The White Room

A white square floating weightlessly in a white field.

I imagine a white room, stark, bare, utterly simple, hidden from the world. At eleven o'clock people in the city are busy, making phone calls, preparing, getting and spending...blind to it, unaware of it's hushed silence. It is like an attic flooded with light or a white boat on the white sea. It doesn't exist. Or perhaps it does.

What we see are reflections of it: light glinting off windscreens, dreamy summery lemony afternoons in Seville, a room overlooking San Marco where light and words float and intermingle effortlessly, reliving ancient affinities. What will convey to us that which death cannot take away?

Here, this second space, polar space, north of the future, is blank, empty, full of ways. Here, there is no talk of doors or keys, of what binds us and what keeps us free; of what is "mine" and what is "thine", nor any mention of "inner" or "outer", motion or stillness. The room opens up to a hundred others, like a dream within a dream. Restrained glances and the chase. The thief hides, laughing to herself, breathing heavily,wanting and not wanting to be found...

Here lovers hold hands freely and stroke one another's hair with tenderness and gentleness, robes fall away, introductions are made, swans glide on silvery still ponds, hearts melt but the blue-shadowed snow abides. The face of lost things, the face of last things. Lace curtains flapping, then curving softly outwards towards her, and then breathing in. Patterns of light and shade dance on the floor. Enigmatic, cryptic. In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into the sublunary world. The soft milky dew of her eyes, untouched by sorrow. The un-created world, the pre-world, a white paradise of all possibilities, where sleep is the beautiful dream of a dying man.

A single tear dissolves the circle. Tears, the traces of memory. Clouds and wind melting into all directions and into none. A bird flying by a cloud, merging, surrendering to it. But who is to say who is who? Mountains and white skies remember the secret and open up to one another. The vertical and the horizontal. Here, no image or form takes shape, no thoughts and no words divide; only the silent whispering of children into eachother' s ears up close, only a breath, a smile, a sigh...and then she is gone.

A singer once sang:

He who is close to your heart
How happy must be his fate.
Those people close to you
How blessed they are.

When the heart takes a liking to someone,
so that her nature becomes like yours
Then the days of death are near
And yet,
He who is close to you
How charmed is his fate

Those who suffer, whose hearts long for her
and yet still do not complain,
How strange their hearts must be!

~~~~

Your face is the white picture of your right hand;
your hair the one that writes the black book for my left hand

There was a dark storm all around us, or was it your tresses? There was gentle rain all around us. Or was it the sorrow in your eyes? The kajal around your eyes smudged, mine burning for yours. Black ravens flew in all directions. But here there was calm and stillness, like nothing else on earth.



She fell into his arms and time and the world stood still. And for a moment he was in her and she was in him. She said: And now, now and now! But if he held here then he knew he could never let her go. If I were blue for you...but I am black, black.



You had a mirror. I had a piece of paper. Did they help? You wrote your name for me thinking, like a child, I would forget, and it filled up the empty page. The jealous stars had broken the mirror. But then, you smiled and caressed my hair. God relented-"Okay, just once, for you, because you hurt so much"- and I saw something astoundingly beautiful in my heart. And it was a picture of you.

An Enchanted Place and Time

He said hello and felt awkward and unhappy suddenly, because it was a sort of goodbye they were saying and they didn't want to think about it. So they stood around, and waited for somebody else to speak.

Pooh brought the chocolates and bitter tea with him...such a generous heart was to be found behind all that fur!

"You are a faithful servant, bear", said Christopher.

Pooh (or bear-Christopher always liked to call his friends different names) was very happy, even though he didn't quite understand. Pooh thought: how wonderful it would be to have a Real brain which could tell you things. "But what is meant by 'real'? ", he asked himself, assuming Christopher could read his thoughts. "And what do you mean by "faithful" ? "

And he took a stick and touched Pooh on the shoulder, and said "Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my Knights".

But Pooh was saddened by this and kicked the ground.

"Am I a Knight amongst Knights?"

And now it was Christopher's turn to misunderstand.

"The night is also a sun"

"Am I your child, then?", said Pooh, equally confused.

Pooh wondered if there was a place where what he said would be finally understood.

"There is one such place!", said Christopher excitedly. "I shall take you there".

And Pooh wondered to himself why everyone didn't live there if this place really existed.

"Oh Pooh, you're so mistrustful! "

Pooh, or Bear as his friends liked to call him, held out a paw but Christopher hesitated. "No, no clinging on!"

Pooh was saddened by this and wondered why Christopher's voice was so hard today.

And then seeing this Christopher tilted his head so that his chin rested on his neck and said the same words again, but this time in a hushed voice and ever so gently: "No dear Pooh, no clinging on". And even though he still didn't quite understand and never would, he knew that Christopher meant well.

Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going.

Pooh gave Christopher a 'going-away' present (although he didn't want him to 'go-away') . He was always helping Christopher like that. It was a blank piece of paper. It's a comforting sort of thing to have, said Christopher, folding up the paper, and putting it in his pocket.

~

And they walked side by side, listening to all the things you can't hear.

Christopher Robin told Pooh many things. And they laughed together, each making the other one happy. And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it would not stop.

~

But Pooh was thinking too, and he said suddenly to Christopher Robin,

"I think I know you now".

~

Then he began to think of all the things Christopher Robin would want to tell him when he came back from wherever he was going to, and how muddling it would be for a Bear of Very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind. "So, perhaps," he said to himself, "Christopher Robin won't tell me."

~

The he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you went on being faithful without being told things. "But that boy was so tricky! How could he trust him to always look out for me", Pooh thought to himself.

~

Finally they came to the place that Christopher had mentioned, but Pooh was disappointed since it looked like any other old place to him. Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world with his chin in his hands, called out "Pooh!"

~

"Yes?" said Pooh

"When I'm--when--Pooh!"

"Yes, Christopher Robin?"

Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again and he could never really understand him when he became silent.

"Pooh, when I'm--you know--when I'm not---will you come up here sometimes?"

"Just me?"

"Yes, Pooh."

"Will you be here too?"

"Yes, Pooh, I will be really. I promise I will be Pooh."

"That's good," said Pooh.

" Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."

~

Pooh didn't understand figures very well and thought that Christopher was already seventy or sixty at least, the way he was always talking about serious things.

"How old shall I be then?"

"Ninety-nine"

Pooh nodded.

"I promise, " he said.

"Pooh, whatever happens you will understand, won't you? "

~

For once Pooh was silent and thought that this one time he could say that it was Christopher Robin who asked too many questions, not him. But he let it pass because he didn't want to hurt his friend.

~

"Understand what?", said Pooh.

~

And then Christopher noticed how tattered Pooh's red waistcoat was. But it's fading colours made it all the more beautiful, like a rose that is dying. He took off his blue raincoat and gave it to Pooh. Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's paw.

~

Then he turned his back to Pooh and walked away, so that Pooh wouldn't see the tears welling up inside. Pooh asked, "Are you sad now?" but he didn't hear him.

Pooh walked with his slouched shoulders to a nearby tree and sat under it, with his back against it. He felt sad and funny at the same time. And then he came to understand that this most ordinary of places was truly enchanted. For this is where he first met Christopher, and this is where he last saw him..and this is where he would return, when he came back from wherever he was...

.

.

.

Is it really you?
Slip off the mask, sweet Love.
Plunge the sword again.
To "die before one dies".
All life is here,
at this still point of the heart.
Sustained by the desire for love ,
or was it the memory of love lost?
Look, now!
Your dark tresses fall.
Black birds startled from the trees.
Your white hand revealed.
The poverty of the moon.
The crimson blush in your cheeks.
The lover slayed by your looks.
I want to live,
I want to die.
Does this fading, soaring
please you so?
---b.

And the b mourned the loss of the R

Re-vision

His gaze, contemplating the stars, remains alert, available, and released from all certitude.---Seamus Heaney on Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

Do we see ourselves or others in the right way? We cannot see the whole in the fragment, understand a book from a single page, or the word stripped from its context. What do we actually know? Very little, I suspect. It is as if coming across one blog-post in a whole series one could divine something of the personality of the writer-when it is something in the making. Perhaps God could see us in this way, as if all that is superficial/accidental is whittled away to some fundamental, essential gesture or act. But I don't think so.

Notes from Iris M.

We do not live just for one day. Freedom is the attempt to see clearly, to cancel out other versions, ignore certain views of things, to know what and when to forget, what and when to remember. What M is attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly.

And this, our endless task, follows from our necessary fallibility. This is not a question of facts, or concepts, but of understanding, and of incarnating them into one's approach to life. Re-vision. What is required is a change of key, a change of heart, the supreme dexterity that enables one to find a different tune, to keep things open: wonder, precisely.

What seemed to be softness can turn out to be hardness. And what seemed strong can turn out to be weak. You just don't know. The historical individual is, and makes, a series of mistakes, corrections, cancellations, reconsiderations, reassessments, rejections and affirmations.

Love is knowledge of the individual, an inevitable infinite task because of our fallen nature, our finitude. A deepening, a complicating, a widening of our view. A breaking of the self. An ideal end-point, a limit that is never attained, something that can only be infinitely learned, approached softly, quietly.

We grow by looking. [Medusa?]. We apprehend more than we clearly understand.

~~~~~

The more I think about Bellow's Seize the Day the more I think of its religious undertones. Reading backwards always means we read another book. The main protagonist changes his name, tries to find his real name, which is the freedom of the individual, not of the generations, the species.

And the father refuses to carry the son's burdens. He will have to suffer on his own to come to the truth: I am not going to pick up a cross. I'll see you dead, Wilks, by Christ...

On the chaos of a life with no order of the soul, a life that isn't strung together in any theme but only progresses in fits and starts: Everything was like the faces of a playing card, upside down, either way.

Wilks must learn: Bringing people into the here-and-now.The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us..Only the present is real.

And what is real, what is imaginary?Dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects. The worst kind of people always want to look at you in a clear mirror or a camera. But extreme beauty (and ugliness..Medusa) cannot be perceived directly. What is the right way to look?

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own which he figured out by private thinking..you had to translate and translate, explain and explain, and it was the punishment of hell not to understand or be understood and yet the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone..There sons and fathers are themselves, and a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel's mouth. There truth for everybody may be found...

Gold, Black, and Blue

If anyone out there-assuming there is an anyone and a there, there- has Louis Armstrong's Black and Blue please do pass it on. Ta!

The Mirror

It wasn't given in bad faith; and it wasn't taken in bad faith. But something changed, something passed between them in that one moment. She forgot to smile and he saw something, slumped, and covered his face with ashes.



You thought I wanted to...what, exactly?



His heart became heavy, was close to the ground. Fire to stone. Why does hardness always defeat softness?

...The mirror shattered. It fell to the ground and from its thousand pieces many streams flowed-or were they tears? And to this very day men and women drink from it with sorrow and clouded thoughts, each suspicious of the other. How to pick up the pieces?



The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed, and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in memory after separation.



I must go from here, she said. For there's no place for the way I feel. But I will always be beyond the blue horizon, there or thereabouts. And you, clown, will you be sad?


How strange, he thought to himself. What else can a clown be? Snow fell. It was general all over. And so he fell, and fell, and fell. And for a while it seemed that there would be no end to his falling. Until he reached earth. His hand reached out: snow and skies remembered. Snow still dreaming of floating upwards. Slightly bewildered, out of sorts, his first questions: what's the time, where are you (and to this day people still question time, still ask: where are you?) .


But there was no-one there. Am I the only one awake or am I the only one asleep? Here, what is dream, what is reality? What is day, what is night? Is it winter now? Why else this black sun?

He trudged on, leaving no footprints, or none that any would follow. What else is there to do but kill time. He took off his blue raincoat and sang, thinking of that time before time:

but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

And then he just happened to come across a blank piece of paper, as one might stumble into a rose garden. He looked at it intently. A blank piece of paper is full of ways. Much better than a mirror !, he thought to himself. He knew that she had sent it, to paper over the cracks, to soften the stone -softness always defeats hardness; and he would write, and send word back to her...

Sadness

There's a type of sadness that is fashionable, trendy..that delights in wallowing in its own misery and that is really, at heart, nothing but another form of egotism, another prison. Perhaps one has to suffer such instances in a candyfloss americanized world of perfect smiles and fake happiness-as if it were the only gravitas that were possible in an unbearably light, floating world. Be gentle, b. Faced with so much shallowness perhaps this is not such a bad mask to wear after all...and let us raise a glass to those who know how to contrive a certain amount of superficiality without having to explain...



Of course, there is another form of lightness, what Nietzsche called a lightness out of profundity but this type of boundless grace is reserved for a few or for a few precious moments, for those who know how "to bless". And there is also a profound sadness which is not just a 'pessimism of the intellect' and which is somehow still mysteriously open to the gaze of the beloved.



C directed me here:



Memory of the sun seeps from the heart
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.



Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it?-Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.

----

Why is that at this page
Alone the corner is turned down

-----


O my heart, how you yearn
For your dying hour.

----


No, I am only looking at the wall's
Reflections of the dying heavenly flames.


----

Do you forgive me these November days?
In canals around the Neva fires fragment.
Scant is tragic autumn's finery.

-----

Now mirrors learn not to expect smiles


-----

Westward the sun is dropping,
and the roofs of towns are shining in its light.
Already death is chalking doors with crosses
And calling the ravens and the ravens are in flight.


----Anna Akhmatova

~~~~

The storm came and passed. Nothing changed. Just rearranged. But across the bridge the wind howled, as if it was possessed. Notes flew about-the word weightless at last-and bags started flapping, like so many sails on the wide blue seas. Hit the accelerator. Perhaps to take flight...(no, that's not what you think, dear reader(s)).

We peer into dark mirrors, and see other worlds, other lives, carrying on, silently. Like this screen before me. Or Satie. Or people inside,

framed in the window, they see blackness framed
hear breathing and draughts of air and the moon the moon..
the window is a mirror and two people are
separate, see thier night selves on the other side
eyes fixed and the frame defined

The hand reaches out into the open. But the word returns to the world...

Of snails and tea (no, not together!)

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.



--Calvino





"Beware of false infinities"------Simone Weil



Today has been a difficult day for fasting. Time passes quickly though as the sparks fly in a conversation with Saleem and Mongol. "We've been reduced to the level of savages" he says, "only thinking of food, as if we should live by bread alone"."But we've always been savages my dear Q." Our taste for blood goes unslaked and we outdo ourselves in thinking of ways to extend the 'unnatural growth of the natural' as if these were part of some mysterious and rigid law that we fulfil, not knowing why.



In the darkening shadows a few lights go on. How the light thickens. We look up at the windows , imagining the life that goes on without us. Nowhere else in nature is there such curiosity. At six we stop at the Wright's Bar-why does one have to go to an Italian to get a decent cup of English tea?. We gulp down large swigs of milky tea.



Infinity in a cup of tea. Even the ever-talkative Saleem is strangely quiet, subdued even. It is one of those perfect moments when all seems right in the world, everything is in its proper place. Kairos.



In the monochrome early-morning light even the council flats have an alluring beauty, as if these lunar buildings, a perfect mathematical equation, were carved out of marble, moonstone. One is reminded of how light can transform our own ugliness. For the Japanese, on the other hand, there could be no such crystalline, time-resistant structures: wabi , deliberate imperfection, meant that they had to grow with nature.



I pass a few snails that are huddled around a small puddle-what for them must be a veritable lake. The spirals of their shells all flow in the same direction-bar one. This is the handedness of the universe, the slight imbalance, the imperfection in perfection, the anarchy in the heart of the black sun that sustains all worlds. If things had been arranged slightly differently, then we would be like this, and not like that; the faintest of breezes caused by a falling peach blossom is enough to disturb the equilibrium and take us to a parallel universe. Is this, then, the best of all possible worlds?



Nearby a slug has been crushed. Another joins him (no snails , I note). Perhaps to witness the spectacle of the nirvana-soul, or maybe just to comfort him in his last moments. There is an awareness of suffering at every level of being in the universe; compassion is the highest form of understanding. I had once seen the same thing happen with a crow as it was brought some food in an empty field. This blackest of crows, whose very blackness permeated every pore of its being, whose skin glistened with it, had he perchance flown too close to the sun?Near Russell square a six year old Chinese boy-far too old, large-is being pushed in a pram by his mother who is bent over in ..in what? Bellow teaches us to be attentive but what is it? A tiredness with life, grief? And then I see the child moan, flaying his arms and legs in all directions like a shooting star. There is something terrible, frightening , in this desperate attempt to reach out, to communicate. His younger sister, in a pink school uniform, extends her arms and places the palms of her hands over his head and presses down as the mother blows a prayer over his head. In this gentle silence is there any need for more words?



After the tea we, like Knulp, have no desire for anything and there is no idle chatter. Just thankfulness and stillness and a total lack of concern for the world that is hurriedly passing us by. This feeling lasts for a few minutes then, out of idleness, we casually turn for a second cup. It is poisonous, bitter to the dregs...and we start to argue again.



Only a saint truly knows "how to bless", knows that infinity is but a moment that becomes hell if we try to create it or if we grasp it too tightly with our hands. The desire to add to perfection or to reduce imperfections, to make everything right, without grace and humility, corrupts our souls.

Fall

Spring, Winter, Summer, Fall.
It will come. It must. Even if one doesn't understand the order of it, it is there, in our blood, pulling at us. Dark forces are gathering in a distant country, entangled like storm clouds, or black tresses.
We fall, we fall...
some gently, some like leaves that spin and spiral around an invisible axis.

Why are clowns so clumsy, always falling over themselves? They make the inevitable seem accidental, and the necessary purely contingent. To make a fool of oneself, a spectacle, so that one does not see the working of the real comedy within. The clown is fooling himself! A great pretender who doesn't even, like his cousin the jester, speak truth to power.

The continuance of the world. Sun-and-wheat consciousness. The earth, with her slow rhythms and patterns dulls us. We make preparations, learn from one season to another, accumulate. Mirrors darken, flesh sags, eyes narrow and yet still we are, remarkably, indifferent to our lives and the lives of others, as they fall away. Then what? Perhaps a hand, white as porcelain, will help us up again. But:


It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender

So he thinks to himself:

sun disc
silent. warm enough
for you? all windows
alive with reflections..
air cool still
singing of first rain and
the rain drop by drop makes holes in my song
the rain the rain drop by drop
the power to be humble and clear forsook me,
this world of moods and voices around silence.
---via C, via John Riley.

Les Voix Humaines

Has there not been an endless span of time before Man appeared - a time when he was not yet a thing to be thought of?---Q:76:1

There are many things I cannot remember now. Many words have I forgotten. Sweet paradisal soundings, language of the birds; the voice from those distant lands, a turn of phrase, a startling expression..all this remains only vaguely familiar.

After the rain cleared the sunshine burst through with a radiant brilliance and brightness, as if the light had been waiting to clarify the world at that very moment. Suddenly the earth became weightless. And silent. A few birds glided on, making their way through their invisible tracks, ancient pathways that we've forgotten, and the breeze rustled through green leaves so that all was a play of shadows and light, sound and solitude. I looked up to note the clouds rolling eastwards, as if down a stream, or as if they were being drawn towards some unknown centre by a great magnetic force.

I thought of Brecht's poem. I stood there for an age, like a stone statue that sees the world passing him by but cannot say a thing. When I looked up again the clouds had disappeared.

Listening to this sublime music , guarded, reticent, reluctant to cede anything to the Will...like folded wings, a self engrossed in its own thoughts, centred on its own being, and yet here too there is the aspiration to speak with a human voice. Sometimes we feel like being human, just human, the way a cloud's a cloud. Nothing more, nothing less. Do clouds, too, dream of breaking free, of finding a language like ours?

---(First written, Sunday, July 1st, 2007, around 11 a.m.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A poem, courtesy of a companero, from across the seas, the wide blue yonder..

In a Dark Time
by T. Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

~~~~

You don’t know how hard it’s been,

to find you a gift.

Nothing fits.

Why bring gold to the seam, water to the sea?

Every idea of mine seemed like hauling spice to the East.

So I got you a mirror.

Look at you.

Think of me.

---Rumi

We want to hoard things, like Pharoah who imagines that the things he keeps close to him in the grave will find a translucent beauty in another world. There, the true name of everything will be known and cherished, will shine through with a dazzling clarity, as it would on a blue morning: a comb, a ring, a mirror...

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago

-a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef

- they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

We want to hoard words, scour a text, sift out the inessential, so as to fix our identity, all the time imagining they can give us solace, hoping that there must be a meaning there somewhere. But more than this, we want the word to open up to other vistas, so that it (and we) are bound and free. And what can convey such a strange desire, except the human voice and the memory of it? Words reach us from distant shores, like the light from the stars-frail, sad, wistful, as if they are on the verge of disappearing. Comb, ring, mirror, words..it is the giving of them that he remembers.

We think of poor Pharoah and what it would be like to live like that, of how we would like to keep those words that have been given to us, and then awake and see the face that spoke them.

Falling Leaves

Poplar and oak awake

all night. And through

all weathers of the days of the year.

There is a consciousness

undefined.

Yesterday's twighlight, August

almost over, lasted, slowly changing,

until daybreak. Human sounds

were shut behind curtains.

No human saw the night in this garden,

sliding blue into morning.

Only the sightless trees,

without braincells, lived it

and wholly knew it.

----Denise Levertov

The arc of stars above her head

Are a thousand years of life hushed.

Slender moonlight slips through her arms this night.

Her radiance grows with a strange and quiet light.

A gem is taking shape or a heart is breaking...

Memories fade and fall away to the ground,

for eternity there to lie.

Tonight and only tonight,

the tree knows what it is to die.

---b.

The leaves have gone through a myriad of transformations even as they lie there on the sodden earth: from tiger-striped leaves of the forest to the bright yellow stars of August; from the deep swirls of the brown, dry, crumpled and twisted around themselves like snails or shells, to the ones that are profoundly dark, as if they'd been burnt, blackened out..and the blazing red hearts that remember something of their former glory to the purple ones that write the world's prose on my doorsteps. Today, all I see are small child-like ones, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

~~~

Jigsaw puzzle:

The ability to match, to fit the pieces together. To intuit unity and hold that image in one's mind. But also to perceive what is unique, different from the rest and then to see that as something that belongs with something else, that makes sense against the background of another, larger picture. One doesn't match the pieces only on the basis of colour or content-but on shape and pattern...as if the style of a piece was as important as the fragment of the picture it carries with it. Once seen in the right light, the problem disappears.

~~~

The voice falters, and the hand hesitates. What is required is something beyond one's resources: a more sonorous voice and the blue incense of heart and word.

~~~

Silently the birds

Fly through us. O, I, who long to grow,

I look outside myself and the tree inside me grows.

The Fierceness, the Sadness

They lived in squares and loved in triangles.
(The Bloomsbury set).

India beat England today. What could be worse? England beating India!

Swami: A mouse's eyes are so sad. Of course, one cannot see this when they are alive -because he is always running around and is never still enough for you to get a good look. But when he dies, then look. There is an indescribable sadness there, deep shadow where there should be light.

And why is that?

Who is to say? Perhaps it is because even as he plays, even as he dances in a frenzy, forgetting himself, still he remembers that one day he too must die.

Cluniac Style:

"Swirling drapery, twisting line, as if the restless impulses of the wandering craftsmen, the goldsmiths of the Viking conquerors, still had to be expressed in stone. Bright primary colours. A Tibetan fierceness".

The Mullion at Souillac: " It is an epitome of forest fears, a kind of totem-pole of western man at the end of his wanderings"

----K. Clark, Civilisation..


"That by the 11th and 12th centuries there had emerged in western Europe within Europe a Church art a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in colour and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art."

---Schapiro.

Geoffrey Hill: wilderness revives, fierceness of the heart.

Pent up into a region of pure force
Made subject to the pressure of the stars
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyes

And fell, until I found the world again
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?'

--------

For so it is proper to find value
In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored:
The long-lost words of choice and valediction'

--------

We are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God.

---Kafka.


The equivocal, oblique way of God: a detour:'Writing is the moment of the desert as the moment of separation..God no longer speaks to us...we must take words upon ourselves. We must be separated from life and communities, and must entrust ourselves to traces, must become men of vision because we have ceased hearing the voice from within the immediate proximity of the Garden..Writing is displaced on the broken line between lost and promised speech. The difference between writing and speech is sin. The Garden is speech, the Desert is writing..Speech is presence, writing is making present the absent...

A white sheet of paper is full of ways.

Sacrifice of existence by the word and consecration of it by the word...In God's name.

'The caesura, the discontinuity, does not simply furnish and fix meaning..the letter is also solitude, distance, separateness, respect, the letter of the law.'Is the choice that of a natural and an institutionalised solitude, desert or city, tree or the ship's mast?

Like the sailor who grafts a name
On that of the mast
Is the sign you are alone

'Every exit from the book is made within the book. Indeed, the end of writing keeps itself beyond writing..the world is in the book.'

---Notes from Writing and Difference, Derrida.

There's no remaking reality.
---P. Roth.

The Weight of the World

No! I refuse! My heart shall be a tower
and I must set myself upon its edge
and in that nothingness must be once more
all world, all pain, all that cannot be said.
A solitary thing, still lost in huge excess
time after time darkening and lightening-
the last surviving image of all yearning,
cast out into infinite restlessness.
And still this fixed, ultimate stone face,
consenting to endure its heaviness...

---Rilke


It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod.... And to drink and eat.... [i]t would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper.... To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'
--Wings of Desire.



They have been set there as if left behind

by the gigantic forces of the tides

which carved them out and then again retreated

but generous and lavish, openhanded,

left attributes to them which were the sea's ;

they are distinguished from the natural

configurations from the rock because

they wear a bishop's mitre or a halo

or, like a clock with its own time to tell,

a face will sometimes even show a smile-

the sum of all its hoarded, peaceful hours:

once, intricate as ears and listening,

they caught the city's sounds, heard every groan:

they guard the entrance now and keep its shadows.

A whole dimension is intended here

as in a stage whose backdrop and whose boards

are understood to represent the World-

which, clothed within his part, the Hero enters.

Their hearts are motionless. They stand so tall,

removed from time and in Eternity.

Sometimes a gesture upwards, vertical

as they , emerges from the drapery

but is abandoned, only half complete

and overtaken by the centuries

while they stay poised above the carved stone brackets

on which a teeming world they cannot see

swarms with a wildness till not trodden down

----------------------------------------------


Singing and silence. But mostly it is silence. Every day the same. What does it mean to say 'day'? We learn nothing, and forget nothing. We accumulate and store things up. Everything that could have happened has. Plenty Coups was right after all: after that nothing happened. How strange, how strange our life here. What do we want: heaviness or lightness?

How Google Saved A Girl From Melting Away

A cloud in the wind, at the corner of the world.
---Tu Fu.

Less than a day in paradise
and a thousand years have passed among men.
While the pieces are still being laid on the board
All things have changed to emptiness.
Nothing is what it was but the stone bridge.

---Li Po

From Cassiel's notebook.

In a strange village called Karachi (sorry, astarte, couldn't resist!) a man climbs a pole, vowing to never come down. At last, he thinks to himself, like a Baron in the Trees, I can breathe. Fed up with the world, he will never look another human being in the eye again. He clings onto that pole for all his life, but one day he will let go and fly from here into the wild blue yonder, like a bird that melts into the clouds.

In a remote corner of the universe a girl types something into google and is assured that she hasn't floated away. A thousand flowers still blaze away, like a fire searching out a form, or a sun that burns with an untold brilliance: I want to live, I want to die. Meanwhile, the blue mourns the loss of the Red.

Memory is neither a melting away nor a crystalization; neither Spring nor Autumn, neither what we know nor what we will know; it is but a trace of what we once knew. The rose, like the ripples of light on a stream, gathers itself in to from an image, and then disappears. And who is to say whether this image is fading away or soaring? You do exist, you do not exist: the image is not nothing, precisely, but neither is it the Real.

Khayyam, this Red you see before you, is it not the same as that of the blush of the girl's face you once knew, or the lips longing for wine's deep mysteries?

Only the philosopher asks, dumbfoundedly: what is red?

You do not know me.

No, I do.

You will never know me.

I will.

You have never known me.

There you are wrong.

All is fleeting, all is vanishing. Why do we cling on, then, so tightly? What else can we do?

Useless to call this spiralling wisp of life one strand in the the web that heaven and earth weave.--Li Po

In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. ..Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystalisation.

The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves , and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood and looks around, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. ...tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.

---D.H. Lawrence

I Don't Like You...

Odds and Ends (zdreanţă, bucată)

O.E. screade "piece cut off," from W.Gmc. *skraudas (cf. M.L.G. schrot "piece cut off," O.H.G. scrot, "a cutting, piece cut off," Ger. Schrot "small shot," O.N. skrydda "shriveled skin"), from PIE base *skreu- "to cut, cutting tool" (cf. L. scrutari "to search, examine," from scruta "trash, frippery;" O.E. scrud "dress, garment;" see shroud). The verb is from O.E. screadian "prune, cut" (cf. M.Du. scroden, Du. schroeien, O.H.G. scrotan, Ger. schroten "to shred").


The orientalist:
Deposited, once again, on the fringes of a well regulated society, with its coherent and self-sustaining stories, its archives and stone-like memory, its official histories and endless, rambling reconstructions of its past; all resting on on the surest of foundations, the strongest of footholds-even if imaginary or sunk deep into the reservoirs of the collective unconscious. He, on the other hand, lingered and tarried like some medieval beast on the periphery of the known: a shadowy figure, clinging to the borderlands; a creature known only through village gossip and folklore, distant and as ephemeral as the morning mist. A fleeting, insubstantial shape of a man; the breathless condition of inner revulsion-a revulsion for the myriad lives that were and were not his; a classical fanatic for whom ideas were incarnated in his eternal gaze.


The old man was no longer the mediator of an experience, because the experience ended with him each time. But in this way he became something still more mysterious and impressive: a stone abandoned in a field, cut by an unknown hand, according to unknown rules. Such survivors, deprived of descendants, have faces that are striking in their isolation. Their uselessness is majestic and the wisdom they possess and surely do not wish to hand on gazes at us in silence, like every memory that agrees to destroy itself.
---Roberto Calasso.


One must either be a monk or thoroughly absorbed in the world to not be concerned about its business.


Ammons: Snow poems: plenitude and nothingness. A self that stopped, that never became, was aborted. "The name nearest the name, names least." Mountains, where 'gigantic motions have been summarized into stillness'. A life, where all possibilities of escape are open; life that "fastens into order enlarging groups of disorder...no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."


All the zeroes running through my heart,
Looking for the one.
---b


What is b but the meeting of 0 and 1?


Life, no matter hard you stare at it,
is but a moment.
I close my eyes
And the world disappears.

---Swami


In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise
-----W.H.Auden


Eden is more interesting as starting point than as a destination; alienation and the fall are a spectacle worth recording. Fallen time is where all the action takes place.


Home is where the heart is
But where is the heart?


A path well trodden ceases to be a path. Is all philosophizing nothing but the trick of the body? Its inward movement the awe from which wisdom begins, the sigh the withdrawal from the world; pain the awareness of love lost, the realisation that this awakening is only a lonely thought, a tardy replacement for what is no more? Second thoughts.


The romantic genius is one-sided, his truth that of an extremist; the Renaissance genius, or the humanist par excellence, is more rounded, a man for all seasons, a polymath. Also, the former is a man of action whilst the latter is an artist. How one perceives genius is an indicator of the temper of the age we live in. Can there be a poetic genius in the prosaic times we live in, now that language has lost its fluency and naivete? Or a religious genius when faith is grounded on the shores? Who today holds our attention, catches our gaze? The mathematician and scientist speak in tongues...


One sidedness is a sign of greatness, but second rank. The one sidedness of the intellectual creates the illusion of having everything-an abstract all-sided individual

---from Soren K.


A description of faith is not faith. Understanding is not a concept.


Any man's death diminishes me
--Donne


Noh: Zemi motokyio:
Forget the theatre and look at the actor.
Forget the actor and look at the heart.
Forget the heart and only then will you understand Noh


A burnt-out angel that has exhausted all possibilities within; only a silhouette remains.


Orientation:
Facing the right direction, not being in the right place. An elemental soul and an angelic soul: the human being is the cross where they meet. By virtue of the former nature is his 'brother'; by virtue of the latter consciousness or awareness breaks out of its dream-like state
---from Ostaad Elahi


Sheltering your heart from the heat of the day
--D.Mahon


"The best way to escape one's life is to quote: to live in a parallel world that is not yours"
---?


Dada: empty language of meaning ...the world already has too much meaning and must grow light again: the heavy burden of the word must be destroyed in a counter-culture. Iconoclasm.


To live in paradise alone.
--Marvell.


The loneliness which is the truth about things. Socially sanctioned communication has nothing to say.
--from V.Woolf


The paradox: those who are most alone have most trust in the world [the ascetics love the world with a love that outshines the hatred of those who are in love with the world]
--Hohl.


The politics of the sea.

The Mysterious Magician

Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely. Neither when I was alone, nor with others. I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means at last I am whole. Now I can say it because today I am finally lonely. No more coincidence...
--from Wings of Desire

Is it me? The things people take seriously are the things I laugh at. That can sound terribly condescending, as if one is proud that that is just so. But it's not that. Seriously. And the things people laugh at are the things I think are stupid (would be great to wheel in St. Paul here: "be not conformed to the world" but even that is setting oneself up: as if one had to be eccentric...)

Here, I feel like scampering for my books, see what Iris has to say, but what could be more ridiculous?!

Someone asked me: "Do you think you were a clown in a former life?"

Me: "Er..former?"


Today, early morning, I found this card on the windscreen of my car:


MASTER OF MAGICIANS

Awarded Bawa Magicians

Prof. Bawa Amil Husnain Shah's Message

For My Brothers and sisters..wishes can be fulfilled success within wiwcle of an eye

AFTER THE SUCCESS FUL VISIT IN EUROPE NOW IN PAKISTAN FOR THE FIRST TIME.

Open Challenge for all magicians that they cannot over power on my action, If you are suffering from any difficulty for eg. Love Marriage-failure in love-to make merciless beloved in your possession-every kind of lottery-Non-unity in husband wife relationship-Raw in Laws-to make husband on the right path-stoppage in business-any physical and psychological diseas-fear of anemey-ceasuare of children forever-failurein vist forgin country etc

Ladies and Gentleman who can not come themselves-Contact on Mobile phone.

...(some Multan number)

Now, I'm wondering: why was I the only one who got this card? Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Was it a sheer coincidence? Perhaps the sun is getting to me. How I miss England's black sun...

Crone, crow, scarecrow
On the edge of everything
Like a burnt-out angel
Raising petitionary hands
~~~


There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.

Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,

It is falling

Like leaves on the cold sea.

--Derek Mahon

The Garden

We stood a moment so, in a strange world.

And the Blue flames of love

Mourned the loss of the Red.

So close the book now,

For what be, let be unsaid.

Indestrucitible stars,coldest of flames.

A frost-starred heart

still spells out your name.

To whom shall I speak,

Then what shall I write?

Is it still day

Or is it now night?

Each mortal thing has its own double,and each its own law

But in love's dark mirror,I perceived its one flaw.

Gentle moonlight sighs

And peach-blossoms wait.

Disappear to eternity,

remembering their fate.

Their true life, then

This brief moment's fall.

My heart breaks too

In the heart of these walls.

-----b

~~

~~~

You ask me why I am sad

I do not answer

For my thoughts are carried

like peach blossoms down a stream

Far away from the world.

---After Li Po

The Not So Strange Case of Dr. Robin

A doctor in small place not far from here has been accused of blasphemy. Apparently, he had made light of someone's very long beard and that person took that as an attack on the religion. I'm not quite sure how that translates into blasphemy but the fact that Dr. Robin was surrounded by a mob and that his family has had to flee speaks volumes about the level of fanaticism.

~~~

Ali writes an interesting post on the Islam 'smear' against Obama in the NYT. Speaks volumes about...

~~~

The Dougal told me a true story about how a maulvi was caught setting the Quran on fire in Faisalabad a few years back. The mob tied him to the back of a motorcycle and dragged him through the town. After that they chopped him into bits and set his body on fire. Then, realizing that he was 'one of their own' (i.e from the same religious group), the mob promptly turned up at his house. "What do you want now?", asked the tearful wife.
"Oh, we've come for the funeral prayers".

I kid thee not.

~~~

Two Sundays back a woman kills herself by throwing herself in front of a train. Out of sheer desperation. Tragic, no doubt, but perhaps not something so strange in the scheme of things. But the report also had this to say: The woman walked (walked??) with her two kids in front of it. And passers by noted that she kept her hands over their eyes so as to not frighten them.

Outstretched hands of mothers have been protecting us from evil for a long time.

~~~

You know, I would have loved to have written about Charles Taylor's fantastic 'Social Imaginary' or read up on the baroque, or on Kierkegaard, but instead my mind is occupied by the sheer absurdity of it all, of what some people with a rather peculiar sense of humour call 'the real world'. The 'best of Creation'? Not so sure, not so sure.

On this crooked timber nothing straight ...

Eckstein

NOT, I'll not, carrion comfort,
Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

-----

But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

---Gerald Manley Hopkins


At bottom every human being knows quite well that, as a unique being, he is but once in the world and that no imaginable chance will for a second time bring together such a wonderfully variegated assortment as he is into one. [...] that every human being is a one-time wonder, they dare to show us the human as it is, uniquely itself right down to every moment of the muscles, and what is more, that in this strict consistency of its uniqueness, it is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, new and incredible like every work of nature, and not the least tedious.

--Nietzsche (courtesy of anton)


And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that what we are is what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and with thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if only we would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.