Elgar on speed

Listening to snatches of a programme on Elgar on R3. The way you live and the way the programmes are made means that you only hear snippets, fragments-the very notion of a limited whole now sounding terribly provincial, old-fashioned and narrow-minded.

One thing that struck you was the different pace at which the same music was played and the setting of the pauses. Is a text, a score, infinitely flexible or is there a structure, a truth, that must remain invariable to be known over time? How much is up for interpretation and what weight does the individual have in the collective phenomenon of the playing/listening/reading of something over time? How much of what we consider to be valuable depends on continuity, the persistence of something over time?

~~~

24/7 is a great little book on time and the extraordinary modern pressures placed on our sensory capacities-in order for capitalism to break down any further natural "barriers" to its progression. In some sense just an extension of E.P.'s wonderful 'time-work discipline'. 

The need to cram more and more experiences into a given time period means, ultimately, that the quality of experience is itself diminished. If time is linear then there's always the possibility newness, unchartered territory (and capitalism needs such 'spaces', thrives on discontinuities and the destruction of the past)but time is also always running out, slipping out of our hands,never to be regained or recovered. 

~~~

Illich has to be one of the most original thinkers (as oppposed to an academic or 'intellectual'). Who else could write about deschooling society, the relation between university and text, medical ethics, a sort of history of needs, the energy crisis, the gaze in the age of show, the commons of silence? 

When did 'speed' become so important? Turner, Marinetti? What makes 'speed' possible? Firstly, the narrowing down of experience to one dimension. Secondly, the positing of a single, uniform and calculable and comparable notion of speed. Time-and not just labour time-becomes abstract, "standard" and universal. The notion that time can be uncoupled from lived experience, the belief that duration is orthogonal to the depth of one's experiences or the nature or quality of the 'objects' with which one engages in time results in a dry, mechanical and mathematical view of time. The rhythms of daily life, of the seasons, come to count for less and less.

One must rush through everything, tot up the counters as soon as possible, keep things flowing, in circulation.     

Blessings of the Sun

Fuchs found Southern California, 1937, "still undeveloped, fresh and brimming and unawakened, at the beginning everything in this new land wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind."

"What is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a story life...It's the melodic line-when it all comes together, it sings."

'It is sometimes to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness an frugality of life in the Midi which includes a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone...Sunlight reflected from red tile floors on to whitewashed walls..and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled , hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it....Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear...'

---Stella Bowen.

~~~

The old sun on our backs, a life in the open, out of the cloister, away from the cramped, stifled and pointless conversations, the crabbed existence of dreary drab afternoons, the mind vacant of any lasting thoughts, churning out anxieties for a halfpenny.

The old sun, its ancient pathways, the timeless within the turnings. The sun's light: 'tight and loose': fidelity to the centre; the dream of periphery. Like a pagan you look to the sun, and all falls away. No chain of being, no thought of the same sub-atomic processes working in both of us, but the simple fact that a life under the sun erodes our names. My hands are burned, my face has darkened. The north survives in the small mirror but leaves my eyes... 

'In a kind of weightless, swinging realm'

Bob drew my attention to a Time of Gifts (still unread!). A fab. article today draws comparisons with Laurie Lee's A Walk...

Strange that you're drawn so much to travel writers when you remain so rooted and fixed in your ways (and all that stuff about the greatest journeys taking place in the mind...well...)

Today you asked little r: will you be like Van G or Gaugin. Will you paint  what you see around you or will you paint what is in your head. 

"I will paint what I see"

Good for you, little one!

"And then I will keep it in my mind"

Is 'and' the most important word in the English language?

~~~

When it comes to language you still have MDF's Debts of Honour in reserve. Something to save for when the light becomes too strong and you've run out of escape hatches... 

In terms of 'travel writers' Byron's Road to Oxiana has some sublime passages but for some odd reason comes across as superficial or at least light weight. M. Asad's Road to Mecca remains a classic-at least up until the point in which he becomes a Muslim. Chatwin, of course, but more for his open, inquisitive mind-which seems to have been attracted to everything- rather than for his descriptions. Thesiger for his old fashioned refusals and lovely black and white photographs.

~~~

To walk is to think a little, to be prepared to get lost (in fact, to will it). To sit in a room filled with books is as one-sided as sitting on a beach in Rio (you suspect). The world is always either too much with us or not with us enough. Is there a pleasure that knows nothing of itself, a weightlessness that retains a sense of verticality?   


~~~

'A thousand years of village life come to an end...'

I wonder if a way of life really truly ever comes to an end. I suspect it does, though elements of it survive in a word, a phrase, a pause, some distinctive gesture fashioned through the centuries. The land, the stars, the seasons that roll on by, timelessly, weightlessly, above us, through us. 

A sudden nostalgia for the broadsheets, a slower pace of life encapsulated by the dreary, stretched hours of a Sunday morning. It is not true that we now live without rituals and repetition..it's just that these instincts/needs get displaced onto trivial, mundane things and routines.

Summer is the forgetfulness of time, the great beach on which we find ourselves stranded, blinded. The longest day of the year, like memory's peaks in the distance. Solstice, the turning of the heart, the shortest and frailest of shadows, reminds me of a name I once knew...    

My face, for the world to see

There is no preparing for the unforeseeable, the unpredictable; it's just part and parcel of life. And yet there's no acceptance in that "just" as well. There is no preparing for what is inevitable either.

One of the disadvantages of not belonging anywhere is there is no continuity to time. Instead, one is transported-perhaps jolted is a better word-by the sudden reappearance of a familiar sound, a particular slant of the light, to another place, another time, another life...

Foyles has had a face lift and shifted two doors down. From a dense, medieval cloister with piles of books heaped up haphazardly on the floor to a generic 90's hip place selling moleskin notebooks and weak latte. And now, with its open plan, bright light, light wood furnishing it comes across as less of a bookshop and more as a sort of post-modern lounge. It has its charms, sure, but the face isn't the same...

The poetry section is considerably weaker. What immediately strikes you, apart from the fewer number of people in the store, is the poor lay out and selection of poetry books. Why focus on Kipling and Leonard Cohen? 

Of course, whenever you enter such a place-and, in general, when you come back to London, you are reminded of how much you miss out on (and have missed out on). I suppose this sense of a world of possibilities slipping away can become oppressive at times. In the same way, if you see an attractive woman ...

And, of course, this is madness. The inability to accept one's station, one's limited potential, is itself a feature of our times, if not of time itself. It's not the many lives we could have had but the single life that wasn't lived fully. By wanting to 'have it all' we end up having nothing. Perhaps your puritan roots will always feel there's a shadow thrown around all desires. Or, to put it another way, when it comes down to religion your heart is not quite in it. You flick through Merton looking for a wisdom without religion. Which is to say: foolishly. The desire for understanding is suspect if it doesn't break through the image.

~~~

Limited funds, space and time. So, the choice of books will have to be thought through carefully. Again, derivative, second-order questions and perspectives plague you. You imagine a book without footnotes. And, more radically, occasionally suffer from Mir's syndrome (Dyer) hoping to do without them altogether. 

~~~

You walk in the peak hour against the stream of humanity. Every face seems preoccupied and distracted and it leaves its mark.Or it could be me. It's only when you hear the calm, measured voices on the radio do you feel relieved.    

on the other side of the bridge...

Neither East nor West; neither Greek nor Jew...

You never thought you'd make it out of the heat and bright, all-encompassing light. You followed a shadow (in your heart). 

You stand back and observe the distances...observe that you're not really here either (and maybe never were). Still, when you walk along the familiar streets you do have the sense that all this is a dream, a profoundly familiar dream...

The seasons roll by. All the rolling of the die. The gods' warm hands in the clouds, yours in your pockets, dumbfounded, dazzled by the strangeness of your feelings, your lack of orientation (something beyond the jet lag).

There are moments when you feel truly blessed, surrounded by so many kids. Most of the time you're just trying to catch your breath, find a small place of silence and shade in which to be alone with yourself. I suppose there's always been this notion of thought only being possible when one separates oneself. To think is to die a little. The little is important...

On the 275 you observe an oldish man with terrible skin and a crooked leg limps and hobbles his way to a seat near mine. He carries an open black bag. He crouches over a book, James Patterson's Cat and Mouse and puts on some burgundy spectacles, transforming himself into a latter-day monk. He is utterly absorbed by the book, chapter 28. Alone, a survivor of the times, secluding himself from the harshness of the light, or having to answer any questions. He places his forehead down on the back of his hand (in which he carries a walking stick). It's all gone wrong but he can't tell where or why.This is it. Keep your breath pure. He wears stylish black Nike trainers ("daps"..a bit of South Wales there, for you). On second thoughts, this man is not what he first appears to be. In this second space of hesitation one sees that he carries some nobility with him-despite his awful choice in literature-which you think might be a ruse anyway. He speaks in a muffled way, chin down, his voice broken, words stumbling out of his mouth. On both sides of the bridge human beings remain incomprehensible...

At Barking a thin and short old Indian man looks deeply, intently into a freezer containing Diamond Seafood Shrimps. For a moment I think he's going to dive in. A bargain, perhaps. Or perhaps he remembers a moment from his childhood, when his Bengali father would take him to the sea and they would peer over the boat, looking together in the same direction as wave after wave broke, splintered and re-formed-as they've always done from time out of mind. 

The East European women are all very thin. there's a glint of attractiveness behind the harshness of their lives. London is like some great resting place for travelers of all sorts. Only the Paks who came here in what seems an age ago still harbour secret thoughts of going back, of being unsettled. In many ways Muslims continue to be 'edge people', the non-jew non-jews.

~~~

Tony Judt's Memory Chalet is a wonderful gem of a book. As if to say: write down all the small things in your life which go up to make up a life.         

Isis

You never know how things might turn out.Which action will lead to what consequences. But one bit of 'folk wisdom' has it that what doesn't start out well is unlikely to end up well.

The "intelligence" on Iraq, for example. The laughable presentation of cartoons and fables by Colin P at the U.N. Everyone conveniently forgetting that Saddam had been a sand niggah for a while..."our sonofabitch", to paraphrase Kissenger.

So, after all the billions of dollars spent, the loss of human life, the erosion of liberties in the so-called war on terror, and what have you got? A rag-tag group of crazies walking into Iraq's second city as if they were out for an afternoon stroll on Brighton pier. Al-Q may or may not have had much of a presence in Iraq before the war but I think one can safely say that the invasions have led to the growth of fundamentalism (both in the region and in Pakistan). A case of unforeseen consequences? Well, not really. A lot of people at the time said that al-Q was a spent force (intellectually, morally,politically and spiritually bankrupt). And there were wise heads in Jordan saying that these 'operations' would create a thousand bin Ls. Time will tell. But right now, it does look that way.

Disaster and catastrophe are overused words. But you have to wonder.   

To have a centre

Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute—the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute.
---Novalis (courtesy of anton).

A normal man is one whose tendencies are, if not altogether univocal, at least concordant; that is, sufficiently concordant to serve as a vehicle for that decisive centre which we may call the sense of the Absolute or the love of God...

This type [the pariah], who lacks an axis, is capable of "everything and nothing"; he is a mimic and a born actor, always looking for a substitute for the centre, hence for a psychic homogeneity which necessarily eludes him...

...we live in a world which on the one hand tends to deprive men of their centre , and on the other offers them-in place of the saint and the hero-the cult of the "genius"...

[A genius is interesting and "authentic" to the extent that he or she is a wild card, opposed to bourgeois society and its values. i.e. in some senses: a 19th century genius. Is there a more universal type, one who is normal, balanced, virtuous?]

[A genius, with at least two heredities], lacking a true centre may easily be a psychopath-and this precisely on account of his unbridled subjectivism-whether he be a schizoid artist or a paranoiac politician.

[Whence the strange disjunction between a brilliant work of art and the character and personality of the artist]

JB reports Lucian Freud to have said:

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex.He said unless you've had anal sex with a girl she hasn't really submitted to you."


~~~

[Art for art's sake. As Arendt said (more or less) there is only 'process' now; we pride ourselves on our "truthfulness" rather than any substantive notion of the truth. What counts as a free activity? Can we think of reason independently of purposes, values? i.e. instrumentally or even more "bizarrely" (Sen) in terms of internal consistency?

What matters is the journey itself, the procedures. Departure, not arrival...one must always take leave and never arrive or even hope of arriving. Homecoming of the heart? Forget it. Where's the door? The great paradox (Arendt, again): to think of earth as our only home means we end up hating it, trying to flee it (in fantasies of escape).

Man finds nothing but himself. And he is thoroughly bored by it all. He finds nothing in himself and must, therefore, find it outside of himself. "I wasn't myself," a man says, looking back at his anger/mistakes/bitterness over his life. When are we ourselves, then? What are religion, art, friendship, ethics, love if not the possibility of transcending ourselves, a kind of second space?

Thought finds nothing but itself and is henceforth fixated by questions such as: "what can I know (of myself, of other people)?". 

In economics: exchange divests the world of any "intrinsic value". From now on freedom is a process, an unending process...A space of flows..the triumph of capitalism depends on a culture and mentality which supports and justifies it}.

"Renounce centre" (Asherby). Life on the periphery. Except margins only make sense in relation to a centre.The centre is where, in some sense, nothing happens?: one just is.

~~~

It is humanistic narcissism with its mania for individualistic and unlimited production that is responsible for this ultimately useless profusion of talents and geniuses

[Britain's got talent. Back in the land in the pure almost every child is a genius or a potential genius...which makes you wonder why things have gone so wrong]

A quality is fully legitimate only on condition that in the last analysis it be linked to necessary Being, not to mere contingency, that is, to what is merely possible.

[On the other hand, there is a strain of 'thought' that would have us as nothing but mere flotsam..temporary, accidental, insubstantial beings thrown up by chance. How much of modern thought ad modern experiences works to de-centre us? Darwin, Freud, and the Camps...]

The 19th century-with its garrulous and irresponsible novelists, its creators of pernicious operas, its unhappy artists, in short, with all of its superfluous idolatries and blind alleys, leading to despair-was bound to crash against a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity, thus the First World War.

(quotations from Frithjof Schuon's 'To Have a Centre')

Guarding the eye in the age of show

Last week a woman was stoned to death outside the Lahore High Court for marrying someone she wanted; at around the same time two teenage cousins in India hanged themselves from a tree after being raped. Honour killing. Of course, no-one wants to make the link between highly sexualized imagery and violence. But even if it doesn't culminate in actual violence it can hardly be denied that it does do violence in some way-to the image of 'Man'...

Iris M and Illich wrote about this a long time ago..about how extreme images dull our minds, our judgement and capacity for ethical behaviour. The range of words we have for different ways of 'looking' (which includes not looking, not hearing, etc.) may be diminishing and that in itself may be a result of the falling away of certain ascetic practices and disciplines: how to look at the world in the proper way, how to look at people from the right angle...

IPL, for instance. In the 'cricket' commentary all subtlety is lost and all that can be muttered are a few cliches ("that's a fantastic shot"). This, itself, is a result of the format of the game which encourages a simple and basic response (power, rather than nuance). And it might be argued that all this is tied into commercial interests. IPL is really just cricket pornography.

Everyone must be made or made over into a spectator. In the 'attention economy' we must remain riveted to the action (even if there really isn't any action, in the proper sense of the word). Which is where the cheerleaders come in. Keep the adrenalin and cash flowing. It's a fantasy world and, we are told, the poor Indian bastard who comes home from a hard day's work just wants and needs to be entertained, to be allowed to enter this make-believe world for a brief moment so that he can forget the grim realities of his life. This is, of course, all really a cynical ploy to keep him a poor bastard for the remaining part of his life.

Who, today, can think of asceticism, sobriety and self-limitation as being enriching? To live in a small place, but to live well."To lower one's gaze" is a constant refrain in the Qur'an. This approach exists within a tradition, a culture and set of norms (individual or social)...and aims to develop an attitude towards things: habitual reflection. Since it is related to not just modesty but balance, equilibrium, it is also surely fundamental to an aesthetic sense: the attentiveness to, and recognition of, beauty. How to weld pleasure to proportionality? What is to be guarded against is the "lustful eye", the greedy eye that desires without limit. "I want it, and I want it now". One click away. The ten thousand songs on your mobile.

the way of the world

The way the world carries on, in a stream of light/time/light, is the world. 

When all the distances have been measured, explored, down to the n th degree, you find there's one distance that fails the test. It slips out of the book and there is no word for it. It is like a word found in nobody's heart (Celan).

You struggle with the lists, the tying up of things, the settling of (old) scores/chores. You sit in your car having completed your exchanges. A man briskly walks to the bank, thirty minutes late, and adjusts his tie as he extends his neck upwards. For him the day is just starting and you're out of the equation, looking at everyone and everything out of the rear window; already your thoughts narrow down to practicalities, to the avoidance of sentimentality...and your heart is a stranger once again.

There is something utterly plain and mundane about how the world continues without you-and because of that it is also like something that doesn't sound right or something that catches your attention, the way you note out of the corner of your eye a door that is usually permanently closed but now suddenly ajar. And because of the awareness of all that is fantastically simple and familiar, the seamless continuity of other people's lives, you get a rare glimpse of the fascinating and the mysterious. It is like seeing the mirror and not the image.

~~~

In the morning you had noticed with some alarm the vast number of ants (with their death-wish) in the bathroom, eating away at the walls, finding all sorts of angles of attack, making their way through the cracks and thereby extending them. You casually wondered to yourself: left to their own devices how many years would it take for them to gnaw away at this structure? How many generations? You'd caught them at it, seen a part of the process with your own eyes.

Suddenly you had a great desire to be like the main character in The Time Machine and to see the whole building, from its first bright day under the sun to the day when a dark wind blows through the ruins...ruins that suggest no structure and that offer no clue whatsoever as to the function of the building or to the nature of its inhabitants. No future being would wistfully look back and ask herself: was there once a person living in this place who thought like me? At most she might think mechanically, scientifically, about causes-large and small.    

The Inner City

(Pictures are borrowed from the excellent website, 'The London Column')

The oldest of stories; how did it begin? Which movement of the heart, concentrated in a single gesture of my hand, got me here? The oldest of human stories; how did it begin, again? The hidden streets of our lives; now a name, now a cellar. There is a single medieval street that survives amidst all that is strange and new and it is something like an obsolete word in a dictionary, like the oldest human feeling in a stranger's heart, like nothing else... 

Entartete Kunst

We, we are people of dust. There is no more 'we'. We are no more. Did I say we? I...

The structure, the structure is there, more or less, the barest outline of some previous existence, the way my sad smile traces the same sad smile of my ancestors from all those years ago. For some unknown reasons that look was carried in my eyes, down to the bone. They'll find it one day in my DNA but never know...

He loved art more than he loved people. People were trash, dispensable. They fell, were often evicted from history; they were unreliable, were susceptible to disappearances. He loved ideas, he loved ideas more than anything else in the world. 

I do not watch television any more and haven't seen a movie-from start to finish-for a long time now. What's the latest? I have no clue. I live in my room and no-one knows my name or address. I have built myself a hole and live with my testament and my shadows. No record contains me. I think, therefore.

The keeper of the flame, the steward of the trash of the world, the accumulation of false steps, mutations, contagion. That ancient chaos that was there in the heart of the first man, twisted, his eyes glinting with transgression, is here, 360, in this boarded up room that is kept out of the sun's vengeful eye. 

"All I wanted was to live with my pictures".

He keeps them close to him, like so many dark memories. All that is not said or shown becomes more real with the passage of time.He will die and live this way. 

The pictures survived him, like Paul Celan's bottles tossed into the ocean, suddenly returned from oblivion, inevitable tokens of lives lost and reminders of art's endurance. 

The journeys made, the lives lost across the wide ocean. The condemned in their dark chains, the free, thirsty, all at sea. Already, before the mirror my image fades, my hands become heavy. For those without a land must take to the sea...

What shows up? This will make you laugh. A silver dish that could be redeemed for forty pieces of silver, a last act of stealing, to keep your name.

On a morning like this they will find me, a head full of straw. Ah, 'the strawness of straw,' said the poet, this old essence of man. 

...

A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He 
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture 
for them. 
They are like grains of rice. 
He wonders if it is possible to shrink something 
out of existence. 
He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess, 
if they have any sense of scale. Perhaps they think 
the test tube is a glass barn ... 
He wonders what he should do with them; they 
certainly have less meat and wool than ordinary 
sheep. Has he reduced their commercial value? 
He wonders if they could be used as a substitute 
for rice, a sort of woolly rice . . . 
He wonders if he shouldn't rub them into a red paste 
between his fingers. 
He wonders if they are breeding, or if any of them 
have died. 
He puts them under a microscope, and falls asleep 
counting them . . . 

---Russell Edson

~~~

+++

---

The cypress is in pieces...it's asleep

in the road, in its own ascetic shadows, green and dark,

just like it is.

M. Darwish

The anarchist spirit...free not to make sense. The story, the sturdy, improbably impulse [that has been with us from the beginning].
(Tim Winton)

the mirror that faileth

For anton,

What comes after this Homeric pause?"
…as if this were a lovely dream
in which prisoners of war are relieved
by fairness of their long, immediate night,
as if they now say:
"We mend our wounds with salt"
"We live near our memory"
"We shall try out an ordinary death"
"We wait for resurrection, here, in its home
in the chapter that comes after the last…"

---Darwish

The pause between our lives, our words. 

You drive in the swirling dust storm, the lights clouded out, bags and debris either caught in a vortex or suddenly freed from its gravitational pull and set free on a tangent. The city is transformed and barely recognizable. The same road that you travel on a thousand times now appears like a side-road in some provincial part of a country you've never visited. A few people twist and contort their bodies to avoid being caught up in it. 

Each year the dust adds a layer of greyness to your face. An image fades, the music hisses and I wonder: did I ever know you?

From dust to dust. This is how I speak. 

~~~

An hour before we had sat together with a sense of last things, a group of friends at a farewell dinner. There were succulent legs of lamb, chops, chicken grilled on hot coals. The wives were tired, bored, somber with their plotting eyes. Only the young and unattached spoke with any freedom. Little r and the twins ran around the long tables. Someone asked me: what's A's story? In five minutes? 

T told us of how one wise old villager was asked by the youngsters: "old man, tell us how much food have you eaten in your life". He looked puzzled. "We mean, if you could add it all up how much would it come to?". The old man thought and thought (for he was one to take all questions seriously). His memory is good, his mind agile. "I think," he concluded, "if you put all the chickens and quails and other birds in one room, back to back and on top of one another it would fill this very large room." It is hard to tell whether he or the audience were satisfied with this answer. It is not always easy to add up what we've brought to and taken from this world

~~~

Dust, dust...I think I saw your face, Khayam, in the gaze of a world-weary dog. Something of your ancestor's temperament entered my soul, too, and now I recognize your single pulse which beats irregularly amongst mine, a gold coin with foreign script. There is dust on my hands and in my hair but A brings me only food, no wine to forget. I reach home and look to the mirror of bronze and hidden silver. She pauses and my mind clouds over with sleep and a vortex of dreams take shape, and there I will see myself more clearly...

privelege

We think of certain moments in our lives as being representative of the whole story. There is a story, there has to be one. Nothing is quite as essential as believing there is a category of things, places knowledge...that is essential, real, primary. We privilege that arc of our lives or those particular sentiments, thoughts, behaviour over all others: this is me...all the other times I wasn't really myself. Of all the selves I could have been this was it. Or that " me" was all thought, all will, not the frail, uncertain, and changing body.

We privilege our own situation, too. The times we live in are the defining ones. It's a turning point, a time of crisis or glory but always a time that is central to the unfolding of human history. One expression of this is our inability to imagine other people in different times or places as being genuinely happy or satisfied. Our lives will always appear to us as the best. We live in the best of times, the worst of times. I am the first man, the last man.

We privilege certain people over others. There's a central class or group and then there are the outcasts, the marginals, the " lower" types. There's no " up" without a " down"; no centre without a periphery. The damned and the saved...

The trinity of centre/ hierarchy/ origin doesn't always have to hold. At times we have imagined each person to be a centre and sometimes we' ve  believed in many gods.

This sometimes gets extended: humans are at the apex of all life and deserving of greater rights. The earth itself is the great pivot on which the whole universe turns.

Or if we are not the centre, or at the centre, where all the action takes place, then we imagine some other, fundamental place or being that represents this carved out area of privilege: God or Eden or utopia or home being the real deal, the sacred, the central realm that resists change or dissipation. We will walk through the door and things will fall into place, come together, make sense again. The fractures will be healed and we' all be whole again. The music stops, finds its resolution, the image comes into focus, two people meet...to find a centre that was previously lost...is there any other story we tell ourselves?

To have a centre, an origin...what would it be like otherwise?

On the other hand, aren't large parts of modernity opposed to this view. If there is only sovereign becoming then we posit a centre/ origin, construct the foundations ourselves and they are only provisionally fixed points. Don't Darwin and Freud work to de-centre us? Democracy, too? If the centre is everywhere then why bother talking about centre? Also: a rose is just a name, red is just a secondary quality. Our lives are brief and full of jumble. What holds them together? Is there a fixed, given stable central identity any more or do we have to accept the fragmentary position we find ourselves in? Value doesn't inhere in things or places any more..it is just 'lyingly added'. That is the summation of our predicament, then, and the full blown consequences of accepting a floating world is that we, too, become insubstantial, drifters, nothing but a "thinking reed".   

old hat

He gained one formulation from Sufism which exactly matched views he had arrived at independently: this was contained in the word baraka […] Graves compared it to the Elizabethan word ‘virtue’, in its meaning of ‘act of blessedness’. Essentially, however, the word means – in his words – ‘the sudden divine rapture which overcomes a prophet or a group of fervent devotees’. He assimilated the concept into his own scheme of thinking and feeling. In his hands it becomes more familiar and understandable than it is in Shah’s [account of Sufism]. Thus, durable goods that have been used with loving care, until they disintegrate, possess baraka, as do handmade objects, with their ‘glow of care’. ‘Baraka will never become a scientific term’. In literature baraka means ‘quality of life’; and, like religious ecstasy, is attained by ‘self-hypnosis’. The poem – the true poem – that has barakahas an ‘inspirational quality’ which defies critical analysis. Baraka came to mean, to him, ‘love’, while ‘anti-baraka’ meant ‘lovelessness’. The concept figured strongly in many of the poems he wrote after 1960, but its essence had always been an essence in his poetry.
(Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, His Life And Works, 1982: 506)
---from Melinda Lovell's lovely page.

***

The chances, the statistical chances, are that something will go wrong, pear shaped; if not today, then tomorrow. The random gene thrown up, the moment of thoughtlessness, the movement of historical forces, some iron law, working its way silently into your path...fate up against your will. Art or love may give it the temporary slip, but it is as permanent as gravity. 

***

You bump into a friend after ten years...it is painful to write this...your best man, in some ways a younger brother. Already this sounds false...But there he was. He walked past you. Then you realize he probably can't recognize you. There's no spark left on his face...it's as if he's not really there but locked up somewhere. There are no words spoken. As I turn to leave he nods as if to acknowledge me. It is profoundly sad to see the liveliest face, the brilliance of a mind reduced to a shadow, a shell. It dawns on you that you may never really see him again....

"So, you're playing fast and loose"

~~~

'A name, a life sum, a mere mark left by a man wholly in that succession of centuries.'

We are carried apart, me & you, in two different directions by two currents of time.

On the fifth day...

I read the book backwards, reciting marked words and passages into the unknown. There was a face that translates the emotion shared by a whole people; a face that has an infinite repertoire of expressions, like that of the first man, the first woman.

Some hands hold all the gifts within a moment of time, or so the ancients believed. 

I find words and little else. Your image reaches me at set intervals, like a wave. Despite the years I reach only the outer limits of understanding. The picture is never that clear. What range of possibilities is open to each human being and for what duration; that is the eternal mystery. There is a single place in the world where a woman looks in a mirror and adjusts her hair and the world lives on, passionately.

The heat surrounds us today, we are bound by it and a thought begins to stir in the mind. The shades are drawn down, a kind of oasis is created in the heart of the city. The city is the mirror of the soul. The sun traces an ancient pathway, familiar to others. What unites us often blinds us. There was a word for this spellbinding moment but it has fallen, fallen out of use. 

The flesh of a peach is so soft and succulent; the cold heart of stone a stark reminder.

We move in time imagining everything else stays the same, that it will be there when we return. We move, we fall, and each moment of that descent is a pause, a guide mark, and a segment of a curve as solid as a chain of gold. Each movement in space brings us back to a point which, because we happen to be on it, seems to us a center.

There is much longing within time.One might go so far as to suggest that this longing is time. 

The Land of the Pure

In the land of the pure there can be no innovation, no false idols; only the same old hypocrisy that doesn't change year after year and  the same whoring heart, faultlessly unfaithful to the last dregs. Nothing much holds the wall up. On that side wild growth and snakes; on this side decay and falsehood.

Ready to go...but where? Get the shots, the dope, then north by north-west and I'm out of here.

~~~

Religion, you feel, would be quite a good thing if it wasn't for religious people.

~~~

The centuries. Everything in Yourcenar's book is marked by the need to be understood against the background of time. Nothing could be further from the thoughts of the moderns (you suspect).

Evaluation, judgement, reflection...all that requires taking a step out of the stream. One can deny the flux or say there is only flux; alternatively, the third way suggests a way of accommodating oneself to it. The great line: 'nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.'

Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' and 'Ugetsu' (finally!) have been downloaded (er.. "bought"). 

~~~

After Life

recollection

Is nostalgia just a construct? 
I can't remember.

Tea is just an excuse. Why does tea bring back memories on its own?

~~~

There is a surprising amount of nostalgia (what, are we talking quantities here?) on the black sun. You suspect that in a life less stalled there would be a lower quantum of it (is there some magical formula?). There are lists to remind us of what we're missing: the 20 books one must read; the 100 films one must see; the ten places one must see before one dies and so on and so forth. If you live in linear time something will always be lost and never regained. Come again? There is a list which I cannot find.A list that is lost.

~~~

There will probably be less nostalgia as time passes. 

If you're constantly on the move, if technology is rapidly changing, if you live in a shape-shifter's world defined by the latest fad, fashion, or trend..then what will you be nostalgic about? Is something deep-rooted in human history about to to be lost, erased from memory-or at least set to decline in significance? 'You are reaching the limit of your storage capacity'.

Nostalgia for the book, for instance, only makes sense if one has been brought up in a culture where books are part and parcel of the culture or your individual life. But what if that isn't the case? Will people even remember that there was a different way of paying attention, of being friends, of preparing food?

But there are limits..and if you don't let go how can you move on (gosh, that does sound like Oprah, doesn't it!). Is nostalgia a function of limitation? Surrounded by things I have less attachment to any one thing? 

~~~

There is a restaurant on High st. Ken where you can sit for two or three hours and not think of time. No matter how bright it is outside it is always cool and dark inside. You have been going there for ten years and have only ordered one dish (I kid thee not!). And the tea is probably the best tea in the world. Tea, conversation, and ease represent the old world (not that you're averse to coffee). There's a small bit of Persia in London. And that is the great thing about global cities: they gather people who bring with them in large carpet bags a treasure of objects and memories and stories so that even when the original place has vanished a trace of it lives on (in a word, a gesture, a taste, a recollection). London, the great whore, the great hoarder. 

Nostalgia: for what we could have been. 

He sees a woman in the train across from his. In a casual moment both stare out and catch each other's glances. That is how faint the connections are. He wonders. Two hundred years ago they could have been master and slave. Now there is the formal equality of strangers. The equality of exchanges. Is nostalgia anything but a moment for a moment?

Words were spoken. A world away from my heart. Your star is rising, mine is falling. A note was played, and the fingers retained a dim memory of its form. There was the tinkling of china in Kyoto. Introductions were made as the snow fell effortlessly. London was the beautiful city in which everything happened, and I its exile. Of the thousand days that have passed, the mornings lied through, and it appears I lived but one night unspoken. Outside, beyond the glazed windows it was winter time, summer time, and only my head and book above water. Outside still further, the Roding found another day, forgiving all those who walked by her side. What ocean had she left?

Little r stood on a tree stump, we at her feet, and she proclaimed all time had come to an end. But inside time passes faster than I can recall.

There was a time when I did not know you Why do I find myself in what is lost?

A fisherman's net lay discarded, heaped under the sun's hours, dreaming of one particular fish.

She asked, "would you a day, a single day in which to drown in the white room or,like this, the sound of the sea, the movement of time's hands?

This return, a reentry to the place before the first things were broken, the first words spoken. The glance, the hesitation deep in your voice, the edge of desire...

You look for dim reflections of the sun' light on pebbles, the thousand-fold universe of self-sustained miniature worlds. The light spills from trees, but at ground level it is already darkening, disappearing in this final act, as transient as snowflakes. It breaks into shards, fragments, warm globules, narrowing down to essentials in acute angles in dark corners. A black sun..

The white room of your heart, a world of many directions, in which a black sail from the east strays, dark and true as the words of night.

nothing to lose

Let us not talk of injustice today. If you are a man you have already forgotten woman, if an Israeli then you barely imagine the rags Palestinians cling on to. Let it go. Let us not think about the injustice against black people or against jews or against muslims. There is no injustice against the poor by the deservedly rich. What would it mean, today, to think of and speak to another human being? The lost, the list of things and people and things lost is no longer a list.

...

I scatter you before me line by line with a mastery I only possessed in beginnings.

....

Darwish.

Time is a scarecrow
Time is a crow
with nothing to lose.

In the cave/stove
I assume an 'I',
assume a you,
together, 'we'

I have my eye on you.

[Before]
You[
Scattered like petals before my bride,
like petals after my death.
Sun and scar, indelible,
one.