Take care !

Gradually, the two [kindness and clear thinking]have come more and more together in my feelings. I find that much unclear thought exists as an excuse for cruelty, and that much cruelty is prompted by superstitious beliefs.

(Russell, in one of his somber moods, from his autobiography, via Nabs, my Old English carrier pigeon!)

"If we take pigeons as an example..."(Aristotle). Normal pigeons are not into constant work. They lounge in sun, bathe in rain. They don't travel far for a meal. They maintain close contacts.
--Thalia Field.

What is amazing and utterly astonishing about life is that people take care. Perhaps not of themselves, as much as they should, but of others, for others.

I know the boffs want to explain this by evolution but why go down that road (or any road!). Ethics as the limit of reason? No, that's not it either.

~~~

in the early morning, dew and stars still marking their presence, on course, of course. you catch a glimpse of the tired, weak sun's reflection and think to yourself: the sun itself is a distant reflection. before the light was everywhere; now it finds solace in the frames of the library's dark high windows. place has become important once again. light finds its true Form. but direction without strength is a terrible fate.

what shape will the day take? no-one can tell-even if they could. the light in this season is spent, hangs around buildings, trying to rekindle ancient affinity with brick and stone. waiting, as if that was its essence. solitary, thoughtful, as if it knew these were difficult times, its winter mind cleansed and cleansing, aware of departures. no second thoughts.

~~~

take care: a way of saying farewell. before one signs one's name or jots down some abbreviation, an initial, perhaps. the simplicity of a letter-like 'K', even though crooked. and 'R,' which folds itself around itself, which is like a thought in water, is but a derivative or relative of 'K'?

the drowned, reflected world

They are a long inspection of a drowned, reflected world, in which no sky is visible except by reflection; the water fills the whole frame. ..In these paintings, emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things. ..to conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence, which involves an undertaking which comes close to the act of creation.

What showed on its surface, the clouds and lily pads and cat's-paws of wind, the dark patches of reflected foliage.the abysses of dark blue and the opaline shimmer of light from the sky, were all compressed together in a shallow space, a skin, like the space of painting . The willows touched it like brushes . No foreground, no background; instead, a web of connections


The same. The same.
then once, in a flash,
fresh ground,...
black, grey, green, and blue
water, stone, grass and sky
and each unique set stone!

---August 11th, 2008.

(K. Clark on Monet, and R. Lowell)


.[b]efore the metal shaving mirrors
and see the shaky future grow familiar
We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...
---Lowell

Cage [ I ].
I, that I b.

~~~

Restless night. At 1 (and then again at 3) woken up by some incredibly loud music. A mix between bhangra and Prince, I thought to myself, half awake. Also, incredibly good, though infuriating. Knew I would never hear that tune again, or know what it was. Let it go.

Still in the twilight zone, wondered what Montaigne would have done. No, no use, letting it wash over as if I wasn't concerned, or thinking that it would eventually come to an end, didn't work.

H woke up at 4 and then R at 5. Early morning lecture so I had to wake up at 6 anyway. 45 minutes to find some kind of peace, some sort of space that would carry me through the day...then, out of the blue, I was suddenly at City airport, getting ready for one of those trips within a trip (like a dream within a dream). I'd forgotten my book, but wasn't overly concerned for some odd reason. And then, amongst the ruins, down a steep incline, there was this beautiful singing tree, deeply familiar, autumn leaves shimmering in the late afternoon light, the light in August caught, concentrated, reflected, drowned.

life, the universe, ...42.

Now, what was the question again?

The problem with academics is that they think they know the answer to every question and, perhaps more importantly, that that is what ultimately counts in life. The 'view from nowhere', 'Knowing', 'truth', or a knowing doubt, truthfulness..that's what it's all about. What is "it"? What cannot be known cannot and should not be spoken of.

What I did hate, though, and what finally set me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term..without turning in my grades, was that the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core,-all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence.


Invariably it's the technician's spirit, the algebraic soul lurking in the background. Universal causality. This for that. What, exactly, is the first philosophy?

F. Rosenzweig:

"My life has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...

Everyday life, it is clear, cannot possibly be ignored; one cannot exist entirely in the sublime realm of theory, no matter how "essential" it may seem when compared to dull, tedious reality."

Are you a philistine, then?

Perhaps. But it is a sign of good health to find that the most ordinary is worthy of attention and respect, and that some things must be passed over in silence. Not only is it that you cannot know everything; it is that you do not want to anyway.

{I think that's why, from a personal point of view, the comments section has been more enjoyable than writing the posts or, perhaps one should say, it's offered a different type of enjoyment, one that doesn't necessitate any comparisons}

What was that Russian term again, the one for 'thinking with others'? When so much of life is already confrontational, is there any need to add to it?

The double negation:
I am, therefore I think
We are, therefore...

khalwa...

That's it,
that's joy, it's always
a recognition, the known
appearing fully itself, and
more itself that one knew.
---Denise.

and knowing isn't everything. this you always knew.

someone asked me: with regards to the things that you are instinctively drawn to: do you always make them your own? but surely such a thing is neither possible, nor desirable? for the desirable comes to us (or it doesn't)...all one can do is be open to it, not will it or possess it. a question to myself.

but, also, to 'make something one's own' requires an incredible amount of creativity, inward concentration, human generosity, or 'expansiveness'. does it also mean one ceases to be oneself? and even then, the beautiful is never owned and never fully comprehended. mysteries are only deepened; there are always veils and there is a thirst that is never quenched (he says, putting his jewish hat on).

the following was shared with me by flowerville. you can read the full chapter online.

slow learning:

We have to learn to give up more and more of what we have accomplished, what we have gathered in and what we cherish. Getting old means giving up something forever at every stage of the process. The trick is to learn how to give up things gracefully and without despair...

We must accept what is and prepare to let go of it...

As long as we are alive, we have the capacity to develop compensatory skills and seek new insights...

Living consciously...one strives to make new relationships in order to stay rooted in life...

Much more than at any previous stage of life, the old person has to be flexible...

Old age is the ripening of the fruit, the preparation for the harshness of winter, when the roots grow and strengthen, a time when leaf mold decays, making a seedbed for the new growth of mushrooms. It is the closing of the circle...'

---Gerda Lerner.

but, also, the opening of another circle...

the black moon

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

(), )

Turned our backs to one another...bound by the empty space ( )

A life in parenthesis...the moment before, the moment after:

Wie kann es sein, daB ich, der ich bin,
bevor ich wurde, nicht war,
und daB einmal ich, der ich bin,
nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?

5:21 In order to give prominence to these internal relations we can adopt the following mode of expression:)

'How to live'..breathe in, and out. Breathe in...

Coming to the end of the book on Montaigne. Quite good, dear C. Can't remember a word, though! Which is probably just as well. There is no formula. The digression is the path.

Would never say 'God save England' (May the Lord protect me!) but might, just might, be tempted to say God save England from the Europeans (and vice versa!) All that long-winded theorizing. For Christ's sake! When all is said and done, the time has come to speak in plain English, ma cherie.

The ontological argument can be saved by a comma. Can others be saved by a " ) "

Compassion, not knowledge. "Walk on," said the Buddha.

five or six

"Every hour has sixty minutes, every minute has sixty seconds. But on one given day, I might film only twenty seconds. So, of course, that doesn’t represent my life - but it presents something that was important to me. A moment. Why did I film that moment? For some reason, I felt I should film it, without knowing, without rationalising. I just had to do it, and that’s all. Therefore, in essence, maybe those twenty seconds define me, you see – not the other twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and forty seconds. Maybe that little moment is essentially me. Who knows?"

The element of chance is a definite artistic category in your work.

"Again, you can go back to Dostoevsky in that respect. It is all about the moment when two people meet, that one second when they really click and understand. So seconds can be very important...

Film is not eternal. Everything is fleeting. How much is left of 12th century art?..

Well, [a] misfit ... I’m an outsider. I’m a monk. I’m somewhere else, I have my own life, my own small set of friends...I live in Brooklyn these days. So I have my own village, my own small town. New York consists of one hundred villages, you know?"

---Jonas Mekas, interviewed by Grisseman, 2008.

London, as everyone knows, consists of five or six villages. I forget. The Commons, the village greens, etc., etc. In each place, at each moment, there are a thousand histories, a thousand mirrors, carrying on without you. And in just one, there was a hidden moment with you. But I forget where it was. As chance would have it. Isn't the city, with its myriad images, a reflection of that lost time?

a digression on jews and muslims

late 14c., from L. digressionem (nom. digressio) "a going away, departing," noun of action from pp. stem of digredi "to deviate," from dis- "apart, aside" (see dis-) + gradi "to step, go"

Jean Weir in his 'De Praestigis daemonum' (1564) had calculated that 7, 409, 127 demons were working for Lucifer.

You find this fascination for detail laughably ridiculous. Slightly more serious, though, is the religious fanaticism that lies behind it. Of course, not 'counting' can sometimes also be diabolical ("we don't do body counts," they said about Iraq).

What's disturbing about certain aspects of religion is the flights of fancy it can inspire. The mind, unmoored, unrestrained by facts, veers off into all sorts of useless directions. The fanatic, unaware of his own humanity or that of others, disparages the ordinary and the complex and opts for the "heroic" and the simple. The springs of motivation are clear-cut and elementary; the end is dazzlingly self-evident and irreducible, and the possibility of a revision of one's ideas of how to live are ruled out from the beginning, which is another way of saying that he never allows his ideas and values to brush up against the social fabric of reality.

But the 'anti-religious' types are no less boring and predictable. Those who can't see any beauty or truth in religion or other cultures are often, to my mind at least, as closed-in and narrow in their outlook as the conservatives (and possibly the fundamentalists as well).

So, when E-k writes about the dispersion of jewishness in America I can understand that at a personal level ('understanding' is already once removed from feeling perhaps). I mean, to lose one's identity is,no doubt, a personal tragedy. Politically, of course, it might not be such a bad thing for the Palestinians!

And from my own experience I know that some of my cousins/friends are deeply concerned about losing their muslim identity living in Britain and the States. And yet, to be honest, such a thought never occurred to me in all my years there nor does it interest me one bit.

Recently got in touch with an old friend who chose a religious life. Very moderate person, not a 'beard'. Read Augustine's City of God in school days -and not to refute, but to learn. And you've still got a lot of admiration for his quiet dedication to a kind of life that he passionately believes in. There's something to be said for that and you would be wrong to say that there isn't something there that deeply appeals to you. The 'life of the mind' isn't all that great if you haven't got much of a mind, and you doubt it would be even if you did.

So, I don't think of myself as a 'British Muslim' at all. Questions of identity are, to paraphrase Augustine, not a problem unless I think about them! Can one stand aside from one's faith and still be religious: a non-Muslim muslim? Again, questions of faith are only interesting to those who are out of the circle of faith (this horrifies my non-religious friends who believe everyhting should be questioned, scrutinized, even though that's very bad manners).

Can one renounce one's faith? Possibly. But I was born somewhere else, and this nose of mine, which no-one as of yet has commented upon,that neither Roxana, or anton, or nikki knows, though both jewish and muslim is, to not put too fine a point on it, still quintessentially Kashmiri!

under construction

Thanks to Miguel for pointing me to this wonderful song!

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage ... Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors, quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.
---Bellow.

the lawless heart

what is the way to your heart? what are its stations? and why does the black crow wait, his thoughts like a grave shade within the shade. those folded wings hold what space: forest in the silence; silence in the forest.

'the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart'

the winter soul, that forgets its way; your tracks covered by snow, you forget north and south, the differences between me and you.

the lawless heart. Var. when the ice melts, and the roses awake from their dream, then there is another forgetting, like the shade within a shade.

(poem, G. Hill; photo: courtesy of an incredible artist, Roxana)

the lives of others

"Time is everything; Man is nothing."
---Karl Marx.

"Time is everything."
--little, darling R.

"Will there be a time when I'm grown up and understand things?" asked R.

"Inshallah," I replied.

"But what if I don't understand things?"

"Er...then you can write a blog!"

~~~

Took little R to the zoo. Despite the lovely lazy Sunday feel to it, the leafy shade, the slow meandering that reminds one of the importance of useless things, she wasn't mightily impressed. Perhaps the elephants and hippos were too big for her little eyes to take in; she seemed to gravitate to the smaller animals like the birds (but not too small: ants are not very interesting). Or perhaps some of the animals were just too weird (aren't all animals weird, though?). Camels, for instance. And the white lama had a very odd personality.

Or maybe it was that she didn't realize some of them were actually animals. The giant turtles hardly moved. She might have thought they were just very large stones.

But I really think it was this: animals are boring bastards. They actually don't do much. Now, I'm not saying I expect to see them playing cards, or playing some Bach, but just lazing in the sun all day like that. Dear me! You can see Protestantism has had no effect on them! The closed, opaque lives of others...

"But, but..." R said eagerly, "people look at me and probably say the same thing. And for all I know they probably look at you black sun and think the same: closed, lazy, an odd personality...need I go on?"

"Oh R, that's the last time I bring you to the zoo!"

"Yes, let's go back and read some Montaigne"

"We understand nothing of a dog's experience...they understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book. Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the 'zest' or 'tingle' which comes when one is completely absorbed in what one is doing. This tingle should enable us to recognise each other's similarity [and] in turn should lead to kindness."

(emphasis added by R)

---S. Bakewell, On Montaigne.

what dreams may come

Well, the last conversation of the day, at about 11:30, had me say: "we might as well be Hindus" . The other person nodded and said, " why not". And it ended there. But how did it begin?

Just a throwaway line about how we're both sick of eating meat and that it'd be better to eat just vegetables. (Followed by the now obligatory line about how India is doing much better than Pakistan). But nothing else. Just a casual conversation and no further reflections on it. Just let it brush by. Not too surprising either, since on Eid these sentiments usually come to the surface...i.e the colossal waste of life and money, the sheer 'showiness' of religion.

Someone once said that your truest dreams occur just before you wake up. Or maybe they're just the ones you can remember?

So, you wake up saying what you think are words in Hindi! Bizarre! Vir, Var and something else that you've now forgotten. You sit up for a minute trying to recollect. Now that you think of it, R does the same thing. Cheeky monkey!

Yes, that's it. In the dream there's also this weird object with parts that correspond with each of the three words. The first part is a large but thin brownish oval stone. Polished. It's connected to something like..well, something that reminds you of a tree. And this itself, as you move down, branches off into two symmetrical seeds. In fact, you remember hearing the words: " the double-seeded...". and finally this is connected to some roots which, strangely, are a mirror image of the whole object itself. And as if to indicate that there's no finality, the tip of those roots has another outgrowth that repeats the whole thing again (a fractal?)

[Er...what were you saying about therapy, Nabil?]

And what about the words? All you can recall is that 'vir' stands for human being and that that is what is highest.

Of course, now that you think of it , there was this essay by Coomaraswamy that you read many years back that talked about vir, wasn't there? And hadn't that strange student just a few days back asked you-you of all people-to review his essay on Coomaraswamy's essay on craftsmanship? And hadn't you been reading Sennett's 'The Craftsmen' that very day?

One should never look for the origins of dreams. It could be anything ! (the lack of c.r.'s , for example).

Walk to office in the early morning. Not a soul around. Dogs barking in the distance and crows craaing even though I can't see them. Past a lovely tree whose pink petals have nearly all fallen to the ground. Thought to myself, the other day: must take a photograph. And then again, why not just enjoy them and this fall...the strange (random, symmetrical?) pattern they form around the tree.

Leaf through a book on my desk and open it to the page I'd been reading two days back. The first lines that catch my eye are:

"For pray what is the end of Man? Is he created for Happiness? Or for Virtue? For this life or the next?"

Now I'll walk back and have some breakfast. So endeth the dream.

Zzzzz

"all I know is that so long as I am asleep I have neither fear nor hope, trouble nor glory; and good luck betide him that invented sleep, the cloak that covers over all a man's thoughts, the food that removes hunger, the drink that drives away thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that tempers the heat, and, to wind up with, the universal coin wherewith everything is bought, the weight and balance that makes the shepherd equal with the king and the fool with the wise man. Sleep, I have heard say, has only one fault, that it is like death; for between a sleeping man and a dead man there is very little difference."

Strange black tide...brings forth such dark mysteries. Her, panting like a well-fed dog: to shrug it off, or accept this mortal collar? Desire is not a reason. What then, dear Knulp, can you mean? Is there a dream within a dream? A room you didn't know?

Increasingly, I feel like ending it (the blog, I mean). Hurrah! I hear you shout. No matter what one says or thinks, whether one has faith or none, is drunk or sober, the snow drifts down, generally, all over.

Even the most beautiful thing in the world is, alas, a thing in the world. Knulp, you old joker...

end game

no-one loves no-one, said red to blue.

but in the saying of it, she allowed a shade of blue to enter her life, and became no-one for a while.

In game theory, in a 'finite game', when you know the end, then you know what to do in the beginning. But no human has knowledge of their death...and any given life is full of deaths.

from russia, with love

Showed Solaris to the students last night. Surprised that a number sat through it. Was asked to say something on it and very gingerly agreed...

What can one say? What should one say. I don't know much about the technical aspects of the film and I'm not sure whether the biographical ones are important. It's a poetic vision by a unique individual that requires a unique response. After all, Tarkovsky once said (of Andrei Rublev, the great painter of icons), Traditional truths remain truths only when they are vindicated by personal experience.

So his films are not about 'explaining'-and I couldn't explain them anyway-but only showing us what is somehow familiar-if it touches us, that is. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't. I think Mark Rothko, who was Russian in a way, would have understood how feelings open the way to what Milosz calls a 'second space'.

In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says:

The aim of art is to loosen the soul, to render the soul capable of turning to good. Showing, not telling.

So, I don't like this film because it's a so-called intellectual film or because I like the"ideas"-Tarkovsky was right here when he said: thought is brief, but the image leaves an impression-but because, to take a deeply Russian notion: the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Of course, this is a slow and complex film with lots of 'inter-textual' references (Rembrandt, Breughel, Bach, Don Quixote, and others) and a particular emphasis on time. Tarkovsky himself was wary of films that aimed to merely pass time, or kill it, or forget it. His view was quite the opposite since bereft of memory a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence. So, memory has a spiritual quality to it.

I'm reminded here of a true story that I read in the papers some years back about a man who would forget all he knew every seven minutes. He described his life as like an island in a vast ocean. Incidentally, the only thing he could remember was music.

Finally, I don't think this is a science-fiction in the traditional sense of the term. Why I love this film is because it is, at least to me, a profoundly religious film, a film about the mysterious and that is something which leaves explanation open, but not too open. Like a broken circle, perhaps? And that brokenness implies an understanding of the truth, as one of the characters in the film says, that you can only love that which you can lose.

An education (wanderlust)

The vagaries of the internet world mean that you can put up a song today and it will be gone tomorrow. Oh well, such is life: what is lost was never yours in the first place...finders, keepers we used to tell each other as children. And now?

"Not to find one's way in a city may be uninteresting...but to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling."

What you look for is what you never find. But then, all of a sudden...there..stolen glances, borrowed time, how strange the heart of a city is:now a landscape, now a room...Paris taught me this art of straying. Her lawless, deviant soul. And you, a slacker, a silent poet?

He saw her, fish, in a crowded stream of people and remembered home: there is no fish in the Tigris; there is no Tigris in the fish.

A net snared a net.
Embracing we sever.

"Some writers and walkers had cherished this idea of the city as a kind of wilderness, mysterious, dark, dangerous and endlessly interesting." What is this fascination for dark light?

I stood motionless, preoccupied with linking the present moment to the preceding year's, to make them one.

What is united in memory is untied in life...

He sometimes followed women with small feet and high heels...she said: "I can't convey how much my boots delighted me" (and him, too!). "I came home at all hours..so that even when I was away from home I felt at home everywhere". Paris as a bedroom, a labyrinth whose centre is a brothel, a virgin forest.

"I was like a boat on ice," she said...and "I always forgot to lift my dress." Him: "like those wandering souls who go looking for a body...he enters as he likes each personality."

The damp, intimate, claustrophobic, secretive, narrow, curving streets...

Startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence. A one-way street. With a door. And a room. And the world.Thanks to her. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain. And he saw innocence in the face of experience.

But language limits what can be said, just as walking, with its turns and detours, limits what you can know.

(all quotations from Wanderlust and one from Celan)

back to the sun

turn your back to the sun. the slow bare light of winter, the burnt light, makes everything float effortlessly. ancient chaos of the sun, turns back the time. you think. the road back fading with each passing day and hour. for us there is no season, no deadline. our pact with light, promotes our going and coming, as shadows in expressive light.

tell me, was this the way? what weight the hands have now. did you by some strange chance believe I would leave you, leave you where i left you thinking i would return?

butterfly

R loses an argument (surprisingly!)

Oh, Ssshh, for heaven' sake! Can't you see, black sun, I've got things on my mind. Got important things to think about. Can be stuck mulling around on dark things all the time. Dear me!

But thought is brief; the image leaves a lasting impression, little one.

Ha! And all along there I was thinking you were a Muslim! This won't do, this won't do at all I tell you.

Oh, you silly clown, why don't you agree with me.

Oh, okay, I will if you buy me a dress, a new dress woven, From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven