Shit India!

Remember seeing the horrified faces of those who had just watched Paromita Vohra's Q2P at Tate Modern. Guess they'd been expecting something exotic, colourful, garish...I dunno, dancing elephants or gyrating hips from a Bollywood film. Or maybe something 'spiritual,' some austere, un-worldly Indian holy man, a swami, a sufi, telling it like it is, offering some solace for the soul in these troubled times. The Orient, after all, is full of mystique and wonderful extremes.

Quite disconcerting, really, to learn that 638 million people have to defecate in the open becasue there aren't enough toilets. Shining India? Not so sure.

Of course, goes without saying: you can't imagine Pakistan or Bangladesh being any less shittier.

~~~
Ban the Burqa?

The poor level of political debate in this country is always something that's astounded you.It's not just the staple BBC programmes with their comfortable, middle class, middle Englander platitudes and trite observations, programmes that offer a semblance of-and therefore acceptable level of-serious concern and reflection; it's not just the rantings of the dunces in the Daily Mail, The Sun, etc., etc.

No, it's the ability to repeatedly miss the fundamental point-almost at will, one is tempted to say-and concentrate, instead, on secondary issues. Apart from cases where identification is absolutely paramount (security, say)and cases where it's forced on women, does it really matter that much? I mean, of course it's distasteful and not very progressive (quite the opposite, to my mind)but does that warrant a ban? Freedom surely entails the possibility of other people choosing what to you may appear as silly or harmful options but that to them come across as meaningful and correct choices.

But, again, shouldn't the main concern be about equality in education, housing, jobs and not the burqa as a sign of difference, a sign that is only adopted by very few women? As with the BNP's focus on migrants, the more central issues of globalisation, class, and the decline of manufacturing are swept under the carpet by the BBC wallahs. If you believe in free markets then capital and labour must be free to move across borders. Eventually the cultural contradictions of capitalism will come to the fore.

~~~

Here's Will Self (which reminds me, must take some Spike back to the land of the pure)...

On the day after the catastrophic defeat, Richard Littlejohn “wrote” in the Daily Mail: “If the Few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now.” Someone in television once told me that he’d been present at a meeting where a reality show was pitched called Daily Mail Island, the conceit being that contestants were marooned on an island where the only news they had of the outside world came to them via the Daily Mail. Needless to say, the pitch failed when one of the commissioning execs observed that such a land mass already existed – and it was called “Britain”.

Richard Littlejohn..how to describe him? Not as rabid as mad Mel or as shrill as Anne Leslie, just one of the professional whingers.

second thoughts

I don't care much for the times we're living in.
--from The Time Machine.

Was on Facebook for an hour (shudder). If you're going to be seduced, it should at least be by something beautiful.One-liners are fine if you're Wilde-but even that gets tiresome after a while.

Second thoughts.

Thank God!Re-vision. Iris M.

When the child was a child old Frithjof was deep, very deep(you still love his book on the 'Red Man', The Feathered Sun-as much for the pictures as anything else).

There was this:

"...whereas in the Middle Ages novels still drew their inspiration from myths, legends, and religious and chivalrous ideals, they [novelists] became from a certain period onwards more profane, even garrulous and insignificant...

Literary realism is truly subversive because it aims at reducing reality to the vilest contingencies of nature or chance, instead of leading it back to its archetypes...in short, to the essential."

Well, all heady stuff if you're a teenager (not that you were looking for anything in particular-good ol' Kashmiri laziness saved you there!). But I guess there's a pessimistic side to life that thinks profundity goes hand in hand with sadness, suffering, or a generally negative stance to the dull, bourgeois, disenchanted world that is 'the world'. Anyone who's never dreamt of escaping hasn't, surely, lived or understood? Whither shall I flee? (Tillich seemed to make sense then, and Hesse too: 'the desire to sleep overcame all desires').

Some uneasy feeling always tugged at you, though. Something too fanatical and stark about absolutes, perfection, essence, renunciation. There was no one thing. And

Finitude is not a misfortune.
--The Allama.

All this talk of 'the spiritual'..there was only one thing worse: the search for it. Notions like the 'timeless east' were laughable, utterly fake,as was this silly veneration for 'the Past' and Tradition. Try something a bit simpler like running water, local justice,education, citizenship...'existence precedes essence'.

Not that this was anti-religious. But such talk and terminology doesn't interest me anyway. 'Religious' and conservative people are insufferable bores.

Anyways, I've come to enjoy reading fiction a lot more. Recently picked up Stoner (highly recommended by anton), Fred Exley's 'A Fan's Notes' (one of Richard Ford's top books), Updike's Rabbit Redux book.

E.M.F:

The portrayal of life by values replaced by the portrayal of life by time.

Yes, that seems to be it. Individual experience, unique, new, novel...the broken circle. God, you can't even read Ouspensky on Icons any more.

He who vilifies time, vilifies His Lord.
--a Prophetic saying (quoted in 'The Reconstruction')

What is truly subversive is how the men in hats denigrate reality, substitute the universal, the abstract, for particularities, the concrete.

+ - (or tales from the frontier)

Borders has closed. Can't get over it. Change only makes sense against an unchanging background.

Angina days, blue snow
time ticked away
in cut-out arches,
time is blue, time is snow
red sleeves, black hat...time is yellow that none can tell it.

And the block of buildings near Tottenham Court Road has been ripped up; some shops have been closed, boarded up, whilst others have simply changed hands. Everything's been reduced to the basic in this shapeshifter's world. At the corner, Dionysus fish and chip shop is no more. An age of austerity is upon us. No-one has anything to say in these Poundlands, or if they do it is unclear, muffled. Just stare vacantly between departure times,as feet shuffle along.

And the old second-hand book shop, the shady oasis, has also gone. It was always an anomaly,a throwback to the 1970's and you never really bought anything from them (except, perhaps, your unread copy of Rebecca West's Grey), but still..it was always there. Now, instead, there's the Korea Ginseng Centre. And that too has failed and folded.

You hate to think..hate to think what's happened to the Italian second-hand book shop further down, past the abandoned Church.

The walk to the reformed church
red and white surveyors' poles constitute the idea of God.

Neither God nor place survives. The light flattens everything, makes a desert of it. Flatters some faces. Grime and grimace. Dust settles, accumulates.

The wind is full of black dust
It scours the names of the gravestones
and etches this day
into us.

What is the German for 'one'. The subtractions that lead one to one.There is a right moment,and a left moment. Denise in the shadows. Pluck out a word, like an orange from a dark tree.Your hand loosens. Mark my words, father used to say.

The pencil lead

is my favourite:

by day it writes out lines

that come to me at night.

Day by day you write, without return, rhyme or reason.

between R and Z

I
.I will
leave
I will leave

....You

alone

.......I

(you alone. you, alone)

with.with your
I will leave you alone with your
thoughts

of...

[at the bookshop the assistant asked, this John Riley-Celia's poet-when was he around, then? Hard to say,to the hard of hearing: we're always 'around', never really here. Of beauty, of truth, but not beauty, not truth.]

A reader has aksed -yes, such a creature actually does exist!-who do you write for (which is better than: what are you actually trying to say in your obtuse, evasive, nonsensical way or, why on earth are you writing at all?). Well, yes. And. Or. Orr.

"Unfortunately, we didn't have the volumes from R to Z-and the want of them shows in me to this day."
--Gunter Eich.

farfetched images that made evasion a revelation.
--Lowell/Vendler.

Everything is a sign for something else. The medievals would have understood that. Excuse me whilst I put my religious hat on. The Garden. A shadow. A shadow of doubt.

~~~

Always good to have your hair cut by a woman. Very sad story though. Don't look at her directly, even her reflection in the mirror, when she tells it. Why does everyone want to confess-except me?

~~~

mad conversation overheard at Foyles:

God's a reader. God loves chaos.All the ancients knew that. Even the scientists know that. That's what I'm saying. We're vibrating modes in the universe. We may destroy ourselves before we reach the answer.

The small Inidan man, quiet, balding (very shiny head), sitting and looking up at this crazy Englishman, now and then interjected..infinity, hinduism, etc., etc. but his words were barely audible.

It went on:

Dinosaurs. Do you know why they're important? God probably got bored of dinosaurs.[Well, who wouldn't?]. God's a genius. Or whatever. Even if you don't believe in God.

Good God!For a while mumbo-jumbo is interesting...until it becomes the norm.

all you wanted

it's a kind of world that's not a world, just the pieces. so the last look isn't the last. or maybe it is. so you came back. it was here all the time. right here for you. the beauty, condensed, like a gold ring in a desert, or all summer evenings rolled into one, repeated, as if nothing had changed, even though greyer. all you wanted, needed. it wasn't a word, or a place, but a word in a mirror hidden. your face..

Radical Centre

There is a moderate temper that is mind-numbingly boring, mediocre. The quiet life that never ventures anything and never loses anything, spinning out a dull monotony; an accountant's spirit that sees only shades of grey and that deals only in the possible.

And then there is the life at the periphery, un-centred, and free-wheeling, always seeking out the impossible, taking flight from what is given. But this is equally tedious if it isn't natural, if it's forced, or a position one has to take in relation to society (Ernst Bloch saw this clearly in relation to Bergson's 'pure duration', Utopia); a mad person doesn't write down her thoughts, but lives them...burns according to her own lights. Only a voyeur or a philosopher (which amounts to the same thing) takes a step out of life: to think is to die a little.

The modern mania for newness-and after me the deluge!- has the uncanny habit of ending up in the most terrible solipsism. Is it anything but the final convulsions of a will from whom the very meaning of the word freedom is slipping away?

In a superb article Jonathan Jones asks the question that never gets asked: why does so much of modern (American) freedom end up as a compulsion?

Be not more wise than it behoveth, but be ye soberly wise.
---Romans: 12:3

'...[b]ut reason has taught me that, if you condemn anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible , you are claiming know the frontiers of the will and bounds of the will of God.'

Anything that outstrips our reason will seem 'unreasonable or monstrous'. Strangeness is taken away 'from the very things we hold in our hands' not by knowledge but by habit (Hume?).If we understand the difference between what is impossible and what is unusual , or between what is against the common opinion of mankind, then the way to observe that rule laid down by Chilo, 'Nothing to excess', would be, Not to believe too rashly: not to disbelieve too easily...not to despair over what we cannot understand...not to be so curious that we cannot leave anything unresolved or undecided.
--De Montaigne.

~~

There's a great temptation to impose some sort of conceptual and/or real order on freedom-and a considerable danger in doing so as well. Freedom is only meaningful in such a scheme of things in terms of its relation to the things we have reasons to value. The act of free choice, autonomy is, seen in this light, of instrumental value only: how far it furthers the things we 'ought to' want ('ought to' means have reason to). The market, for example, is supposed to offer both types of freedom: process and opportunities freedom (opportunities to achieve valuable outcomes, and process freedoms in terms of the lack of constraints imposed by society, religion, tradition).

Seen in this light, the market can promote frivolous (or even harmful) desires since there is no second-order evaluation of those desires.Freedom cannot be bogged down by reason, responsibility or the interests of society. To the detractors of modernity (and the market) such freedom is a 'lonely freedom' (Augustine?), an abyss..the unstructured will, flights of fancy that know no borders, desire driven into the wilderness by the imagination (or, worse, by the manufacturers of dreams and false consciousness).

On the other hand, though, it is only too evident that freedom would be quite meaningless without individualism (being given what one wants, what is best for one, is not the same as choosing the good for oneself). Also, part of the charm of market freedoms is not that it satisfies given wants/desires but that it leads to new, unexpected ones, and that through the continued process of choice (and education) one could make more refined choices.Manipiulation is only one way of thinking about preference change.

a little testament

from a great distance the sea doesn't move. just a crumpled piece of blue cloth feckled with small white cloth dots. from a distance, a human being, a fire, a spark...

"Can I get a window seat?," he asked.

"Why, of course," came the reply from behind the counter.

"And a seat as far away from the toilets as possible...if it isn't too much trouble, that is."

"Sir, just wait and see, I'll get you a seat away from the whole world.God willing, the seat next to yours will be empty as well."

How quickly he was to recognize him, surprisingly so for somone with such a round and amiable face. He sat quietly waiting before Z, along with husband and child, walked straight past him; a furtive glance his way but nothing more. He made to get up but decided against it. It was her though. Two minutes later she walked towards him, alone, walked like someone coming out of the sea, an image that suddenly appears out of the fog. Her hips were full, her curves accenuated by the tight jeans she was wearing.

"So it was you!"

"Yes. "

[Silence]

"And how've you been?"

"Good"

....

Redux:Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin, returning, from reducere to lead back
Date: 1860.

...

Scribbled in the book: a name,a date (light blue ink): BaRbaRa Bodenheimer, 1973.Who the fuck? And why the pronounced R's? Her considered assessment: Good.

...

Who owns the rights to a heart, the various pathways that very rarely converge, some being more ancient than others, some in a state of disrepair?

Always the same. The locked jaw, the frozen words, the failing of the light.This remarkable reluctance or inability to just come out and say it. Tell it, but tell it slant.Old world reticence-or so he liked to think. In reality it was charming only in small doses and women were too savvy to give it a chance to flower into something else.

His hand reached out to touch the pram handle, the exact same spot she had just moved her hand from. Unconsciously, of course, but it led to a half-second awkwardness.

"So?" she said, shrugging her shoulders, raising her eyebrows, trying her best to make him feel comfortable. "Are you happy?"

He resented the question. "No. Yes. But not in an ecstatic way, I guess." He really didn't understand what he was saying but continued: "Just your run-of-the-mill sort of floating, mid-afternoon mild happiness." What was he saying, he thought to himself. His mind was all blubber and empty grey spaces.Maybe she'd wanted to hear something else.

There she was, with those sweet dreamy eyes, desert eyes, veiled in sadness.On her mother's side she was from the same tribe as his. He looked at the two small silver rings that studded her earlobe.

Even as she was speaking he misunderstood her, looked away, downwards, found all sorts of directions and angles. She, on the other hand, found her own inwardness by speaking at an ever quickening pace. His name was too solid, too square-ish. That was the problem. Your parents, they fuck you up.

He tilted his head to her. He liked being at a slight angle to the universe.She rattled away. The supreme confidence of short people. 'Just listen,' he thought, 'let them confess.' He was like Charon, helping people across, letting them find their own words for loss, the words they thought were worth remembering.

"Catch you some other time then?"

"Yeah, some other time"

the dogs of Lahore

'I foresee a calamity meted out to our tribe,' he said with a heavy somber growl, his eyes somewhat vacant, the glassy essence clouded over. His words always had this reassuring aspect to them, as if he was speaking from the inherited wisdom of aeons passed. The simple, solid, square-like words, ever present, like stones.

And not for the first time in their lives the leader was able to crystallize the uneasy feeling that they had all felt but were too afraid to admit to themselves. He could see more clearly than them. Times had been hard before, of course, but this time the new political directive-humankind were to be offered 100 Rs for each dog's tail-struck a deep chord of fear in their hearts. It was true: something dark and sinister had developed in the mid of man and it was coming their way.

'We must leave here and go somewhere else. If the city doesn't afford us protection,' said one articulate dog, 'we must head off to the country.' Everyone knew he was correct, but thought of a thousand reasons to stay nevertheless.

And then the self-reflection, the debates and discussions followed: 'Could it be that we, the oldest inhabitants of the city, the first to set foot here, could really be hounded out of our homes by these rabid fanatics?' Some shook their heads, mostly in disbelief. They had been here before the first humans, since time out of mind, when everything was wild, fresh, open, unnamed. And when these latecomers did eventually arrive wasn't it the dogs who showed them how to hunt, how to survive, how to live with warmth and fraternity and loyalty? It was they who befriended the strangers, helped them feel at home (because they felt so lost). And when the humans called the worst form of death a 'dog's death' they had simply laughed it off, because they were experts at letting things pass (unlike them)..and how silly it was after all: for what was a huuman life but bewilderment and confusion? And what was this strange death alone?

Some were adamant, trusting the ways of the world. 'In time, they wil understand their folly.' Others, the pious ones, put a religious slant on their proclomations: 'Falsehood by its very nature is short-lived.' Still others, the really old Lahoris, were too tired and lazy to worry and fret. In reality, their love for peace and idling around made them resistant to any thought of change. How good it was to rest under the shade of an old tree, or sleep in the afternoon sun on a bed of grey sand left by the construction workers at a building site. All change was illusory. For once poet and philosopher agreed...

The humans in the mean time had taken to burning leaves in the cold months. Many saw this as an omen, saw death in these smokey flames. So, a group of 30 of them gathered at the intersection of Cavalry and Walton, old and young, wise and foolish. The storyteller, the mongrel, was with them. He told them of how the dogs in England were happy even though not so free as they. How in America a man had said "the barking of the dog, a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God's sake, open the universe a little more!). " And on hearing his stories their hearts raced. They bounded down the busy road, flesh on stone, not knowing where they were going, what they were looking for or, inded, what they would find. All they knew was that at this very moment they had never felt so free, never felt so sad.

the juggler

c.1100, iugulere "jester, buffoon," also "wizard, sorcerer," from O.E. geogelere "magician, conjurer," also from Anglo-Fr. jogelour, from O.Fr. jogleor (acc.), from L. joculatorem (nom. joculator) "joker," from joculari "to joke." Connecting notion between "magician" and "juggler" is dexterity.

To juggle: a constant refocusing of attention. Deception. Letting go at the right time.

"Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.”

---Wittgenstein.

"Modern authorship is become a species of stenography: we continue even to read by proxy. We skim the cream of prose without any trouble; we get at the quintessence of poetry without loss of time. The staple commodity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, unwieldy bullion of books is driven out of the market of learning, and the intercourse of the literary world is carried on, and the credit of the great capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating medium of magazines."

---Hazlitt.

Fusion

If you see it, you'll see it everywhere. Wherefore do you talk of distinctions? Your eyes like a green sea...when I think of you, I can't breathe.

the voice of things

"And we realize what interests the artist [Morandi] is the process of the visible first becoming visible, before the thing seen has been given a name or acquired a value."

"Every individual is not only a synthesis of existing relations, but also the history of those relations, which means the resume of all the past."

"On the nurraghi (dry-stone towers of Sardinia) : they offered shelter, probably many layers of shelter, for men are many layered."

"Stone was called heartless because it was deaf."

When everything is in flux, nothing stays the same, when no order establishes itself, is as good (or bad) as another, then stones offer the only available promise: that of shelter, and "stone was considered as companions."

"Stones propose another sense of time whereby the past of the planet proffers a meagre yet massive support to human acts of resistance as if the veins of metal in rock led to our veins of blood."

--from John Berger.

the third place

In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornamental collection of small glass 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.
--Saul Bellow.

To go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning, hierarchies and self.
---R. Sennett.

The rush for third place:

"This is the game that no-one wanted to play."
(a comment on the Uruguay-Germany match).

Something tragic about third-place play offs. Whether you win or lose it doesn't really matter. No-one remembers you anyway. It's a surreal experience, watching two professional teams suddenly lose all their seriousness and almost become child-like, naive. The game, like a Sunday morning, can offer some pleasures but ultimately suffers from a foreboding sense of its own futility. You watch it knowing that as soon as you turn your face away it will disappear, like a dream, like Venice.

And the squad photographs before the game (this time it's the whole squad, not just the team) is quaint-as if to say: this is the last time we might be together, it doesn't matter, we have to carry on..we've missed our opportunity, it will never come again, that moment wasn't ours after all. For some it will be their last game. But that's the way it's always been. Come and go. Lives briefly lit up by the spectacle, and then a return to the grey. Does philosophy really help here, all those books (which you can't remember anyway)? Better to follow Khayyam, and drink, drink...

somewhere

Mr. somewhere

Like there isn't going to be any tide, like there isn't going to be any time, to get out, away from me. No hand on no heart, you know. Tell it now, the minute the last minute. The door, a true image of direction.

Calvino...

books, etc.

By 1950, a quarter of a million were published every year, while today a book is published somewhere in the world every 20 seconds (that’s 1,576,800 per annum, in case you were wondering)...Google’s servers process a petabyte (one quadrillion bytes) of data every hour. Fifty petabytes is roughly equal to the entire written works of humankind up until now.

---Will Self.

Of course, others have made these points before: George Steiner on verbal hyperinflation, Ivan Illich on the disappearance of the commons of silence, the proliferation of images, Jonathan Franzen in his wonderful Harper's essay on 'linear' reading vs skimming, surfing. Think of it, all those stacks of journal articles, newspaper opinion pieces, blogland, youtube, the universities churning out research, the superhighways, bandwiths clogged up with data. Speed is of the essence.

Well, not really an avid book reader (unlike C, D, anton, and Roxana) but still think the case for reading fiction has to be made. "what's the point," old Mugs once said, "why not just go to the facts?"

an interlude:



Martha Nussbaum:

the decisive moment

Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif

--Bresson.

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
---Borges

But if each moment is causally linked to every other then each moment contains all other moments, just as a raindrop is a temporary solidification of the process: sea to cloud to sea. There is no decisive moment. And yet...

A horrid e-mail from a friend (and so strange too, given that he was such a fan of Braudel)...Geographical time, social time, and individual time. Can "events" really be just surface irruptions on an otherwise unimportant, slow-moving backdrop? Why does this idea make you uneasy? Singular events that structure the future, that rupture the past (conformities and hierarchies). Is this not a bit like the isolated will that chooses without, as it were, a fabric woven of reflective practices, all sorts of subtle connections and patterns between a person and her culture, history, expectations, desires,imagination, and sense of time?

The slow-moving material of our lives. Like the elements, structuring but not determining certain possibilities, certain styles of soul, gestures to others(Primo Levi). Gellner (The Plough and the Sword), Guenon, Braudel.

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

And yet, something survives, even if it is as frail as a faint grey line on a canvas, as trivial (but beautiful) as a blue ribbon on a sack cloth. Oh, this droopy, sad lower lip R has inherited. Dear child! And those inquisitive eyes, that restless look..oh, those mountain people, they've seen it all before.

the mind is not a computer

"Any employment is better than no employment [even] if it's about flipping burgers or stacking shelves rather than being sat at home feeling sorry for yourself and vegetating. There are lots of other skills required and valued, like people skills: you could be on a counter in a store. It's all about building up your skills base."

---Carl Gilleard, The Association of Graduate Recruiters.

Skills: an input into some output (read: productivity or GDP growth).Which means that 'useless' subjects like philosophy and medieval history and literature should not be taught (what's their 'market value' goes up the cry...you've got limited resources and have to make a decision after all...). Well, yes, but decisions imply that we can compare along some dimension and also that the 'aggregating principle', the weights we give to the quantities along each dimension, is simply given and not a highly contested and deliberative process.

And this is not, perhaps, too dissimilar to the notion that the mind sifts through given data, computes, and then gets to some conclusion. But which data is selected, and what counts as 'data', is surely a matter of experience, desires, expectations-in short: our engagement with other people, language, and the world. Can we really just point to objects without language? And is repetition or processing-no matter how speedily done, no matter how extensive, the same thing as thinking, as judgement? [But if we don't have a mechanical explanation does that mean we're left with no explanation, no possible explanation? Is freedom of thought arbitrary, an abyss, not subject to theoria?]

~~~

People often talk about tradition and the way things are-and in most cases (at least now) you think this is a cover up for subjection and the stifling of thought or anything new. Traditionalists are pessimists in this sense: everything is a falling away from the origin and purity; the modern world is full of depravity and decline and the attempt to bring about progress ends up creating terrible dystopias and disenchantment.

Much has been lost. No doubt. But a simple question: would you really rather live in any other age than the one you're currently living in? {if you're blogging/have a computer, I'm assuming the answer is no, but surprise me}

‘I am contending for the rights of the living and against their being willed away, and controlled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead.’
---Tom Paine.

day-to-day

A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom.
--Seamus Heaney (on Robert Lowell)

Ten thousand Fords are idle here
in search of a tradition.
---Lowell.

the almost heroic will to eke out a meaning from the humdrum, drab day-to-day goings on, to live a life without craft or guile, without the deep continuities that come from tradition, a settled life. instead, the edgy dislocations, the dark strikings as evening approaches; the thinning out of a life written in grey that dislodges sense. the past, a series of abandoned reflections, unattached to any word or thing...

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.
---Robert Lowell.

life, studies

the huge square shadow of the library spreads itself, a prolongation of a tightly packed cube of truth, resisting the plurality of the world, steadying itself against the slant of time, heaving like a lost ship, creaking like the wood in an ancient forest. a contemplative long-legged bird steps into the shadows, out of the brilliant annulling white light, as if it were entering its own grave.

inside, so many words unread or misunderstood. you can't explain. there they stand, isolated like the sleep of a child, atoms or fixed stars, decaying with the hands of the clock.

the upper rooms heavy with a thick, hushed silence, the neon lights mostly switched off, a few faulty ones still flickering, as if half-awake. i am handed a bunch of dazzling new keys that flash like a live fish in my hand. a double turn of the wrist and the dense steel lock clunks open, automatically, with an unmistakable certainty and resolve.

forefinger and thumb clench the chosen key so as to not forget. gestures of the hand this late in the day are like the dark badges of the mind. your eyes strain to pick out a number, match it with that on the scrap of unfolded paper in your other hand, the mind sifting for the right decimal place or for the vague recollection of the right order of the words. even here, the shadows, the slippage...

downstairs a bright glass cabinet holds a few obscure books, half open, spine upright. they're like trophies or the stuffed specimens of some mysterious animal. a lonely student is coiled over his notes, the words crazily spiraling, swirling in his confused mind-or so it appears that way from his disheveled look, the blank look on his face. where did it all go wrong?

next to the cabinet an empty-headed girl with thickly painted lips looks up at her friend, head tilted, cocked his way. she thinks dark thoughts of the life to come, thrilled that he might help her escape...

but still life, it's everywhere, has invaded the inner recesses of the soul; the iron in the blood, the iron in the books, that settled unfreedom, like blind lust that crashes down on us.

"look at your face," he said to her, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. but she only thought to herself: " you become slightly more unreal to me every day." the shadow of the word inheres, like the inner facet of a diamond, unable to make itself clear.

All I Need is Time

(This live version is so much better than the recorded single. the only thing that comes close is Roy Orbison's version).

~~~

someone said to me, the advantage of living here is that you can live like a king. all i need is time then I'll be a king...

that is, of course, quite true. but why would one want to live like a king? isn't a king cut of from other people and ordinary pleasures? and isn't the king's life based on the exploitation and suffering of many other people? the only important thing in terms of kingship is that one has a queen...

i've also heard many Paks say to me: in England you can only be a second-class citizen. there's some truth to that-or at least there was up until the eighties; not so true now, I think. but, again, what does a king know of citizenship?

It's not just that the vast inequalities of income and wealth in this country are wrong in themselves; it's that they translate into social and political inequalities. As David Miller pointed out some time ago, one important aspect of inequality is the way in which inequalities in income are regarded. Two points: it's hard to imagine there being much respect in a society when there are such extreme inequalities; secondly: a certain level of inequality may not trouble people too much if:

a) it was fairly acquired-a fair process,
b) is a reflection of merit,
c)doesn't re-inforce or contribute to inequalities in other spheres (gender relations, political representation, etc.)

civility, politeness, courtesy: civil, polity, court.

a king is really only a king in terms of his private pleasures. in a country where there's a strong public sector, a large and effective public domain (David Marquand)the king's wealth doesn't count for much and might even be seen as something that deprives him of something valuable, locking him into his own imagination or fantasies, isolated from fellowship, experience, a proper love of the world.

~~~

what is intelligence? the ability not to ask such questions? perhaps more: the ability to ask the right questions, to know that not everything under the sun can or has to be questioned. there's something quite fanatical about a mind that wants ready solutions, that cannot abide ambiguity, or come to terms with negative capability, or the occasional use of circular reasoning. after all: one could also ask, if one were so inclined, what counts as a reason (i.e what are the requirements for a reason to be a reason..Broome).

anselm:...

after all these years the only thing you've understood is that if this question is to be answered-and that's a big 'if' - it is: the ability to get out of oneslef, to recognize others..and more: intelligence and desire: volo ut sis.

the houre of the houri

Yet t’was of my minde, seising thee,
Though it in thee cannot persever.
For I had rather owner bee
Of thee one houre,than all else ever.
--donne.

from the beginning each letter of your name was burned on my lips, like a mark of ownership. strange it is then, that you only heard my silence.