pink moon

On the corner of Denmark Street: speckled stone smashed, revealing root. The memory of the young woman at Foyles still fresh; her pink dress, too modern a cut for a bookshop, her vibrant stride and wavy hair, a pink blur. You turn your head down to word, text, gaze finding the words:

There are not always melons
There are always stories.

Well, yes, indeed. 

At St. Giles a solitary pink carnation wilting in the summer light, light that is still young. Happy hour is over and the wine glasses have been emptied to the dregs. The long grass, the late shadows, the mystical emptiness of the Church, the strugglers speaking in tongues; a fat black man that you saw many moons ago, who used to sit next to you at Borders, still half crazy, speaking to himself in a wispy voice,with a newspaper folded under his arms; you imagine the folds of his skin, the stench from trying to stay alive on the edge of things, keeping afloat.

Buddhas have replaced  garden gnomes in England.  You have to be out of it. The Taleban and smashed stones, crumbling Buddhas, the nihilism of the heart. If they had their way everything and everyone would be destroyed, so there would only be God. 

Little r has six stars on her hand, one for each word she knows. Words with three letters. "Not big ones," she says. So, no 'love'? "Yes, just small ones, but not God...words like 'God'". Little r, you're such an actress, and just a  little bit pretentious! "Have you seen your blog lately!" 

The grey of pavement, dark and dry. You think you'll gain some insight this close to stone, on Kingsway. The rituals you surround yourself with; don't look back and keep your heart empty. 

Hammershoi and Five Easy Pieces, the prelude. That bit where he comes home knowing it isn't home any more, but is the closest thing there'll ever be to home. He sees a shape, walks into the silence, the black and white photos holding up something to his face. A home, a house, the great protector against the fierceness of the hours, of the mind losing track. Stone house, built next to tree, each lives in its own world and time, each a boundary to the other.

~~~

anton wrote a beautiful line, which I've just remembered:

the price of being in the world is not being yourself.

Which is complete, in itself, like 40 pieces of silver in the world, or a coin resting on a shelf, but still only half true, for the price of being in the world is also being yourself. At the time of death, there is no time for metaphors.   

Definite Hate

Who would listen to a music band that called itself by that name? Definite Hate. As opposed to, what? Vague Love? The connection between music and violence. The first time you saw it-or is this just a faulty memory-was when the President of Panama was being hounded. More recently, it appears that terrorist suspects are sometimes subjected to hours of heavy metal played extremely loudly. But is there something older, something that stretches back to our time as warring bands? Music as a way of stirring the senses, of helping us find some ancient pattern of unity, fraternity, brotherhood? The most laughable thing in these Olympics has been the sight of grown men and women crying when listening to their respective national anthems. Pathetic and funny at the same time.Is there something about music that can lead to the individual finding pleasure in some sort of collective dream? And the Proms-dear Celia will hate me for this-what is all that about?  

"These people haven't heard heavy metal. They can't take it."


Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles of Greek organizations. These hypermasculine s

ystems perpetuate a culture of conformity and intolerance. They have inverted the traditional values of scholarship to turn four years of college into a mindless quest for collective euphoria and athletic dominance.
---Chris Hedges.

Gosh, and I thought my uni. was bad!

~~~

A comment in the Guardian on Michael Page:

"If he's a member of the master race, we're all fucked."

~~~

The first was that people hipped on sports can get overaddicted to victory. Sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag had become a go-for-the-win triumvirate that had developed many psychic connections with the military.

--from Norman Mailer's intriguing NYRB article.

____

Another horrific case of "honour killing" draws to a close. Easy (and wrong) to generalize from a few specific cases-not least because it means glossing over individual tragedies. The mind at a depressing blank when you consider how much human stupidity and viciousness there is. Not much good saying Bach, Rembrandt...Sometimes a moderate kind of utilitarianism, whereby the ordinary lives of  large numbers of people are made better, seems attractive. In an age which is obsessed by "inwardness", "states of mind" and "spirituality" you wonder if a dose of pragmatism isn't in order: Good states of mind require things to work (Keynes). You wonder if it isn't time, if it isn't always time, to pack one's library.

You don't quite trust anyone who isn't, at some time or another, sceptical of books/academia/ religion. Not the virulent kind of fanaticism of a Dawkins, mind ; but a gentler type of questioning, which is really bewilderment. Ho hum.

~~~

The colours of the heart. What would you know!

Officially the heart is oblong, muscular, and filled with longing.
But anyone who has painted the heart knows that it is also spiked like a star
And sometimes bedraggled like a stray dog at night
And sometimes powerful like an archangel’s drum
And sometimes cube-shaped like a draughtsman’s dream
And sometimes gaily around like a ball in a net.
And sometimes like a thin line

And sometimes like an explosion.
And in it is also a river,
A weir and at most one little fish
By no means golden.
More like a grey jealous loach.
It certainly isn’t noticeable at first sight.
Anyone who has painted the heart knows 
That first he had to discard his spectacles,
His mirror, throw away his fine-pointed pencil
And carbon paper and for long while
Walk outside.

---Holub.

A few strokes are able to transform a blank page into the expression of an emotion, a still moment. The reluctance to disturb perfection--a few dashed lines hurried off, like a few choice words that say what is essential, finding the right key. Sometimes you think these direct, fresh, "open" sketches, are much more interesting than the finished article. Stokowski said something similar when speaking about rehearsals: something completed vied with a startling experience. This blank space, preserved in the Cezanne; Saskia's eyes lovingly caught; the strength of Ruben's Hercules; a brilliant, vivid satyr by Watteau, red in claw; Breugel, with his intermingling of the secular and the religious.

The paper open to the ink; the human hand open to the human heart...

Down to 'the tanks' at Tate..something like Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Got caught in a light strobe-my two minutes of fame producing guffaws of laughter from a few tourists. The books under the bridge tightly packed together, very reassuringly. Brilliant 11 0'clock light and a cool breeze on your face A few notes of Piazzolla striking out urgently, the choppy waves of the Thames as jagged.... Off to see the fantastically inventive Heatherwick. Awestruck before his creativity. Fidelity to natural limits. If one knew how shape responds instantaneously to different pressures, repetition,  materiality would be poetic, unfurl like a snail, reveal a different space, an angle that no-one in the universe had previously seen. Then to the more familiar small oil sketches (Constable) and the wonderful walking into the silence of the room that holds the 15 th century tapestries. No-one ever visits these rooms.

You think to yourself: London, Paris, New York (and Berlin, says the dougal) are still real cities. 

London Olympics: 0

If that wasn't naff I don't know what is! After an hour the family had switched the box off and friends were phoning me up or texting saying how awful the whole thing was (maybe we were just spoiled by the Chinese). Would have been better off doing slum dog east end or how "we" bombed Jerry. But here's the thing: England's always thought it was the centre of the world; a strange kind of inwardness that pushed to the extreme becomes xenophobic-as well one might expect from an island nation. As the kids today might say: anal. 


You've always thought that England is best when it does small-things like afternoon tea and religion; whenever it goes big it looks rather ridiculous (colonialism, for instance). And of course, "only connect" is something that one struggles with..no, just leave me alone with my tea and newspapers...


The papers have played it up as eccentric and irreverent, as being a reflection of the quintessential "English character". Not sure if that's true..I mean, like any other self-perceptions that people have of themselves-like the 'stiff upper lip' (which, incidentally, was apparently an Americanism!)-there's a grain of truth to them. But the ideals we hold up to ourselves and other people say more about us whether they're true reflections or not. Mr. Bean, for example, is not eccentric. Spike, on the other hand... 


Someone once wrote that the scene of English fiction is always the home whereas America, with its wide open spaces, allows for and encourages an engagement with bigger issues. So, the insular, parochial, fake inwardness character...is that really just shyness? In any case, there's something quite claustrophobic about all this domesticity.


The man of action is never the hero of English letters...


But there is a tendency with the English to dislike writes who fail to sustain their stay-at-home virtues, who fail , indeed, to devote themselves to the occasionally poetic business of nothing very much happening all the time.

Nicholson:

And all rivers were one, and they all led back to the Roding...

sweet, ordinary earth

Yes, I know, a bit of an odd way to pass a tough hour before iftar, but J.B.'s programme on parish churches in East Anglia has its moments. Old stone, leaf, dream of star; the green shade of late summer afternoons a kind of slowness, displacement, fierce resistance to serial time; the silent interiors, wood gently ageing; the words spoken, the same sound and inflection century after century; openness that was fated to give way to an indifferent gaze; history in stone and wood and glass, emptying out before our eyes, the God of absences, beyond words and theology.


~~~


there are moments when you've stopped in your tracks, grateful for something you can't name; yes, this is it, the small glimpse of understanding, of contentment: look out and look back; taste and see; no mystical flight, no awe, a very down-to-earth feeling that finitude, somehow, is not a misfortune, a sense that the clothes fit, that there is a type of ease or another life in the shade of the great trees below sweltering sun. Ubo, himself growing old, says to me: the reality of life slips into shadow, as it always has and always will; soon the shadow itself will be but a memory. Then he turns to me, mischievously: "Wah! I've become a poet in my old age." And this line, from the morning's gleaning: whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before.

~~~


Now, it has been suggested by one of my more cynical (and fairer) readers-though the scallywag shall go unnamed-that this mild epiphany of mine must have come to me whilst scoffing down one of my beloved cinnamon rolls. Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? I shall remain silent on the matter. A love that speaketh not its name!

Recently discovered a spiced teacake (in California that might be mistaken for a drug-filled after-tea indulgence, but no). A bit squidgy and chewy, but given a medieval twist, you think, with its currants and spices (cinnamon, clove,...). But hang on, those spices weren't around then, were they? Allspice, one of the great treasures of the world-even if it did lead, eventually, to colonialism. 


So, what's the difference between a Chelsea bun, a hot-cross bun, and a teacake? Forget the Ph.D...this is a real research question, one that merits some empirical testing...

debts of honour

 At Valentine's park, Il. Stop to stare at the strange assemblage of people around you at the playground. Wonder what old Enoch would have made of it all. One hundred years ago, when he was born, the ethnic and religious composition of people would have been quite different. Here there were Sri Lankans, Gujratis, other Indians that you couldn't place, Paks, some Africans, a few Chinese people and a number of mixed race people as well. Horrified, perhaps? Or maybe not...

You see a six year old podgy kid, desi, walks by stuffing down his flake 99 with great relish, wearing an Eng-er-land t-shirt. Most of the parents speak in English with their kids and, just like everyone else, make sure their own children wait their turn. The hijabis are out in full force and most  people are cool with that. It's just the way it is.

You have to think, though, if anywhere else there'd been as rapid a change in society as there's been here..well, maybe the problems would have been of a different magnitude. And of course, putting your red hat on, you have to say that race is really a red herring in that the fundamental changes in society have come about with the decline of manufacturing, Thatcher, globalisation, the decline of the public (Sennett) and a host of other factors. The best thing that can be said about ol' Enoch is that he knew Welsh. Apart from that he was, to be quite frank, a bit of a wanker.

~~~

Now, really must put in some effort to find Michael Foot's book, 'Debts of Honour'. Since you are reminded of him every time you walk past the Gay Hussar, you ought to try and scoop it up soon, to repay a debt to an honourable soul.

~~~

In one of your more pessimistic moods you get the terrible feeling that not only is socialism on its last legs but that the very notion of the social is on the decline. Of course, it might be countered that there's always been a  certain roughness to the 'north'  and if we extend our historical horizons a bit we might be inclined to say there's been an improvement in manners, civility ( N. Elias) 

Ramzan...

There's something not quite right writing about fasting-to be self-conscious of your actions..isn't the elimination of that precisely what is aimed for? Or is it? You don't think Islam works by negation but, rather, that the supreme virtue is 'balance' or moderation. But then how does one explain such extremism, such a pedantic fascination for details? This, too, seems a bit of a generalization, an ahistorical summary. A balanced view would surely say that different virtues and vices come to the fore under particular circumstances.


Not sure if I have the strength or conviction for this one. You wonder how important 'niyat' (intentions) are in the observance of any act (religious or otherwise, but especially religious). Or do you just go with it, follow a ritual and see if something comes along the way? To suppose there's some sublime moment, some perfect  clearing of one's mind and heart before..is that not another form of extremism?  


Khair...you see the elements of doubt on the dougal's brow. Confess, dougal! (And never forget the Inquisition!). Is humour allowed? Probably not. Not moored to any tradition you find such questions themselves slightly ridiculous. Ah, the Moor's/Mir's last sigh!


Ubo says I'm exempt from keeping them since technically speaking I'm still travelling (No, not "traveling" in your sort of 1960's, hippy way, but literally speaking. Well, it's been two months, but you love the sentiment behind his thoughts. 


The strength of the community? Have you actually seen the community bro'? If you did, all questions of belonging would soon be resolved! The unity of the ummah..oh, please, give me a break dude.

Anyway, let's see how it goes. Reading Rebecca West at 4 a.m. is probably not a good idea. The names of Croat kings are swirling through my mind. 


~~~


Yesterday, off New Oxford Street, past a theatre whose name you forget, you heard what sounded like seagulls...did they stray so far? This notion of an inland bird, off the radar, without a sense of verticality, out of touch with the open blue skies..was this a metaphor?

names

anton, I have to borrow-if I may-your beautiful quote. By a strange co-incidence (or maybe one just seeks them in a certain state of mind, a kind of temporal order?) I was looking for a quote-also from something I haven't read-and it turned out to have your name on it. "your name on it". That can be a terrible thing, but when said in the Pakistani context it's always-I think-in a positive sense: you're starving, have no money in your pockets, shops are closed and you see your friends at a table. They offer you the last bit of food and, judging you to be hungry, will say something like: "it's yours, it had your name on it". Okay, okay, the quotes... 


 (Xenophon): 
 [8:18]How good it is to keep one's stock of utensils in order, and how easy to find a suitable place in a house to put each set in, I have already said. 


 [8.19] And what a beautiful sight is afforded by boots of all sorts and conditions ranged in rows! How beautiful it is to see cloaks of all sorts and conditions kept separate, or blankets, or brazen vessels, or table furniture! Yes, no serious man will smile when I claim that there is beauty in the order even of pots and pans set out in neat array, however much it may move the laughter of a wit. 


 [8.20] There is nothing, in short, that does not gain in beauty when set out in order. For each set looks like a troop of utensils, and the space between the sets is beautiful to see, when each set is kept clear of it...


and, &...


'And so too, without leaving the confines of the weaving, he feels himself to be at the very centre of creation, while still in touch with its borders and frontiers. Art like this beckons man to live within its world, freed from the sins of the other one. 
When it was first woven in the eleventh or twelfth century, the tapestry must have measured six metres in length, but only three metres sixty-five survive. The passage of time -- whole epochs in revolt -- has destroyed almost half of it. But the overall structure of the work, the strands of coloured thread and the remaining mutilated fragments allow us to reconstruct the composition and imagine the themes depicted in the missing parts. What one admires in the work, beside the fine execution, handsome texture and harmony of colours, is this structure -- a structure so symmetrical, so dependable that even when incomplete, it is possible to recreate the whole, if not on the cathedral wall, then within the framework of our imagination.
There the missing parts unfurl, fragments intimating the larger harmony of the universe. What we love in any structure is a vision of the world that gives order to chaos, an hypothesis which is comprehensible and restores our faith, atoning for our having fled and scattered before life's brutal disorder. We value in art the exercise of mind and emotion that can make sense of the universe without reducing its complexity. Immersed in such art one could live one's life, engaged in a perfectly rational discourse whose meaning cannot be questioned because it resides in an image containing the whole universe.

What surprises and will always surprise is the notion that a single mind could conceive of such a convincing and pleasing structure, moreover a happy one, a structure which as well being a metaphor is also a reality.'

Cristina Peri Rossi -- The Ship of Fools


~~~


I guess in an age which revels in the fragmentary, the sideways glance, any mention of 'unity' automatically suggests 'totality'. To be of a single mind can only point to a kind of fanaticism, or rigidity at best. And yet, the simple things, the deep familiarity of a voice, the right combination of spices, the old tree outside your house, the smell of fresh grass, the same fading, slanting light flaring briefly on a cool summer's day, the light glancing off bushes, the inky Roding, full of calm mystery..all this seems eternal right now. Tomorrow your head will ache and you will stumble through the day again, not sure if you're dreaming this since, like a mirror facing a painting, you seem to have been taking this one image in for such a long time that it's something you inhabit.

take it home:

As time goes by the question of belonging, of where home really is, becomes more vexing and less important in equal measure. It sounds ridiculous to say that the music one first learns to love has anything to do with politics or the place where one lives. In any case, there's a whiff of old-time craziness hanging around any association of music with 'the land'. It would be quite interesting to know what the second-generationers (West Indians and Paks and Injuns) started listening to and how far it branched off from their parents' tastes. Classical, for example. How many working class, non-white people got hooked to it? Of course, the dougal was listening to Rimsky-K even then. But most of the music that floated our way wasn't Rafi or Bach; it was more like Marley and Otis and... of course, as time goes by, baggins becomes baggier, has fewer assumptions or convictions, thinks less of course. ry cooder: music the last bridge between people. Possibly. Probably, as little r says. the old times: nothing can be brought back and we are old now. all we have is this thin raft that is love and memory, and a few books, and a track here or there.

the world of lost chances...the gold thread loosened from your garment, straying, touching earth. your heart turned to a heart bluer than mine. 50 shades of.

Listen
 It's a question of listening with the heart, rather than the ear
You'll find bridges inside yourself, and roads that lead right to me
I'm awake all night, looking out for you

 The Secret Sea

 When nobody's looking at her
She's no longer the sea she's just as we are when no-one's looking at us
 She has other fish, other waves,
and exists for herself alone,
and for those who dream of her, as I do here.
 ---Jules Supervielle.

the destruction continues...

Hard to know what to say. I think Gellner alluded to this years ago in his 'Muslim Society'. With so much destruction and violence around, one's instincts are to fall back on your reading. Yesterday saw (but did not buy): The Death of Virgil; Death of the Heart (yeah, I know, 'death' does seem to be looming large!); Under the Volcano; Names (DeLillo); some John Burnside poetry; a new book by Chris Hedges. Did purchase Bob's highly recommended Time of Gifts (4 quid on the South Bank, under the bridge) and Anne Carson's beautifully produced Nox (about the death of her brother).

bbroken lives

you want to cut through the crap, all the false words, the fake sensibilities, the sheer scale of the artificiality of it all. Geoff dyer (I think) wrote about how some of the most clear-sighted work coming out is war material, directly out of the fog of war. A basic fact remains: higgs-Boson is a fucking joke. After all these years, the streak of violence doesn't wash away.

and there's this simple, honest piece that makes you think about the down and outs, on whom "austerity" is forced:


'We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.'


--Chris Hedges.

the end of the south

The end of the south, or so it seems. The train journey through small places, the land locked in its ancient ways; the desperate teenagers with escape looming large in their minds, all decked up (or is that down?). Basildon man in front of you, red-necked and a brown balding skull. A sort of bigot-or at least you imagine. Is Basildon, after all.

Fairlop Fair was a flop. 250 years of tradition reduced to a few women in beards prancing about and some awful songs.

~~~

At southend: the blustering wind, our teacups flying off in all directions; we hold on to our paper plates for dear life and gulp down our lukewarm tea with a great sense of urgency. Nothing's quite right. England's gone, and the last fish shop is closed for the summer. Even anton's author sounds a bit fake-and her recommendations are never wrong.

K

"I would have thought", said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature."

"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You may as well say one was above humanity.”

Bennett,A. continues to charm: direct, irreverent, funny. Only time for snatches, but still...

"'Police killing was lawful' says inquest. What police killing isn't?'"

'The joy of being a mob, particularly these days, is that it's probably the first time the people on this estate have found common cause in anything'

'In England age wipes the slate clean. If you live to be ninety and can stille at a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.'

'I'm brushing my teeth...then a little school or class passes...Ethnically mized with Muslim women in headscarves in attendance, a couple of tired-looking teachers and young fathers too...A poor school by the look of it...But the simplicity of this little column , the tired goodness of it, reaffirms...what? A belief in common decency.'

I think that last line sums England up really. A European (or an academic) would have written: the project of inter-subjective mutual responsibility to 'the other'.

'Jesus loves everyone, except you, you cunt.'

There's nothing more boring than meeting someone who thinks books and Literature are the cheez...of course, except for meeting someone who thinks the opposite. 

Mir's syndrome...

The History of Silence [   ]

There's a book on everything nowadays; everything's tainted. The private lioves of nobodys, dissected with great care and attention to useless detail after detail. 

"Is there a history of silence in your family?" asks the copper/shrink/wife. 

Royalty: the ability to forget who one is? The giveaway line that reveals, finally, who you are?  

 

Takes a step back from the fray...he sees the whole picture in his mind, chooses the right moment, and finds time, space. Is Pirlo a sufi? Not since Zidane side-stepped the whole Brazil team has there been such a masterclass.

(proper) desire

You looked away just once
as you leaned on the chip-shop counter,
and forty years were gone.

---Helen Dunmore 

Economists are wont to speak of wants as anything but 'given'. Can there, then, be any sense to thinking of desires as wrong or of them being too many, or too few? Forbidden desires, excessive and frivolous desires..what language do we have to reflect on them and think of sharper, 'higher' desires, ones more attune to who we really are?

ploughing the field...Adam Smith:
...


The moment of recognition, that leads to intimacy, a kind of understanding. To assume we always know what we desire, who we are, is a great conceit. We stumble through, imagining the lives we didn't live but might have. "If..."..."one day...". the clauses, north of the future, the winter soul, finding true north, as if passing downriver, sparkling, far from home but clear to us at last.


~~~

One day the Earth will be
just a blind space turning
night confused with day.
Under the vast Andes sky
It will no longer have mountains,
There'll be no more mountains,

not a rock or ravine.

 

Only a balcony will remain

Of all the world’s bulidings

and of all the human mappa mundi,
limitless sorrow.
In place of the late Atlantic Ocean,

a little saltiness in the air,
and a fish, flying and magical
with no knowledge of the sea.

Picture a car of the 1900s
(no raod for its wheels!)
and three young girls of that time

traveling through the fog

They'll peer through the door
thinking they're nearing Paris

when the odour of the sky

grips them by the throat

Instead of a forest

there'll be one bird singing,

which nobody will ever place

or prefer,or even hear
Except for God who listening out,
proclaims it a goldfinch.

---Jules Supervielle.

out of the blue

I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,

The gold skins newly dropped
from God's bright fingers, still
implicit with the light.

A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,

as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms

we might have known
before the names,
beyond the gloss of things.

---John Burnside.

Culture vulture

Flipping aimlessley through last Saturday's papers, couldn't but help think to myself: there's an awful lot of things to see, books to read, music to listen to. You keep on adding to your lists, which is silly, really; it only adds to your (mid-life?) anxieties: things-to-do-before-you-die sort of thing. Of course there's no time for any of it. You end up (no, you've ended up) living a life without assimilating anything, and have no sense of any inner coherence; instead, fragments of lines of poetry, quotes here and there, a few jumbled thoughts which it would take you a lifetime to untangle. The number of half-read books, half-watched films, and music listened to distractedly is staggering. Everyhting is there to be consumed, nothing to be savoured...

'The range of culture is so diffuse, the "topics" of interest so proliferated, that it is almost impossible to find a centre of gravity that can truly define the "cultivated" man.'

--D. Bell.

'World-culture', fusion music, international best-sellers. You have to wonder: how convenient all that is for capitalism and the marketeers. The idea of boundaries, limits, of something being withdrawn from one's gaze or understanding, is simply not on. The past and "exotic" cultures must be plundered, made "available" (is it a coincidence that that word is related to sex?)

~~~

The case of someone who went missing 21 years ago has been re-opened. There's something utterly mysterious about that (assuming it's not sinister, which is more likely). Someone, back in 1991, just walking out and never returning, the bowl of cornflakes on the table a sharp reminder of his presence, the room exactly as it was when he left, his loved ones greyer, wiser, sadder; or maybe they've moved on and he returns to find strangers living in his home...

~~~

As we become more competitive over luxuries we 'lose the ability to share and sacrifice. There then follows, says Ibn Khaldun the loss of "asabiyah", that sense of solidarity..that group feeling which means mutual affection...'
--D. Bell. 

But what's the evidence for that? It seems, on the contrary, that market-based societies are fairer and have higher levels of trust etc. Also, the 'group feeling' was often based on tribal instincts, ethnicity- and depended, at least in part, on excluding those not in the group. Of course, to a conservative, this falling away from unity is to be deplored. It seems unquestionable (to him) that the modern world is full of alienated, estranged, disenchanted individuals. Markets, or so the argument goes, lead to a decline in "social capital" and to "atomization".

R and R

little r's favourite song at the moment. only problem is: she sings it to the words from bleedin' julie andrews
:-(

Gotta break her out of the white man's culture.

Regret
Slips its noose
around the neck
  ---Menashe.

Skidelsky's new book is out. Chimes with my own planned book.

'Deprived of their ethical language by the collapse of religion and the strongly individualist fashion in economics and political philosophy...'

news from a strange planet

an hour before sunset and little r helps me collect some flowers; we don't know the names of any of them and so have to go by their weirdness or size (in her case). she blows at a dandelion, not knowing yet the timeless human convention of making a wish as one does so. the natural life of flowers on earth intermingling with human history, desires, expectations. at other times people have held buttercups under your chin as a proof of love...

we walk across the wooden bridge, full of cobwebs but no spiders. the Roding in full flow, dark and brooding as usual, bending back the tall grasses. r thinks she sees a fish but it's only the glimmer of the late sun on a ripple. "strange that you should remember fish at this particular moment in time," I said.

"why? don't you know that i always think of fish no matter where i am, no matter the time of day."

there's no arguing with her when she's in that mood and so i let it pass.

we pass back and forth across the bridge several times. "this doesn't go anywhere," she muses. strange, because you'd always thought of bridges and how they facilitate movement. but when you think of it, there they are, fixed in time.the world, a static bridge, and i have no desire to be anywhere else, nor any need for names.

~~~

"The Puritans have stern faces; but their eyes have looked on life."

"I came to recognize a certain humour, flippancy even, as a sign of the higest seriousness."

'And if there was asingle day when we did not meet

I would sit listless, my mind in a tangle of gloom

To think we are now thousands of miles apart

Lost like clouds on high where many high winds blow,

What chance is there of ever meeting again.'

spent

'I began to realize how much audacity, patience, and solitude are required to express one's experiences.'

'the world, my life, binds the dark and light

together, reconciles and separates

in lucid day the chaos of my darkness.'

---S. Spender.

The great language animal has run out of things to say. Which is not true, of course. More like: I've run out of things to say and of copied lines.

Have western institutions run out of steam? The ability to go on requires energy and a blind will, hope -against the odds. [Aside: no point talking about the 'Arab Spring' or other places such as China since you don't believe they have much to offer]. Well, all instituions decline. That's just par for the course. But what, if anything, can stem the rot, lead to a fresh sense of renewal and purpose? As at the personal level, one can only dig deep if one has available resources stored up. Does an increasingly exlusive focus on our predicament, the sataisfaction of our desires and goals,indicate the weakness of instituions? Surely one of the aims of any instituion is to provide background set of norms and values that spans the generations? If our relations are viewed as being fundamentally of a contractual nature then what relation do we stand in with regard future generations when they do not even exist now! 

~~~

G. Steiner: the great importance of 'if', to think north of the future.    

first words

Descent. Stars, clouds, mist, dew. I fall.

Walk into the familiar. The tree in the leaf, the flourishing of green under the seasons. Menakshe. Me.She. The narrowing down, to find the first stammering word...sparse, pared down, the singular. The sound of your re-entry into the world. the grey skies over, cast their spell. the mystery of a name, re-emerging. you find yourself. the days of deep light and dark shade. too much history floating in the clouds. you look down, small steps. for a stone no-one has tread on...

a sudden breeze picks up, an hospitable gust from a great distance. spent forces, ghostlike. it brushes through a cloud, and delivers a few splotches of rain before my feet, displacing the dust. your heart dry, remembers, imagines a word. the river/we cannot cross/ flows forever. time herself would not flow, reverse. the swami hugged me. my brow unfurrowed. little r cried.

descent/dissent. down, to your self. surround your soul with words, and stolen glimmerings.the Lord of boundaries opens His doors again. a golden chain of light links us. outside & inside my house: i live in the day, with no time to know another.

The silence is vast
I am still and wander
Keeping you in mind
There is never enough
Time to know another.
---Menashe.

On the origin of 6 pm

At 6 pm tomorrow I will be somewhere else, or here. Don't ask where my heart will be! For I haven't found it myself. Use a magnifying glass, steady your hand, and see it burn.

Human fates are simplified by names. But your multiple names are so confusing. The unnecessary complexity of mixed origins, like the ancient anarchy of the heart. We walk, dragging our love behind us. Because we can't see what's ahead, north of the future: 6:01. "There you go again," she said, "putting words into my mouth." A keepsake for my namesake. There are no words. There never were when it came to the crunch. There you go again, she said, bringing silence to my heart...

Your eyes, of course. But I shall remember your mouth. What if the image before death is death itself? 'Five minutes to six,' at St. Paul's. Time is on our hands...

London, sweet London, translate my words for her. Fortunately, I hardly ever understand you. Take my coat, and slow my pulse. Help me find my true pace, the image I keep in my top pocket. Tree and star, and dark crow; muse whose mind is a series of inter-linkages, the face of sun's dark'nd world. Raven of the heart, looks down and spies that the magnitude of things is measured by the depth of the cut. 

Your mouth, (), deeply familiar. But when I kiss you, your tongue tastes of a tenth planet...your gait is indeed royal:...infallibility of breasts. You walk without motion. Your absence noted. And so it is 6 o'clock. The same as yesterday. The same as tomorrow. 

 

Colour me once

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, swelling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

Bent in emptiness

over emptiness

But flying.

---Ted Hughes.

fictions

Fictions are often a  good thing. Liberal democracy is based on the "fiction" that everyone is equal at some fundamental level, or at least we should treat eachother "as if" this were the case. Whether we are equal or not "in reality" is hardly the point.

'Men who were naturally sociable would not need to contract together in order to form society, and would not rationalize society in contractarian terms...Contract as the foundation of all society is required only by men who are not inherently sociable'

Also, our 'natural' inclination to "truck and barter" (truck means trick, btw) leads to the formation of society/the public order. But hang on, is there actually any record of barter or is this another one of the economists' theoretical constructs...the 'as if' world?

To think of relations as a contract has its obvious advantages: a certain distancing from the self, and a greater potential for inter-actions; but, on the other hand, the claims to universality that it makes often go side by side with a depersonalization or 'disembedding' of relations. What, exactly, is meant by 'I-We'?  

the oasis

Lawyers are a strange breed. But then again, so are academics. In fact, everyone not like you is simply weird or messed up in the head.

One step forward, a thousand steps back; read one article or book and realize you have so many more to read (you blame the kuffar technology for this). Of course, it's all a strategy to avoid reality or doing any real work (like collecting one's thoughts and actually putting them down into a coherent form instead of this spluttering nonsense).

So, busy yourself in a bit of gossip: a faculty member was off campus and contacted (via one of his student spies on campus). He was told that two students were at it in the bushes. So, Saturday night, he drives for one hour back to campus, because he feels he has to uphold the "core values" of the university. He searches for them with a torch and stops a couple that just happened to be walking hand in hand around that area. As it turns out, they were the wrong couple. As usual, this descends into an 'us and them' type of shoddy discussion: the self-styled religious vs the self-styled liberals.  And you thought university would be a refuge from the crazies!

~~~

A few lines from 'The Poverty of Clio':

'Changes in the form of religion take place as rational decisions determined by comparisons of benefits and costs...In societies that allow plural religions to compete with each other, religious entrepreneurs adjust product characteristics to match different sets of demands and, in the process, sometimes create alternative forms of religion.'

You have to wonder at the sheer stupidity of some academics (one hesitates to use the word 'intellectuals' in the same sentence).

You send the book to your colleagues. Of course, it's naive of you to expect it to generate any discussion. A book?! What's that, for Christ's sake! 

~~~

The lawyer. Far too jovial for my liking. A plush velvet lampshade, tilted at an angle; the door constructed at an angle so he could see people outside his office. "This is a very weak case". Our hearts soar. "It won't be solved even in fifty years." All round general relief. Then he adds: "InshAllah". Hmm. It's a strange fact, but in the land of the pure when someone utters those words you automatically suspect something isn't quite right.

~~~

Anyway, must somehow find an oasis in this desert. Books are not the thing, or only a temporary ladder of escape at best. Perhaps a picture, an image, to distract one. A quick fix, a 'high' to blot it all out. The sudden demise of the black sun, totally unscripted...  
 

  

black sun

But how did it begin?

With fragments of sentences, books half read, people half imagined, which is to say: with reflections and traces, and memories and a chaste heart. To travel, and leave everything behind, to grow in lightness (Calvino), only to realize that you haven't moved an inch, as in all the best traveling. 

At Penarth pier, as a young boy, you look down through the planks to the sea; the movement of the world, the slow rocking against the fragile creation of human hands. Old people shuffle past you, from another world, death on their purple lips. It seems like this moment is forever: memory is the stillness of the soul in the world. Snow clears, the frost bites back from the windowpanes, seasons turn and wisdom escapes you. This series of attachments hidden, like an underground stream, the fabric of our lives woven from far too many various threads to have any coherence.

'In the evenings especially, when the candles have been lit, a hypochondriac sadness, without object, like a blood-red tone over everything.'

"Have you had your mid-life crisis yet," a friend asked.

No, not yet. Why, what does it look like, and what colour is it? 

A crisis requires too much energy, but if it comes then it will come. May the Lord give us strength [he says, quickly looking for his religious hat]. 

Yesterday at __'s birthday party. A room of poets and writers and artists. Suicide contemplated to end the boredom. Except quiche and cinnamon rolls served by old Emmanuel kept these thoughts at bay. Even little r was quiet, saw through the fakery, and busied herself by stuffing her mouth with potato chips with great sense of purpose, a renewed sense of life's charms.    

so to speak

 'The result of my life was, so to speak, nothing.'

The storm in your eyes, the white lightning behind them that flashes out, burning, reducing all to red; the heart that is opened, brought to speak of/on its own; the recollection of bright days as the rain falls obliquely on cold windowpanes. Memories held closely to oneself, the fist clenched. The rain falling, the loosening of your hair, the glare of lights in the darkening, the rain, full of longing, dissolving what was left of you. 

Typhoon. Such a strange history. A word well-traveled. Mixed ancestry. How nature loves to cross boundaries whilst humans erect barriers, create distinctions. The great clearing, the open ground, breaking newly, your brow fresh, radiant; the miscellaneous bastardization of our lives, the mingling of thoughts and blood, when the time is right, when time, finding itself, slots into place, and the rain falls darkly no more. Then, with flowers on your lips and winter in your heart we will, so to speak, kiss.

why are some countries poor and others rich?

An interesting review/summary of the new book by

Acemoglu

Meanwhile, for my money, probably the best journalist writing today:

"Just as privatised medicine leads to the over-treatment of the rich and under-treatment of the poor, private schools over-educate the rich. This leads to many of them being educated beyond their intelligence."
---Zoe Williams.

Two questions: what is the appropriate distributive principle (priority to the least well-off, Utilitarianism, etc., etc) and what is the relevant 'evaluative space' (what, exactly, is meant by 'well-off' and how does this relate to other things we value, such a freedom, efficiency, fairness...)?

Acemoglu et al produce some interesting work but ultimately you have to ask yourself if there isn't something odd about explaining history through "origins" (or initial conditions: path dependence). Furthermore, one has to wonder if a great distortion to our understanding doesn't follow from the manner in which economists both try to fit historical events into their framework of rational choice theory and from their desire to reduce the set of human motivations down to the bare minimum, as if to say: the springs of action can be narrowed down to one fundamental, tightly wound coil. 
 

the devil was in the details

the changing year, the animal longing still on us; 

the changing year, and the animal longing.

This day, of all days, makes you hark for the Bright Feast; as the years collect the moments of our lost lives, the desert of the heart in a pagan year remains unbroken. 

The grain of wood in the woods is unknown; so, too, your heart. This strangeness, deeply familiar. The accumulation of details, of intuitions and imaginings, even as understanding escapes you, lacks Form. the world, the bright face, the resplendent image, the idols of your heart, brought to the surface, only to die. Lord, what is this longing but a type of blindness?

God knows, it's just the devil...

'It was the time of summer when wounds heal slowly,

Beautiful the world, and beautiful my desires.'

Summer, Spring, Autumn,

the times of our lives, full, and full of longing.

Summer, Spring and Autumn, the seasons of hell.

Winter, when time stood still for us. & north was a star high above the world, the high desire, the darkness of the soul gathering the moments of love that were apportioned to it. and in the night, these words were true. Second-order desires are not a forgetting, but a deepening.Our circles, broken by the hand of fate. hold on, b fades, soars...  

21st.

'Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.'
---G. Monbiot.

The disturbing thing is just how many people sincerely want to believe there's depravity, moral decadence, a falling away from some prime, pristine point in time; the origins, free from the plurality and complexity of the world, a time when everything was in it's place, neatly ordered, recognized. Maybe it's deep rooted, that kind of nostalgia? But you can't help wondering if it finds more fertile ground at particular junctures in history, or-at the personal level-when one is of a certain age? If there's one thing worse than an old fogey it's a young fogey! 

Atomisation, angst, anxiety, and alienation. You don't really buy any of that (except in small doses) and those who pedal it, shovel it out to the students, are an odd breed indeed. Over here it's very much: Tradition, the 'golden age of Islam',our culture of honour and respect (for women, the environment, elders etc., etc) Except, of course, no-one's ever actually, you know, seen it.

So, today, the unfashionable thought that, you know what, things are actually a lot better than they've been; the untimely thought that the Enlightenment (without the fanaticism bit) is actually not half bad (Calvino's baron). The shocking news that market societies have their virtues (and not just their vices). When all is said and done, who would like to go back (assuming such a thing were possible)? Minorities, women, gays and lesbians, peasants? I somehow doubt it. The old (Republican) virtues, the old religious moralities were, it seems to me, reserved for the few-and sod the rest!

21 st century enlightenment:

...  

How red left me speechless

There was this line from Miro...

There was this line from Miro, that went something like...I choose a direction, and when I'm done with it, I go in a completely different direction. I love that.

A particularly acute reader pointed out, with regard to my last rambling post, that it was quite ironic for me, of all people, to be writing about pluralism when I am, in reality, actually unaccepting of differences.

You wonder about this blog and your writing here over the years. Your varied musical tastes (from post-punk to Jordi Savall), the change in your reading habits towards more poetry and fiction, the move to ethics & economics, your fascination with crows, the 'Red Man', the sublime art you've got to see over the years and commented upon, your mistrust of, and indifference to, politics as well as your hatred for fundamentalism...all that, despite the odd rant here and there, and...

Well, of course it could be that all those things are only in one's mind and what really counts is how you live, how you interact with other people: experience is not a set of fleeting impressions or a few stray words; isn't there a fundamental narrowness here? Here, I think the reader is on safer ground. But even then, is that really true?

... 

second thoughts, 'second spaces': 

But what is so surprising? After all, some of the most brutal men to have ever lived on this planet undoubtedly had "fine feelings" when it came to art, music, etc. (i.e the Nazis); and haven't there been poets, writers, and artists who have espoused anti-semitic or racist or fascist views (Ezra Pound)? Closer to home, you see academics who are, supposedly, fantastically well-read and yet, at the end of the day, they're still major league assholes; and what of the self-styled 'religious' who have often, far too often, promoted or supported bigotry, hatred, repression and violence? 

What (or who), then, is a liberal? Perhaps we should put our deep passions to one side after all. The disturbing possibility that poetry or philosophy may not, in the final analysis, be intimately related to goodness. Are there particular features or characteristics of a person, then? If pushed, I'd be inclined to think: maybe. Maybe the ability to find second spaces, to give others (and yourself) second chances, cut them some slack (everyone's got some crookedness somewhere); one should not think everyone else is illiberal. 

One of the great things about this place-despite, or maybe because of, its barbarity-is the desire to get on, to forget. In may ways, at the day-to-day level, there's a certain ease about 'the east', a reluctance to be too confrontational or antagonistic (is this related to a lack of individualism?) For all my love of West, North, there's still something to be said for East; the South, however, continues to piss me off!   

the first word

A depressing line from a publisher:

“We always say, ‘How about a little novella that we can sell for 99 cents?’ ”

In an age of verbal hyperinflation, is this so surprising? Every desire is but one click away from being gratified, instantly 'downloadable'. The free flow of capital producing the free flow of information.

~~~

The origins of Islam.

As long as Islam has been about there has always been the claim that, well, actually it's just a copy, a heresy of sorts, borrowing from (take your pick): Gnosticism, Byzantium, Iraq, Judaism, Christian mystics and so on. 

This question of borrowing is an odd one. For who could deny that any "idea" or religion takes on the shape and language of the culture and society it finds itself in? But the criticism cuts deeper than institutional forms etc. It is, rather, to point out that if we could trace out the origins we'd see, clearly see, it was all concocted, that the religion "itself" (if we can make such a distinction) is somehow a corrupted version of the "true" faith. 

My problem with that is, firstly, why is there a need to show that one's position is the only true one? This is far more interesting, in my opinion. Against a view that there can only be, and has only been, one "true" revelation it is not surprising that everything else must appear to be in some sense derivative. Secondly, it seems like a futile thing to aim for. I mean, religions have been around for centuries, thousands of years. The question, therefore, is not simply why should you want to change someone else's views but, rather, can you. This is one reason missionaries grate on your nerves so much. 

The difficulty for a certain type of Muslim (perhaps the majority) and for some people of other faiths, is that Islam is so pluralistic. One of the central claims it makes is that it is not new! It is, or so the claim goes, just the last in a series of revelations. If muslims are supposed to "compete" with people of other faiths in good acts then they're also supposed to recognize that some of those other people are "righteous" (a momentous word)and what distinguishes people is not their class, religious orientation ('kiblah') per se but their "intentions" and their "acts". 

Islam is “at its best” when it grounds the formation of a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity.

--Zizek. 

Perhaps. For a certain type of radicalism or zealous puritanism can also follow from that...If Islam emphasizes balance and moderation above all else, then it's city & desert, home and homelessness...

In any case, this bores you. More interesting than that is the dialogue (internal and external) between faith and modernity. What interests you more is the notion that the 'religious spirit' is not only found in other religions (this is almost a matter of doctrine in Islam, in my understanding) but that it survives and flourishes even without the institutional forms associated with religion.