the generalist and the amateur

Well, if you hadn't noticed yet, most of this blog is a fraud with its extensive quotes and half-baked ideas [I hope you appreciate the 'distancing' from myself here! :-) ]

Priorities: Of course, it's important to re-iterate the importance of scholarship-that's what you're supposed to be doing, isn't it?-and of detailed, nuanced argument. Especially with the barbarians at the gate, mullahdom around the corner; especially given the appeal of bread and circuses and the quick fix, the bottom dollar. Also, you want to rail against the semi-literates, the really dangerous ones with their easy generalizations and caricatures-and that includes looking honestly at yourself as well for once.

But, secondly, you want to talk about the arrogance of academics in a dispassionate tone. I mean, yes, that's better, I mean, is there a point where specialization degenerates into a trivial pursuit? Why this suspicion of one-sidedness, endless revisions, "theorists"? That's what I loved about Celia, Jonah, and Turab (to a lesser extent..sorry old boy)...an intelligence that doesn't take itself too seriously, that isn't opaque, is still amateurish...second-best, if you like.

I guess what I find most disconcerting, though, is a sort of hostility to other people..yes, it really is that, I think. Turf wars. As if one could only talk to one's tribe, as if the plebs. really don't or can't 'get it'. Russell, Berlin, maybe Nietzsche himself...weren't they all generalists who would be ripped apart by modern scholarship?Analysing and dissecting things to death.

None of that is important. What is, is the ability to speak with a human voice.

Nietzsche in Turin

For the Dougal, who still wants to talk about transcendence at this late stage in the day. Thank God!

God is dead.
God is dead.
God is dead

....And Man isn't feeling too well either!

Western man is stuck in 'la'. Nietzsche mistook the stepping stone for a place of rest.

'The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction'

---Susan Sontag, NYRB


Notes from Lesley Chamberlain's book and Heller's The Disinherited Mind:

'Yet he still saw the world as essentially illusory'

'How to live, then? Art and imagination as a substitute for Tradition, a way of creating one' s own world. 'The noble soul has reverence for itself'. The dissociation of faith from knowledge, faith from sensibility. If Tradition is invalid then there is only the world of absolute immanence. And after Auschwitz, the Trenches, does he still affirm?

Nietzsche: " He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere-he must either deny or create it."

Rilke's Tuscan Diary: " We need eternity; for only eternity provide space for our gestures. Yet we know that we live in narrow finiteness. thus it is our task to create infinity within these boundaries, for we no longer believe in the unbounded." We can no longer be sure we love the lovable.

'The battle in his soul with the southern light; high style against northern restlessness; pleasure and ease against a brooding, shifting inwardness. Isaiah Berlin: Verdi marks the end of naivete.

'With their [Wagner's , Schopenhaeur's] embodiment of the restless will, the creative life which enjoys wildly, gluts itself on excess and longs for metamorphosis..they offered an intoxicating vision of life which might entrance but never lead to a this-worldly, healthy, Greek kind of happiness. A rejection of the intense, glittery life but also the flat, prosaic one that required such intoxicants. The nervous excitement of the Romantics was never his style; they placed happiness outside of themselves, outside of life.

The South: self-assurance, resilience, serenity and calm joy..the willed lightness of being -as opposed to the heavy Nordic pessimism (D.H. Lawrence: the brown-eyed and the blue-eyed). ..Light feet, humour, grace and freedom; the tremor of southern light,; the smooth sea perfection.

'The collapse of benevolent certainties, the emergence of an edgy, rootless spirit..and the eventual emergence of a hypnotic and instinctual popular music ("trance" !). a music that is beyond the rational vs a music that is tunefulness, in the right key, on the right wavelength.

The divided self: 'German fascination with asceticism and mystical delivery from it' . Mass intoxication, the seduction of the spectacle, the relinquishing of the soul, of individual responsibility in favour of the Father(land).

How to live confidently after the death of God? Only with strength and courage: "Man is the creature who must constantly overcome himself to live fully." To accept one's fate and from it create a life..an art of living. But in a decadent culture, 'mankind would simply run out of energy and individuals would fail to find their own tragic strength.

A collapse of the common world, of the cultural world and its rituals, customary consciousness and norms. From now on one would have to find this strength on one's own.

'Nietzsche wanted only some kind of music to lead the modern heart back , or on, to a summer, more open..searching to lose urban nervous tension and northern formality in a glorious blaze of colour and light..and the simple life. ' [Not the only one: Van Gogh, Gaugin..Matisse: The Dance]

Neither from nor towards; at the
still point,
there the dance is
But neither arrest nor movement.
---T.S. Eliot.

Never trust a god who doesn't dance.

Demythologisation: the body is mere body, the symbol mere symbol.

A kiss is just a kiss, a smile is just a smile...

"He was most at home where there was least 'reality'-in music. The music of modern Europe is the one and only art in which it surpassed the achievement of former ages. This is no accident. It is the speechless triumph of the spirit in a world of words without deeds and deeds without words."

The sun-drenched art of the early 20th century. The new primitivism, masks. Colour replaces sense and meaning after the death of God. For Van Gogh: the sun is presence.

'The power of light to transform , and especially the moment of transformation, fascinated Claude, as it did Nietzsche.

'For something to shed its veil one requires patience and hospitality. 'The act of knowing involved an act of laughter, an act of mourning, and an act of cursing' (Spinoza).

There remains , perhaps
Some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day;
There remains for us yesterday's road...
----Rilke.

"The portraitist of this situation is Van Gogh. He painted the tree of Rilke's elegy, the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are chance receptacles of all the homeless energy of the spirit..It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism...the absence from our lives of common accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade the empty shells of fragmentary memories, hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning."

From now on: the life of man: 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'

Mapmakers

Two of your friends-so supremely intelligent and charming that you think twice about writing this-have written the same thing: effectively: the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Always the same: not the artist with a vision of the good, a loving attention to the world, but the "unthinking and amoral" artist, with the 'will' of the artist, the sheer ability to create and destroy in itself being what counts. Whether it is a 'demonic' will or not does not ultimately matter. Jonas was right after all: in the Gnostic age there would only be talk of "autocratic power" and pleasure that is "consumed".

Something in you rebels at this 'nonsense on stilts'. Corruptio optimi pessima

Is it not still the tent of scattered stars
the high transfigured world that love has made?
--Goethe

What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we might be doing at a given moment , we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self…’

—-Basho.

‘Since the willful Twenties, the committals of the Thirties, it seems to me that my life as a man and as a writer has been spent on crossing and re-crossing frontiers and that is at the heart of any talent I have…Frontier life has been nourishing to me. Throwing something of oneself away is way of becoming, for the moment, other people and I have always thought that unselfing oneself, speaking for others, justifying those who cannot speak, giving importance to the fact that they live, is especially the privilege of the storyteller, and even the critic-who is also an artist. A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at the 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 leaves. I look a long time at flowers. As I am always on the watch for dramatic changes in the London sky… I store up the procession of headlands and terrifying ravines..and all of the landscapes that have formed me. '

—V.S. Pritchett, As Old as the Century.


‘ One of our contemporaries is cured of his torment by simply contemplating a landscape. '

---Camus.


'…[t]hat not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.’

—-Joan Didion


‘These fragments I have shored up against my ruins.’

—T.S. Eliot


Some of these words are tinged with despair whilst others suggest a cool equanimity in the face of the dissolution that time and the world bring about. In both there is an attention to detail and only a hair’s breadth separates the different tempers. Pritchett’s fabulous essay is the perfect example of a slow-burning happiness, of a style of writing that conveys a rock-like understanding of the world: a serene accumulation of experiences, an age-old trust in the certainties of the world, a keen awareness that in time all that is superfluous will be worn away and only the simple will remain. Perfection lies in the cadence of the voice, the eagle-eye that picks out a word from the many possibilities, in the miracle of how a word evokes not just its own lineage of comprehensions, that deep store of transmitted meanings with their subtle gradations that is embedded in the language-consciousness of a writer, but also in the way in which a particular word will interact with both those that are not chosen as well as the silences between it and other words.

It is as if the sheer passing of time confers on the writer a deeper sense of his surroundings, a greater appreciation of life’s still moments. There is a way of knowing that derives from becoming increasingly estranged from the world and one’s life and there is another that comes from finding one’s place, the meridian of one’s life, and growing ever more deeply in love with it. There are mapmakers who never leave home and then there are those for whom the lonely, high seas beckon. For the latter it is the fragments that are the ruins…

But let us also say there are two souls in one...rooted, open: a broken circle.

The Romans kept an image of Terminus [the god of boundaries] in the temple of Jupiter...and the interesting thing is that the roof above the place where the image sat was open to the sky, as if to say that a god of the boundaries and borders of the earth needed to have access to the boundless, the whole unlimited height and width and depth of the heavens themselves. As if to say that all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space. And it is that double capacity that we posses as human beings-the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us-it is this double capacity [that is the truly human]
--Seamus Heaney

Der Sterbende Auf Der Brucke

The flecks of the first raindrops.
The sun.
Bread and wine.
Skipping.
Easter.
The veins of leaves.
The fluttering grass.
The colors of the stones.
The pebbles on the river bed.
The table cloth in the open air.
The dream of the house..

anton and roxana both write today and I feel compelled to argue with them, put my muslim hat on...

In our knowledge of death we are superior to God.
--The Allama

Life is one and continuous. Man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illumination from an Infinite Reality which "every moment appears in a new glory". And the recipient of Divine illumination is not merely a passive recipient. Every act of a free ego creates a new situation, and thus offers further opportunities of creative unfolding.

And my muslim readers will immediately recognize the context of these sublime words:

His eye did not wander, nor did it rove.
--Q. 53:17

Not "surrender" nor the undivided light. But a deepening, a widening of the circle. A broken circle. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, said the Rabbi. The green waters beyond the black. Into the blue again. The wild blue yonder, the open. The open hand that gives, ceaselessly. Solar generosity. Not "detachment" but Iris's: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding. Hannah, the princess: for the love of the world.

Finitude is not a misfortune.
--The Allama.


Must we now learn again to name the things we love but do not possess? Not sweet paradisal words, yet an elegiac song for all that is destined to pass away, all that is touched by finitude. One cannot but help think that we only love things that can die -even the gods fall for the mortals. When all is said and done, can anything surpass this transient spectacle?

The smell of fresh coffee. The darkening of the clouds before a storm. The last flaring of the sun on a late summer's evening. The peace of a Sunday morning. The alternating patterns of shade and light cast by a tree. Walking alone under tents in the night. The greying wisdom of an old dog. The final page of a book. Winter fires fragmenting. Your sad sweet smile.

heartlands

For anton:

After following the Bandar Shah a little while back, we turned to the right down a track between wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an esturay, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. In other greens, of emerald jade or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengali jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland...the heavy full-blown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself.

The sun was warm, the larks singing up above. Behind rose the misty blue of the woodland Elburz. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth.

Bearing, landmarks, disappeared as they would from a skiff in the mid-Atlantic. We seemed to be always below the surrounding level, caught in the trough of a green swell. Sitting down we might see for twenty feet: standing up, for twenty miles-and even then, twenty miles away, the curve of the earth was as green as the bank that touched the wheels, so that it was hard to tell which was which. Our only chart was by things whose scale we knew, groups of white kibbitkas, dotted like mushrooms on a lawn-though even in their case it needed an effort of reason to believe they were not mushrooms; and droves of cattle, mares with their foals, black and brown sheep, kine and camels-though the camels were deceptive in the opposite sense, seeming so tall that it needed another effort to believe they were not antediluvian monsters.

As the huts and animals varied in size, we could plot their distances: half a mile, a mile, five miles. But it was not this that conveyed the size of the steppe so much as the mutliplicity of these encampments, cropping up wherever the eye rested, yet invaraibly separate a mile or two from their neighbours. There were ..of them , and the sight, therefore, seemed to embrace hundreds of miles.

As plans of cities are inset on maps of countries, another chart on a larger scale lay right beneath our wheels, there the green resolved, not into ordinary grass, but into wild corn, barley, and oats, which accounted for that vivid fire, as if a life within the green. And among these myriad bearded alleys lived a population of flowers, buttercups and poppies; pale purple irises and dark purple campanulas, and countless others, exhibiting all the colours, form and wonders that a child finds in its first garden. Then a puff of air would come , bending the corn to a silver ripple, while the flowers leaned with it; or a cloud shadow , and all grow dark, as if for a moment's sleep; so that this whole inner world of the steppe was mapped on a system of infinite minute recessions; having just those gradations of distance that the outer world lacked.

Our spirits had risen when we left the platteau. Now they effervesced. We shouted for joy, stopping the car less the minutes that were robbing us of the unrepeatable first vision should go faster. Even the larks in the paradise had lost their ordinary aloofness. One almost hit my hat in its inquisitiveness.

---------Robert Byron, Road to Oxiana

...[H]e could never have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were-a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence...a breathing without returns to a starting-point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.

Wlateau's Drapery: Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation-inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand-of tone into tone, of one indeterminate colour into another.

--------Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception

Ex-stasy: to stand outside of oneself; the urge to escape from self-hood..doors in the Wall (H.G.Wells)

The garden is the verdigris on the mirror of the spring breeze

---Ghalib.

Beyond the black night of the heart is the emerald mountain, we are told. Beyond all loss is the other life in the heartlands, a place where we shall roam, aimlessly, you and I.

the discarded image

I read the curious story of a man living on the west coast of Ireland who collects all of the things that the vast and boundless sea intermittently throws his way with a dedication and singular determination that resembles that of a monk. He combs the same stretch of coast every day , searching for the objects that people have discarded, misplaced, or that have by a sheer act of folly found their way into the Atlantic drift and he never thinks of returning anything to his generous benefactor. He does not sit to ponder the degree of chance involved in each find though, or if there is a pattern to the discoveries; he just gratefully receives what ever makes this journey. Each thing is as valuable as the next-as if the sea was a great democraticisng force-but each is still a document that testifies to a life that goes on elsewhere, quietly, beyond his knowing gaze.

Occasionally he will mistake the gleam of the sea for diamonds or some precious treasure and his heart will skip a beat but for the most he patiently awaits what each day has to offer. To think otherwise is to return to the world of men and expectation and hope. Sometimes he will find an old coin, a hermaion, dislodged from the deeps after many centuries, like a painful memory, and this is the only time that he experiences any sense of relief: "the old ways die hard" he says to himself. Here, at the edge of the world, with the ice-cold wind the only other voice, he cannot allow such thoughts to warm his blood.

In his heart of hearts, though, he knows that what he has accumulated during the course of his life is not worth that much. None of it is really his, just objects from far away places and distant times , each with their own history , each entombing a series of memories that reach this final destination, a grey graveyard covered by expressionless stones. By the time they land on this shore they have become totally useless, and have no relation to the world or the stream of life, just empty fragments that were once touched by human hands. It is as if the sea is also an Atlantic of Time, whose very immensity drowns out meaning. A shell, a green bottle, a car number plate. By the time they reach him the owners will probably have all long passed away just as the light from a distant star can still reach us long after its living fire has been extinguished.

He decides to build a monument to all those lost lives, those lost moments. It is a sort of shrine or temple. And he wonders to himself whether he isn't a member of an ancient caste of collectors, a tribe that is loosely connected to the storytellers, record-keepers, folk singers, to the great librarians of old who would gather those beautifully illustrated books that told of the history of all wars, all thought, and of all love's tribulations and then place them in huge stone buildings for safekeeping. Perhaps he was like the old monks who had carried with them across the vastness of the ages the wisdom of the East, the last in a line of transmitters of the tradition.

There were the lonely fortified monasteries , like little arks floating and keeping the adventure of consciousness afloat. The brave souls, the monks and bishops who carried the soul and spirit of man, unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the howling flood of the Dark Ages.

From the top of the hill he looks down at the town and a thought fills him with disgust. He is no different from those down below who have crowded themselves with images and things, weaving continuity from the most frivolous of things in order to create a world that would cover the gaping hole in their lives. As an ascetic he had always thought that things had just come his way but now the time had come, perhaps, for him to discard this image of himself and to not write about it. Perhaps then, and only then, could Charon return to the land of the living.

the killing moon

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon and this is the moment when it would most require our attention since its existence is still in doubt.
---Italo Calvino

This is the day she came for me.

I've been waiting for thee, my child, she said. And there was such softness and gentleness in her voice that her downcast eyes seemed sad to me.

I hate you, she said. But she said it so sweetly that it might have meant something else.

I have been here in the forest like a spell, waiting for you, year after year, hoping for your return.

This is the place where she came for me.
Like the moon alone with her thoughts, how I thought of you.

This is the way she came for me.
Her hand drawing an empty circle, her head to an angle, she said my image shall be as a mirror to yours, and yours to mine.

This is the life that came for me, out of the shadows.
But you saw me once, glanced my way on that grey afternoon in the drizzling rain, so ordinary otherwise. Across the busy street when I said to myself "I know you". There you were, with your deep melancholic gaze, staring at me in the fleeting reflection on the window pane unaware that our paths had crossed.

This is the day. This is the day death came for me, slid into my world, took my breath away.

The Killing Moon - Echo & the Bunnymen

BGE

The danger is that such a society, dazzled by the abundance of its own growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never-ending process, would no longer be able to realise its own futility-the futility of a life which does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject which endures after its labour is past.

---Adam Smith, cited by Hannah Arendt

One cannot enjoy good states of mind unless things work.

--Skidelsky on Keynes.

~

That appeals to me, seems about right, just far enough on this side of worldliness. A certain type of Muslim sensibility here. No sufism for you, my friend. States of mind'? Possibly. A good life sounds better. A bourgeois ideal? Don't knock it. I think that's why 'suffering' as an ideal is something that makes your nerves twitch, why the current fashion for making a song and dance about one's "inner demons" and angst bores you. Likewise, ascetism and hedonism are too extreme, too cut-off from the world.

~

But yes, the world, bridges (Simone). How we need them! A good slice of luck, a dollop of kismet if you like -and some brown bread doesn't go amiss either.

~

Hollywood nearly always trumps Europe because its films do not represent ideas but embodies them in an entertaining spectacle. So, to talk about The Time Machine as if it were a film about class subordination and how one class is sustained by the other is to miss the point.

Anyway, it is not the subterranean Morlocks who are dominated but the Eloi who enjoy their moment in the sunshine, quite oblivious of the world around them or any of their compatriots. The problem is not that labour is constrained but that even the free life seems to be so utterly devoid of meaning that one wonders what joy can be had from it.

Capitalism and modernity work to destroy limits; both are an unending process, a life of continuous self-creation and production without any identifiable telos. Marx's utopia envisages a time and a place where labour has ceased to be a curse or a constraint since it has been liberated from want by the immense productive capacity of technology. But there is something very strange with this end of history since labour, which was once the source of all value, ceases to be of importance and politics is also abolished. What, under such circumstances , binds one person to the next? A life that is without contradiction and tension is hardly recognizable as a human life at all. A life that becomes too sweet, like one that becomes too bitter, fails to hold our attention and can barely be inscribed with any meaning: there is a retreat into the private realm, beyond good and evil.

At the end of history our problem is not that of an overbearing central authority, the straining to establish autonomy against constraining forms of power ( the state, the family, societal norms, capital) but how to negotiate a life where everything is fluid, where nature herself is not an opposing 'other' but something of which we are but another manifestation. Nature has been completely humanized and we have been completely naturalized. In this post-redemption world we sink back to our animality-not a ferocious assertion of wants and desires, to be sure, but an animal satiation and bovine acceptance of things. Amongst these 'things' we must count ourselves since distinctness is a remnant of our thinking in a finite world. In the Empire of Liberty there is no inward and no outward or, rather, each transmutes into the other. What happens when we lose the very concept and experience of 'limit' and 'frontier'?

Perhaps an equally telling indication of the malaise felt in this world is the inability to imagine immortality. Without the tension necessitated by the pull of the transcendent can there really be any art or even imagination? Marx had thought that we would engage in hobbies but the truth is that unless these are connected to the world they seem like so many trivial pursuits. Technology may solve the problem of labour but it only opens the far deeper and seemingly intractable one of leisure.

Boredom: the unrelenting need for diversions, stimulation, agitation, startling experiences, the exotic. But the flatlands of the spirit are not so compromising. After the difficulty of the mountains, the difficulty of the plains (Brecht). We are "held fast" to the potential of things but view them listlessly. To have moved from use value to the virtual worlds created by imagination and wishes. But a time comes when this lack of contact with reality tires us. In the end of days we will want nothing more than to renounce desire itself, to long again for a return to an inorganic state (thanatos). Inactive, fallow, neutral. Neither animal repose in our being nor a human striving to transcend our horizons , all we have left is an intelligence and a will that is passive and indifferent to everything. The only serious problem now is one of "meaning"...how to kill time.

For the Eloi, who live a life of superabundance amidst an eternal and spotless sunshine, books and civilisation are entirely superfluous. As are memories and regret. They can, without pain or any inclination to act, watch another of their own drown and think nothing of it. It is another moment in the stream of life.

The irony of all this is that it is the self that desired to distance itself from life, to survey it with a god-like mind, cold and objective, that has ended up been swallowed up by it. It is as if the alchemist who had tried to control and manipulate life and nature had himself become nothing but the passing of time.

However gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit-and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded ipsisimosity- in the end one must learn caution...and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalization of the spirit that has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were a salvation and a glorification....The objective man, who no longer curses or scolds like the pessimist, the ideal man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures-we may say he is a mirror, he is no 'purpose' in himself. Accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing and reflecting imply-he waits until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively, so that even the lightest footsteps and gliding past of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film. Whatever 'personality' he still possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener disturbing; so much has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of outward forms and events. He readily confounds himself with other people, he makes mistakes with regards to his own needs...

His thoughts already rove away to the more general case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself. He does not now take himself seriously and devote time to himself. He is serene, not from lack of troubles, but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing with his trouble. The habitual complaisance with respect to all objects and experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he receives everything that comes his way, his habit of inconsiderate good nature, of dangerous indifference to Yea or Nay...his mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm , no longer how to deny.

Auerbach's Faces

Wandering tribes have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.
---Bellow, 'Seize the Day'.

Too many lives go into the making of one

Stone face, frozen spirit; yet there is no hint of melancholy here. For that one needs two moments, one needs the past: here there is only the unbearable weight of the present; the final instant, with all of its gravity, its earth boundedness, holds our gaze in a quiet rapture.

The subdued flickering of a grey flame: a soul that grimly but determinedly looks out and upwards to a heaven it doesn't believe in. Other faces look inwards, calmly, half-resigned to their fate, wondering if in these late days self-reflection isn't anything but a futile gesture. A face that is closed in on itself: a muddy icon to the sunken realities of the south, to a vision that is unable to see north of the future..

The lines of the face, the patterns of being, are incoherent close up. We must be at just the right distance to see the true self. A step in either direction....Only at a distance, at the edge of possible perceptions, does each face express its unique death-thought. It is as if only at the frontiers of existence do we see reality for what it really is. And this thought is something that a human being carries with him all along but only now, and only with great effort, does it come to the surface. So now, when we look again, we see an oblique line and think that the essential style of soul of this person was quiet despair; another, whose lips are at an angle, was cunning but there is an element of sadness, bitterness, even, at him being so. It is as if knowledge increaseth our sorrow.

What stands out in these pictures is the violence, the force of the paint brush. The fantastic desire to build layer upon layer of complexity on to the human face. It is this dedication and concentration, perhaps, that is the only thing that stands against the dissolution of time, the slow depletion to to other places. And in this there is a wonderful poetic lyricism of the finite.

Two nights ago I saw my father, my Jew, in a dream. His hair was fully grown, thick like I remember it from the old black and white photographs but, more than that, it had the shape that one sees in certain icons. This impression was reinforced by a face that was narrower than usual, a face with a stubble and significantly darkened...as a Kashmiri he'd be horrified by that!. But there was a deep and sound peace to this face, one of utter tranquility. Is it that we see the true face of other people-and ourselves-only in dreams now?

{since lines and dreams seem to want to come together today}

6.522

6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said..

----Wittgenstein, Tractatus


The solution to life is that there may not be any solution, which is not to say that one doesn't still look for it.

The problem of life disappears once it stops being a problem. One has to learn to live with mystery.

Ethical reflection is neither word nor deed, but both.

----------

I saw the swami in a dream last night and felt compelled to retell this story. There are certain days, moments, gestures, that become 'canonical' in one's life-if such a phrase be permissible-and we often spend the rest of our lives trying to recall them or repeat them in one way or the other. And so I ask the swami again and again for the details..how did it all begin, then what happened...

Now, just as there is an inner essence to every thing, so there is the unshakable cynicism in every cynic-and that pretty much describes me. I'm even cynical of my cynicism-which is quite an achievement, let me tell you! I remember walking through the park near Soas and the precise time of day-and every time I walk there I recall that moment...

The Dougal prepared herself for her long journey to defend her thesis. Everything seemed to hinge on those few hours (though in truth they hardly ever do) and no-one wanted to speak about the dreaded possibility (how wise it is to know when not to speak!). But the swami did. She had seen in a dream the night before that the Dougal would be asked no questions whatsoever. 'Unlikely' is not the word to describe such an event occurring. But that is exactly what did happen. To the western mind such intuition and correspondences speak of a 'backward' mindset, a remnant of a mode of 'thinking' that it thinks it has 'transcended'. At best, one might concede to analyse such a series of events but Blake was, after all, right: he who sees Ratio, sees only himself. Must we learn again that there are things beyond the bounds of our knowledge; that mysteries can never be explained, only deepened?

When I tell this story to my friends here there is no surprise, no incredulity . All they say, in a matter of fact way is: is it not written that the true prayers of a mother are always listened to? No 'philosophical' investigation, no psychological probing or quest to know what in this story is a fact and what isn't.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Borrowed lines

"This line (the line of beauty) must unfold without breaking in our head, but it is not possible for the hand to trace it without interruption and without stopping and starting several times."

-- Joseph Joubert

Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift, the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as summer taught, winter tested, and one had only to watch the apparent movement of the stars in order to guess one's declination.
--Henry Adams

(courtesy of antonia)

This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is one major colour that does not exist in the rainbow.

A pure brown lies outside the possibilities of nature that we know. All the greenish-browns, silvery, moist brown and deep gold tones..have the common quality that they strip Nature of her tangible actuality.

They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith..Destiny, God, the meaning of life. Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the soul, and more particular , of a historically disposed soul..By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future.

--Spengler, Decline of the West

stray reflections

Good start to the day: a beautiful post from anton -which I hope she will permit me to copy?- and some wonderful lines from Roxana. Plus: halva puri.

For anton and roxana (please note: the spirit of this is non-confrontational, just some stray reflections)

Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and in the best sense, free.

Was leafing through some Ruskin at Nabil's place and came across some lines which were similar to those above. About order and "real" freedom, about how freedom was an inner relation to outward circumstances, how serving one's superior is not necessarily servitude-and nothing compared to manancles of the machine, etc., etc.

First things first.

Nabil, what is this crap? Pass me some chocolates (he has an endless supply).

White or dark?

Black, bro'. It has to be black today.

Second thoughts:

Do you instinctively flinch on reading such words? Of course, you're not a 'medieval soul' for all your self-deceptions. But you liked Ruskin, the little you had read, the conservative radical. Wasn't that the type of 'left' that appealed to you, away from the radicalism of the bolshies, with their hatred of the past, their scientism?

But are instincts enough? What are your reasons? Without them, doesn't that lead you to fanaticism or subjectivism? But no, today it doesn't seem that way. Being 'like minded', sharing in the 'commons of the mind', is not, really about 'thought' but ultimately a matter of one's temperament.

I am in pain.

Do you need to hear me say that, think about it, 'know' that the statement is 'objectively' true, a "fact"? Do I need to say it to myself?

What do you want to avoid? What you think are two mistakes:

Firstly, that what 'is' is the same as what 'ought' to be. That the structures of dominance are to be accepted; that submission, passiveness, willing passiveness, can be a type of freedom or even the best type of freedom; that everyone must 'know their place'. The freedom to be oneself, a positive freedom, is not really about the lack of constraints, and is something of a different nature to the 'lonely freedom' (Augustine) of the moderns. Freedom within Tradition, norms, the familiar, the Truth.

But what about your radical Islam: do not bow your head to any person. Only in relation to the Divine: to be free slaves, a 'higher fatalism' (the Allama). But even here you are uneasy. The more he blasphemes, the more he praises God.

Secondly, that freedom is just the lack of constraints, a breaking free into the open, the uncharted. For you feel that this 'mechanical' view of freedom (Bloch?) can and does lead to, paradoxically, a lack of freedom. A slave of one's desires. The 'shock of the new' is the dominant discourse and it informs all practices. Go which way you will. The arbitrary will, the open road. Freedom is not about vision or 'the good' but revolt, rebellion, traveling, not reaching.

But then the question of orders of pleasure, of second-order desires. The ability to take step back. Preferences are not merely 'given' but socially formed, constructed, manufactured. Evaluate, consider, form judgements (Arendt). Without this, are we human (Frankfurt)? Your guru, though you have no gurus: Sen:

We need both rationality and freedom, and they need each other.

We stray, we reflect. In both there is freedom.

Out of time, out of place

One day I will fly from here.
---the swami

A Gaelic bard they praise who in fourteen adjectives
Named the one indivisible soul of his glen;
For what are the bens and the glens but manifold qualities,
Immeasurable complexities of soul?
What are these isles but a song sung by island voices?
The herdsman sings ancestral memories
And the song makes the singer wise,
But only while he sings
Songs that were old when the old themselves were young,
Songs of these hills only, and of no isles but these.
For other hills and isles this language has no words.

The mountains are like manna, for one day given,
To each his own:
Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen
Or the golden-haired sons of kings,
Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves,
Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail,
Whose words make loved things strange and small,
Emptied of all that made them heart-felt or bright.
Our words keep no faith with the soul of the world.

----Kathleen Raine

Contrary to the commonsensical view immigrants are always old. We are old because we are the guardians, because we are unable to shake off all that has happened to us. Immigrants, like the exiled, preserve the memory of that other place-at least for a while. It is like a line on our face, a trace of another light in our eye. We recognize each other by it and nod, silently, to the strangeness we instantly gravitate to. A word pronounced in certain way, a few dissonant notes. All this reminds us of somewhere else.

We are old. We accumulate the past with diligence and an infinite tenderness, as if placing a ship in a bottle. We are obsolete (Swami). Perhaps we always were.

And where are you really from?

Really?

Do I only think

I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space

and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?

strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.

"The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed, and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in memory after separation."
---John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket

Nothing must be glossed over. Everything must be committed to memory lest it slip away. Degas loved horse racing and ballet because both involved traditional movements and costumes (this was an age in which the gestures of the bourgeoisie were disappearing).

"Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs..He was continually struggling to achieve an idea of perfect form but this did not prevent him looking for human truth in what might seem an artificial situation.

[of the late work]: It is bold and summary, almost a sketch or beginning, with simplifications which may be due to failing sight, or may be due to artistic development, because almost all great painters arrive at the same kind of broad simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and bobs of colour. To this Degas added his mania for going over the same theme again and again, each time making the forms bolder, more complete and, as it would seem, more final...The great authoritative outlines [of the Three Dancers] are certainly not purely the result of failing sight..It is a classicism which aims at the final presentation of truth and the long chiseling away of form till it reaches the idea."

p.s. I hope you like the frog ! :-)

the qualities of darkness

What moves us? You want to say something. And yet you don't. Maybe you can't. Face to face with a profound mystery what else can one do but stop, look, and listen! What does that say about you? God knows! Yes, that's it.

I can say less and less about myself or anyone else. Doubt moves lovingly within a circle. Anyway, the ink is not dry. Even if essence is given, it unfolds in time. Only at the end of life can one say what life is, if at all. No? I have become a question to myself.

I stand before this picture, drawn to it. Here darkness is not 'nothingness', does not 'represent' it, nor is it a negation. And I have a strange but deep desire to be nothing, to literally walk into nothingness, this silent night or desert. Put all thought to one side, put the thought of no thought to one side...stand alone.

Can one distinguish between the qualities of light, how it slants, how it gently falls all around one? If so, then for darkness, too? There is something comforting, alluring or magnetic about it. There is a soft radiating warmth or degrees of humanity to the blackness, as if there was a sun behind it. The surface is neither shiny nor dull. Do not think of appearance or reality. No, just be.

No words. Religious, spiritual? What does it matter? No.5, the quintessential. What you need now is not light but silence, stillness. How you would dearly like to erase harsh words, bitter thoughts, undo the hardness of one's face. Here, finally, to walk in the forest, to lose my name, let my clothes fall to the ground, be your shadow, speak with you, face to face.

How can emptiness be so beautiful?

Broken Circle

Is this how it ends, my oldest of friends? A full stop that is empty? The pupil of finitude, the iris of infinity-controller of light? Focus: black sun orr the houri. Isis was a magician, wasn't she? Or a clown? Or a goddess? Why do you make distinctions? Is this a passageway to the white room or the land of the crows?

I am with those whose hearts are broken for My sake.

---Hadith Qudsi

The heart's endless desire to break...

Why so downcast, my soul
Why do you sigh within me?

---Psalms

the redemption of time

Aim, the black sun is in your range. Steady, now. Nerves. Fire! Ah, what a good shot the Queen is.

Bruno Ganz - Lied vom kindsein


warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch.

It is time to kill. And I shall do it with my silence, she said.

Roger Fenton is immediately known for his Crimean photographs, for the way in which he conjures up a private world, rendering it familiar and warm, so that one almost forgets the harshness of war itself. But I like best his attempt to capture and freeze time itself, in some of his landscape photos.

In some we see people caught in the light of a doorway, or small children climbing a fence, oblivious of the gazing world. All that transitoriness is played out against the solid bulwark of the masonry of Churches, abbeys. It is as if a meditation on the most fragile could only be possible against the backdrop of what is most permanent: time-worn stones and faith. Against this relief it appears that life is always slipping away, always in danger of falling back into the inorganic, of disappearing around the corner, retreating to the shadows-like so many of the subjects of the pictures themselves. Out of sight, out of mind. Even the huge, solid edifice of history and memory that we erect around us may not be enough to hold back time. Perhaps Fenton is saying that given this inevitability there is nothing else to do but portray something of our ineradicable ephemeral nature.

Even the stone sculptures are composed with their shadows in close attendance-their alter egos. The dark knives that cut into our being are really just death-masks that carry our imprint with them. The wilderness photographs. Always a solitary individual surrounded by the emptiness of nature. The foreground-a river, a stream-is slowed down by the exposure of the camera revealing a stillness and an elemental simplicity that doesn’t seem to be out of place or artificial. On the contrary, it appears that this is the essence of its real nature; that at the heart of all this rushing and striving for definition there is a contemplative nullity that embraces everything in its totality.

In a few it is the sky that is slowed down in this way. Reduced to a white, blank canvas so that the landscape below is a fundamental land, a primordial place, once again. The land in these photographs is barely anything more than a contour, a cold unredeemed place. We are back to the Old Testament, to the heath that is only briefly lit up by starlight. This is the world of pure potentiality, the pre-formed garden before Adam has named anything. One can imagine how alluring such a picture would be to a world-weary generation, one that was questioning the infinite advance into the future, the sunlight.

Perhaps there were other truths to stumble on, other realities that had to be erased before the earth would be forced to yield her secrets to science and technology.

We have lost our sense of what the earth means; to turn, and turn, and spin-in the heart, and not just the body-this, and this only, is time...and the redemption of time.

Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new !
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green ! the land how fair and blue !
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition ; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One ; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again !...

No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming ;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
----Dowden

Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There Is A Season) - The Byrds

If on a winter's night...

I like it when one catch a glimpse of the future in the present...a hint of the imminent summer in spring. But what I like even better is when things revert to the past: when, all of a sudden, a winter's night weaves its way into the steady course of the spring days.

Was at the book fair last night. Outside in a huge tent, with blue patterned carpets on the cold grass and the vague smell of something. What was it? Had they been keeping cattle here the night before?

Delighted to find Calvino's Marcovaldo and AnneMarie Schimmel's I am Wind, You are Fire. But the strange thing was that every book I picked up was like the exact copy of the Dougal's..i.e. the same edition, same cover. It was as if I had walked into her room and picked them up from the white knee-high shelves myself whilst she wasn't looking. I was half expecting to find a dry brown leaf in one of them. Also, I was convinced that I'd find Roxana's Solitude of Ravens, just because one always finds strange, unexpected things on a winter's night....

Lots of books on Islam. Lots. Earlier, Moaiz had visited and showed me a copy of Abdullahi Naim's new book on secularism in Islam. Had he been reading my blog or was it a sheer coincidence? Good book. Pity it's completely irrelevant here. Power, not knowledge.

About to leave the tent for dinner when I stumble across the unheard of 'Hero Books' , Partap Street. It says on the card: Founder: Syed Ghulam Ali Hero; Deals: All Kinds of Rare& General Books. Okay, let's see what you've got.

Pick up the following, all for 700 Rs (about 5 pounds):

Odes of Pindar,
Humboldt's Gift by Bellow
Some book by Harold Bloom
Anna K by Tolstoy (again, the Dougal's copy)
Islam: Reform or Subvert, by Arkoun
Tawney's book on Radicalism
John Gray's on Al-Q.
Some book by Stefan Zweig in Germanish so the Dougal can practice.

J found a book written by his great great uncle. A first-edition, published in 1882. On Lahore. Old Lahore. The Lahore that is no longer, even though it's all around you. Lost track of time as I lost myself amongst those old bookshelves, with the books scattered haphazardly everywhere. For a moment the seasons didn't matter, nor did the horrible events unfolding in Swat trouble me. A magical night. As I walked out of the tent -was I circus performer in a previous life (some, no doubt, will say: previous?) - I half imagined that it would be foggy outside or-and this amounts to the same thing-that the world had disappeared.

I have to end on this, a story from Marcovaldo.

Marcovaldo goes to the cinema to escape the drab days of his life. He leaves in the early hours of the morning.

But the return home in the drizzling night, the wait at the stop for tram number 30, the realization that his life would know no other setting beyond trams, traffic-lights, rooms in the half basement, gas stoves, drying laundry, warehouses and shipping rooms, made the film's splendour fade for him to a worn and grey sadness.

On his way home, though, it is foggy, so foggy that he can hardly see to the end of his nose.

At that moment he realized he was happy; the fog, erasing the world, allowed him to hold in his eyes the visions of the wide screen..the Ganges, the jungle, Calcutta.

Marcovaldo gets lost, or willingly lets himself get lost. One can only truly lose oneself in what is utterly familiar.

If he met a passer-by it would be easy to ask him the way: but whether because of the loneliness of this place, or because the hour or the bad weather, there wasn't a shadow of a human being to be seen.

Marcovaldo climbs a wall and reaches a great height (without him knowing it). At a certain height one can see the world clearly, in all its detail (Baron in the Trees). But sometimes one also needs to see things at eye-level. Snakes and ladders.

...he soon took a step into the void and fell headlong...I'm dead! he thought; but at the same moment he found himself seated on some soft earth...He lost heart. What did it matter which direction he chose to follow if, all around, there was only this empty fog?

ah, how easy it is to lose heart, lose one's heart. Why do people say: Take heart ! ?

Well, where does Marcovaldo end up? That, you'll never know, dear reader. But if on a winter's night you find yourself lost and as lonely as a bird in the vast darkness of the sky, then remember this simple truth, or imagine it if you like: what isn't lost cannot possibly be found.