Californian Days

We live in an age when it isn't easy to distinguish between your natural inclinations and the times.

-----David Remnick, editor of the The New Yorker.

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Walking down Beaumaris Drive in the middle of the morning, a time when the world is just about to stir, find its groove. I look askance and see an old woman, perhaps in her eighties, diligently attending to the plants in her small square garden. She is immaculately dressed- pale blue cardigan, make-up, a large gold broach- and there is a tremendous look of seriousness on her face, as if knowing how to approach each flower in the right way was not just a matter of the application of a vast accumulation of knowledge and experience that she could draw on at will, but a trying out of all that she instinctively knew. And why make that distinction anyway? To be gritty, obstinant, tender, just in the right measure...the garden was a world in itself and she was no different. To be so thoroughly engrossed in the give and take of the world or the rhythms of the earth was to move beyond self-consciousness.

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That worldy wisdom, self-absorption, the deep knowledge of and reverence for the details of a life-no matter how narrow a life it is- holds the nomad spellbound. Equally, the stranger, the misfit, and the rootless looks on at this lack of alienation, this roundedness, with a fascinated horror and is simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the vision of domesticity, shallowness, and stillness. The perfect intensity that can be derived from a command of skills and the deep continuity-resources that only civilisation can make available- dazzles the monolithic mind with its sheer horizontality.

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There's a finality about the sunshine today. It signals the last of the summer days, the late flowering of possibilities , a final flourish before the onset of the dark and fatalistic winter. It seems as if one is witnessing the world in colour one last time before we slip into a perpetual greyness. The light suggests a perfect ripeness or sweetness but to reach such perfection must also mean that everything can change in an instant.

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There's a slight chill in the air-not the type that reaches the bones, but one that leaves its impression nevertheless. By 10 0'clock things have evened out and listening to some Gary Jules I wonder if the mellowness is coming from the music, the faded yellow light or if its just the way I'm feeling right now. It's nearly impossible to listen to classical music any more- everything has to be about timeliness now, has to be related to that small patch of time and space that we've experienced. There must have been a thousand days like this before.

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The sunlight does not so much as illuminate the world as hold it together in a delicately poised totality. Chains of frail light. The last moment contains all others, encapsulates all that was said and unsaid over the long-break. It also mysteriously evokes distant places and times, both familiar and imaginary: a lazy November morning in Lahore, tramping through leafy Richmond suburbs, and wide open Californian streets.

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Practicality, taken to its limit, reverts to the poetical; Roth can convey a world in all its of particularity and utterly believable depictions are carried on the back of a solid prosaic world of fact, knowledge and experience. So much of the artist's work is in making nothing happen, in creating a space where intelligence can burst though the mundane and sparkle all the more for standing out from all that is intimately familiar. And then there is the type of wisdom that only comes from a cerain level of detachment, the inner dialogue of a lonely self:

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As she was speaking,she took hold of his arm and now, as she became silent, her grip tightened as though only her hand could continue the burden of her thoughts.

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Now it was like the laboured conversation among guests at a late hour after there is nothing more to say, nothing but ashes in the fireplace, dishes in the sink, a chill in the room, a return to ordinary estrangement.

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There isn't any place for the way I feel

-----from Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

Shadow of ourselves

I guess there's a part of us that wants to stay in the shadows but another that wants something, someone, to bear witness to our tattered lives. And what could be easier: one step to the side and the world passes you by! Ole!

A friend asks: what do you really feel? Crumbs! Q would have said: steady on old chap. The old world still understands the value of masks and hypocrisy and superficiality..a lightness out of profundity...Reminds me of Walter Ong once asking a Red Man how he would describe himself.

"Well, about six feet tall...'

"No, no, your personality"

"That is not for me to say; others may tell you"

And so it is. What is this desire to chart the soul, to lay bare its trials and tribulations? Augustine would rightly ask: God, what am I?Who is to say! We are, eventually, what we scrawl down in our words and deeds. One is reminded, again, of the Red Man's love of secrecy. We live now in an age of confession, a world where globalizers want to "open up" different regions, and scientists think they can name everything. Roll up, roll up...the day the world floated away and pleasure dissolved memory into a series of fragmentary moments. Like a note from Chopin, on the verge of disappearing. Flattened out, one world, the shiny surfaces are the only reality in this fake universalism, this false infinity.

But perhaps not. For no matter what happens the shadows remain, and the world is still the world, this tent of scattered stars, full of longing, full of hope or remorse. We still wake up and are amazed by all that has been given to us. And even if they convince us-the scientists and the mullahs-that this world is nothing but ashes still we can know that all is not lost.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be

and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

So, there is nothing to tell, and if there is one must tell it slant. Let us not seek reality or purity (perhaps that only exists in certain human voices); but instead let us return to the world which is nothing but a blue and red flame, light that mingles with shadows in early November mornings.

Faith is in you wherever you look

At a dewdrop or a floating leaf

And know that they are because they have to be .

Even if you close your eyes and dream up things

The world will remain as it has always been

And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river

You have faith also when you hurt your foot

Against a sharp rock and you know

That rocks are here to hurt our feet.

See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?

We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

---Czeslaw Milosz

Ich habe genug

Welt, ich bleibe nicht mehr hier,

Hab ich doch kein Teil an dir,

Das der Seele könnte taugen.

Hier muß ich das Elend bauen,

Aber dort, dort werd ich schauen

Süßen Friede, stille Ruh.

With thanks to C for pointing me here. I know you disagree, but I still think the Lieberson version is more beautiful. I was listening to this on my way home late last night, as the mist descended . Nothing to do but walk in circles, so I took another round. There were no people around, only a few sad lights and empty roads. Not the calm before a storm, but the peace after one. And for some strange reason it all of a sudden felt as if I were in a camp.

I arrive home-or perhaps I should say 'home'- and read:

I want to take of with you, I want to go away with you,

With all of you at once,

To every place you went!

I want to meet the dangers you knew face to face,

To feel a cross my cheeks the winds that wrinkled yours

To spit from my lips the salt sea that kissed your lips,

To pitch in with you as you work, to share the storms with you,

To reach like you, at last extraordinary ports!

To take off with you, divesting myself of me-come now,

get on with it, get going-

My civilized suit, my genteel behaviour,

My innate fear of jails,

My peaceful life,

My sedentary, static , orderly, all-too-familiar life!

sub-way

I'm living but I'm feeling numb, can see it in my stare
I wear a mask so falsely numb, and I don't know who I am
Despite the worlds inside of me, thwarting me away
I've noticed in other eyes, time's closing in
My world is under a sentence of death
I was born underground.
---This Mortal Coil

A dream-like existence precedes a dream-like essence. A day passes, or is it a year? Does time mean anything alone (ask God!). A worm sighs like no other,the dark glass fades and a butterfly is born. A thousand chances have passed by before the inner storms are quelled. Flitting, fluttering in and out of time, like others fall in love. Strange are her paths. Blind or blinding, an undecipherable sign. Wayward and unpredictable,as random as the moon's scars. A life lived with remembered death. The blots spread. Beauty marks!

She continues the search for her true form. But remembering that other life she forgets how to fly. The nets close in. The silver inherits the black. And so, now she lives behind a glass case, protected from the winds of change, displayed under an eternal sun. Delicate, fragile, almost imaginary..restless, yet so still. From now on wings will have to grow inward. A world within a world within a world. But this darkness is nothing new: the night is also a sun and a sigh is just a sigh. To others she has become a name. But what is a face if not the revelation of a mystery?

Endless Desire

The endless desire of the human heart to break.

----Freud.

Love is a series of scars. No heart is as whole as a broken heart.

---Rabbi Nahman.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Black it is. Sweet it is. I am nothing without it. I am nothing with it. If only I could find a name..but there's no place for the way I feel.

So, here we are, estranged from ourselves and from others; and yet perfectly reconciled! Our very conformity is a sign of our alienation.

Why so downcast, my soul?

Why do you sigh within ?

What use in saying this isn't the way it was meant to be? This is the way it was meant to be. Always, yes, perhaps always, we were never meant to fit. The world is the world..a blind godhead. But this much is true: everything here reminds us of something else; every reality is a shadow, every life lived a dim reflection of the lives we have missed out. Not the deathless realm for us.

In our knowledge of death we are superior to God.

All this fading, soaring, beautiful or useless, bitter or sweet. What else is there to say? You do not want to be named, and turn your face. Fair enough. I, too, will hope that

I will run, run

and never find.

Between the Moon and New York City

For the Cyranos who leap in the void, for those in-between places and lives, who are not all here, but also not all there! For the silent voices, the blank spaces that we carry around with us; for those who are a shadow of themselves, but remain, like an 'unconquered flame', serene; for the others, who mourn like a whispering blue flame. No words of solace, no music to soothe your soul. Comrades of the non-representative community, companeros, fellow-ghosts, all I have is questions...

Bullah! Can I know who I am. I neither join the faithful in their devout
affirmation in the mosque nor I find myself scaling the subtleties of denial. I do not raise my finger with the righteous nor do i bare my breast with the condemned. I am neither Moses nor the Pharaoh either. The sacred scriptures from this world or from that contain no clues for me. I do not discover myself in the sensual surrender. I am neither concealed by the profane ecstasy of intoxication nor made mainfest by the holy Vedas. I am not contained in what is uncovered by the wary eye of wakefulness or in what is revealed by sleep. No form of pleasure or pain, revelry or remorse, finds me out.

I am not disposed by fire, air, water and dust. I am neither A Hindu nor a Turk, my identity lies neither int he wilderness of Arabia nor within the walls of Lahore. I am not the secret essence strenuously revealed by creed and religion. I was not born of Adam and Eve. I did not adopt my name nor can I own any. I am neither stationary nor adrift. can I know who I am?

It is I myself I know to be the beginning and the end. Neither do I recognise any other being. It is nowhere else but within myself that perception and knowledge are embodied.Then who is he that stands as the Other? And who am I? Can I know b?

----Bulleh Shah

Eternal Sunshine

Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed-- You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak, And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress: I but a shadow--you a radiance fair! Know you what such a moment holds for me? If ever I were eloquent. . .
---Rostand.

Winter moon,
with your pale shadows in the long grass.
Stone of light, mortal god
that speaks to the poet
Inspiring him with Love.
You, who in yourself are nothing,
and never fully yourself.
You, who stands alone in circular thoughts,
whose cold gaze is the destiny of the sea
Perchance you know something of my soul?
---b.

Next time,

'I'll live, in a dream, in a stranger's house

Where perhaps I have died

Where the mirrors keep something mysterious

to themselves in the evening light'.

Next time,

I will leap into the fire

To find your name.

Not lament the deepening of the shadows

Nor stop to hold the ashes.

Next time,

I will beckon you to my side

Raise a candle to your face.

Softly whisper, move closer, gently now

So to see who is who.

Next time,

I will not let the silver inherit the black

Or let the blue mourn the fading of the red.

Next time,

My loving gaze will pierce the dark glass

So there be no time after time.

Next time,

I will be true.

----b

Protestants, and Saudis, and Bears! Oh, My!

I recently picked up Stefan Zweig's book on the right to heresy but my heart isn't in it. I don't want to read any more about Luther, Calvin or fanatical Protestants. (Reading Ali's recent positive spin on how good it was to live in a "Christian Nation" -America- nearly made me fall off my chair). What did Larkin say again.."desert of bigots"..and he should know!

Talking of which: the Saudis have sentenced a young woman who was gang raped to 200 lashes for sitting in a car with an unknown man. That these crazies should be strong allies with America is really quite remarkable. But then again, perhaps not. Zealots often flock together, at least in the short run, before they turn on themselves.In any case, most of it is a pretence, a wild facade, since they're actually the most twisted and decadent people themselves. He who plays the angel ends up playing the beast. Fisk was right: the so-called "royal family" is really only concerned about whoring and gambling. The evo's and the mullahs are just the guys who never got invited to parties...

Well, the Saudis are succeeding in spreading their nonsense here as well. And Yasser was right: what's left of Lahore's beauty is being destroyed by rampant commercialism and those terrible palm trees. I don't quite trust a city that has lots of palm trees (sorry, Karachites!)

Listening to that fool Ahmed Deedat and his monkey, Zakir Naik, the other day. Speaks volumes for a country when such johnnies are held in high regard, deemed to be "scholars". The old man was harping on about the "decadence" of the west. G-strings and what not. One could see him warming to the theme. Car adverts with scantily-clad women all over the place (by then he was foaming at the mouth). And all this from a seventy-eight year old man!

Anyway, I give up.

Turab has told me of a t.v channel that has a very popular food programme. One can learn how to make an "Islamic salad". I kid thee not ! Boy, oh boy, where are those bears when you need them?!

Leap of Faith

The one that held acquaintance with the stars,
And wedded man to man by purest bond
Of Nature, undisturbed by space or time;
Th' other that was a God, yea many Gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, and was
A joy, a consolation, and a hope.

Visited Chiswick House today. Mind-numbingly boring. A perfect example of 18th century classicism: rational, clear spaces and perfectly aligned columns. Too much regularity can be a form of madness. The gardens, too, were immaculately kept, planned with architectural precision and all the sobriety of a geometric mind. Only the trees seemed to resist in their own way the imposition of linearity on them. The trunk of one had managed to twist itself right around itself, as if it were trying to spiral out of control; another's branches sunk to the ground , touched the earth and then in the most bizarre and fantastical fashion surged and snaked up again so that the whole branch came to resemble a giant horizontal 'S'.

There are two ways of looking life, running throughout just about everything, marking out two temperaments or the two parts in us: the individualistic, atomistic vision that starts with 'I' , the lonely self, and the desire to find one's deepest instincts, to live one's soul. This duality, or division, has, we suspect, been with us from the very beginning: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

Stone, indestructible, everlasting, and abstract is the symbol of rational knowledge. It is an idea of perfection and boundedness, the lawlines of our culture, the first constructions of a mind that gradually awakens into self-consciousness. To place a stone on top of another one is also to initiate an act of remembrance, to imagine a temple, but also a grave (which is but a place of communication between life and what eludes it) . But an extreme rationalism can also lead to a fanaticism of thought, a hypertrophy of the mind. The stones that circumscribe the hearth's fire can, in a late civilisation, become oppressive and heavy. Totalitarianism is the extension of 'home' to everywhere. Fatherland.

The fall: the Tree of Knowledge offers the promise of immortality, or an alternative way of achieving this. But Man, who is 'hasty', must approach things one step at a time..stepping stones. The rational always binds the truth to one level -even though it gives the impression of an abstract many-sidedness- creating order, harmony, and unity. A singular truth. A calm, golden circle. But at its centre is the Tree of Life, an axial symbol of all that escapes the squares of the mind; the anarchy of the heart is like her deep roots, the branches that soar up to heaven like the wings of a prayer or love. This tree, life itself, is all that cannot be captured by our systems of thought, a muddy centre that is the mythological, chaos and intuition of the universe that precedes the rational, that fires our creativity and imagination.

Our first temples, our first politics, originate here in this sacred place; a tree encircled by stones. Nature and culture, heaven and earth. Also, our first dancing grounds. Ever since that first fall we've been trying to decreate ourselves, tear ourselves away from the rigidity of thought, convince ourselves that there is a form of understanding that lies beyond analysis and 'knowledge'. But that requires a leap of faith. A faith in the uncertainties of life itself and a trust in what is unknown. And that means returning, with a child-like naivete, to simplicity and looking once again at the world and other people without any concern for perfection or imperfection. Thought and action, inward and outward, remain distinct , but united. Then, and only then, do we feel the stone, think the tree.

Often rounded, always open.

There's something about an integral intelligence that isn't pedantic, argumentative or finicky-or at least not always so. The cleverest people always know not what to say but when to say it. More importantly, it is the style of their silence that leaves a lasting impression, as if emptiness itself required a certain artistic approach to one's personality, a learned response. Just as there are a range of voices, so are there a range of silences: one can pass over the faults one sees in one's loved ones or friends just as there is a supreme etiquette, generosity of soul, in learning to let go. Both require a sort of openness that goes beyond 'truth' or 'facts' . But always there must be an extension of the contours of our being, the ways in which we can conceive things, the depth of our perceptions, and a heightening of our awareness of the truly different.

The narrowing down of our horizons, the contraction of our hearts can, in itself, only be a phase, a possibility. Jalal cannot exist without jamal. there is a type of cleverness-an intelligence of the mind-which is like a perfect mathematical bridge, and to displace but one part of it would disrupt the whole structure. But there is another type, that of the whole person that is of sprawling nature, that sees intelligence in humour and hears music in intelligence. For a true philosopher there is no activity from which one cannot learn. The whole earth is a mosque.

The hedgehog knows one thing but the fox knows many. Fox: quick-footed, nimble, light-hearted, often out of sight, cunning. An unhoused, roaming spirit that leaves a trail of fermenta cognitionis.

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
------Thought-Fox, Ted Hughes

(First posted, Sunday, August 20, 6:31 a.m)

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I don't know why I wanted to re-visit this today. Some strange compulsion to find a pattern, to retrace something in one's memory. Isn't the desire to label these posts, put them in a box, also another form of fanaticism? The city and its grids of thought. Perhaps it would have been better to stay in that 'dark hole of the head'.

A Certain Light

In a certain light we are not who we are. All that was false falls away. In that second space we see behind appearance, the time that generates time, the gaze before the gaze. Beyond the stones there is another reality, other orders of being. Sometimes, as in a dream, we are made aware of them co-existing with our own familiar way of seeing the world and we catch a glimpse of these other realms; we discern our name, reclaim the acts that are ours, and think to ourselves: this is our true reality, all else is shadows.
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Anything can happen.
Those overlooked regarded.
Ground gives.
The Heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
---Seamus Heaney.
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Maybe this other reality is locked into stone, inheres deep in the rock, like a black bird, captive but taking flight; maybe it is our gaze that has turned the world to stone, brought about its silence, when everything is flowing? The bird dreams of a star, catches its own reflection and now waits, age upon age, to be released...
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Looking close in the evil mirror Crow saw
Mistings of civilisation..
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Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned
Like nothing in the Universe.
Created for black sleep. Or growing
Conscious of the sun's red spot occasionally,
Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.
---Ted Hughes

For the dougal (when we were young)

"In a world very different from our own.."

I think not my friend, I think not.

A moment...many years ago

Courtesy of jackybowring

A Blue Star

mihi quaestio factus sum ----Augustine

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Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

------Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

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Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves.

----A Tibetan Buddhist saying

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How would it end..

What did I do to be so black and blue?

----Louis Armstrong.

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People, loved ones, from a distance always remain the same. On returning, though, they are not the same.

I once saw a blue star. I forget the time, it was a few years back. It was not unexpected though. In fact, the papers had been predicting a "significant" event for some time leading up to its actual appearance. Except no-one could tell where and when it would be seen, and as a result most people lost interest in it. But then it arrived, like a stranger from another vast desert that had mistakenly made its way into our corner of the universe, or like a silver fragment that has abandoned another way of life. It was so blue that the whole of the late summer evening sky took on this strangely beautiful hue. And yet the star remained the star-unique and at the same time absorbed in this infinite sea...like a guest that picks up the accent of the host but remains an outsider nevertheless...

For an ancient mind her appearance would not seem that odd, though. Perhaps this was a journey repeated every 10 million years or so? All wonder is lost in mechanism. Just as for a great oak the life and death of a flower is nothing and passes in a twinkling of its eye, so it is that the life and death of the oak is a but a flicker of time in the consciousness of the stone.

Many seasons have passed now (seven, to be precise). And I guess I'll never see that blue again, the very essence of blue itself. And perhaps it only came as a reminder: that we, too, are confused strangers here, tangled, mortal selves, surrounded by unfathomable depths but also living with a blueness that is within...

One could spend one's whole life searching to find that blue again. But it will never come. That much I know. And if it does, then who is to say that I too may too lose interest, or maybe I will not be myself then but somebody else? But that wild blue yonder will always speak to us with the tender voice of those who have long passed away. Calling us, gently reminding us, that the blue of distance can never be overcome, never become accessible, and that all our games are just a version of our childhood ones of 'lost and found'; in that startling instant, I am not I, and You are not You: Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum

So, now I look in the mirror and do not recognize myself. I smile. Yearning makes the heart grow deeper.

At the end of the day:

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, the expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment,the range of experience seemed limitless...

Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep, but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

Last Tango

Some music, for those who are far away

The Undetermined Animal, मुद्रा

Martial Law

This is my Department Head being arrested. He now sits in a jail and awaits sentencing tomorrow along with 45 other intellectuals, human rights activists and lawyers. What a joke!

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There is utter confusion here. Rumour quickly followed up by counter-rumour. Feverish speculation followed by a non-plussed attitude. Hope and then resignation: "what else do you expect in..."

I don't have my Kadare with me but I do remember this: power depends on indeterminancy, the enigmatic, on the inability of anyone to predict anything, so that we are forced to hang on every word, every gesture, every shred of possible meaning established by the Great Leader, as if these were a portent of our eternal destiny. Texts are scrutinised, analysed and re-examined over and over again. This has to make some sort of sense.

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This is absurd. This is absurd because it is so real.

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Knowing the secrets of everybody around you was indisputably a blessing, but not knowing them was close to being sublime. He'd only recently come to understand that, and it left him in a state of great calm.

---Kadare.

Dear Reader(s)

Dear reader, hello. If you have a bit of a poem you love or a passage from a book, a quote from a film, or anything else you want to share please send it this way.

Salaams,

b.

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Thanks. Will post them soon. I will keep this page safe, the signatures of those who help me find my own name. Danke!

------

Celia:
'Sunt lacrimae rerum and mentem mortalis tangent' - who has ever managed to translate that in any meaningful way, but the Latin says it all and will haunt me until I die.

‘In freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbraelustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet,semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt,quae me cumque vocant terrae.'


Astarte:

"...I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood:O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I am too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever."

---Graham Greene.The End of the Affair.


Kinkminos:


“Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heaven-world he stated that he was now on the path of prālāyā or return but was still submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the lower astral levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations in the great divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities of atmic development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped with every modern home comfort such as tālāfānā, ālāvātār, hātākāldā, wātāklāsāt and that the highest adepts were steeped in waves of volupcy of the very purest nature.”

Ulysses, James Joyce

Wings of Desire

If you mention Dylan you will be shot

Broken

Qalb: the turning of the heart is like the ploughing of a field; everything must be broken up; that which was silent must come to the surface...

'Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.'
---Leonard Cohen

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Fifteen minutes out of the 'green zone', down through dusty roads and past a small village where kids, half-clothed and scraggly, played with beaming faces despite the filth. The approach reminded Alex of California: there was something completely vacuous about the open roads and palm trees, dotted with extravagant mansions on either side. That's all before one enters this other place, a place whose very existence only serves to make what comes before it even more surreal

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Just after the village (and before the agricultural land he had come to survey) we saw a man, knee-deep in a ditch, digging away with an incredible amount of concentration. With a bent back and an intense look on his bearded, pointed face, my only thought was: I wish I'd brought my camera (so speaks the voice of the bourgeoisie). The lives of others: unimaginable. We have no understanding of, no connection with, the land-and a part of us thanks God for that. What do we see?

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A theoretician might 'think' of his contribution to economic growth; a theoretical mindset might muse on the tradeoffs between incentives and security or talk about universal human rights (or the lack thereof). But how many of us see this individual, at this particular time. Someone suffering, broken by fate, yet resolute

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We are among creatures but remain separate from all creatures

Just as, in 'rupak tala,' the first beat is also outside the pattern of counting

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----Mir Dard.