an ordinary day on earth

You must remember not to write anything that makes people sad; it is not permitted to mope about like this and drag others with you. So, so, in an attempt to do just that there will be no poetry or mention of other writers in this post; there will be no use of the word 'dark' and any dark thoughts will be banished. Instead, all there will be is a simple retelling of the facts, with the odd description here and there. The key is not to keep memory off stage, avoid any metaphors, and to look at the world from a distance and yet somehow retain some sort of human angle-like that of an eight foot giant, perhaps. The key is that you do not look for any keys.

Leave out anything that looks to me forced, deliberate or fake.
---K. Ridgway

I wanted to write a book where nobody underlies anything on any of the pages.
---J.Salter.

(via asylumwordpress)

Your mind, a river, flowing, neither pausing to reflect nor running fast to forget, neither accepting joy nor rejecting sadness. The mind, a river, flow...

There will be no doors, no bridges, there will be no mirrors or missed chances and silver will just be a colour. There will be no specific names and no universal meaning; words will have no roots, imagination no destination and your voice will be clear and sound just right You will not be able to hook any feelings to the rapidly passing clouds up high above. The last faded splendour of the evening sunlight will say nothing about the quality of your life. No beauty or truth, just an equation, like 2 +

"What does 'and' mean?" she asked

~~~

London: the greyest, saddest, dirtiest great city in the whole world.

At Woodford you hear from around a corner the loud voice of a shortish woman. You imagine her to be dark skinned with unwashed dark, frizzy hair:

"I tell you to get-er the whole thing". Then, more excitedly: "getta er the whole whole fucking thing".

~~~

At Gate Street, which leads on to the wonderful (and smelly) Remnant Street, a small man walks with a bent back but with his French beret firmly set. His back and neck are bent. His head is barely at the level of his shoulders and he stares at his feet as he walks. Two hundred years ago he would have been a sniveling French peasant. He wears a checked coat and has remarkable broad shoulders, like those of an ox or a boxer. Earlier, on Southampton row a man-probably an American-walks towards you with huge thick and flat thighs. They're almost like extensions of his hips.

You find every third girl to be attractive-in a kind of inaccessible way. Or, more accurately, you should say: a flick of the hair catches your attention here, a calf muscle there...now and then you see a noteworthy neck. Very few noses worth commenting on, though.

~~~

At LSE we sit in a wood paneled room at the back. A committee room that has retained the feel of the 1950s, the tables arranged in a great rectangle. We sit there discussing the economy, unsure what else to say to each other. "Does printing money increase national income?" I offer: "Not according to the Quantity theory of Money". Howls of derision follow. No-one, in this day and age, wants to talk of theory. It's so, like, you know, 20th century. Books, let me tell you, are a dying species...

~~~

Sebald on Walser on ash.

~~~

On the central line back, around Leytonstone, you note a serene old man sitting with a finely combed head of silver hair. He sits quietly reading his hardbound book; it must be, you think, a library book since he's not the type to waste money on books-unless it's on the military. Another checked jacket, but this time the squares unfashionably small. No hint of swagger or dandyism in the solid black and grey lines. A strong thick jaw and a slightly protruding chin. At Snaresbrook you note his black rounded glasses, surprisingly out of place on such a face. Fifteen years too late. Dark grey flannel trousers, meticulous concentration. A real reader (either that or a racist who can't abide the fact that he's sharing a train with so many foreigners). A temperate man of few words, you suspect. Perhaps a retired schoolmaster. Nothing extraordinary about his nature and perish the thought of any mystical possibilities. From a bygone age when rules were rules and the only exciting thing about France were the women.

~~~

You pick up Memory Chalet...

the return

Officially the heart is oblong, muscular, filled with longing.
---Holub.

At the airport you scoff down a buttery and flaky croissant; the tea is piping hot. After a while you realise an old class fellow is sitting next to you. Twenty years ago M was quite attractive: sparkling eyes, fair and bright complexion, golden curly hair that made her look European-or maybe Lebanese- and high cheekbones on a roundish face that gave her an overall appearance of a sly cat.

It was hard to get a word in edgeways. She's now a minister at the national level, one of those turncoats from the Musharraf era. I pretended not to know. She told me how she'd set up her ex-'s business, how she'd led the twitter 'revolution' and how I must, simply must, read her memoir. By now my thoughts were turning to the possibility of a second croissant. Of course she was older and therefore more tired looking than I remember her. For Christ's sake, I look like a complete mess myself. But there was something unmistakably sad about her steely face, despite the well-disguised fake optimism and spontaneity.

"I'm bored here, " she eventually admitted. "Shall we phone MMP (a mutual friend)?". It then struck me that there had always been something immature about M. Why she would want to become a politician is beyond me. The admiration, the allure of the limelight, no doubt, has to play a large if not central part in that decision. Are politicians, you wonder, any more loveless creatures than the rest of us?

"Isn't it time to go in yet?" she asked.

"No, only numbers 50-80 have been called. What's your seat number, M?" (I say her name, trying to avoid any deference).

She waves her ticket at me and smiles. "It's number one!"

That figures.

~~~

On the plane a man sitting on your seat.

"Excuse me, but I think you're in my seat"

"No," he replies. "C is the window, A is the aisle"

I look up and check, then check my ticket again. I bite my tongue. He's so cocksure that I decide to just let him wait and stew in his own arrogance for a few minutes-yes, a bit of a vicious thing to do- and then he is eventually moved. The woman next to me then says "ladies" and looks up at me. I'm supposed to decipher this half wit's mumbling; it's a kind of lame protest at having another species sit next to her. The 'woman' is at least 100 pounds heavier than I am, middle aged and, to put not too fine a point on it, a real horror show.

I give her the eye, the old cynical look that has been perfected in my family over the last 250 years or so. I wanted to say to her: "Do you really think I'd have any interest in..." but I resist and for the second time, with a great effort of will, I hold my words back and just let my heart sink.Eventually she moves as well as I don't budge. One in the eye of the Islamic Republic! I open a book-more as an attempt to make sure no-one talks to me than anything else- but have become so irritable by now that I can't read Walser's The Walk. Instead, I turn to Updike's Rabbit...

~~~

On the district line and I already feel like a stranger, horribly out of joint. At Chiswick I look down on all the sunbathers in the leafy park, without a care in the world, lapping up the warmth. Glass and silence, forest green benches, blonde hair casually thrown back, the way people talk to one another without really saying anything...a way of passing the time, avoiding any real stuff.

In the plane it is quiet as well. I remember preparing myself for eight hours of silence before the journey. I could have been a monk-if the food wasn't so awful. All these faint hours, lost, trapped behind the metal, and yet, outside, all that timelessness.

Under the trees in Lahore, so many petals have fallen to the ground that they've perfumed the cement, made it softer: a dimension of tenderness is added to the world. The green-yellow haze of light, the green and yellow, speak of abundance, lush exuberance, superfluous capacity. Summer always surprises in its openness, always makes you think of "always" the way the night stays in the early morning hours of the day, blurring the sense of the passage of time, making memory redundant.

~~~

Updike, it says, writes of loss. Well, who doesn't nowadays! But yes, you want to believe that there's some essential truth revealed in the confined lives of 1950s Americans. Screw all that post-colonial nonsense. It takes 20 pages or so to get started, to work its way past all that stuttering; the writing is precise, narrow, small-scale, tightly domestic-bound; the roads are gravel, the alleyways all boxed-in. Then the writing shifts gears into an open, ever widening arc of looseness and freedom, like the summer light itself which draws everything in to itself. The light, breaking open the broad, dark country.

~~~

You get out of the taxi, catch your breath, look upward at the great tree whose reassurance is something you  can't imagine going without. Look up, take it in, the deep-veined pattern of shade it casts. It's dark silhouette against the brilliant clear light; the tree has become an ikon of itself, pivotal in this little corner of my world, protecting us-you somehow imagine-from chance, time, change. There are a thousand names written on its bark, in Arabic script. One of them, I have come to recognize, as my own. I have traveled for too long, and know much of distances by heart. But the return, this re-entry into the centre of the world, always leaves me, unknown to myself, speechless.

~~~

And farther inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube.

---J. Updike.

Away for a while

Is classical music superficial? Yes, all that stuff about 'the timeless, about so-called higher feelings...but when it comes down to it (or in the moments when you're prepared to put the trappings to one side) isn't there something timeless about popular music..timeless in a different way?

Music wedded to a particular moment in time, a particular place; a stilled moment that stays the same as life moves on. And that music was part of your life, which is why you can always associate specific memories with it: regret and heartache and longing and desire, as they are actually experienced.

But, it might be said: does the intensity of an experience count for anything, especially if it is not related to attention to an 'object' of desire or understanding  that is intrinsically superior, more refined, 'deeper', merit worthy? In a world that is given over to instantaneous and non-reflective pleasure isn't there a case to be made for objectivity, for 'standards' of judgement that cannot be reduced to an individual's desires? Isn't the classical something that stands the test of time, that stands, in some sense, against the corrosive influence of time?

Perhaps. But you're drawn to things that exist in time, in your time. That's what you can relate to. And there is often something terribly stuffy about European 'high culture'. Which is why Hollywood still trumps all that pretentious European high brow nonsense.

The time has come, you think, to speak in plain English. Music from the 80s. Yes! That's what we want...music that reflects time. 

'Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 
 ---Thomas Merton.

The Purple Revolution

PRINCE 17 Days Vidéo vingtvingt sélectionnée dans Musique

Revolutions die in their own red...Red betrays.

Never trust a woman who wears red and black.
---Derek Jarman.

But the crow is something...Their shades. It's so black in there you can see purple in there.
---Roth.

the day the poetry ended

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.
---Aleksander Hermon.

The day the poetry ended there will be no more words, no more words from me to you; or from you to me. There will be no word to match the feeling, no turn of phrase to match the heart or the turning of your heels. Love and fear, and that type of thing, she said.

The day the poetry ended I will walk in the winter light at 11 o'clock in the morning, unseen by any living soul. The sparrow will sing uninterrupted. My hands will be in my pockets and I will have no thoughts of any particular note in my head.

I shall walk next to the dark river, hopelessly out of time, achieving a rare "smallness", much sought after nowadays, my breath close by my face.

In time there will be other poems and other readers, other discoveries and other roads, none of which I will comprehend or even notice.

In my deep pocket I will keep with me a list of collective nouns to remind me of the old days, and a chestnut that once fell before its time from the grand tree outside my house. I shall still look for A Third Concept of Liberty, taken from me in the back alleyway by the garages, on a night when your life spun around your head.

At 6 o'clock I will walk up the hill against the stream of returning workers and with a clear mind and loose change buy some smoked mackerel. It will be a meaningful act. Somewhere else in the world a man will send a woman a poem and she will fall in love. Even when translated it sails over me. And still, I know what it means.

The day the poetry ended I shall walk oblivious of the shadows, with a firm and stylish stride into the world that no longer exists, walk in no particular direction with nothing but my thick protective coat and sturdy hat that keeps the light off my face, just the way my father walks...

sheltered light

Trust you, trust you to find amongst all this light the one dark strand of your heart.

You seek out that inward shelter, refuge from any gaze, a still point in the world's turning. To escape one's inward gaze, too.

'Sheltered, priviliged, mysteriously stalled life'
---JCO.

~~~

There was a perfect tune-you'd ask Bob if it wasn't so cheesy. It was in the old black and white French Robinson Crusoe story. The dubbing made it stranger than it probably was. But there was also a sense of an intense desire to reach home entwined with a profound desire to remain a stranger, to be forever one of those 'given up for lost' people so that he could always make a dramatic entry, savour the surprise on loved one's faces. That moment imagined, in the desert, was more real than memory, even. The memory of the future, of the back garden shade, the sinking back into a comfortable chair, the great restoration work that goes on all around the central emptiness of a life.

He'll take the small hours, the abstract designs, the free-floating down Regent's canal, the light flooding through the trees down onto his face; one hand in shade, the other in the light; the movement of light on the dark water's surface, the sudden appearance of a plastic bottle, discarded thoughtlessly, as he dances in and out of a reverie, the changing of the seasons running like a film over his eyes, remembered with perfect ease.

He would recall other journeys, Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, the dense interweaving of canals that could mysteriously  connect two streets  in ways that pedestrians could scarcely imagine, or cut through them like a diagonal. Or the Thames, down towards the forgotten docks, the blackened history, the drizzle of rain fresh on his open face, the sense of being alive, of growing old, of roads not taken.

He'd walk, one hour north. London. To get the sun out of his eyes. Find the dark strand, the unused stations of the heart.

There is no culture, there are no norms here. Me, myself and I. What do I need? What do you need (only incidentally, strategically, so to speak)? Let's do it, then forget I ever knew you. It will be like tomorrow. We live in this timeless world. When you run out of space, time is all you have.  

The further colour recedes in time and space the more it glows. Golden memories.

A sport and a pastime

Too much sun makes you forget. I wondered around for five minutes looking for my sun glasses before realizing that I was actually wearing them! Too much light obliterates your sense of space or depth-everything seems two-dimensional.  The light is a horizon. It makes objects seem less real, less solid, the desert in them making them ghost-like. At least you don't notice them as much; all you care about is the shade they afford...You start to think a bout the quality of shadows, the depth of coolness to be found in them.You want to walk in a perpetual shadow, alone. Even the car casts a thin shadow, that takes the temperature down a notch. You start to think in terms of degrees, angles, moments of respite, distances from oasis to oasis. What's left of your frazzled mind thinks in terms of equations, energy.


The heat and light is relentless. 47, 48 Celsius for the last week. You walk into a wall of fire. You wake up the morning light burns your skin, stings it. The bark of a tree has peeled off, blistered by the heat into long flaky shavings, leaving the tree bare, nude, like an uncovered white arm.

You went to a presentation. A very fetching woman, sleeveless top, her hair wild and uncombed, like a Red-Indian, her eyes and body posture all dreamy.

The heat saps you, makes you slightly drunk, the words you speak slung out in a slow drawl.  By five o'clock the brightness is less of a problem; the heat is radiating from the walls, the floor, any horizontal or vertical plane. It surrounds you, is up to your neck.  Bottles of water lie strewn across the table; you've put up thick covers over the window to block the light's late entry.

In the middle of the night, the darkest twenty minutes, that small arc of inner peace, you know the sun is out there, burning, stoking the furnace, like a mindless stalker, an army getting ready to leave camp, or the first stunted notes of an orchestra before a performance. Even the high moon seems to be bathed in warmth tonight. Sun, time out of mind.

In the north there is much longing, a sense of absence; here there is only the sense of an all-pervading presence. The sun is like a god, a southern god. Van-G would have understood that. Chain of being. No-one is an individual here, no-one can be. The dream-like quality of our walking, the bare-minimal pulse of meaning.

A socialist manifesto: electricity, water. The basic conditions that at least give us a chance of being human. Perhaps we shouldn't ask for more. For a good state of mind things need to work (Keynes, more or less). You have some sympathy for poor people. You feel like a Russian aristocrat in a novel who has suddenly realized that his country is fucked and that he will drown along with everyone else, a horrible meaningless death.

  

Burning the Days

"Below, the earth has shed its darkness. There is the silver of countless lakes and streams. The greatest things to be seen, the ancients wrote, are sun, star, water, and clouds. Here among them, of what is one thinking? I cannot remember but probably of nothing, of flying itself, the imperishability of it, the brilliance. You do not think about the fish in the great, winding river, thin as string, miles below, or the frogs in the glinting ponds, nor they of you; they know little of you, though once, just after takeoff, I saw the shadow of my plane skimming the dry grass like the wings of god and passing over, frozen by the noise, a hare two hundred feet below. That lone hare, I, the morning sun, and all that lay beyond it were for an instant joined, like an eclipse."

---James Salter. 

~~~

Dear Roxana, 

I have mixed feelings about Salter. He is often described as a great "stylist" or "a writer's writer" and you soon realize that that can either mean that he is excellent or that he is superficial. I think the times we live in demands something grittier, writing shorn of embellishments, vast plots, too much interweaving...anything devoid of "the lyrical" and that manages to stay clear of the dreaded label:"a profound meditation". Or maybe that's just me...Tell it, but don't tell it slant...  

I started with his Light Years and, incidentally, read it on a plane. At the time his writing captivated me although it did seem a bit staged at times-but then again maybe all novels have that quality; as if one could see the scaffolding around, the blueprint of, the house. But no, it was dazzling. I don't want to go back to it. Let sleeping dogs lie.

Started A Sport and a Pastime which was billed as a racy novel. Gave up some thirty pages in. Then started Solo Faces which struck me as utter, utter rubbish. 

I may buy his new novel because he himself says in an interview that he was sick of being called a writer who could write "the perfect sentence". Let's see.

'“Forgiven” is not the right word. I think its lyricism has been accepted and understood in the context of the book.'
---James Salter.

~~~

What do we remember: a sentence,a particular tone, a way of approaching, the build-up, the quality of the light during our reading, a picture, a gesture, the silent hours, the absorption, the forgetting of the world. Not the whole experience, no. There is no such thing. You can't look back and say to yourself: I remember my life, for much of what formed that has slipped away, irretrievably, into the darkness; much of that life was just a blank space even when it happened, or didn't happen, if you see what I'm saying. The 'unity of a life,' then? But we are not medievals any more, at least not for the most part.

'Peak moments'. The beginning, the end, the phrase which resonates, that arrests your attention. Already you have entered a dream, but now you open a door into another one...

It was nothing, a few light years, the smallness of life in the vastness of the unknown. The hierarchies of the soul displaced, the seasons rushing through you like a gust of rain in arid country. Clutch at it or let it pass. 

Look in the mirror, look askance: the strangeness of strangers, their essence like the strawness of straw. The beauty of distance holds its own, has its shadows. Is that all that connects us nowadays you ask?

~~~

“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams … one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea." 

 
  

the remembrance of things past

or homesick for the earth...

darkness stored/
becomes a star.
---Menashe.

'Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the shadows, a gleam in the windows...only Paris and (in a naive way) Moscow absorbs the whole nature of spring into them as if they were a landscape.'
---Rilke.

~~~

Many years have passed and many things have been forgotten. Some words endure, as if by chance, because spoken at a particular moment, in some specific place. Time slows you down, throws its hat into the ring, fudges, glosses, blurs. Doubt unfolds, disrupts, keeps the gaze lingering on broken things. Despite everything-or maybe because everything really wasn't everything- there is this incredible capacity to reflect the world, to frame the old questions without grasping for any answer.

The old, dank, long cellar in which we kept unused cartons and used bottles, malt vinegar and presents. The coldest room in South Wales, humanly cold. Under the stairs another dark room in which you kept chestnuts, growing them hard in brown paper bags, knuckle-like nobbliness or thin-wedged chisels. You found a collection of old 33s: Yes, we have no bananas. Passed them back. They weren't yours from the beginning.

What do you bring with you, what will you take?

The windows onto our street. A corner house, so streets. Undecided where to belong, which part of the world to face. Windows, mysteriously solemn in late summer evenings, but faithful

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet's early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,...

---D.P.

Despite the years that have gone, something is retained, even if it is only a distant image now. The windows' dark winter mind in November; you collecting money as you pulled your Guy Fawkes on a wooden trolley through the streets. The faint smell of sparklers, the burning in some open allotment, the early closing of the shops in preparation...

The world, the narrowing down of vision, the distorted images, the weary faces. And yet, still this tentative holding on to things that last, to things that change: sky and tree, wind and star.

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

findings

the years radiating

toward the so-called first days,
toward the so-called last days,

inadequate boundaries

of the heart you hold to.

---Duncan.

~~~

A flower. A hand. The hand you've been dealt. The hand that held a flower to me.

The dealer's hand, as old as time itself. The cards are on the table. The days are lost.

I, mortal, that live by chance
and know not [who] you love.

The precision of your hand's gestures. Ancient offerings. A heartbeat lost in the shadow of another. The red and the black, falling, revealing an infidel's heart.

Your eye, skimming for the word, as it hunts the image. Breeze through it, as if word or image could be solace, the solstice of the heart.

The stars through centuries return
rimes of light to burn in this moment's eyes.

The moment anticipated. Found. Understood, registered, taken note of. And now for tea and a biscuit, which I must give up one day.

(photo from the book, Two Rivers)

The money changers

Faith is under the left nipple.

~~~

There's something sordid about money. Of course, only someone who has enough money can afford such sentiments. You wouldn't even have a chance of counting as an intellectual unless you looked down from a great height on 'worldly affairs' and the commerce of the little people. Money?! For heaven's sake!

At the bank, the light gleaming off the trashy silver metal, the dust on the floor almost visible because one can see footprints everywhere. A small bank, something one might expect to see in a sleep provincial town. Everyone knows, for instance, where the kids of their colleagues are studying, who is having an affair, etc., etc.

The money changers come in one hour late. A maulvi wearing jeans and a black and white Tartan shirt. A Bay City Rollers fan? Here? He brings with him two kids-they can't be more than eighteen years old. One is a body builder and has perfect teeth. The other, his sidekick, just looks like a poor Indian villager. The way in which they count the money, their fingers effortlessly flowing and clicking over the notes, you suspect they've been doing this for a while. It's almost as if they've been groomed to do this (what a terrible thought!). But you do wonder about their lives.

One of the kids asks for a calculator. He calls it a "punshee". The maulvi makes fun of him, asking him in a baby voice if he wants the poon-shee. This brings great merriment. There's a kind of camaraderie here that one rarely sees in academic circles. Without romanticizing it you wonder if it doesn't have something to do with passing along something with one's hands, the sharing of some tangible object (as opposed to ideas)?

There are different circles: guards have their own in-jokes, their own reliable and immediately understandable gestures. The bankers, too. And one imagines there's a warmth to the company of thieves as well.    

The security guard slumps in his chair, thoroughly bored by these transactions. Seen it all before. He wears thick black army boots with the laces going up to his lower shin. He has the thickest and darkest moustache you've seen for a while. A real solid trapezium. His balding head and his whole demeanour make me think of Larkin. He wears a huge ring on his left hand, a visible sign, perhaps, of his faith. Stones are never really just stones. This large red stone, obviously fake. A link to an older kind of faith, one that came before abstraction and theorizing.

Shahazad is an incredible banker. Don't know if he'll do well in this field-but I really hope he does. He gets up to help an old woman cash her cheque, jokes with the lowly clerks without any condescension, reassures me about the transaction and keeps a keen eye on the money changers (who have now removed some money from under their shirts!). They keep their extra money there, strapped on with big thick grey tape. Under the left nipple!

They are never stopped by the police. There's a whole network thing going on here. Lots of phone calls. Lemon juice is given to all parties. The cash machine counts the notes, flicking them at rapid speed. One of the bankers places ten piles of fifties (pounds) on the table and turns them over, two at a time, starting from both ends simultaneously. This could be Vegas. 

Sweat. Wipes his brow. The money reflected in his glasses. A faint image. Not the real thing.

When all the money is stacked up it's time for the final deal, the closure. I'm asked to put my hand on the money. This is a formality, some kind of ancient ritual since I don't have to actually hand the money over. There are knowing smiles, nods to one another. There's a web of human relations here.

A certain social fabric somehow exists.
---Bagehot

~~~

A man lays a hand on his chest when he takes an oath, as he may clutch his brow when he is solving a problem. Why should such instinctive gestures be taken less seriously than theories that faith is an inner state, thought is in the head, love is in the will and so on? Faith, like thought, is often visible.

~~~

Loose strands that I will tie together one day. Bind and cast a spell. A certain fabric exists between us. An image. Red. Beneath that white. And a fluttering red heart like the flapping of a tattered flag in a spring breeze. Then, again, a white room. In which I find my name, my heart, a shadow of yours.

'Short distances and definite places'

What is this dark and silent caravan
that being nowhere, neither comes nor goes;
that being never, has no hour or span;
of which we can say only that it flows?
How was it that this empty datastream,
this cache of dead light could so lose its way
it wandered back to feed on its own dream?
How did that dream grow to the waking day?
What is the sound that fades up from the hiss,
like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing,
now full of its only note, its lonely call,
drawing on its song to keep it singing?
---D.P.

Those Chinese labourers working on the railroads, like they'd be hitting the thing...but looking away too, and noticing, say, a crow flying overhead...the Oriental mind going off on a different track.

'Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield' has the ring of a Chinese proverb adapted to the American landscape.

---Brian Wilson.

~~~

The croupiers' fatigue humanized them; they rubbed their eyes and stretched their legs and their agile hands went limp. Abby was a little dashed and melancholy, let down and drained; she was, even though she had won, inconsolable because now the table, stripped of its seductions, was only a table. And the croupiers were only exhausted workingmen going  home to bed.

---Jean Safford.

~~~

What is it to be a human being but to remember and imagine this gentle return to the ordinary life of square gardens and warm dinners, the reflected winter lights glowing mysteriously on the long eastern windows against darkness's depths? The quiet life that carries on under the radar, unbeknown; the interior life: nothing special, except for the fact that it is not registered on the surface; or it is, in your gait, the distant look in your eyes, the loss of swagger, panache, but all of that is only witnessed by other people.

Your face against the window pane, the hundreds of cars silently dashing by, the travelers with their lonely radio songs and memories of bright, carefree summer days.

You, you who have traveled much but are still the same. It is as if you have never left your room, have lived all your life gazing out. This interior castle in the driest desert. There is a tree there, somewhere. Or you imagine it. You think of home. A dark bird opens its thick wings and takes flight, disappears right out of the picture, carried by silver and star and reflection.

harja-waldaz

O London, faithless whore...

Never fall in love with it! That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer.
---Walser.

The last station, at the end of the line, facing all that wilderness, the long suburban hours of stillness, of dreary  Sundays and re-runs on the television. The papers lying in a jumble, the words half remembered, the smudge of ink, roast beef and potatoes and mint sauce, the long windows looking out into Vere Street, your collection of football badges, medieval heraldic badges of silver & gold. Tribal affiliations and genealogies fascinate the rootless, but to the true exiles they are only signs of loss, not of love.

Sort the prescriptions out on the carpet. Read the names and form a pile. Jones is a common name in the dark country.

~~~

North by north-west and I'm out of here.

~~~

There are no distinct lines, no one moment when it "happens". Where do we start and which line will we catch (or is it: which line will catch us)?  The way back, which you know blindly. The way back to the heart: not so easy. How you travel, then, and not just where.

There is more confusion and indistinction in life than theorists will lead you to believe. This incredible mixture, of fire and glass, mirror and bronze, sight, touch, speech. We were once the same, kid, you and me. The Greeks have got a name for it. The beauty of the equation, the humanity of the line curving inwards, the equivalences, the mutual exchanges, the gifts we bring one another and that are bestowed upon us.

There is a time for turning our face away, and a time to see: face-to-face. Ah, tears. The tears. Yes, a time for those as well.

The world that isn't a world

There's nothing worse than seeing a blog that's been abandoned but is still 'out there' (well, there is actually, but...); it's not like a run down house but more like a home that has suddenly, inexplicably, been vacated. You roam around in the house and see all the familiar things: references to books, music, the odd tale of heartbreak or current anxieties that will seem terribly dated if considered in the passage of time..it's all there bar the person himself/herself. You don't know if this person has moved on to a new city, divorced, developed some terrible illness or even died. All you see is the outer shell, the fragments of a life, and you try to reconstruct some meaning out of it, like an archaeologist. A world that isn't a world any more.Freaky.

The importance of the living word, for Christ's sake!


P.J. pointed me to this:

To be whole-
now, or again,
to know the divine healing,
that which is known by blood-blood's faith
as by the bloodfall.

Carried by silver and star and reflection.
To be healed, if there's disease
Those plants we know by older names:
Boneset, selfheal, thoroughwort,
tansy for bitterness
Or the healer's milkweed: Aesclepias...

~~~

'In 1977, after the death of Henry's father, a lab researcher noticed that he kept in his wallet a handwritten note to himself-'Dad's dead'-to anchor his recurring feeling of absence'.
---Mike Jay, LRB.

~~~

After writing that one thing we would definitely not see after the horrific crimes in Ohio would be a questioning of the role of men in (sexual) violence there has been a spate of really informative and balanced articles in the Guardian doing just that. Not a kind of man-hating diatribe or anything much to do with testosterone but the more interesting (and perhaps important) point about cultural attitudes. How many degrees away from 'normality' is perversion? Is it, actually, a matter of degrees or are there fundamental distinctions here?

Some of the Guardian articles: here and also here

on the edge of forever

Released through bars of sorrow
as if not a gate had opened but I
grown intangible had passed through shadows,
from dark of yearning into
a soft day, western March.

---Denise.

~~~

The Guardian of Forever is a doorway to any time. To risk all and leap through time, to find one's lost friend, Bones.

~~~

The black and white world of our childhood was transformed by the flick of a switch into a muti-coloured cartwheeling universe.  Something was lost,  something was gained. All of a sudden, as is always the case with such transitions, the world came to seem very old. The image sinking further down irretrievably into the mind's store, the lowest shelf, dated and bottled, drawn and shaped by the individual herself-and only the individual could speak of it, like the last speaker of a language or a marooned survivor.

When men dream each has their own world; when they are awake they have a common world.

~~~   

There are many ways to lose oneself. 

Time is a door
I could not open.
---Adonis.

~~~

There was an awful article in The New Yorker about online universities. There's something primitive about Harvard and all this business talk. But there was mention of this word, hora...

The appropriate season, the right time,  associated with: ripe fruit, crops harvested in the right season, a man in the prime of his life, a woman in the bloom of youth, a maiden ready for marriage; an auspicious time, the ritual perfection of time, time that returns (by law or is it chance?), the perfect moment, the time that is the curve of beauty, time regained, when things (people?) finally come together, when time stops being time forever.

the still point of the heart

impossible to be silent kkkkkkkkkkkkkk    impossible to speak
ritual of light holds memory of darkness
in itself and  we, kkkkkkkwe cling to darkness.

~

stillness in the house, delight still
ascent and descent still possible, labour of precision
the crows' thick wings pass overhead; life in-
tensified, held now
as albatross wings are a part of the wind.

---John Riley.
~~

A house, not very well built, in the stream of the world. The structure of our lives like a house of cards, as chance would have it. Today there are a few pale watery high clouds but the morning sky remains bright and open. Yet despite all this there is the distant sound of thunder, the slow rumbling, some old god's ancient anger, reaching us now, as if from another universe.

There are moments when life becomes transparent. You view it from a distance, like a painting. You're not moved by it, but nor do you judge it. It represents no order of any kind, but there is a kind of patient stillness that allows you to see this, a mind free from too much anxiety. A narrow vision, concentrated on a few details, the learning not to care. What else do you see, remember?

'The old steps live only in me.'
---Denise.

How much else will fade under the sun's gold, burn or simply peel away? The winter mind struggling on, in the heart of so much brightness. Winter: gathering, collecting, storing up. It will amount to nothing, but you've stopped counting anyway. You have no thought of the heart's spring, its final emergence into the green. Pull the clothes over you, find what warmth there is, the muslim 'la' around your neck. The storms of heat, the desert light. Thoughtlessness, Walser said. Pay attention now!

The End of Jewish Intellectualism

Nomadics's recent post pointed me to this. Eighty years to the day, more or less...

Of course, anti-intellectualism is something you face all the time in the land of the pure. The very idea that a book could count for anything in the bigger scheme of things is far too radical an idea. Continuity, novelty, fragmentary insights-as opposed to the unchanging pristine truth of the orthodox and the theorists; all of those things count against the high world.

In the beginning was the deed, not the word. The act, the 'vital act', that cuts through the web of thought.

But...

The withdrawal from the world, the quiet 'interiority' of reading,  the value of 'privateness,' the importance of being alone with one's thoughts, the bright scope of imagination, the emergence of neglected, marginalized voices, the ordinary flawed lives that seem more interesting than the spectacular ones of heroes or saints. The laughter, too, that shatters the confidence of power.

Fiction, with all its meanderings, its false attempts at redemption; art as the illusion of comfort. The image, the book, both must be destroyed, since they are derivative, reflections, "idols" of life, shadows of reality. Why bother with the myriad streams when you can go to the source?

Only the things written down have any gravity to them. The other things are ready to disappear.
---James Salter.

Literature stands opposed to fundamentalism and totalitarianism partly because of its lightness, its reluctance to speak with capital letters, as it were, its desire to only half resolve or bring into focus the complexity of our lives and the world; on the other hand, it creates mistrust amongst political and religious authorities precisely because it is so serious, because it offers an alternative way of looking.

~~~

Yesterday, little r asked me who I would be voting for. She's quite fond of PML (N) because they have a white tiger (I haven't got the heart to tell her that he nearly died from exhaustion yesterday). She asked me who I'd be voting for. Like Richard Pryor, "none of the above" but before I could answer she prompted me: "the Taleban?"

Yeah, maybe.

"But they say 'No' to television, to Barney and to chicken & rice."

She looked quizzical. Yes, my work here was done. Already she knows Adam Smith was friends with David Hume and she knows that the word 'equilibrium' is associated with 'economics'. The books, the books and friendship and other small things will survive. I don't know how, but they will.

The mysterious, imperfect world

Gosh, Gopnik always delivers. I think I first came across him via C and his delightful introduction to Molly Hughes. This reminded me a bit of Rowan Moore's superb essay on the Twin Towers in which he writes about something called 'deliberate imperfection' in the Japanese tradition. 

There's something imperfect about our world, something that shall forever make it incomplete and not quite right. That blank space, that line that is slightly askew, the wrinkles on our hands, are also the source of longing. It is through the cracks-as the old cliche goes-that the light comes in. Broken circles, and all that.

Anyways, here's the dope, kiddo:

'For, deeper still, in some primal part of us, there is always a vital role for the not-too-perfect in our pleasures. Imperfection is essential to art. In music, the vibrato we love involves not quite landing directly on the note; the rubato singers cultivate involves not quite keeping to the beat. What really moves us in art may be what really moves us in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”: the vital sign of a human hand, in all its broken and just-unsteady grace, manipulating its keys, or puppets, and our minds. Expressiveness is imperfection, and Harryhausen’s monsters and ghouls are expressively imperfect. “I don’t think you want to make it quite real. Stop-motion, to me, gives that added value of a dream world,” he once said, wisely, himself.'

the wonder

One wonders at the wonder that is the wonder.

What is also wonderful is this experience of wondering itself, and myself as the person in whom astonishment ..is felt.

One often wonders: What if? What if one. What if one were not one? 

There are different kinds of wonder or perhaps they are all really one? Amazement to idle day-dreaming. Startled out of one's sleepy senses, and back again...

I wonder and immediately you imagine it. It somehow exists, somewhere, and yet it doesn't, really. Is the wonderful really so because of the wonderer, because he wonders? Or is just there, for us to stumble upon? We wonder about many things and it sometimes takes our breath away. To wonder is to die a little.

The wonderful resists being defined, any binding. What kind of knowing, then, is it? When we come across it we acknowledge it even if we can't speak of it. How else could it be? Er..Ur. Pre-reflective. The wonder itself illuminates. It is in the world, far from us, but also close. What is wonderful stands out. There is something fleeting and novel about it. I sometimes wonder. I'm hard on myself, but it is only sometimes.

'The philosopher does not permit his wonder stand as it is, to be released into the flow of life. Of necessity, he must "hook" the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought's "object" and "subject" from the flow of life and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates and is perpetuated in the motionless mirror of his meditation; that is in the subject. He has it well-hooked; it is securely fastened and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive, statuesque, subjugated."

The solution and dissolution of their wonder is at hand-the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a wonder to eachother; they are in the very heart of wonder. Life becomes numb in the face of death and dies. The wonder is unravelled . And it was life itself that brought the solution.'

---Franz Rosenzweig. 

The Wonder Years

My education is a kind of uprooting, a turning away from the lives I could have led, the loss of a sense of home (but not homecoming). The year ends, there is more bewilderment and strangeness  It is not too unlike previous years. 

Your life, the working out of a philosophical problem, carries on largely unnoticed. Faith in the public square is replaced by faith in the squares of the mind. A tendency to be drawn to writings of low-key humanity, words in lower case, with some things forgotten, many more remembered.

What is the use of thoughts and ideas if one feels, as I do, that one doesn't know what to do with them?

---Walser.

If one can have sound reasoning or faulty reasoning then who is this person that takes a step back, so to speak, so to speak? More: what is this process by which we can disentangle ourselves so, what name do we give to the ability to observe and judge our thoughts? Does this set up an infinite regress or does faith leap in to overcome doubt? Is there a final address, a "home" from which all further thoughts proceed or is the shadow of home always with us, so that what we see is already tinged with memories?

G. Ryle's Aristotelian address...

Faith in the squares of the mind is replaced by faith in the public square. No, not quite. That's not it. It is replaced by a nameless and small faith. Crumbs! Man shall not live (by bread) alone.

Wayfarers

Reading up and around Walser-never a good idea-you stumble across someone called Hamsun. Looks good: "fragmentariness," lyricism, the ordinary lives of ordinary people, someone who was greatly admired by other writers, "the first", the originator of modernism, etc., etc. But there's something terribly stern looking about his face, the unwavering solid jaw, for instance.

Just read the bloody thing, why don't you? But it's the old Camus/Berlin problem. You just can't let the politics go. But if you're going down that line (I imagine my imaginary reader asking) why do you seem to let your guard down when it comes to Muslim writers? Aren't some of their views obnoxious as well?

There was this line by Charles Ramsey-and I think it's got everyone's attention:

"Well, I knew something was wrong when a pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she homeless, or she got problems, that's the only why she's runnin' to a black man."

Compare this to ol' Knut job:

"The Negros are and will remain Negros, a nascent human form from the tropics, rudimentary organs on the body of white society. Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm"

Now, he may be a "great" writer, but I just haven't got the stomach for that type of nonsense. A man of his time, you might say. Let it go.

Back to Ramsey...

"She needed an ambulance, or what? She needs everything. She's, uh, she's in a panic. She's been kidnapped, so you know, put yourself in her shoes."

....

Maybe there's a point here about this need for "heroes", everyone's desire for fifteen minutes of fame, how an ordinary person speaks just the lines we'd expect him or her to speak-as if we'd seen them all too often in a movie. Just recently there was the American cowboy at Boston, the dark man in the shadows, dealing with his own suffering. Don't knock it. It's real. The ordinary loser, wayfarer, as a way out of the mess, the all-American nobody who doesn't want much except to sit down to the game with a Big Mac and some beer, whose good days are a long fine summer and a barbeque. Disheveled, forgotten, in and out of welfare, the wonder years gone from his eyes, his bones long, his clothes loose.

Of course, this is just a sideshow. The main story is, of course, the horrendous act itself. This, you feel, is the issue that will undoubtedly get swept under the carpet because it holds up a true mirror to just how sick human beings really are (for human beings read: men). This is on the back of the terrible revelations about Jimmy Saville and now Stuart Hall. 

waltzing

There is a sense in which if we could see something from every angle we would attain universal humanity; on the other hand, such a thing may not be possible, or even desirable. We live in the arc of time and space that has been allotted to us. A self-contained life would be an acknowledgement of this. Would it be anything more? A whole-hearted acceptance of the cards-this, to me, seems impossible and not quite right. The right angle to the universe, the finding of a vantage point, through the forest, so as to see clearly. At the very least, the ability to dream oneself out of where one finds oneself and is lost...

What does W look back to? Nick Lezard says to Grimm's fairy tales, characters half-emerging into the light, a peasant dazed by the city lights. And yet, more than anything W sounds modern to our ears: easy going, light hearted, slightly unhinged, someone who repeats words to himself, like this, like this...

Everyone says he is incomparable and a great sign of that is that everyone wants to draw a comparison with him! To me he sounds a bit like Calvino's Palomar, or at least a Palomar who hasn't lived through the horrors of the 20th century. Naivete: yes!; but what distinguishes them is that one still hears a human voice talking to you in W...

"Paint me a railroad station, then, ten minutes before dark."

Commentary on this, from goldenrulejones (a lovely site on Walser):

What does "then" mean, or rather do, in that sentence?..It carries the faintest hint of a continuing conversation, and smooths out the otherwise abrupt transition the reader undertakes in the opening sentence or paragraph of any story: from knowing nothing about the world of the story to accepting that world not only extending forward through time as we follow events of the narrative, but extending also backwards in time, before the events of the story occur, and before we came along.

Imagine someone stumbling across your blog for the first time...maybe they read your latest post, quickly glance at your 'other bloggers' list or 'labels' to quickly gauge where you're coming from. An image might help. Does this person have a friendly face? Man or woman? That's always important.  Maybe, if you care enough, you look at the 'about me' page, see what films or books the other person likes. Doesn't really get you very far. What's the story, what's the story before the story? 

~~~

Last night there was an electricity shutdown from 10 'till 4:30 in the  morning so feeling a bit cranky today. The back up UPS system needs a clear two hours of electricity to gather its strength and so any continuous shortage incapacitates it. By two o' clock the fan has slowed down, a slow swirling around its centre and you think to yoursef: why bother! Please, do us a favour and stop going through the motions of being a fan, accept that your existence has changed...

By two thirty you say to yourself: show some mental strength, don't let this get to you..in the bigger scheme of things your uncomfort is a laughable trifle, something that can be forgotten with a healthy breakfast. You examine your hands in the single stream of light that penetrates the darkness...it is like a miniature stage light.

By three you are thankful for the fan which is only working intermittently now. It takes huge ten minute 'breathers' and then gets back to work, reluctantly, as if being whipped...

You think to yourself: mental strength means accepting you haven't got mental strength; you need to be more flexible. If you resist too much it will come back to haunt you so let it flow.

The battery is down to its last reserves, the copper wires barely sending out a thin pulse of energy, the last hope of the element like a tired fox that raises its head just above ground-level. The quiet interior world made visible. 

There is the call to prayer, mercifully, in the early morning. That signifies you've made it. You walk about in the last crumbling hour of darkness, without any anxiety, pacing up and down, stumbling against little r's bike, the strange waltz in the early hours of the day holding me together...

first love

You chance across a book when you are fifteen or sixteen and are captivated by it. Of course, why wouldn't you be! In comparison to your experiences of life at that age most books will sound wiser, deeper. The proportion of your life's experiences to the world's is wildly and amusingly small. Perhaps it's always a mistake to return to one's first loves...

A strange fact: the first book you read by someone is invariably the best, good in a way that is unrepeatable. Well, not so strange given that you often choose to read a book that is usually recognized to be the writer's 'best work' and, despite all the scepticism about reviewers the law of averages suggests that the chances are-and we're only talking about chance here-there will be something to it. 

So, for instance, Salter's Light Years was the thing, at the time. But no matter how hard you try, the rest is tosh. The radically abbreviated sentences..it's all so fake! Then Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son. After that Train Dreams was a huge disappointment, despite the rave reviews (yes, I know, that contradicts what I've said above).  I'm put off from reading anything by M. Robinson or Paula Fox in case it tarnishes the memory of Housekeeping and Desperate Characters. And can anything equal or rival Stoner. Best not to go there.

Is this just laziness? Well, you've read some Roth and some Bellow and some Hesse, so maybe it's not just that.

Knulp. Now, there's something I'll never go back to in case the spell is broken. Reading Walser now and loving it. But what if I'd come across this book when I was seventeen? Would I have dismissed it or just not even have been interested in it? Chance, again. Or would I have read it so that its charm might have worn off by now? There's no telling. That former self is as much a mystery to me now as I am to myself today. But you can also half imagine yourself being intoxicated by Walser then. 

~~~

57. Everything seems to stop at 57 (of course, Arendt starts at '57). I mean, page 57. The charm of Walser is that every third line or so half undermines the previous two. You're not sure if he's making a theological point or commenting on class. Probably neither. 

What if one stumbles on to a first love late in life, though?

Now that I think about it, the whole aim of my writing here on the black sun has been an attempt to return to Wales..er or some dim reflection of the dark country.  One's inability to adapt to the world and changing circumstances would be quite charming, I'm sure, if ti wasn't so clumsy!

The man with a clay mouth

The man with a clay mouth was losing his hearing; day by day words became softer, fuzzier around the edges, the points of abrupt change in tone petering out, all the varied accents that human history has produced up until now blur into indistinction. Some slowing of the mind the way time works itself into wood, some bridges not crossed in his mind, or maybe just the relentless pressure of the sun's expansive light filling out all empty spaces. Each word spoken became like every other word, dreaming itself into the other, and each speaker the same too. He thought he could imagine a word that would reverse the trend, the decline, an invariant word that would all of a sudden emerge like an unexpected holiday, as fresh and uncluttered as if it had been spoken by God himself...

The man with a clay mouth was losing his sight, his ability to recognize faces and put a name to them. More so his own. A failure of memory, the frailty of his inheritance, the blindness that was passed down unforgivingly in his genes. What can one say? We are what we were. He looked at old pictures which he kept safe in a dark cupboard so as to remind himself of his former self, the fading yellow images from the 1970's when everyone had thick wavy hair and wore flowery shirts, the days when days were not counted and time was still time...

The clay man did not read and did not have anything in particular to say. He felt less and less uneasy about the suffering in the world, had fewer opinions on anything at all.  

The long silences of the heart, the sea at 3 o'clock that even God only views from the corner of his eye. He dreamed of a wooden key, whose rightward turning was a splendour to behold, the sound of freedom itself. The slow creaking clank, like rope being twisted, that relaxed itself into a light, springing click.  

He walked alone with the Roding by his side, the grass knee-high, sticklers on the back of his leg. Ancient pollen, eternal stream. He thought how quiet the world was and how he was somehow a part of it. The grey sky would become denser, light thicken, and the first thin wire of ice would form in the water. The winter in the heart. The congealing, the gathering, the preserving, the resistance to all that flows. This, too, he could understand. There was a reason that the man had a mouth of clay, but it was something he could not speak of.

the first man

An interesting discussion on Camus by Geoff Dyer...

To look for the writer who never was quite the person you imagine or imagined him to be. To struggle against oneself, against one's own position and perceptions. The first man, born under blinding light that was a metaphor not for place, because place itself was just where one's love happened to be. One likes a book, a particular work of art, a piece of music, but what is it to be fascinated by the "author"? 

The last man, the late style, trying to recover form, to make amends for one's mistakes, for your political naivete. To retract, retrace, retreat, revise, re-imagine those first steps...

The end of the lyrical stage in one's life, the sad fact that when you look back you see a slightly different face to the one that captivated you at the outset...

This deep commitment to the core of what you are, to the people that helped give shape to your life. Over and above justice, truth? 

~~~

You just remembered that in a wise move some years back you actually did purchase a copy of Walser's Benjamenta, on the off chance that you'd be interested in it one day. 

Shades of Augustine:

Already I have become a mystery to myself.