the things we couldn't say

There are things we couldn't say. We have words for such occasions as well. There are things we must not say, even if the heart speaks them.

One thinks of the medieval world as a world of correspondences, a world in which everything stands for something else. The metaphysical/shamanistic/romantic mind cannot allow anything to exist on its own, a name without essence.

For some the history of the world is this coming to see clearly. The great desire to stand or walk alone in the world, without the gaze of the other (Other), like Rousseau's first man who moves from heath to city, shivering in his loneliness, with only a dull remembrance of the former colours, the multivalent unity of thought.

Through time what survives? The most fundamental conditions of life and our responses to them. Our most fundamental gestures, when all has been said and done, retain the quality of something archaic and true, a central strain to our being that we cling on to through the vicissitudes of time.

In the light of experience. Something is furthered by modernity's rejection of the medieval world. The simple piety of ordinary believers will transform itself and flow, when religious sensibilities ebb, into a quiet and calm appreciation of an ordinary life. A frail, transient happiness.

And yet, and yet, without a sense of being anchored in a meaningful world the imagination will take us to strange lands, without a readable map. There will be no legitimation from the 'object' of our love, only the love itself which transfers value onto what comes within its reach. And so it is, we blow hot and cold, never sure of what will last and what will fall. In our hearts a part of us wishes it just so. Finally, a human being will find himself in the gaze of another human being and find his peace in the world and that will suffice. But there is another part of us which hasn't completely forgotten and it rejects any sense of 'home' or conformity, reconciliation.

The great paradox of the modern age is, as Hannah A saw, the more we believe life on earth is our only destiny, the more we desire to escape it, the more alienated we feel. And the great disasters of the last century..what were they but an attempt to build a kind of heaven on earth?

~~~

Why do those in academia find it so hard to speak honestly, plainly? No doubt part of the problem is that academics are by temperament usually withdrawn from society in the first place (that is what drew them to academia, after all). But it is also that the emphasis on specialization, on technical and arcane language, contributes to the obfuscation. They write for one another and the structure of the Ph.D programme, as well as the nature of publishing, results in a very narrow measure of communication. It is also the case that the sheer number of people writing and thinking has the unfortunate consequence of people repeating truths that were well understood in a previous generation in but a more fragmentary fashion. In the rarefied air of academia there can only be marginal contributions to an already vast accumulation of knowledge with the result that it is rare for any one academic-unless she is a genius- to grasp something that even bears a minimal resemblance to the notion of "the discipline" as a whole.

It is impossible to keep abreast of all the developments in one's area, let alone have anything but a rudimentary understanding of the historical development of ideas in the field. There may be some vague notion of "the classics" -things you think you know but haven't actually read- but by and large history is deemed to be of very little importance. One finds oneself on the top of a mountain, not knowing how one got there or who came before, and all that is left is for you to do is find your own little space into which you can place you little tattered flag. You have a brief and dim understanding that there are other mountains "out there" but since they don't alter your own bearings they can safely be ignored.

And so it is we move about in life, imagining ourselves to have found some partial truth, congratulating ourselves on our new-won freedom from dogma, tradition, superstition, myth, looking down at the flatlanders and their erroneous ways. Only we have taken up the challenge of living in fragmentary times, nay, of even recognizing that time is fragmentary. We latecomers stand tall and wonder why it's so very cold.

perfect sentences

I sometimes think about the perfect sentence. It mustn't be too long and typically it must express something profound. But what makes it perfect is the matching of the economy of style with the idea, half guessed at, intuited. It must sound right, the timing, as in life, being nearly everything. (Any suggestions are more than welcome).

You might well ask: does where the line come in make any difference? Probably not. The line startles with its originality, its pitch perfect sense.

Some candidates:

This lacks brevity but has the momentum and lightness of a forward dream:

'He moved through the fields like a sleepwalker, lost in thought, waving his cane high in the air, following his star, which he would lose amid the sunflowers, only to find it again at the edge of the field—on his greasy black frock coat.'

Or this:

'Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before'

Or, more recently, this:

'Clocks struck widely different hours'.

There are philosophical lines-"pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality" and there are poetic fragments as well. Would chose something from K. Irby or this, from another J. B. 

'The flower's pollen
is older than the mountains.'

Dead Poets Society

Pierre has this interesting (and distressing) piece here

There is some ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry but is there also one between religion and poetry? Aren't they on the same side? I would love to read commentaries of the surah on the poets in the Qur'an but from the translations I have it seems that poetry is viewed in the same negative light. Which is amazing, really, given how it has flourished in many Muslim societies (which is just another way of saying that poetry is a universal mode of expression.

So, what is it about poetry that is so dangerous? And here I feel that even in the attempts to suppress it there is a secret nod to the power of the word. This stands in stark contrast to those who think that words are fundamentally incapable of expressing human truths. There is a strain of thought that maintains that all that is true or beautiful is "inward" and not something that can take on bodily or material form. The "divine spark," as it were, radiates with an inner brilliance but is unknown in, or distorted by, the world. The word and the world will always be shadows, poor imitations of the genuine thing. In one way the ideal is the philosopher who sits alone with his thoughts, untroubled by other people, the body (which is to say time) but also disenchanted. Is there a type of thought that recognizes the existence of time (Lowith)? And isn't poetry one manifestation of it?

~~~

Do you know what, little one?

"Yes," she said, with feigned sense of inevitability..."I love you more than worms can say"

That's right, yo got it, more than words.

~~~

"The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentially of holding with words the totality of human experience-everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot b hostile to man."

---John Berger.

And you wonder, is that poetry's magical hold on us: our ability to be dazzled by words? Is that why it is seen as competing with religion? Or is it because poetry can be in love with itself, its own sound, and not the truth? Anything can be said if it sounds right. Poetry is a digression, a distortion, a refraction and a fraction of what is true?

the voice of a woman

Under American women’s influence, he [Henry James] insisted, language risks becoming a ‘generalised mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine’; it will sound like ‘the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog’. 

---Mary Beard, writing in London Review of Books.

The whole article can be viewed here.

Of course, everyone is partial to a particular kind of voice but this is something beyond mere preferences or cultural familiarity; this is, instead, about power and marginalization. 

One way in which it manifests itself is class: one has to speak in the right way or tell the official stories to be heard. But that is only one way. The elephant in the room in this case is gender.  The only acceptable voice is a sexy one (Mariella) or a passive, docile one.  So, think for a moment about how M.F. or Joan Bakewell are often described: "the thinking man's bit of crumpet".

What underlies it all? Hard to say. Could it-at least in part-be related to the idea of autonomy? If the ideal is to be alone with one's thoughts or to act in a way  unimpeded by other people, then being talked to or talked back to seems extremely unpleasant. Other people are a hindrance, a nuisance.  Silence and reticence, quiet contemplation and stillness are promoted over chattiness as a way of being deep (and by temperament or learning you gravitate to that view yourself).  But is there another way of talking, one that is more open and genuinely conversational, a quick wittedness, a measured intelligence that knows the right words, the appropriate time for silence, humour, questions?

All of a sudden I am made aware of how awkward (this) writing (this) is because it is, essentially, addressed to myself. 

a time will come...

A time will come when you realize how stupid you are," she said.

Sorry, that time has already come and gone. 

]
]
...[
[break]
[
[...]
me.

~~~

The light swerves, reverses. The moon is high, pale blue in its pale blue sky, late in the afternoon, or the fag end of the morning. The moon's time has come and gone, and is all the more fragile for it, lacking any substantiality of its own, on the edge, always borrowing light from others: "hey, excuse me, have you got a light?..."could you spare a dime?"

The light swings, reverses. March is like October, at equal distance from the small turning point. Invisible birds chirp in their high trees, confused by the light which is of the wrong intensity for this time of the day.

Two people can exist at the same time but really be from two different time periods. Something of their lives overlaps...one steps into the circle of the other and sees himself more clearly.In a time to come there will be no circles, only a point. 

The same fundamental human gestures survive after all this time. There are minor modifications and cultural variations but what was once human always remains so.

The light swerves, reverses. Arrangements are made; you re-adjust your clothes, brush your hair, make yourself presentable. The money is on the table. Money doesn't matter. You've kept a small five pence piece (not quite a dime) in your pocket to remind you of the future time. How we humans invest meaning in the smallest of things! This line from Holub, from memory: a human being, crouched near a sofa, trying to retrieve with a spoon a pea which he will never eat. 

The small weight, the imbalance in your life, the thin margins of chance in which things are decided. 

~~~

little r heard the call of the muezzin. "Is that God speaking?" 
No, I replied. Quite the opposite. It's a maulvi.

"What is he saying, then?"

He is asking people to come and pray.

"But I've never seen you pray"

I pray in my heart. You can't always see everything that exists.

time of the end

"We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration."

---Thomas Merton.

~~~

Ecoute, apprendras-tu à m'écouter de loin,
Il s'agit de pencher le coeur plus que l'oreille,
Tu trouveras en toi des ponts et des chemins
Pour venir jusqu'à moi qui regarde et qui veille.

---jules.

~~~

I find myself,
lost again.
Twice I saw you in a dream.In one you slipped me a piece of paper
that fell to the ground like the autumn leaves. On it you wrote:
]
]
...[
[break]
[
[...]
for
me.

Why are your words like winter, why do you veil your face? If we meet it is like this, you say, in a dream or not at all, or like the dead on the battlefield, after the war is over and our blood has mingled and the flowers can dream of stars again. How can we forget our time they say to one another...C'etait le temps du soleil. And now? And now we only hold smoke in our hands.

'Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.'

'I lower my eyes, huddle. Everything in me and on me hangs down like grey veils..I'm old, I sit and say nothing.'

'They say to me: "Philosophy!" Yet the death that comes before times cancels the later one.'

---Robert Walser.

~~~

We would walk and then dart into a museum, a gallery, a bookshop, small or large, to find shelter, perhaps the only kind available nowadays. Apart from home, of course. That goes without saying. 

To join the groups mulling around in the lushly restored National or to have eye and mind glance over the well-creased spines of the books in a second-hand basement shop amounts to the same thing, really: invisibility, the desire to lose oneself. 

There is no-one to talk to and there is nothing to say. Not that one strives to fail. It's just that the whole notion of success seems suspect. What kind of witness do we want is the question, I suppose.

As a Muslim one has to "bear witness" to (God's) reality. That seems like an incredible thing if you think about it.  

For the last three days I have dreamt of being in London. Someone once said, on escaping from a Gulag: the whole of Russia is one gigantic Gulag. There are prisons within the prison. But if that is true it is also the case that there are brightly lit rooms, unexplored, within the rooms.

~~~

Something as simple as buying a ticket. Floating in a train against the flow of traffic, the warmth of the light in the carriage amplified by the glass. A book, a pencil, a cup of coffee. Holes in your shoes, your hair uncombed and wild. The district line. It has to be. You cut through leafy suburbs where marriages are breaking up, over canals and bridges, looking down to spot some people who have wisely and permanently decided to live offshore. You feel at ease in your well-worn clothes. Have many deep thoughts-which you keep all to yourself. Where are you going? It doesn't matter. Find the stop that is yours, wait for the doors, and before the announcement walk back into time...  

Time, again.

'Ruins are rather touching. Before the residues of noble things our pensive, sensitive inward selves involuntarily bow. The remnants of what was once distinguished, refined,and brilliant infuse us with compassion, but simultaneously also with respect.'

---Robert Walser.

'Far from looking on their works with despair, we join sightseeing tours and queue to gawp at their artefacts at the British Museum: because right now it's we who are winning, we are alive and they are not. We gloat. We preserve ruins because they tell us that we are not yet, for all our idiocies, ruins ourselves.'

---Jack Robinson.

Leisure, amusement, commerce, sporting recreation, industry, faith and religion, family and tradition, all broken and felled by time. There is something about seeing the remnants of human civilisation like this. These pictures could have been stills from a film, so familiar are they. Like something from Planet of the Apes or a post-apocalyptic future that we imagine and, strangely, want to imagine. 

There's this line...after the draining away of meaning from the cosmos and before Christ man found himself utterly alone. Here, perhaps, there's something else: the world, life and nature return to being what they were before human beings made their mark.We delight in seeing these traces of ourselves, conjuring up images of a family crowded around the television set, munching savouries during the advertisements, knowing full well that none of it will last, knowing full well that the coming silence was already pre-figured in the wide empty spaces between man and man, man and woman. Already our hearts were abandoned.

We loved to look at old photographs, name names, try and recall something funny an old and now deceased uncle once said. Our fingers rest on a face and we remember. A line,a quip, a gesture is all that remains. Or we recall a dead colleague or one who has simply decided he's had enough and had to move to another city or country. We wonder about those lives that go on, those lives that because they go on elsewhere and are far removed from us are really like a death to us. We ask ourselves, not very seriously: where have all those people gone? What are they now? Will anyone say the same about us?

This is not just about the future; it is about the past. We want to look back, picture the refuge we constructed for ourselves against the storm, remember how it used to be. 

We lived on the surface of this planet. We lived on the surface. And now it reclaims us and all we ever built. Maybe it was because we built against it in the first place that we're undone now? That was the huge gamble: linearity...stepping outside the cycles of life. 

Every story must begin in August.

Millions of years pass, row upon row, until a particular clown is thrown up. And then he or she falls, disappears, trips on his own laces or is shot or catches some rare virus or...the list is endless. The refinement of human manners undone in an instant; all that striving in harsh climates, toiling away under the sun just to produce the clown who fritters away his inheritance whilst watching a Saturday matinee. 

'I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.'

---W.B. Yeats.

What a look there is on the morning face in the mirror, the defeated look ravaged by time and uncertainty, the world-weary sagging flesh, the deeply creased brow, the eyes narrowed down by too much light and lack of sleep, the surface blemishes, speckled, dappled, joining like spilt ink into lost continents of the imagination. The hair greying, thinning; the powdered cheeks deathly grey, the eyes steadfast in their longing for solace, glory, insight. The heart, too, full of rumours of its own demise, the mouth and jaw now well set after so many years, the lips formed by sparse words and silence. Ears that like the hands fail to grasp everything, the mumbled words re-arranged somewhere in the deep synapses of the mind. The stylishness of the mind frail, tattered, snagged on the past, out of tune with the notes of the shape-shifting world. Faithful neck, that has supported the possibility of the right kind of glance for so long, a resolute and guarded secret stance that doesn't stoop before power or fame, the rare strain of uprightness flaring like the long light on a green summer's evening. Beneath it all, you imagine a true face, the constant heart that the child once possessed, the child whose only wish was for five more minutes of sleep, granted like grace, for no apparent reason. 

the open work

By  sheer chance Bob comes up with these lines from some book:

'What we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading. Over the years my experiences, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps re-shelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library; my words and my world - except for a few constant landmarks - are never one and the same...'

Ties in directly with what I'm trying to write on.

T.S. Eliot: the present alters the past (more or less). Each new person doesn't just add to what is possible, isn't just a new direction or angle introduced into the world; he or she also alters the way in which the past is understood, completed, furthered, taken up and carried forward. In the light of modern experience a classic (or anything of value) gets the chance to express itself in another way. 

One can't but help think of the creation/revelation connection. Levinas: Revelation isn't complete because each new person is in some sense part of it. 

One of Bob's recommendations was a wonderful CD: Bach/Coltrane. And it makes you wonder: does Coltrane bring something out in Bach that was only latent, the way, say, the crucifix only found its people in later centuries? The moment of creation/revelation is dark, concentrated with meaning (like the first calligraphy, Kufic..only later becoming expansive, clearer).

Aside: of course, Taha was killed for suggesting something similar: the second revelation...

How can one moment (perhaps one moment in the future) redeem or sour the past? As if to say, the final moment changes all that has passed before? Or the first moment, structuring all others.

John O'Neill's example-which is a point against utilitarianism or, rather, its peculiar notion of time ("additive separability" we say in economonese).

Couple 1. Unhappy, unhappy, unhappy, unhappy and then, finally, on the last day they make up and are happy.

Couple 2: Happy, happy, happy, happy and then, finally, on the last day they quarrel and are unhappy.

If one were to simply tot up the levels of "happiness" and "unhappiness" on each day it would appear that the sum for couple 2 is greater (ignoring discounting). But, many people would reasonably think that couple 1 had the better life. Why is that? Is it because we see things or want to see them in a narrative unity? The last moment counts because it gives structure to the other moments (Kahneman's peak effect), changes the way in which we understand them.

This relates, I think, to Iris M's discussion of 're-vision'.

~~~

I read her words and it seemed they were for me, as if I'd always known her; now those very same words seem to be for everyone and it is as if I'd never known her. At he beginning and end of a book there are very often blank pages. I'd always wondered about that-until now.

the neglected massacres

The neglected massacres of Christendom and Islam. A misreading, or a change of focus, scratch that (but don't erase it): The neglected masses of Christendom and Islam.

'...and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination.'

We see the evil and violence in other people to deflect it from ourselves. But it goes unnoticed-except by the fanatics-that America's Great Wars on the Americas, or on the slanty-eyed brown people dazed by opium or centuries of laziness, has wreaked havoc, made the last century coarse with spittle and a spiked imagination. 

The violence of Empire, the nation, tribe, ethnicity, father, husband...the terrified heart's love of tyranny, order. Satan is the ape of God. If evil is a falling away from the good it is also an inversion of it. 

In fifteen seconds two cities are obliterated, a cloud of white ash falls silently on the playground. A medieval scholar is dragged out to explicate the nuances of just war theory while utilitarians in their bunkers cast their gaze on an impersonal future of maximal goodness. A drunken poet recaptures the moral feeling but no-one knows how all this came to pass. At precisely that moment a Japanese man reads a book on the trenches, a throwaway line about how true friendship is found at the end of suffering. But he has not time to hand this on, his thoughts and the very words of the book fused together in that hot grey flash of eternity that hounds the ghosts from their rich pickings.

In the dark continent-dark from our willed ignorance-millions are killed, cleansed, mutilated, raped, burnt and still we complain: there isn't enough caramel in the macchiato. There was something missing, the sweetness not quite right. The 'image of Man', Jonas would say. Is what, precisely? Bach through the centuries, the beast through the millennia.

Our star, wild and unknown, unprotected, sinks back into the night, hoping to avoid everyone's gaze and, like a neglected child, stay in its dark corner.

I wanted to be free

Dora was not an easy read and I'm a bit relieved to have come through it. At the heart of it is a profound sadness but in the second half of the book it isn't at the forefront-perhaps mercifully so. Today I simply want words to wash over me, find something that doesn't trouble me, see what light can do.

I picked up Hass's book with that very title. Beautifully produced, and once again I'm wondering if beauty, art, poetry, friendship and love can redeem the sordid mess, bring a hint of sweetness to it, if not order. Sometimes one has to turn one's face away, aghast.

Today, more than anything, I wanted to be free from any deep thoughts, any reflection. Such a luxury is rarely afforded one nowadays and yet the other extreme-of plunging into the shallowness of the world head first- has never really been an option. Not out of choice, I daresay, but because my temperament and upbringing forbids it. And yet, without God what seriousness can there be? Are you just a clown after all, a high-minded clown?

"Why can't you see God?"

Little r asked: "Is He dead?" (all her references being to Mufasa and the Lion King).

"No, He is alive in heaven"

"Yes, he is watching over us like all the Great Kings".

The 'Harlequin speech' of the crazy on the street corners, the speechlessness of the tall flowers in the fields. Nothing is more important than keeping straight (Thomas Moore?). Down a road I know so well, comfort in the only life I knew. I'm no scholar and my words fall on empty ground. I lower my voice, trying to recall a dream from last night. A list, a set of lists. Books or colours piled up, about to topple, some secret arrangement. The patchwork heart.

Can you still make me out...are you still the same? We become invisible to ourselves with time. What I caught was a snowflake in my hand. Brought it inside and kept it in a ceramic bowl near the gas heater. There are many distances, but none like memory, none like love.

(words by Jules S.) 

the factory

There is something haunting about the writing of Derek Raymond. I suppose it has something to do with my living in a very old house and being frightened as a child by the long, dark winter nights, and by The Hammer House of Horror and Tales of the Unexpected.

Much is made of the grittiness of the factory novels-and rightly so. But what astounds you is the gentleness, the occasional lyricism and the attempt to speak with a human voice, to find it in the words of the dead themselves. 

Here he's talking about the dropouts, the homeless, the nobodys in eighties London...

'In the day you could see them,white, faded,and stained after such nights in winter...the thin, crazy faces, strange noses, eyes, hands rendered noble by madness and hunger...later, the flat, sullen grief of their meaningless statements'

That, for me, contains a brilliant line and makes me think just how false the hands of academics are!

And, as always, underlying the novels is the idea of an old England, some older and more fundamental sense of decency, moral norms, restraint that are sidelined and ridiculed in the brash new world of Thatcher's dark nightmare. 

then there's...

'..love is nothing but a thin remembrance, a deferred loss...All defeat, all battlefields are the same. Napoleon after Jena, even Wellington after Waterloo, finally learned how to weep over the waste of trust, over faith in death lying where it fell, the lazy eyes, the broken arms and the stink of last meals bursting open for the rats into fresh, uncaring air, birds, flies, sun settling...'

But there's also another kind of oldness...

There are certain types, characters, that have been with us since the beginning of human history: the wolves in the pack, the irredeemably evil, the outcasts who are recognised only by their cold and lifeless eyes. This primordial chaos in man's heart-and one has only to state the fact to be astonished: most of the violence and evil in the world is done by men- is not something one can reflect on or, perhaps more disturbingly, eradicate. One would like to think it some ancient vestige or trace of our animal-nature carried over all these hundreds of thousands of years and nothing more-an old scar and not something that is lodged permanently in our being, as if to say: we can't take too much reality, haven't got the right frame of mind to do so.

There is also this sense of the fatal moment, when paths cross and how no-one can avoid that. There is no mystery to solve since the bleakness of the human condition has no permanent answer in this life. There is no well-marked door that leads to innocence, no white hand that will reach down and wipe clean the blemishes. There is only this idea: keep your head down, get out of the way.

But there are moments of stillness, repose, of shelter from the fierceness of the storm, the vast incomprehensible sorrow...

'Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

'a great builder of bridges in space'

If I could, I'd build a bridge made of nothing, nothing but my dreams. It wouldn't reach anywhere in particular but it wouldn't be here; a direction, maybe, something like north or north by NW. And I would come to love everything I've passed over, everything I've missed.

'One day Earth will be
just a blind space turning'
and I the last man with sight
am blinded by you.

'One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others'
Angina days are like a foreign word on my lips.

'The drowned man seeks the song
that shaped him long ago'

Jules. S.
~~~

Book. Coffee. Book. Light. Shade. Words arranged in lines, a cloud over my head, and the waves a miniature scrawl of confusion.

Book. Green apple. Book. Sound. Silence. Words fall from the page, the night stands over my head, and the waves lap and bounce like an unrestrained dog at my feet.

~~~

On the plane back a man in a large black hat chats up the woman next to him. He has haggard look on his face and can barely stand up. She complains. The liberals on the plane have no sympathy for her. The mullahs want the man thrown off. The plane is divided. "What do you do?"
"I'm a housewife"
"Strange, because you look like a servant to me"

A bald man in a tight three-piece grey suit then proceeds to punch the man in the hat. The hat, miraculously, stays on his head. The son now gets up. Others restrain him, holding his wrists down. This is a question of honour. Up in the air there are no bridges between people except for our bloodlines. We watch like villagers viewing a wrestling match, our in-flight entertainment having been cancelled. The real wretchedness of human beings is a poor substitute. Everyone's at everyone else's throat. The low-level bickering continues, the insults continue to fly. Suddenly, I'm homesick for the earth.

Time and the other

 'The western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a asocial and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.'

---C. Geertz.

~~~

The strangeness of the frontier, where the past is an utter blank, a dark room devoid of any memories or mirrors. One can only look forward and see time hurtling towards one. In the evening of the heart even a small light looks like a sun. 

the words we have lost

'There are days when
time’s lead feet do damage,
when the sea resembles
the tear of a melancholic god,
the desert a scab
on the ribs of the land,
& the sun a shower of coals.
Days when hope
crosses her arms.

But there are days
when time is just a grin
that flies away,
days when I crave
to mix the rainbow’s every color
on a pallet,
fashion a brush from a feathered cloud
to paint a world without an axis but with several poles
& throw dice with the cardinal corners.'

~~~

There are words we will never hear, as immobile as stones, rooted to one place for all their lives. There are others that are destined to cross the seas, be translated, lovingly recorded, contested, shortened, elaborated upon, analyzed.  Further, books will be written in support of (or against) them; chairs will be set up, careers made or broken on the splinter of a sentence. Eyes will be ruined, the glass will become  more opaque, its density and curvature warping to a unique calibration, the dust will inch its way into the cracks and our hair become thinner, greyer and still the secret of those words will carry on. Some words will enter the world stage, but others will become obsolete like an old love in one's heart, reduced to the memory of a moment of infatuation on a Monday morning.

The poet, like the nomad, lives in time. Most likely neither his words nor his heart will become a legend, or part of the folklore repeated by children and the old ones.  

By chance,  a fragment of what I say makes it to her before she closes the window. I slip into the cold country of her heart, my temporary visa nearly expired, my migratory impulses dashed, to underscore the point.

~~~

What existed in the inland for all those centuries? The dry heart, the set routines, unchanging like the waves that lap the shore. The millions of waves every year, each the same and yet different,  and the tens of millions of years that pass before someone speaks a single word. 

How did they navigate the seas in the old days, before technology had extended its hand? Through songs and the stars,  the placement of each word as fixed as the star, the story remembered off by heart, the mystical union of what passes on earth with that which remains imperishable.

Pearls are substituted by oil and words by the flash of a light across a screen. Interest peaked and waned, the sap in the trees settles, the heart regains its constancy. Our lives, a brief moment in the open, a boat that forgot to count the waves but remembered the words we have lost.

the view from nowhere

Each time there is something in my silence that you note, that breaks you. It adds another feature to my face, as I change inwardly, like a statue's eyes, gazing outwards and backwards at the same time, the heart balanced precariously.

The shape of the unmade bed, human warmth draining from its creases and folds.

What words we humans carry with us, the vast square spaces, as calm as a dusty, late afternoon. We could be anywhere...this universal music of the shopping mall, the same fake gestures, the same migrant workers only really half here.

We could have been anyone, me and you.

The first light of day touches his sleeping head,
Glides on his forehead,
Reassures itself he's the same man as yesterday.
All the colours creep through the window,
As soundless as ever.
The white from Timor via Palestine
Leans across the bed and spreads itself out.
The grey is so sorry to have left China
It lies on the mirror,
Gives it depth simply by approaching it.
Yellow dabs itself on the wardrobe,
While black repaints the human condition
The fate of the man lying in bed.

Madrid

On the fast train you wondered why the trains in England were so slow. Fascism was always in a rush to get to the future. You hurtled past a built-up environment: cement-trees-cement, your life flashing past you. The slowing down of a train into a platform, the muffled voices in the loudspeakers, the bustle of departures and arrivals, is a thing of beauty in the world.

Everything in Madrid seemed new, even the parks. At least compared to the south. Here you saw radiant new lovers hand in hand in the park, speaking freely with one another whereas deep down, in Cordoba, Al-andalus, all that lost country, there were only restrained glances and dark faces. The south is a dusty place, full of people sleepwalking to their death. The taxi driver stopped the car. "Why have you stopped?" I gestured. He nodded his head towards a woman crossing the street, her hips swinging wildly from side to side.

You searched out the cheapest meal, the place where you'd have to say as few as words as possible. Did con carne mean with meat, or without. 'Con', your mind told you, meant together, as you walked alone. Without any knowledge of a place, without any words, well, you could be an American or an Englishman, just another passer by, someone who will add a bit of green to the economy. Stick to the fish, even when inland. In Madrid you were told people party until 3 a.m. You went to the Prado and saw Goya's black pictures instead, choosing to be reminded of how much Spain loves the spilling of blood...

What is a kaffir? you said to yourself, looking into the mirror. The tall, elegant windows opened onto a blank wall. "It's the cheapest room we've got," said the man. You just spoke the magic words, I replied. In the lobby old men with thick moustaches and blue blazers read the newspapers with such repose, as if they were sitting in the balcony of their own homes!

Every poet/academic/ tourist/ junkie, walks around in the city in a state of bewilderment, invisible and precisely because so, the most visible. You think to yourself: the disappearance of a letter can take the plural and make it singular. Each person walks around in his own desert. It is said in an old poem of the desert that a man is half his tongue,and half his heart. And if you lose both?

~~~

You return to London and it is like being smacked in the eye. Despite all the bridges London seems like a very unromantic city. Madrid appeared formal, elegant, and far more beautiful-well, at least from the sky.

Selections

The law is consistent; grace is inconsistent.

Life is not a matter of getting something out of everything. Life itself is imperfect.

Our vocation is precisely to be imperfect, incomplete, insufficient in ourselves, changing, hapless, destitute, and weak, hastening to the grave...but His peace must somehow find its way into our lives, secretly, while we are here...

And the secret of sincerity is to be sought not in a love for abstract truth but in a love for real people and real things...[sincerity: to say what we mean, to mean what we say (intelligence and will).]

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure...

We must somehow strip ourselves of our greatest illusions about ourselves, frankly recognize in how many ways we are unlovable...we must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be.

---Thomas Merton.

~~~

A life with limited possibilities is not really a life, for life itself is a breaking into the unpredictable, the open, fresh ground, as well as a returning home. A life where one is held fast by possibilities also diminishes us in some way and makes us homeless. 'Home' and repose is then a projection, something deeply imagined, longed for. A life of persistent longing doesn't seem like much of a life. 

Without any ideals or principles would our lives just consist in a succession of moments strung together after one another? 

Sincerity: to see oneself honestly. Are there limits to how long one can look?

A child sees some spilled ink and immediately asks: "who did it?" A grown up sits down and analyzes the pattern.

What if our desires really did express what we are at heart? The loss of courage, the wrong turnings, the words spoken in anger...we say to ourselves, consolingly, "I wasn't myself", keeping this precious image of our "true" self somewhere safe, deeply  buried, as if we could retrieve it at will. We open the cloth and see that it has faded and the frame is being eroded by rust. 

In revolutionary times there are those that seek some new gesture; there are others who marvel at the deep continuity of the shapes human hands make. Start at Year One or hope that time will come around again, that the past will carry on into the future, as something lived, known, even if unspoken.

And now, when things change at such an alarming rate, the hands of the father are not recognized by the son.

Does the last moment seal, put a stamp on, all the moments that went before it? Does the last moment reveal or upturn, confirm or bewilder? There are hands that are full of sin, and there are poor hands of simple, elegant grace; hands that have known the years go by and that bear witness, others whose movements say nothing.

There is universal human nature, national culture, the genius of place, continuity of work patterns, family inheritances..and against all this the individual scrambles his or her way out into the clear, emerging like a bright, clean shoot. Against the solid and slow moving way of life each individual gesture could be recognized and each find his or her place since stock phrases, facial expressions, ways of speaking and hand gestures would be repeated year after year, unknowingly. Now? Our hands are more anxious.'Talk to the hand' means: there is no more mutual comprehension. Increasingly you see hands and fingers busy texting.

The revolution, she said, will be me & you.

Above: a picture of Tina Modotti and one by her. What a life! Stumbled across her looking for Paul Strand's Mexico pictures (which you saw at the Tate a few years back).

~~~

Wahabinomics.

I've often found economists to be a bit asocial (or anal) and one wonders whether anals are drawn to the subject or if the subject makes them like that?

With their quest for purity, their simple, reductive assumptions, and construction of 'pure worlds', they are a bit like the wahabis! Also, given the imperialism the analogy may not be too far off the mark!

(photos courtesy of Roxana)

Our dwelling place, the light above, a ribbon of  warm light in the old corners of the house that are somehow found and seen again, against all the odds, after so many years of neglect. 

The centuries-old light that mysteriously returns in summer-as it always does. The warmth on your back, your hands unloosened, the deeply veined green shade cast by tall trees, the high windows in the elegant streets around London House, the library windows jarred open, the women becoming more dreamy.

The old medieval light, your exquisite, starred heart, the darkness that picks out the light and gives it shape.

'History in stone and wood and glass.'

This knowledge of the window is something that eludes you and these distances another kind of beauty in the soul. The death of the heart is not so unlike the life of the heart, though it is seldom commented upon.

This shadow that grazes the light, that snicks it, is like the last word you spoke, the filigree of absence.

when the saints don't go marching on...

Prompted by something Bob said about music being banned in Islam and by today's article in the Guardian on the decline of the shrine culture in Pakistan...

First of all: cards on the table (cards are also unIslamic, by the way): you're from a wahabi-type background.

Secondly, you've never really had much interest in Sufism or "spirituality" and only a passing interest in religion, if truth be told. I see myself or I'd like to see myself as probably very much like my grandfather, the old jew, muttering away to himself in the shade, alone, or like the dougal, who despite all her Catholic friends is really more like an Anglican or a Quaker, or the swami who strikes me really as an old Hindu, with Sanskrit in her heart, or Ubo who always prizes being funny, conversational, practical and sensible over religious (boy, do I come from a confused family!).

Ubo, Aba, Abbot...from the Syrian.

But there was something to be said about the old, eclectic ways and it was this: they were messy, confused, full of remnants of backward customs, agricultural practices for sure, but they allowed for all sorts of accommodations, a space for music, dance, gatherings, devotion and encouraged a sense continuity and community.

The wahabis, on the other hand, with their austere, sober and harsh interpretation encourage only a petty individualism and suffering. Culture is reduced to "innovation", a deviation from the pure ways. Sit at home, pray, procreate, stuff your belly. This, in a nutshell, is the message of the mullah.

Of course, that's never been accepted. People like to eat with other people, look and talk with other beautiful women, listen to music, watch films, joke around. More to the point: the religion-or the approach you're attracted to-has always been more 'worldly' than either some strains of sufisim or the wahabis allow for. Great schools of learning, the creation of architectural spaces that emphasize balance, repose, harmony; art and beauty as an expression of one's faith (jamal and jalal, together), radical social justice..all of these things suggest something quite different.

In the final analysis could one say that a human society without music isn't really a human society? Of course, that is what the Taleban and other nihilists aim at. But it won't happen. Because even if the saints don't go marching on there will always be love and friendship, compassion and beauty.

(p.s. If anyone wants a copy of Hans Jonas's brilliant essay on Gnosticism and Nihilism just give me a whistle...you know how to whistle, don't you?)