green philosophy

'I saw there was nothing to learn in the deep north...you get enlightenment where you are.'
---E. Bond.

We're out of time, you and me, kid. There's no two ways about it. The arctic is heating up at twice the global average. Scale down, reduce your thoughts to a minimum, to the essential, the necessary. We're old already.  Read about polar bears in a book. A world of reduced possibilities and diversities, the angles to the universe folding. What will you remember? Not Socrates or any mathematical equations. There won't be so many questions, or answers. Books, libraries, abstract thought..all that will seem so quaint, mystifying. Why did we darken ourselves with words for so long?

Crow, no longer afraid to touch the earth lightly, settles down. Once again, time will move in large sweeping arcs, free from machines and human regularities. What shall I remember, precious one? My house, the tree, stars, grey clouds, morning snails and slugs? History in stones and wood and glass. Fires still burn, the red in the green...

We will search and search for our previous life, unable to reconcile ourselves with loss (much as we do now). Or that look on your face, the recognition of so much time passing deep in your eyes; London, still a dark memory in my heart, the bridge, gently arching over the Roding, where a black dog once licked little r's face. You will remember how once she was startled, asking: "Why did he do that? .."What language does a dog speak?"

Muslims don't like dogs (Celia once said). Muslims don't like anyone! But there will be no time for such considerations. Flags, as beautiful and meaningless as silver badges loosely pasted in a scrapbook; the dizzying awareness that what held us together was just a two-dime fiction, that Shylock had it right about the great equivalences: my flesh was your flesh after all.

'Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before.' An intense stillness..the smallest sound is easily heard.'
---J.B. 

Green spark, Montale, the district line, Bellow's green Venetian bottles, Tarkovsky's sad green of Solaris/Roding, Bonnington's lady-in-green, a "luxuriant green"...

what do you need? a tree a house to
gauge how great how small our human life
how great how small when you look up to the top of the tree
and get lost in the lush luxuriant green
how great how small when you think how short
your life compared with the life of trees
you need a tree you need a house
not all for yourself just a corner a roof
to sit to think to sleep to dream
to write to be silent to see your friend
the stars grass flower sky
—Friederike Mayröcker

...the green after the black in AnneMarie's German sufism. Bulleh...

She injured me, then turned away.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.
She clothed me in robes of green and red.






  

the eaters and the eaten

'The table is laid according to rules of symmetry, choosing the right cutlery...Everything is controlled by aesthetic norms, and these norms, freely obeyed and freely varied, convey some of the meaning of...life...it speaks of tranquility, gentleness and things that remain forever the same..serving the food is also ritualized and you witness in the family meal the continuity of manners and aesthetic values.'

---Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy.

When your German friend was here you remember how, when going out for a meal, you or other friends would invariably put some food in his plate first, before eating their own food. A common gesture, but obviously not a universal one. And you have to confess that at times this custom has slightly irritated you. But, for my German friend it was as if his very individuality was being affronted.

One of the best meals I've eaten was in Seville...a lavish but inexpensive two hour affair with ripe watermelons, bitter coffee, dark chocolate,..sun and shade and a book. On the other hand, one of the quietest and simplest meals has been in Hunza: delicious goats cheese, apricots (of which Denise lovingly once wrote) and freshly baked bread. The etiquette there seemed very much to be: don't speak unless you have something to say. Not Wittgenstein, but a kind of natural grace and ease with oneself. None of the straining egos of 'the south', no excited and lively banter, no background music, just the mountains, clouds, and the bitingly cold air on one's face. This was, according to the locals, 'little Tibet' and it's not hard to see why...

It's tempting to look back, all misty-eyed, and reflect, Waltonesque, on the small ordering and regularity in out lives and how their dissipation is somehow a symbol of the fragmentation of modern times. Eat on the go, or in front of the television, eat on one's own or eat just because one has to, to keep the body going.

On the road to Bukhara, we stop at a roadside restaurant, a rickety wooden structure, something one imagines only existing in a medieval book; there the old man crouches on his haunches (eating or drinking standing up is usually frowned upon in many muslim countries); he pulls out a knife that he carries with him (this reminds you of Berger's fantastic essay) and starts to cut wide slices of succulent watermelon for all of us. Then, the oldest of our traveling companions is asked to break the large oval loaf of bread and divide it amongst us all. Again, there's something deeply reassuring about this ritual.

Of course, there are other norms, pernicious ones, that have profound implications. Those associated with gender biases. How do these translate into nutritional and educational inequalities? Work pioneered by Sen (I think). Other norms, rituals, strike one as very odd. For example, when in Boston, living with a Hindu family, an incredibly loving and gracious family it should be added, my entering the kitchen was frowned upon. Sharing of food or drink that has already been tasted is also considered to be quite disgusting.

Cleaning one's plate is also, you guess, a fairly widely practice. For Muslims it's considered part of the sunnah, for  northern friends it's plain old pragmatism (D. McClosky has a lovely reflection on the Dutch and their idea of "waste"). Drinking a glass of something in at least three 'goes' is also a custom, though I do confess to swigging down glasses of lassi in one go. Eating with the right hand now seems to be a fading remnant of an old tradition. Another part of that tradition: only eat so that your stomach is two-thirds full (there are other, more social ones which advocate that if one of your neighbours- up to seven houses from yours-is hungry then you have an obligation to share your food). You are told stories of how back in the per-partition days food was regularly shared by neighbours across the wall.

Cooking with someone is as enjoyable as eating with someone. But that's the subject of a whole new post. (R. Sennett: Craftsman). The politics of slow food.Food as a "political commodity" rather than a natural one (Ignatieff and Hont's fab. chapter on 'needs').

In a dark, dilapidated room in Karachi you remember how distant relatives, people you barely knew, laid out an elaborate meal for you. We sat, crossed leg on the floor, eating out of plates set out out on a brilliant white piece of thick cloth. Then they stopped and realized, in horror, that I didn't eat with my hands. There was a frantic search for a spoon and all was well in the world again. In Kashmir, you are told, there aren't always individual plates. That sounds too Arabian, barbaric, almost.Each to their own, I guess. Really must read Norbert Elias on manners.

Albert Hirschman: the common meal as a symbol...

To eat, outdoors, watching the world go by. One of the great pleasures of life. Paris. The click of high heels, the swoosh of a dress...Or a sarnie and some coffee, sitting on a bench or under a tree, a book placed down next to you, never face down, and never completely closed (a protruding pencil or bookmark makes sure of that). London. A liberating sense of freedom, equality and anonymity.

~~~

"To cook for someone is an intimate act. To prepare food that another will place in their mouth, that will be tasted and swallowed and then pass through that person's body, is a primal exchange. We care about food in literature not when it is deployed as a symbol but when it becomes a language. One cooks. Another eats. "

---from the Guardian.

Babette's Feast, of course. Courtesy of Beth.

Someone recommends a passage from Beckett...

tea for two and me for you...

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

---D.

I asked four people Scheffler's question; three were economists and all are my good friends so I was a bit surprised that their answers seemed to give greater weight to the former fact than the latter (or at least that's what I'd somehow tricked myself into believing...that friends somehow reflect and enliven our own deepest understanding of life). The fourth friend, a philosopher, didn't see how this dented consequentalism. I guess one should be thankful for such a response, but a part of me couldn't but help want a human response, one not so abstract.

I don't really believe-as some have suggested-that a training in economics makes one more prone to believe that "self-interest is the first principle" (Edgeworth).

Scheffler's question raises the question of how or why we value something. Firstly, it is unlikely that someone is going to be indifferent to the question; secondly, they are unlikely to think on the lines of an elaborate cost-benefit analysis, carefully weighing up all the bad and good consequences (no more suffering in the world, no more people able to listen to Bach, discover and create new and beautiful music, art, friendships). What is more likely is a sense of sorrow or even dismay. These feelings may be overwhelming when one thinks that loved ones will not get the chance to live wonderful lives (we commonly refer to the "premature" death of someone and are quite comfortable with commenting on how tragic that is). So, it makes sense to believe that we could think the end of a way of life, and of particular individual lives, will distress us.

This points us to the idea that we can value things without experiencing them and that consequentalism (and therefore utilitarianism) has its flaws. If it is argued that we do experience fear, sorrow, etc. that misses the point: that feeling is only derivative of an event in the future that we care about, that is important to us. Also, that we may not take into account all the consequences, may not view life from the viewpoint of the universe, suggests that a different type of thinking is going on here, one that is inextricably linked to our relationships. Value, or valuing something, then, can be for a different type of reason (if one wants to use that word). 'Valuing' is the meeting of subjective desire with "things"with objective qualities.

I desire tea. I desire tea not just for the taste of it but for, at least in part, the social dimension it has; I desire tea for two; I desire that you drink tea and desire it too and, even more, that maybe you do not like it but drink with me (not necessarily for me)... volo ut sis...or is it, perhaps, my desire for tea is really a reflection of a higher-order desire. I do not even like tea: I desire you. A new cogito: I think of tea, and I am. I sip tea with her, and am not.

What would it mean to lose the sense of continuity, of things carrying on? Radical Hope, as Plenty Coups might say. What if there is no north, north of the future? Not in the overtly religious sense but more in terms of an afterlife..a life after ours?

Scheffler's question is, for me, a question of what it means to be an individual, a question of our relation to time, of our appreciation of the fact that we find ourselves in a web of relations and dependencies and obligations that cannot be reduced to calculation or rationality. A love of place, of people, of life itself...perhaps our sense of the prospect of it perishing would enhance, in a not ambivalent way, the things we have come to love?

~~~

Train Dreams

Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. The sober blank verse is widely spaced and...easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page.The whole book is as delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.

----J.B.

God needs the hermit in the forest as much as he does the preacher in the pulpit.
---Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

Peak-effect. The last few pages certainly gave it a kick but on the whole: didn't do it for me. And the main reason is that the content demanded a different form: more detail, more pottering about, more everything; instead, what we got was a short story, a few moments of someone's life plucked out of the stream. You wanted to see a life, vast and quiet as the surroundings, an epic unfolding itself down through many various paths. touching on wider events in the world...the history of America itself, maybe.  

Lesley Chamberlain's got a new book out; was chuffed to be invited to the book launch but I fear I'll be like Rita fretting over what to say at Michael Cain's dinner party, so maybe not. Can't wait for her book on Van Gogh, though.

The posthumous Keats, or whatever it's called, is an incredible bore-so far. But I guess I'll persevere since it might link up with John Gray's fascinating Immortality book and Scheffler's question:

Say you live for a normal lifespan but that you now know that thirty days after your death the whole of human life will come to an end. What difference-if any-will that make to you in terms of your attitudes, feelings, actions?

A rather morbid and abstract thought experiment but one that leads to some interesting reflections.

Another Day

Slightly less boring than yesterday. The usual routines of exercise, the track in the evening now filling with darkness, swooping birds, flitting bats, and flying insects. Man, 'Nam couldn't have been this bad!

Dinner. superb food but everybody seemed out of sorts. Or maybe it was just me. Much more likely. I probably died and didn't realize it. I was only half there, like some ghostly visitor from another world, mystified by the whole scene of domestic plainness and the rigid artificiality. Of course, you somehow think to yourself that all this fakeness will one day give way, crumble, to reveal some sort of resplendent truth, just the way you peeled away 12 layers of wallpaper in the old house, in the old country, Wales....

It's not just the falseness in one's voice; it's the nonsense one spews forth. Desert Fathers and stones in their mouth. Out there to escape the incessant chatter, babble, idle speculation and pettiness. Not the Syrian eccentrics, of course. Bake a cake. Eat and share it. Read a book. Spend some time praying or in the garden quietly going about your way...the sudden light near the library, this wild mixture of sunshine and shadow, reminds me a pure Sunday: late lunch, roast beef and mint sauce, then the Big Match...

A looked bored out of her mind, that vacant look, the flashiness gone from her eyes...as if she'd already been married for twenty years, or lost something of great value. The discussion wheeled unpredictably from jihadi violence to "experience", then back to DFW (who no no-one has read), then back to deadlines, how the department of politics was full of shits and losers (general agreement there), the mediocrity overflowing from their department like so much refuse that hasn't been collected in the winter months. H, probably a bit drunk, his voice full of condescension and a mild resentment, urging us to fight the good fight like a parliamentarian whip, despondent (or maybe just bewildered) that we weren't all true intellectuals, didn't see what was at stake here: "the university", "academia", I guess. My heart isn't in it. Opposite me: a very attractive and stylish foreign woman. I put on my liberal hat...

The kids, dazed by it all, unable or unwilling to share anything with one another, or play together (I don't know why that's always expected of children). They're supposed to learn how to be sociable, how to listen, mix, express themselves. But from who?

Another Day

Reverence, tolerance...

There's a lovely chapter in Roger Scruton's Green Philosophy. I want to put to one side his (minor) comments on Islam but it never ceases to amaze me that people can comment on some topic about which it is abundantly clear they have little knowledge of. I mean, it would sound slightly ridiculous if a non-scientist made remarks about the scientific method. Of course, in an era which supports ever more fantastically rigid lines of demarcation between branches of knowledge it may be that no-one can say much now about anything except their own tiny area of specialization. So, yes, tradeoffs.

~~~

There's been some comment about the youtube clips which, no doubt, many Muslims will find offensive. And the recent decision by Channel 4 to pull the plug on a programme on the origins of Islam (Tom Holland?) has also brought widespread criticism (rightly so, in my opinion).

Some will say that freedom of speech isn't the real issue here; what we should be concerned about is the terrible violence and stupidity associated with some religious groups in the modern world (some may wish to go further and say that violence is inextricably linked to religion-or at least one religion-both at the historical level and at the textual/doctrinal one). I think that that's a reasonable and fair discussion, even though I don't really have much time for that point of view. Violence and the Sacred: Dudley Young, of course.

There's the minor point that it does appear that one group of people (Muslims) in the world is highly sensitive to criticism or ridicule and quite childlike in their reactions. Again, broadly speaking, that sounds about right- putting to one side Jewish complaints of anti-semitism.

My question is off tangent to those discussions: can people who have lost the sense of reverence for anything holy truly be said to be irreverent? When it was said of Eckhart: the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God, this was against a background of faith; in a similar vein, the idea of liberty, or one idea of liberty-that of freedom from constraint-was really a pressing concern when the state, custom, tradition, and religion bore down heavily on the individual. But I don't think complaints against authority were tantamount to the desire to abolish the idea of limits, restraints altogether (even the Reformation was about a reform of the Church, surely?).

This reminds of a brilliant essay by Cavell on Kierkegaard. Up there with Kristeva on Holbein and his own superb reading of Endgame. Words and concepts like "holy", "revelation" ..what can they mean in the times we live in?

What must strike the modern world as profoundly strange is that so many Muslims do in fact have a reverence for holy persons (of different faiths..as a matter of dogma, actually). Not talking about the barbaric views towards images (Buddhist and Hindu) of some, but of the day-today religious views of the majority. And then there's one of my favourite stories-which sounds authentic-about how the Prophet protected the image of Christ from being destroyed in the Kaba (see Titus Burckhardt's Art of Islam for details).

To go back to Scruton: is there something about the modern way of living, capitalist society, that destroys the sense of reverence, attachment to a place or the past or to nature? Is there something about it-its emphasis on use value, for example-that erases the boundaries between public and private, sacred and profane, the different "spheres of justice" (Walzer) so that the very notion of transgression becomes redundant? What happens when the shock of the new doesn't shock any more? Is nothing sacred, Rushdie asked, and the answer was: No!

Illich has this phrase: the 'revolt against necessity' and Hannah says: the 'unnatural growth of the natural'. To speak of "necessity" or "needs" and not wants and desires is to go against the grain. Are we in need of a different view of austerity, one that means living in one's limits with a sense of joy and responsibility?

It might be said-and with some justification-that religious people have rarely tolerated other people (minorities, unbelievers, etc) and so why should they now be afforded such space. Such a view really only mimics the hatred expressed by religious people. What would the world be like if the so-called religious people and the so-called non-religious people actually sat down and listened to one another as human beings, instead of ridiculing the other, instead of trying to determine the limits of free speech? Surely free speech is one that is easy-going, full of light-heartedness, but respectful of other people's sensibilities. Although the art of conversation still survives (despite the internet!) one does sometimes wonder if it will continue to do so when the voices of hatred and bigotry are so resoundingly loud.

snakes lane east

Once, just past Saint Barnabas's Church, on a bright day, an old man walking in front of me stopped in his tracks as a hearse passed us by on Snakes Lane East. I still remember his gesture to this day: a simple and elegant doffing of his hat (or was it a cap?). But the essential gesture...

Now, what motivated this person to do such a thing? This already sounds like an odd way to put it and smacks of bad faith or as if one was trying to explain something to someone who was from a  foreign land and who didn't understand the norms of the society he or she was in.. What reason did this person have to act in that way, in what we all recognize as a moral way? You're inclined to say out of some sense of duty but then you might think that such considerations appear to be 'mechanical', as if imposed from the outside, as it were (aside: criticisms of Judaism or Islam as being too ritualistic, too bound by the law, also seem to stem from the view that there's a radical disjunction between the "inner" self and the body, the act, the world).

If not that, then might we temper our view a bit and say: as a mark of respect? But how, it might be asked, can there be respect for someone who isn't really a 'person' any more and not someone you may even know? An impartial notion of respect does sound a bit weak.

We can dismiss at once the notion that he did this because it made him feel better or happier. Can pleasure ever be a reason? Yes, of course! But it seems mighty odd to conclude from that that it is always the only reason or that it always trumps other reasons? In fact, pursuing this line of thought, there's something not quite right about thinking that the reason the old man doffed his cap outweighed other considerations, other reasons to act (for example, he may have been in a hurry to buy some food for his granddaughter). Doesn't the reason we're after rule out the possibility of weighing up reasons? Is it not the case that that the man did not even think that the other things were reasons at all! Which is not to say that he was just forgetful or thoughtless, or lazy in his reasoning. But by excluding other reasons to act from consideration, things that wouldn't even have crossed his mind, was he merely acting out of instinct? Are we wrong to attribute reason to his actions in the first place or is that being unreasonable?

Was the old man really just repeating an action he'd seen his father, grandfather doing, all those years ago, when it was more likely that the dead body would be pulled by a horse rather than a car? How important is memory here? To learn something off by heart. Was he, by doing this act, placing himself in the web of connections that have defined him, his community, his traditions? Why should we think of this as an individual act independent of the world he lives in, distinct from the relations to other people, dead, alive and unborn? What, after all, is the normative force to his action? Why do we approve of his action if we're not at the same time convinced that this is how he (and we) ought to act? What is the pull of morality and why does it come across as a requirement, a demand, as a lack of choice?

you cannot be serious

'Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline, is not simply mounting a conventional attack of agape against eros, faith against culture: he is rather saying that the self before God is not serious, it is groundless. It is not something that exists in its own density and solidity: the self before God is poised on the divine word...

5 September 1966

What I see is this: that while I imagined I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the invisible God – and this clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that made sense. The rest has been absurdity. There is 'I' – this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love. This incoherence! There is no longer anything to pride my self in, least of all 'being a monk' or being anything – a writer or anything...

The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously, that is to be proved, free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful, successful and in a word 'not absurd'.

---Rowan Williams on Thomas Merton/ Barth.

~~~

There is something absurd about those who want to "prove" or "disprove" religion by arguments, logic, science or anything else; something slightly preposterous about the desire, or is it need?, to think that you, and only you, have hit on the truth, been delivered, found a clear view, made sense of it all.

notes

There's a false note to Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams that makes me deeply sad, profoundly regretful that I actually spent money on this book when i could have given it to charity (these are the types of consideration I often mull over in these bleak days away from home). The first bit is okay: terse, condensed, worked over like a flat piece of metal, but then it loses the plot because it tries to breeze through time. How can a novella or short story do that without appearing untrue? So, his romance with Gladys is, given their courtship and her death is covered in a few pages, almost comical and replete with cliches, like a series of notes or points that have to be made, before they can be crossed off. Shoddy.

~~~

Yesterday, at a wedding out in the back of beyond. Got lost, as usual. Strange how when the sky is really dark a place that is  utterly familiar almost becomes another city. The quality of light is the quality of our understanding. I wonder if this disorientation isn't but a sign of something else, some deeper malaise in my life? At the wedding, which we made just as they were signing the documents, there was-and yeah, this is going to surprise the secular/atheist fundamentalists who have stumbled across this blog-a lovely recitation of some Qur'anic verses by the mullah. As always, no-one has much of an idea of what is being said, but there's something satisfying about hearing solemn words repeated in a slow, ancient way, a kind of remembering and binding to previous generations. Set words, and probably the same intonation, over all these years. Couldn't help but be moved by it all as I thought how many couples over the years had sat listening to the same words, their hearts full of the same hopes..and no-one knows how anything is going to turn out, what fate will bring them. Not the smiling uncles, the proud fathers, the aunties showing off their jewelry, the bored photographers, the younger girls who wonder when their turn will come...not a single one of them.

And since most of the family is broken by fighting and pettiness, I find myself the sole male representative of this side of the family. Haven't got a clue what to say and I've forgotten the envelope for the money. Where's Ubo when you need him! 

~~~

Earlier in the day, not thinking ahead of the wedding and the great food that would be available I stuffed myself with two almond croissants-which I ate in the dark of the two-storied car park, munched down along with some piping hot milky tea. Peaceful, absent minded bliss among the vacant spaces and muffled sounds. Pure grey insulation. Was going to buy some cinnamon rolls, but for some odd reason resisted. Old age, I guess. Wiser and older?

books, etc.

When it comes to reviews of books there are only two people I trust: anton and Nick Lezard. Don't think I've actually read anything that the latter has recommended but he always writes with such gentleness and with a small-scale, unpretentious love of books that you feel that he just has to be right. So, maybe I should try and get a copy of 'The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls'.

What is it about the short story that appeals to you? The precision, the puritanical idea that no word is superfluous, no image is allowed to grow (he says, putting on his Jewish hat)? The loose bagginess of the novel, in which one can lose oneself, can find some comfort as words wash over you.

The Dougal, of course. Still half in love with Capote's Cold Blood. Not so sure of her reading of Light Years, though Salter's other work does seem horridly false, contrived. Denis Johnson's Train Dreams isn't living up to Jesus's Son. So far, that is. Not sure why I was expecting some visionary prose.

Books to read, on my shelf:

M.D. Foot: Debts of Honour
R. Hass: Collected Poems
J. Burnside: Black Cat & Selected Poems
P. Linebraugh: Magna Carta
A. Carson: Nox.
L. Moore: Collected Short Stories (dougal's choice).
Transtromer: Poems
Hutton's book on Keynes
K. Jamie: Sightlines (N. Lezard's choice)
Infinity: the story of a moment (anton's choice)

~~~

There's something funny about religious people making fun of religion; not so funny when it's by non-religious people with their own axe to grind. If there are religious people out there to convince you that there's beauty, meaning, sense in the chaotic world, then there are non-religious people out there to convince you that all we are is raw flesh, and then, eventually, dust. What both share, and what I dislike in both, is this desire to convince or bring you over to 'their side'.

~~~

Scuton's Green Philosophy is a huge disappointment. Why is it so hard to find a right-winger who writes beautifully? There's one chapter on 'home', settlement, that has some nice thoughts, but apart from that he's a one trick pony, harping on about 'big' government.

Eagerly awaiting John Broome's book on the climate. At least he's a proper philosopher, a very clear thinker, even if one doesn't always agree with his views.

~~~

Some dickhead recommended two novels written by desis. I don't think I can read any of that artificial shit. And one on 'Islamic civilisation'. I think I want to throw up.

winter breath

These first steps, footmarks, were they mine or yours?

In my coat I sit

At the window sill

Wintering with snow

That did not melt

It fell long ago

At night, by stealth

I was where I am

When the snow began.

---Menashe.

 

The book said, watch your breath, count your breath...this song of emptiness and fulness. You said, in your funny voice, "do I bring you up?" and my breath trailed away to some frozen, distant land...

 

I shall imagine that each poem I read is really about you, cast off rememberings. This was the place that was the place. Strange how strange the heart becomes, how much our faces darken with time. You, on the edge of the picture, nearly gone, my hand resting a second on a random page, against the system of loss.

The snow, the white object of our past, the splintered frames, the shards of glass on the wall to keep trespassers out, preparing us for the sharpness of the outside world....this "there" that holds us rapt. The frozen ground, gnarled roots and knotted weeds. Here, where no love is.

You said, in your sad, melancholic voice, "Do I bring you down?"

The ancient sadness falling, like forest green. The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.

Within the dream you said,

Let us kiss then,

I put my mouth close to,

Flow North, flow South..

It is not love you will find.

The narrowing sun

lights her eyeleashes

 

 

Yellow Birds

La pluie nous a débués et lavés,
Et le soleil desséchés et noircis.
Pies, corbeaux nous ont les yeux cavés

---Villon.

There is something terribly morbid running throughout this book, the chance happenings, turnings, that lead to the horror, the way in which things might not have ended up as they did, the way in which low-level failing lives might have not spiraled downwards, out of control, intercepting the trajectory of other people's ordinary lives, bringing them within the orbit of that dark story. At first, since you'd only seen the film version-the latest one, not the old one-you thought that this would be about a single theme: the lack of hatred for the killers...

You start the day knowing it's rained the night before..can sense it like an animal: the stillness of the early hours, a hint of the smell of fresh earth, the delicate sound of leaves. 5.30, for an hour, you read, when you should be preparing for the 8 o'clock class. Scoff down a croissant, buttery and not crumbly at all. 

The coincidences...you'd read a review of Yellow Birds by J.B. and thought to yourself, yes, perhaps reportage is the thing, stay clear of all the bullshit fiction, the elaborate conceits, the constructions around reality; hadn't Dyer said as much? You haven't got the stomach for Johnson's Tree/Smoke. And then, some way into the book, out of the blue, as if it's staring you in the face, as if when you can't remember if you'd dreamed something or actually experienced it, there's the dream of the yellow bird... 

without words

Beads of water collect on the back of my hand; some reach out and join with others, before rolling off to the side; others, the more individualistic ones, dart off, unexpectedly, as if with a mind of their own. Deep veins, a bundle of raw nerves, the calmness of a posture. How poor your hands are at gathering, collecting...

There's a starkness to the opening page of 'A Death in the Family' that made you return to it three times before moving on to the second page. Bleakness, a desire to stick close to the facts, shorn of too much artifice, embellishment. How few times you've spoken with a clear voice...

Find a space, a time to yourself. Your mind, the mind, stilled; not by love, but perhaps by the image of it. If I had no more words, or maybe just one, I'd say your name            ,

the sense of an ending

  (etching, courtesy of Roxana) Things draw to a close; that's okay, you're not the first one. It's not okay...

You think you can draw a circle around your life and the lives of others, protecting them from vulnerability, change, illness, but it simply doesn't work like that. You haven't got the strength of character to live with the flux, displacement-or maybe that's just the cards you were dealt.

All those books, words, stored up against life/death. The escape, home a refuge, a raft in the stream of things so that you don't have to talk to anyone, engage with...what an awful word: engage! Time passes, you've nearly lost your bearings, places and memories accumulate in you, the blue shadow behind your mind's eye, time out of mind. This great desire to shed skin, walk away. A strain in modernity: the desire for lightness, superficiality, laughter, emptiness, not too much "meaning" or the 'wisdom of the east' type of nonsense; to divest oneself of names, traditions, definitions..to speak with an authentic voice, elemental gestures, without quotations, clichés, stock phrases; to be close to nature again, putting images and mirrors to one side, striking the right note...art transformed into life. 

Whitechapel

There's something mysterious and beautiful about the flowers and plants that grown in the Underground, a dazzling darkness that seems ageless...

Life, full of ambiguities, uncertainties, stray reflections, random chances. It's been like that from the first day..it's only that you walk into the mystery right now.

The day starts of grey and sombre, the cloud cover thick and universal, the rain steady but light. But by late afternoon the sun flares, and time starts to be found again in this new, lyrical brightness. Between the tunnels there's an open stretch, light flooding down upon it, the lilacs gently swaying in the summer breeze, the sudden play of light and shade.

You walk past all the people distractedly going home, but you also see three members of some amateur music group (two lean and long haired men and a woman with strong, determined features in contrast to her soft eyes). You only hear one of the men near the Royal London Hospital say "Yeah" but it's said with such self-assuredness, such knowingness, that you could be forgiven for believing this man has proclaimed some great truth with the utmost naturalness and simplicity. Strange to think that as the day ends for some, so it begins for others.

Near the library, which you only saunter to to kill some time, there's the potent smell of fish. The Bengalis, with strong arms and tired hands pull the green and white tarpaulins down. How ancient this gesture! Sixty years ago you would have seen exactly the same co-ordination of mind, eye, and hand; would have seen the exact same thoughts of home flash across faces, the same looking out into empty space, the recognition of a hard day's work done...On the opposite side of the street, the pencil thin arms of a cross, gleaming amidst the lost light. Near the restaurant, the old brick houses, high windows, the clouds radiant, swimming across the sky..the East is dilapidated, run down, for sure, but for a moment this is like a scene from a Vermeer.

Today, Michael Foot's Debts of Honour comes in the post. Beautifully produced and a bargain at 64p.

'Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. The sober blank verse is widely spaced and...easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page.The whole book is as delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.'

reveries for a lost innocence

This was in the news again (NYRB). In general terms the incidence violence may be decreasing but who cares about generalities?

Is there something about photographers and nostalgia, something about holding on to what cannot be held...time, itself, which is never really itself after all? Is it not the same with all of us? Or does this feeling become more intense at particular junctures in history-ones of rapid displacement or change?

Your hands grow dark with time, your smooth skin giving way to hair, blotches of sun shaped freckles. On the move again, never looking or finding, but stumbling. On your desk, right now, are sprawled many things, none of them very appealing-or if so, then only for a moment, not really a reverie one could get lost in. And still, you ask: my soul, why do you sigh within?

...

There's some great music and film making in this documentary.

70,000 (out of 240,000 applicants) were selected as volunteers for the Olympics. Individualism and the end of civil society in 'the west'? Nah, don't think so! After the Madrid bombs it is estimated that up to 20% of the population came out on the streets on one day, singing: "a people united will never be divided". 

So, here's the dope: countries in which the nation-state has had a poor run and/or those in which markets are weak are only apparently more individualistic. If truth be told-to take up an old point made by Gellner-those societies are prone to be more chaotic and more likely to be governed by autocrats (the old, "princely" form of power).

~~~

Lovely tributes to Freddie Mercury and to John Lennon last night.

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?