a bad thing for the Palestinians!

And from my own experience I know that some of my cousins/friends are deeply concerned about losing their muslim identity living in Britain and the States. And yet, to be honest, such a thought never occurred to me in all my years there nor does it interest me one bit.

Recently got in touch with an old friend who chose a religious life. Very moderate person, not a 'beard'. Read Augustine's City of God in school days -and not to refute, but to learn. And you've still got a lot of admiration for his quiet dedication to a kind of life that he passionately believes in. There's something to be said for that and you would be wrong to say that there isn't something there that deeply appeals to you. The 'life of the mind' isn't all that great if you haven't got much of a mind, and you doubt it would be even if you did.

So, I don't think of myself as a 'British Muslim' at all. Questions of identity are, to paraphrase Augustine, not a problem unless I think about them! Can one stand aside from one's faith and still be religious: a non-Muslim muslim? Again, questions of faith are only interesting to those who are out of the circle of faith (this horrifies my non-religious friends who believe everyhting should be questioned, scrutinized, even though that's very bad manners).

Can one renounce one's faith? Possibly. But I was born somewhere else, and this nose of mine, which no-one as of yet has commented upon,that neither Roxana, or anton, or nikki knows, though both jewish and muslim is, to not put too fine a point on it, still quintessentially Kashmiri!

under construction

Thanks to Miguel for pointing me to this wonderful song!

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage ... Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors, quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.
---Bellow.

the lawless heart

what is the way to your heart? what are its stations? and why does the black crow wait, his thoughts like a grave shade within the shade. those folded wings hold what space: forest in the silence; silence in the forest.

'the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart'

the winter soul, that forgets its way; your tracks covered by snow, you forget north and south, the differences between me and you.

the lawless heart. Var. when the ice melts, and the roses awake from their dream, then there is another forgetting, like the shade within a shade.

(poem, G. Hill; photo: courtesy of an incredible artist, Roxana)

the lives of others

"Time is everything; Man is nothing."
---Karl Marx.

"Time is everything."
--little, darling R.

"Will there be a time when I'm grown up and understand things?" asked R.

"Inshallah," I replied.

"But what if I don't understand things?"

"Er...then you can write a blog!"

~~~

Took little R to the zoo. Despite the lovely lazy Sunday feel to it, the leafy shade, the slow meandering that reminds one of the importance of useless things, she wasn't mightily impressed. Perhaps the elephants and hippos were too big for her little eyes to take in; she seemed to gravitate to the smaller animals like the birds (but not too small: ants are not very interesting). Or perhaps some of the animals were just too weird (aren't all animals weird, though?). Camels, for instance. And the white lama had a very odd personality.

Or maybe it was that she didn't realize some of them were actually animals. The giant turtles hardly moved. She might have thought they were just very large stones.

But I really think it was this: animals are boring bastards. They actually don't do much. Now, I'm not saying I expect to see them playing cards, or playing some Bach, but just lazing in the sun all day like that. Dear me! You can see Protestantism has had no effect on them! The closed, opaque lives of others...

"But, but..." R said eagerly, "people look at me and probably say the same thing. And for all I know they probably look at you black sun and think the same: closed, lazy, an odd personality...need I go on?"

"Oh R, that's the last time I bring you to the zoo!"

"Yes, let's go back and read some Montaigne"

"We understand nothing of a dog's experience...they understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book. Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the 'zest' or 'tingle' which comes when one is completely absorbed in what one is doing. This tingle should enable us to recognise each other's similarity [and] in turn should lead to kindness."

(emphasis added by R)

---S. Bakewell, On Montaigne.

what dreams may come

Well, the last conversation of the day, at about 11:30, had me say: "we might as well be Hindus" . The other person nodded and said, " why not". And it ended there. But how did it begin?

Just a throwaway line about how we're both sick of eating meat and that it'd be better to eat just vegetables. (Followed by the now obligatory line about how India is doing much better than Pakistan). But nothing else. Just a casual conversation and no further reflections on it. Just let it brush by. Not too surprising either, since on Eid these sentiments usually come to the surface...i.e the colossal waste of life and money, the sheer 'showiness' of religion.

Someone once said that your truest dreams occur just before you wake up. Or maybe they're just the ones you can remember?

So, you wake up saying what you think are words in Hindi! Bizarre! Vir, Var and something else that you've now forgotten. You sit up for a minute trying to recollect. Now that you think of it, R does the same thing. Cheeky monkey!

Yes, that's it. In the dream there's also this weird object with parts that correspond with each of the three words. The first part is a large but thin brownish oval stone. Polished. It's connected to something like..well, something that reminds you of a tree. And this itself, as you move down, branches off into two symmetrical seeds. In fact, you remember hearing the words: " the double-seeded...". and finally this is connected to some roots which, strangely, are a mirror image of the whole object itself. And as if to indicate that there's no finality, the tip of those roots has another outgrowth that repeats the whole thing again (a fractal?)

[Er...what were you saying about therapy, Nabil?]

And what about the words? All you can recall is that 'vir' stands for human being and that that is what is highest.

Of course, now that you think of it , there was this essay by Coomaraswamy that you read many years back that talked about vir, wasn't there? And hadn't that strange student just a few days back asked you-you of all people-to review his essay on Coomaraswamy's essay on craftsmanship? And hadn't you been reading Sennett's 'The Craftsmen' that very day?

One should never look for the origins of dreams. It could be anything ! (the lack of c.r.'s , for example).

Walk to office in the early morning. Not a soul around. Dogs barking in the distance and crows craaing even though I can't see them. Past a lovely tree whose pink petals have nearly all fallen to the ground. Thought to myself, the other day: must take a photograph. And then again, why not just enjoy them and this fall...the strange (random, symmetrical?) pattern they form around the tree.

Leaf through a book on my desk and open it to the page I'd been reading two days back. The first lines that catch my eye are:

"For pray what is the end of Man? Is he created for Happiness? Or for Virtue? For this life or the next?"

Now I'll walk back and have some breakfast. So endeth the dream.

Zzzzz

"all I know is that so long as I am asleep I have neither fear nor hope, trouble nor glory; and good luck betide him that invented sleep, the cloak that covers over all a man's thoughts, the food that removes hunger, the drink that drives away thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that tempers the heat, and, to wind up with, the universal coin wherewith everything is bought, the weight and balance that makes the shepherd equal with the king and the fool with the wise man. Sleep, I have heard say, has only one fault, that it is like death; for between a sleeping man and a dead man there is very little difference."

Strange black tide...brings forth such dark mysteries. Her, panting like a well-fed dog: to shrug it off, or accept this mortal collar? Desire is not a reason. What then, dear Knulp, can you mean? Is there a dream within a dream? A room you didn't know?

Increasingly, I feel like ending it (the blog, I mean). Hurrah! I hear you shout. No matter what one says or thinks, whether one has faith or none, is drunk or sober, the snow drifts down, generally, all over.

Even the most beautiful thing in the world is, alas, a thing in the world. Knulp, you old joker...

end game

no-one loves no-one, said red to blue.

but in the saying of it, she allowed a shade of blue to enter her life, and became no-one for a while.

In game theory, in a 'finite game', when you know the end, then you know what to do in the beginning. But no human has knowledge of their death...and any given life is full of deaths.

from russia, with love

Showed Solaris to the students last night. Surprised that a number sat through it. Was asked to say something on it and very gingerly agreed...

What can one say? What should one say. I don't know much about the technical aspects of the film and I'm not sure whether the biographical ones are important. It's a poetic vision by a unique individual that requires a unique response. After all, Tarkovsky once said (of Andrei Rublev, the great painter of icons), Traditional truths remain truths only when they are vindicated by personal experience.

So his films are not about 'explaining'-and I couldn't explain them anyway-but only showing us what is somehow familiar-if it touches us, that is. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't. I think Mark Rothko, who was Russian in a way, would have understood how feelings open the way to what Milosz calls a 'second space'.

In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says:

The aim of art is to loosen the soul, to render the soul capable of turning to good. Showing, not telling.

So, I don't like this film because it's a so-called intellectual film or because I like the"ideas"-Tarkovsky was right here when he said: thought is brief, but the image leaves an impression-but because, to take a deeply Russian notion: the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Of course, this is a slow and complex film with lots of 'inter-textual' references (Rembrandt, Breughel, Bach, Don Quixote, and others) and a particular emphasis on time. Tarkovsky himself was wary of films that aimed to merely pass time, or kill it, or forget it. His view was quite the opposite since bereft of memory a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence. So, memory has a spiritual quality to it.

I'm reminded here of a true story that I read in the papers some years back about a man who would forget all he knew every seven minutes. He described his life as like an island in a vast ocean. Incidentally, the only thing he could remember was music.

Finally, I don't think this is a science-fiction in the traditional sense of the term. Why I love this film is because it is, at least to me, a profoundly religious film, a film about the mysterious and that is something which leaves explanation open, but not too open. Like a broken circle, perhaps? And that brokenness implies an understanding of the truth, as one of the characters in the film says, that you can only love that which you can lose.

An education (wanderlust)

The vagaries of the internet world mean that you can put up a song today and it will be gone tomorrow. Oh well, such is life: what is lost was never yours in the first place...finders, keepers we used to tell each other as children. And now?

"Not to find one's way in a city may be uninteresting...but to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling."

What you look for is what you never find. But then, all of a sudden...there..stolen glances, borrowed time, how strange the heart of a city is:now a landscape, now a room...Paris taught me this art of straying. Her lawless, deviant soul. And you, a slacker, a silent poet?

He saw her, fish, in a crowded stream of people and remembered home: there is no fish in the Tigris; there is no Tigris in the fish.

A net snared a net.
Embracing we sever.

"Some writers and walkers had cherished this idea of the city as a kind of wilderness, mysterious, dark, dangerous and endlessly interesting." What is this fascination for dark light?

I stood motionless, preoccupied with linking the present moment to the preceding year's, to make them one.

What is united in memory is untied in life...

He sometimes followed women with small feet and high heels...she said: "I can't convey how much my boots delighted me" (and him, too!). "I came home at all hours..so that even when I was away from home I felt at home everywhere". Paris as a bedroom, a labyrinth whose centre is a brothel, a virgin forest.

"I was like a boat on ice," she said...and "I always forgot to lift my dress." Him: "like those wandering souls who go looking for a body...he enters as he likes each personality."

The damp, intimate, claustrophobic, secretive, narrow, curving streets...

Startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence. A one-way street. With a door. And a room. And the world.Thanks to her. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain. And he saw innocence in the face of experience.

But language limits what can be said, just as walking, with its turns and detours, limits what you can know.

(all quotations from Wanderlust and one from Celan)

back to the sun

turn your back to the sun. the slow bare light of winter, the burnt light, makes everything float effortlessly. ancient chaos of the sun, turns back the time. you think. the road back fading with each passing day and hour. for us there is no season, no deadline. our pact with light, promotes our going and coming, as shadows in expressive light.

tell me, was this the way? what weight the hands have now. did you by some strange chance believe I would leave you, leave you where i left you thinking i would return?

butterfly

R loses an argument (surprisingly!)

Oh, Ssshh, for heaven' sake! Can't you see, black sun, I've got things on my mind. Got important things to think about. Can be stuck mulling around on dark things all the time. Dear me!

But thought is brief; the image leaves a lasting impression, little one.

Ha! And all along there I was thinking you were a Muslim! This won't do, this won't do at all I tell you.

Oh, you silly clown, why don't you agree with me.

Oh, okay, I will if you buy me a dress, a new dress woven, From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven

The Queen that dwells in the dark
feeds on the death of stars,
comes to eat at my heart-
a poor feast for a poor soul.

She reminds me of a song
I've always somehow known.
We walk in tune, until I forget
everything I'd remembered off by heart.

half-hiding

How did it begin?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age
I know nothing of cities
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside.
---Kavanagh.

To come accidentally upon
My self.
Like a fool,
who finds himself
Lost.
"I caught myself...," said the Buddha-soul.
How strange your fall.

The placeless heaven.
was always there.
never here.

I have become a question to myself,
I think I am.
We hide ourselves
from one another.

and you?
where were you
when the questions stopped?

But when did it begin?

Why, my soul, do you sigh within?

...

me against the world.

Well, fuck this for a lark. If the terrorists don't get you the mosquitoes will. Dengue fever has spread. Estimates are that 2,000 people have been infected in Lahore alone. Two thousand and not counting. Fumigate the rooms and do a Howard Hughes. Q U A R A N T I N E . Mosquito repellent lotion (after deodorant, talc, sun block etc. etc...)If the mosquitoes don't get you the chemicals will. Damn those multinationals and Zionists.

At the same time you're supposed to be working on a talk on ethics and economics for the policy centre. Right, the last thing on my mind right now is the connection between logical positivism and early 20th century economic thought.

~~~

Met an old uncle. Ex-army man. No nonsense sort of person. Doesn't think much of "intellectuals." Or "pseudo" intellectuals. Not real men. A bit gay, in the final analysis. He's been shot three times, caught one of the most notorious Balochi bandits, and had a testicle blown off while retrieving a tank that had strayed across the border during the '65 war. Wasn't even his.

Commanding office: bailed out. Crikey! There's a good chap and go and get my tank back for me , won't you? Well, that's the upper classes for you. If the capitalists don't get you, the landed gentry will.

He asks me: "what do you think of the economy's chances?"

Me: "Have you seen the film 'The Titanic'?"

Him (very seriously): "I think I understand what you are saying."

Meanwhile, Ubo is in great form, spinning out stories about legendary cricketers he's seen (the three W's, for example). As if by talking incessantly we could stave off the impending doom. He doesn't take very kindly nowadays to anyone who he suspects of being an "optimist". To anyone of such inclination he shakes his head as if to say, "you silly bastard, can't you see this country's ruined, have you lost your marbles, you silly old goat?".

~~~

So, I was standing in line waiting to pay for my creamy tea (don't ask) and this student turns round and asks me:

Is it true Ghazala Irfan has a 3-series?"

Me: What?

him: "is it true..."

me: sorry, what are you saying.

him: "is it true...."

me: listen, I'm sorry, but I simply don't understand what you're saying.

him: "a 3 series, a BMW."

I turn to a colleague. Well, looks like when it comes to the non-crazies it's me and you kiddo. But even here I'm beginning to have my doubts about you!

There are a lot of weird people out there. Much safer in here, blogland, talking to the girls.

In praise of folly

By a strange co-incidence Paris, London, fundamentalism and 'conversation' seem to be finding their way to these blogposts. One of the disadvantages of never actually finishing a book, of reading bits of books at the same time, is that one's mind strays and finds such senseless connections all the time. Freud: 62. No doubt, if I'd been reading Gibbon this post would have been about fancy, instead of folly.

"To them (the zealots), freedom of mind, a mastery of sense and a liberty in thought and action imply debauch, corruption, and depravity."
---Shaftesbury.

"In primitive societies people tell tales and expect their listeners not to question them...without intelligence man is not social, he is only gregarious."
---Samuel Johnson.

"There is... a real satisfaction of living in Paris from the great Number of sensible, knowing, and polite Company with which the city abounds above all places in the universe...Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company.
---Hume.

"Every woman in Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she."

Conversation is for wimps, as my friend might say.

"Bring a wiseman to a party: he will disrupt it either by his gloomy silence or his tedious cavils...If he joins a conversation , everyone suddenly 'clams up.'"
---Erasmus.

the black and the blue

Not only kids, primitives, and southern women love bright colours-war does too.

---Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?

~~~

Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art. He was ruled by 'freedom and laziness.'

---Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne.

~~~

Free spirited people [are perfectly satisfied] with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up in a way to live that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with it.

---Nietzsche.

Music: well, could have been Pink Floyd's 'Us and Them' but I guess it has to be the great Louis.

WtF !

WHORE: hore [hoere, Dutch]. A prostitute. A woman who receives men for money. Dryden. A woman who converses unlawfully with men; a fornicatress; a strumpet.

"The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression."

Interestingly, the modern urban dictionary concurs.

So, what makes for a good conversationalist, or a good conversation (in our sense of the term, not Johnson's above)? What makes for a bad one?

1. a good listener (does such a beast exist?)

2. must have wit, charm, but only when not called upon to exhibit these characteristics.i.e naturally witty...or must at least appear to be natural. But not too witty.

3. flexibility:
a) ability to converse with both sexes
b) doesn't make silly sexual innuendos (some of you may think a) is an example of)
c)shouldn't be patronizing (some of you think b) is a good example of)
d)shouldn't be too self-conscious (some of you think a), b) and c) are.

Flexibility: not dogmatic (fundamentalists and ideologues of all stripes make poor, very poor conversation. Inveterate bores.

Flexibility: to not always talk about the same thing..like 'flexibility'. Fielding: "He can talk of Fashions and Diversions among the Ladies..can likewise talk on a Fan, or a Horse-Race."

4. Sober. Not too sober.

5. 'Anals'. Always talking about themselves, their work, or what's wrong with their body. Intellectuals and academics tend to be anals and are to be avoided at dinner parties where they usually discuss their own petty politics.

Too much to say is nearly as bad as having nothing to say.

7. Raillery. Nothing like it! Love it. But not too much and not the kind of vicious 'taking' that is part of Punjabi culture. Not too rude, not too polite.

8. Not always light. Not always dark. You know the type I'm talking about: existential angst, wears lots of black, very profound, has to fit in some Zizek or Derrida in every line of the conversation..doesn't "do" trivial. Chit-chat and small talk is for the bourgeoisie. We're talking about VERY SERIOUS things here indeed.

But too light as well. The airheads and buffoons. Always smiling..."those men and women whose face is ever in a smile, talk ever with a smile, condole with a smile, etc." (Swift)

Get this, the other day I was told (not for the first time I might add): come over K, always need some light entertainment. WtF ! Swift: : "Your Business is only to laugh in Season..while this merry Companion is acting his part."

9. Name-droppers and people who feel compelled to sneak in foreign words into their conversation.

10. People who always agree with you and those who suffer from "the Itch of Dispute and Contradiction."

And I'd dearly like my friends, both
Young and old up there to gather
All of us in German babbling
Paradisal words together
---Goethe

The Real...

"Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak."

---from William Hogeland, The Boston Review.

Much the same from Jonathan Raban and a slightly different angle from Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker. Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions: small-town America against the cosmopolitans.

Anti-elitism. Anti-state: John Birch (great song by Dylan, of course).

Easy to dismiss "them" as simply paranoid, nuts, like all the other right-wingers: Hindu extremists, Muslim fanatics, Israeli settlers, the BNP and other thugs/racists.

Easy, but correct! Their so-called "legitimate grievances" are really, for the most part, just the inability to accept other people and the decline in their own power (Norman Mailer may have been on to something here). If you believe in universalism and are against ignorance you're being elitist! Gawd help us!

And the "real Americans", the "pioneers" were really slaughtering the Red Man, creating a wilderness for him, one that matched the wilderness in their own hearts.

In a similar vein: the nihilism of the Muslim fundamentalists and the degeneracy of the conservatives who support them or turn a blind eye to them.

Once you start talking about the real American, or who's really a muslim, then you set up all sorts of distinctions: the pure and the impure, the true and the untrue.

David Marquand makes the intriguing point in The Decline of the Public...

the dougal

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the sources of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

and this, of course.

the open field

somewhere. not here. someone. not you. what goes to make up a life must be that which goes up. the hour before the hour. it goes on. with or without you. when life would be in the finding, the clearing...an open field, raw, broken, that does what it knows the case to be, is what its own silence tells it, has learnt to dispense with mirrors.

stone, tree. your absence. shaking my heart like a storm in old trees. the affinity of the high leaf for roots, the richest vein, there from the beginning, in stone. open to the light, vertical shadow. morning brightness, spiked, startling, loosened into deathless afternoon conventions. fearless timekeepers mark the abundance of time, which is really the lack of time. this was you, after all.

speak for yourself. who else could? you're so full of yourself. unselfing: as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else. but the act of hiding is still an act. light reflected, with all its settled qualities, is still not the thing.

~~~

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the sources of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told

often i am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos.

---R. Duncan.

From Russia with love

Started Lesley Chamberlain's Philosophy Steamer (wish I had got Applebaum's Gulag instead). So far, not half as interesting as her fascinating Motherland.

Started with a conversation about Berlin and whether-or to what extent-he was attracted by thinkers from the counter-enlightenment. Was there something very Russian in this? (and what of your own fondness for Tarkovsky, Rothko, icons, Akhmatova?)

Part of me-and not just the wahabi part-isn't very interested in the "mystical"...in fact, reading about Berdyaev one almost longs for a cool autumn mind to dispel all that fogginess and bagginess, the mystifications and darkness, the emphasis on folk, the land, and tradition; and one needs to assert, again and again, the 'I' so that it is not subsumed by the 'We'. There, see, even there it creeps in with a metaphor! Where's Bronk when you need him?! Did Spengler really say Russia was the future?

A bit like at the National, when you suddenly come across Poussin or the Flemish painters (winter scenes, Vermeer, northern sobriety, austerity, the solid, plain world of the bourgeoisie: black, not the sun) and heave a sigh of relief: Thank God! Or when you return to the patient, sombre, unfussy reasoning in economics. One wonders if others felt the same toward the end of the late middle ages (Huizinga is brilliant on this).

Rilke: "Russia because for me...the deep, daily insight that reality is something strange, something that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience."

why so blue ?

A reader once asked why the black sun is so blue. Well, yes. My thoughts exactly!

Does anyone know which city this is? A city with so many bridges must be great...

I walked across the 'millennium bridge' with the swami, the very first day, when it shook and swayed from one side to the other. Linking the old (St. Paul's) to the new (the Tate). What else is a bridge but a quivering memory spanning differences in time and culture? We all held hands and I looked down. Remembered the sea. Only then realised it was with me all along...

Montaigne on a lazy Sunday morning

Nothing could be better than picking up some useless book on a Sunday morning, when everyone else is asleep, and sitting quietly in your room, the sun lovely and weak, as you eagerly await the perfect breakfast (hash browns, grapefruit juice, baked beans, a French scrambled egg and some good, strong coffee).

Well, perfection never arrives and was more in the anticipation of it. (Made do with Cheerios and toast, if you must know).

Montaigne's cat:

'We have some mediocre understanding of their meaning; so do they of ours, in about the same degree. they flatter us, threaten us, and implore us, and we them.'

There's something quite appealing in the idea that we should make do with what we have, with what we are; gratitude for the time we have. The idea of perfection on the other hand...there's something fanatical about it. Not just the religious zealots and settlers, the moral brigade and inveterate do-gooders, but a certain kind of academic, too: like a man who walks alone, and in the dark. If things aren't perfect then does it follow that the world must be a dark place indeed?

Always been sceptical of people who try to paint a picture of modern society as somehow angst-ridden, full of existential doubt, plagued by meaningless desires, etc., etc. Modern-day gnostics, really. A leap out of the mechanical world into faith. Isaiah Berlin was right here: two extravagances: to include only reason; to exclude reason.

You read a silly quote today: all progress comes from the unreasonable man. I'm sure that appeals to a certain temperament, or is popular amongst undergrads., but it comes across as childish and naive. Much prefer, this lazy Sunday morning-even without my coffee!-these words:

We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside.

Dada, Gaga, there, there...

For Nabs:

Dada: empty language of meaning ...the world already has too much meaning and must grow light again: the heavy burden of the word must be destroyed in a counter-culture. Iconoclasm.

Lady Gaga. Crikey! The desire to shock soon becomes quite tedious, moronic even. Guenon was surely right here: the carnival only makes sense against the backdrop of a stable world. Which doesn't, of course, mean one sides with the stifling and pernicious woolly-minded ramblings of the conservatives and the orthodox. It doesn't mean taking sides at all: I prefer not to.

The hyperinflation of the word (G.Steiner), the lack of what Illich calls the 'commons of silence,'...very much in line with the instantaneity of late capitalism, with all this fake mumb-jumbo about gnosticism and spirituality: the truth is within, words are heavy and deceptive, not the real thing.

The Declining Art of Conversation: yeah, like, whatever. Facebook, for example. Not a substitute, to my mind anyway, for the day-to-day conversations (informed discussions, or just joking around with friends) that go to make up the social fabric of our lives. You might be there, but what if there's no there, there? What if experience cannot be communicated because we have such little experience of the world, of other lives?

The old tension-which led to so much creativity-between the word and life, text and experience, presence and absence, is lost in the swamp of information, all 'downloadable' at the click of a button. Does a world of all possibilites cease to be 'a world'? And what happens to imagination, memory, and reticence in the headlong rush to take it all in: been there, done that?

The speed of conenctivity doesn't necessarily foster the ability (or desire) to connect.

joy & sorrow

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.

---from Mir Dard.

relearning the alphabet

I wrote you. I wrote you somewhere. I wrote darkly on your white soul, the loops of the letters like so many nooses. composed myself. crossed what needed to be crossed, joined what had to be joined. some slanting at the right angle to the universe, others shook with a brightness, clearly for you. still you wrote back:

'The writing wrong, the meaning wrong,
the style wrong, the spelling wrong.'
---Sarmad.

so, what is it? must one learn or forget?

A

to relearn the ah! of knowing in unthinking

B

to be. to love an other only for being

C

clear...the seeing that burns through, comes through to the fire's core.

K

but find my face clenched
when I wake at night
in limbo.

N

something in me wants to cling
to never.

R

from dark of yearning into
a soft day...
as acts of magic I would perform.

Z

the blaze addresses
a different darkness.

---D.L.

as the bishop said...

This had me rolling in laughter. The punch line: "Naturally, a job of that sort could be given to a woman who in any event is licentious in her ways."
Hmm. Expect a sudden surge in the number of muslim terrorists!

And here's another joker.

And in the news today we have these charming people

Now, what is it: is it that there's just this exogenous amount of crazy people out there, some of whom become 'religious,' or is it that religion itself encourages such sort of loopiness?

now and then

" I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
---Sebastian Smee on Lucian Freud.

The Platonist might think "there is no whiteness so white as the memory of whiteness", as the memory of lost whiteness, but such is not really the case. The eternal's love of time; the eternal one's love of the particular one...he bears his fate like an old infidel, waiting for it to crack.

Lights turned down. The wisp of the low blue flame. The slow understanding within bounds, circling, retracing. The inevitable drift to the South, your name like a ray of sunshine amidst the world. Silence, followed by speech. Now and then.

The same. The same.
then once, in a flash,
fresh ground,...
black, grey, green, and blue
water, stone, grass and sky
and each unique set stone!
---Robert Lowell.

constellations

is this the place? no, this is not the place and never was. this was never the place where I met you or left you. never. but if it was? this is the place where someone mentioned your name. you weren't real, like the story of a long forgotten queen in a book. then, the red blush of your cheeks set hearts on fire. and if once, then why not again?

From Rebecca Solnit:

The belief that places in the imagination can be contained, versus narrative, wandering, wondering across genres, disciplines, and time.

Jimmie Durkham: "nothing could be more central to American reality that the relationship between Americans and American Indians, yet those relationships are of course the most inviolable and the most lied about."

R.S. The greatest tragedy of the new technologies may be their elimination of the incalculable-the coincidences and provocations and metaphors that take us out of ourselves and put us in relation to other things. To live inside a mechanical world is to live inside plotted possibility, what has already been imagined; and so technologies that are supposed to open up the future instead narrow it.

N. Klein: 'virtually lost, virtually found'

'The sky is consciousness of the landscape'

Hannah: metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.

R.S. Another rupture is between stars and constellations, information and stories..after the telescope the sky began to fill with objects that had no place in culture, that were accessible only to specialists, and that outreached the ability of culture to assimilate new objects into existing patterns.

M. Foucault: constellations of meaning linked by metaphor were being replaced by expanding galaxies of information.

constellations: routes for the imagination to travel, approach the unknown through the known, the abstract through the concrete.

Aristotle: A good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity of dissimilars.

Trust, trust in the unknown, in what you don't know. Incredibly difficult. But still, the wonderful example of the Crow Indians.

Tierno Bokar writes beautifully (and simply) of the 'three lights'...at the first level "the darkness of superstition surrounds them, the cold of incomprehension makes them tremble. They remain huddled up in a small corner of their tradition..at this stage adepts cannot go beyond the stage of imitation (taqlid) and the letter...

The second light is like that of the sun...Just as the physical sun gives light and warmth to all beings, who from this perspective are all brothers, the adepts who have reached this degree of light see and treat everything that lives under the sun and receives its light as brothers...It will always come from the same source and will never falter throughout the ages.

Q: 30:22.