constellations

is this the place? no, this is not the place and never was. this was never the place where I met you or left you. never. but if it was? this is the place where someone mentioned your name. you weren't real, like the story of a long forgotten queen in a book. then, the red blush of your cheeks set hearts on fire. and if once, then why not again?

From Rebecca Solnit:

The belief that places in the imagination can be contained, versus narrative, wandering, wondering across genres, disciplines, and time.

Jimmie Durkham: "nothing could be more central to American reality that the relationship between Americans and American Indians, yet those relationships are of course the most inviolable and the most lied about."

R.S. The greatest tragedy of the new technologies may be their elimination of the incalculable-the coincidences and provocations and metaphors that take us out of ourselves and put us in relation to other things. To live inside a mechanical world is to live inside plotted possibility, what has already been imagined; and so technologies that are supposed to open up the future instead narrow it.

N. Klein: 'virtually lost, virtually found'

'The sky is consciousness of the landscape'

Hannah: metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.

R.S. Another rupture is between stars and constellations, information and stories..after the telescope the sky began to fill with objects that had no place in culture, that were accessible only to specialists, and that outreached the ability of culture to assimilate new objects into existing patterns.

M. Foucault: constellations of meaning linked by metaphor were being replaced by expanding galaxies of information.

constellations: routes for the imagination to travel, approach the unknown through the known, the abstract through the concrete.

Aristotle: A good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity of dissimilars.

Trust, trust in the unknown, in what you don't know. Incredibly difficult. But still, the wonderful example of the Crow Indians.

Tierno Bokar writes beautifully (and simply) of the 'three lights'...at the first level "the darkness of superstition surrounds them, the cold of incomprehension makes them tremble. They remain huddled up in a small corner of their tradition..at this stage adepts cannot go beyond the stage of imitation (taqlid) and the letter...

The second light is like that of the sun...Just as the physical sun gives light and warmth to all beings, who from this perspective are all brothers, the adepts who have reached this degree of light see and treat everything that lives under the sun and receives its light as brothers...It will always come from the same source and will never falter throughout the ages.

Q: 30:22.

the muslim problem

This follows on, presumably, from the Jewish problem, the Yellow Peril, reds in the bed,the moral degeneracy of blacks, gays and lesbos, the spiritual depravity of the infidel, the polytheist..dirt, filth, vermin, infecting the purity of the greying white man, fortress Europe or the muslim ummah. Keep them at bay: segregation, camps, detention centres, reservations, gulags, walls (what the Israelis call a "fence"!).

We must maintain our traditions, protect and conserve our culture, our way of life.

Yeah, sure, but then why talk about globalisation and the free movement of capital? Why talk about the "dynamism" of the market if you're so hooked on to the past and your comfortable 1950's version of England, to picket-fence and apple-pie America with its bourgeois morality of eternal happiness (D. Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism). Materialism isn't that radical after all, wouldn't you say?

And how can you pretend to be civilized when that's your attitude to other people?

Ho hum.

~~~
Last night I heard this song in a fantastic dream, woke up as if my heart was pierced by it. A slow, calm cool burning, fire in the ice. Song of the year, perhaps. But Sharon Isbin's version, not this one (though this is good as well).

~~~

Today, human, and nothing else.

Just feeling human
the way a cloud's a cloud..
Human, free for the day from roles assigned,
each with its emblem
cluttering the right hand..
Human, a kind of element, a fire...

~~~

But I forced to mind my vision of a sky

close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move-

a sky of gray mist it appeared-

and how looking intently at it we saw

its gray was not gray but a milky white

in which radiant traces of opal greens,

fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again,

and how only then, seeing the color in the gray,

a field sprang into sight, extending

between where we stood and the horizon,

a field of freshest deep spring grass

starred with dandelions,

green and gold

gold and green alternating in closewoven
chords, madrigal field
---Denise.

the lightness of being

H: Do you know yourself?

K: As much as any human being does.

No, the human heart is unknowable. That's the point. Only what is lost can be found. One cannot lose what one has not possessed.

I can lose what I want. I want you.

The Wonder Years

the past and the future. seen in our eyes, stretched out on our faces, like the shadow of a bird crossing our path. our own shadows, second selves, at home in stillness, the oblique figures like the smallness of the hours, reminding you of the ground. you look. stare at the patterns of light and shade formed by wind and leaves. the mind clear at last, shining. the darkness of the night. words are burned in the fires.

you're too tired for dreams. the animal repose of breathing. this breath. wisp of life. the short and the long of it. the force of pen on paper, ink on the blank canvas,. your hand cocked at an angle, scrawls the words, "I hate you." when truth be told.

~~~
From where did this rain in our lives come? How did red enter the world? And why so blue?

R's outstretched hand. Beautiful in the rain. Thought she could catch it. Flexed her fingers and thumb. Give me! Now! But it is only the curve of the hand that collects and re-collects. Sustains. To be human means forgetting. Breaking free from the angular. Means remembering. The circles. Even if broken.

the dance of sparks

The East-West diwan: Because God is neither of the East nor of the West.

When you come to the bridge, loosen your clothes, let down your hair. You will be asked what you remembered, and what you forgot, what you have lost, and what you have found.

my daughter, the fundamentalist

Little R, with little to show for the day, saw me reading Charles Taylor's book on secularism and attacked it with a venom (which is a pity, because it looks quite interesting). There's probably no gene for scepticism so, gosh, this is going to be a lot of hard work! [er..it could be that she just liked the shiny cover].


Some people think that secularism is the same thing as atheism; a more interesting angle would be that it opens up the space for different forms of religious/spiritual experience (along the lines chalked out by Lesley Chamberlain). If modernity was a second Fall or a "second turning inwards" (Arendt) then one doesn't have to necessarily see it as opposed to faith.

Of course, the truth is that the old religious forms and practices have fallen by the wayside: rituals are seen to be too mechanical; we have less sympathy for the authority of organized religion; and religion plays a far smaller role in determining or influencing our values, norms, and lifestyles). You can tick off the usual suspects: science, urbanization, reason, ...

Well, that may not be such a bad thing after all-even though there's no denying the something valuable has been lost in the 'demythologisation'. On the other hand, the space vacated by the traditional forms has been taken up by all sorts of crazies: evangelicals and fundamentalists, born-again zealots and revivalists. Some are dangerous, others merely silly.

And with this group there are also the free-floaters, people who pick and choose what they like in their search (Zen, Buddhism, Sufism, Kabbalah, New Age...). The 'authentic self' has got to meet truth half-way, on its own terms, and it has to speak our language. This may sound to many as something frivolous and, ultimately, futile since there have to be shared symbolic orders, widely recognized or ordained 'channels', bridges, sacraments, places of refuge. To say that there are 'chance receptacles' is surely just one of the logical outcomes of the development of Protestantism: the lawless heart searches in the dark night (a hidden affinity with Romanticism?).

The real horror for the old school is that what they call a 'loss of faith' is met with such equanimity. That for the moderns there isn't a spiritual crisis is probably a sign of how deep the crisis is! (Fenelon: indifference of the soul). The lax approach to sexuality, the worldliness of the bourgeois soul that places all value in the security afforded by objects, the inability or reluctance to ask the serious questions in life or even believe that there are answers to them...all this smacks of a profoundly a-religious and sceptical attitude to the highest possibilities in life. Or so it is argued.

At the deepest level you don't think that's true, or what truth there is in it has to be seen in the light of the terrible social rigidities and stifling narrowness of the old approach. And to paraphrase Ghazali: once you're out of Tradition, there's no going back. But even that's too negative. No-one can deny the deepening of the subjective side of things (Schuon), the 'psychological' richness (Maritain) that comes about after a fall. As the Allama tells us (relying on Rumi, I think): the fall is really the beginning of our rise...and "finitude is not a misfortune."

Maybe R was on to something: the shiny surface of humanism and secularism are important. One suspects that God does judge us by appearances. And if one must err, then surely it is better to do so on the side of freedom?

forbidden colours

before going back to sleep she stopped what she was doing, thought of him, and smiled. But once asleep she completely forgot him, and could only remember the blue in her heart, because she knew it was forbidden to show his face to anyone, even to herself.

the wounds on your hands would not heal. if only i could forget time for an hour, he thought. she said something, sent him words in a blue bottle, but it was lost in translation. how strange that none of that mattered now. something was said, and it was unknowable. he understood it, or imagined he understood it, by the tone of her voice, just as one understands a certain colour can be 'sad'.

an ordinary life

Heller:

The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh. The sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more that their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity. It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism.

~~~

an ordinary life, surrounded by ordinary objects; the hardest thing. some form of contentment in the middling, plodding way. no sudden bursts of insights or dazzling moments of awareness, no patched up mystery for you; things still don't quite fit, but have grown around you nonetheless. adjustments are made, whether out of maturity or cowardice. time will tell, has told.

you can't remember a tenth of what you've read. a few lines here and there acted as buffers, keeping reality out rather than letting it in, or deepening it. but things are more blurred now, less harsh, greyer..layers of black and white and grey.

the hunt

I found a word.
you came to me.
the hunt was on.
but i lost you
because I saw you everywhere.

answers and questions

Just been watching that blubbering idiot Mark Lawson interview Roth; the same old cliched questions, stuck in his flabby throat; the whining voice hooked on to its own self-importance, unable to disentangle itself from the grooves of his mind. The appearance of intelligence, so appealing to the beeb's middle class viewers. The questions we ask reveal who we are.

Simpson's (simple) world:

Watching Simpson, the great liberator of Afghanistan, on t.v. Depressing that this should pass as a programme on politics. There he was, pottering around the old streets of Baghdad-stuttering past his old "haunts"-in his pink shirt, full of himself, as usual.

At one stage he becomes irritated, as if the real people were disturbing his reminiscing about the good ol' days. "This man (pointing to a police officer) is becoming a bit of a pest." And then:

"But the old ways are coming back again, family and tribe."

Oh yeah, very reassuring!

He has an interpreter tagging along with him. Simpson, in his charmless way, reassures viewers: "I go out with the army..er...I meet them and it seems to me they're much better, much better than the Afghan army, say."

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the occupation, Mr. Simpson, but still, what's the death of a few hundred thousand people in the bigger scheme of things?

The interpreter, to Simpson's dismay, says there's a kind of nostalgia for Saddam. "Surely not amongst the Shias, only the Sunnis?" The interpreter says that this isn't the case, that the people he's come across prefer to have things work-no matter what the leadership is. Simpson, visibly disturbed by this turns to him and asks, " Do you mind if I ask if you're Sunni?"

Then, all of a sudden, he breaks off the 'serious' discussion to recall how he bought some ol 78's from the street corner they've just passed. And this, you feel, is what it's really all about: Simpson's world.


I'm beginning to think that a classic is something that one reads only once and not, contrary to received opinion, something that one can return to again and again; by its very nature it is incomplete and it always leaves its impression without fully being articulated. Whether one reads it once or a hundred times makes no difference: its main virtue is only to point to its unfinished nature, its ability to resist definition...

Kadare's 'Broken April' is a dream...dark and brooding and utterly simple:

His eyes were fixed on the grey sky that spread, lonely, above the mountains; it was hard to tell whether he was making them dark or if the darkness within him came from them.

Or, perhaps Bellow says it better:

And what he saw with his eyes was not even the real heavens. No, only white marks, bright vibrations, clouds of sky roe, tokens of the real thing, only as much as could be taken in through the distortions of the atmosphere. Through these distortions you saw objects, forms, partial realities. The rest was to be felt. And it wasn't only that you felt, but that you were drawn to feel and penetrate further, as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and the crystal forms inside your bones. Rocks, trees, animals, men and women, these also drew you to penetrate further, under the distortions (comparable to the atmospheric ones, shadows within shadows), to find their real being with your own. This is the sense in which you were drawn.

After reading that purple prose I feel the gloom has lifted. Minor irritants seem like so much rock dust in the orbit of being. One only has to shrug one's shoulders for the universe to take shape again...

How spacious the heavenly halls are!
Approach them on aerial stairs.
Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.

Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
---C.Milosz).

~~~
A fire that purifies is a"friend" (57:15);
the earth is nothing but a co-mingling of fire and ice.

Qantara

What force there is in fish that live their years
in the cold darks of the sea, swimming the darks

In August once, I dozed on an unused bridge
to hang in the very world, in the teeming air
...
absorbed in certainties that never fail, though blind.

---William Bronk.

~~~

The way books are randomly placed on the shelves at Readings is wonderful. Yesterday you found (and bought) Snow Country next to Malone Dies Alone. May not read either, but still, the sheer surprise of unforeseen connections, the bridges...whether we walk them or not, spanning out like blind chance in a mechanical universe.

~~~

Each person that enters the world establishes a new relation to it, sees it with new eyes; she enters the door, is the door. The last person to be born on earth will have no time, but will also, miraculously, be a record of all time, since everyone would have lived in her. The search for God is meaningless if we die alone. The last person will look on things with kindness, as if they were the last things, beautiful in themselves. And like the first person, she will be startled, knowing much, full of longing. Today, the last person lives in each one of us.

nostalgia for the particular

I see the night falling, darkening,
you see the stars shining.
Your mind blossoms, mine is withering
The words we shared dissolved as they're spoken
are worlds away from my love.

'Though I do not understand her words,
and may not know her heart
Is it not enough that one so beautiful
now speaks to me?'

She has foresworn her cruelty-but can she?
All wrath? All cruelty?
Be what you may.
I wish that all you are had been for me.

I shall write to you even without cause.
Simply to write your name fills me with love.'

---from Ghalib.

As was his language, so was his life.

---Seneca.

No man or woman can communicate their dreams; and so it is that when they recount them to the public world they lose all meaning and sense. By eleven o'clock the dreamer himself begins to wonder if there was anything to it and his uneasiness or pleasure soon dissipates like fog broken up by the penetrating rays of the sun. By evening there is only a memory of it. But this serves as material for the dreamworld in which he will be plunged again.

~~~

Some odd conversations yesterday. One with a student who said: "nothing profound has come out of Russia." It saddens me how far this country has slipped. So far students only copy from wikipedia (sorry, nabs, but you're so wrong on this one). Soon, one expects, it will be from people's twitterings!

~~~

A.r.m.'s response to Lesley Chamberlain's article was thoroughly disappointing, reactionary, even. As if to say, human spirituality can only be found in the forms of organized religion. This seems patently wrong to me and belies an inherent suspicion toward culture and life itself.

~~~

In a somewhat similar vein, I find the notion of the 'spiritual east' to be something of a fraud. And more than that, the idea that the spiritual is opposed to the material just doesn't make much sense to me. Those who say that the west is 'materialistic' haven't a) lived in the 'east' and b) understood that there are many ways to live a good life. Keynes was surely right -putting to one side the idea that goodness is only an experience in the mind- when he said: One cannot enjoy good states of mind unless things work.

arabesque

"French culture of the twelfth and thirteenth century readily adopted forms from the Islamic world, with which it was in touch, and especially those forms that were of Persian origin. This elective affinity is to be seen not least in the knightly epics of both sides..[and] is prevalent in almost all knightly forms of the medieval West; minnesingers and troubadours..."
---Titus Burckhardt.

{Was going to put Debussy up here, but not particularly fond of it. Any other suggestions, dear reader?}

"Revelation came to me from the Orient, said Matisse. The Arabesque in Islamic Art represents the tenacity but also fragility of life, which can be bestowed or withdrawn at any moment. The positive forms of the arabesque create the negative spaces of the shapes in between; these empty spaces symbolize that which 'belongs to God'-the permanent but invisible reality of the divine principle. Similarly, for Matisse, there is the complementary between negative and positive shapes: what remains belongs to God."
---Betty Cuther.


You understand that this is difficult for those reared on the importance of distinctions, on the misplaced notion that there are, when all is said and done, fundamental differences, irreconcilable differences.

But there is 'neither Greek nor Jew,' and Islam is neither of the East nor of the West.

"[In] Arab interlacement the filled spaces and the empty areas, the design and its ground, are both of strictly equivalent value and balance each other out...so that one's attention never halts on a particular element of the decor. The continuity of the interlacement invites the eye to follow it, and vision is then transformed into rhythmic experience accompanied by the intellectual satisfaction given by the geometric regularity of the whole."
---Titus Burckhardt, from his magisterial Art of Islam.

To view some examples from this book click on the following link

(and no, C, still haven't read the Matisse book!)

hush now, R.

"Not another post on religion...please!... For the love of God!, " I hear you say, dear reader (hey, that's Beckett, isn't it?). You really are too much of a joker to be religious...not quite the high-minded buffoon that is Herzog, but you're on your way up...

Feeling a bit shelled out nowadays. My mind, or what's left it, strays far too easily and I can actually sense the frame of my body aching, going through the motions. On auto-pilot, if you know what I mean.

Must read Schama's book on Rembrandt. Finally got to see 'The Jewish Bride'. And he was right: is there a finer example of delicate sensibilities in western art? The hands, of course (chiasm), but also the direction of light that catches part of us. Up close, it's just dry drabs of unexciting paint, so much so that one is reminded of the sheer materiality of not just the painting, but of our own existence. But from the right angle, if we look in the right way that is, we see the familiar in a different way, transformed into something magical: light, at any time, has the ability to pick out the gold, to bring it to the surface from the deeps. And brightness finds a pattern, makes it its own, no matter what.

Goodness:

Was thinking: is there really such thing as a good human being? A good cricketer, a good teacher, or son, or daughter maybe, but a human being? Isn't goodness fundamentally a quality of our relations to others and to the world?

It's now; always was. don't stop smiling, R.

The Bauls of Bengal

The Bauls of Bengal are like the wombles of Wimbledon: common are we, wandering free.

Dalrymple on the Bauls here

Bob's original post that pointed me this way is here

And this made me think of:

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

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

is religion possible

An old question, but why not?

Hans Jonas
Kant
Allama

~~~

In an age dominated by reason, science, facts (the world of values shrinks)it seems barely likely. Or if it does, then it will be a very arid,abstract, 'scriptualistic'(Gellner) religion that appeals to a half-baked mind, the bazaari class: the Idea of God. Worse, much worse, it will degenerate into the kind of soppy, mind-numbing platitudes of the American Sunday-school variety, or the breathtaking silliness of the evangelicals.

Cut loose from reason, tradition, a sense of continutiy -the importance of urbanizaion and technology cannot be overestimated-it can quite easily morph into, has morphed into in many instances, a terrible fundamentalism (Gibbon was right here: the problem is not so much institutionalised religion-though that brings its own horrors-but the unhinged imagination, "fancy", that loses any connection with the world). As Christopher Hill informs us in 'The World Turned Upside Down,' this was always a possibility with the 'religion of the heart'.

After the holocaust how can there be religion? Really. If you haven't thought about that then you haven't really thought about religion very seriously.

De-mythologisation: Iris M.

Well, no more transcendental models (the cosmos, nature) and rituals, symbols, and dogma all seem too rigid (think of how pejorative these words are: dogmatic, purely symbolic, ritualistic). And if there is only contingency, what binds us, what can bind one human being to another?

Is religion possible without 'bridges' (Simone Weil), channels, receptacles, places of refuge, shared symbols (Peter Fuller), a common world, a reverence for texts, a north, north of the future?

But yes, despite this religion is possible (whence the nod to Chatwin in the title of this post).

Not simply as an impulse-as if that was a mere whim, something that wasn't fundamental to our being. But a response that is deep-rooted. Lesley Chamberlain says it better in this fascinating piece here .


'We are involved in the mystery of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. What is true is 'beyond' but its reflection is also here...spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality.'
---Iris M.

the line of beauty

The inner-what is it? If not me, if not you?

stone, star, flower, wind.

When great age becomes child-like again, joins it in simplicity. And the flame of the candle before the sun is not extinguished. The inner sense of your life unfolding: stone, star, flower, wind. The sound before the sound, the darkness of the sun. The inner is a mirror that must be polished, so that I remember, so when I look at me, I shall think of you.

"The sound of Christian bells draws man upward and leads him away from the world; but the heavy and deep sound of the Buddhist bell leaves us motionless, it makes us come down into ourselves...

Beauty is like the sun; it acts without detours, without dialectical intermediaries, its ways are free, direct, incalculable; like love, to which it is closely connected, it can heal, unloose, appease, unite, or deliver through its simple radiance...

The empirical "I" is nothing but a shifting tissue of images and tendencies; when the ego of an individual at eight years old is compared with the ego of the same individual at eighty years of age one may well ask oneself where the real "I" is. And if man could live for a thousand years what would remain of that which was his "I" in the first century of his life?Beings and events would drift around him like leaves scattered by the wind, the sky itself..."

---Frithjof Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism

There is no pluralism in the mosque

Can't stop laughing over this one...

"There is no pluralism in the mosque."
---Pamela Geller.


Yes, you know. The great entertainment value of 'religious' people and conservatives. Bob posted a picture of her in a bikini (which nearly won me over). But no, no comparison to the very attractive 'Mad Mel'.

First things first:

Well, you can be sure a lot of the brothers will be saying, 'see, I told you so, there isn't really freedom in America'. And yet, these very same people will have next to nothing to say on the lack of freedom of worship or the deplorable way in which minorities are treated in their own country.

Gosh, there are a lot of crazies out there! From the Israeli settlers to Hamas, Hindu fanatics to the homegrown Muslim nutters here. And the neo-cons too. If you thought Bush was thick, just wait-God forbid-'till God-fearing hockey mom gets in! Ooh, she'll show that pinko-muslim-gay-loving Hussein where to get off. God dammit!

All of them would be hilarious if they weren't so dangerous, if what they said didn't resonate with the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of 'ordinary folks.' Crazy people are only interesting from a safe distance. Fanaticism is, ultimately, rather one-dimensional and rather tiresome. Goodness, on the other hand, is utterly mysterious and un-nameable.

Pluralism: