I tumble through the season like a second-rate acrobat. Nerves all a-jangling; the inner wrist of certainty; time on your hands. Stand outside and read with an espresso, kit-kat. Christian Imagination, if you must. George Herbert.

And now I am here.

Hold the thin book up in one hand, to the faltering light. The sun retreats behind a cloud and darkness and stillness falls all around me. Gather what strength you can for the final lecture and then let it go, sail away. Don't dwell on anything for Christ's sake. Nothing to tie together or reflect upon. And now, a moment. Preparation. Lights. Trembling: In-action! The circus goes on.. 

~~~

Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me 

None of my books will show; 

I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree, 

For sure then I should grow 

To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust 

Her household to me, and I should be just. 

Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek; 

In weakness must be stout; 

Well, I will change the service, and go seek 

Some other master out. 

Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot, 

Let me not love thee, if I love thee not. 

I grew up in a dark country, originally, sort of. Wales, my whore, with your old-time piers and last breath, made up of old forms and forgotten words. You arrived after so many detours and brief stints in old cities, hurtling to a stop in a second-hand maroon Anglia that cost 15 pounds back in the day. And witnessed, for what it was worth, the last remnants of a way of living that was about to disappear before everyone's weary eyes, a life whose key and timbre would enter no history book or official record. File under: 'Without Title' or 'Missing Persons'.

No-one arrived (or at least no-one left). Objectively speaking it was run down from day one and all the people seemed to be permanently tired. Borrowed time. The thriving port now a distant memory. Sunday roast and the obligatory ritual of boredom thereafter. Piece it all together and it doesn't amount to much, but what does? A few sharp memories, the dread of first days, but much else has sunk into oblivion. Wandering tribes have such fantastic features, Bellow wrote. Perhaps.

The familiarity of being a stranger to oneself, to the life you're living. First seeds sown in the dark right then. 

All cities look the same at dusk. Your hands stained with ink. Some of it smudges on the tightly arranged words in Anglican Identities. Perhaps that should be angular. Tyndale sounds like a wahabi. There must be patience, dry spells, an acceptance of absence- Lord help us. Nothing finds perfection; that's just the way it is. Speak, even though there's silence in your words, the silence that recalls other times.      

There is darkness in the morning. I don't know why. My books are scattered on the floor, on the desk. Why even bother with 'my'? The window is open. I hear birds chirping, a few stray notes from a guitar, distant but also close up if you know... I hear the silence of my own life and record it here, for you, as if you could tell it or you could hear it. 

There is darkness at eleven o'clock and I don't know why any more. The coffee was too bitter. Danish blue and walnuts. A quiet hour spent noting the thoughts of Finnis's Natural Law. Copy the words down in your hand until they're real. Old ways staying down below the lights keep the song of the world going, no matter how faint.

Eight hundred years of thought and commentaries, almost unbroken. The sky is older by a couple of billion. But the thought and not the theoretical formulation is older still. There is no time. 

The door to this phase of the year is closing. You'd take stock but all you got is a blank page and a blunt pencil. Why expend any effort. The birds are chirping in this mysterious darkening and there is laughter far away. Things roll by. Same as it ever.      

  

Galbraith anticipated the evolution of today’s capitalism. Rather than conceive of it as operating on the same “ market-force” principles as a medieval fair or Middle Eastern souk, where buyers and sellers interact to find prices that reflect preferences and scarcities, he thought of markets as cockpits for the interplay of concentrations of private corporate power. Prices would, of course, be manipulated; consumers and governments would be hoodwinked; employees could expect a raw deal.

What keeps executives, owners and politicians honest are embedded and strong institutions representing other forces – unions, strong consumer groups, independent regulators, checks and balances within companies and effective political parties as alternative governments-in-waiting.

Galbraith would not have been surprised at the degeneration of corporate culture worldwide: too much indulgence of greed as a market “incentive” and too much indulgence of market power dressed up as “wealth generation”. Investment banking (witness the latest fraud allegations against Goldman Sachs) is a particular cesspit. The institutions of countervailing power have been dismantled to allow “market forces” better to operate

They do not see that the streets shine beautifully, that they themselves are walking on stars and water, that they are running in skies to catch a bus or taxi, to shelter somewhere in the press of irritated humans...

--Merton.

The books are falling to pieces, the cards are on the table; with time I've darken'd my mind with words. Aquinas in the 1260s or ancient cities near the Amu Darya, swept over by layers of dust, now sunken, forgotten, a mere flickering of a single pulse in the vast life of an indifferent universe. What takes us from this present moment. The scratch on my arm, the line etched in a fallen stone now invisible, deep as it is in the bright, high grass.

Nothing will last; the spectacle I see behind the glass of my heart is without pomp or splendour.  

   
"Dark and light, certainly, death and life, and the title, which calls up both wakefulness and funeral starkness, intensifies the riddle..the youngest things in the image are also the oldest."     

--Robert Hass.

The moral maze

How Professors Ceded Their Authority | Chad Wellmon 

"The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments, and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally penalized, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and insisting that the system’s overseers turn the cant of diversity and inclusion into real change. A student who experiences discrimination or harassment is taught to file a complaint by submitting a written statement; the office then determines if the complaint has merit; the office conducts an investigation and produces a report; an executive accepts or rejects the report; and the office "notifies" the parties of the "outcome."

These bureaucratic processes transmute moral injury, desire, and imagination into an object that flows through depersonalized, opaque procedures to produce an "outcome." Questions of character, duty, moral insight, reconciliation, community, ethos, evil, or justice have at most a limited role. American colleges and universities speak the national argot of individual rights, institutional affiliation, and complaint that dominates American capitalism. They have few moral resources from which to draw any alternative moral language and imagination. My students have adapted the old Protestant college’s moral mission to the demands of the institutions in which they now find themselves.

The extracurricular system of moral management requires an ever-expanding array of "resources" — counseling centers, legal services, deans of student life. Teams of devoted professionals work to help students hold their lives together. The people who support and oversee these extracurricular systems of moral management save lives and inspire students, but they do so almost entirely apart from any coherent curricular project.

It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched, or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. They are, instead, matters for their extracurricular lives in dorms, fraternities or sororities, and student-activity groups, most of which are managed by professional staff members who, for many faculty members, seem to work in a wholly separate institution. The rationalization of colleges and universities has led to the division not only of intellectual labor (through academic specialization) but also of basic educational functions."

~~~

Those in any profession usually inflate its overall importance to society. Academics are masters at this, often claiming that the university or the liberal arts or "critical thinking" will:

save humanity

lead to enlightenment

enhance democracy

help rationally order our lives
further research, creativity, productivity and, consequently, economic growth
weed out prejudice/superstition/tradition.

The truth, though, is that the university is just one institution among others and that it has been rolled over by neoliberalism. It is hard to imagine how it could ever be immune from cultural, political, economic and technological changes in the wider society. 

What is the main aim here (and is it governed by methodology)? Break down, analyse, deconstruct, historicize and problematize. In short: "Truthfulness" rather than the Truth. What, if anything, could unite the various disciplines into a comprehensive whole (Newman's question..which is not a question any more because the ideal no longer remains an ideal).

To talk about the moral or spiritual purpose of education or the university would, I suspect, appear to be some kind of joke to most students (and faculty too no doubt). Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake or to get a job; those seem to be the only two options left: esoteric, arcane, partial and trivial pursuits ("the life of the mind") or the furthering of materialism.

Morishima: 'The Good and Bad Uses of Mathematics':
       

The Dark Age Ahead

Re-reading J. Jacobs' book. The first chapter is the best, setting out a general discussion of crises and how they might be linked (do they re-inforce one another?; is the seed of hope and a possible future already contained in a crisis?). Things can fall apart, spiral downwards; there's no law that states that an equilibrium will be reached. Or if it is, then it's a low-level one of survival: a tired and low-key civilization which is closer to barbarism. K. Clark: 'by the skin of our teeth' western civilisation came through the darkness. One wonders, though, how much of our character, mode of thinking and temperament is formed by a crisis?

Do we become cruder, lazier, more indifferent? Does our language splinter and coarsen so that we lose our finer sensibilities? What do we care about in the end days? Will we, as Milosz asks in his great poem, 'bind the tomatoes' in the Great Scattering? Why tend to crops, to other people's concerns, to our dress or way of being in the world when the order of the world is barely discernible? 

Scheffler's question: how much of what we value depends on its value and the activities that bear value, continuing over time? Without that sense of continuity, succession and transmission is culture even possible? If we live only in the 'now' isn't that a very impoverished kind of existence?

J. Bridle's New Dark Age is really fascinating (will write about it later).

J.J.'s choice of imminent signs of a multi-level crisis are really intriguing (and perhaps a little surprising).

The dissolution of the family. The distortion of education. She's trying to get at the roots here. Climate change is an effect. I'd add technology as a potentially disastrous disruption of the time-worn ways of thinking about what it is to be human. 

Part of you doesn't even want to talk about this. Actually, that's probably (in part) what has stopped us from doing anything about it. The problem is too big, too complex and it almost seems inevitable; against that what kind of language is left to us to talk about these things? We have gladly living with contingency for ages, without a sense of final ends or first things, without myth or tradition or religion or a sense of the cosmos (Tarkovsky). Living for the moment or, alternatively, fantasies of linear progress and endless time, infinite desires. As if we could go on forever. Well, all that is over now but a mindset that was structured by such notions now finds it difficult to cope with the hard realities. 

Our little self-interested perspectives have led to the destruction of the environment. Well, damn those brute animals and damn the future generations (what have they ever done for us anyway?).

What words, then, if not Greek, Biblical, Qur'anic?

~~~

Rachel Cusk: the end of character. Hmm.

Yes, in the Dark Age ahead there will be no books (or there'll be books but no reading. The time of the Eloi). 

There probably won't be much play or games either. Life itself would have become a meaningless game. We might look back on the old pictures of the circus, football matches, religious ceremonies and rituals and wonder to ourselves: who were those strange people?

They'll look back at all those pornographic images in the dying days of their ancestors and wonder: what strange creatures our ancestors were. Or maybe not, because the sense of the past will have disappeared with the future.         

Thinking together.

Herbert McCabe writes with great simplicity (like Thomas Merton), which suggests to me that he's actually lived a religious (Christian) life. There's an arresting line in one of his books: the social is spiritual (more or less). Goes against the grain of modern thought which holds that the private or individual realm is what distinguishes us a thinking and spiritual beings. But what of Blake's: "He who sees ratio sees only himself"? 

I don't know if I'll get round to reading his book on Aquinas (but this is, perhaps, what I should have been reading in an alternative life). That sounds all wrong, too modern, because there's something to be said for accepting the life that has been dealt out to one (I say that not as a generalization because I know people have gone through terrible things; merely stating my own case and why I have so many grounds to be grateful).

What is true is true and not true because the individual mind thinks it. The individual mind can "latch on to" what is true: the meeting of subjectivity with objectivity. 

Stokowski once said-and I really like this line- a musical score is just a "text"; it only becomes music once the human hand gets involved.

For some academics, perhaps a large number, abstract models or theory, the text ripped out of its context is the thing itself. How does it make contact with life? At one level it's all very clever but it is often really just a form of idiocy.  

post-

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe - can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. ..

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless" ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful "cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. 

---Zizek.

1970s. 

The sense of exhaustion, of no more new beginnings or 'experiments in living'. Been there, done that. Nature herself is depleted. Atrophy, winding down..Becket's Endgame, of course. 

The quest for the exotic is more than a century old! The shock of the new fails to shock. What next? After Auschwitz could anything more perverse and degenerate even be imagined? Is the only energy left the ability to move in a downward spiral?

By the 1950s people were already writing about this: the end of Tradition, transmission (Arendt); the 'worldlessness' of capitalism (Arendt again). The sense of an ending and therefore the need for conservation (of: words, seeds, heritage, human genetic material, historical buildings, wildlife, languages, species). The Royals would come in handy here; immigrants, too. The BBC and its shoring up of the ruins with fragments from the nostalgia industry.  

The push to more extreme forms of 'action' (de Sade); extreme sports, "kicks", "highs" in a jaded world. Freedom morphing into a kind of compulsive behaviour or nihilism (Eagleton: Holy Terror). "Have you ever considered any other kinds of freedom?", Brando would ask. Or: withdrawals, retreats, Buddhist mediation, Zen stillness (didn't Spengler say Buddhism would be a "late" religion?). Oceanic feelings, "release", just do it, go with the flow; football as a religion, rave parties: the need to disappear. In the 1970s there were the disappeared (Latin America). 

Abstract art: the disappearance of the human face. Hockney: we are witnesses to our absence. Technology and data flows. Human beings are just data points. Ambient music: everything is mere background now, as if we were living perpetually in an airport, with no departures and no arrivals, just the same old CNN re-runs. The abstract, neutral space that is no place, no place like home: airports, shopping malls, cinemas, and hotels that are all surface, depth less, shiny and eternal. Friction-less - travel light in the desert of the real, grasshopper, because all that matters in late capitalism is the space of flows, the networks. 

Near Gower Street

The old camera was simpler and therefore better. The old way of looking at the world was simpler...

Yesterday, a glorious early morning drive, past small plots of land (wheat, mustard). The light is golden, gentle. Everything's at peace with itself. The ploughed soil, dark brown and firm at this time of the year. All the ancient ways surviving. Cows grazing..later on a group of camels (with their multi-coloured saddles) passed by you. The trucks with their dazzling, ornate designs, quiet and determined on their long haul. At the service station, deep in the heart of Punjab, they're serving espresso! (not half bad as well).

On the way back you stop on the roadside to see some people making lumps of golden, raw sugar from sugarcane. You wonder how long the process has been around. A thousand years? It's boiled in a huge metal pot under a wood fire. The aroma of the sugarcane is sweet and comforting. A man in wellington boots tells us that no chemicals whatsoever are used in the process. 

By the road an old man sells it by the kilo. He seems remarkably content in life and smiles at us warmly. How long has he been doing this kind of work? What is there to say to strangers? If he asked us what we do we would not be able to explain anything to him in any great detail. I ask D, "What, exactly, is the point of our knowledge?". "Not much," he replies, but lets it go, since this question is too close to home. New York, London, tens of thousands of pounds, so many hours of intense devotion to trying to understand fairly frivolous things; a life given over to asking the wrong questions, abstractions, theories. All that has led to this inexorable moment at dusk in an unfamiliar land; we stand at the roadside, bewildered, as limited as the man selling the sugar that has been made to crystallize and then harden under the winter sun.
   
It is night now. The lights come on at the service station as we swill down cups of hot milky tea. The mood lightens, as some people contemplate that the day is done. We look past palm trees to the dying sun. "If there weren't these damned kids on the trampoline we could be in California," says D. That time has gone, like much else.

We drive back in the enfolding dark, with less to say to one another. D wants to listen to the Pet Shop Boys. By the side there are the controlled fires (rice?). Each pile burns brilliantly, separately, deep into the fields, in a time-worn ritual. The fire, pure and clean, seems to burn with very little smoke rising into the night sky.

At the toll plaza entry and exit is noted with some seriousness. The journeys you've made over the years.

You stand over the basin and wash your face with a handful of water. Don't look in the mirror in case you see yourself. Make preparations, as best you can. Another early morning departure, another journey into the unfamiliar. Who is it that goes, who is it that returns?       

   

Robinson

there isn't an anchor anywhere.
there isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

--Bronk

Before Robinson there was only Robinson. When you've lost sense of direction there is no Englishman, no Saracen.

start again. the drift of the world brought me here...

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from?, she asked 

Originally?

No, but where are you really from?, demanded the racist 

Originally?

Country of origin?, asked the pale looking official. 

I come from the land of the pure, where the purer the land the more bitter the almonds, he said, lyingly. Then Robinson looked out to the sea and remembered the colours:

"And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently..."

--Isak D. 

V.S.P.

A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at streets and their architecture much longer and more intensely and at Nature and landscape. I gaze at the plane tree at the end of the garden, studying its branches and its leaves. I look a long time at flowers. And I am always on the watch for the dramatic changes in the London sky.

--V.S.P.

No, not read. Too late to start. But the small sketch (in one of Dougal's books) did leave an impression. 

And now? As age has caught up with you and you find yourself catching your breath on the stairs. Or forgetting names or squinting to make out the face of the person walking towards you. Who the hell is that?!

The old practical ways, inherited from Ubo, linger on somewhere deep down. There seems to be less and less to say- and I don't know how to say it. Ignore the signs, don't look for wisdom. Carry on, in fact, as the clown you've always been. 

I can't say that life is narrowing down appreciably because it's always been- at least in some sense-narrow. Out of choice more than circumstance it has to be said. A needless distinction, perhaps, for how is one's character distinguished from the times one lives in?Still, you note the old Puritan hat you wear with some distinction (not pride) is nearly threadbare after all these years. Most of my clothes have holes in them for some odd reason. Moths or just general wear and tear.  

The other, special hat of yours you keep safe on the top shelf for Christmas visits to London has been worn only once, the day after your birthday. It blew onto the tracks at Woodford and stayed there all night. Recovered it on Sunday morning and was amazed to see that after a brief dusting off it was as good as new! So, there it rests, along with the other hats and the unworn ties from the 1970s (why did Ubo have so many brown ties, you wonder).

I don't study anything with any attentiveness. Instead, drift, drift. There's been no change in the sky for six hours now (if that helps). The only tree that exerts a magnetic pull on me is a million miles away, north by north-west... There is a road, there is a word, that would make sense of all of this, if I only I could find it (okay, okay, James Salter, if you must).

A sign of old age is that there are fewer signs and you don't know who you are. Apart from that, all's swell.  

Devils

"Souling"- the practice, on All Hallow's eve, of going from door to door asking for "soul cakes" and in return singing prayers for the souls of the givers and their friends. "Souling" is of medieval origin; now trick-or-treating.

via Robert Macfarlane.

~~~

A Christian woman accused of blasphemy has-thank God- been found not guilty. But the maulvis have been wailing and foaming at the mouth since last night ("who will rid us of these turbulent..."). Devils on the streets. 

Little r was dressed up as a devil for Halloween. God knows what the domestic help (a forlorn woman from a village) must have thought. [That really does make me sound like some sort of character in a Russian novel before the Revolution]. I'm not sure if there are depictions of the devil in Islam so maybe things are okay. r asked, "How do I look?". I replied in a mocking tone: "It's like, soooo you."

One of the fortunate consequences of the fanaticism of the mullahs is that the whole city is closed down today. So, it feels like the first day of the year in London. Grey skies, not a soul about, fresh espresso (which the Guardian, curse them, claim is not as good as filter coffee). I can hear the crows but they're lost somewhere up in the smog. Started Alexievich's Second-Hand Time. 

My double life continues, which is to say my half-life does. Dia-bolical: divided self? Note to self: But don't take your unbelief too seriously, old bean.

~~~

Ali Qasmi really looks the part. He has an old 19th c. beard that Marx would have been proud of. Dressed up in a suit and tie for Halloween. "Who are you?", I asked. "An Islamic banker", said Q. He's got a devlish twinkle in his eyes. In Qatar I thought he'd hung himself out of boredom. When we visited a shopping mall (what else is there?) he said to me, "look at that sexy woman over there". But, Q, she's wearing a burqa! "I know, I know, but I saw her ankles."

He's an old school historian who hates new-fangled words like "multidisciplinarity". Everyone wants to change things all the time. But it takes time, everything takes time. I look at his gentle face closely. Actually, it's not the historian speaking but a fellow Kashmiri. Leave it be.

In an age that has convinced itself that activity is preferable to inactivity it is a pleasure to meet someone who still wants to talk about books. A line from Brodsky struck me this morning: They [he and his friends] preferred to read rather than act. 

I prefer to read than write. And sometimes I don't. And then I don't care about "preferring" or even the "I" that prefers or prefers not to. Instead, a crow haphazardly making its way through the dense fog...

1969

Some things remain the same and some things pass.

--Ronald Blythe, Akenfield.

There is something of the matter-of-fact about the statements of the people that populate Blythe's wonderful book (not finished). This makes the simple statements actually more profound, mysterious, because they've been lived inwardly rather than 'thought'. Similar, in some respects, to Alexievich's superb Chernobyl. It's the voice of the hedgehogs- people who have only known one thing and one place. An old-world solidity that comes, one imagines, from living close to the land and being in touch with the seasons. Less idle chatter, more connection to harsh realities ( which echoes G. Thibon's observations in Back to Reality). A certain kind of narrowness, no doubt, but can there really be a sense of missed opportunities if that's the only kind of life you've ever known?

That's the way it was; and that's just the way it is. Fatalism and the harshness of the conditions of life are perhaps intertwined with one another. The existence of an apparent profusion of opportunities can, on the other hand, lead to superficiality (I say "apparent" because Chesterton's remark should always be kept in mind: after all the frenetic whirl of changing opinions, fads, machines..the "factory remains").

~~~

Zizek writes that in 1970 Agatha Christie wrote an odd book in which she expressed her utter bewilderment about the direction England was taking. The 70s, the decade in which nothing happened, the afterglow after the raging 60s. Nothing new to be said: just retro and conservatism.

Agamben: By the 1870s the bourgeoisie had forgotten all its gestures; from now on they'd have to be recorded, preserved.   

~~~
It is time we spoke in plain English. At the end of times we must recall the most primitive of words and feelings, that long-forgotten love of the world, those old human instincts that drew us to beauty (of a woman's face, the order of our homes, of nature gloriously free from the touch of human hands). Plain and simple words. But also great ones, for the smog and soot from the world-ending fire is reaching us already. 

No-one compares

I really like John Milbank's work. The little I can understand, that is. A philosopher and a theologian who writes about the importance for religious thought of 'the social' and relationality. So, it was surprising and disappointing to see him write this about Sinead O'Connor's conversion to Islam:

"Sinead O'Connor's conversion suggests that Houillebecq has it right. Liberals will embrace an authoritarianism to escape their own contradictions if it is respectably other and non-Western. She is a civilisational traitress. And has no taste." 

Pretty strong stuff! Ultimately, I wonder if this goes back to something R.W. Southern wrote in an intriguing small book many years ago. Islam has always been inexplicable. The real trauma was not just the violence (actual and alleged) nor was it some kind of 'civilisational' conflict. The deep rooted hostility has always stemmed from the question: If there is only one true path how could God allow another religion to emerge? The only answer to that must be a kind of repression: it is, and has to be, a false religion. No-one and nothing compares. 

Yes, we might on occasion recognize the beauty of its art, the personal piety of some of its followers, and its contribution to medieval scholasticism but, ultimately, it's a deception because even though it recognizes one God it doesn't do so in the right way and is therefore a distortion! (A question to yourself: can a culture that produces so much beauty actually be at root a perversion of the Truth?).        

I


I can't say your name 
without a crow flying by.

Shadows of ourselves

I was a shadow of myself-and have been so for a long time now if truth be told. If I could measure time, that is, so to speak, in some sense, if you know what I mean.

You, too, were two shadows: of yourself and of me (even though it would kill you to admit it). And then you would be one. 

"Take aim and take care!", said the Queen.

He stood there, quivering, unresolved, at the centre of absence, a loss for words; a black sun eclipsed by a darker sun. Some silver coins in the deep inner pockets of his outer coat; with time the silver inheriting the black. The winter light on his hands, alive, the deep creases on his face, the dark river of his mind. All that he owned, fading with time. 

A few crows suddenly took flight and broke the silence. The queen's black net turned heads. Medusa let down her hair and froze a thousand hearts."You fool for so fooling me!" , she said to her shadow. No matter how close, no-one could find the way to her heart, if truth be told, in some sense, if you know what I mean. But it was November, the time of forgiveness. She read him some lines in her barbarian tongue, as if to comfort him: the way is short, the night is so dark, and still you do not find the way...   


What you are supposed to hit
is the bull’s-eye, that black spot,
that precise spot, and the arrow
is supposed to stand there quivering!
But that’s not where the arrow goes.
You get close to it, closer and closer;
no, not close enough.
Then you have to go out and pick up all the arrows,
walk back, try it again.
That black spot is highly annoying
until you finally grasp
that where your arrow stands quivering
is also the center of something.

---Olav Hauge

Clearing

Methodically sorting papers is one thing; quickly dumping huge piles of assorted rubbish into large cardboard cartons is quite another. It seems that there's so little time left for organizing, for sifting out what is valuable from the debris of your life that has accrued over the decades. So, fling the papers, unopened envelopes and postcards into the bins and cartons. There's simply no time for reflection or nostalgia. The whole thing appears botched right now. Receipts, bank statements, past examinations, unread journal articles, a few choice quotes that seemed profound at the time..all destined for the furnace, the trash heap.

What you're looking for, you can't find. The uneasy feeling that it doesn't matter either way. Whether you bring some kind of semblance of order to the piles or not. Let it all go. And then a kind of resentment wells up in you: all of this documentation of your life! To what purpose? Is that who you really were? Nothing inward here amongst the scraps. Khayyam: drink up!

By chance you stumble across a letter from Roxana. Very sweet and innocent. A kid, after all! Who knows where anyone is or who anyone is or was. Everyone's life is shrouded in an unfathomable mystery. It won't settle. There's no clearing here.   

   

  

Shikast

I am part moon and part travelling salesman. My specialty is that of finding those hours that have lost their clock. 
--V. Huidobro 

The hour is upon us; the shadow of the hour. You write into this silent wilderness with a sense of freedom that comes from not being read. All the hours that were lost are somehow still with you! As faint as the smell of tobacco on an old coat, or the ink smudges on your fingertips. 

My specialty is that I do not have a specialty. 'Shikast' is the wrong word because there has never been any desire to win; there has been no game. But a loose sense of being lost then, not lose. And now. 

What is this fascination with games if not to be lost in the rules? Necessity and chance. The old sense of a labyrinth or a maze; and the sense of relief when find your way out. Fold the board, close the book, and return to ordinary life. Lost and found.       

Old School

B bB  
K

When Dear Abby was asked the question ‘Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?’ she replied, ‘How should they answer?’

--Hanna Gray.

'Yes' and 'No' in my true love's eyes.

One day Enkan called to his attendant, "Bring me the rhinoceros fan."The attendant said, "It is broken."Enkan said, "If the fan is already broken, bring me the rhinoceros himself."

Master, the circle is broken.
Is that why you call me Master?
Should I fix it?
Maybe.

The word "hippo" is still funny even though "hippopotamus" is too frivolous a word in English to be in any way helpful.
--Gunter Eich. 

What about "rhinoceros" then, Master?
Why do you call me Master?
Is it funny?
It is serious, but still absurd.