Joining the dots

"These are the regimes [the oil monarchies] that are militarily and politically supported by Western powers, all too happy to get some crumbs to fund their soccer clubs or sell some weapons. No wonder our lessons in social justice and democracy find little welcome among Middle Eastern youth."

--Thomas Piketty.

"Feminism's ambivalence has been resolved in favour of (neo) liberal individualism."

---Nancy Fraser

~~

Uncomfortable thoughts, no doubt. That is not to say, of course, that inequality is the cause of, or even the major reason for, the rise of Isis. But unless someone starts to talk about Saudi (and its funding of a particularly narrow, bigoted, conservative and pernicious ideology all over the world (including the West) we're going to miss out on an essential part of the story.

Of course, that's not going to happen because 'the West' has, well, how to put this, been in bed with these crackpots for an awful long time. Money and "national interest" over what is ethically right. That's why you'll never see any criticism of "mystical" India when it comes to Kashmir. 

Seriously, I don't know why I don't give up.

~

Haven't read much Nancy Fraser (her Marx's Hidden Abode is superb, though). But, again, this is a sophisticated, nuanced and perhaps somewhat controversial view. It is, of course, not about praising the hierarchical structures of dominance that are usually associated with pre- or non-capitalist factors (culture, religion, tradition) nor, obviously, is this about romanticizing the past.It's more to do with how the left can move forward in the face of neoliberalism co-opting the language and modes of thought of any resistance to it (or, to put it the other way around: how resistance to capitalism is shaped by the type of capitalism it opposes). 

Culture, like identity, is a construct. A sense of belonging, identity over time, the notion of 'place' or of value persisting over time..all that must be deconstructed, thrown out of the window as a fiction. How very convenient for late capitalism which emphasizes fluidity and "flexibility", transgression and the erasure of all boundaries, markers (unless they serve a purpose to the machine)

Pluralism (..

It is surely one of the greatest ironies of our times that the scripture which is the most tolerant of other religions, indeed, which is unique in its recognition of, and reverence for, other religions, should be used as the basis for the most fanatical acts of intolerant violence.
--Reza Shah Kazemi.

Of course, I personally think that that is precisely what traditional or orthodox Islam (islam) is but it probably wouldn't be too far off the mark to either suggest that most people haven't believed that Islam is pluralistic or, indeed, that anything but a small minority today believe it is.

Well, not so sure. The instances of intolerance and exclusive attitudes cannot be brushed aside so easily and the institutionalization of difference and hierarchies is deeply troubling. But, but..even though the ordinary believer may not believe in pluralism as a well articulated theory the pluralism is manifest in lots of ways and if you've been brought up to think there's only one true path then the pluralism of Islam is worrying.

Reverence for the Prophets is one such manifestation (the very word 'reverence' may not mean much today). The 'People of the Book' (which has slipped into mainstream thinking) is, of course, a Muslim notion and serves as a starting point for dialogue. That followers of other faiths could be called "righteous" ( a momentous term) is worth considering. 

5:48 is canonical and reaffirms a central idea running throughout the whole Qur'an, namely: unity in diversity. The second third of the second surah is an unequivocal exposition of this principle. "Salvation" is not restricted to any particular denomination.

~~

Part of the problem is, you think, relating everything back to an intra-textual understanding of religion. The question we're facing here is surely not one of the level of pluralism within the Qur'an but about pluralism in modern society (a political question). How do Muslims live in a pluralistic society? That, you have to note, is not a question about pluralism between religious communities. 

The mistake is further compounded by thinking that Muslims, just because of their name or tacit adherence to the faith must, of necessity, think in exclusively religious terms (it's as if both hard-line secularists and fundamentalist alike cannot stomach the possibility that a Muslim's relation to his or her faith is more eclectic, full of gaps, holes, and certainly more tentative. As opposed to that is their view: "This is the Muslim. These are his/her views. This is the Muslim community, This is Islam". 

No humility whatsoever is the use of the word "is"! 

The question is then erroneously posed as: how do Muslims (who are, by definition, "religious"!) live in a secular society (which is non-religious or at least non-spiritual-at least that's what Muslim's are supposed to think!)?

You suspect that part of the problem is that the west is, actually, incredibly tolerant and pluralistic in many ways and that many of the Muslims now living there are, well, to be quite frank, quite backward and intolerant.

But, again, second thoughts..

Most of the problem stems, surely, from the fact (at least in the UK) that most of these people came over from small towns and villages where the attitudes were pretty conservative/ 'traditional'? This has less to do with Islam per se and more to do with education, language, and cultural norms.

Secondly, the second and third generation saw their parents face racist abuse. Growing up with that is not easy. And despite all the marvelous strides towards becoming more open societies 'the west' has to face its own blind spots: it hasn't actually been that tolerant and has been deeply infected by a race consciousness that demeans non-white people. One cannot simply brush away the whole history of colonialism and the attitudes that fostered it and that it in turn supported.

So, you suspect that integration has failed for a whole host of reasons (that include housing, the lack of a sense of belonging..remember, the second and third generation simply couldn't understand where their parents were coming from).

But I want to question even that! For lots of people 'integration' has worked. In terms of language, sensibilities, humour, education, cultural interests and attitudes to work lots of 'Muslims' are already part of modern society. In that context the idea that there has to be a "reform" of religion can be seen for precisely what it is: an ideological and polemical construct by right-wing groups. 

Book of the Year..Mir Syndrome

Well..er..a bit of a problem here in that the books I've actually read this year have been whittled down to halves and quarters, or random passages, books tossed out with joyful abandon and started again but then given up on half way though (again). 

Diagnosis? No, haven't joined the fundos (yet) but have fallen, sort of, half out of love with books. There, said it! 

Yes, Daniel Fuchs, whose verbal talent outweighs his storytelling abilities. Always felt that these were just scenes from a movie spliced together. Far too rushed, far too little "padding". But, still, for all that a good read. Updike was right here.

Talking of..someone had mentioned his early stories (Knausgaard?) or was it De Waal on Cheever?

Or these lines, for example:

"Why. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness. The white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why."

In a former life, or maybe just a few years ago, or perhpas two hours from now, I suppose I'd be drawn to that kind of writing but part of me can't help asking-and this goes back to the Mir Syndrome-so what? Or, really? 

This goes against the tide somewhat since everyone says that when it comes to "art" you should see the thing in itself, and not try and ruin it with baqwas theorizing, the accumulation of a writer's personal details or any kind of contextualization.

When I recommended Salter someone very wisely replied: "not another book about an upper middle-class sensitive couple whose marriage unravels?". Well, yes, that about sums it up (even though you'd like to think the brilliant writing stands apart from the conventionality). 

And that's the problem, really. There's something that's too white, too male, too 1950's sensibility, that has begun to grate on your nerves (not that I can abide the thought of reading anything that is deliberately non-white, non-male..etc. ..the very notion of a genre just another ploy by the market to price discriminate and capture surplus).

But it's the whole angst business, the whole goddamned business of "loss" and, worse, "a meditation on loss". Added to that is the need to be seen to be intelligent, witty, ironical..to find the perfect line (quickly followed by the blurb: the writer's writer who says in a sentence what other writers say or don't say in a whole book. That's just more of the Great American Salesman for you!).

So, it gave you great pleasure when you read Maddie Crum-that can't be her real name, surely?-taking down Updike for writing this awful tosh:

"Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all [..] Funny how the passionate ones are often tight and dry and the slow ones wet. The thing is play them until just a touch. You can tell: their skin under the fur gets all loose like a puppy's neck."

Again, this just sounds like the modern/American obsession to say the first thing that comes into your head. Realism is equated to sticking close to the tenor of everyday speech and the writer's contribution is to make it sound real, as if those are the words that someone would actually speak. 

Misogyny? Yeah, like, whatever. Deal with it. Get over it and move on. Stop trying to "judge" everything and take it at face value. 

Then there's W.D. tearing Knausgaard to shreds:

"The prose consists, for the most part, of a flat record of superficial detail, unenlivened by the touch of literary art: by simile or metaphor..by beauty, density of form." He continues:

"Everything feels hastened through-every scene or dialogue, every description, no matter how verbose-.." 

More:

"..the meaninglessness of his existence as he humps his way though middle age. but it's not surprising that there isn't any meaning, if you can't be bothered to look for it." 

At this stage you're probably wondering if I'm just looking for excuses not to read the blasted book, a way of getting over the fact that you've wasted twenty pounds.

There is a comparison with Updike who writes:

"She is serious, a serious small-faced animal sniffing out her new lair."

That's held up as an example of Literature but it makes you sick, too. The whole bloody thing looks, well, rather childish.

~

Infinity: the story of a moment. Again, this is pretty dull writing. The great disadvantage that Europeans face, compared to Americans, is that they are constantly forced to appear intelligent. Must address the Big Questions..y'know, Art, Life, Meaninglessness, etc., etc.

Cliches, piss takes, pseudo-intellectuality.."the piano is a universe, Massimo". 

"The Italians do not know what it means to be quiet." 

What is one supposed to do with a sentence like that? Smile?

Then there is this cumbersome writing:

"Education draws you along paths you know are not real paths until you forget they are not real paths and think they are the only paths."

Who the fuck talks like that?

"A musician needs peace and time, inner peace and inner time." An inner ear, an inner eye. An inner buttock, too, perhaps?

~

Worst book of the year: McEwan's drivel, by a good mile. This was so bad that it actually gave you a kind of fanatical, sadistic pleasure in trashing it.  

Best book: Marjorie Watts's Are they Funny, Are they Dead? (I think)

Matthew Crawford's Distraction was also very good, except for the last chapter which sunk it. Flashes of great writing in Hoggard's First & Last Things. Other good reads: James C. Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism. P.L. Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence was lovely. Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban, innocent and charming.  

Kenneth Minogue's Liberal Mind was informative but nothing compared to his The Concept of a University. David Harvey's Seventeen Contradictions (half read) helped make sense of things. W. Deresiewicz continues to provide the most interesting insights into the modern the trials and tribulations of the modern university. Putnam's Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, profound on second reading.

Poetry: W.S. Merwin's The Moon Before Morning was reassuringly small-scale, calm, "out of it".  

Biggest Disappointment: Mary Warnock on property. A truly pedestrian mind at work. J. Dumouchel's Ambivalence of Scarcity was a one trick pony. J. Berger's A Fortunate Man (half-read) is not going anywhere. James Kelman's Greyhound for Breakfast was miserable and incomprehensible.

Other books abandoned: Renata Adler's Speedboat. After twenty pages the writing came across as fake. Even worse was John Buchan. 

This was a year when even Penelope Fitzgerald, surprisingly, seemed not worth finishing. A year in which Gopnik seemed strangely small-minded.  

And that, I suppose, is the problem. My heart just isn't in it. 

A lovely short story by Grace Paley makes you think there is still hope. And you have stored up Elizabeth Harrower, Mavis Gallant and Ferrante. Someone mentioned Christina Stead. Let's see. Caught up in the thick of it, a time which, if things fall apart in the future, I will look back on with some nostalgia..the brisk winter morning walks, the cup of hot tea in your hands, the kids running to the door to greet you..yes, amidst all that flux you can't convince yourself that it really matters.

You sit at the window and life goes by. Reading a book won't help you escape or make much sense of it, won't reverse or even arrest time. Why lose yourself in someone else's life?

Keynes's Grandchildren, King of the Castle and the costs of wealth

Re-reading a wonderful chapter, 'the costs of wealth,' in Gai Eaton's lovely little book, King of the Castle.  

Of course, there are lots of things to object to in the book: the conservative strain, when you think about it hard enough, doesn't resonate with your own sensibilities even though you can see the appeal. I'm too much a child of my times (or just a child, perhaps!) to not believe there's something deep in the sense of the ordinary, the fleeting, that in large part goes up to make the modern. Soul, blues, Rothko, Tarkovsky and fiction are not to be sneered at. Still, I think Gai Eaton can be read as a corrective to the overly optimistic view we have of modernity, a counterbalance to the view that progress doesn't entail losses of any sort whatsoever. 

And, of course, the book was an introduction to the work of Hannah Arendt, Bettelheim, G. Thibon and Frithjof Schuon (the Thibon, sadly, not a book that you acquired and that is increasingly difficult to find at a reasonable price).

"The heart follows the hand"

What a wonderful (Sufi/Jewish?) saying. 

Or:

"Your thought should keep pace with your foot"

There are many things we don't know and cannot know. To learn to live with that, to know when to let go, what to keep hold of. The kind of knowledge that you don't get at the university. That, too, has a place, of course, but insofar as it isn't integrated into your life, not incarnated, then it remains fragmentary, partial. More to the point, since it is something that doesn't inhere it can be quantified, measured and exchanged. The things worth knowing are not so easily lost (like Pascal, there's the temptation to sew them into your clothes).

To keep pace with what you do know. To not try and outstrip the rhythms and patterns of a life. Abstraction, in itself, is not the problem; it's the one-sidedness of it that counts (in both sense of the word). 

~
The costs of wealth is, of course, linked to Keynes's question: how much is enough? Is there a sens of 'enough' and what happens when we overstep that boundary? Will we move into a more civilized epoch where we devote more time to "higher" pursuits, leisurely activities?

Keynes was right on the button when it came to predictions about productivity growth over the century (though for the wrong reasons). What is startling is that he got the fundamentals wrong (or overlooked what was really happening). 

Did he really believe that 'the economic problem' -the scramble for absolute needs'- would be solved once we all became rich enough? For such an acute observer of human psychology, how could he be so mistaken?

Of course, even when great thinkers are wrong they are interesting. So, this is (with the help of Stiglitz) worth exploring.


"The majority of people need to find some repose in things around them if they are to avoid a kind of inward dissolution in the time-stream."

Trumpet and the delusionals

"Men can retrieve their sameness by being related to the same chair, the same table."

--Hannah Arendt.

A common world. A quaint thought for the times we live in. Instead, the only commonality that is really likely to emerge is that based on fear, hatred and tribal instincts.

Old man Trumpet makes you laugh:

'Trump's base is the blue-collar worker, low-information voter without a college degree-essentially trailer-park crowd with rocks in their head." 

A priceless comment on CiF. 

Old Lahore

I am neither Hindu nor Turk, my identity lies neither in the wilderness of Arabia nor within the walls of Lahore.
--Bulleh. 

The ability and the desire to 'not say' is, of course, also a way. But it's the kind of feeling and way of living that would be completely lost on someone whose identity has been made over by the nation state and whose contours have been shaped by the engineered desires of the market (which is to say: all of us!). Or maybe not. There is always a chink in the armour, a brief moment when you look back on your life and think: the meaning of it all couldn't have been reduced to the fact that I had some asparagus on my plate, that I flitted away a third of my life away in front of the box or intoxicated, pursuing a happiness that was always around the corner.

What, then?

~

Haven't read Olivier Roy's Holy Ignorance (mentioned in the Shatz article) but the thesis does look very appealing. It seems to be something like this: 

Secularization and modernization haven't lead to the retreat of religion, as was hoped. The Enlightenment hasn't ushered in a great wave of rationality or reasonableness (one has to remember the Camps to underscore this point).This isn't just the traditional story of urbanization and alienation, the disjunction between the values of the (traditional/rural) family and the young man who grows up speaking a different language. Perhaps there's also something more specific going on?

Is this just a variation of a point that Gibbon made a long time ago? That religion, tempered by worldly concerns, answerable to a constituency, influenced by eclectic local cultures and practices and embodied in certain practices, institutions, orthodoxies (a "language") would be less fanatical than one that is free from all constraints? 

A version of the Protestant thesis, I suppose., except here individualization and the breaking of the institutional hold doesn't lead to "piety" or "conscience", a 'religion of the heart' (C. Hill) but to a kind of extreme individualization which finds its 'home' in a gang, a cult rather than in the family or the norms of wider society. 

Separate yourself from society because society is filth, corruption, Babylon. Culture is an "innovation" (doubly so because modern forms of it have nothing to with "us"). 

So, modernity (capitalism) breaks up any sense of continuity, durability, any link with the past or the matrix of terrestrial life. This is the abstract Man with his abstract desires, the Man without any qualities (of course, relatively benign when we think of most people). This is the 'missing person' Mary Douglas writes about, the modern Gnosticism that Jonas writes about: the great separation between the 'I' and the world, between me and you, the true believers and the damned. 

Ratzinger, intriguingly, made precisely this point with regards (extreme?) Protestantism and Islam: they posits a leap of faith, are blind, depend on a God whose will cannot be known (or is arbitrary), a God that is utterly transcendent, remote. This is not the place to contest that, but if applied to the extremes it obviously makes a lot of sense: Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism.

This also resonates with Gellner's notion that modern Islam would be scriptualistic, urban, 'Protestant'. That means that the older rural and syncretic traditions would be bypassed but, eventually, so would the traditions of scholarship and community understandings (Levinas) that bound a community. The end of the book and the rise of the internet also has surely something to do with this "quick thinking" and the emergence of virtual communities? 

Now-and this may be specific to Sunni Islam-everyone's an imam. (Roger, a friend and Protestant missionary, once told you: "Everyone's a saint, I'm a saint").    

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Will read it and see what he actually says.

But here's the thing, the supposed freedom from inherited structures of feeling and ways of being doesn't necessarily produce more freedom (in fact, it can lead to quite the opposite. That's the daring thesis). Freedom from other people can go hand in hand with a hatred of other people. The notion that we should all be footloose, "nomadic," disrupt the hierarchies of control now sounds woefully outdated (more applicable to an older formation of capitalism). In an age of 'liquid modernity' it is precisely that kind of disjointedness that is required. Nothing must be allowed to settle.

This, you're afraid, sounds like a hymn to the petit bourgeois-and indeed it is! The small scale life that values friendship, belonging, cinnamon rolls, art and music, your "favourite things" is not to be sneered at. Simone: without bridges many drown. The Catholic Church has always realized that. Conservatism, in that sense, is not about a narrow-minded and parochial justification of the way things are (because that includes all kinds of injustice) but is, instead, a recognition that you can know who or what you are without having to define yourself. Not this, not that, the Hindus would say...

Old Lahore has lost so much without their presence...

{The book, Holy Ignorance, is available online. if you would like a copy drop me a line}

   

'The kingdom's bastard child'

I understand that this might not be the most popular to thing to say right now but it's interesting that no-one has much to say about how the Saudis have funded the growth of fanaticism in so many places over the last forty years (with the recent help of the Qataris) and how they seem to be the allies, good friends, of 'the west'. As the Yanks love to say: "Go figure!"

Adam Shatz, writing in the LRB, raises a number of interesting issues:

"What most of the jihadis appear to have in common is a lack of any serious religious training: according to most studies, there is an inverse relationship between Muslim piety and attraction to jihad. As Olivier Roy, the author of several books on political Islam, recently said, ‘this is not so much the radicalisation of Islam as the Islamicisation of radicalism...

Exploiting Saudi anger over Obama’s pursuit of a rapprochement with Tehran, France has aligned itself with the Saudis on Iran’s nuclear programme and on Syria, and is now competing with the US to become Saudi Arabia’s top supplier of advanced military technology...

All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed."

~

It goes without saying that this is a nihilistic outfit and that it is probably drawing sexually frustrated young men to it. Paris, the centre of prostitution and vice (really, might want to take a trip to Dubai or the kingdom). I don't think one can or should ignore the horrific sex slavery that is involved here. Not just because of the absolute despicable nature of it, but also as a way of partly understanding what's going on.

Right-wingers are keen to connect this to immigration, refugees, to Islam, to the Palestinians (yes, there is sickness everywhere)..anything but the involvement of their "own" governments in helping create the swamp in the first place. This is not about "blame" but about trying to understand.

On the other hand many Muslims are, in your opinion, failing to look at their own political and moral failings. Is the drift to conservatism, the growing prevalence of conspiracy theories, of anti-semitism and anti-western attitudes, leading to a kind of mass delusion which, coupled with more specific factors such as alienation, urbanization and rising inequality that affect specific groups, making the emergence of extremism all the more likely?

It's a bit glib to paraphrase Keynes here but: 'good states of mind depend on things working'. When nothing is working, what fills the vacuum?  

Saturday morning

By some kind of miracle youtube is back up-for now-in the land of the pure. So, more on Keynes's wonderfully provocative article from 1930 a bit later.

Some people are defined by the place they come from-which is all well and fine. I've always admired that in some way but also found it kind of revolting at the same time [he says, putting on his Jewish hat].

Neither Greek nor Jew.

And, related to that is: God is neither of the East nor the West. A genuine nomadic spirit cannot and doesn't care much for "territory" (in the modern sense of the word), though it does allow for the sense of home (Hugh Brody is insightful here: it is the settlers and not the hunter-gatherers or nomadic peoples who have a contempt for the land). Guenon, writing a century earlier, would say that they lived in "space" and not in time (unlike the moderns who live in "time").

To take a leaf out of Guenon's book: the very desire or need to cling on to this national sense of belonging is to assure oneself of some kind of continuity over time (Scheffler is quite brilliant on this..notes to follow).

Illich's stunning question again: what would it be like to live a life that isn't so organized, so structured?

In art, music, friendship or love there has to be a connection, or there is nothing. To connect is already to reject the ossification of an 'I' or a 'We'. The political has ceased to be a genuine 'we' for a long time now. The market and the state are false unities (Badiou). Simone would say the state and money are false gods [again, this sounds Jewish].

Arendt, with her canny perceptiveness, wrote of how the disappearance of the public world would entail the collapse of the private one as well. Is that we have now or is it something we're approaching?

A friend told me that in the Qur'an there is a saying that God is 'Lord of the worlds'. I hadn't thought much about the plurality of the word 'worlds'. He went on to say: if God is unlimited then why do we bind him to one form of understanding? 

I think that idea of 'binding' is as true of religion (in its worst sense) as it is of nationalism (in its worst). 

Saturday morning is a time of peace, a time when you are reminded that the world goes on without us. What space there is between the notes, what softness in the sunshine! Why dig in so hard, then?

Fidelity to the line, the true note that stays true after all this time, bound and free (Hadewijch? Isn't that right, ma soeur?). The house is in ruins, perhaps in a state of permanent disrepair, as Yusuf Hamza suggests, but I choose to remember my favourite things, this bright and clear Saturday morning.   

News from a strange star

He's a truly wonderful, kind person. He's an intellectual and creative but he's not an atheist.

-- Stephen Stapleton, Edge of Arabia.

'According to Fayadh's friends, when the police failed to prove that his poetry was atheist propaganda, they began berating him for smoking and having long hair'. 

What kind of messed up world do we live in when you have to justify your religious beliefs just so that you won't be killed by a bunch of fucking towel heads. Dunno about you, but it's quite a jump from trying to stitch someone up for "atheism" to berating them for having long hair. Ah, America and the UK, you have such sweet friends. 

Great material for a Monty Python sketch. Except there is a real human being involved here. A Saudi "religious expert" once said-and this can't be true, can it?-that it is legitimate to work with women in the workplace as long they have (symbolically?) breast-fed you because then you think of them as your mother. Er...yeah, okay.   

Mali: 'Some hostages, including those able to recite verses of the Qur'an, were later released, security sources told Reuters'.

--The Guardian.

Time to learn a second language?

In the land of the free ol' Jeb says yaz can only gets in if you be provin' you is right in the head, or offera the Christian faith. Darn it, ain't no more space for more rabid dogs. Weze filled up alredee with dem Joos an' niggahs an' dikes. The boy is tellin' it like a straight shooter from the ol' days, I tells ya.

The Indian's have spent 30 billion dollars building a "smart city". A pity there are no smart people left to live in it. Perhaps they could fund it by selling more of these star tortoises since there is, as the Guardian says, "international demand"? 

As someone recently wrote: When, exactly, does climate change kick in?  

A London Bedouin

The background story interests you more than the poetry, to be honest. The poetry is lush, lyrical, wild and nervy. I suppose you have to be of a certain temperament, have to be able to 'fly' with it, because if you pause to think about it, you can end up asking yourself: "what are you on about?" 

So, yes, there is something hugely fascinating about someone who decides to pack their bags and call it quits. There is a sense of expectation, the clearly perceived life panning out: years of continued engagement with higher things stretching into the distant future, the commitments, the carving out of a life that rises above the mundane; immortality, of sorts, perhaps second-rate but still, a bronze evening that endures in the memory. The possibility of being a cultural icon, the staged readings, associations and 'movements' and the like-minded travelers along the way.. all that provides a warm glow against the lonely evening chill. 

The rush hour. You take a step to the side, darting out of view, finding..you're not sure yet, but not the chartered mind, the hour of fame then oblivion. Why not die first? Become invisible, obscure, avoid speaking straight or straight up. You come to realize what needs to be said is very little. The rest can be written on scraps of paper kept in deep outer pockets or pointed to. (Shades of Wittgenstein?). In the inner pockets, a Bible. Faith under the left nipple.

Harrower. Walser. Keep walking. Go to the sea. At the edge of the world you can sit still and reflect-an oriental skill. Become so small that nothing is left but broken sentences. Maybe something will emerge from the ruins. Nothing can from the false wholeness. 

The fragmentary life that was full of disappearances; never still, restful, always half-lit rooms of the heart, street, bed. Always half-dark. You're one of those persons. 

There's something extreme in your voice, of that you're sure. These dark clouds in your life, brought on by a thousand-year old bronze cat from the East and its dead eye. The graven image that prevents a second life, a weird inheritance, like mixed-blood unsettling the lines, making me a bedouin in my own home. 

I rush to the desert, which has always been with me somehow, like a hole in my pocket. My story can't be written or read, an unpublished manuscript thrown on the flames, the ashes fluttering and spilling onto November's frozen mud. The oases, the mirages, never far, slip down to them in mid-afternoon, beyond the gaze of men in pointed hats, forgotten, adrift, drift now in the distances of the Venice-blue streets, with drifting yellow-sentences down Soho for a shilling, knowing like no-one in this arab hour. 

The time has come. Make arrangements, head for the sea, back to where you know. Get on the wrong train, go in the wrong direction; the carriage is, for a brief rickety moment, suffused with light, envelops you . You stagger and stand still like no-one else, pass through tunnels and then into the open light, right into and through the heart of a shadow-less space, only to realize you are lost again.