Ni Putes Ni Soumises

I don't know if they have any links to the right-wing or not, but it's a great name nevertheless.

On Friday night two Tablighis (missionaries) come to my house. Heal yourselves, you motherfucking hypocrites.

Saturday: Read two stories in the papers: one about a French-Pakistani who torched his Moroccan girlfriend in France, and the second of a German-Afghani who killed his sister -do the details matter?-by stabbing her sixteen times in what is called an "honour killing".

From Pervez Hoodbhoy's article:
In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia's ubiquitous religious 'mutaween' (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia.

More depressing news: the Pakistan government has capitulated and allowed sharia law in Malakand. We're in serious trouble. Is that the music on the Titanic I hear striking up....

for the love of the world

Even though I know your inward secret, nevertheless declare it now in thine outward act.
---Rumi.

Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, animal consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder.
---D.H. Lawrence

Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
-----Hannah Arendt

There is a love of the world that is cheap and second-rate; this is really very little else other than the love of oneself-if such a thing be possible. But the world and all that is in it is then reduced to a soulless abstraction. Everything is just a projection of the all-consuming self and the world becomes as fleeting as our desires.

In previous times we have thought of the world in relation to a perspective that encompassed 'heaven and earth', the metaphysical and the physical. But the materialistic monism that is a by-product of science , and that was initiated further back by Descartes, has only space for a dead world and mechanism. Only the human mind (not person-mind, body and soul) existed like a spark in the void. All this comes about, it must be recalled, alongside a profound scepticism toward the commonsensical view of things as well as the idea that anything is merely 'given'. If we can never be absolutely sure that we can know the world as it is -our very reason has become suspect- then we can at least know it as we make it. In this second-turning inward the world has become a truly strange and fantastical place.

Of course, we could never maintain such a tension. As Nietzsche remarked: abolishing the Real world behind the Apparent one meant that the latter disappeared as well! With the advent of Darwinism mind- and thought itself- became organically linked with the world and its hidden forces, processes. Once again we have come to share a nature with Life, but this time it is only one of blind mechanism and contingency. How often one hears the childish exclamation:we share _ % of DNA with a monkey/lizard/pig. And atoms with a stone too, no doubt! A substitution of material continuity for an ontological one.

Is it , then, the case that a devaluing of the metaphysical necessarily entails a diminished understanding and appreciation of the world? Is 'the Fall' always not the discovery of the world but the discovery of our isolation from it? From then onwards the world becomes a "problem", something that has to be subject to "analysis" as it becomes an "object" of thought, and we a "subject". Nature now becomes a confronting 'other' when, it might be said, true understanding comes from knowing and acting with the world: Mitwissenschaft. Thinking is not independent of, free of, the world. To think is already to be in the world. Is there a thinking self before the world, prior to language? (Wittgenstein).

But let us not be hasty here. Edward Said: time into space: "[With]the opening up of chronological sequence into landscape the better we are able to see, experience, grasp, and work with time." It is often said that 'the Fall' marks the precise point at which Time comes into existence; might it not be that it is also the growth of our consciousness of space? The world now takes up the space between us and God (and Time is the Space between me and You). And the world taking up this intervening space , this in-between-ness is a blessing. Without it we would be burnt by the dazzling presence of God. And the world itself also introduces us to plurality and multiplicity. 'I' would not be 'I' unless I could relate to you through a common world.

So, let us not look with too harsh a gaze on this ability of ours to think of the world as separate from ourselves. Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory, ...mind can achieve her object by picking out one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world , partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in. (Eddington).

The danger is, therefore, of seeing the world only from the perspective of discontinuity. To do so, ultimately leads to a perverted love of the world.

There's a sort of betrayal involved in talking about someone or something that one deeply loves. It is as if in naming that something or someone one is taking away something essential. But it is not really so; without our opinions the world would stop turning.

If there's one piece of writing by Hannah that I had to name, that means the world to me, it would be her short essay on Lessing. It goes like this:

There's a lack of commitment to the world and its affairs, its politics and 'current events' , that derives from an otherworldly shunning of the material and physical; there is also a passive indifference to the world one that finds its satisfaction in the private world of pleasure (in this regard asceticism and hedonism are not too dissimilar).

But then there is a vigilant, active, and wholly mindful, attentive aversion to any orthodoxy in such matters. In such cases it isn't the world that is left behind; no, instead there is the constant re-orienting of one's views towards the world and other people. Nothing is final, everything can be revalued, revised. It is, in short, to be the contrarian par excellence, to be wary of being 'conformed to the world' and ideological snares. Like a flaneur, one chooses carefully which elements of an ideology one likes. Carefully, but lightly. Today one is a conservative when yesterday one was the soundest of liberals. A shifting constellation of allegiances that confounds bourgeois sensibilities: consistency is a virtue of small minds.

It is, therefore, not a lack of commitment to the world per se, but only to it to the extent that it is the world. Everything depends on recognizing there are different levels and types of pleasure; that there is a right way of seeing, that a person's style is not incidental to 'form', that judgement is not just subjective taste, and that there is- though it is not always adequate or proportionate to the object of its desire- something called 'proper love'.

fact and value

What is meant by 'and' here?

It does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition.
----L. Robbins, 1935.

So began the long slide and the dominance of the 'engineering approach' (Sen).The Gradgrinds want to talk about 'facts' all the time. What else is there? Everything else is, strictly speaking, nonsense or, to put it in milder terms: what transcends us may exist but we cannot know anything of it, nor can we say anything about it.

'And': is there a dichotomy (not just a distinction) here or is there entanglement?

From Iris. M:

Fact and moral value are separated so that the latter cannot be derived from the former. But in this 'move' the realm of the ethical shrinks and the world becomes the world. Values are something lyingly added.

Wittgenstein:
morality is a (stoical) acceptance of the world (fact, necessity, fate). To accept it as a whole, as if from outside, is the moral sense. We cannot alter the facts. Morals, then, becomes a matter of style, an attitude, a way of looking at the world. The world is either good or bad. The world must wax or wane depending on our attitude.There can be no detailed ethical propositions, no moral "facts". Only silence. This running up against the limits of language is ethics But surely the awareness of limits points to something?

We enact morality. The word is the deed. True, but we also try and justify our actions through arguments, reasons..'life is not an argument'.

The Gita: holiness within, selfless action without..the allure of unity. One wonders if the 'success' of the modern west depends on a tension or a heightened awareness of the disjunction between body and spirit, revelation and reason, intellect and will?..and has this been responsible for her creativity and her calamities? The spectacular society is one such disjunction: between vision and the good; existentialism another: the blind will.

To separate fact and value so categorically runs the risk of the latter becoming irrelevant in the face of the relentless onslaught of the worldview of science. The Nazis were, no doubt, very intelligent in a superficial sort of way. But understanding lies in another direction: integral intelligence is neither abstraction nor is it intuition. The intersection of the idea and beauty...often rounded, always open...western man, on the other hand, suffers from a hypertrophy of the mind.But human beings are moral agents. This does not require a negation of facts but, rather, being on our toes when it comes to two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason (Berlin)

What is meant by 'and'? Amphibious beings come to realise that there are 'different modes and levels of insight and understanding'.Truthful vision, virtuous action. The question is not whether separation is possible but whether a reconnection is? Knowing isn't everything.

The austerity of this severance also had a part to play in the Romantic movement, as involving the liberation of the individual into the open space wherein to construct his [own] morality..stirred by reflection upon freedom versus necessity, passion versus reason [interests], value versus fact.How to reconnect to the world? Eros (Plato) or duties (Kant).

Hannah A:
pleasure is a fundamental awareness of the world.

The Good life becomes selfless through an increased awareness of, sensibility to, the world beyond the self. Attentiveness...In a good man duties are more like habits than acts of the will...the picture of unity again.But we live in a demythologised world. There are no more images. The mirror has cracked.We yearn for the transcendent, divine, pure but in picturing it to bring it closer we make idols and lose it. But in shattering it we are left only with silence and absence once again and then we wonder whether that second space even ever existed. Our human frailty means we search for and do not search for a name.

"The idea of reverence is common to what we usually thought of as religious and moral attitudes, connected with art, love, respect for persons and for nature, extending into religious conceptions of the sacred or the holy...Reverence for life and being, for otherness, is something which can be taught or suggested very early. 'Don't kill the poor spider, put him out in the garden'. Even the use of 'him' or 'her' instead of 'it' may help. ..Formal religion provided ritual and imagery, presenting it as something ordinary and usual. What happens every day is important , images can affect the quality of our thoughts and wishes. The damage done to inner life, to aloneness and quietness through the imposition of banal or pornographic or violent images by television, is a considerable wound...Some understanding of, and taste for, exercises in detachment and quietness, the sense of another level, and another place, a larger space, might thus be acquired for life. Simply sitting quietly and calmly can be doing something good; subduing unkind or frenzied thoughts certainly is. Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world."

(for Bob and Trumwill, who think we need more analytical thinking)

finely aware, richly responsible

Here's Martha Nussbaum on literature and moral imagination/philosophy. If you don't have access to Jstor I can forward you a copy on request.

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."
--Wilde.

Do you agree with that? [Celia, I need you in particular to respond to this]

Well, first things first: it's pretty difficult to say that a whole book is moral or immoral-either in intent or content. Secondly, one has to be on guard against the moralizing brigade that wants, on the one hand, to prescribe 'good' books in order to produce good citizens, moral upright beings, provide moral instruction and so on, and proscribe 'bad' ones in order to protect the innocent, prevent 'moral corruption' on the other hand. And there is, as Roxana rightly points out, the danger of totalitarianism here (Plato, the Taliban, the Communists etc) .

But even putting that to one side -which is not to ignore it, far from it- is Wilde still right? Would one say the same for art (i.e art has no relation to religion or the ethical whatsoever)? A painting is just painted with some style that is evaluated in a favourable light or has some formal features that one finds agreeable? When one talks about 'good' must one inevitably empty it of all moral connotations?

What does literature do, then? Have you ever walked away from a book thinking, you know what, I feel morally uplifted? I don't think that novels work in the way, nor do they aim to. But to say that is not to admit that they are written with no purpose except for a stylistic one. For what is the work of the imagination, the ability to sympathise with other points of view, pay attention to details, picture a life, enter other worlds, become finely aware of conflicts, tragedies, but a moral endeavour?

And shouldn't we also think of some novels (not "the novel") as attempting to show human acts of kindness, generosity and strength in the face of adversity-personal, political or moral collapse?And what of Bellow, with his supreme gift of inclusiveness, his fascination with matters of the soul (as Amis says), the swift flow of prose that picks up the details, leaves nothing out, lets the gaze move on, trained and effortless.

And now, after listening to Wood and Amis on Bellow (do watch the superb BBC documentary on him if you can) I am compelled to quote the following:

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

Bellow was a great pleasure-giver; and a very serious pleasure-giver, too. I mean that he treated the novel in the highest terms, considered it a metaphysical vessel, a form for the examination of the self and its strivings.

--James Wood.

Of course, one doesn't read books with the explicit desire for gaining moral insights, but tell me, who amongst you has read a book or loved a book just because it was well written, for aesthetic reasons alone?

I don't know. I think reading encourages you to take words seriously. And that means, also, not taking others too seriously.

As a character from my favourite Calvino book says: "We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves" To which one might add: we can know nothing of ourselves if we overlook what is outside us. Here "knowing" is not epistemology , but understanding and comprehension. It is not about "facts" but values that are deeply entangled with them.

From the same story:

He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.

Take two

Talking with Lukas and he said, surprisingly, "my problem with Rothko is that he just does the same thing again and again. Where's the creativity of the artist there?"

Similarly, Roxana talks about the 'freedom of the artist' in the rather all-too familiar way of: repression by, or constraints imposed by: the State, Church, Religion etc., etc. One wonders, if that is true, whether many (most?) of the artists before the Renaissance were just duds, lacking in freedom, individuality, and creativity. Art for art's sake? Maybe. But shouldn't we also ask, like Brando, "have you ever considered any other freedom?" What happens when 'the shock of the new' is actually just a worn-out cliche?

Inventio:

re-discovering, re-turning..."take two-ness", re-vision, re-vising, re-living, creative repetition.. to draw out of a theme all the possible permutations. Look, and look again. Second-order vision.

'A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us-along with immeasurable riches-snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions but as an organic habit of recreating what has been received and is handed on. It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality.

there may be other and better ways of being original than our concern for the writer's own individuality..our self-conscious fictions

We may come to believe that, great as some authors have been , their greatness is finally surpassed by that of the craft they have served; hence whenever we reckon their contributions we should also remember their obligations; no credit need be lost if some of it is shared anonymously with others trained in the same techniques and imparting the same mythology.'

---From Albert Lord's Singer of Tales

I can't imagine this as striking our modern ears as anything short of blasphemous..."our" hard-won freedoms and individuality achieved by defying the dead, oppressive weight of tradition and authority . To walk and think alone. 'I'...then the world. Creatio ex nihilo. The Romantic legacy. How can there be a 'commons of the mind' or 'group rationality'? What is this "muddy centre" before we were. I must see and make the world according to my own lights or be enslaved by those of another.

A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays, and race meetings, and seaside outings, ..in the necessities that crave expression after the church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continual of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened-all this is signified by their language.
--Englands of the Mind, Seamus Heaney.

Edward Said on Glenn Gould:

The search for order and new modes of apprehension-a "new kind of thinking". To escape the need to grab attention [but escape where?]
A rejection of 'vertical' romantic music.

Bach: anachronistic (a return to old Church forms) and daringly modern in his isolation from rituals and conventions. Bach's innermost truth is that in him the social trend which had dominated the bourgeoisie (technology, rationalization?] is reconciled with the voice of humanity.

Gaddis: Not the opposition, but the overlap between artistic individualism and collectivist technology.

What's the problem? Technology.
What's the solution? Technology.

The ultimate mystery: the rational and the pleasurable.

~~~~

In the 'bringing forth' of the artisan the instrumental is detached -unlike a tree which brings forth fruit . The human way of "revealing".

Industrial techniques: not an unfolding but a "challenging" of nature (an unlocking, storming of it..see Hannah on acting "in" nature)

Modern technology turns everything into a "standing-reserve", a resource to be exploited. The loss of wonder, the truth of the thing. What is this but the demand for a constant presence. Is there, then, a link between the need for concepts, images in the human mind and technology?

Creativity: one must make something of one's own life. Is there an element of violence in this 'making'? Liquid modernity: nothing is 'given'. Are we not looking , ultimately, at two views of freedom?

~~~

Notes from Rieff.

Wilde as the prophet of the future..the artist as the revolutionary..free from inherited inhibitions conventions, conformities, authority. Express yourself! Subversiveness. Every man is his own priest (the Protestant contribution). And now: entertainment, stimulation, liberation..the "will" is everything. A learned rejection and acceptance, the compelling truths, is stifling, cramps my style. An artist creates his own life. No more imitation of models or ideal conceptions of the self..all that is solid...the "dissolution of restrictive shapings". To have and be everything.

double dutch coiled against the sun

When people stop talking like friends or as if they were talking to a loved one, then arguments flow, the heart hardens and the ego takes over. It's me against you, kid. Like bickering children or academics: "you can't prove it" and..well, that's your point of view. Online formats rarely, in my opinion, foster the grace required for silence, letting go, actual listening.

Words: When the loved one says : "Do you love me?" then you know you're in trouble!

We grow up with set words, fixed images, cliches, stereotypes. These are, I guess, sometimes useful. But less so when one is on the receiving end of terms that are used-thinkingly or unthinkingly, deliberately or unwittingly. Words such as "Paki" or the now more common "Muslim" or "Jew" to set up an indelible boundary between 'us' and 'them', for example.

Distinctions, distinctions: Is it or is it not important to draw distinctions between the way in which words are used? Can one ignore the political ramifications of using the word 'nigger', for example? Or the market rhetoric that encourages us to think of certain qualities as 'things', commodities, alienable quantities. Everyone has "their price" we are told. "Human capital" or "collateral damage" mean what, exactly? If you see and think about other people as "dots or dreams" and not as human beings then how long before they become dots or dreams. How long before they become a number? Primo Levi.

As Ubo would say: get your priorities straight.

I grew up thinking West Indians (yeah, I thought it was a country) were the coolest people on earth (today I still can't help gloating and laughing at the thrashing that England were given). Partly down to Mr. Heinz, our black mayor who used to let me wear his gold chain of office...and then there were the Dutch, epitomized by Cruyff: cool, sophisticated, off-key, second-best.

I don't know what's happened to the Dutch, though. From culturally and politically liberal to...what? Hard to say. Need to read Buruma.

Pearson, the man who invited Wilders over, had this to say:

[Pearson said] he believed a Hitler-type figure should be allowed to speak in public in Britain. "I would go and laugh at him. You couldn't take him seriously, could you?" he said.

Er..yeah, except people did take him seriously.

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.
--Iris. M.

Turn away now Jonah, Mark, if you're reading this. Yah, man!

'Don't you walk through my words
'Cause you ain't heard me out yet'

Dreadlock Holiday.mp3 - 10cc

Light Years

Faith, like a bird, sees its 'trackless way' unattended by the intellect.
--The Allama.

Today, the quality of light reminds me of Milosz, of what is bound and what is free, of weight and lightness.

How should I live?
How do I bloody know!

Is the unexamined life worth living?
Dunno, let me think about it.

One sometimes hears in my 'line of work' the assertion-and it is said with some pride: "I'm a theorist". A fancy way of dressing up a very limited approach to reality. I always feel like asking: Of what? What actually does such a convoluted approach achieve, what does it aim to achieve? University people are 'infected'-if that's not too strong a word- by this desire to appear clever and sophisticated in such matters, to confound people with difficult words and useless jargon, blissfully unaware of the lives of real people, the lives of others.

Of course, this is not an argument (why does everything have to be an argument?) against abstraction, discipline, technique, clarity and so on. Just asking: what is the "life" in the 'life of the mind'? Is there a point in time where one has to ask oneself: what am I actually saying, what do I actually know, what is the shape of my ignorance, how is my thought related to my life? Why do you want principles, regularities, homogeneity...why this aversion to wonder, particularities, the unknown?

Right-seeing: the ability to see others in the right light depends, doesn't it, on the ability and desire to see ourselves in the right way?

The end of philosophy: to see the end of philosophy. All truth is on the boundaries.

"The eye of a nihilist" - Nietzsche wrote in 1887 - "is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, to lose their leaves".

Everything had left her-the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something. They pass, dissolve, are scattered like dust..The days had lost their warmth. Sometimes at noon , as if in farewell, there was an hour or two like summer, swiftly gone. ..In the distant fields, seas of dank earth far from towns, there were still tomatoes clinging to the vines. At first glance it seemed only a few, but they were hidden, sheltered; that was how they had survived.
---Light Years.

because

Because there's so much stupidity in the world it's worth remembering what is beautiful. Even if that was not the case it would still be worthwhile.

Not for the first time a student has talked to me about how 'decadently' women are dressed here (read: jeans). I really don't know why they don't ask for a transfer to Afghanistan or Saudi. "This is not part of our culture". Yeah, right, and what is: 'honour-killing'? The beast is within, as the kid says.

Talking with the Cheema...and so, this old guy comes to my office with his elderly wife and asks me to write a manifesto for a political party they're starting. Ten minutes pass, 15, 20. The main (only?) agenda being: no taxes. But during all this time the women is silent, passive, just listening to her husband in astonishment, reverence and profound admiration. So, I ask him: who's this (the party chairperson, I think to myself). And the guy just says, without missing a beat: " Well, we were on our way to get some groceries together and I thought I might as well bring her along".

The cheema at a photocopier place:

'By the way, you're not Shia are you?"

Cheema: Why, what does that matter, I only want some photocopies

"Nothing personal, but these people are infidels"

[as always, there's a story behind the story...behind stupidity is more ridiculousness..it transpires that his sister, recently widowed, has lost a lot of property, and that's got him going]

C: but if you were a Shia she would have actually got more property. And then the details, the persuasive details.

The man is convinced. You can see the glimmer in his eye, as if a new thought has entered his head, penetrated his dense skull. Cheema, the sly dog, knows how to pull the strings. The thought of it gets the photocopying man excited, it's beginning to make sense..if only he can hold on to this feeling. Yes, the Shia are cursed but let's not be too judgemental here..there's something in this for all of us...

Half and hour of reflection and discussion.

"I see what you're saying cheema saahib and I understand you perfectly now. You are a wise man, an educated and literate man. A top man. What you say is sensible, reasonable and correct. But I'll tell you one thing-if you permit me?"

C: Go on.

"The shia are the worst scum bag infidels that ever were"

stray reflections

for roxana:

a new category that is not a category.

Kierkegaard, Genius and Apostle:

The former is an individual genius who expresses or articulates a truth that is greater than himself, his spiritual substance; the Apostle is a function of the Truth, someone who bears witness to an impersonal, transcendental Truth and is chosen by grace. The relation to the self-to our eyes-is contingent. A circle, rather than a diamond.

Appearance and Reality.
...


For what may I hope? (J.Lear):

Radical hope is radical because it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. When the cultural world around us collapses, when all that made sense now seems irrelevant, how do we survive, how do we carry on? How do we take forward what we are, what we know, into those unchartered waters? We need to dig deep to find courage , but the very framework that elucidates what is meant by 'courage' has itself been dismantled...

Steadfastness. Latching on to a path, a way, even though unusual in all respects. How can one even imagine such a possibility? Doesn't hope depend on some determinate end, some picture of how things will turn out? This is the problem faced by the Red Man with the destruction of his way of life.

Courage. We are finite -and recognize ourselves as such- but still we reach out to the world in yearning, longing, admiration and desire for that which we take to be valuable, beautiful, and good. This is the world we inhabit.

Socrates. Every soul perceives that the good is some thing but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things.

We reach out for sustenance, to a source of goodness that is beyond us. It was there before we came.

Commitment. The ability to face up to reality . This, only a true individual can do. What resources can one draw on, what experiences when experience itself is empty? How do we go on? But at the same time, new limits to the possibility of experience are opening up.

And yet the Crow remains assured, his dream-vision vouchsafes the possibility that though human beings may be overwhelmed by cultural destruction, the fundamental goodness of the world is secure. Fidelity to his dream would ensure that his people would come through what was the destruction of a telos , the radical discontinuity that announced itself with the coming of the white man. To stray is to lose all...

Only thus could he out-stare the nothingness, face the destruction ahead of him and walk towards it, courageously.

Anabasis

For anton:

And Man was created restless
---Q:

Again, I go.

A country here, not mine. What has the world given me but this swaying of grass?

....from the moment when, for the first navigators, a new land was in sight to the moment when they set foot on the shore, from the moment when a certain learned man became convinced that he had witnessed a phenomenon hitherto unknown, to the time when he began to measure the import of his observation-all feeling of duration abolished by the intoxicating atmosphere of chance- a very delicate flame highlights or perfects life's meaning as nothing else can...

I am only counting on what comes of my own openness, my eagerness to wander in search of everything, which, I am confident, keeps me in mysterious communication with other open beings, as if were suddenly called to assemble.

-----Breton

For us moderns there is, perhaps, only this desert, this wandering: worldlessness. The world has flown away, and the land seems strange to our senses. The search is everything. Process and striving-the legacy of Romanticism, Protestantism, capitalism. To live in time (Eliade). But maybe it has always been like this. The world is not the world. We have always lived with absence, with bewilderment. Why lament it now?

Blessed is the man who hears the crash of thunder and doesn't think of home.

--Basho

Part of our soul longs for rest and peace ('the Garden') but part of our soul is anarchic, nomadic. If we 'reflect' the divine then part of us is unknown, cannot be captured by thought or image: a Jewish thought. Burckhardt has an intriguing comment on depictions of heaven: crystalline forms (perfection, completion) and plants (life, growth). A German thought: the soul is forever fading, soaring.


Notes from Badiou:

(a) Xenophon describes the collapse of the old order that gave meaning to the collective presence of the Greeks..after Cunaxa they find themselves brutally deprived of any reason for being where they are. They are nothing now but foreigners in a hostile country...a principle of lostness.

(b) They have only themselves, their own will and discipline to rely on..from now on they must invent their own destiny.

(c) The way home is not a pre-established path. Only by walking, only by wandering, is the path revealed.

Again, I begin.
The root of all politics: hope.

May I run, run, and never find.
---Shah Latif.

Love would never leave us alone

This can be read in more ways than one. Do I only imagine Marley singing this? Wasn't it: 'the past would never leave us alone'?

Why speak of the past if it is truly past?Because that is the way back. All roads lead to..But it is gone. I allow it to slowly slip through my fingers-or at least I like to think so. By doing so nothing is lost. The tree still stands outside my window, bearing witness to my fragmented self. There is no escape. No journeys. Only a return. Desire is always memorable. Creation is always a loving return to the origin..the late style, full of re-vision, open possibilities: the first note contains all others -as well as the unheard.

If we occasionally forget it is only because the pain of remembrance is all the more sweeter, delightful. If I walk in a different city to you do not think my stride has changed any, that my panache is no more. These things were always with us, from time out of mind. Love would never leaves us alone. Yes, eyes grow dim, flesh weary, hands sadder. I am not me, and you are not you. Don't let go, but don't hold on. Mirrors sigh. But still I trace your image, still I hear your voice. Even a distant echo. The walls do not lie. The unconquered flame.

I gave you the beautiful journey
Without her you would not have set out on your way
She has no more to give you
And if you find her poor, I did not betray you
With all your wisdom, all your experience
You understand by now what Ithaka means

---Cavafy

I am a stranger to myself. Is it the land, or Time itself? Is open the same as broken? My voice sounds cracked, crooked, and I speak unfamiliar, barbarian words. But still, for you, I sign my name.

---b.

of what survives

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
---Ted Hughes, Thistles.

'Solstice: A turning, culminating, or stopping point; a furthest limit; a crisis' (OED)

Now can we let it fall away?
Let us say
Not what we have or want but what we
Have in common
Solsticity, where we be
Cool as we will
The distant sun seems to stand still
Sol is both the sun and the one.

Solsticity, the place of stasis and extremes
Where it's Christmas and Midsummer all the time, the fall
In that desire means,
Missing what this place was once to us all
The stillness of the sea away from the shore
Our coming, our being home more.

---Adrian May, friend of the Dougal.

Amidst all the glass and steel that was our university, between the cracks of the cement and the dullness of the flatlands, the communist dystopias of the towers, the stifling air, a few human beings floated our way, whittling away at time with a whimsical aimlessness, brushing dark thoughts off as one would nonchalantly dust off particles on one's shoulder; And so what if the majority saw them as ghosts, thin and insubstantial remainders of the past?

So much grey matter! These evenings of the mind. We were like one-eyed men in the land of the blind. Even with one eye one must look, remember the colours.The vast fortress of the intellect melted with the remembrance of summer days; no winter rain could blot out what was given to us; no howling winds drown out the melodious voice that testified to our survival, to what survives...

Everything that is given with love, with an open hand, will be returned; everyone that gives so, will return. The mythical soul remembers the fields of gold, carries them in her.

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

'Were we not made for summer, shade and coolness
And gazing through an open door at sunlight?'

Today, a summer's day in spring.
Everything's out of sync., off the hinge.
And still the heart doesn't know why.
Until a Summerfield truck hurtles by.
Carrying desire far and wide.
As the old house shudders, side to side.
The still centre of the world is here.
All roads of the future, the past, laid bare.
In yellow pages and the silence of the wood
Dust settles, whilst windows sigh, streams flood.

I've been here before, but didn't stay.
A golden beach and childhood play.
Smiles glint on timeless screens.
Radios blare their seventies' dreams.
The ices in their hands nothing like the starred heart.
The old ones tired, having played their part.
Afterglow, afterwords.
Fading light, never heard.
-----b.

Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance

Under Pressure - Queen & David Bowie

memories of sky and earth

I wanted to re-visit the old, familiar places..the hallowed ground of the British Library or the National. Poussin, with those clear spaces in which one can breathe, some wonderfully geometric mind at work (I don't know why I think of Bach when I see this image). But more than that: the slight curve of the backs is repeated, and the light isn't the deeply piercing light of the north.

Instead, what strikes one -apart from the whole system of glances and eye contact- is just how gentle, tender, relaxed and light everyone's hands are. Every hand is giving...

Painting is the result of receptivity of ink. The ink is open to the brush: the brush is open to the hand:the hand is open to the heart:all this is in the same way as the sky engenders what the earth produces: everything is the result of receptivity.

And then Rembrandt's 'eldery man' with such incredibly thoughtful, wistful eyes and those locked hands. I don't know, someone (Schama, probably) once said that his paintings represented all that was most delicate in European humanism. The light, coming to rest on one specific object, a button....

Its meandering, hallucinatory quality that suddenly comes to focus on one particular object, one item within the field of vision capable of absorbing attention and momentarily freeing the body from pain and breathlesness.

On the way back, stopped off to see Richter's wonderful, wonderful painting (its shimmering, trance-like quality has to be seen, taken in). It's like a dream, or memories, or layers of dreams superimposed on one another. Sky becomes water, clouds become reflections of the sun but are more real than the land. Take a step back. Look at the parts and then look, look again. To see the whole. No, not see...

It immediately reminded me of Monet's water-lilies (which I haven't seen). But there we are opened to vast swirls of ever-new vistas. I don't know what's going on here..it's mysterious and silent. The mind has to be stilled.
~~
They are a long inspection of a drowned, reflected world, in which no sky is visible except by reflection; the water fills the whole frame. ..In these paintings, emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things. ..to conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly effeace themselves in a complementary silence, which involves an undertaking which comes close to the act of creation.
~
What showed on its surface, the clouds and lilypads and cat's-paws of wind, the dark patches of reflected foliage.the abysses of dark blue and the opaline shimmer of light from the sky, were all compressed together in a shallow space, a skin, like the space of painting . The willows touched it like brushes . No foreground, no background.; instead, a web of conenctions
~
~
The same. The same.
then once, in a flash,
fresh ground,...
black, grey, green, and blue
water, stone, grass and sky
and each unique set stone!

---August 11th, 2008.

(K. Clark? and J. Berger, Shape of a Pocket)

~~~~~~

Was going to write on Rothko and qualities of darkness, but there are also qualities of lightness: light days, light years-distant, weightless; the light by which we see ourselves, by which we are seen; the light we remember from childhood, that illuminates hidden possibilities: second thoughts, re-vision: to see another in the light of new understandings. The order of light. Light-compulsion. Light as a metaphor (Iris M, anton): lucidity, clarity. To see things in the right light. Light that travels, overcomes time, that splinters, refracts. Things that come to light. The fading light of sunset that falls softly across your face, the first light of morning that introduces colour to the world..light that transforms useless things into glimmering, dazzling objects of affection.

Today: Athens; tomorrow: Jerusalem

~~

by the sense of light

you grasp the soul

in the blue shade

Tears Dry On Their Own - Amy Winehouse


All wrath? All cruelty? Be what you may
I wish that all you are had been for me.

I shall write to you without cause
simply to write your name fills me with love

Though I do not understand her words,
and may not know her heart
Is it not enough that one so beautiful speaks to me?

When, Lord. you fated me to bear such grief
You should have given me more hearts than one.

---selections from Ghalib.

ael

woke up with these meaningless words still fresh on my tongue:

The star dwells in the night
the night dwells in the star
the forest unfurls itself in the world
the world itself in the forest

multitude of beasts march together in creation
as solitary humans march alone to death.

Hands that would heal
sought my dark face
in the times of snow
the raven of my heart is lost
like to like, eye to fire
the medieval chant
so it is, the wounds on your hands
fail
will not heal.

Not for the first time this week, something strange happened. I turned to anton's blog and found exactly what I was looking for when I meant 'medieval chant'. How spooky is that! Anyway, it was:

The soul by grasping the similarity of things, returns to itself [ad se ipsam rerum similitudines trahens aggregat] and this is the cause of the fact that the mind itself, which grasps the universals, is composed of every substance and every being that it represents to itself.
----Hugo of St. Victor - Didascalicon

Well, from heals to eels:

'the female lives like this for years, in ponds and streams, and then, one day in autumn she stops and eats nothing more. her colour changes to black, or nearly black, her nose becomes sharper, her eyes large. Moving at night, resting by day, sometimes crossing meadows and fields she travels downstream to the sea..once in their life, and once only, they go to the sea..no one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went.
---Salter.

I

The strange part if his head. The strangely ripened
Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles
For some large containment. Lobed glands
Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.
This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.
Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,
The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,
Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold
Distilled only enough to be different
From the olive lode of her body,
The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger
With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye
Behind her eye, paler, blinder,
Inward. Her buffalo hump
Begins the amazement of her progress.
Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin- concession
To fish-life- secretes itself
Flush with her concealing suit: under it
The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel
As her belly is, a dulled pearl.
Strangest, the thumb- print skin, the rubberised weave
Of her insulation. Her whole body
Damascened with identity. This is she
Suspends the Sargasso
In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell
Sealed from event, her patience
Global and furthered with love
By the bending starts as if she
Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone
In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,
The nun of water.

II

Where does the river come from?
And the eel, the night-mind of water-
The river within the river and opposite-
The night-nerve of water?

Not from the earth’s remembering mire
Not from the air’s whim
Not from the brimming sun. Where from?

From the bottom of the nothing pool
Sargasso of God
Out of the empty spirals of stars

A glimmering person

Ted Hughes

The Door

I've been tagged. Not sure what that means but, as the saying goes, if you unclench your fist I will extend my hand.

I think it works like this..er...you post a few lines (your own or from a poem or something) that 'rings true for you' (yeah, that's it, or was it that you treat me to a cinnamon roll). Okay, jeez, I'm under pressure already since I'm not sure I even know three live bloggers (damn that Roxana!..probably some ancient Romanian curse on me if I don't comply)

So, I tag Anton, Celia, and Ali Hasnain (if you're still around..do you even have a blog?)

Now, what do I do again?

~~~~~~

Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality.
---Hannah A.

There is no moment when I forget you, except the days when I do.
There is no redemption of time, except when there is.

The Door?

First forget what time is
for an hour.

What can you learn by heart? A rose is not a rose, though each thorn draws blood. The rose is but fire, flickering time, sometimes ablaze with longing. The red mourns the loss of the blue. But listen: what once was, always is. Here, love wears forbidden colours; there, across the bridge, through the mist, beyond the garden is a door that leads to a white room. Mark it well.

There, you will find time within time, like silence within silence. And a black mirror. When you look at you, you will think of me, speak our common name. There will be an end to the granting of names. Like two stars in the day, or gold coins on the sand, invisible, except to one another. I will be me, except when I won't. A broken circle, or something that rings true for you.

Coming into the high room again after years
after oceans and shadows of kills and
the sounds of lies
after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting
turning there thinking to find
no one except those I knew
finally I saw you
sitting in white
already waiting

you of whom I had heard
with my own ears since the beginning
for whom more than once
I had opened the door
believing you not far

(quotes from W.S. Merwin and Paul Celan)

for the time being

time-being?
time, being.
For !

Does 'for' ground us, or point us somewhere else?

Say the words slowly; say them quickly; life is one. Or maybe it isn't. We are two. Time, being.

For a while I thought Calvino, Kadare were the thing..and there's no doubting the supreme intelligence in them (one mathematical, the other mythical). In both there is a strange correspondence between the human level and that of nature (the atomic in one, the land in the other, with their structure and rhythms sharing a likeness with those of the human being).

But, but..this is something else: James Salter's Light Years...the one thing needful? There is no one thing. I gave up marking passages and phrases with my lead pencil..there were too many.

But I've always believed, I know it's true, that any main branch leads you straight to the trunk . If you know one thing completely, it touches everything. But, of course you have to know it....

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others . We turn to it as flowers to the sun...

What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past , that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, that habit which gives us shape. ..He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour , and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...

a day of strange coincidences

Shine, sweet freedom.

I wanted to say something about how a post comes about and also to talk about co-incidnces (even old siggy...62!) because the moderns don't really believe in such things. Incidentally, I remember saying 'good luck' to a muslim before an exam and he turned around and said, full of arrogance, 'I don't believe in luck'. Er...yeah, okay.

So, so, n, this is how it came about....

I was walking past the Church on a wonderfully crisp and clear morning. And I thought to myself: how good things are (it's good to look down when one has such thoughts). And what goes up to make a good life? Love (think Corinthians, here), friendship, eyes to see the world, money, a mind to read books, a restless heart, a good slice of luck, an independent spirit. And what freedom! Then one can remember the giveness of these things. A strange thought occurred to me: I shouldn't think about this for too long but just, as the Buddha says: walk on!

Okay, I do recall, however, that I'd post this song because I was feeling so exuberant.

Well, get on the tube (usual place..a stickler for meaningless rituals). Open the book on the Jewish princess. My eye alights on the word "genius" and then rests. A thin rainbow has formed across the white surface of the pages...a small, diagonal one that cuts across the text. I don't look up to see where it's coming from or where it ends (don't look for the source..enjoy the moment). I look around to make sure that no-one is looking at me and then just stare and stare at this rainbow. It is interrupted by a framed white square rushing by the page but otherwise is constant. Fragile and childlike.

And then it strikes me, ten minutes later: "remember the colours" from the last post! I repress a smile in case the farangis think I'm cracked. At Stratford it goes. I'm not disappointed. It had to. That's the way of rainbows.

Off to Dillons (okay, you can call it Waterstones). Leaf through some books. Jean-Luc Marion's catches my attention. Read a few pages on the gift (don't , for once, copy words down because, like the rainbow, I want them to remain free). A gift is a gift if it is not thought of as a gift, a gift is a gift if it escapes causal relations, is not an 'object' , doesn't establish a 'relation' with the 'subject'..there is no 'economy' of the gift (this was beginning to sound like 'negative theology')...

Back to Charing Cross (which, after the British Library is a kind of spiritual home to me). Sit at the same place I always sit, the usual latte and my own fish sandwiches in silver foil. Rituals, rituals..pick up Skidelsky's biography of Keynes (looks good) and notice that they're playing old eighties tracks. And then, ten minutes in, what do they play but old Macdonald! How bizarre!

What happens then is that I usually scurry down some words and try and link things up, the scaffolding to what I've felt or what's been floating past me. So, I was tempted to look up Heller on Goethe's theory of colours or Corbin's opaque book 'Temple and Contemplation' which has a section on colours.

But today none of that matters. Look back on Charing Cross road, the beautiful neon lights in the blue-black darkness..and then it's gone. Down Denmark street (per script) to meet the Mongol and Nav for tea and reminisces on how we screwed up at the L.S.E. (some things never change!). Cinnamon roll. Sublime. Tea from the Italians. A few laughs and farewells...and then we slip off the page...Omnia mea mecum porto.

Sweet Freedom - Michael Mcdonald

the colours

remember t h e colours. Be close to the colours!

remnants of hearing, seeing

In the wellspring of your eyes
like the fish-nets of the labyrinth
A net snared a net
we separate entwined
~

It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
that unrest formed a heart,
It is time it was time
It is time.

~

kept from harm by a word found in nobody's heart.

~

with a variable key
you unlock the house, in it
drifts the snow of the unsaid

~

yet we could not
darken over to you:
the law was
light-compulsion

~

do not work ahead,
do not send abroad,
Stand
in here:

deep-grounded by Nothingness,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fitted to
the pre-Script,
unoutstrippable,

you i take up
in place of all
rest

~

a tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone.

~

by the sense of light
you grasp the soul

~

unrecognized,
for you
alone

~

we the overdeepened, set apart

~

to stay at home in the being two of despair

[a broken circle! the circle stands empty, a symbol of nothingness...which is to say what? that it is something or nothing? a bounding, binding circle that embraces what is lost, the circumference of our understanding; the circle: from 'I' to 'you']

~

look, i rise, look, i fall
am an other, am no other.

---these were the beautiful words of Paul Celan

~~~

W.S. Merwin: