Each man and woman is the light they know or recognize. Though it stoops and bends down to us from afar, like the fragrance of the flowers from the deserts of Uzbekistan or the outer reaches of a dark universe, it is we who make something out of it by tilting our heads to it, if at all, giving our assent or denials.

This slanting winter light, frozen light stream, from a half-dead mongrel sun, bristling with the expectant new year in its webbed refractions; this we hope will open us up to some perfect mystery, will clarify, still, moderate and reveal.

With age we move away from abstractions and hard-worn truths to something softer, gentler, less precise. There seems to be less time now to work things out, less space to shelter, and you think twice about reliving some old memory. The wind strikes up a note of discord, as events and unfinished business stack up against you. Nothing happens as you drift. And all this will be called a life by some, this slow accumulation and running down.

Pessoa wrote that he had lived a lot but not really lived.

There must be some form-perhaps it is described in some ancient text-of the life well lived? A way in which character takes shape and the scales fall.

The mud in the fields has hardened overnight, with nothing between it and the stars. There are small muddy puddles that resemble those in a village and the roads, too, seem to have become more earthy. You walk across the broken fields, without too many assumptions. Of all the hearts I have tried, I have found this winter one to be the most agreeable.

Warmth slips from my fingers, and on the road my eyes look out impassively at the passing world, just as my father's steely eyes would, almost without blinking, all those years ago. Across bridges, keeping up with the setting sun, or down country lanes to Cardiff, this is how we traversed the silence. 

Time has done its best and time has caught up with us. Streaks of rust on my silver buttons, the mind that cannot hold the line lingers in a daze. Your hands full of blemishes, barely imaginable a quarter of a century ago. You look without favour on younger people. What spring was sprung for this arrival? Uncalled for, and your own voice falters. A small semblance of order aimed at, like the terrace of your mind, some deep unknown strata of childhood memory caught in the fall of light. This light that falls on saints and traffic policeman alike, on the prostitutes in-between the acts, on the collectors of rubbish that sparkles like misplaced gold, and on their terrible hands, misshapen by fate.  

the universal

The universal grey clouds up above. You stop at the traffic lights where the road swerves erratically back to the gated community and the cloistered dullness of the small lives. Beyond, the open 'ring road' which branches off on to the motorway and pure wilderness. This great accumulation of traffic lights, this cathedral of lights-the red of religion, the green of a boiled sweet, the turquoise of a south pacific sea-is like a pilgrim's penultimate resting place. They are he last great universal signs we have. Somewhere, right now, in Buenos Aries, a woman is staring vacantly at the traffic lights, waiting for the change, the sudden change in gear that will move her out of this impasse...

Listening to the music in the car, with one eye on the back seat passengers, insulated against the cold by this little domestic scene in a capsule, you wonder to yourself: why does the music seem to reflect every turn, every emotion in the petty dramas of your life? And how could this be? 

Education: you bump into a fantastically clever (and humble) colleague at breakfast time. He's your age and already with four young kids. "Where do they go to school?" you ask. All go to religious schools, it transpires. Maybe the'll catch up later. You don't care, of course, but it does say something, you think, when the brightest people of your generation think that a "true" education is a religious one. I'm not even against that in principle (somewhere deep down I harbour a longing for a different type of knowledge). It's just that the level of education is likely to be so poor that it will just be a form of brainwashing. 

On Friday we went with little r to her Christmas school party. A bonfire, Santa's grotto, and so on. Also, a very fetching woman wearing bright red shoes, leather trousers, and lace gloves up to her elbows, leaving her upper arms exposed. Yes, well..er..ahem.

An old friend had asked me to sponsor his walk (or participate myself) to raise funds for the "Islamic education" of kids. Now, I'm not averse to the idea of sponsored walks, but: for an "Islamic education"? Firstly: why not for something useful like access to clean water? Secondly, why an "Islamic" education and not education in general? Thirdly, what is Islamic about an "Islamic education" anyway?  

~~~

I'm not sure if I can read the whole of Carol Shields's LP. A bit gimmicky, staged. That there should be a whole chapter on Larry's penis is a bit off-putting.She just doesn't get a handle on it. In any case, as with Updike, you feel there's a difference between a writer and a novelist. Both work within conventions, of course, but the former will always keep the voice true, real, so that it speaks with a grainy realism. The latter, on the hand, is too self-conscious, too aware of "plot", frameworks, "style", all the things they've learnt from other books or school. The former wants to breathe life into her creation and doesn't care too much about consequences or "the universal". The novelist is enamoured by his own cleverness, and has one eye on sales or posterity. 

~~~

Perhaps a fingernail from your hand
lives on in my hand...
One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others,
know how to keep it.

---Jules Supervielle. 

a life in common

Little r asked me what I was reading. 

Oh, just some notes

"Is it a story?"

Not really, it's an experiment by some scientist.

"Tell me the story!"

Once upon a time...there was a man who wanted to find out what made human beings sad or happy. So, he asked a baby monkey: you can either go to this fake "mummy" and get milk (but not a hug) or you can go to another fake "mummy" and get a hug (but not milk).

"Why can't the monkey go to the daddy"

Well, let's forget that. So, what do you think the baby monkey did?

"I think he went for the milk and then when he was tired he went for a hug."

~~~

Driving around the streets of Lahore on Saturday morning, the fog dense and dirty, grimy and grainy, your '70's Addidas blue and gold jacket only slightly crumpled, tossed on the back seat. The road has darkened overnight with rain but the day hasn't cleared and the light is still murky, as if blown in from the sea. It is overcast and soulless, the grey buildings are so dull that this could be a run-down part of London, or Rumania. Then, all of a sudden, while listening to some Bach, it suddenly struck you that your life is right here, right now, in these confined streets. There seemed to be some great revelatory quality to this singular thought (which will seem banal on reflection and/or to other people, no doubt). This very moment you are alive in the world and that is all that counts. 

But then a second thought: you only feel this way because the light, the cement, the colour of the road, even, the time of day, all of that reminds you of so many other Saturdays in a previous life: walking to the station to get the Saturday Guardian, a packet of minstrels in your deep pocket, the wind on your face, the bark of the trees gloriously given additional weight by the overnight rain, the freedom from time taken up in your stride, the Roding hemming us in to this little world, an old man shrugging his shoulders, a woman walking her dogs;there is a timelessness in these gestures, a timelessness to this loss.  

Roxana once wrote: there is no redemption of time. But it seems to me that time is always repeating itself, so that if you wait long enough the same characters and faces will reappear, the same November light that you saw in childhood will come around again, as will the same magic of the first snow of the season, the first green of spring. The only difference being that we will be older, greyer, slightly less coherent and maybe less wiser, but our eyes will recognize this familiar moment of life and death.

~~~

Looking for a black woolen hat you stumbled across a very curious looking sign that pointed down to a mysterious basement shop. 'The gift shop' or something like that. You're sure that if you look for it again it will have disappeared and that you will never find it again. You walked down the steep stairs with their plush carpets, and the dim, hazy orange light gave a rich glow to everything you saw. In this large room, which was a lot warmer than you expected, you found an old piano, lots of dark-wood chairs and tables and on the walls were, amazingly, lots of old plates, the kind of central European or Swiss memorabilia that only a very peculiar person would bother to collect. On one shelf there were small wooden puppets of clowns and angels and next to that large Bavarian tankards with their ornate designs. For a moment I forgot I was in Lahore or in 2013. This could have been anywhere: Berlin in 1970, say.  

The shopkeeper (I say shopkeeper but I wonder if he really wasn't a djinn, a Lahori version of Mr. Benn) seemed totally nonplussed and sat meditatively in his wicker chair, eagerly waiting to switch the light off as soon as I tumbled out of the shop.  

tangential

'I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding which is Jewish.'
---Bellow.

Second spaces, second chances, not for the first time.

The human condition: the time of the body (birth, growth, decline and death) and the time that is aware of this (consciousness). The time that is lived and that which is thought: the circle and the tangent... 

There's a wonderful line in J Berger...about how the gold of pollen is older than the iron of the mountains; how it's always been there, and will be even when things are on the level. 

There is no magic, perfect 'circle', only its reflection. We stand at its centre and imagine the circumference. Life, a constellation of events with their own inner working, their own pattern and not a continuous stream. There is duration and deepening, the background work, simple moments when everything is gathered and brought into focus (by what hand?). 

Our lives, brief though they are, have moved away from their centre and discovered other, more provincial or limited ones. Gone off on a tangent...to lose oneself in a steady stream of aimlessness. 

Tangential: hardly getting to the truth of it, vaguely or erratically related to the centre. 

Tangential evidence. The witness who stays in the dark corner, waiting for her turn to speak. 

'The tangent would be merely a line without the circle.'

~~~

Books of the year (2013)

1. Nescio, Amsterdam Stories
2. Walser, Institute Benjamenta
3. Gopnik, Winter
4. Cheever, The Journals
5. Barnes, Levels of Life

the fiction of democracy

There's this line in Iris M about how liberal political regimes work on an 'as if' basis'. i.e. we treat men and women and all sorts of groups as if they were equal. There is no room here, you suspect, for discussions of our "true nature" or essence. Does a politics based on such fundamentals eventually end up as a form of fascism and destruction of politics itself?

Of course, there is a lot of machismo associated with politics and there's always the old boys' club phenomenon at various levels. But in another sense democratic politics-since it is about persuasion-is more feminine, and less about "vigorous natures". A good democracy is also about conversation and imagination (how to imagine the lives of the poor, the excluded) and so here, once again, fiction comes to play a role (more specifically by highlighting the ordinary, flawed lives of individuals).

Pierre ("nomadics") points us to an interesting book, In the House, Un-American by Benjamin Hollander. And David Runciaman's book on democracy looks absolutely fascinating. The intro is here.

Really interesting stuff. One tends to think of the central problem of modern political regimes in terms of their inability to deal with time, change, since the old systems had some sort of "foundation" which was supposed to be rooted in the cosmos, religion, fundamental nature or timeless truths. Democracies, on the other hand, deal in contingencies, current needs and lack a long-term perspective. Worse, to the extent that they merely represent economic life they cater to people's desires and choices-and these are often fickle, with only a tangential relation to our "true" self. And not just because we're deluded or lack information, self-understanding..more, because we live in time and can never see ourselves from a distance,a s it were. 

Democratic life is vague, uncertain, partial, fragmentary, with a multiplicity of understandings of what constitutes 'the good life'. How can there be politics-a binding-if there is no common good? How can a system be stable if it is so open? (This is something that has always troubled fundamentalists who see democracy/the west always in some kind of crisis, teetering on the verge of collapse).

But what if it is just the opposite? What if the autocratic regimes cannot get a handle on time because they are so rigid, inflexible?

~~~

If one makes the claim that to be rational one should understand the limits of rationality is one undermining one's faith in rationality itself? 

Isaiah Berlin had written many years ago: two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason. 

If you sit in the middle somewhere aren't you opening the door to irrationality (after all, you still believe, don't you?)? Not so sure, since what you do not deny is the fundamental capacity for reasonableness: to take a step back from one's views and examine them in the light of experience. Public reason, discussion, different voices, accommodation. All that gets lost in the anti-politics underlying fundamentalism and fascism alike. 

Democracies are hypocritical and never live up to their ideals. But has ever has? Theocracies?

What kind of individual does a democracy produce, require? 

I don't know, but there is a line in Carol Shields's Larry's Party which goes something like...is it possible for men to think about goodness in a sustained way given their testosterone (i.e their inclination to cruelty violence)? And what type of goodness is envisaged? It seems to be one that emphasizes independence, autonomy, and the lack of fragility-and maybe that has fed into our ideas of individualism and political virtue (vir:) .

Where economics and politics might change, however, is in the very scope of these notions. From now on a more integrated view of pluralism could be underwritten by a more pluralistic and inter-subjective notion of ourselves: I-We. 

"Vigorous natures" may or may not turn to gentleness.  Which is to miss the point, entirely.

if I had a million dollars

'If I had a million dollars 
we wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner
But we would eat Kraft dinner
of course we would, we'd just eat more

And if I had a million dollars,
I'd buy your love.'

I'd eat Rye bread for breakfast and lounge around thinking of my Caucasian rug. If I had a million dollars I still wouldn't be rich.

Today I walked in the fog with an immense sense of freedom, with nothing to do or prove and with nothing to say. It was like I was dead or something.

I am gradually building my house-the rustic French breakfast place that opens up onto the garden, the bookshelves, the leather chairs, the warmly lit rooms in which there is sparkling conversation, great ease with one's friends-in my mind. By the end I will have a good picture of it all, even if I'll never be able to inhabit it.

~~~

A young woman came in to clean the house. Well, with her tight black clothes and girlish physique it was only her coarse, worldly voice that gave any indication that she was in fact a lot older than she appeared. She didn't notice me sitting at the table, eating my porridge and immediately made for the heater on the other side of the room, giggling to herself as she did. She placed her right hand on the wall and then extended her left foot to the fire, warming herself up in a gesture that was at once elegant, graceful and economical. Is this how the old Degas felt?

~~~

I lie down on the couch and see the apartment in a brilliant, dark mirror on the wall. All the lights are off and the fog has hemmed us in, paralyzed us. It moves in from the north-west, is dense, dark and slow, making its way inwards, pushing against the high windows almost with a muffled thud. In the mirror you see another place, one you long to walk into as if on your first day on earth. You drift in and out of sleep, your thoughts and words strangely disengaged from your body. You sweat it out. Knots or bulbs that had been strung together in a tangled bundle now loosen up, unfurl, curl up on themselves like melting butter leaving a wonderful clear and fresh space as your senses rock themselves out of their slumber. Your eyes regain something of their former alertness, flutter erratically and dart to take in as much of the world as they can, as if gasping for some reality to latch onto. You remember the green before the Fall and consciousness takes those first tentative steps of freedom, emerging from the dense fog...

The pen pusher (the poet) and the drug pusher both seek out the perfect line. Blue speed, white ecstasy: chemicals soaring, caroming through your body, the dose/dope of love. Berkeley, '68: halls of light, exalted silence, wide experiments in loss. Colombian crack, Pakistani hashish, universal Man stoops below a trembling sun with his trembling yellow-stained hands: deal me another! 

Vapours clearing out a centuries-old mind, the mists of time purchased with a few dollars scrunched up in his fist. Veins exposed, ridges and blue shadows on the pale moonskin of his wrist. AR_IV_AC, lovely white goddess, harbinger of the sweet cold sweat of forgetfulness, hold out your hand to me this hour. 

Truman Capote

Just before the evening fog descended, you headed for the large iron gate to pick up your books. Already you could see some people tightly wrapped in their beige mufflers as others walked briskly by, hands firmly rooted in pockets. Your mind is all clogged up and your nose barely functioning. Bunged up, well and true! 

For a relatively small amount you pick up: Greenblatt's The Swerve; a thin book by John Berger, a nice hardbound copy of Carol Shields's Larry's Party and a lovely produced copy of R. Hass's essays, What Light Can Do.

You decide to write a short story, one line by little r, followed by your own one-liner. I would, obviously, write the whole thing down. One day kid, I said to her, we'll outshine Truman Capote. 

'Little r said "eh, eh, e," trying desperately to talk to her little baby brother. 

Then I said, "You know what, you're a great communicator; you're always trying to connect."

She then said: "Give me an example?"

I can't think of one.

Suddenly little r said: "if a horse says "neigh" then I will say "neigh".

Yes! That's right.

It always surprises you just how good Carol Shields is. The only other book you've read stumbled a bit since the plot wasn't that tight, but no matter, there's a kind of rare wisdom to parts of the writing. Small scale and low-key for sure, and there is quite a lot of rambling (first 100 pages of LP) but there's a kind of intelligence that isn't showy or particularly dazzling. 

~~~

the strength of the old soul: image-making, name-giving. the work of the century finding its way into his life: his gestures, his failings, his partial-sightedness.

grey zero

'I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid.'

Miles above the grey clouds are swirling around with a ferocity barely imaginable. Down here below all that is translated into a dense and rich fog that settles and will not clear, even by mid-morning, such that a gentle grey blanket covers us, making us invisible and unknown to one another.

Your bones are cold but three cups of hot lemon and honey keep you going. Today you imagine inhabiting some long sentences, washing over you, rather than focusing on words that get stuck in your throat.

One wonders how this country might have developed had it not swerved towards the Arabs and had it not been drawn to the frontier, the tribal belt. What softness and gentleness is lost when all we think of is war and survival?

Books to look out for next year: a biography of Walser and a translation of the love sonnets of Louise Labe (NYRB).

Your throat has packed in, your strength collapsed; your Ray Bans sit idly, upturned on the desk next to a small and delicate bottle of "dollar" black ink and a strip of paracetamol, punctured and holed-out. The winter mark sheet and a USB (on which there is an image of a gentle reader) rest on Hazlitt. Mekas's Walden, Glenn Gould's Idea of North, bottled water "with added zinc".  There is a kind of world down here, tainted but intact. Blue matches strike to light the world red for a second. 

Miles above the grey clouds are swirling around...

writing, home

'I sit there, wondering about this, never sure if our barbarism denotes vigour or decay.'
---A.B.

Strong natures, slave mentalities and all that. One is surprised that after all the violence and the bloodshed of the last century anyone would want to talk in that way. The surprising thing remains that for a society that prides itself on 'historical consciousness' how so much is easily and wilfully forgotten. If there is one lesson-and perhaps there isn't-then it's this: human goodness has to be learnt, nurtured and cannot simply be assumed to flow automatically from our "nature".

To paraphrase Kenneth Clark: gentleness comes to the north via the south, the east.

There are lines here that you savour for the flow, but when you write them down you start to question the meaning. One can be lulled into switching off by the intonation of words...

'It was only gradually that I came to appreciate how tolerant he was, and gentle, and lacking in any respect for the form of things.'

Does a 'lack of respect for...' induce kindness, tolerance or does it inevitably lead to a type of dogmatic and harsh and 'ungiving' attitude to others?

As always with A.B. you feel he is wise-within given limits, and perhaps wisdom resides in the very 'knowingness' of one's capacities to understand and express certain things.

'In those days Peter could tap a flow of mad verbal inventiveness that nothing could stem...there is no suggestion that he is going to mend his ways in any permanent fashion. He goes on much as ever down the path to self-destruction, knowing that redemption is not for him-and it is this that redeems him.'

Again, on initially reading this it came across as much gentler, humane than it does when torn out of context like this. Only part of us, one feels, applauds such single-mindedness; the other part recognizes it for what it often is: bloody mindedness.

'In him morality is discovered far from its official haunts, the message of a character like Peter's being that a life of complete self-indulgence, if led with the whole heart, may also bring wisdom.'

Again, rather like a fool, I was drawn to these sentiments, somehow thinking that even if they didn't make complete sense to me they could plausibly pass as a way of life for someone else. And there's always, I suspect, a more than grudging admiration for a person who knows their own mind and what they want in life, as there is for someone who doggedly pursues a particular path knowing full well that even if they do not achieve what they set out to do they would nevertheless have accomplished something as great by following their own lights.

~~~

You are in no mood for dipping today; nor for finishing Rabbit which, to be honest, is pretty mediocre. The time for epigrams, aphorisms and grand statements may have come to an end. 

pastime

an activity that someone does regularly for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby:

"his favourite pastime was shooting and golf"

synonyms: 

hobby, leisure activity/pursuit, sport, game, recreation, amusement, avocation, diversion, divertissement, distraction, relaxation, pleasure , entertainment, fun, sideline, enthusiasm, interest, passion, fad, craze, mania, obsession. 

~~~

I like to dip into Lydia Davis now and then. A small, brief, encounter. Google images has a picture for every taste. "We have a wide selection of images, Sir, for the discerning voyeur." Google, you must remember, is part of the entertainment industry. 

~~~

When the world ends there will only be leisure. Will play lose its interest if everything is superficial? 

~~~

Today you saw an old man-though your definition of "old" is rapidly changing-walking sprightly despite his age and rickety body. He is a cleaner of some sorts and has a fixed smile, immaculately well-set hair (as if plastered on). And there are specks of grey on his thick, old-style moustache, that gives him a dignity that is unmatched in the whole university. Must one suffer to have dignity, today? The entirety of this man's life-story is contained in that moustache. The rapidly changing colour of it the crux of his life: from deep and strong brown to a lighter, mousy colour, straw and sand, then the onset of inevitable grey. This one single gesture seems to frame the rest of his face.

~~~

Saturday morning is full of cartoons. They are thought up by grown-ups for grown-ups and therefore lack all charm, all innocence and all humour. Mostly it is people being zapped or turning into machines.

~~~

Peter Brown and the Romans. 

Free sex on the back of slavery. 

The jolly free-for-all, which we like to imagine as forming a timeless human bond between us and the ancients, was based upon the existence of a vast and cruel “zone of free access” provided by the enslaved bodies of boys and girls. Slavery, “an inherently degrading institution,” was “absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life.”'

Freedom (from the body, from society)...the isolated will vs an embodied sense of the self, connected with other bodies and, ultimately, to the cosmos. There is the darkness associated with the structure of dominance that was 'the world' , but there was another type that would replace it: that of the self battling against an ever darkening world. 

The chain of being: freedom or unfreedom? Do chains, dependencies, bind or connect

the fox

The fox was sadder than I thought. Her heart was gentler than I had taken account of. The fox was sadder than my thought. Her heart I had taken.

The blue fox could not be trapped. The blue fox was a trap herself! "Kill me!" she said. And something in him died as he pulled the trigger. 

He climbed to the top of the mountain to see her better. But he ended up seeing only himself. A fine blue thread, she wove into his heart.

"This lush, luxuriant tail of yours, it must be worth something?" 

"Only if you keep me alive," she cunningly replied.

He sat there, looking through the ice, through the snow, his life carried forward in the snowstorm. For a moment she opened the door, walked daintily into the swirling snow. "This white room of yours is a bit bare, isn't it?" she teased. But he imagined a chair and a table for her and poured her some green tea. The first hint of spring in her heart appeared again. 

She seemed far away. She seemed close by. He saw time falling to the ground and conversed with her in a dream.

'the night is so dark
the way so short
yet you do not wake against my heart' 

He knew she must go. For a while he traced her footsteps in the snow. He was sadder than the fox had thought. His heart she had taken.

the golden state

Unremarkably, he put the glass of plain water on the table. The refraction of light at this hour of the day moved his heart an inch. The clarity of light depending on the weight of the world. He saw a fetching woman wearing all black with a set of golden badges or oblong medals on her breast, shining with honour. He thought to himself: "I must get this for my wife".

She said: undress my gold. The words as ancient as time, as human history itself, a reflection of some haunting, archaic desire brought to the surface.

The swirling dust is an irritant at this time of the year, filling out the waiting rooms in clinics with children whooping and sniveling. But it also lets us see the light, filtering down in streams through the boughs of the trees, or like columns made up of golden chains of morse code...

With gold there is no "or like", no space for metaphors or tryouts. She said, look my way...
]
]
]
burn
]
]
]

A fragment of a sentence, a line unblurred, I turned my head ever so slightly to pick them up. There is no seeing clearly, no chance of seeing without gentleness. If the eye only sees similars, then what of the human heart? What field of vision lies open, what golden state must be reached before the eye is dazzled, the heart stilled?

Gold, the absolute of time, the standard of consistency, universality, the moment when nothing is left to see or undress. Gold, the thing that makes all exchanges possible, that allows things to flow. The fleetingness of our lives and loves arrested, locked in the certain gaze, of trust; the voice free, our words measured soundly, leaving winter behind, finding south, Byzantium, Constantinople, the nameless.

'Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.'

There is something remarkable about the attempt to put things together..our deepest instincts, you think, are to unify, draw patterns, gather and resist the flow...

You stand by the small bus stand on a blustery and clear day, wondering nothing much in particular, trying to make yourself invisible. Behind you the huge, dark and imposing Gothic hospital with its labyrinth corridors and army of professionals. Out here you feel healthy, pure; inside there is a sickly kind of warmth, a diffused light and tepid hospital food. There is the recognition of pain, suffering, something that must be dealt with and that cannot be escaped. Outside, there is much dreaming...

Two nurses stand close by and discuss their plans for the evening. And who can blame them. But the strangeness of it all. To carry the idea of revelry in your heart as one eye looks at death. There is no room for poetry here and you're overwhelmed by the ability of people to only deal in facts, the bare bones, the stark realities...life reduced down to a series of tables, charts and probabilities. It dawns on you that it takes a special kind of strength not to day dream, not to leave the room in which you are standing. Everyone looks ridiculous without their own clothes. An old man, ninety plus, has so few memories, so few words that he can only repeat the same phrases to us in an empty ritual. The war is now the defining moment of his life-though it didn't seem so before.

On the small bus back already your mind is turning to dinner and you feel guilty. The sheer inescapability of decline grips you by the throat. That our fate is shared or universal provides no solace. Each person fades, dies, in their own special way. If someone were to see my face from outside-for the whole journey-what would they see? Behind the glass they would see dim watery reflections of clouds and trees pass over my face, highlighting and then obscuring my eyes; they would see my tangled hair, my thick peasant hands propping up my chin, my Buddhist-ears listening to the silence, the deep lines on my face that with more concentration would have been saint-like; they will see a clown on his day off, a one-legged acrobat mumbling to himself as if he were talking to God. A dropout, an outsider, unkempt, his laces permanently undone, his jeans torn, his t-shirt stained, the loosest collection of clothes one could imagine.

An unread book in one hand, a pencil in the other. There are no notes to make since to do so is a kind of betrayal. Stay tuned, pick up on the mechanical warmth, your heart staying bewildered. 

achievement

I don't know quite why, but I felt a strange kind of sadness reading the final few pages of Cheever's journals. I think it was his deeply conflicted being, his profound loneliness, his longing for a different kind of light, a moral beauty of light and, I suppose, there's the lack of resolution. Towards the end it seems that nothing is solved-maybe that's precisely what life is, an unsolvable mystery?

At the end one doesn't want to sit in any kind of judgement but, instead, just say: here was a human soul, here was a life. What else does the presentation of a whole life attempt to achieve but this coarse, incantatory statement: here I am, warts and all.

As a whole, does it make sense? You sometimes hope that something of that medieval idea is alive and well in the modern period but if truth be told you know that that kind of narrative is reserved for the very few, the rare exceptions, in this day and age. And still, you are gripped by the possibility and are unwilling to relinquish standing in that strand of light for the undefined shadows.

I am no longer dealing with the common disadvantages of need...I am dealing with time, with alcohol, with death.

Who wants to look back on their own life, who can? Especially in mid-stream? The past seems like a far off continent today, as the morning light cracks open, peels away. You look and see that everyone is asleep: little r like a drunk, H, statuesque, and the little one who, when awake, looks at me with those quizzical eyes, the eyes of an old man, of someone who is asking the fundamental questions: what am I doing here, do you love me? These questions never leave us and never fail to startle us.

You look, and look. There is something of the deep warmth and order of civilisation in this sleep, this last hour before everyone wakes. You will eat porridge (barley and Quaker oats), grilled cottage cheese with Worcestershire sauce and grilled tomatoes, exercise, collect your books and notes and yet there will always be this sense of something missing, the idea that no matter what achievements there are life is radically incomplete. You have to learn to walk around like that; it marks your steps, curves your back, hunches your shoulders, folds another line into your hands, narrows your eyes, makes your heart sing a song you don't know the words to.

"But I deserved better". There is, of course, no such law.

What law is there, then? What latitude is given to me on this faint, sunless morning, to understand the stumbling of my life? What do you expect at this time of your life? There can be no prolonged engagement with truth when you have skimmed the surfaces so lightly, sought out the corners in shadows. You want to be a mystic for $3.50.

~~~

In a discussion a colleague asked me to imagine a perfect contract, imagine, as a thought experiment, that we could foresee every contingency. If we start from that then we can make sense of reality as a lack, a falling away from that ideal.

But what if there are some things we simply cannot know?  Why should we imagine we can have God's perspective, can see final causes, the last hour, every detail? Is this finite, limited outlook, this 'brokenness', precisely what makes us human?

Among all the debris, the scathing comments, the cock-ups, there are moments of great tenderness:

So I say that what I love is the world that lies spread out before him [my son].

You think or want to think that words and gestures like that are enough to redeem a man's life, overcome all the pettiness, the bitterness,  that surrounds you, that has infected you. But it doesn't always work like that: a beautiful door doesn't always open to a beautiful room. And the light varies; there is darkness in the morning and an old music strikes up. A set of circumstances, a memory, a character, a sense of permanence that was not tarnished and that stood aloof from the times we live in, something that could touch the universal, the true, and shine.

The nature of this sorrow is bewildering. I seek some familiarity that eludes me; I want to go home and have no home.

northern soul

Gloria Jones -_Tainted Love (1964) by Tushratta

If classical music appeals-predominantly-to white upper class southerners then soul music, though universal, is of the north and for the north.

Paul Mason, spot on: coolness in the 20th century was thinking black and don't let them tell you it was any different.
James Brown - Gonna Have A Funky Good Time... by alexandru2006

High-ed business

Thomas Frank, brilliant as ever.

And one in the eye for all the right-wing ideologues here

Drawing to the close of Cheever...

There is a way out, I know-a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word-but I am unable at the moment to find it.

Today you saw a dark, singular brown leaf, about the size of your thumb or a peanut shell, lying distinctly on the dew-covered grass. Next to it a deep-green weed, flattened like a frozen star from another planet. 

The mornings are dark and devoid of any colour. I stagger a little when I walk and this is the darkness that I sought.

Your skin is incredibly dry and feels like an ancient parchment. It is as if your face is a single page, a page that no-one reads-least of all yourself. Out of the corner of your eye-why do you always see things partially, never completely?-you notice a glinting of gold from the nail-cutter. Perhaps there is an engraved gold fish on this one. You turn the water off and open it up. Rust, so deep that it turns to gold when the light is just right, or strikes at the right angle, or when someone looks at with curiosity. Is the human heart any different?

You open it up, only to be surprised, deceived. 

At a different time of the day all this may appear quite different than it is. From some great outback a message will come and you will pick up the key again. 

The papers in your office are piling up. A friend suggests that my bouts of illness this year-which is very unlike you-ultimately stem from this collection of paper and dust. There is a thin film of it and it gets into your lungs. So, work might kill me-indirectly. 

There is very little humour in the journals. Does that count against a person? Will there be a time when there is no counting?

There is something comforting about the smell of tobacco on your clothes, like a distant memory that is filtered by the passage of so much time and that yet, amazingly, clings on. The shabbiness of your life, its lack of direction...maybe all that will be redeemed by the past. 

You will go nowhere during the break, not leave the city that is not really a city. You will, no doubt, talk to a few people (who are not really people). Preparations must be made. Another journey, one that lives with us forever but goes unseen.

what I expect to learn

Searching for an essay by Annette Baier you come across scores of websites which have summaries or analyses of her work in general or of the particular chapter you're looking for. Invariably the post starts of with "what I expect to learn" and quickly proceeds to a number of questions:  "Who is Annette Baier?", "Why does she reject Kantian universalism? " and so on.

Everything is out there: notes, commentaries, links, references, quotes, fragments of the essay..everything, that is, bar the actual bloody thing! I'm sure the chapter and the book actually exists in tangible form somewhere in the real world, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an online version floating around amongst the trillions and trillions of blogs and webpages. But what I learn is that what I expect to learn cannot be found-no matter how powerful a "search engine" you have. The simple notion of a book, the possibility of being able to slowly read something in one's hands and not be ceaselessly and frantically always searching for it...this seems like a skill that will be lost on future generations.

Instead, we grasp at-almost in desperation- some quick fix, some immediate illumination, or easy to swallow sugar-coated palliative, as if we could become wise with better technology, greater "access", quicker fingers and eyes: glancing, skimming, dipping into, this huge accumulation of data and information. We 'grasp at', but rarely grasp. Why should I always expect to learn, understand? Yes, but also: why should  I expect when there is no effort? Thirdly, what can I expect given the levels of distraction and sensory overload, the lack of stillness in one's life?

~~~

What do women want from moral theory? Do they even want theory? Has ethics narrowed its vision by focusing on a particular set of questions and approaches: what obligations do I have to other people and what are the grounds for them? Can we still, today, talk coherently about the good life, and do we need a shared notion of it or is a purely subjective assessment all we can reasonably expect and/or all we should really aim for?

What is the role of love, friendship, sociability, dependencies, relationships, and care in the good life? Is this an area of 'thought' that has traditionally been neglected by men? Is there another form of cleverness and is it gendered?

Iris M., P. Foot, A. Baier, S. Wolf, M. Nussbaum....

Is there an underlying anti-Utilitarianism in their thought?

Something that is perhaps related: Carol Gilligan-whose book looks fascinating- on the distortion produced by men thinking about relationships (Freud, for example).

The limits of abstraction, of "theory", of seeing things in the cold light of the day.

The lone, isolated (heroic) man, fighting against everyone, against the world, pitting himself against the elements, negative space, time and dissolution, the entropy of the world. The searcher, the hunter, the man of few words, impassive, resolute, the mystic-seeker-who will find God on his (His) own.

Western man, who must climb a mountain, escape from himself to find himself.

"Why?"
"Because it was there"

Freedom = freedom from.

But what of the gatherers? What of those who acknowledge there is mystery in life itself. Natality.

Nothing in particular

The final day of class ended without a bang and something of a whimper. Not quite the way you envisioned. I suppose in the old days one would be concerned about the destiny of one's students. Right now that is the last thought in my head and I can't wait for it to get colder so I can make some hot toddy.

At the fruit & veg. shop a man's shopping back split open and out spilled his veg (parsnips and sweet potatoes). He scrambled to pick them up from the floor in one quick movement, his arms trawling the floor for any ones that might have escaped his eagle eye. Standing next to him, in the centre of the shop, was a middle-aged man, puffing away on his cigarette like a chimney.  Another man walked in and asked: "Why did you throw the stuff on the floor?". The man took a deep drag of his cigarette and said, in a Zen moment of detachment: "He didn't like the prices."

~~~

At dinner in a trendy 'cafe' Tony told me that his supervisor had told him many years ago that a Ph.D was about knowing everything, knowing everything about nothing.

~~~

Trying to explain to little r what a deadline is. How does one do that? Through abstraction or examples? A general rule or particulars? I tried the latter and then asked her to make up her own example.

She roared, "Scar (from the Lion King, in case you didn't know), says I will kill you, Mufasa, next week."

Er...not bad, r, that's a deadline and a dead lion.

(I can hear Roxana groan at that but Ubo, the specialist in awful jokes, would be quite proud, I'm sure)

~~~

So, here we are, in this dissolving hour, looking at the changing light for a sign, waiting for the world to be drawn down, curve inwards, offer some kind of protection. Gold columns of light filter through stiff leaves, and the road is glazed with a brilliant yellow film of sunlight. The trees, that have withstood so many variations in temperature, climate..extremes and long hours of boredom, seem so densely packed today that you think of them as holding hands.

In the first-light round white globes dance as the stars fade, turn their backs. It's getting there but you want the cold to break you. On the way to school you see a beautiful young woman walking precariously on the grassy island between two busy roads, stylish and self-conscious, her large Sophia Loren glasses the thing that would be picked out in a caricature. You think back to the old man in the Seventh Seal and his scathing comments about how all beauty must fade. True, but while it lasts, let it last.

Primary love

There's always been something exotic about Hungary. Ferenc Puskas, for instance. Then the name: Magyar and the old association with something eastern, tribal. Then there was Ubo's 'Hungarian Goulash' which tasted suspiciously like our own alu gosht.

There's this line in Todorov which he attributes to Balint (I think) and it goes something like:

'What we desire is not pleasure but relationships'

Of course, one gets immense pleasure from relationships (as well as heartache) but all that is derivative. It would be a strange person who sets out to make friends with another because they want to maximize their own happiness. Can pleasure be a reason? Or, to appropriate a line from JB: men either get on with women or get off on them. 

The economic agent, on the other hand, is quite autistic, anal. The 'social' becomes 'social capital' and self-interest is deemed to be the 'first principle'. We start off as isolated and enter into a contract (because it's good for us). If such is the case can we talk about genuine sociality, of a love for conversation-in the broadest sense of the term?

The little Freud you've read you've found to be exhilarating but, but, all that stuff about wanting to kill the father, etc. just seemed fundamentally wrong to you, childish, even. What if love and not conflict was primary?

~~~

"Commercial transactions imply both equality and separation..." whereas in the older idea "you are free from your debt to an ancestor when you become an ancestor;...you are free from your debt to humanity when you act with humanity...these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence the very notion of canceling a debt, and achieving an autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start"
---D. Graeber.

the wrecked light

come to the shore
to find love
has gone, even though
she said she'd be there 
forever.

to find your love, a world, a stone,
richly veined with light sea moon
sparkling on the edge of a wave
with mineral green, elemental gold

the light dissolving, degrading
threadbare as a faint grey line.
the A star of your heart 
marked down finally as a cheat.

An old man collapsed on the floor,
his huddled body a crescent of shock,
his cane, flung to the side,
tastes an exalted sense of freedom.

~~~

I pitched my life in shadow. And out, out in the swinging dark I saw my debts accumulate. The long moments, folded in my pocket. If I had one word for you it would be ancient, indecipherable, obscure, a word whose meaning is lost. 

Tinsel.

gaudy, showy, superficial, valueless. 1575

tinsel.

the losing of something; the sustaining of harm, damage or detriment; loss.

tinsel.

it will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

~~~

'the tables of the feast 
all cleared; mice among the grain, and dogs
but few people anywhere.
There's ice between the cobblestones
where drink was spilt - some scraps of bread,
chicken bones, that's it...

Fires sputter here and there but there is little light
and the ground beyond the square 
is frozen hard as iron.'

That's it? It passed you by and you missed it. Was it meant to be that way? There you are, unspoken, unspoken for. I hold all your names in my hand. Only this? Time flies in both directions, making the hours seem long, the days whittled down to a stumbling moment, a word, a glance. I don't want to hear from you, don't want to see your eyes. There is something I can't remember; it is like the homelessness in your voice. A rare skill to be able to unpick words and find a letter, 'K', a bone, in your teeth.

I come to the shore again and see myself clearly, or my shadow-life. We sit in the car becalmed and silent, like the first evening star, shivering, with nothing to say. A formal ghost sits next to me. We strike up a conversation. A dead gull flies above us. He tells me how it will end, how it all began, how the light was torn, shredded, wrecked...

(words by Robin Robertson)

the end of religion?

I cannot ope mine eyes,
But thou art ready there to catch
My morning-soul and sacrifice:
Then we must needs for that day make a match.

My God, what is a heart?
Silver, or gold, or precious stone,
Or starre, or rainbow, or a part
Of all these things, or all of them in one?

My God, what is a heart,
That thou shouldst it so eye, and wooe
Powring upon it all thy art,
As if that thou hadst nothing else to do?

 Indeed mans whole estate
Amounts (and richly), to serve thee:
He did not heav’n and earth create,
Yet studies them, not him by whom they be.

Teach me thy love to know;
That this new light, which now I see,
May both the work and workman show:
Then by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee.

---G. Herbert.

After hearing all the shrill voices at university and, more generally, in the country as a whole-both pro and anti-religion, it's so nice to hear a mature conversation about how religion survives despite everything (Start the Week: John Tavener, J. Winterson, Drury,...).

If not religion then the religious and if not that, then the spiritual. JW is fiercely clever and the only point of disagreement with her is about the "invention" of rules/rituals/forms/shapes..as if to say: we can make them up as we go along. I suspect that if one were to accept that they are not entirely man-made, not provisional or a product of the imagination, then we'd be in the territory of religion proper, and that is something that cannot be admitted. Fair enough.

~~~

What light there is hangs in your voice. And it is yours.

Absence and presence is the mark of time; it is how the child first counts time so that time and again we are left wondering. The child sees a breast and thinks: milk! (Rumi). This, it turns out, is not true.

Desire is not aimed at pleasure but strives for a relationship (this was, perhaps, the most profound line from Todorov's book).  But pleasure, too, is a way.

~~~

I have a scar on my knee which no-one can see. When I was a child it gushed and spilled darkly. To this day it amazes me that it healed.

When I was slightly older, in another country, I played for the Colts and ran into a pole, slicing my lip, an inch away from tearing one of my faces off. The gash would bruise, the stitches removed, but I don't think I've spoken straight again.

There are many muscles in the human body one was not aware of. Equally, the human soul is full of darkness.

The ability to say "Yes!" is something only the naive and the wise possess. But there is, maybe, no such thing as possession after all. It is 4 o'clock and the sun is dead; my life continues.

The desire to say "yes!" reminds me of a poem by Denise...

Light,
Light, light, light
light.

How one must breathe the light, find the right pace, understand that it can be jolted at any moment. The dark equilibrium of a life is formed by many variables, some known, others unknown.

In Italy even a statue can appear erotic! 

Conversation in Moscow

In a dream from a day or two ago you saw a beautiful white building, floating, solid but also intensely real, its shape well defined even though its interior was empty. A survivor, a whale, a palace. White stone dreamlike against the plain white landscape, the northern place from deep memory with fading soft colours dying from its surface, a trace of Venice, which is south, east, or Westminster, home of conversations...

In a dream you thought you knew many people. A fire, crackling with great strength, chairs arranged, time passing without being noted, the hours of our lives a brief smile, the light flashing from silver, roxana and anton with their hair down. Your own home, where you don't speak, but tend the fires, see to the lights and keys.

The lights change, you try to detect the notes of sadness in the air. The winter soil beneath your feet grows cold, is knotted into a pattern. At eleven o'clock there is so much light that it seems as if every inch of the world is covered by it. The old sun on your back, the shadow of the trees falling on your face...

Go through the exercises-of the body, not the spirit. Drink too much black coffee which, at my age, is asking for trouble. What type of question is that? You feel a knot grow in your heart or is this just the evil eye on you, some twist of fate, a design cast on you like a loosely flung shawl? We talk of Spain, the south, about how a taxi driver will stop the car or steer it to the side, letting it drift, to look at a beautiful woman. This conversation we're having now, over Spanish omelettes in the English tea house, this is it, here and now. Yes, you think. But this is not it. Already I've forgotten what was said. There are other conversations locked away somewhere, stuck in your throat, that you imagine lasting forever, that maybe you will strike up when you are more yourself.

In Moscow there is no God. In Lahore, too. Gagrain, floating in outer space: "I find no God here". As if. As if he'd be waiting for you with a cigar and flowers. A word, a sentence, a word that would take us back, aback, through the years. Relearn the alphabet, the spell, the silences between the words, too. Become one of the dark ones amongst the dark multitudes...