You want to think of East or West, what is open or closed, but here, here at the still point of my heart there are no such distinctions.
No. I do not think of the future and your return, nor shall I live in the present. This life is but the moment when the past became the past. Here, in dark passageways, I shall live alone with the Alone.
No, do not hold on to my image, do not remember my stone face. We must forget everything. Let the black fire consume me. I want to live, I want to die.
The swami said, 'you know, there was a time when people would hardly ever leave the place where they were born. My mother only rarely left home'.
As we walked our separate ways, one to the east, one to the west, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the saddest thing imaginable: the back of a loved as she moved towards another life...and the gaping silence between us grow, an abyss where words not spoken fall and the moments not shared rest, like a dead body in a stream or a receding image in the dark glass.
(I am told of a wonderful Jewish tradtion where on one particular day the doors are kept open so that the spirit may return)
Saying my farewells, ticking them off as if they were some sort of last rite that has to be performed..the sheer necessity of it dizzying, the anticipation of the final door closing leaves me slightly breathless. Walk past the South Bank under a grey sky (the best place to be alone, surrounded by joggers and the world rushing by). And wasn't this how it began....
Have to see Richter's transcendental painting again. Could sit in front of it for a while and allow it to mesmerize me and bring me back to stillness..the shimmering reflection of white light in a green world, light dissolving the cages...
I sit on a wooden bench dedicated to an "unknown husband" before the Thames and today, for some strange reason, it seems more like a sea than a river. Tranquil and becalming, a constancy to its movement that is reassuringly familiar. The waves never leaving their confines. The grey slowly slips and slides toward me. How we hunger for a crumb of meaning to our fate. I fumble in my coat pocket for the chestnut that I've kept there for the last five years. It's good to find things on the floor and keep them safe in dark places.
Monuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity
Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice,
pins, stamps, and glass beads:
tales of the time
Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes
fire burned in the mirror
slot machines of vision,
condensation flash for conversation
the reflector of the inner eye
Scatters the spectacle
God all alone above an extinct world
The apparitions are manifest,
their bodies weigh less than light
lasting as long as this phrase lasts.
One final look at the second-hand books under the Embankment. I turn around as I walk away: no, the world hasn't collapsed, life goes on. An old lady leafs through a book, showing it to her world-weary husband: "no, this isn't just an ordinary fashion book, it tells you why..." I lose the thread..other people's lives aren't that interesting anyway.
On the bridge a beautiful Russian (or at least East European) woman asks me where to get a 'tour bus'.
Listen to Montserrat singing those sublime lullabies that are an island of peace amidst the flux. I move on to the bookshop, not expecting to find any solace in words. An hour to kill. As if we could! And there I hear old Leonard, singing this song...
And read these words:
I dreamed that dead, and meditating,
I lay upon a grave, or bed,
..In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
I raised my head. A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.(All this was in the dark.)
..the graceful head
changed its position mysteriously,
since there was neither sun nor moon
to catch its young attention.
The rooted heart began to change
... and then it split apart
and from it broke a flood of water.
A few drops fell upon my face
and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
(As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
The weed stood in the severed heart.
"What are you doing there?" I asked.
.."I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."
Elizabeth Bishop
You unseen cathedrals,
you rivers unheard
you clocks deep in us.
~~~~
'An end to the granting of names'
There stood
a splinter of fig on your lip,
there stood,
Jersualem around us,
there stood
the bright pure scent
above the Danish skiff we thanked
I stood
in you.
~~~
We gaze at each other,
we speak of dark things,
We love one another like poppy and memory
we slumber like wine in the seashells,
like the sea in the moon's blood-jet.
~~~~
Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark
Well, enough of the G-minors and slouching thoughts, northern melancholy. Funk: perhaps. But when it comes to soul, step aside.
The first music the dougal listened to was soul/blues ( B.B. King's album-yes, those were the days when we bought albums!-was the ultimate cool when others were listening to Blondie). It wasn't political. Howard Jacobson recently wrote on how Jewish people and black people shared a sense of exile. But no, it wasn't that-though being an outsider would always mean that we wouldn't take authority or orthodoxy seriously. It was just that the music was so much better! Of course, the same couldn't be said for cricket. Cricket is political and nothing gave us greater pleasure in the sweltering heat of the summer of '76 than to see the Rolls Royce float in and destroy England (Sorry, Jonah!). The Welsh and Irish were black as well. How we would sit around the television and blow like mad to prevent England from converting after a try!
But this is the type of stuff I listened to:
In any case, one thing that music does is that it prevents you from being a red-neck or bigot (I can see this being taken up as some sort of marketing strategy!). Well, I'm not so sure any more (Steiner: the relation between high culture and barbarism..Wagner). But on the other hand, perhaps Barenboim was on to something: an openness, an attentiveness to what is other, to the 'who-ness' of the other. So, yeah, there were some white women who could sing with soul (Lisa Stansfield, for example). And then there was the Queen of Neasden
There was a sadness that not even he knew..and besides, knowing is not everything.
The day had started well. A Chinese girl, dressed in black, had stopped him and asked him if he knew where China Town was. He paused, scratched his head, pointed, got it right. Usually, he only knew where he was going as long as no-one asked. But there was a quiet, solid, calming look to this girl (did she actually say "excuse me mister"?) and so it sorted itself out.
Corn was swarming with ravens.
Black searching out gold, as if the light could redeem us. I will not see a day like this again, thought crow, not as long as I live. Age upon age, benumbed by the terror of the stars, living in the shroud of the trees where darkness is defined, arranged, or where the moonlight slips down, cleanses the heart's mirror with a film of forgetfulness so that our thought is a dashed circle of stone. But the day...
To be attentive to the quality of light in each season, not caring for universal sun. Crow thought to himself: I am all birds in one, and none. Falcon-ancestry, undimmed loyalty, this inheres in my breast along with the white peace that is like a human hand, or the remebrance of snow, and the tearing frenzied thoughts of the eagle. We know the days, blood-scarred like a tulip; our idols free and blue, without shape. Then crow, startled, descended, his shadow before him, for he had seen something familiar in a man's eyes...and there was a kind of wisdom in his green-winter eyes.
He heard the man speak: you circle around me like a vulture around a corpse; so was your love for me: sustained by the memory of annihilation. Stones grow heavy waiting here, whilst your nail anticipates blood.
We gaze at each other,
and speak of dark things.
Crow stood, at a distance, out of sight. There stood the bright pure scent and I will stand in you for a while, thought crow. Saddened by the man's darkened face he wanted to tell him:
You know, there's no end of space
you know, you don't need to fly,
you know, what inscribed itself in your eye
deepens our depth.
But the rain fell, breaking up the hierarchies of the sun. Crow swooped and the man only saw the reflection of a black cross on dark windows, and then moving horizontally on a black plinth. Saw it everywhere. Crow, who had lived hundreds of years thinking no-one loved nobody, grasped down in the deep and plucked out his eyes, saying: you have lost sight of the beloved so now her image will live and grow within you...
C, I know you like the other version, but I love this one. Thank you so much for drawing me to it.
I was listening to some Morten Lauridsen with Y the other day and he just said: how can the maulvis not understand this..how can one live a life without music?
Y'know, over the last few weeks I've heard a lot of crap (by Americans, it has to be said) about intelligence differences between 'races' (read: the usual narrow-mindedness masquerading as 'science' or knowledge). I give up. Seriously, I do. Larkin: a desert of bigots. For those interested, here's some sublime music by one of, you know, one of 'them'.
Some people think that there are an irreducible core set of principles by which to live by. Fair enough. It's tempting, da stiu. But what if there is, as C says, an 'existential fluidity'. Things change, capstones shift. We would be nothing if we didn't cling on, if we didn't dream of home, but we would be nothing if we didn't, sometimes, let go... if we didn't want to be as light as air. What is 'down' is not always down..sometimes it will be up, like a balloon, empty, hollow, but on the ascent.
From a distance, the white diamond looks like a black sun. And from close up? There is no apprehending of it close up, since it blinds.
Oh, come, so that your picture be placed within my heart- don't go to China, for there they'll paint it just on silk.
When the Emperor of China dies, the porcelain will let down her hair from despair.
** 'da stiu' means 'I know' (apparently). I just like the sound of it, but for all I know it might mean oranges!
We live in one place and one place only. Now, and now, and now. But we reach out for somewhere else, beyond the blue clouds and blue flowers. That 'sweet golden clime'. Sadness doesn't flow away, but is endured. All we know is that we will not stay here long. But the heart doesn't know whether it wants to arrive or leave. Divided, split...nothing is as whole as a broken heart.
Now,I remember everything; I have been devoured by my memories. It is good. That radiant future that is the past...
I never meant to cause you any sorrow I never meant to cause you any pain I only wanted to one time see you laughing I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain. ----Prince
Words and phrases I picked up from G. Hill:
hoop, hooped, husks, ceremony, habitation
'The bones that cannot bear the light'
'Decay of blood'.
'Fierce heart, iced brain, cleansed thoughts'
'The sun's primitive renewing fury'
'Recall the wind's Flurrying , darkness of the human mire'
'The stark ground of this pain'
Ten years without you For so it happens Days make their steady progress, a routine That is merciful and attracts nobody Already, like a disciplined scholar, I piece fragments together, past conjecture Establishing true sequences of pain; For so it is proper to find value In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored The long-lost words of choice and valediction.
~~~~
She dared more love, yet her starved eyes caught His, devouring at times
Some, finally, learn to begin Some keep the arrangement of love (Or similar trust) under whose auspices move Most subjects
~~~~
In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into the sublunary world. Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery riddled by needles: the silver veining, the gold leaf , voluted grape- vines, master-works of treacherous thread.
~~~
"One cannot lose what one hasn't possessed" I can lose what I want. I want you.
~~~
If the night is dark and the way is short if the way you take is to my heart
say though I never see you again touch me I shall shiver at the unseen
the night is so dark the way so short yet you do not wake against my heart
emptiness ever thronging untenable belonging how long until this longing end is unending song
and soul for soul discover no strangeness to discover and lover keep with lover a moment and for ever
I shall live in grief desiring still to grieve
I shall go down to the lover's well and wash this wound that will not heal
beloved soul what shall you see nothing at all yet eye to eye
depths of non-being perhaps too clear my desire dying as I desire.
~~~ Oh my dear one, I shall grieve for you For the rest of my life with slightly Varying cadence; oh my dear one
But it is mere occasion or chance distance Out of which you might move and speak my name As I speak yours, ??? with sleep's Miscellaneous goods for as much As I can have, an alien landscape The dream where you are always to be found
Love, oh my love, it will come Sure enough. A storm Broods over the dry earth all day
You are outside, lost somewhere I find myself Devouring verses of stranger passion And exile. The exact words Are fed into my blank hunger for you.
Perhaps there's not much to be gained from setting up such dichotomies, for conservatives can be radical and they can be traditional. And strange that I should gravitate to some conservative voices (Berlin on deMaistre, for example) when most of them are of this infuriating Sunday-school-little-house-on-the prairie- type or from the world of mullahdom or the petty lower-middle classes with their fixation on the female body, "decency" and a bovine acceptance of things. Mid-west or small town Punjab-it doesn't make that much of a difference..it's a certain one dimensional vision and narrow temperament that is horrified by literature (it's lack of "truth") and jazz ("meaningless") and the rupture of the 'fabric of society' (read: immigrants).
On the other hand, nothing grates on my nerves more that the pseudo-moderns with their fake "spirituality" (Sufism) or their blind devotion to science-explaining anything and everything by some half-baked evolutionary theory, their keenness (though perhaps compulsion would be a better word) to speak "openly" and "frankly", to argue every single issue to death, to speak of abstract, universal 'Man'-some cardboard entity on which they project all sorts of desires.
The rational, atomistic individual (or the heroic individual), solid and uncomplicated, for whom nothing is 'given', who is his own project, against the real 'authentic' self or the community, the political animal. Distinctions are set up. Reactions and counter-reactions. The Dawkins-brigade, the Chomsky-devotees, thehadith-quoters, the statistics-pushers, Americans who talk about happiness, and the morons who think ZakirNaik is an intellectual, that Saudi has pure Islam. Lord, I ask you to save me from these people...
In a conversation with a friend the other day he excitedly stands up during dinner to explain how short the dresses women wear nowadays are in Pakistan. ..what with their deep slits and revealing...
Oh dear, get a grip of yourself man!
And another, a Jordanian woman, on how she would never go to the Dead Sea because that is where God destroyed the homos.
Er..hang on, I use those Dead Sea salts for my bath!
~~~
Notes from P.Rieff:
The unalterable 'I', identity and inwardness. Theory is conforming to reality, not transforming it (Marx?)
Modernity: a movement from the dichotomy between obligation, duty, and moral commitment to inclination and desire. [only the desiring self is true, no matter how that relates to 'the good'. The modern economy: the production of spectacles, of desire itself: eroticism, publicity, advertising]
What is authority but a limiting authority, a closing down of possibilities beyond one's self's desires, the repression of the impossible..the commanding truths are prohibitive. [ you can hear the modern attack..'repression', did you say? Freedom as autonomy -and that only. A 'lonely freedom' ! (Augustine)].
Arendt: the impossible became possible..thinkable (Auschwitz) Zizek's succinct formulation: you can, therefore you must. The knower walking into the known...over short distances of time, short times of space.
Transgression as creative. Sacrilege. Is nothing sacred? The consumer consumes all moralities like things. We do not even fear falling...fearless, without guilt, we celebrate celebrities, delight in trashing the decadence of others.
Yeats: And fastened to a dying animal it knows not what it is.
A credal self that cannot cross boundaries (cp. the self of late capitalism that is defined by its very ability to be nowhere, to not being tied down to a 'place').
Thomas More's strength, opposition..."not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do-I, I."
The intellectualization of culture: one can, in principle, calculate everything. [the reductionism of science has helped here]. Technology as the primacy of possibility that can transform our lives and bodies..Badiou: not ideology, but technology as the radically neutral re-maker of 'man'. Everything can be known....
When I was a small child, said the swami, I saw in a dream that my uncle had come from a long way off and brought chocolates for everyone and a sky-blue sari with sequins for...
Then what happened?
What is this, are you interviewing me?!
No, just want to get the details right (I'd heard this story before)
Well, the others mostly laughed and ignored it but twenty minutes later that's exactly what happened!
I don't know why the day has started with the recalling of a meaningless dream more than 60 years ago. I seem to walk much of the time in the grey squares here as if in a dream-like state; no, not the fabled absent minded teacher, thinking great things or absorbed in his/her own petty thoughts and research ideas. No, something much simpler: just absent minded. The dream of being lost, of not being me, not being me, of being found and lost again.
Life is but a dream, merrily, merrily...
Nothing haunts us like these words; nothing seems truer. Can the truth seem? (A question for the philosophers!..sorry anton, couldn't resist!)
Mongol was right, we never took anything seriously. To dream is, perhaps, another way of refusing to grow up (Exupery?), a holding on to the belief that there is an elsewhere, another time beyond time.
Today you wanted to write about Gaddis and against the moderns; no, to rant, but instead your hand strays to a book you would never have otherwise picked up-Bachelard's book on reverie.
When there falls from the hands of the serving girl the pale round plate, the colour of the clouds, the pieces must be picked up.
Gentleness of seeing oneself as a child again In the old house of stones too black. Gentleness of recovering one's thinner face Asa pensive child, forehead against the windowpane.
~~~~
Everything that exists today was imagined long ago --Blake.
I love that line, Mr. Blake.
You are an image within me, a picture. I've burnt the others. I dreamt of you and you came to me. Did you really live before I was born? I find that hard to imagine. Cut birthday cakes and shoo pigeons? Ride a bike and fall off it, grazing your knee and crying without me knowing, or without me dreaming it?
To be lost in thought is the wrong kind of loss. But we live and want to live in the world, with all of its fragmentation. Only by breaking do we see ourselves..sharply, like shards of cutting glass, like sky blue dreams that are brought to us in the early morning, gift-wrapped
All of us in German babbling Paradisal words together
---Goethe.
"But you can't speak German, you cheat!" "Ah, but there I'd have a German soul"
You think of something to say but find nothing-except for a few tired cliches. You so desired greatness of soul. But such things are only conferred, not a response to wants and human longing. And you are without title. You wanted to be silver-tongued, speak honey-dewed words with a rare eloquence, and without hesitation. More: a hand guided, a mind nimble, brain cells flashing with the fire of lightning. Instead, you look at mirrors framed by dark wood all day, stone-faced, and think of the softness that has departed from your eyes.
There are so many words in the world. You think: when will we understand the silence...
Hammershoi: Startled silence and bare interiors. Outside: everything is a haze and all voices are muffled by the snow. Like an ark in a storm. Occasionally a tree branch will tap the window or the frames will be rattled by a sudden gust of wind, but otherwise all one can hear is the grandfather clock ticking and the regular passing of time. The old wooden floorboards creak, on their own, as if the wood was remembering the forest.
There's no place for the way I feel. --Paula Fox
Backs are turned. Don't look. The curve of the shoulders: the strange presence of classical beauty in the northern light. Angular thoughts persist. Faces are turned resolutely away but always to something we cannot see-their own private worlds or a momentary awareness of loss. Chairs pushed back, a table set for a meal for someone who will never come. The pictures on the wall are blank, the rooms are largely empty and the white doors are open (someone has just left or is expected to arrive)-a stark existence that awaits only the illumination from somewhere else.
In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornament collection of small bottles, Venetian and Swedish. They came with the house. The sun now caught them. They were pierced with the light. Herzog saw the waves, the threads of colour, the spectral intersecting bars, and especially a great blot of flaming white on the centre of the wall...
‘A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through' ---Deluze.
'There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression the actual conditions of life' ---Penelope Fitzgerald.
Outside the law many things happen...
The desire to record everything, jot down the trivial and inessential, to bring fragments of memories to the surface. Grey within grey. Drizzling rain, the first hint of cold air on one's cheeks. Life awakening again. Wind-tousled hair, choppy water slapping brown-freckled walls. I'm a dead man walking, a few moments of reprieve, trying to cram as much in as possible, wide-eyed.: the second-hand books under Embankment, running my forefinger over the well-worn titles with cracked spines. No feverish scanning this time, just a waiting for a name to drop in the slot. Today, I'm not looking for anything..the only need is to slow things down.
The American girl with the frizzy hair and husky voice, the strap of her top slipping off her tanned shoulder as she speaks: " Have you read this?". I look up. She's talking to her friend.
Under Blackfriar's, a guitarist strumming a wonderful, simple tune, almost like a chant. And I think: what is inner, and what is outer.
Walk all the way back to St. Paul's-just to have my usual coffee at the usual place. Crusty roll, Gorgonzola cheese, salad leaves. Hard to say what heaven will be like but can't imagine it being much better than this. Perhaps slightly less milk in the latte.
On the way back past the 'wobbly bridge' : a marriage party! Tourists shout with happiness: Ole! For once they don't get on my nerves. A man palms his camcorder and in a wide sweep arcs it my way. I'm sure I'm caught in some of his images and wonder to myself how many fragments could be found in other people's discarded photos.
I write all this down before, just for a laugh, I decide to go to Tate. At least one can get a good view of St. Paul's from there. It's good to stand in frontof stone sometimes (or under a tree). I'm drawn, however, to a dark room by some lovely music. Sit down and watch Jonas Mekas's 'Walden'. Chopin seems to be following me about these days. Shimmering, flashing lights, deep winter, all rendered in a strangely hypnotic way. The chaos make sense. It makes sense. A life, a world, shared. As if seen by God. The details do not cease from being ordinary details, moments in a whirl of flux and transition. There is no exile. All life is an exile.
Only now, as I collect my thoughts, do these correspondences seem a bit freaky. But it doesn't matter either way.
Oh, what does it matter. I saw it. I did. Off Snakes Lane East, just on Glastonbury Avenue. She crossed my path or I crossed hers. But useless to talk of "mine" or "hers" since when it comes to paths there are only rights of way, sidestepping or an aporia. There she was, slinking her way through suburbia, dinking her way past the debris of human lives gone awry, past the boarded fences of the Russians, who always sat in their concrete backyard, bare-chested, drinking heavily and fondly remembering frozen homelands. And then a swift turn, a scampering back to the darkness-as if to say: I can only take so much human light. Through a hole in the fence, to the open fields. And gone.
~
~
But that was many years ago now. Every time I pass that corner I stop in my tracks and point to that exact place. There! Her absence as strangely real as her fleeting presence. In that space I still see the contours of the fox, like the impression of a footprint in the snow reminds one of someone long after they've gone. As was shown in 'The Time Machine': even though you can't see or touch some things they're still there, it's just that they exist in another dimension-and that dimension is called time. Grown-ups have such difficulty in accepting what lies beyond their own limited vision. We die from a lack of imagination. Even though so many weird and wondrous things drift past us all the time, would we but notice them.
~
~
Well, what do you know! There she was, after all these years, at the train station. I was going to call out to her but didn't. But she didn't even look up and probably didn't remember me. Just turned up her snooty nose and walked away with that quick pitter-patter of hers, as silently and nonchalantly as ever. Ha! Such is the way of foxes. It's in their nature...
~
~
I stood there agape. How difficult it is to say 'we' today. But as she turned with that wonderful red coat of hers I did hear her say: "Don't you know, foxes can't be tamed!"
When I left last time I scrambled for the right words, and stumbled across a book of poetry. Repeating the rituals, the ceremony of loss. A storm starting up, clouds gathering the light to themselves,rain entering the world, diagonally. Waiting to fall...if it started with a word then it could end this way as well; to find a turn of phrase that I could twist my tongue around, not understanding it but enjoying its bitter taste. So that when the storm is over and all things are done flashing it will grow and rise to the surface. And then I shall speak it.
I grasp the possible rightness of certain things that possess the imagination, however briefly; the verdict of their patterned randomness.
~~
..and the great wanderers like the albatross; the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself down on our alien shore.
~~
The end (again). It's beginning again. I find the ascribed place, the allotted time, scribbling frenetically, crazed, no longer mesmerized by darkness. Furiously, as if sparks might fly from ancient flint, the hand willing the quickening of the mind.
The good walk in step. Without knowing anything of them. The others dance around them, dancing the dances of the age.
~~
The tragedy of things is not conclusive; rather, one way by which the spirit moves.
~~
Weight of the world, weight of the word, is Take it slowly, like walking through convalescence, the load bearing not yet adjusted , progress made with a slight forward tilt.
~~
Indebtedness is resolved by paying debts
~~
Scouring the text. Speed and lightness dissolving inherited meanings. You know in your heart of hearts that if you look for something, someone, they will not appear. This word. It must be here, in this book. But everything is in the approach. Like a junkie, what you're looking for is a quick fix which means it will not end. (25 minutes to go). Your eye zeroes in on something. The cold certainty of the doorknob...
Found it! The Time Machine. What else?!
If the sleep mask is a time machine a world attends as under a strange star, our gifts are what we owe, each to the other, and which we give: now there's no going back-the true fiction set in the one frame; or the book set down marked at that page, not closed, and not returned to.
~He entered the black landscape, frightened and alone in the world, his shadow on the snow, not sure if these were his tears or his dreams. Only in the darkness could one find oneself, trace those footprints that led nowhere but back, back to the beginning, north of time's revolutions. Tumbling, tumbling down, until he came to a stop. And there he glimpsed something, a lonelier thing he could not imagine. He spied a small bird, blackness gleaming off its coat, hopping about amongst the tree roots, almost lost in the deep shadows of the forest. He thought to himself: some hearts beat so faintly that not even a god would hear them sigh.
