Shiny, Happy People

You are obsessed by the greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves
------(Q:102:1).

The term takathur bears the connotation of "greedily striving for an increase", i.e., in benefits, be they tangible or intangible, real or illusory. In the above context it denotes man's obsessive striving for more and more comforts, more material goods, greater power over his fellow-men or over nature, and unceasing technological progress. A passionate pursuit of such endeavours, to the exclusion of everything else, bars man from all spiritual insight and, hence, from the acceptance of any restrictions and inhibitions based on purely moral values - with the result that not only individuals but whole societies gradually lose all inner stability and, thus, all chance of happiness.

He has long ago lost all innocence, all inner integration with nature. Life has become a puzzle to him. He is sceptical, and therefore isolated from his brother and lonely within himself. In order not to perish in this loneliness, he must endeavour to dominate life by outward means. The fact of being alive can, by itself, no longer give him inner security: he must always wrestle for it, with pain, from one moment to new moment. Because he has lost all metaphysical orientation, and decided to do without it, he must continuously invent for himself mechanical allies: and thius the furious, desperate drive of his technique. He invents every day new machines and gives each of them something of his soul to make them fight for his existence. That they do indeed; but at the same time they create for him ever new needs, new desires, new fears-and an unquenchable thirst for newer, yet artificial allies. His soul loses itself in the ever bolder, ever more fantastic, ever more powerful wheelwork of the creative machine: and the machine loses its true purpose-to be a protector and enricher of human life-and evolves into a deity in its own right, a devouring Moloch of steel. The priests and preachers of this insatiable deity do not seem to be aware that the rapidity of modern technical progress is a result not only of a positive growht of knowledge but also of spiritual despair, and that the grand material achievements in the light of which Western man proclaims his will to attain to mastery over nature are, in their innermost, of a defensive character: behind the shining facades lurks the fear of the Unknown.
-----(M.Asad, Road to Mecca)

There's something of the Old Testament Holy indignation in this, something that reminds of me of Ginsberg's Moloch.

Morning Star

A fascinating combination of combative and stoical heroism with a priestly bearing conferred on Indians of the Plains and Forests a sort of majesty at once aquiline and solar; hence the powerful and irreplaceable beauty that is associated with the red man and contributes to his prestige as a warrior and martyr. Like the Japanese in the time of the Sammurai the Red Indian was in the deepest sense an artist in the outward manifestation of his personality: apart from the fact that his life was a ceaseless sporting with suffering and death, hence also of a kind of chivalrous karma yoga , the Indian knew how to impart to this spiritual style an adornment unsurpssable in its expressiveness.

...[t]he crucial importance he attaches to moral worth in men- to "character" if you will-and hence his cult of action. The heroic and silent act is contrasted with the empty and prolix talking of the coward; the Indian's love of secrecy, his reluctance to express what is sacred by means of facile speeches that weaken and disperse it, can be explained in this way.

The whole Red Indian character may be summed up intwo words, if such a condensation be allowable: the act and the secret; the act shattering if need be, and the secret impassive. Rock-like, the Indian of former times rested in his own being, his own personality, ready to translate it into action with the impetuousity of lightning; but at the same time he remained humble before the Great Mystery, whose message, he knew, could always be discerned in the Nature around him.

Wild Nature is at one with holy poverty and also with spiritual childlikeness; she is an open book containing an inexhaustible teaching of truth and beauty. It is in the midst of his own artifices that man most easily becomes corrupted, it is they that make him covetous and impious; close to virgin Nature, who knows neither agitation nor falsehood, he had the hope of remaining contemplative like Nature herself. And it is Nature, quasi-divine in her totality , who will have the final word.

-------Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds

Earth, Fire, Wind

All yours, Injun, twenty-four bucks’ worth of glass beads,
gaudy cloth. I got myself a bargain. I brandish
fire-arms and fire-water. Praise the Lord.
Now get your red ass out of here.

I wonder if the ground has anything to say.
You have made me drunk, drowned out
the world’s slow truth with rapid lies.
But today I hear again and plainly see. Wherever
you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.

I wonder if the spirit of the water has anything
to say. That you will poison it. That you
can no more own the rivers and the grass than own
the air. I sing with true love for the land;
dawn chant, the song of sunset, starlight psalm.

Trust your dreams. No good will come of this.
My heart is on the ground, as when my loved one
fell back in my arms and died. I have learned
the solemn laws of joy and sorrow, in the distance
between morning’s frost and firefly’s flash at night.

Man who fears death, how many acres do you need
to lengthen your shadow under the endless sky?
Last time, this moment, now, a boy feels his freedom
vanish, like the salmon going mysteriously
out to sea. Loss holds the silence of great stones.

I will live in the ghost of grasshopper and buffalo.

The evening trembles and is sad.
A little shadow runs across the grass
and disappears into the darkening pines.

-------Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan

Black and Blue

To my horror I find that I'm becoming a white man....

I should have realised that something was wrong by the cessation of the traffic outside. But too late, as usual. It was if the world had stopped and that this little local crisis had the power to re-enact that rarest of things: a time when English people actually stop doing things and start talking to eachother about something other than the weather. The flood- caused by something as unremarkable as the usually gentle Roding-had started.

By the time I got to the garage I could hear it thundering down the slight incline, menacingly, as if it were a slab of lead or ice. Not to be outdone by the river's maliciousness, the clouds darkened over. Inside, the water was black and up to my ankles and the musky smell of the furniture that was brought from Pakistan now mixed with that of dank wood. The rats had already scurried off with their customary good sense, as if they could sense the impending doom of this sinking ship.

It was too late to phone Bogdon -the Polish Robin Williams look-alike-and it would take too long to explain to him that we needed the services of "the Russian" (the huge Ukranian, a force of nature in his own right, who could be commanded, like a djinn, to move just about any object on earth). And I knew then that the attempt to save things was futile. With this realisation came a sense of relief. There was a perfect stillness. A cool northern breeze pushed up against my back and over the water, causing a flurry of silver ripples against the carpets and my Zen bed, the Zen bed, Zen bed.

Blessed is the man who hears the thunder
And does not think:
"it's the end of the world".

But it was hard not to think of the departure from Pakistan a year back and lost friends, a parting of ways which was at least the ending of a world. I will never forget a dusty and gloomy room in the dilapidated back streets of Lahore where I was shown a 19th century Caucasian carpet.
"But I cannot afford this [it was 30 lakhs -around 40,000 pounds] " I said to the owner. At which point he pulled up a chair, told his son to make some tea and said Khalid, let us look at it just for the beauty of it. The old ways of the east die hard...

Reluctantly our mam came down-nothing, and surely not something as inconsequetial as a flood, could tear her away from her book of poetry. She was particularly fond of reciting the lines: we asked for four days of life; two were spent in waiting, two in regret. She surveyed the damage from a distance, like a grand Ventian Doge, and said: "I hope you've saved the onions and tomatoes, I need those for tonight's dinner".

When the waters receded I could just about see from the corner of my eye that most of the albums had been destroyed. From childhood we had been taught-though taught is not the right word-that there were great benefits in 'not looking' at the world. I now knew what this meant.
Marvin and Otis, B.B. and Sam and Dave; and the reggae cassettes as well: Marley, Steel Pulse, and Toots. Miraculously, Streisand and Manilow survived. I should have read this as a sign.

A few months later I had to download some of my favourite tunes to an ipod (if you don't know what that is, it's like a walkman; if you don't know what a walkman is it's a bit like a cassette player...eventually , we'll get to human memory!) The choices were, to my great surprise, white groups from the 70's and 80's . Not Arvo Part of Bach's fugues, which might have denoted a modicum of respectability, but pop and rock for Christ's sake!

How bizarre. I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as half jewish (my grandfather was also known as 'the old Jew'-largely because, as far as I can make out, of his fine waistcoats and dandy hats-and I had always imagined that there was more than a hint of Buddhism in the lazy, pluralistic traditions of the Kashmiris, but this was going a bit too far. Of course, language and the grey clouds had already long ago entered our blood, gently shaping our thoughts like the contours of a river-bank.

But , politically at least, there was a radical refusal of system that was always muslim (shia?) To always take the weaker side, as if to redress the balance, was to be in a permanent state of opposition. But now this! Admittedly, it wasn't as serious as supporting the English cricket team but....

There is nothing left to do; it seems as if time istself is pushing us in this direction. I have to download some Louis, quick, before it's too late....

Cold empty bed...springs hurt my head
Feels like ole ned...wished I was dead
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Even the mouse...ran from my house
They laugh at you...and all that you do
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Im white...inside...but, that dont help my case
Thats life...cant hide...what is in my face

How would it end...aint got a friend
My only sin...is in my skin
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Music of Time

We live in a fragmentary age, where we can see and feel only parts of the whole picture. An era of narrow specialization and a world of fantastical, slender, and restircted vantage points. Is this because of the times we live in-times in which the world's myriad images swarm before our eyes, clamouring for our attention ? (note: already the question has to be broken down, offering up its multiple constituent modes of analysis: the psychological, the political, the sociological, each as palusible as the other, each as good a substitute for the other).

But perhaps it is because the very content of our knowledge-in distinction from our approach to it-is in itself fragmentary, incomplete, incoherent, ambivalent. What can we know of history or any process whose results lie undetermined so far ahead in the distant future? The times we live in or the Time we live in?

The turning away from the classical precludes any sense of 'totality' and maybe even the notion of order and authority are de-valued. The tension between the infinity of life and the rigidity, fixity of the mathematical and of 'structure'. However, from another perspective it is the mathematical that expresses not permanence or the absolute but an infinity that is dynamic...an unending series (and it is the biological which represents temporality and contingency).

But hasn't this always been the case? The radical insufficiency of a finite mind faced with a reality that stands apart from it; amind that stuggles to cirumscribe all that is 'other' but that also learns to come to terms with what lies beyond the realms of its comprehension, its own, as it were, 'glasses'. We see through a glass darkly and are somehow aware of this fact.

Leonardo: the mathematical and the biological, structure and universal flow. Music, as harmony, is a pattern and spontaneity.

My share in all that is happening ...I- this bundle of flesh and bone, of sensations and perceptions-have been placed within the orbit of Being, and am within all that is happening. Danger is only an illusion...for all that happens to me is part of the all-embracing stream of which I myself am a part. Could it be, perhaps, that danger and safety, death and joy, destiny and fulfillment, are but different aspects of this tiny , majestic bubdle that is I? What endless freedom, O God, has Thou granted to man.

----------Muhammad Asad, Road to Mecca.

Rats

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your Cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.

---------Isaac Rosenberg

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

--------Robert Burns, To a Mouse

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful
of screeches like torn tin,

An effective gag.
when it stops screeching, it pants.

And cannot think.
'This has no face, it must be God' or

'No answer is also an answer.'
Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth.

Are stealing its backbone
For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,

For supplanting every human brain inside is skull with a
rat-body that knots and unknots....

'Stay' says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat's head down into godhead

The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
and the sleep-soul of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow-

That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried

The horned Shadow of the rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs

While it supplants Hell.

------Ted Hughes.

Lahore is Lahore

The risk of having a port-city as your capital is that it is too open to the flow of ideas, goods, and people. Far better to imagine a new city out of nothing, an abstract glass city where none of the old mystifying powers of the land and established hierarchies can take root: the bureaucratic city par excellence, or make some provincial centre the main city, the main bulwark against modernist, dissipating forces. The capital has to be a city of desire and memory...

Lahore , like all closed or land-locked cities, has always existed. There has never been a time when it didn't and so to talk of the establishment of foundations is meaningless. Culturally conservative, she turns her back on the inspiration of the high seas and instead models herself on the slow-moving rhythms of the earth. If there is any regeneration or vigour it always comes from the north, but they too are soon lulled into her deep sleep and afternoon stillness. To live for a day there is to live for a thousand years.

The secret of its longevity is that it has retained all the charcteristics of a large village: the gossip, the landed elites, the bumpkins, the clowns and dreamers, the drunken poets and jilted lovers, ... and the intrigues are always of a small and trivial nature. In it simplicity and crudeness it has retained something of the human-whereas other cities grow by becoming more machine-like and less human.

Of the twelve or so remaining statues only a handful remain in public spaces-the others confined to the dusty backrooms of the museum. And what need would there be for such objects when the each person is a living statue? "Orr?" (And?) is the usual refrain...but what else is there to say but repeat the old stories?

Back when Lahore was a fledgling city a Lahori went for the annual Hajj to Mecca. On his return he was all praise for the holy city. The piety and holiness of the people. But the Lahoris, impatient as ever, wanted to know more: orr?
Well, fantastic food and hospitality.
Orr?
The sense of peace and tranquility, of closeness to God...
Orr?
Sensing their growing frustration he then told them what they had wanted to hear all along.
But Lahore is Lahore.

And since that day Lahore has always been the capital of the world, the only city in the world- beyond which exists only a number of smaller villages. Nothing could change her; immutable, inscrutable old Lahore.

But change she did. Some cities grow in lightness, others in extensity; Lahore doesn't grow either upwards or outwards but only in density, absorbing other people as it does foreign stories that she makes her own.

But soon a crack appeared in her heart; what was once only the wilderness now became the most inhabited part of the city; and what was originally within the confines of the "gates" was now only "the inside city". On the inside there were only decaying buidings, the fading splendour of once regal gardens and a sort of fatalism, resignation hung in the air. As the soul of Lahore drew ever more inward, attached by the thinnest of threads to the ever-growing distant memory of what she once was it was as if she was becoming a dream within a dream. But this in itself was nothing new. Lahore was always the most real of cities because she was the most unreal...

In Place

There's something almost holy, sacred even, in a person who has lived with and understood the fixed patterns of life and the land; who in the regular movements of the seasons can see the turning points, the transitions from nostalgia to hope and back again. Here one is not talking of individual poetic souls who are in touch with the mysterious -almost as if by chance -but of the sturdy recorders of history and folk tales with their rock-like memory. It is not their closeness to the elemental, raw sensations, that is unique but their heightened intuitive awareness of the intermingling of nature's and their own destiny. The stories of the people merge into the stories of the land.

Kavanagh:
the parish is not a perimeter, a limitation, a bound, but a 'space through which the world can be seen'. Parochialism is unversal...all great civilisations are based on parochialism..to know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge , a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the juncture of four small fields-these are as much as aman can fully experience.

This, of course, only 'works' for us as a kind of metaphor since there is no going back to nature or to cosmos for the latecomers that we are. The unchanging habitat is an expression of and a product of the genetic material of the species that creates it: the spider's web is without teleology. Only language and myth re-connects it with the human world..."spin a web". But our heart isn't in it. The gradations of being , the subtle threads that bind us in feeling and consciousness with nature no longer exist, or if they do cannot be found. We see only "pure extension", magnitude. There is only the "idea" of nature, which is to say: discontinuity, radical and absolute, and nothing else.

At a certain age the clothes fit. There's an equilibrium between biological and social worlds. It is as if one has grown to one's limits, being has filled us out and there is a certain peace about this, like two overlapping circles finally becoming synchronized. But from here it appears that there can only be a decline, a falling away. This perfection cannot be consciously designed by a political system or even by religion since it depends , crucially, on the awareness of our fittedness with all that has passed in the universe, a sense of not being estranged from oneself or from the times we live in. And that type of self-assuredness is fragile, temporary, and not something that can be aimed for or re-constructed once it has passed; it is pure gift.

To speak a word of love.
But there is none.
To hold a fire to the sun.
But the gods never come.

Cans't get out of myself,
No matter how hard I tries.
Always singing to myself,
My self, my 'I', never dies.

If

"If a wound hath befallen you , a wound like it hath already befallen others"
-------[ Q: 3,140].

God may reduce you,
on Judgement Day,
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
----W.H.Auden

The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.
It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen.
-----Angelus Silesius

Paragon of animals, quintessence of dust.

Winter is a thousand directions: past , future, regret and a promise; a homecoming of the heart and the death of the world. Summer is nothing but an endless horizontal.

Depaysement: nocturnl rambles, exile and disorientation; dropping out of bourgeois society,..arriving somwhere for the first time and feeling the wonder and excitement of a world that is not yours and that never will. Not reaching out to possess that otherness , but just an awareness of it: as if one were seeing the world on its very first morning.

Never read more than you can practice.

Kamikaze diaries: Of the 4,000 one quarter were unviersity graduates, studying Latin, Chinese and western philosophy. The ultimate test, the right of passage that they set themselves, was the ability to comprehend Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One wonders if they remembered any of it during those final moments....

Contra Jogulatores Obloquentes

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof beams
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise.

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.

-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing , we turn to our friends.

-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.

-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people and people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a committment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occassionally felt that way. No, the first formualtion was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God revelas His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in relaity nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is resored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:
metmorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.

Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.

The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary..only equals laugh."
Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.

Endgame

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
(W.B.Yeats)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
(T.S.Eliot)

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
(C.Milosz)

Sunday Afternoon

"Still life" means "everywhere there is an orderly way of life...a tidiness of the house and a cheerfulness of mind...domestic, everyday life" and even the life of the court is only a heightened version of this: eroticized boredom.

Arcadia and the pastoral idyll: "everlasting spring", fullness and roundedness; primitivism and childhood were the only modes of authenticity against the backdrop of a once familiar landscape that was slowly receding from our eye's view, fading into our memories. The only way in which the increasing mechanical world of routine, rationalized organisation, and production could be held at bay: pleasure, art and culture as the last bastions of relative autonomy from the markets.

Nature is re-imagined as a place of respite from the onsetting forces of capital. But even here, leisure is soon colonized, brought into the folds of the space of flows.

But there is an older, "eternal sunday" that is depicted as a land of abundance where, as in the great feasts, there is " no sign of anything beyond what can be drunk, eaten boiled or roasted" and a certain innocence prevails. Here, there is the "unobtrusive enjoyment of life and carefree seriousness...an immediate other world beyond hardship." Here humanity is reconciled with nature, at ease with itself; there is only the present and self-presence and it is full, ripe, and serene.

On the negative side, however, there soon emerges another picture, "a single mosaic of boredom...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box", intensely pre-occupied. We see a "hapless idleness" and "expressionless brooding...an [internal] infernal utopia of distance and such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon is the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself."

"Cezanne transforms even his still life in which things are rigorous and sedentary, in which happy ripeness has settled, ...into a witness to a heavy contentment."

The dullness of modern regularity beckons, stretching across the horizon like a clouded gaze, extending its grey monopoly over anything that it approaches. Sameness hangs over us like fate. Henceforward, with the road to metaphysics closed, there could only be a detached and studied idleness, or a descent to eccentricity, random spontaneity, madness even-all signifying, in one way or the other, the presence of a genuine human soul behind the mask.

To fall, to burn a path with one's own eyes...is this not infinitely preferable to the mundane, shopkeeper's mentality? An act of the will, even if misguided, indicates the shimmering of the spark more than a thousand years of this sleepwalking, of this still life....the "repose of a settled nature".

The Allama would say: the ink is not dry!

Gaugin, who in his European world-weariness seeks happiness and colour beyond the deep blue seas. To find the "remote and primitive world", far away from the rigid, familiar world of hierarchy and stratification...as if contact with the exotic would unlock some deep part of him that had long been lost; the body, the sensual, hedonistic pleasure as an escape from the monotony of industrial society. It is the dream of freedom-freedom from anxiety, guilt and responsibility.

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilising old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.

But the insipid "sunday afternoon" , with its sickly glow and peaceful slumber, its sun-and -wheat-consciousness, in so far as it expresses, with its wistful glances, rigid, well-defined personal spaces nothing but the desire for solitary contemplation, for uninterrupted being, and forgetfulness it knows nothing of real presences and connectedness-modern awareness is infinitely atomized and divided, ; in this sense, even as a negative image it carries over with it, and is structured by, the memory of the conditions it is trying to escape. Either as a temporary respite from mind-numbing routine, or as a final goal to be achieved, the afternoon is a long-drawn out realisation that the life of abundance, of the Eloi, is a shallow one.

Leisure: " a means of favouring bourgeois ends: the reproduction of working power"; the need to "kill time", to throw oneself into the whirlpools of chance through adventure, gambling, exploration, intoxicants...anything to get "out of oneself", the claustrophobia of "being" that is also an unbearable lightness of being, an eternal Sunday of sunshine. Anything can be endured except the succession of fine days. "Sociability as the form of play in a society confirms this society in even escaping it." The one-dimensional garden -as well as the desire for a dizzying escape from it in pleasure-are both marked by the closed spaces of capitalism and its work-routine.

The pressing question then becomes how can "free time" be used, "consumed", "valued". In late capitalism, leisure is either a moment of recuperation or it is a method of stupefaction: entertainment and the culture industry become a way of mesmerizing people, riveting them to series of fragmentary images and sounds, each as fleeting as the next-whether it is an image of fear or pleasure is of little import. The flight from boredom and indifference can, from now on, only be solved by the industries that manufacture dreams of escape and rebellion...the very same organizations that generated the levelled-down world in the first place!

"We have time and example neither for the grace nor the peace of happiness " because work has burnt us out. Culture: been there, done that. Tick. And move on. Only the hobby indicates " a private appearance of what activity with pleasure and love could mean."

Bourgeois presentation and administration of culture: " such cultural transmission resembles a promenade concert in small spas, and the Sunday supplement in the bourgeois conformist press."

The past then becomes "history", something to be viewed from the safe distance of behind a window plane...a museum piece. Culture is a matter for our educated tastes, our refined sensibilities, but never something that continues to inform our whole personality (rather than just the mind), rarely something that does not cease to affect our very way of thinking and living as soon as we step outside the walls of the gallery, museum, or concert hall.

"Really experienced history, namely that experienced in terms of forming history oneself, provides no legacy for ...the sunday room, instead, it is a house that has more staircases than rooms."

(Citations from J.Franzen, intro to the Gambler and from Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope, vol II)

London, c'est moi

London, the mongrel city of a thousand voices, of a thousand and one dreams....

On the tube: an African woman reading the Quran, two crackheads discussing the best drugs to take, a Russian couple in love, a banker with a deeply furrowed brow, talking to himself, calculating, calculating...the East Europeans, still free enough to laugh unconsciously, like children.

Up above: Bentham and his rationalism in the abstract city.Then from nowhere a soft breeze blows this way and a few blossoms fall on my eyelids and I remember that Blake lived here as well.

Near the church:
a hearse passes by and an old man doffs his cap and stands to attention; does he "think" about this, or is it something he has learnt from his grandfather, a custom from time out of mind that he instinctively follows, not knowing why? Moved inwardly by love or outwardly be tradition? What is "inside" here and what "outside"?

On my way home:
a tramp asks me: "did you have a good day?"
Same day, same life.
"Yeah, not bad" I say, lying through my teeth, going through the rituals "And you?"
He has the gentlest of smiles...what would I know he says in the shrug of his shoulders. His face is burnt and he stinks to high heaven. What is it like to live a day facing reality, without the pretense, without the falsity of society, alone in the universe?

I place a pound coin in his outsretched hand; the curve of it folds in on it, neither accepting nor rejecting it.
"I need twelve for a roof tonight".
So much for marginal economics!

I walk on by.

I am alive , but life without beauty seems pointless.
But no, to be alive is everything. Even if we are ashes, invisible to the world, nothing but thoughts in the underground, we still dream of being leaves and dream a thousand dreams of open spaces, of drfiting and landing softly near the beloved.

VLADIMIR: We have our reasons.
ESTRAGON: All the dead voices.
VLADIMIR: They make a noise like wings.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
VLADIMIR: Like sand.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: They all speak together.
ESTRAGON: Each one to itself.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: Rather they whisper.
ESTRAGON: They rustle.
VLADIMIR: They murmur.
ESTRAGON: They rustle.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: What do they say?
ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives.
VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient.
[Silence.]
VLADIMIR: They make a noise like feathers.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
VLADIMIR: Like ashes.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
[Long silence.]

Stray Reflections

Fragments of a fragment....
Not wanting to place these fragments in their respective places it is, perhaps, better to just assemble them here, haphazardly, without any logic; instead of trying to harmonise the others they will just remain here, displaced, discarded; that way the past will never be completed and be always open to additions, further cancelations and deletions....

The whole world is made of fire,
the whole world is fire.
----Heraclitus.

Why so downcast, my soul
why do you sigh within me
--------Psalms.

We live and dream of other lives; our life itself is part of the life and dreams of others and just as a dream only occurs within a life, so a life only occurs within that other, dream-life which is the realm of possibility.And all are contained within the orbit of that greater circle, the iris of eternity, that single moment that is the Life of God, the "blinking of an eye"....

Shamanism is a stray descendant of Sufism.
-------Ted Hughes.

Augustine.
Our desire for the world makes it , in some sense, "the world"; fleeting, because we die even if it endures. To lose oneself in the dispersion of the world, "worldliness", is a way of losing the sense of fear that the good will pass away.

Iris M.
Anything that consoles is false. We live in an age that is sceptical of happy endings (the Romantic legacy).

Anselm.
We can 'conceive' of something beyond which nothing can be conceived. Which is to say that we can know our limits and therefore have some "idea" of infinity. To affirm transcendence requires a degree of immanence.

American Artists' congress, 1936.
The individual is identified with the private ( that is, privation of other beings and the world), with the passive rather than active, with the fantastic rather than the intelligent. such an art cannot really be called free , because it is so exclusive and private...An individual art in a society where human beings do not feel themselves to be most human when they are inert, dreaming, passive, tormented or uncontrolled, would be very different from modern art.

Outside William Morris' house.
The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light and finally they disappear into the hidden depths....and then the sun is reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together again in a loving embrace...and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself, endlessly, eternally. Perhaps it is the ceaseless movement of the stream that allows such an image to form in my mind; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change it is doubtful whether there would be a reflection at all. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time because of the permanent presence of the sun?

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream return to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without its illumination the stream is nothing but a memory, a thing that exists only in the mind as a possibility, empty and alone.

Courtesy: the perfect matching of inward intentions with outward gestures.
The Gita: holiness within, selfless action without.
For the moderns courtesy will appear as something wholly artifical, superfluous and trivial. The mechanical repitition of the set phrase, the cliche, spoken at just the right time and the right place, lacks "authenticity", "individuality".
However, for an aritstocratic soul it is precisely this sense of balance and proportion that is the highest virtue since it is at one with nature; from the perspective of the 'outward eye' there is only a mindless formulaic act; but the medievals would have understood "the deed" to be a sober, outward act and a state of inner freedom, "drunkenness".

Isaiah Berlin on Naivete:

The naive , in contradistinction to the sentimentalist, is not conscious of the rupture between "thought" and "action", feeling and expression. There is a pre-lapsarian harmony and unity. This will appear to be superficial, shallow, too peaceful. the sentimentalist, on the other hand, is always searching for that lost unity..he is always outisde nature, alientated from himself and from society...2 not joy or peace but conflict with nature or society, unsatiable craving, the notorious neuroses of the modern age, with its troubled spirits, its martyrs, fanatics, and rebels...."

He comes to delight in his inability to find "home".

Idols

What lies at the heart of idolatory? The desire to kill all that is alive and to assume life where there is none....

The concept of life in the West results from a perversion of the Christian belief according to which God, who is Life, became man. From this promise, this offer of a gift, this mysterious opening to what lies beyond, a this-worldly entity was derived. Life became an immanent idol, an all-purpose polemical label, a conceptual justification for boundless acquisition in this world. Indeed, life permits the formation of a foundational category, separate from the cosmos, for possessive individualism. From there it is easy to see the leaps to the struggle for life against nature, other individuals and society. In this construction, life cannot be understood apart from the"death of nature." In a continuous thread that runs back to Anaxagoras(500 - 480 BC) and up through the sixteenth century, an organic, whole conception of nature was a constant theme in the West. With varying nuances and emphases, nature was seen as alive, sensitive, at times animistic, correlated with human action. With the Scientific Revolution, a mechanistic model came to dominate thinking - nature was then seen as dead. This death of nature, I would argue, was the most far-reaching effect of the radical change in man's vision of the universe. But an insistent question then presented itself: How do we explain the notion of living forms in a dead cosmos?The modern substantive concept of life thus appears as a kind of mindless movement to fill the void.

----Ivan Illich

To kill all that lives is to set oneself up at the centre of the universe, the only point at which there is life and intelligence; it is to say that Man is the measure of all things..in short, it is the desire to see with the eye of God, to assume that one has power over nature (which is recognized as nothing but "extension", a lesser power or "force" ).

Idolatory is a form of substitution; it is to substitute the relative for the absolute, the temporary for the permanent; Man, the "image" of God, becomes the sole intelligence, alone in a cold universe. To do so, he must first "kill" God.

Idolatory mirrors the fall; it is the desire to see things contingently, to see them in isolation from the divine; it is to draw a circle around a centre that we make and thereby place ourselves at the centre of the dance of time.

The cogito: to say "i think" is already to assume too much; it is to place oneself as the originator of thought, as if one were totally self-subsisting. The medievals would have said that we can think points to an existence and essence that is given to us.

Idolatory is to see only onself in a circle of reason that starts with the turn to subjectivity and ends up with oneself; but there are other circles that start with love and end with love...for isn't love the acceptance of the 'other'?

A concept of God becomes an idol.

-----Gregory of Nyssa

God is a percept, the world is a concept.

-----Ibn Arabi

Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.

Idolatory is to hold on to immanence without the sense of transcendence.

Wonder,
a garden among the flames!

My heart can take on
any form:
a meadow for gazelles,
a cloister for monks.

For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrims,
the tables of the Torah,
the scrolls of the Qur'an

My creed is love;
wherever the caravan turns along the way
that is my belief,
my faith.

-----Ibn Arabi

The Death of Christ

The following is taken from Kristeva's 'Black Sun' and 'In Our Time', Radio 4)

"Some may lose their faith":

How to realistically depict, to 'faithfully' represent what is always eluding presence, namely:death. But this is not just a question or artistic style ; is death just a natural phenomenon amongst other phenomena, and, more importantly, what of the death of him whose meaning lies in the supernatural, in the overcoming of death, the world, and time?

In this picture there is no sense of transcendence, no hand that stretches out to us, just an accepting of the power of death to silence life with equananmity.

In most depictions Christ is surrounded by others and in this way is related to the world again through grief and hope, expectation. Here beauty "negates pain" and this is pre-figured in the Redeemer's prior intuition of the suffering to come...but one must not think of "knowledge" as being fundamentally different from "love" at this level. But here he is utterly alone, a stranger in the world. Is this too our ultimate reality?

Beauty, art, as a form of consolation. But compared to the lived experience of the consolation of religion isn't art a "dead letter"?

Holbein's Christ is " inaccessible, distant, without a beyond", a closed space, without any "height", 'verticality'. To show death in all of its starkness, as a human fact amongst others leads us to ask whether we accept all of life as essentially finite, a play of forms, haunted by its own impermanence, or do we make a "leap of faith" . Death is the boundary that clearly delineates these options; it is as if there is an absolute severance between the two realms, the sun is infinitely distant and its withdrawl leaves the world utterly cold, dead. Does the painting mark the beginning of the gnostic age?

At the limit of humanity one is forced to question all that is not-human; and this can only be the horror of the abyss (' formadibilis abysis') or the beatific vision. Holbein's depiction of this caesura that is death, his equating it with the most ordinary of events, draws us into thinking about the extra-ordinary. As if redemption were only possible if were to become aware of our own 'brokenness', our alienation from the world and from others..for Augustine the true horror would be that we gloss over this gap with false illusions and satisfactions...we simply do not know what we lack, that we lack; we are full of ourselves and imagine ourselves as self-sufficient.

Is Holbein's message a spiritual one? By imagining death is he saying that we should incorporate it in our daily life? Although we live in its shadow, by forcing our attention, our gaze, to it, are we not thus learning to "die before one dies"?

Sign of the times:

The cold winds of the Protestant Reformation touch even the most sanguine of minds. Those stern implacable faces signal a return to the solid world of reality, nature, and simple truths far removed from theological speculation, to sobriety and restraint; a pragmatic spirit that will busy itself in ordering, organizing, and classifying the world in its minutiae. All truth resides in the here-below, in the history that we make; we cannot know anything of the beyond....this is quickly followed by the devaluing of anything that suggests transcendence: for modern man death is the ultimate problem.

From this emerges a humanistic response-not the affirmation of another "good" but the serene acceptance of death "not as a condition for glory or the consequence of a sinful nature" but as our essential desacralized reality-a reality which is the foundation of a new stoical, human dignity. The dignity of a life without Redemption, one that is not structured by what it "is not", a civilisation that gives up on seeing life as a waiting for the right time, and one that reverses the whole assigning of value to an 'elsewhere'.

This is not , perhaps, an iconoclasm or a 'demythologization' that wants to come face to face with a truth that is not clothed by myth, history, time and one that is, therefore, in the service of religion; this is, rather, the beginning of the horizontal leveling of the times, of Time, of the Spirit.

There is a dignity in the very attempt to represent the ending of desire (for religion, values, everlasting life). Is this the moment when the modern soul recognizes that it is only a body and how does one re-present that which is on the verge of disappearing from sight: death?

But is not the message of Christ also the ending of, the death of desire?

Mors ultima linea rerum

To paint the bare minimum is to be on the verge of indifference to the world; the Puritan retreats to his inner world; the melancholic stands "aloof...a devotee of disenchanted non-pressure [de-pression]...a technician's amoralism" . For the painter of modern life the question becomes how to paint disenchantment?

In the face of a loss of meaning, values, a symbolic order, separation, and emptiness one can turn to despair or one can attempt to mirror the indifference of the cosmos. But the history of mankind shows that such stoicism is not possible and that the intoxication of our sensations and passions usually go hand in hand with an utter indifference to the world; infact, this insatiable desire derives from boredom, just as the pangs of escapism are more acutely felt in a world that has been leveled down. Restlessness and uniformity are inextricably linked. Modern man is caught in a flux between the desire for the most severe order and the most unrestrained spontaneity (and this tension is part of the legacy of the Protestant ethic and perhaps the northern soul: to be all or nothing...perfect humility or the superman).

Technology merely prolongs and extends what has already become a possibility at the level of ideas: the materialistic monism that holds that we are and the universe are essentially matter. This leads to the most terrible claustrohopbia (was colonialism, space travel, the attempt to find an open space, a primal arcadian alterity that transcends the familiar, an escape from bourgeois dullness?). Demonic restlessness since the will is all that there is, the only sign of life, if not intelligence, against the sign of death. The craving for endless sensation, experience. forgetfulness...is this not a sign of our desperation?

If the universe will not be transformed, redeemed, if death is inevitable then indifference to it rapidly shifts from a balanced and calm detachment to existential angst and back again. If there is only death then why act at all? Joy in contingency or nihilism seem to be the only logical conclusions. One must make oneself an artist...the aesthticization of life the only way of enduring sovereign becoming.

"Not knowing or able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves....taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge their, exploring them like large unknown territories."
(Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet')

But the death gives life and is not discontinuity pure and simple; it is a death but only the death of death itself. Death,mortality, which is the essential definiton of our humanity, would in this sense only signify a temprary break in the bond between Christ and the Father (and therefore between us and God); it is precisely at the point of perfect horizontality, the limit of humanity, that the divine appears. Is that not the meaning of the cross?

The great danger seems in extending this point, this moment, to all instants. for what can follow from this is a devaluing of the world...one must be dead to it...the world is only so much dead matter; in such a radical picture the world is either everything or it is nothing: positivism and blind faith are distant cousins...what would it mean to prolong such an attitude or orientation? Is this the 'la' of the muslims?

But such splittings, 'deaths' are, it is argued, part of our necessary make up; the continuation and individation of our lives as well as our growth and advancement rest on the ability to separate ourselves from former lives: birth, childhood, objects we are attracted to. If the religious spirit is, like art, whole-making, consoling, a re-presentation of what is lost, is it not also iconoclastic? Religion as a broken circle? We must learn to give up what we deisre...desire for objects (life) or our attachment to them (it)?

Redemption Songs

Ga'al: Redemption: to free by purchasing back people that have become alien property...to bring out of slavery. Repurchase. To pay back a bond.

Religio: a debt.
yawm-a-din: the Day of Judgement..or when the debts are paid back.

Life is a gift which has to be paid back.


Redemption is the end of a story, when the whole world, nature itself, is redeemed and harmony re-established...a static vision of perfection.

The very structue of life is one of mimetic desire;our very subjectivity is constituted by it; we copy eachother, repeat ourselves. But this necessarily leads to conflict, competition, and anxiety as we desire the same object. Whence the need for a scapegoat (escape goat)...a way of transferring, arbitrarily projecting guilt. A form of catharsis enuses from this ritual cleansing; the establishing of a new beginning and a return to innocence are deeply embedded in our lives. The origin is always the centre of perfection from which we fall.

Christianity is a self-willing sacrifice that ends the chain of sacrifices and victimization; by doing so he reveals the old order of relations and by doing so destroys them. The world, nature, which is alienated, "wounded" is reconciled. We are alientated from God and the very ground of our being. Augustine: is freedom possible, is there a "natural" way out or do we need grace to realise the gravity of our situation? The earliest art-Daniel and the Lion-in the catacombs, cut off from the world of light and public rituals suggests such a transformation, a moral experience that is the starting anew, a wiping away of the slate.

For Redemption to mean anything we, and the world, must be in a fallen state. The ray of hope that is Redemption can only shine if the world is sunk in darkness, if at the very core of our lives -and not contingently-there is a deep pessimism. Faith is destroyed by indifference. By banishing evil have we laso eliminated the possibility of salvation? If we chose to forget death what value can eternal life have? Holbein's picture points to such an indifference, neutrality, horizontality.

The Enlightenment will also try and return to innocence but it has a diffciulty: if man is essentially good, where did evil come from?

But we cannot live with such a lukewarm view of things; neutrality generates or degenerates into all sorts of secular redemption narratives.

At the heart of them is the existential picture: man faced with is own nothingness, always ready to heroically re-create himself, to re-fashion himself. A radical awareness of nothingness, that nothing is given and that nothing persists..when Redemption comes to ful-fill....

Secular redemptions also come to end the story or offer some sort of consolation; they aim to resolve or nullify conflicts and tensions.

Darwinism: the pessimistic acceptance of what "is"; conflict and striving are inherent in the human condition and if so many of the weaker fall by the wayside then that should not trouble us since it is only part of the larger scheme of things. This narrows the distance betwen what"is" and what"ought" to be. Redemption in this sense is an acceptance of radical contingency..a story that ends all other stories.

Marxism/Socialism: a move beyond the curse of labour and wants. Utopia is a re-linking , a re-establishing of 'plenty'..a return to the promised land and freedom from slavery. Revolutionary hope: escape from strife and move to the end of history (and politics); the proletariat is the redeemer of the whole of mankind.

Consumerism: the satiation of desire. A type of fulmilment, gratifiation(but of which self?) If we are defined by what we are not, then might this not be a way out (especially if the distinction betwen reality and apperance, "lower" and "higher" pleasures is now less distinct?)

The problem with desire was that it was laways closely aligned with imagination and, therefore, with infinity. By objectifying desire in tangible goods one could thereby delimit the boundaries of desire. But is this not just a substituition of an endles stream of goods for a boundless, ever-expanding desire? Might not the secret allure of consumerism be that it doesn't , infact, offer, a final redemption?

Freud: the unlocking of tensions/conflict. Redemption must start out with a dark picture of humanity: perversion. But the resolution is only an awareness of this intractable part of our nature and the desire for perfect resolution is itself a symptom of the problem.

So, secular redemptions all (except Marxism) seem to point to a false infinity; our redemption rests in understanding that there is no redemption...that we must give up the curse of looking for meaning; all seem to be tainted by the idea that nothing lasts, by death, precisely. Only the marxists with their utopias really believe that time can be redeemed...and they're all dead.

Religious redemption, in contrast, is rooted in hope, it identifies itself with it. Ours is an age that lives without the sense of transcendence and is truly nailed to the cross where there is only death and discontinuity or dissolution.

For us, like Holbein, is art the only refuge? If so, " Redemption would simply be the discipline of a rigorous technique."

Making Nothing Happen

How to represent that which cannot be represented (a black square: Malevich, an empty space?)?

The visible must always point to the invisible, just as music holds on to silence in its very heart....

How does the word become life? Is Revelation, a 'sending down' , not also a ladder back up? Creation, an image, is a separation and will, therefore, always point to transcendence, to what "is not", but it is also, at the very same time, not nothing, but precisely an image of that reality.

The modern is a search for a space that could contest, oppose, stand in complete alterity to bourgeois hegemony. But it is, itself, enmeshed in it via representation. ....a "preparing the ground for the ruthless incorporation of marginal and underdeveloped states." [the irrational, the rebel, become commoditised].

This is a colonisation of the marginal, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled...a way of disciplining fluidity, rage, of immobolizing energy; to domesticate the 'other', to bring all understanding back to one's own system of self-understanding.

The contradiction of capitalism: capitalism requires an open space, a frontier, one that can supply raw materials and buy its goods; the modern is nothing but this setting up of heirarchies and distinctions.this is the first stage of colonialism, of 'solid modernity', of Protestant 'sobriety' and discipline...modernity as the control of space. But this gives way to the other dimension of capitalism: the need to transform labour into a proletariat and with this will come the most decisive changes: the incorporation of the 'other' into one's midst, the eradication of all boundaries (cultural, political, economic); late modernity is about transgression, equality, a constant making and re-making of oneself, 'liquid modernity'...the 'divine recklessness' of Protestantism.

The world in the image of New York: when time has conquered space then only a singular undifferentiated space remains, a grid , a set of relations; power is diffuse, the centre does not hold and "periphery" and "centre" are interchangeable (this is an image of a religious concept: God is a centre that is everywhere and whose perimeter is nowhere..the modern world could only come on the back of a number of theological insurrections and inversions); the very concept of "limit" loses much of its meaning. In the Empire every man is 'King' and pushpin is as good as poetry...it is the empire of signs and universal equivalence.

More than anything: labour, life, process, are introduced into the public realm (where they will eventually devour it); all that is solid melts into air; from now on it will be time, and those who control her, that hold the power..."time is everything, Man is nothing" (Marx). Art must, in this sense, aspire to transience, to its own wilful destruction for how can art which is 'space' , flatness, the 'timeless', 'presence' , depict movement, life itself? How can it re-present that which eludes it? Is not all pictorial art a "freezing of the music"?

Klee:

The organizing powers have come to need a more convincing account of the bodily, the sensual, the liberated, in order to extend-maybe to perfect-thier colonization of everyday life..."

Collective actions, ritual gestures, shared images of authority, a common symbolic order, jostle uneasily with the needs of individual spontaneity, freedom. How to abstract from the world-this world, any world? How to rekindle that divine spark in this cold universe? The modern turns inwards, the Kingdom lies within...the letter killeth...

But this "second turning inwards" that starts with Descartes is riddled with problems; can there be meaning or understanding that is not social? Can there be a private language?

The disruption of the collective world, 'the given', will allow the world to flow again. Modernity is nothing but the re-discovery of the infinite, of Nature not as 'essence' but as becoming; it is a turning away from the cosmos, a search for 'outer' space....modernity must construct itself as an endless series of images and who is to say if one image in the spectacle is any more real than another? All that matters is the process, the constant breaking up of images (this is the 'nomadic' element in late capitalism); velocity: to leave the social world behind...when one wants process AND judgement.

Modernity, by losing 'the other,' loses the creative tension that has sustained it; appearance ceases to be appearance once the reality behind it is overthrown.

The Unhappy Consciousness.

modernity: the tagic confrontation of self-sameness, the absolute, the unchangeable, the timeless, and the undivided self, order, light, harmony, proportion, "sight", the static with contingency, the fragmentary, music, transience, the dynamic, dissonance, aporia, the endless whirl of difference.One wants to see the stars and feel them, to discover a pattern to life, but also to disrupt uniformities, sameness. ....hide and seek, lost and found. We need mortal thoughts, a timely way of knowing, truth that is incarnated in the body and not just the mind...the word must become flesh....

The "unhappy consciousness" is unable to accept this two-foldedness is its unity; we strive for purity and eternity and detachment or for to be a thing amongst other things that come and pass (essence vs existence, realism vs nominalism); to be or no to be when to be and not to be is closer. Man is suspended between being and nothingness, a donkey with angel's wings; we can never reach nothingness or the divine. Man, the barzakh, is this great amphibious being.

Because of this radical undecidedness he sides with, identifies himself, with the changeable consciousness but he cannot follow negation to its logical end; contingency only derives meaning against the background of an essential nature, difference against sameness, distinction against unity; time against the timeless; that we are finite, that we can think of ourselves as so, only has meaning if there is the infinite..it is the infinite that is placed in us that allows us to think in the first place (Descartes)..I am, therefore I think.

Jackson Pollock: the line doesn't represent objects or delimit a space, not the "binding" of reality or structure but "pure, disembodied energy." This is modernism's worldlessness. Endless difference, American unbound, improvisation as the quintessential american art, Bergson's "pure duration", endless sensation and desire. This is not, perhaps, unrelated to teh growth of capitalism: man defined as having finite resources but infinite wants, happiness as the search for an end that has no end, that is always just out of reach: non-satiation.

Marks, traces that are not to be read as making a subject, but rather as texture of interrruptions, gaps, zig-zags, a-rhythms, and incorrectnesses...the absence of a contiunous psyche from start to finish.

Pollock: " a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion"...a way of divesting oneself of the "I", a form of escape, renunciation, to show something that has a likeness to nothing...a way of being "in" the world so that one does not know one is in it; to be musical, precisely: one is immersed in feeling and there is no confronting 'other' ...Malevich again: the desert.

The attempt, the paradoxical striving to realise the un-formed; to be unfounded, un-found...the desire for openness and a wilderness that is not constrained by forms but in the paintings, is not openness to like emptiness, and might not freedom be too much like confinement, a compulsion?

"something which cannot be recognized as part of the universe is made to represent the universe." Interlacement and interminling negates "belonging of things in the picture to any one conceptual space- to any one part of the world or imagining of Nature.

Everything is connected to everything else.

But once we make a mark can we ever escape metaphor?

Discontinuity, aimlessness, abrupt reversals, dissonance,...do not lead to endlessness or their own dissolution; instead, dissonance is the truth of Harmony. Harmony is unattainable.

To cancel Totality by the criss-cross of meanings.

Old Age

I rush by, coffee in one hand, a list of books in the other; a thousand images (people?) whirl past me and my head is heavy with thoughts...why did Odysseus refuse immortality, is this a metropolis of the ethical vacuum, would it have been beter to gamble all and lost, than to have never ventured anything in the first place....

I see an old man walking ...each step an achievement, a huge expending of energy and effort: two steps forward, one step back; the curve of his back a near-perfect semi-circle, as if he were bowing before a king, in absolute isolation, alone in the universe, alone before the Alone. To focus one's attention on a single detail of his being is obscene: I must move to the universal....

I see many such old people, stumbling, shuffling through the streets, caught in their own time, their own familiar pace of things; the world passes them by, the world has passed them by. I wonder if people think the same when they see me. Close to death, they have already disappeared, are in the process of disappearing. Only they know what it is to "die before one dies". We turn our faces, avert our gaze, we must expunge these grim reminders of our mortality from our thoughts. To "think", to approach the calm seas of the universal, is a way of doing so.

Life only seems bearable to me when one succeeds in avoiding it.

But ethics must be more than an attention to particularities and contingency and less than a timeless thought; a spontaneous gesture is neither 'thought' nor 'action'... I slow down, just enough so that he doesn't think that everyone is rushing past him....he looks up and I see the piercing blue of his eyes. He smiles like a child. If old age is the closing of the circle then it meets its origin again, and that is pure innocence. I see that goodness is fragile, like a blue flower, like old age....

Thought: to describe the world from the outside-coldly, factually, mechanically, transcendantally. Or the bare details of a life, the essentials, historical being; the "person" is the cross where these intersect, he is the space and time where "beauty" and "idea" mix...

Not soon, as late as the
Approach of my ninetieth year
I felt a door opening in me
And I entered

the clarity of early morning...

Moments from yesterday
and from centuries ago,
A sword blow, the painting of eyeleashes before a mirror
of polished metal, alethal musket shot, a caravel
Saving its hull against a reef-they dwell in us
Waiting for fulfillment.

We are not angels; this is the blessing and the burden of mortality. And perhaps we should note that it is the immortals who are always "falling" in love with the mortals ( which is to say: the desire to fall into time) while it is we who hold back our hand when the golden cup of immortality is offered to us...

Let me run, let me run, and never find
(Shah Latif)

Acceptance of the ineviability of the cards that fate has dealt one is compatible with the most terrible sense of regret for the fact that things had to be the way they are; in fact, to consider the former is to have only an outward understanding of time; the human angle, which encompasses both, is of a higher order.

pigeon

Please do not feed
the pigeons.
They are a health hazard
and a nuisance.

I saw this sign, tucked away in the corner, at Acton town station. This is one of those places that is at the end of the world, and that is still populated by people in 1950's thick coats, old- world grimaces, and one that is permanently bathed in sunshine, as if it was always a sunday afternoon there. It is better to not stop there but quickly pass through, convincing yourself that such places do not really exist...

That someone should say "please" only confirms that this is England. Note: it is not "do not"...not a command but neither a request; a thousand years of Englsih tradition are summarised in those words: the law is binding but it is a tradition, a set of customs and precedents and common sense behaviour, not a directive nor a moral imperative.

What troubles her, though, is the use of the words "they are"; this has the ring of metaphysical certainty about it. Can one be so sure that ALL pigeons are a nuisance or is it only these ones that have reached the end of the line, the retrogrades that have escaped the centre? It is as if one wanted to define the very essnce of pigeonhood in terms of this one characteristic (and let us not forget that they may have many other traits as well). surely it would have been better to say : "they may be a nuisance"?

I imagine an elderly Benthamite figure sitting there, calculating the exact costs and benefits of allowing the pigeons their freedom; one has to weigh this against the "nuisance value" they impose on us humans; the problem of making inter-personal comparisons of utility fade before the inter-species one!

My attention turns elsewhere. I see my shadow clearly outlined against the brilliant light; with my black hat and long coat the shadow comes to resemble a chess piece or a Russian priest against an infinite white landscape. Never have I seen myself so clearly as I did then....

Mystery Tramp

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition, and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definition. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form.
Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe the imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.
That entire philosophical and dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immaturity which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

(Gombrowicz).

Apollo and Dionysus, Cain and Abel, Athens and Jerusalem.

The msytery tramp, the bohemian in a no-man's land, the great upland traveler, seeking that sweet golden clime...intoxicated by the stangeness of the world, knowing that the stars are windows to other worlds; that there are doors beind these doors of perception.

Beneath our official selves, beyond the adult, rational, social , respectable world of appearances there lurked immaturity, irrationality, anarchy which occasionally comes to the surface, jostling for space, nudging to one side the dry bones of conformity, questioning the authenticity of customs, beliefs, culture, ideology, continuity, the past.

The last iconoclast. Intoxication, when most people are intoxicated by themselves. Walking under the open skies, refusing system, or being conformed to the world. Walking , to dissolve previous selves, to loosen up his being. Walking to exhaustion, until one has worn down one's soul, caught a glimmer of a different state of consciousness.

The wild man has always fascinated civilisation. Undomesticated, outside the borders of the known world, he is the stranger par excellence...the refugee, the escape artist. Stateless, he passes through all places as if they were bridges. Fate is a direction , a story to be written on a blank sheet of paper or, even better, sung; the ink is not dry.

He tarries near rivers and streams because these remind him of the promise of the sea, of far away destinations. The desire to be elsewhere is overtaken by the desire to not be. Let the lights go out in the dusk. And what of it if no-one knows who I am? Contempt for the solidities of the world is followed by a love for them, just as affirmation must follow negation.

To be committed..to what? To not being committed? To the deep blue sea rather than the tired earth? To the fantastical and the improbable, not to pin one's hopes on the final resolution of problems. A solution is only another problem. Must one reject seriousness, and the wisdom of the ancients, the men in hats and "sustained joy". Profane illumination lasts but a moment, like the fireflie's.

An overturner and a re-mapper of settled geographies, and genalogies. He thus lends himself especially to rereading in different contexts, since his work is all about how life history offers itself by recollection, research and reflection to endless structuring and restructuring in both the individual and collective sense.

This disruption of stable patterns, the fixed image, 'identity', is a 'sound thought', a nomadic thought. It is late in the day, the world is settling down into its place, like a cloak falling to the floor. Perhaps one can summarise a life in a single gesture, perhaps a final flourish will make things clearer and the pieces will finally make sense. But only maybe.

The late work: Not the final notes of evening, the summing up one's finest and deepest thoughts ; nor the completion, the circumscribing of reality in a coherent picture, a settling of
accounts or a grand attempt to bring all that had gone before into some sort of resolution, harmony. Not to be concerned about the timeless or the withering gaze of time. Instead, a return to long forgotten and displaced motifs and themes; a turn to new openings and fresh insights, the charting of unbounded territory, a mind that still delights in ambivalence, contradtiction, indeterminancy...a soul that is still in love with the fire of the world....

There are no final moments; each moment is a final moment.

He passes whole towns and cities and even though they be built of gold and silver, for him they remain ephemeral, dream-like..more so, the inhabitants. The city of quartz is a sparkling illusion, behind its thousand diamond facets is a world that crystalises and then splinters, fragmenting his vision. Theirs is the never-ending world of authority, of tireless boredom, a repetitive, monotonous life. The great winding down of our thoughts, the sapping of energies, until they become but marionettes, de-void of the capacity to imagine anything new. They live exclusively "in" time whilst he gives no thought for the 'morrow.

What we do and think is filled with the beings [ruins] of our fathers and ancestors.
Childhood, on the other hand, is a time without flight, an "I" without death. But man, the great mid-point , the 'barzakh', the intermediary, falls and becomes time; each action, each thought , now occurs at the intersection of the "past" and the "future"; the stones, the sea, the trees: these are our past, we their future; by our very nature we are restless. Each birth opens up a new universe, but so does each death... each gesture changes the meaning of all previous gestures, each name the significance of those that have passed, those that will come.

The city closes in on him. The frontier has moved inwards. He sees the desert in her eyes, the wilderness in his heart. He becomes sceptical of scepticism itself since it is nothing more than a settled position, something to be subverted. Without totally abandoning his naivete he becomes modern, understanding that to be so is to live without the absolute; there is no completion, and his 'house' must always be without a roof (like Terminus). But the whole earth is a mosque.

How to escape oneself....one...self? The tramp is a jester , a trickster, because he mistrusts the stabilised world, the establishment, the "iron laws of symmetry", and convention, codes, the cold congealing of assumptions and self-evident axioms, decorums and familial pieties, class and social hierarchies. More than anything he floats through life, undoing, uncreating himself. Meaning, the ancient curse, must be abandoned. Maybe. He follows and scatters clues that lead nowhere and even destiny cannot read this anomaly.

He tramps the landscape because he knows that it will fashion, from its infinite potentialities, his beloved....somewhere. He reads its lines like one would a face, searching for fate. But one should not look too closely for the signs.

We have no tolerance for the undifferentiated fact, bare reality, pure sensation, the moment we confront chaos- which is to say raw uniterpreted reality-we look for signs of order, pattern, meaning. Look up at the cracks in a ceiling for what may or may not be a sign, a portent, saying to ourselves "maybe it is an arrow, mayb..,maybe not". Pursue some or all of the possible signs and you may find yourself the dupe of a cosmic joke. Think about the possibilities on offer..you will feel oppressed , overwhelmed by the way meanings turn out to be misleading or irrelevant.

Form and finish are to be avoided-even though they provide a temporary shelter against randomness, chance, and chaos. They are a violation of our nature which is radically open..the open road of our future is a frontier with wide empty spaces. The tyranny of form, the dizzying array of formal boundaries,..even to confirm that we are "free", "spontaneous", "authentic", we subordiante ourselves to the language and thought of society. These deviations from the norm are predictable, even desirable for modernity which relies on a radical transformation , melting away of anything that is 'solid'.

We must be more and less than we are. The mystery tramp negates any sense of formal identity, ridicules it. Fissures in his character are nothing...nothing compared to agape, agape. Consistency is a virtue of small minds and his thoughts, like a poet's, ramble on, without any direction or goal. Digreession and sudden irruptions of insight, wild improvisation is his inscrutable way. In this, the wild vagrant will give up the ghost of rural tramping and step into the jazz age...

A life that is unpredictable, unmechanical, discontinuous with anything that has gone before, surreal, a life dedicated to improvisation. Nothing is 'given', we are what we make of ourselves and no-one could see that this idea of freedom would lead to the most terrible nihilism, to a garrulous but vacuous and endless posturing...a finite self with infinite desires. The dream of unbound freedom, the smashing of the old world's constraints has, quite remarkably, led to the most rigorous compulsions. As if the self, the vagabond mentality, is now a slave of its own desires.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1370298,00.html

The de-sacralization, de-mythologisation of the world can be achieved, not through philosophical discourse, but via ridicule and laughter. The order of the world can be inverted, turned inside out with the aid of the carnivalesque, the cabaret, and mocking irony.

They speak an urban language of simultaneous sensations and speed, of anonymity and masquerade, of gendebending and transience, of exuberant pleasure mixed with anxiety..faint threat haunting wicked joy. The threat is of totalitarian order, mechanism, but also of the inevitable, rapid passage of all things, including love. Through stupidity and innocence and naivete, one could oppose the violence of the world, un-write the necessities it imposes on us. Might not the seductive allurement of entertainment, decadence, frivolity, lightness, be an antidote to the really dangerous dreams that fascinate manking and hold him spell-bound, those of the solid world: money, power, ideology, distinctions, binaries, hierarchies, and its constructs of mythical moral purity, a paradisal language, uncorrupted time?