dream house

Given there is so much disorder, chaos in the world, why should we add to it?

Anyone who has visited the South Bank, lived on a council estate, or seen the university of Essex will immediately understand just how soul destroying and ugly modern architecture is. One can only imagine Eastern Europe to be any worse. Underlying both, of course, is Bentham's utilitarianism/communism. The irony being that what is seen in purely utilitarian terms ends up as useless (and at a much quicker rate).

"Ruin porn".

An interesting term, suggesting a kind gaze, full of of lust for disasters, signs of disintegration, abandonment (is this so very different from the Romantic age's love of ruins?). Perhaps. There, 'brokenness' suggested wholeness, the idea that something was lost: we live in a broken world but to appreciate absence we must have a prior notion of 'presence'. Or it suggested the continual survival, even in the barest outline, of something once loved and valued. But now all we have to go by are fragments. We live in a fragmentary world and that's all there is, all there ever was. God and the cosmos are not even in the equation. If-and it's a big 'if- anything is of value it is because I say it is so. There is no discovery or finding, only a making. There is no 'world' so to speak, only 'I'. The world is lyingly added.

Why does beauty matter?

You've thought about this a lot recently especially since you live now without much music or art and see fewer and fewer beautiful women (the women are either "aunties" or silly young girls). The city of gardens with its leafy suburbs is now a city of crass commercialism: glaring and tacky billboards, awful cheap imitations of Dubai-style building, and the insulated bubble-like shopping malls that are a feature of just about every city nowadays.

Music: dissonance.

At a store you heard some rap music being played and it was the most awful rubbish one could imagine. You wonder if anyone could even understand what was being played: "I'll take two women and fuck you ho" sort of thing. Charming!

To even mention the word taste today is to open oneself to the charge of elitism and snobbery (whereas, of course, you are arguing for just the opposite!). Khair...Here's some Scruton: Roger

take it home

"The treasure . . .lies buried. There is no need to seek it in a distant country . . .It is behind the stove, the center of the life and warmth that rule our existence, if only we knew how to unearth it. And yet – there is this strange and persistent fact, that it is only after . . .a journey in a distant region, in a new land, that . . . the inner voice . . .can make itself understood by us."

---Denise Levertov, via Zimmer, via Buber, via...

There's this line in Becket where he criticizes the Welshman (or have I got it mixed up?).."you were only looking for an animal kind of warmth," he says. The warmth of friendship, well, that's another thing, in a different league. Even loyalty to religion can seem cold, distant and mechanical. 

The nihilist/fundamentalist/academic/scientist will often say that the warmth has drained from the world. All that is left to do is to articulate how the world falls in each specific detail with utter detachment and objectivity(your old village mullah is far superior in the sense that at least he dreams up interesting stories of the decadence of women!)

But despite everything it goes on and you don't believe all that tosh for a moment. The fact that in Lahore at least ten thousand women put on lipstick each morning and/or diligently get their kids ready for school says-to me at least-that the old ways will survive. 

~~~

It is strange to think of it now but we actually saved up to buy music. There was no "instant access" or "one click buys" and, given our lack of money and our wise parents' reluctance to indulge us- we ended up with very small collections (the only other alternative was taping stuff off (or off-er, as the yanks would say)the radio. 

The dougal had this album which in its astounding brilliance was the cheez when it came to coolness. Who else could sing: "There was the Queen, looking tired,just back from a holiday..."? And then there was wonderful tape-sadly misplaced despite your best attempts to keep it safe- of Elkie Brooks'-she of the husky voice fame-selection. Janis Joplin, Peabo Bryson's Feel the Fire (yeah, Peabo!), Sam & Dave's Don't knock it. 

That tape, despite its awful quality,and despite only being only thirty minutes long, had all the warmth of our childhood in it. It is often said that music opens up new doors, extends one's understanding, enlarges sympathies, broadens our outlook, touches some mathematical truth or gives us a glimpse of some greater, finer or grander sense of meaning, harmony, "oneness", even. Without music no tribe, no civilisation. But for us, music was never about a return or about picking up the loose threads; it was and is always about this breathtakingly simple emotion: take it home.

~~~

Still haven't got much money and youtube is down and out in the land of the pure, but the music... "

The Reformation interior

"...the 17th-century Dutch painter of church interiors and perhaps the first purely architectural artist. He created beautifully complex spaces out of Reformation interiors..."

The frontier has been drawn in, the wilderness is everywhere. Your hands broke, the words slipping through them. If I could remember, I'd feel less cold. The human soul in November awaits the first light, forgiveness. You have a sense that there's another room in this room. 

Gagarin, at the frontier: "there ain't no God here". And when he got home?

~~~

'at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
[here]
low in the historical dark they disappear into.

...

desire/desire's
inside track.'

---Alan Shapiro

There was a time, there was a time when man was nothing-do you remember? Nameless, sort of. And that time is like now. But for a while we are like nothing, survivors from a golden state, the way golden pollen is older than the mountains (JB). 

Each love, each pleasure is, it seems, also a memory of something else, some older time. There is a kind of "Platonic" remembering which stretches beyond experience (as narrowly construed). But if so much is true, then something of the future, too, is with us already. It is incredible that so much of the world could find its way into such a small space. 

Somewhere, off the central line, there is a tree, a house, a room crammed to the ceiling with books, mostly unread or unfinished. There's something of my life still there. 

Now that Ariel Sharon is dead one thinks: the stark interior, if projected outwards, makes a wilderness of everything.   

habits of the heart

Given the way things are piling up in your life (time, most of all) you have to decide what to read and what not to. It's that simple. Lacking many possessions and not being fastidious toward them has resulted in a blasé attitude to things (though you suspect your wahabi sensibilities have something to do with it as well). So, the question of what to give up and what to keep has never really been a pertinent one. As long as your books are there, your comb is in the right place, then God is in his heaven and all is right in the world ..well, that's probably the only kind of order one can expect (in one's own life) given the way things have panned out.

But the pressing nature of time  means asking, really, what do you want from a book. More to the point: what do you need, and is reading the best way of fulfilling those needs? Already that sounds frightfully self-conscious, far too much like a utilitarian. The lists will pile up and you will end up, like Buridan's Ass, paralyzed by indecision. And if someone were to say to you: east or west, Islam or enlightenment, you would turn and say: Yes!

Ultimately, the problem is that thinking about goodness and being good can often drift apart.  

What kind of wisdom is it you're after, what kind of understanding of life can there be except from within life itself (which must include reading and a stepping back from life,but not be reduced to distances)?

N.Lezard highly recommends John Williams but the thought of reading about the wild west in deeply unappealing. Instead, a name is thrown up in the comments section....

"No new ways to be new, as Frost said. I think that’s a reasonably good statement. There’s nothing new under the sun, sayeth the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. I think more circularly than linearly. I don’t think there are beginnings and destinations so much as circles that end by closing and starting over again. I can’t think of any fiction that introduces new elements of what used to be called “Human Nature,” nothing that isn’t present, say, in the Iliad and the Odyssey. 

The qualities of character, the machinery of suspense and climax, of mounting action and falling action: I don’t think we’ve seen anything new in that way. There are new clothes, because civilization can change, and we get out of armor and into doublet and hose, and then Brooks Brothers pants, but we’re still the same people, and doing the same things essentially. I think it’s a mistake to think originality amounts to that much...

Chekhov said he worked all his life to get the slave out of himself. I guess I feel my obligation is to get the selfishness and greed, which often translates as the Americanism, out of myself. I want to be a citizen of the culture, of the best the culture stands for, not of a nation or a party or an economic system."

catch a boat to England

The blues ruin the game.
The blues are the game.

Nick Drake's Milk and Honey is still the version, unsurpassed in its melancholy. There something-you don't know what-almost Elizabethan in the singing, as if a tune, a sentiment, a gesture, could somehow slip by, unnoticed, through all those years.

In my mind a line, in the still of night, as your eyes seek out a face, the early hours on the clock (though it's twenty minutes behind the rest of the world) blurred, and a thought is clear, is clear to you now, you know. After the entry of the world-a croissant, a hard boiled egg and some coffee- you've lost it. Something like: conservation isn't holding on to the past; it is allowing the past to grow. A way of life is allowing ourselves the distances. If there was no 'between' there'd be no past or future.

If modernity isolates one man from another (and, more importantly, one man from a woman) then it also isolates us across time. This is the theme of something I'm trying to write on: future generations (and the inability of utilitarianism to capture all of what we deem important in our relation to people and things in the future). The idea can be traced back to Arendt's brilliant opening chapter in Between Past and Future but also is central to Scheffler's 'thought-experiment' in Death and the Afterlife (can be read online: Tanner lectures).

There's no solace in the impersonal, abstract movement of thought across time. I'd rather watch the waves at Penarth, or an old home movie. How do we see other people if we cannot see ourselves?

Sen's Idea of Justice is a real drag and written so poorly. There's something dry and wrinkled, cramped and dusty, about the style of his thought in this book. One can be overwhelmed by the word 'justice'. And do we need a theory?

What of all the drifters, the lives that are barely registered (in the books, the photo albums, God's scrapbook...)? This thought came to you as you started Don Carpenter's book with its clear and crisp writing. In today's Guardian there's a story about Jackson Frank and that in itself reminded you of the great blue's singer, Skip James.

The ultimate story of loss you want to read is Exley's Fan's Notes. But, also, you don't want to just read...

Adam Gopnik on the culture of great drinkers:


'Send out for whisky, baby,
send out for gin.
Me and room service, honey,
well, we're living a life of sin.'

Been invited for drinks this Saturday. But drinking with other people seems like a terrible thing, a terrible waste, too.

Hard Rain Falling.

The only criteria that matters right now is: is it real? A time in your life when you can't take much more artifice (which sounds kind of extreme, of course...putting on your old-world hat you're reminded: there always has to be room for duplicity, hypocrisy, masks,...no-one, except a saint, can live naked)

What would we do without italics? What would we be if we didn't stand askew to the world? What would I be if I didn't stand straight, sober? These old jewish roots of the non-jew non-jew stand me well in these times.

A land, unknown

Nothing is changed
but the world is ended.
Green radiance of a streetlamp in the trees
Shines quietly upon here and now
For time is ended.
The quest is ended.

The single star among the myriad stars
Stands steadfast at the end of night
Over love's earthly house.
Distance is ended.

The single grain of infinitesimal dust,
The mote in the lamplight enters the field of vision,
Is seen, is recognized, is known
As the unique one.

K.Raine (mangled, somewhat).

'K' and 'R' are not so far apart; one is more crooked, the other more gentle. There is the terseness of medieval rigour, a Latin uprightness or reserve to 'K'; R, on the other hand, with the slightest modification becomes a southern letter, utterly open, known, the Sanskrit of the heart.

With time we become a land unknown to ourselves. Our faces and hands darken inexplicably. And time will have taken us upstairs, to the unused room, where lie broken and discarded things, scrapbooks of your childhood, documenting not progress but a lazy Sunday morning spent pasting emblems of silver and gold, heraldic badges, in a wide grey book.

With such soft brown eyes a woman looks my way, her life full of failures and half chances, her breast full of sorrows, a word unspoken on her lips. The clothes on the washing line are frozen at their points; a crow-the fastest I've ever seen- crosses my path, cutting through the cold like a pair of mindless scissors. I remember a day from years ago, chequed flares, a floppy head of hair and a sunken heart, when I was the mayor for an hour, the gold chain placed around my neck so heavy that only a horse could have borne it. The heavy weight of clunking gold on our shoulders, like a chain of names from the past. The gold thread on S's sleeve, thin, delicate, patterned; it catches the light, draws it to itself, is like time freed from itself for an hour.

'Intent on one great love, perfect
Requited and for ever
I missed love's everywhere
Small presence, thousand-guised.'

same as it ever was

Words shall never reach you; my silence will, breaking open like a flower under the spell of the winter light. I have conversed with the black sun, she said.

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

---Robert Lowell.

To walk on the road home when the sun is in a different place; to walk with different thoughts in one's mind, sometimes troubled, sometimes not. To approach the road from the east, not the west or to walk down it with other people rather than alone. Everything is the same, everything is different. 

There are no more outward journeys. But in an instant, yes, that close, there was no time either. There are thousands of ways back---even in winter! 

What preparations we make...the lit fires, thick scarves, the extra layers of clothing, wool replacing cotton, the rubbing of hands dry as sticks, stodgy food, tea that scalds the roof of your mouth..and yet, still the cold can't be kept out.

The old place in summer exists-not just in one's memory. It is there, the green that stays green, that is older and truer than all the days passed. It is there like a flower you keep in your top pocket, the brown leaf in your book, an emblem that lasts through the changes, like Zuzu's, or like the two white flowers lasting through the ages.

The colour of the leaf has faded (love dies too), drained in the presence of the black and white pages, but the shape remains essentially the same. Even when we have nothing to say we will have something to say. The red and the green of my country lies open before me: we are bound and free, you & me.

The rains. The wind blows the light away, dancing down the street, kicking the trash as it does so, swirling in a mini whirlwind around the public swimming pool as all the old people wait for the 275. The old people walk like the wounded, less sure of the ground beneath their feet. The wind blows right through us like a ghost. My reflection is dark on the windows and this is an act of kindness on their part. My face, for the world to see, same as it ever was, except for the fine layer of dust that covers it, that makes me look homeless.

Talkin' about a revolution

The starting point of economics is still in the wrong place. It lies in the Platonic world of perfect markets rather than the real world of markets as they actually work in the human and social world.

---Robert Skidelsky.

"Economists have sidelined the once conventional assumption that contracts and markets are complete....market exchanges are endemic to exchanges that are central to the workings of capitalist economies."

---S. Bowles.

At the heart of most economics (though economic theory is, strictly speaking, more open) are the following ideas: economic agents are rational, self-interested individuals. All three assumptions are now under question. These are taken as axioms and are not really refutable (Robbins). 

The result of such self-interested interactions between individuals is the market economy equilibrium. This, it is argued, is the best overall outcome (Pareto efficient) in the sense that it maximizes overall welfare (strictly speaking, it maximizes the satisfaction of preferences or what people want, which is not necessarily the same thing as what's good for them (i.e. their welfare). Also, since the processes of market choices are supposedly free and open they avoid paternalism and encourage liberty (or a particular view of liberty). In addition to this, markets further innovation, risk-taking, and dynamism. 

But here's the obvious thing: markets are not always in equilibrium (and are even subject to periodical crises)...they do not "clear". Secondly, underlying market behaviour is a mixture of all sorts of motives. Thirdly, we live in a world of uncertainty (Keynes, Frank Knight). The old idea of equilibrium ignores money (pure exchange is modeled along the lines of barter even though,as D. Graeber points out, there's very rarely been such a system) and it ignores time and uncertainty (the latter not being the same thing as "risk"). Another way of stating this last point is to recognize that there are imperfect contracts, since some things simply cannot by their nature be foreseen or they may be too costly to work out beforehand and put in the contract. 

The economics of the future, therefore, has to be more pluralistic. More pluralistic as to what drives human beings, more open to the possibility that we are not as self-centred as imagined by the theorists, and more pluralistic insofar as we have a wider set of evaluative standards (i.e what counts as "the good"-both at the individual and social level).

Less Plato, more Aristotle.

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

~~~

Wood: stable/unstable. The fragility of all that lasts, miraculously, through the passage of time.

Once you had a secret love: seeing 
even her photo, a window is flung open.

---after Frank B.

There is a kind of perfect light, more measured and less abrasive, the light from the 1970's, when I died. 

There is a type of light that hung about in the top apartment where old Malika used to live, the Egyptian aunt with one good eye and a gold tooth who adopted you, her husband gone six months of the year. We would sit there, unable to talk, and she would feed us endless sweet-dishes. God, the Egyptians love their sugar! With their tea "2" spoonfuls means "4", "3" means"5". Nothing means what you think. A lesson never learnt.

He would return, uncle Saleh, a small-time fisherman from the lowly backstreets who'd found his way to to the big seas and a big ship. He'd return and still be gone, listening to recitations of the Qur'an on a tape recorder with the windows flung open, the sound of it always more mysterious than the text, and he would wonder to himself: what had happened to his life, how had it been traded away so easily.

If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like that had already befallen others.

---Q.3:140

He would bring us back coins and stamps from exotic places but you don't remember him actually saying a word. His mouth always full of tobacco, his teeth deeply stained. 

Flowers die from too much light or too much shade. 

~~~

There is a kind of light that balances all time. In summer, in the south, the light is constant for many hours and cannot be faulted or dimmed, adding a bright edge to everything. In the north-or conditions approaching it- the light and time flow together. A moment of absence, a drifting cloud, and the land is dark with shadow again. There is a late flaring of the light, the "late sublime" of an old man who sees that everything is beautiful, with its own particular charm. He looks out of his tall window-for how many more winters?-down towards some woman and thinks of his own youth, the windows of opportunity. Even regret can seem beautiful on the right stage, if your head is tilted at the right angle.

Hopper and the 4 o'clock feeling, the third hour in a row of silence between them. 

At Essex, in those black-bricked '60s towers, the great monolithic monuments to the disasters of socialism, the windows were sealed to prevent suicides. 

~~~

A said that when the light fell on her skin it was perfect. "If only I could marry again," he said, clinching his fists, meaning: "if only I could bed her". 

the long road

'How I have wished for you
how I wish for you today.'

The moment when all was possible, flashing like the silver across the room, the golden eastern morning light glinting into your classroom, ancient and open, lying the way a god would place it, the same way it's been for years, the old light on your back the same as it was on some other soul, many years ago. 

There was a long road in the long road, a hidden vein to our lives, unknown, thin as a grey word that you found abandoned on the roadside. "It's okay, you don't have to talk".

~~~

The death of a fly...

A fly rests dead on my windowsill. What of it. A plump raisin fly that will not be raised, that had no colour when alive, no gloss to his being, no myriad eyes, no rainbow, oil-spill film over its body. And now in death it has curled up, as if in some final act of resistance. There is no grave, no mourning or mourners. A death alone like every other experienced by his species you imagine. We share so much material with the fly,says the scientist/mystic. All our circumstances altered by a simple moment of forgetfulness. A fly is a fly and cannot escape this metaphysical fact either. 

There is no "individual" fly, no fly with some rogue, expansive character.

Each fly is like the other, living in this weird association, a life lived in mirrors, near windows, the old sun on its back.The tribal affinity of flies-without the extremism. 

This fly-your fly- is so silent, like the last word. 

Leave a window open and they will always make for the light, aim to be lifted on the currents of the wind straight out of the room. Without the fly there is no summer. 

visions of a nomad

"Scavenged images".

"Colour: the one single element that binds it all."

There is something about Thesiger's eye-or is it just the subjects themselves?-that picks out the most noble features of  human beings. You wonder: is there a unity to this book? And the answer is, of course: yes! There's a kind of hardship, a facing up to a threadbare existence, that etches itself on the faces and the hands of these people. What you don't discern is any kind of inner turmoil or division or anxiety.

Was just saying to Alex the other day: people like us (or of our class) will always be out of sorts, having but only a superficial relation to the world we live in and without any recourse to that alienation taking the form of religious consolation.

A shaykh (in Notting Hill, of all places!) once told me: at least people in the west live according to their own 'lights', their own vision of how things should be. And that's about right. For when all is said and done there is something to be said for reconciling oneself to the times one is living in, to finding beauty and meaning (or at the very minimum a modicum of being at ease) in one's surrounding environment, one's culture. Putting all the cribbing to one side, most people seem fairly pleased with their 'way of life'. Can any other life even be imagined? (Wasn't that Augustine's fear:  that people wouldn't feel any estrangement?)

1914-

The long century of exile and displacement. No person can live without a home, a shelter, without some grounding sense of permanence. Cheever writes of the 'American nomad', searching for love. And it has to be said, to be on the 'open road', to be so restless (a Protestant affliction?), can lead to all sorts of inner anxieties. The 'American woodsman' (Calasso). But what of the nomad then, or a particular type of sufi, since both lack the rituals, the deep comforts one associates with place, regularity, order, conversations stretching across time that only the recorded word affords?

J. Berger: the nomad carries the vertical axis of home with him (perhaps because there was always a unity to his or her life was this possible).

This reminded you of Levinas's wonderful 'Jewish Revelation'..how the Ark was carried on a pole, how the truth itself must never come to rest, or be fixed in any one 'image', as it were. Revelation (or personal revelations) are always openings, but they can never really be possessed, owned. What we know we carry with us, and is carried over.

Qutb, you think, once said there was something primitive about Jazz. Yes, but in a modern way...the way a few notes or themes are always present, how they unfold from the beginning and no matter how much the structure is 'loosened up' by variations, no matter how spontaneous or off-key the drift is, the music always comes home or, to put it another way, the memory of home is always just about present. 

The music starts off loyal to the original, down to each note, every key. Fidelity to the score, the way it is. A few random notes are then thrown in, appear all of a sudden. A change of pace, rhythm. Picks up where it left off. a new current, change of direction. The introduction of dissonance into the scheme of things. Playfulness that spins out, like a Greek god parceling out destinies. The first stirrings of something different. The music opens up slightly, like a spring day, the first day of the year, the sky becoming lighter. unlocked, unwound. Becomes expansive, loose, but retains the dominant theme at its heart. Curves out in ever greater sweeping movements, further and further from the centre. Vectors of hope, the unpredictable swerve.Freer, less burdened by fidelity to repetition and ritual. Freedom breaking out of structure. the dizzying thrill of the unchartered, of foreign lands. Into the blue, open space. 

How to keep hold of what is fundamental, essential, true?

a new day, a new age.

Bob points me to this very interesting passage that starts with:

'In virtually all cases, a man in his late twenties, no matter how bright and precocious, has not yet manifested his full wisdom, simply because he cannot have had sufficient life experience to mature his spirit.'

The big news last year was the publication of a biography of P.Fitzgerald who only started writing in her late fifties (of course the reasons for starting late may be different for men and women). At the fag end of the year there was also mention of Willa Cather, who only started writing at the age of forty (yesterday you picked up two of her books, one for the title alone...My Antonia).

~~~

A scathing attack on TED here 

'But perhaps this is what the Hybrid Age is all about: marketing masquerading as theory, charlatans masquerading as philosophers, a New Age cult masquerading as a university, business masquerading as redemption, slogans masquerading as truths.'

~~~

There was a time when 1999 seemed in the distant future; now it seems to be in the distant past. Each of us is a still point through which time blows, and time will find us out. Absent from ourselves. At Trafalgar Square...Imran has brought three very pretty girls with him, deep brown eyes, lush hair, dressed all pretty in pink and purple scarves and woolly hats.

All this talk of the future seems empty; the past, on the other hand, is a different country, rich and with a varied texture. And the feeling, too, that the past is given its poignancy and intensity because it is a distant reflection of the 'absolute past', that silence from which the first note tears itself away. 

The first day of the year is always a stepping back into that silence.  

The early morning discussion with the secretaries: so many years have flown by. What is left of anyone? A name, a picture on the wall (if they're lucky). Where is Jinnah now? And Sir Syed?When you're gone from here, Khalid, all they'll say is: "Yes, there was someone here, we think, by the name of KM."

Jesus, it's going to be one of those years!

~~~

Good news: it appears that Danilo Kis (Lea's recommendation) has made it. Abdul, bless his soul, has brought it back with him after a three day flight from London. At his brother's wedding last night we stuffed our faces with steaming hot pilau, tender mutton, moist chicken tikka, plum chutney, fresh curd, followed by the most perfect carrot and milk sweet dish. The wedding halls ("banquet halls") are out there in the outskirts, huge white buildings with glaring neon pink and parrot-green lights, large empty driveways. Something like you imagine Vegas to have once been like. And of course, the analogy is not lost on you: marriage: the biggest gamble of all. 

    

the poet against the world

The poet stands to lose everything.

The poet against the world, against theory, law and history; not against history, but one step ahead of it. She is not for or against "people", but is for this particular person. 

In the world we know, or think we know,the meaning of words like 'friendship' and 'absence' somehow gets lost in translation, which is another way of saying when the distance between two people grows there is only silence. But when we dream, there is another silence, full of understanding...

Every generalization is an image that the poet will break, only to create another, more transient one, like a shape-shifting fire or the moon's light passing over high tree tops. 

'And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling,..' 
--DFW

I can't read writing like this, can't stand the idea of being swept away by words. The false note of lyricism grates on your nerves and in the final analysis it comes across as the writing of a precocious, self-obsessed kid. 

Something is drawing you to give up on reading altogether. There's nothing worse than the fake intelligence of writer and reader.  

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

The poet is against the world but he is for the world as well, at least for a different world that exists not just in the hopes of a generation or in an individual's imagination. He is 'for' the world that has always existed, the acts of kindness, generosity, the restraint and the enlarged vision, the wider sympathies that prevent the world from collapsing into pure nothingness. 

War, you feel, is not just the disruption of 'experience'; it is the very antithesis of it. Which is why it must be refashioned years later into a story, a poem, a film. Collective cultural memory, institutions of all shapes and sizes, and individual testaments will do their best to reconstitute and refashion a narrative, tie the threads together, make sense of the great trenches in our minds, eke out some sense, fathom some line of causality, of sin or loss or frailty or heroism against the familiar backdrop of the human condition.

This frenzied lust for blood must form no part of our nature, must say nothing about Man (and in particular, about man).

Lest we forget. Lest we forget what?

the inessential

Two films, both entertaining , but both lacking something.  McCabe and The Long Goodbye. As with the fiction, which you don't think you can read any more unless it really gets down to the bone, there's a limit to your enthusiasm for films. Larry's Party, for example. Enough writerly material to keep you going but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself: so what? 

You want a book or a film to illuminate some part of your life, bring half-understood things out of the shadows or make you see something in a new light. What you don't want to see is acting, or writing, or "ideas" or any attempt to seem profound. This is, of course, very much an age thing since with time it is harder to tolerate bullshit. Eventually, reality will catch up with you, no matter how many evasions. 

Is there a way in modern life to reach truth or goodness without suffering?

If you cannot see beauty or truth in one's life do you inevitably have to fall back on the mind, the imagination? An imagined beauty? Is art, then, just a high-brow mirror image of popular culture's familiar escape routes? 

McCabe: the west as it really was: muddy, cold, a shambles, full of stupidity, pettiness, made up of village bumpkins, whores, gamblers, goofs, tricksters, dealers and hustlers; a veritable Russian drama without the aristocrats.

Talking of Russia...Ivan's XTC sounded like a great story but the acting is so hammy, so awful that you're tempted to give up on it. If you don't want to see acting you equally don't want to see the lack of any acting! And yet, there was something that drew you in. 

Which leaves you with Bergman's Smiles and Frances Ha.

Much is being made of the renaissance of television with series like Breaking Bad, the Wire, the Sopranos, Sherlock, the Killing...all of which are very popular amongst a certain class here. With life and work catching up on you it's simply impossible to indulge in such luxuries. Are you becoming a Benthamite? Do you want to calculate the precise scale of pleasures from a book, the opportunity costs? No, it's not that, but at a certain age you have to work out-but not too tightly- what's essential and what's secondary. At this stage in your life you don't want to just read about goodness.

The Swimmer

Time is an unbroken line, an infinitely outward extending line. We race with one another, headlong into it, aware that the past can never be retrieved, or never consciously brought back from the depths. All time does is flow, taking us with it. Time as the relentless subtractor. In other words. Time is death, the Fall, quick or slow, never to be redeemed.

But what if, opposed to this modern view, time were circular, always bringing us back? What if time is a condition of life itself, an unending series of possibilities opening up before us? Each birth is a rose against the thorn of time. Insofar as we are modern we have lost the sense (or value) of the timeless and the older, cyclical views of time themselves appear dated. Time marches on (at war with who?), and all we have is this sense that it is taking us away from who we really are-not leading us to a clearer or more complete image of ourselves. Time is a broken mirror. 

Watched The Swimmer again yesterday with some friends (in one of the auditoriums). For Cheever everything is about the moral quality of the light. In the film we see Neddy himself becoming darker with time. In the end he doesn't even have the strength to haul himself out of the pool; he treads heavily, his face bowed down, broken, defeated by the realization that the life he thought he had was all a pretence, a show, a false coin. At the beginning he is all smiles, the symbol of youth, vigour, freshness (he even finds a dark cloud beautiful) but by the end he is almost like a wounded beast, struggling for all his worth for some comfort, solace, some way back "home"... 

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.

Home is the invisible axis, the still point of the heart from which all time is measured. The warmth fades from his body, slips from his hands. The green translucent waters of childhood are now replaced by the fallen brown leaves of autumn. Somehow the idea comes to him that all the swimming pools, the moments of his life, are connected as if really just parts of one river-and that connection goes by the name of his wife, Lucinda. Along the way he his friends will line the banks of this great river; he is noble, different, grand. The depth of life is found in the fact that there are no second chances, that history doesn't always lead us forwards. 

This is it. You had your chance at the good life and you blew it. The light is pure and very elegiac. I see it now, as if it was before my very face. The eighties, the nineties..there are no words for time gone, no matter how much you struggle; the imperfections absolved by summer light or simply forgotten, make their way back, press up against your cheek.

You stand in a line in your forest green blazer, your dark grey flannel trousers, counting the money with one hand in your pocket. You sit slouched on a plastic table, your head heavy with sleep, waiting...eight, ten hours for a flight out of here...when will this journey end? 

There is no-one serious left. The world is full of politics, shallow schemers, reality shows. Late at night the dark winds seem to be lost and there are so many re-runs on television that one has lost the sense of what's "live" and what's recorded. The wide net, all this casting out of words into those empty lives. Where are those subterranean waters that will take me back to the centre? Where is that summer's day when I shot a gun and hit the target and Andrew O'Brien said, exasperated, "beginner's luck!"?

Why do we think luck will stick with us, drag us with it to safe waters? For what is given us in the beginning can be lost, and only a late ace can turn the hand.  

the suburbs

There is a small brick station, lost, blind behind the leafy trees. If you walk hurriedly by it on a blustery Monday morning you might mistake it for a post office or a 1930's municipal building in a state of disuse or disrepair. There are so many stations like that, half in the countryside, linked to the city like an open wound. One day you will get on the central in the dark and stop at every station, walk up the stairs into the light and look at all those small worlds I'm not a part of.

The spiritual history of the suburbs: ice-cram vans prowling on empty summer roads, lemonade and ice clinking in tall glasses, cricket on the radio,  the dull aftermath after Wimbledon, the early arrival of a brief September light enough to chill us in the shade, remind us that all this cannot last. The grass growing thicker by the hour, the last war veterans sunning themselves, their facial expressions having been fixed many years ago, cats and dogs deep in their dreamworld, a young girl just breaking out of hers.

At night a drunk utters his first coherent words of the day, a silver-backed fox slinks through the broken wooden fences out into the sloping gardens and fields, the perfume of the flowers brushing against her, past the constant roaring drum of the motorway traffic. The last song is playing at the straggling party down the street, the plates heaped up next to the remains of the barbecued meat and fish, the bones, the toothpicks, the stained paper tissues that had looked so pure when tightly packed together, the clocks that have croaked, the exhausted, childish giggling, the bodies loosened, hands autonomous of the mind-and it is still not clear at this hour who will sleep with who.

"S", who has worked hard to get here, looks out of his bedroom window in partial disgust at what he sees below him. He looks out at them as would his ancestors, ancient Russian Jews, with great pity and remorse. "Is this a life?" He feels the warmth of the presence of his wife and children sleeping cozily behind his back in a parallel world.

In winter the suburb is Japanese. It is quiet and formal...The last true rituals are played out, the big metaphysical questions worked out in the tawdry details of wrong turnings,  chances that have slipped by. How did I end up like this, my hands so unsure? The summer of my childhood, it seems like a minute ago, less...these patterns, these arrangements, stitched together..what do they all mean? Here we are, a name on a map nobody wants to read. The old gods, Pan-Shiva, weigh down on us like the spirit of the dark forest. You wait, each day, for the threshold, for some great turning point in your life, an event that will draw a line under your past. Jesus-Christ.

In the late afternoon the tinkling sound on the rail tracks like the jangling of keys, the train that passes us by, floats, curves way out from the ghost station, our abandoned little frontier outpost, this temple to some forgotten god. No-one gets off, no-one gets on. We have no idea of the journeys other people make, their easy-going accommodation with the world and with risk.

My life, folded like a Japanese flower, simple and ornate,already a thing of the past.

(Lines from John Burnside. Film: The Swimmer)

~~~

The short story is a gem but the film, well, now, that's another story. As with John Huston's The Dead the film version outdoes the short story in darkness, strangeness. It's the perfect summer day, but already there is a dark cloud up above, heading this way... 

 There was this line that goes: the Red Man's values were expressed in the way he lived; and they were made up of relationships with other people and with his home, his land.

 Great store is set-and rightly so-in the freewheeling individual, the man or woman who resists all definition. But there can be no 'I' without a 'we' or even a 'Thou'. As time rolls on we begin to understand that not all determinations are constricting, that freedom lies in another direction, one less hostile to what faces you. It is wrong, you think, to say there is no 'east', no 'west'. But there will always be a way out, moments when the silver hand of the compass points north, and you orient yourself, even while standing in the very same spot, to another way of thinking, another set of themes.

Is there a word, a line, that will take me back to myself?

Yesterday, as the last light of the day began to flare, you stood in the open talking to a friend and the light all around you delineated every object with a rare precision. Only we remain unknown to ourselves. This great, clear light could have been the light from any northern country and for a moment the world seemed awash, cleansed with its brilliance, our very lives halted the way one halts when seeing a stray photograph amongst all the familiar ones. A crow looks down on us and is amazed by the strangeness of the fact that there are so many blank, wild spaces in the lives of human beings, that after all these centuries of life on earth men and women would be so affected by the changing quality of light.

Our faces, half in shadow, all the losses remembered. A trace of music can still fascinate, hold us. Nothing will change, the human condition an unbreakable thread. But none of us will be around to see it all. There is no set of sets, no comprehensive view, no stepping out into radiant sunlit meadows, only one person gliding into the exact same role as the one who has departed, taking up the fallen robe.