Responsibility

Me. You.

------The world's shortest poem, Muhamad Ali.


Company is indispensable for the thinker.

-----Reflexionen zur Anthropolgie, Kant.

One is dismayed to hear an American say: this person's net worth is such and such. I think this goes hand in hand with an utter contempt for idleness-one that no doubt derives from a tortured Protestant ethic (E.P.Thompson). Scroungers and "losers"..why can't they simply stop moping around and pull themselves together. Man, they're nearly as lazy as them darned Redskins. Why should my tax dollars be wasted on something from which I derive little or no benefit. (In a similar vein, Goodhart writes about how it's possible the welfare state will come under increasing strain as people are less and less willing to contribute to it when the major beneficiaries are not like them (which is shorthand for: black, Muslim, or simply non-white). The fragility of the idea of human rights (as opposed to the rights of the citizen) is exposed here. But it was exploded much earlier on...one must truly ask if it is possible to talk of humanity and responsibility after Auschwitz.

The underlying idea of what man is in today's world is, quite simply, that of a knave. Rational, autonomous, self-interested individuals who apparently mature into thinking beings without any help from society or her norms, without a shared language or culture. Descartes as the exemplar: the isolated thinker. Market society as its embodiment at the macro level: the needs of strangers. The Russians would say, on the other hand: we are, therefore I can think.

The question of responsibility becomes a meaningless one. Am I my Brother's Keeper? Depends on what I get out of it. Always and invariably the same response: Me, myself and I. And so, it is little surprise that there is so much confusion when it comes to Iraq. It is desperately sad to hear people talk about bringing our troops back, about the cost in human lives to our boys, to our reputation. Perish the thought that we should be responsible for the carnage. Nope, must be those Sunni triangles and Shia crescents!

He who plays the angel ends up playing the Beast.

Truth-that of nature or the divine-always works in circles, but human truth is a broken circle. Often rounded, always open. At the level of the individual this implies an aspiration not to close the circle, for to do so would be the closing of the heart. Can there be a deepening without being "broken"? At the political level this is an image of what pluralism is like, with contesting and competing opinions and viewpoints. Like Matisse: to see the same thing from different angles. To hear more than one voice requires an attentiveness that transcends the monologue of the individual. The truth, or a politics based on it, faces the danger of descending into totalitarianism, whereas a liberal politics must always allow for the possibility of the unforeseen, for the very space of the possible and new beginnings. Here the 'I' is not really itself without the appearance of the world, without the presence of the other. In another sense, one might say that the self is not a self without the gaze of the beloved.

A consumers' society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearance, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.

Reality

The more I talk to ordinary people here the more I think this place is going to go up in flames. Well, let's see. At the moment I remain convinced that there's more to be said for actually living a life than pursuing the theoretical one I've become immersed in once again (of course, both are infinitely preferable to the vacuousness of the bourgeoisie).

Last week I went to someone's house and met one of the typical Lahori "aunties"; when asked if she made all the food herself she said, "Well, yes, to the extent that I was in the kitchen" (ordering the cooks, no doubt!)

Talked to the driver. Wanted to know what life was like back in the villages. Awful, he said. There's no life there. All life is in the city.

"But what's the difference ?"

"Over there one person works and ten live off him. Over here ten work and one lives off him."

"What else?"

"Here people need money to survive. There, we all survive because we have are own wheat. Without money people here are nothing". (I thought of Marx: Time is everything, Man is nothing)

"Will you ever go back?"

No, the city stinks and the more you have the more worried you become but, but.."

"But what?"

"But I'm a human being " (with those words he grinned and held his hands out so that the palms were faced upwards..as if the very word 'insaan' (human ) necessitated an opening up). "Who doesn't want things". But then he laughs, everyone here is a crook..who is to say that if I have things I won't become like them".

Now he was warming to this theme of city/village.

"Yes, and another difference, I nearly forgot. If city people have a lot of money they feel restless in their soul and want to go somewhere or do things they haven't before. But we, we villagers, if we have lots of money we want to do nothing but sit at home. Yes, that is all we dream of doing."

"Why?"

"So we can sit with our parents."

"What about your friends?"

"What friends can poor people have? Whoever is with you for the moment is your friend. Today it is someone , tomorrow it is someone else. We are like birds, free."

Ping-Ponge

The sound of a light bulb's heart breaking: ping

'Profiting from the reciprocal distance which prevents coasts from linking up with each other except via the sea or by torturous twists and turns, the sea allows every shore to believe that it is heading towards it in particular. In reality, the sea is courteous with all of them, actually more than courteous: it can show maximum enthusiasm and successive passions for each shore, keeping in its basin an infinite store of currents. It only ever marginally exceeds its own limits, it imposes its own restraint on its waves, and like the jelly-fish it leaves for fishermen as a miniature image or sample of itself, it does nothing but ecstatically prostrate itself before all its shores.'

On trees:

They have no gestures: they simply multiply their arms, hands, fingers-like a Buddha. And in this way, doing nothing, they get to the bottom of their thoughts. They hide nothing from themselves, they cannot harbour a secret idea, they open out entirely, honestly, and without any restrictions. Doing nothing else, they spend all their time complicating their own shape, perfecting their own bodies towards greater complexity for analysis...Animate beings express themselves orally, or with mimetic gestures, which however instantly disappear. But the vegetable world expresses itself in a written form that is indelible. It has no way of going back, it is impossible have a change of mind: in order to correct something, the only thing it can do is to add . Like taking a text that has been written and already published and correcting it through a series of appendices, and so on. But one has to say that plants do not ramify ad infinitum . Each one of them has a limit.

Calvino:

'But what counts more is ..the proportion between the shell and its mollusc inhabitant, as opposed to the disproportion of man's monuments and palaces. This is the example the snail sets us by producing its own shell' : What their work consists of does not involve anything that is extraneous to them , to their necessities or their needs. Nothing that is disproportionate to their physical being. Nothing that is not essential and necessary for them. Saintly in their precise obedience to their own nature. Know yourself, then, first of all. And accept yourself as you are. Along with your flaws. In proportion with your own measure.'

---citations from Francis Ponge in Italo Calvino's 'Why Read the Classics'

'Kings do not touch doors.They do not know that happiness: to push before them with kindness or rudeness one of these great familiar panels, to turn around towards it to put it back in place - to hold it in one's arms.... The happiness of grabbing by the porcelain knot of its belly one of these huge single obstacles; this quick grappling by which, for a moment, progress is hindered, as the eye opens and the entire body fits into its new environment.With a friendly hand he holds it a while longer before pushing it back decidedly thus shutting himself in - of which, he, by the click of the powerful and well-oiled spring, is pleasantly assured.'

----courtesy of C.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

Here, too, there are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart.

---Virgil.

Time is the great healer.
What if time is the wound?

----Wings of Desire.

Met my old aunt over the weekend, the last living link, perhaps, to a bygone age. Fiercely intelligent and wonderfully, deeply sceptical of the mullahs. At 92 she tells it like it is-but I suspect she's always been like this. She's been old for as long as I've known her.

I remember someone saying to her (in the usual false-piety-sense) that in heaven wives would be reunited forever with their husbands. She put her hands to her ears and stuck out her tongue slightly: May God forgive you for uttering such words! No, son, don't say such things. And when I asked her what she thought of the maulvis a few years back she formed her arms to the shape of a machine gun and said this is what I would do: and she let them have it! In those days I would have said that this itself was an expression of an intensely religious sentiment..but now I don't even think that that matters. The human voice, human gestures, trumps all.
[Incidentally, Faisal asked me what the definition of a modern muslim was and I said: an atheist!].

She tells me the story of her own father, my grandfather, who was always mistaken for a Jew because he was so well dressed. Strangely, it's something that I warm to myself when some of my friends call me this. Apparently, he came up with some secret recipe that would help rectify poor vision. By morning there were huge lines outside his house as word spread of this miraculous potion. He gratefully accepted the 5 and 10 Rs notes since times were hard and business was down. He held the notes to the light. "What are you doing? she asked.

"Forthe life of me, I can't tell if these are five or ten Rs notes". His own eyesight was rapidly failing.

And then there were the stories of how his wife would badger him all day. The onslaught was relentless. But then, suddenly, something strange would happen, and there'd be silence throughout the house.
"What happened?" , she asked. " "Had she grown tender towards him at last?"

"No", he replied. It was only time for prayer. After that normal service was resumed!

She lives alone, her two sons abroad, sorely missed. But even here her pragmatism shines through: they had to go and have better lives all the more for doing so. Even if regret is transcended, it isn't abolished. Would we be truly human if it could be? Only fanatics and engineers think that it is both possible and desirable. One day she had a turn for the worse: she thinks to herself: now my time has come. She struggles to her feet and opens all the doors in the house (at least if I pass away someone will find my body). And then she lies down on her bed, waiting, waiting for the inevitable. An hour passes. And nothing. Then she laughs to herself, I'm so old not even death comes for me.

I imagine her saying -and here I use the Dougal's words, whom she most resembles in spirit-sod this for a lark.

We the People

The only real people I've met since coming back have been the rickshaw drivers and a cook at the cafeteria. I'm living here in a green zone, a bubble of artificiality -and I can hear my own voice becoming even more false than before. Of course, I don't have much time for criticizing the superficiality of the world (that is always with us, and always will be) but it must be said that it is slightly disconcerting when one doesn't recognize oneself. One also has to be on one's guard against a ridiculous romanticization of "the poor" , as one should be against a dreamy -eyed view of "tradition" or religion. In this regard the great Catholic writer, Gustauve Thibon, was right: villagers and peasants are as mean as anyone else.

Javi tells me a story of life in the rural areas. At first I think this a metaphor for all life there but he stresses that this is what he actually saw. He gave a quarter of his roti to a measly dog. The dog quickly snatched at it and turned his back on him. He then ran off to the stream and buried it close by. The dog then returned for more. I felt like saying, for fuck's sake, that dog's got more sense than most humans, but there is tremendous onus on not saying what one instinctively feels. Part of the old world sensibilities that dictates that one should know when and in what tone to speak. Such an approach to life is often quite charming but mostly I find it infuriating and tiresome. Old debate: must I say what I mean?

One of the drivers had painted his finger nail a deep red; half of his large toenail was also painted the same colour but the paint had faded somewhat (this is actually quite a common phenomenon). What I liked about him was that when I asked him about the ouster of Nawaz Shariff he said, what difference would that sister-fucker make to the poor people ('swearing' in the Punjab isn't really swearing). Now, he could have said , what difference would he make to 'us poor people' (which would be picturing himself too much as a victim) or he could have said, what difference would he make to "the poor" (as if they were some sort of abstract entity..incidentally, this is why communists could never do well here: talking about ridiculous "concepts" like 'the bourgeoisie' or the 'capitalist class'). But instead he decided to say, the poor people (and that meant him, not me). The problem with "People" for western political theory is that it has at once been "the poor" and a universal construct, "the people" (as in: every person or citizen..whether one can be a person without being a citizen is something that is also not clear: as Gitmo quite clearly indicates.

In any case, the simple phrase, "the poor people" means much more to me than theory.

On the way back another driver, a much simpler fellow, dropped me and the Dougal on the wrong side of a busy road so that we would have to make a dash for it, risking life and limb, in crossing it. Sensing this, the Dougal said, "okay, but if we die then you're responsible" Now, that would barely pass as a reasonable quip in most places, something that might bring half a smile to a taxi driver's face. But our driver was taken aback. To talk so freely about death just isn't on. He looked at us quizzically, "But why should you say such a thing" and then, becoming quite emotional, he said: "death to your enemies, they are the people who should die". Which was really quite a wonderful thing to say when you think about it (or, rather, the emotion behind the statement was)

Hroc, Grajo, 白嘴鴉

At night there is a wild darkness and shimmering lights stretch out into the distant horizon; I'm all at sea here. But when I wake up the whole landscape is transformed-as if I were living in two different worlds. A slow and heavy mist hangs around the trees-ankle length-and the fields lie sodden, like a medieval battleground before a battle. Large pools of water congeal, always at the same place. From a distance they look like mirrors, reflecting the splendour of the morning light. A few birds dart upwards and out of sight, others lazily make their way to a quieter part of the field. Everything at this holy hour is trying to write its name.

At 4 0'clock, the suicide hour, the shadows start to lengthen, scarring everything they touch. There's a terrible fatality about the place then. There's nothing more tragic than this fading sun. It wants to break. Crows start to congregate near mounds of grey sand, settling for death...

'Birds are following a set behaviour of pattern that has persisted for 10,000 years, ever since the last Ice Age. In fact, it seems likely that, before that time, for millions of years of their entire 150 million-year span on Earth, birds exploited seasonal abundances in this manner. With each fresh interglacial period, when the northern lands warmed sufficiently to host breeding birds, they reacquired the art and science of migration like some cosmic weaver on the great loom of time, picking a stitch and reworking it at 10,000 year intervals...


Corvids (include the Northern Raven) are the most intelligent, the first because they are the last. Magpie, Rook, Carrion-Crow and Northern Raven, Fire Crow ( Pyrrhocorax genus).

Rook's iridescence: 'The bird appears clothed in shining light-it is as if the feathers were polished like a mirror.'

16 th century, Ed Topsell: the white crow a kind of prodigy, an omen....'Yet as they spiralled overhead, it turned entirely at one with its neighbours, a freak bound into the wider mystery of their night-time evolutions, until the gloom enfolded them all...A carrion crow has a binding social attachment only to its mirror image, its partner..a fierce territoriality. Rooks, by contrast, live, feed, sleep, fly, display, roost, recreate, fall sick and die in the presence of their own kind. Their whole lives are enfolded in the flock, a collective pattern of their own image-a self -perpetuating inner universe of rook sounds and rook gestures that the birds carry with them..a continuous shared experience.'

'Store surplus as an insurance against hard times (eg. Eurasian Jay)Our Mesolithic ancestors were accustomed to place deceased relatives on the special excarnation platforms. Original home probably on the open plains of Eurasia.

'They open those dark eloquent wings like a great story book, conjuring the steppe landscapes and their numberless human hordes trekking forever westward-the Cimmerians?, the Scythians, Alans, Huns, Magyars, Bulgars and Mongols. Mingled with the rolling craa notes is the sound

The Time Machine

I don't care much for the times we live in.
----From 'the Time Machine'

The swami said, you know, despite everything, it's best to live in the time and place that was allotted to you. This span of the universe is yours, and had you not existed right here, right now, the universe would have been radically different, unrecognizable even.

She knows I am going. This is, perhaps, a subtle way of saying that I should stay put. I now know what Augustine felt like as he left Carthage.

I think over this for two days. Writing will not help, will not change reality. As I pack-half my life has been spent doing so-I only know that once again it is time to disrupt the settled ways.

Borderlands.

I look for the perfect end, which is to say: a repeat of the beginning. The 390, Gower Street, walk past Denmark street, cross at the same point, diagonally, Charring Cross. Border's. Fish sandwich, on brown, with grain mustard. Latte, paper cup, without having to ask for the holder; The New Yorker, NYRB, Harper's if it's in. Grey skies and drizzle. I don't get my usual seat but okay, I'm willing to make this concession. Over the years this routine, this place, has passed the test of time.

Now I must choose a book, at random, scour its texts and try and find some hidden meaning in it; towards the end this will become a frantic search, I know it, a search for a word, a turn of phrase that will resolve everything, put everything in perspective; I will scribble down something furiously and hope to decipher it later on, hoping that sparks will fly, dimly aware that I am only a clerk, a transcriber of other people's thoughts and that any quickness of mind is not mine; it will leap out at me from the pages, and then I will say to myself: what a co-incidence, how uncanny: Freud, you old devil.

But the truth doesn't work like that. Or if it does, then one has to be able to read its signs.

'Gold, silver, to gel-blaze the dark places.
Black has its own gleam. Pascal's
name is a blank to many people; so
also are yours and mine.
there must be unnamed stars but all are numbered
de profundis. Check these on the web
spun by their own light. And does such knowledge
firm up allegiance to the stoic heavens?

~~~~~~~~

The angular
sun on windows or windshields like swans
taking off and alighting..
Let me be, says the dying man, let me fall
upwards toward my roots.

~~~~~~~

For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard
admonitory sparse berries, attrubent
stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light:

for late distortions lodged by first mistakes;
for all departing, as our selves, from time;
for random justice held with things half-known,

with restitution if things come to that.

~~~~~~~

Something here even so. Our well dug-in
language pitches us as it finds-
I tell myself
don't wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense-
granted its dark places, the fabled burden;
its loops and extraordinary progressions;
its mere conundrums forms and rites of disclosure;
its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight;
its earthen genius auditing the spheres.

~~~~~~

..Whether the appearances, the astonishments,
stand in their own keepings finally
or are annulled through the changed measure of light
Imagination, freakish, dashing every way.
defers annulment.

~~~~~

dark moon's non existent seas

~~~~~

How strange you have to be to stay faithful.

~~~~~

[On suffering]

No courage can do more. There is a gap:
let us pass through it; the many voices-
of peasants and soldiers-are reinstated,
the pageants move, stooping, to hallow them.
Nothing tells this story of thee or another.

~~~~~

I grasp the possible
rightness of certain things
that possess the imagination, however briefly;
the verdict of their patterned randomness

~~~~

Now here's real alchemy-the gorse
on roadside terraces, bristling with static,
spectator of its own prime, inclement challenge

or salutation brusquely in place,
hermetic at full display and rallying,
as best becomes it, spicy orator.

~~~~~

There is a kind of sullenness that summer
alone possesses. It passes; will have passed:

not to speak of your heart, that rules and lies
in webs of heavy blood, a clobbering fetish.
Parables come to order; the hurt
is mortal though endurances remain,
as they have to, insufferably so;
hindsight and foresight stationed in their ways.

~~~~~

Durer's Eyes

The way in which we draw boundaries around things, how we define the limits, the periphery, tells us what we are, what is.

.

We need to set up and maintain all that is not-I, all that is of lesser value and reality. How we need those barbarians!

.

The depth of reason is only realised in the play against what it is not-unreason, madness, precisely. And the supra-rational?

.

Madness: A new rite of exclusion, an expression of the desire to set apart the impure, the corrupted-whether in body or mind...

.

Leonardo: he was interested in everything because he was interested in nothing..

.

Durer: Restless, nervous energy. Lacking all self-repose. A life on the edge of a precipice, and one that understands just how precarious this is; far too aware of itself, in fact, to be at peace.

.

It's comforting talking about madness-especially if one isn't mad oneself. The genius of the Romantics against the philistines; mountain people vs the plains.

.

The problem with mad people is that they look at the world too intensely. Searching for a pattern when they need to let go. How many of Europe's leading lights ended up crazy: Cantor, Nietzsche, Van Gogh...

.

To be small and stay small

.

"Assuredly there exists ..work of the kind one can do in a dream? I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese, that is to say, a person who dreams everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid."

From a Boat Trip:

.

"Odd similarity between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in and would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a storyteller as one person there..here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is this why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths?...

.

A girl sitting with us on the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end."

.

Wasler remains for the last 27 years of his life in an asylum; there is a black and white photograph..footprints in the snow lead to tall man lying with one arm thrown behind his head, for all the world as if his last gesture had been to toss off the hat that lies a few feet away.'

Connaught Place, Delhi

The intellectual joy of not belonging.
----Nietzsche.

The intellectual joy of belonging.
----b.

Watched the second half of the match at G's father's apartment. An old man who had recreated a part of Delhi in this leafy suburb of London. Musty, dank corridors and a slightly decaying exterior; plush interiors. The only way to live! He talked fondly of how Lahore was much better than Delhi and Bombay-but that was sixty, seventy years ago, when he was 16. He has no friends here and no family (apart from G). The only time his eyes light up, though, are when he talks of the coffee house back in Connaught Place. His dark eyes seem glazed over, as if they were fixed on a distant object..or a far away place.

By a strange co-incidence the swami has also heard of the coffee house.
"Why, I had cold coffee for the first time in my life there when I was 13, it was 1945; it was bitter and I nearly spat it out. But my uncle, a literary man, said (with a simple but withering glance of his eyes) that it would be terribly poor form to not drink it."

Of course, there was the old coffee house (and Pak tea house) back in Lahore. A place where vagabond penniless dissidents, writers, and intellectuals read poetry to one another. Habib Jalib was a regular:

This country, this country of unsurpassed beauty.
But yes, how ugly are its people!

----------

At Putney station, old but busy. There's more than a hint of winter in the air tonight. For the first time the warm yellow lights in other people's houses look comforting. Life returns to the interior. For the first time one wants to look inside other people's windows and wonder about how a totally different life to your own can carry on so close and yet so oblivious. Tonight, mothers will tell their children not to stay out too late. The enfolding darkness and the bleak buildings-never have they looked so devoid of light-remind one that reality-whether petty, dramatic or profound, is indoors. The sky is blacker than ever. The station lights come on with a ping and a flicker and there is an audible sigh of relief. (It's as if this was Blackpool!).

For a moment we're all sailors on the top deck. We're shipwrecked. The old man was right. Surround yourself. Keep it out. We strain our eyes, search and search in the dimming light. Is there a human soul out there?

----------

I'm lost in thought for some reason and remain silent for a long time. On the district line our train pulls into a station. I look across at another train that seems to be at a greater height than ours. Between its rusty wheels I see a shimmering arch of light. For a minute it appears as if there is another world beyond those lights and I'm nearly spirited away there. Then the train pulls away, revealing a plastic white light. So, this is reality! Don't look too hard at it.

---------

What I did hate, though, and what finally set me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term..without turning in my grades, was that the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core,-all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these mans promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs ...Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible-time freed, existential youth forever,. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth.

...Muslims, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.

----- Richard Ford, The Sportswriter.

At the End of the World (in other words: Woodford Library)

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 it should always be.
for
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

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:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

----C. Milosz

Woodford Library. 12:25.

C asks me to write from "wherever". This is as close as it gets. These are the type of places I always feel most at home; from searching for history books for my school projects, to the quiet, anonymous places like this one. They are like an oasis in a desert, a refuge from the "uniform of the times". And then there's the Punjab public library-a dusty, opaque place that, like the library in Eco's 'Name of the Rose' is full of mysterious unread books and ancient manuscripts. And 'Mecca', the British Library, whose exalted silence reverberates throughout the hallowed space. The great, monolithic bookcase at its centre, withstanding the dissolution of time. We are defined by what we escape from, but also by the place we call home, to where will always return, almost instinctively. Here, there is only the life of the mind, no religion, no ethnicity. Human, the way a cloud's a cloud.

From George Steiner:

The persistence, resilience of the idea of the timeless; the stability, the deep continuity in consciousness: our ability to express, communicate, gesture meaning-to see it in other cultures that stretch back in the mists of time: the language-animal. Are we entering a catastrophic break-not of a past but the past..the Trenches mark the end of communicable experience. The contract between word and world is coming to pass, expire. Technological changes are sweeping in a new metaphysics. An ontological nausea means that we are at the end of the world and we must bring an end to saying, meaning (Beckett). Only science counts..all else is 'non-sense'. The scepticism of Freud: do we say what we mean, do we mean what we say? What is left but the 'rag and bone shop of the heart'?

A young kid goes on a holiday with his friend, Paul, to the South of France. Only one returns, the other drowns.

'I don't believe Paul's death was the only thing that contributed to my breakdown but even now, thirty years later, images of that glorious summer day still come, clear and uninvited, into my mind, and I am standing on the beach-an 18 year-old with everything to live for-looking at death for the first time.'

A single moment can give shape to all others.

Jim Webber, 104, after working for 90 odd years has just stopped working as a gardener to spend more time on his own plot, so that he can grow red tomatoes.

'He has seen the ancient rhythm of farming life turn into a high-tech industry , and the village community disperse. And amidst all this dizzying change, one thing has been a constant: his garden. "Digging is good for the body and the soil". He plants trusty varieties such as 'Onward' for peas, 'Majestic' for potatoes, and 'Crimson Globe' for beetroot.'

When time is running out, stick with the familiar, with what you know.

But what do you know?

Meno:

'How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?'

Rebecca Solnit:

'The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This is the light that got lost..the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not reach us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is the colour blue.'

A Magical Orange Grove in a Nightmare

Sitting here writing this from a run down Barkingside Library. 20 min. to say something before being "timed out". Time is money! I'm going to miss these places, like Walthamstow library or the triste bungalows where old men with their sun-burnt, creased skin wear checked shirts with too many buttons undone and the silver-haired women still find meaning in discussing trivial things. [The grey men with double barreled chests work diligently in the bleached-out gardens, the wives, all seventies-like with their shades and flowery dresses fold napkins or leaf through glossy magazines, turning the pages with their index finger. This is how retirement was envisaged, a quiet winding down to the background of radio commentary and the occasional appearance of a bee to remind them of summers long past. But it's no good. This sucks. Big time. This is just one long suffocating Saturday afternoon.

Outside, on the high street, the heavy-bosomed women with their sturdy arms, arms that have grown used to carrying things, and their stern, implaccable faces. Everything about them speaks of a certain defiance of gravity and time. Redeemed by the solid pragmatism that runs to their very core. Teenage kids screech by, all gell and spikes, a spiked existence. Elongated strides and the clink of bling: the first strivings of the ego].

Simple people for whom reading the Guardian qualifies you as being an "intellectual". Will miss the Village bookshop as well. No, England's gone. There's no two ways about it.

The whole thing-literature, novels-all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously.
---V.Woolf on Hardy.

He was a human being, not 'the great man'.
---L. Woolf.

'He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality...[His poems] remind us that he was a fiddler's son, with music in his blood and bone., who danced to his father's playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him,a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious , ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.'
---C. Tomalin

This post was supposed to be about madness and has ended up about sanity! No time for that now. Later.

Crow Country

O.E. hroc, from P.Gmc. *khrokaz (cf. O.N. hrokr, M.Du. roec, M.Swed. roka, O.H.G. hruoh), possibly imitative of its raucous voice. Used as a disparaging term for persons since at least 1508, and extended by 1577 to mean "a cheat," especially in a game (1590).

Last week saw a news item that showed a woman teaching migratory birds-who had somehow lost the instinct to get up and go-how to stir their consciousness from its dark slumber, unsettle themselves from their ordinary lives, so that they could once again learn that simple and elemental truth: all of life, all its heartache and mystery, revolves around departures and homecomings. Lost and found. There's no other game in town.

I have a terrible sense of geography. I look at the map and can recognize Delhi, Melbourne, London, and Rome. Beyond that, a few places perhaps: California, Montana. Vaguer still: is that South Africa, Argentina? But home ? That's a question of a completely different order...

True places don't exist on maps, never do.
---Melville.

City of Man

'We either value African life, understand a black life as equal to a white life and the poor as equally deserving as the wealthy – or we do not. This reformulation of Frantz Fanon's "a given society is either racist or not" or better yet of Malcolm X's "If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress," is a reminder that there are no fractions when it comes to human dignities and freedoms.'

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---Ngugi...courtesy of the Dougal.

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The three richest people in the world own more than the poorest 48 nations. One billion people live in slums (UN-Habitat); Millions die in Rwanda, Congo, and Darfur and hardly anyone blinks an eye. Is this still a city, a city of Man, or bare forked existence?

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Today I was told by a white Rhodesian that she was "sure" that if she fell to the ground that I, before extending my hand to her, would start a religious debate instead of helping her. One depressing thing to ponder on is just how persistent our prejudices and hatreds are: Sunnis for Shias, the rich for the poor, white for black...On this crooked timber..?

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I think one thing is true though. The Allama was right: for all its idealism Europe has never really overcome its race consciousness. After the Trenches, the Bomb, the Gulags and Auschwitz one is surprised by any talk of civilisation and freedom (one excuses clowns like Bush and his 'Infinite Justice').

Eternal City

Already the flowers are sagging in the warm air. The roads are deserted and the sky is cloudless, dreamless. It is only 9:15 but already one feels the day is done, the dull and flat afternoon is already grasped in these moments, the step becomes slack. Nothing happens in summer; everything is bleached, canceled out: sun-and-wheat consciousness. Time only passes in winter.

The northern soul sometimes seeks the order of the sun and its ability to unburden us, open us up. But mostly, it is absence and blue horizons that have a hold. The pulse amplifies into a terrible , overbearing presence. Is this what eventually drove Van Gogh mad?

Ubo, who doesn't have a pessimistic bone in his body, who would dismiss a dark thought as impractical, said to me: we are like strangers in this world, each of us as behind a glass case; we can see and feel for others, we can see their lives but not reach out to them. Nor can we comprehend their suffering, as they cannot ours.

I wondered: is this why the world sometimes seems a spectacle, somewhat unreal, a show of puppets-beautifully painted, no doubt, but puppets nevertheless? What would shatter that glass, and what would it be like to stride freely, aimlessly or with purpose, like a giant in that other space..to shake hands with an angel.

And then, returning to this theme, and without tilting his head (which would have indicated he had reflected on this matter) he said something like: but that is the tragedy and the beauty of life.

The Allama would say: the trouble with this life is that it has too many limitations. The trouble with the next: it has none. And there is no greater limitation than Time ("Do not vilify Time for Time is your Lord"). Seal sings: Time is the space between me and You.

The Eternal City beckons, but so does the one that is close at hand, that is destined to pass-perhaps even more so. The nihilists see themselves- if nothing else- correctly: they love life, we love death. It is said that those who are waiting to go to Heaven remark: 'we tasted fruit like that back on Earth'. One cannot help think that there is some longing expressed in those words. We fall in love with what is lost.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

The Path

About 100,000 years ago I must certainly have been related to swans and wild geese, because I feel so drawn towards them.
----To Jussi Jalas, 24th August 1940

Faith, like a bird, sees its trackless way, unaided by the intellect.
----Farid.

A white sheet of paper is full of ways.

Old people have walked down the path so often that it ceases to be a path-and they, themselves, have become invisible. V.S.P's 'Life at 80' is sublime on this. Dying people see it. Theirs is a late style . The threads of time become the curves of time.

'Architecture for me has always begun with drawing. When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since. The buildings do appear on paper the way you say, but they are not the result of gratuitous brushstrokes. The pencil is guided by so many thoughts stored away in my mental library. But, when I have looked at the site for a building, considered its budget and thought of how it might be built, and what it might be, the drawings come very quickly. I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say...

When people ask me if I take pleasure in the idea of someone looking at my buildings in the future, I tell them that this person will vanish, too. Everything has a beginning and an end. You. Me. Architecture. We must try to do the best we can, but must remain modest. Nothing lasts for very long...'

Right angles separate and divide. Personally, I have always loved curves, which are an essential feature of the natural world. It is not easy to draw curves, to give them the spontaneity they demand and then to organize them in space in such a way as to achieve the visual architectural effect that one is looking for. Like Matisse, I maintain that my curves are not gratuitous; they have a meaning. At one point, even Le Corbusier, who had proclaimed the virtues of right angles, began to despise them. In the end he admitted that we were right. One day he said to me: What you do is baroque, but you do it very well. You have the mountains of Rio in your eyes.'

----Oscar Niemeyer (still working at the age of 100!)

From the New Yorker:

Sibelius, For an instant God opens up his door and His orchestra plays the fifth symphony.

The 8th, started in 1924, remains uncompleted even though he worked on it up until the time of his death, 1957. Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can't go on like this.

He burns his manuscripts. What must it be like to lose one's work like this (Huxley?). Is there a desire to be unknown, to not be named, that rivals the desire to be an immortal, a star that resists the withering hand of time? Remember, he comes from the outskirts. The human scale of the other, smaller, marginal Europe (Kundera)

Rachmaninoff: I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

'The Finns are descendants of an errant tribe'. Mahler: The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing. Sibelius: A confession of faith at different stages of one's life.

The 5th: repetition of themes with small variations. 'Music becomes a search for meaning with an open-ended structure-an analogue to the spiritual life.

2nd movement: the swan hymn: 16 swans flying over Ainola: One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon..That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider..nothing in the whole world affects me-nothing in art, literature, or music-in the same way as do these swans and wild geese and cranes. Their voices and being.

'The swan hymn transcends the depiction of nature: it is like a spiritual force in animal form. When the horns introduce the theme..it's as if they had always been playing it, and the listener had only begun to hear it. Its intervals split wide open, shatter and re-form.

The symphony ends with six far-flung chords , through which the main theme shoots like a pulse of energy. The swan becomes the sun.'

Three days before his death he would walk in the forest, awaiting the return of the cranes, hoping to relive that moment. To be a radical in this day and age is to be a conservative, to retrace ancient byways, to draw invisible lines. Even if the path cannot be discerned any more, still it is worth living just to know that it once existed, that it was open for each one of us, and that for time out of mind you and I have glimpsed it and gasped at such a spectacular vision.

Their cries echo throughout my being. One of them broke from the flock, circled the house, cried out, and flew away...

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mother

Black Crow

Black was the without eye

Black the within tongue

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

Black the blood in its loud tunnel

Black the bowels packed in furnace

Black too the muscles

Striving to pull out into the light

Black the nerves, black the brain

With its tombed visions

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, swelling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

Bent in emptiness

over emptiness

But flying.

-----Ted Hughes.

"But the crow is something. The way it flies...The noisy caw. Listen. Just listen...Staying in touch like that. The frantic call that means danger...Their sleekness. Their shades. Its so black in there you can see purple in there. their heads. At the start of the beak that sprout of hairs, that moustache thing..probably has a name. But the name doesn't matter. Never does. All that matters is that it's there. And nobody knows why. It's like everything else-just there ..The thing about them is they're all practicality. In their flight. In their talk. Even in their colour. Nothing but blackness. Maybe I was one and maybe I wasn't."

---Roth, The Human Stain

'[T]hey have always been great survivors...crows, after all, are faintly disgusting creatures, with their pickaxe beaks and big, scrawny feet. No matter how often we see them harmlessly bouncing across open pasture or ragging through breezy skies, in our mind's eye we associate them with the aftermath of battles. We imagine them tearing at flesh and uttering harsh cries of predatory triumph.

The easiest way to distinguish crows from rooks at a distance is to count their numbers: a crow "passes its life as one of a pair isolated from neighbours by a fierce territoriality . . . Rooks, by contrast, live, feed, sleep, fly, display, roost, fall sick and die in the presence of their own kind". Hence the old East Anglian adage "When tha's a rook, tha's a crow; and when tha's crows, tha's rooks".'

---Andrew Motion

'It’s the tribalism of crows that intrigues... Individually, they might not be attractive, but together they’re almost mystical. “The rook’s voice is dark, earthy, coarse, tuneless but in aggregate it possesses a beautiful and softly contoured evenness.” The numbers are always large; 40% of Europe’s crow population is thought to be in Britain, and the largest recorded roost was 65,000 birds (in the 1970s at Hatton Castle in Aberdeenshire)...[C]rows are an integral part of British folklore. These birds were seen as legislators, hence the collective noun for rooks, a parliament. (Collective nouns for other species of corvid are “a murder”, “an unkindness” or “a parish”.) Gathering in the trees of old estates, rooks were thought to mirror the cruelty and wisdom of human affairs.

It becomes clear that there’s a fidelity to place in crows that transcends the years. [C]orvids are able to sense an “aura of sanctity” on terrain where, centuries ago, there used to be a rookery...“royal rookeries” (an overlap of rookery and roost) and “ghost rookeries” (an abandoned rookery that is now the site of a roost). '

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O black and unknown bards of long ago,

How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

How, in your darkness, did you come to know

The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?

Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?

Who first from out the still watch, lone and long,

Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise

Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?

---James Weldon Johnson

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Black crows...Black crows invaded our country..and they pointed to me.

---Steve Reich

Escape

We are defined by what we want to escape from.

These early hours of Sunday morning come as a reprieve from all that is dark in our world. The mist lifts to reveal an older, quieter world, one that was always close to us but never perceived. It is that second space that stands before and above all that is familiar. I know it will not last, will fall away again,but is none the less precious for being so fleeting. At least for now all is well.

I have found the perfect music. Not Morten Laurdisen's Lux Aeterna nor Jordi Savall -sublime though they are. I do not search that tune any more.

Now is the time to end this blog. I must pick up the strands again. Weave something of a pattern. Find my life again...

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Yesterday, I was told by an old aunt why my mother ran away. That sounds so like the swami. To fly, soar, and be done with it once and for all. To be drawn upwards by the open hand of the Sun, resting wherever one takes one's fancy. To float effortlessly over deep blue seas, wide pastures, the wild yonder, to understand something of the loneliness of the stars. To cut diagonally through space and time, feel the past rustling through one's very being. Upwards, straining like a Gothic arch, throwing off all semblance of weight. Burning, burning with a blackness that dazzles and extinguishes the self, fading, soaring, the beloved Goethe would say.

At last one becomes the pictures in one's mind. And even if it is only a moment, that moment is all. Nothing is foreign, all is embraced, the inheritance is passed down. The red mourns the loss of the blue. The stone remembers it was a diamond. The tree finds its voice. Someone calls my name.

Fanatics, Flags & Freedom

The siege of the mosque continues. Many of the fundos have surrendered, lured by the offer of 5,000 Rs. One of the leaders has tried to escape dressed in a burqa. What gave him away? His pot-belly. I kid thee not! Anyway, the sight of all these savages reminds me of a scene from Planet of the Apes.

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Never been able to understand this devotion to 'the flag'. Yesterday, an old uncle tells me of how Jinnah recommended that the Sikhs set up their own independent State or at least join Pakistan. Look at our flag, the green part is for the Muslims but the white boarder represents a space for minorities. "What do you say?"

To which the Sikh replied, "And what about the pole that will be stuck up our backsides"

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The Pakistani law minister (Fed. level) was quite peeved that a journalist had written that he could catch terrorists/criminals quite easily because of the 'long arm of the law'. As chance would have it he came across this journalist in a radio interview a few weeks later. Sensing his chance to get even with her he laid into her: "the long arm to you..the long arm on your mother, the long arm on your father"

No, minister, it's just an expression.

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Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure any more
the blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.

(Leonard Cohen)

The opposite of a proper order is, perhaps, an infernal order. Or maybe it is the lack of order, the endless succession of moments that have no coherence, no relation to anything that has previously happened and, therefore, no meaning(Casino Culture, Steiner).

Without a true order there is chaos. But since we cannot accept discontinuity we impose our own, man-made order on things.

Fragmenting Times. Fragmenting Time.

Our fascination and deep revulsion for authoritative voices. Authority, legitimacy amuses us (is something that can be mocked) and yet, at the same time, we dimly perceive that its origins are shrouded in mystery: the unconditioned. Our response to a lack of stability is to -re-create (never discover!) through matter what he have lost in spirit; our craving for solidity in a floating world, gravitas in an unbearably light world, our 'ontological thirst' (Eliade) for being, our fear of contingency,the transitory. Is this not akin to the search for order and conformity of the rootless, the alienated?

The more we live in pure succession, in time, the more we need to stabilise ourselves with forms that resist time (painting, architecture). An army of experts, scientific laws, the administration of things, the vast memory museums (libraries, 'from the archives,' genome projects), leisure ("organized freedom"), culture industries. The great paradox, the more man has struggled to free himself from the unconditioned, the more he has become enmeshed in a vast system (matrix?) of his own making. We live in a gnostic age. And as time goes by we have not lost any of our inclinations for ritual and repetition...

From Walter Benjamin, Illuminations:

'Comfort isolates; on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization'

'The unskilled worker's work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing there.'

'His [Poe's] text makes us understand the true connection between wildness and discipline. His pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves only automatically.'

'Gambling gives short shrift to the weighty past on which work bases itself...The work of the unskilled worker does not lack the futility, the emptiness, the inability to complete something which is inherent in the activity of the wage slave in a factory.' Working at a machine or gambling is 'devoid of substance' because it is cut off from previous acts.

'The mechanism to which the participants in a game of chance entrust themselves seizes them body and soul, so that even in their private sphere, and no matter how agitated they may be, they are capable only of a reflex action. '

'Gambling becomes a stock diversion of the bourgeoisie only in the 19th century.'

'The antithesis of time in hell , the province of those who are not allowed to complete anything they have started...On the boulevards it was customary to attribute everything to chance. This disposition is promoted by betting, which is a device for giving events the character of a shock, detaching them form the context of experience.'

'A series of lucky coups gives me more pleasure than a non-gambler can have in years..I live a hundred lives in one.'

Hellfire Nation

There's a certain comfort to be had in imagining everyone else is evil.

All them evil folks, evil-doers. Why, there's even an axis of evil. It's them women I tells ya (witches ands women folk in general). No its, those plotters, the Jews or maybe it's them there niggers with thier voodo crap. No, its those fiendish commies..God damn and blast. May the good lawd help me now. I see it clearly now, those girly men and gays, the sodomites..the F o r n i c at o r s, corrupting the morals of our righteous youth. No, no don't hold me back now, it's those towel-head gas guzzling racoons. Jesse, strike them down and let fire and brimstone rain down on them pesky moslems. What? Injuns? Why, those savages don'ts knows what we did for 'em. Gooks? Darn and confoundations. Those yella-belly good-for-nothings. Rattlesnakes, the lot of them. And then there's ...

Why, that leaves only you and a few people in New York.

New York! That den of iniquity and vice, of liberal bleedin' hearts and scroungers. There's a curse on them people. I swear by all that is holy on this earth. The beast reisdeth in their breasts. A hell-hole of brigands, heathens, cheats, and whore-mongerers..the filth and scum of the universe congregates there, son. Why, mercy me, don't you know the Lord spoke when he struck her down.

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What are we waiting for, gathered in the agora?

The barbarians are arriving today.

Why is nothing happening in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit making no laws?

Because the barbarians are arriving today.
What laws can the Senators make now ?
When the barbarians come they will make laws.

Why did our Emperor wake up so early?
and, in the city's grandest gate, sit in the state
on his throne, wearing his crown?

Because the barbarians are arriving today
and the Emperor is waiting to receive
their leader. In fact, he prepared
a parchment to give them ,
where he wrote down many titles and names

Why did our two consuls and the praetors
come out today in their crimson embroided togas;
why did they don bracelets with so many emethysts
and rings resplendent with glittering emeralds;
why do they hold precious staffs today,
beautifully wrought in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are arriving today
and such things dazzle barbarians

Why don't the worthy orators
come around to deliver the speeches and say their peace?

Because the barbarians are arriving today
and they are bored by eloquence and harangues.

Why should this anxiety and confusion
suddenly begin (How serious faces have become)
Why have the streets and squares emptied so quickly?
and why has everyone returned home so pensive?

Because night's fallen and the barbarians haven't arrived
And some people came from the border
and they say the barbarians no longer exist

Now what will become of us without the barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

---Cavafy.