Now it's autumn, but
you would never know.
-- J.Ceravolo.

Came across Ceravolo (like Ungaretti) thanks to Tom. It's nice to have these thick books by your side, work through them, which means not working, accepting, intuiting since you don't have the high skill or the fine perception. Reading by the evening light. Kenenth Irby, too. Where have we got to there? The early 1970s, I think.

Today I'm told it's a full eight degrees hotter than the average for this time of the year. The seasons usually turn by the 15th of the month: the dry summer days of blinding light and suffocating nights give way to the monsoon by July 15th; autumn is supposed to roll in, pinching the mornings and evenings with its cool fingers by Sept. 15th; Spring is officially declared on the 15th of February. 

But now everything is out off kilter. Everything is doing its best to break down the light, filter it to something more manageable: the dust, the tree branches, the crows dancing, human memory...

Frank speech, the Greeks said (not freedom of speech). As if to say..avoid abstractions in favour of reality. 

If there was time we'd speak; there'd be no telling. Where to start, but the middle. The words from the early years: experimental. Learn to find your own voice, rhythm,    silences. The old country lettered with arching old-stone bridges. What do you have to say for yourself? 

Begin in the middle of Ceravolo, pick out the page on which it begins. The book traveled a couple of thousand miles to reach my incomprehension. We lived a life like that, not knowing. From your house on Vere Street five roads radiating out. None took you there, for all you knew. How many miles have you walked in your life? Honestly.

There isn't an anchor anywhere, the drift of the world, the drift.   

[I'll begin again]

It was too late. The autumn light fell at wide angles on your face, revealing what you always were. In front of you, though you don't look at it, a map, an ancient forest, green time, a cafe latte. "I am in the middle of my life", am passing through it. Another summer has sunk and my heart with it, all those heavy, ripe hours now distilled to a clear moment. And I am here. You still know how to kill me, she thought, silently, the most inward of her dreamsongs always coming to her from a lofty distance-and then checked herself to make sure her lips hadn't moved. 

"I am more composed than him," she mused, as a shadow fell on her bare shoulder. There is no turning now, only one continuous season. Now it's autumn, but you'd never know. I will become a statue, and wait. I've done that before. The drift of the world, oh the drift...  

Egyptian Blues

(Photograph courtesy of Roxana)

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 old light from the 1970s, a time when I think to myself I must have 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, she adopted you because so sad for a child, and she would feed us endless sweet-dishes. God, how the Egyptians love their sugar! With their tea "2" spoonfuls means 4; "3" means 5. Nothing means what you think. A lesson never learned. 

He would return, uncle Saleh, a small-time fisherman from the lowly backstreets who'd found his way to the big sea and a big ship. He'd return for a few months in the year. 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 the verses always more mysterious and direct thatn the printed text. And he would wonder to himself: what had happened to my life, how had it been traded away so easily? 

If a wound had befallen you, a wound like that had already befallen others.
--Qur'an. 3:140 

He would bring us back coins and stamps from places we'd never heard of before. Some of those countries didn't even exist (Rhodesia). But I don't actually remember him saying a word. A few greetings in Arabic and stock phrases which Ubo knew, but that was all. His mouth was always full of tobacco, his teeth deeply stained; his gaunt face, lean body and tired, profound eyes; his ability to sit still and speak only necessary words left an impression that makes you wonder, even today. 

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 of the day and cannot be faulted, dimmed or disturbed, 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 second chance that we all crave, the "late sublime" of an old man who sees everything is beautiful in its own time, with its own specific charm. He looks out of his tall window-for how many more winters?- down, down towards some woman and thinks of his own youth and the sea. Only the chant of the sea remains. But even regret can seem to have its place in a life if your head is tilted at the right angle to the universe. Remorse, destroys the human world. 

~~~ 

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

~~~
At Essex, in those black-bricked monolithic towers, those monuments to the disasters of socialism and the tides of history, the high windows were sealed to prevent suicides. Bertrand Russell had seen a spate of them. There is no "why" here.

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

~~~

A poem by Ungaretti, translated by Tom (I can't say T.C. without thinking of Benny and officer Dibble), stopped me in my tracks, left me spellbound. Traced down three other translations but here is the first:

His name was

Mohamed Sceab

Descendant

of emirs of nomadic tribes

took his own life

because he had lost

his Homeland

Loved France
and changed his name

Was Marcel

but wasn't French

had forgot how

to simply live
sipping a coffee

in the tent of his people

where the little singsong

of the Koran is chanted

And didn't know how to

give

his separateness
a voice

I went along with the concierge

from the hotel where we lived

in Paris

following his body

down the dingy alleyway

from number 5 rue des Carmes

His remains

rest

in the cemetery at Ivry

dolorous suburb

that always brings to mind

the day

a fairground comes down

It may be I alone
still know

he was once alive

The New Yorker state of mind

C.W. Mills

Its sophistication is one of tone rather than ideas: in it, the New Yorker style of reportage has become politically triumphant.

I'll come back to C.W. M. later but his thoughts on being "outside the whale" (on the necessity of being outside) struck me as very pertinent. Of course, Edward Said picked up on this as well in his discussion of the need to be an amateur, or how one should always write from the margins (in Representations of the Intellectual). 

And that brought me to a lovely little chapter by Bauman and Donskis. Actually, most of it is quite clunky and, though I hate to say this, I think Ziggy has lost it slightly. Be kind to old men, though. I still read his part once out of deep admiration. But Donskis, who I'd never heard of before, really does get to the crux of the matter. Some excerpts and notes:

We are all individuals now, but more by default than moral choice since the individual is really shaped by global forces beyond his control.

"Radically changing everyone's field of reference and system of concepts [by the introduction of a new language, New Speak] would make it easier to take away the dimension of the past...a memory-free world deprived of public historical archives and the humanities in general.."

"Memory uncovers its essence as a conscious effort to continue or prolong the existence of what deserves to exist."

"What has happened [to the universities] is a revolution by the bureaucrats speaking in the name of freedom and competition but each day tearing these values down."

[The only hope] is that universities preserve the logic of intellectual and creative slow food."

"The capitalization of of universities and the de facto libertarian model of their development, imposed from above by the state bureaucracy, is something so grotesque...It is academic capitalism without freedom, a species of technocratic and bureaucratic tyranny implemented in the name of freedom and progress."

"What does academic freedom mean for the bureaucracy and a political class symbiotically related to it? No more than an impediment to a technology-enabled form of social control that requires teachers and researchers to submit standardized accounts of their activities...Academics who don't kowtow, and think they're not beholden to anyone are worth keeping in ignorance and permanent tension in order to make them realize who is master of the situation and work off their debt to the university, programme or department...Then they duly become vassals and pages, and forget all the rhetoric of freedom and autonomy."

"If students never see a free professor who will prostrate himself before no-one, or a researcher who follows the principle pauca paucis (a few for the few), where will they learn to recognize and respect freedom of thought and intellectual integrity?"

"Today governments and bureaucrats deliberately hold academic communities in a zone of ambiguity, obscurity and insecurity; they permanently reform and deform universities and thereby take away scholars' sense of security. Permanent change becomes a perfect form of social control."

"[A lesson learned by our political technocrats]: The enemies of the prince continue to live without living. They are unable to examine or enjoy life; nor are they in control of any intimate aspects of reality any more. Exile becomes a fact of life without showing itself as a form of punishment or as a form of discipline...Exile as a perfect means of control and of 'pacification'.."

C.W.M.

For the intellectual administrators ..the memorandum is replacing the book.

Foundations like to give money for "projects that are large-scale and scientific with a large S-which often only means 'safe' by being made trivial-for they do not want to be made the subjects of political attention." 

The younger recruits, research technicians [of abstracted empiricism] rather than social scientists, young men who come from "the intellectually impoverished background of the American High School."

"I have seldom seen one of these young men ..in a condition of genuine intellectual puzzlement. And I have never seen any passionate curiosity about a great problem, the sort of curiosity that compels the mind to travel anywhere...

These young men are less restless than methodical; less imaginative than patient; above all they are dogmatic...

Much of the propaganda force of bureaucratic social science is due to its philosophical claims to Scientific Method; much of its power to recruit is due to the relative ease of training individuals and setting them to work in a career with a future. In both instances, explicitly coded methods, readily available to the technicians, are the major keys to success...

Once a man has spent three or four years at this sort of thing, you cannot really talk to him about the problems of studying modern society. His position and career, his ambition and his very self-esteem, are based in large part upon this one perspective, this one vocabulary, this one set of techniques. In truth, he does not know anything else.

They are among the energetic and ambitious technicians whom a defective educational routine and a corrupting demand have made incapable of acquiring the sociological imagination."

Wow!

It is a strange thing to contemplate, but does an excess of freedom (or, more accurately, a particular kind of freedom) lead to a form of thought-slavery? And is that formal freedom (in exchange) actually based on co-ercion, exploitation? The underlying power structure, the social relations in production, remain. Quite simply: I have time, an education, capital; you have your increasingly redundant physical labour, are time-bound, debt-ridden. Stephen Marglin's question from his classic paper gets to the heart of things: What Do Bosses Do?

We do not exchange with one another on an equal basis and in production there are people with power to make decisions while the rest of us simply obey (as wage slaves and as slaves to the notion that ever-greater consumption will bring us fulfillment). More than that, the lifestyles of the rich are based on a whole army of unseen workers-either in the host country or, increasingly, from the "third world"- who live in appalling conditions. The whole system has always depended on the "availability" of cheap inputs from non-market sectors: natural resources, the affective (and unpaid) work of women, the labour of slaves, the resources from colonized countries. No, let's stick to the idea of free trade! Let's keep the old Edgeworth model of exchange: I've got some wheat, you've got some potatoes, y'know... 

If freedom is autonomy then what control do we actually have over the kind of life we want to live? The more radical critiques of capitalism (back in the early 19th c) looked at issues of the meaning and purpose of work and its products (and not just the distribution of a 'given' pie). The uncomfortable fact may be that, actually, democracy and capitalism are not ultimately compatible. Economic democracy, for instance, is diametrically opposed to the vast inequalities generated by capitalism (and economic theory is not actually concerned about equality per se).

What role does the 'thin' theory of the individual play in all this? This is the atomistic-universal-disengaged individual who has no nature to speak of, no essence..a man with no qualities whose formal freedom resides in the fact that he eludes all social and metaphysical determinations. A veritable Robinson Crusoe living just enough for the city. 

I am determined and willing to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies.

--Sasha Grey, porn star.

~~

The Great Beast

Mass man, the great conformist,..where did he emerge from? Between the unmoored, rootless individual on the one hand and the person formed by a set of inter-dependencies, the historical communal traditions of association and sociality on the other, is the average man, the man without any qualities. This statistical man is ripe for manipulation and submission because what he wants, above all else, is security and the comforts of his or her private world: the little Englander with his small-mindedness, the all-American loser who never quite made it; they can, at the stroke of a pen, be whipped up into a mindless kind of patriotism, fired by a whole host of concocted grievances and frustrations and the illusion of if not greatness then at least personal significance. A voice in the wilderness that is finally heard.

Of course, this misses the point: it is precisely the rootless cosmopolitan that gets incorporated by various techniques of power into the system. There are no real individuals once you realize that it is the very process of 'subjectivization,' individualizing, that becomes the central mechanism of exerting control. This is not a general statement of how power always operates but, rather, a description of power at a particular stage of capitalistic development.

Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? 

C.W.M...
  

  

I sit at the table in the early morning light, stooped over a bowl of porridge, a jar of fresh honey, cinnamon...

I sit stooped because the broken chair shapes my body in a particular way. The honey..she said, "Come on over to collect it, if you don't mind me in my pyjamas."

"Do you know what an otter is?" I said.

"Why do you ask? she said. Is it because it reminds you of me...or I remind you of it?"

~
The Colonel said, if you have this fresh yoghurt every day then you won't die. In that case, I'll have two bowls, please.

I write on a keyboard without a 'y' or a 'g'. It's surprising how much we need them. In your mind an image of all the other things you've lost settles: time, maps, books,.. 

I'm not sure if one can "read" Ted Hughes's Bestiary. It's more like the poems read you, immerse you in a strangeness, an 'aliveness', that is not textual.

There is no more time on earth: a month floats by in a week, your voice becomes unrecognizable, Greenland becomes lighter by the day, the trees in California are decimated by disease and fire, cities and people are reduced to dust, cities with once grand names and streets named after medieval philosophers, at the outskirts taverns and inns and places of deep shade amidst which the contours of a face could just be made out, the face of a human being at ease in his world. 

The human frame is distorted by the evil in the world. It is strange to think that there was once more time. 

C.Wright Mills continues to both instruct and delight at the same time. Away from the stuffy, ambivalent academics whose supposed fullness of method is applied to the most partial of objects..here is someone telling it like it is, an "unfashionable mind". There's a difference between learning and having being schooled; a difference between a committed intellectual and an academic scholar-the former living in two worlds, her words and work a reflection of her life, her actual lived experience.

Some excerpts... 

The American Dream

If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said. “You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” 

“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this … Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America."

d. bank

Scandals have proliferated at Deutsche Bank. Since 2008, it has paid more than nine billion dollars in fines and settlements for such improprieties as conspiring to manipulate the price of gold and silver, defrauding mortgage companies, and violating U.S. sanctions by trading in Iran, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, and Sudan. Last year, Deutsche Bank was ordered to pay regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. two and a half billion dollars, and to dismiss seven employees, for its role in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or libor, which is the interest rate banks charge one another.

The U.S. Justice Department wants to fine Deutsche Bank fourteen billion dollars for its role in underwriting and issuing risky residential-mortgage-backed securities (or R.M.B.S.) from 2005 to 2007.

---Ed Caesar, The New Yorker.

Apart from the world of finance, think about: the arms trade, oil, the big pharmaceutical companies, illicit trades (drugs, women), the lobbying of governments, the manipulation of data/evidence (tobacco), the sugar industry, the power of the media to influence the markets, all the money ploughed into advertising to convince us that we really do need all that crap after all, the concentration of economic power in the multinationals,..now, what was that story about how markets work again...I've got some wheat, you've got some wine, la de da, la de da. 

Take out power, culture, time, money and uncertainty and you're left with Edgeworth. Brilliant! A natural propensity to barter, said the man, without a jot of supporting evidence. 

First there was Krugman, then there was Buiter but this, my dear, was something special. Romer, one of the true "insiders," turning on his own in a devastating critique of macroeconomics. For thirty years the subject has been going backwards. It's not even been concerned with, you know, that bizarre little fellow, "the Truth" or with science; instead, it's been about creating artificial models. Realistic assumptions? Pfft! Apres moi, le deluge. This, folks, is post-real macro.

Of course, the chump has to wait until he's out of academia before he can muster the courage to take a stab at Lucas and the whole rotten edifice. But still...  

~

Update:

"The one reaction that puzzles me goes something like this: “Romer’s critique of RBC models is dated; we’ve known all along that those models make no sense.”

If we know that the RBC model makes no sense, why was it left as the core of the DSGE model? Those phlogiston shocks are still there. Now they are mixed together with a bunch of other made-up shocks."

--Romer.

Blanchard has also got into the act, writing about the limitations of the models. The response here has been to shrug the shoulders or, at best, rely on Friedman's cop out: the "as if" argument. We know the assumptions aren't "true" (or, more accurately, we don't care if they're true or not) since the model(s) give us predictions. That's what science is about: how things work, not why they work.

A century passes and no-one knows what pattern time will weave. And below these larger circular movements the same holds for a single human life. Some will rise and some will fall by the wayside..for some love, a country, a language will be lost or forgotten forever, only to be remembered, unbidden, by the sudden mention of a foreign word, a particular intonation of someone's voice. 

In a previous age there would have been rituals for loss, for transitions... 

The time we have is short enough but is made shorter by incomprehension. We live with our summaries, our dark understanding. 

When the last of the sunlight goes,
and shadows stretching from the shade
of trees and bushes, long hedgerows,
join up together to invade
wild grasses and flat pasture,
turning from shadow into night...

---Virgil. 

~

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring is a lovely book. At first it seems as if it is slightly staged (this impression is reinforced by the windows being sealed, the house deaf to the outside world, and by the sharp words spoken by some of the characters, as if a definite character, rather than an individual, were speaking them).

PF is, you think, a painter of surfaces-and all the wiser for it. There is a perfect weight to the various characters, such that each person is given just the right amount of space. 

"If the writer is the hired man of an "information industry," his general aims are, of course, set by the decisions of others and not by his own integrity...

Although, in general, the larger universities are still the freest of places in which to work, the trends which limit the independence of the scholar are not absent there. The professor is, after all, an employee, subject to all that this fact involves. Institutional factors naturally select men for these universities and influence how, when, and upon what they will work and write...

The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity continually to unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications swamp us."

--C. Wright Mills. 

That was some sixty years ago. You suspect that the situation has considerably deteriorated. Apart from a few straggling oldies the university is probably little other than an appendage of some corporation or the other. 

The Society of the Spectacle

__ posts a lot of photographs, many of which I cannot look at without feeling profoundly sad. And so you turn your face away. Pictures of the those who may be defeated but who are still defiant (all the people you've never heard of, or not wanted to hear of); other pictures of dead bodies, old people and babies lying in the dust, ghost-like. Migrants and refugees, one moment of their despair caught on film.

__ is the rarest of birds, someone's whose integrity shines through.

~~~

Re-reading Llosa's somewhat polemical writing on culture. Well, what do you want: a nuanced critique? He tells it like it is and an old man has the right to cut out all the bullshit. Uncle N, the wise old fox, said to me: after you've turned thirty you should speak frankly, candidly, bluntly if needs be. Ubo, my Jew, would never agree to that; he'd take someone down but through wit and guile and his dazzling, smiling face. Both are old-world people, from a time and place that barely exists any more...

A culture in the grip of cheap hedonism might sink as it sacrifices everything to amusement.

Light sex, light reading; travel lightly. Instant living, the revelatory "now". Religion for dummies. Einstein explained in a 3 minute youtube clip. Buddhism for CEOs. The artists decided that everything was possible. why does that remind you of Arendt: In the camps, the impossible became possible.

The 'image bath,' a form of docile submission to emotions and sensations triggered by an unusual and at times very brilliant bombardment of images.. 

Scandal, gossip, titillation, fear-mongering. That's what journalism has become. We're all on the internet highway, the road to nowhere. 

Where are the intellectuals? Instead, what you have is their pale reflection: scholars and academics who, like so many others, are on the game. 

The spectacle is everywhere: in politics, sports, journalism. Religious extremists and the war machine are the ultimate expression of this desire to convey what we knew long ago: the medium is the message. But religion more generally is spectacular, a 'show' (tamasha). the self-righteous must be seen to be religious-the final triumph of nominalism, of appearance over substance. The proliferation of sects and cults and evangelical missionaries foaming at the mouth, their pockets bursting from all the cash that's been stuffed in them by businessmen. 

Lighten up, dude.

Excitement, stupefaction, extreme boredom leading to extreme sports, excess, a drug-infused release. Cocaine, ecstasy, heroin..a release from responsibility, expectations, a return to something primitive; to lose oneself in that "oceanic feeling," to drown one's sorrows.

Musical mysticism where, to the the rhythm of raw voices and instruments, both amplified to an inaudible level, individuals are no longer individuals; they become a mass [returning[ to the the primitive times of magic and the tribe.  

The world given over to fashion, showmen, advertisers, pimps and circus performers. Frivolity and easy pleasure are the flavour of the day. 

There's so much innocence in occupation. No, no, it's more complex than that-it always has to be: we, the occupiers, the oppressors, we're human too. Gives us our moment in the spotlight. Why can't we look sexy too? 


  

Anti-Education

"All kinds of utilitarian considerations will be brought forth to advance the cause of technology. Some of the mandarin intellectuals themselves may unwittingly slide into forsaking spiritually meaningful learning for the more certain rewards of specialization and routine research."

--Fritz Ringer.

Spiritually meaningful?!

And:

"Culture and knowledge had been uncoupled from values and ethics and subordinated to "material gain under a crudely understood earthly happiness"."

Now, this "uncoupling," which is surely related to the emphasis on science and the liberal view of the individual, doesn't just come about innocently, does it?

In economics: 

"That it [economic orthodoxy] afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."

--Keynes.

And what of your own experiences? You see the pressure on younger faculty building every day, the performance sheets, the constant evaluation and self-monitoring (a technique by which power is exercised); how the administration is hell-bent on creating a two-tiered "track" system that would consign the workers/teachers to a life of constant stress while at the same time creating a lot of anxiety for those who have to publish to avoid the "lower" track. Institutional divide and rule.

This constant need to tick boxes, to show people with money, other (bigger) administrators, that everyone is busy, doing something. Productivity is up, numbers are up. Couch everything in the language of the salesman and the job is already half done. Entertain the customers/students. They see through the whole shambolic farce that it is anyway. no, that's not right: they don't know any better. They think that that's the way it is and the way it's always been.  

But the real horror of the system lies elsewhere. At other universities and in the schools themselves, students are being ground down and fleeced all in the hope that they might-somehow-be able to make a living once they come out the other end. And the faculty at these universities, not those who are simply mercenaries, are being converted into factory workers. 

Of course, you will be told: why complain when people in the "real world" have it far worse? This, too, is a way of exercising control.

Today you received an e-mail about some project/conference/scam in Berlin: 

Present your research project, business plan, entrepreneurial or social initiative that is relevant to the world of today-in 3 minutes! 

When I think of all that is wrong in the false world of academia in the land of the pure..well, that one line encapsulates a significant part of it.

Everyone must get on the circuit, circulate, add to the "production" of knowledge, be "visible," present yourself, your "ideas," hop on and off the conference bandwagon. To just sit down and watch the world go by with a Jacob's Club (Orange) and a book; to want to do that, to have the resources and guile to be able to avoid being noticed, being spoken of, spoken to...is simply not permissible. Stand up and be counted! Fight the good fight against barbarism, illiteracy, the unenlightened, etc., etc.

Oh, the hilarity and naivete of it all; it makes me howl with laughter and bend over double in joy to witness the seriousness with which these fools take themselves.

~ 

Was stunned by Gilead. Hard to know what to say about it. Maybe some other time. 

After the heat of the day, the cool evening air and the crystalline clouds. Something had ended in your starred heart. We live without knowing.

These last moments rich in their suggestiveness. The older you become the more time is rolled into a single moment. Memories of previous summers suffuse this instant; your hands are loose and open...

What is there to hold on to?

There is deep silence. An unseen dog barks some streets down and then stops for no reason. A child laughs somewhere. Then from up in the hills you hear a train on the tracks. And then, as the breeze picks up and the leaves rustle, you hear the gentle tingling of wind chimes, a signal of presence. But all these sounds are heard individually and they form no " picture", only a pure succession of isolated notes. They are the faint and ghostly reminders of the life not lived. Nothing on earth remains or will ever remain but these cycles of appearance and disappearance- and yet we still dream of gold.

A drain pipe is illuminated by the last flaring of the sun. The light forms a solid horizontal bar of gold above the stone and the shadows. But before long it too is absorbed in the great samsara.

In my coat pocket I carry my ticket with the printed details of my departure. The stars have never looked so beautiful, the rose never so ephemeral. Everything comes into the summer light in time, for a time. Khayyam saw it, this brief, flashing world: drink, and drink well!

Wonder Years

There are many hours in a single day, taking the same shape over the years, slightly distorted, out of place with time. There are different kinds. The wide door leads into the days of our lives.

The hours are sometimes arranged in rows; sometimes not.

'The light in each room of the house is different
But the light of the whole house
Hangs suspended in eternal afternoon.'
---K. Irby.