there was a time

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.

---from Mir Dard.


What is pain itself, that is peace of the soul?

---Shah Latif.


Earth poetizes, field to field
with trees interlinear, and lets
us weave our own paths around
the plowed land, into the world

Blossoms rejoice in the wind
Grass stretches out to bed them so softly
Heaven goes blue and greets mildly
soft chains the sun has woven.

People go about, no one is lost-
Earth, heaven, light and forest-
Play in the play of the Almighty.
---Hannah Arendt

There was a time when we didn't question, when the voice didn't quaver and the hand didn't hesitate to accept what was given. There was a time when the frail winter light held things together, when we measured the earth by our stride. Cricket in Victoria Park, deep into the day, the old tree serving as the wickets, the hedge as the boundary. Long summer evenings, bats criss-crossing the sky as the last traces of light left the purple clouds..the moment, from purple to grey, like a face that suddenly becomes sad for no reason...

quaver: a note of time value.

There was a time when what seemed near was very distant, when words lost their meaning and "up" meant "down", "love" meant "hate". But even here, a wisp of life survived, like a thin trace of silver in a darkening mirror, or the flash of desire in your glistening eyes-dazzling reminders, remainders, of another time, another place.


I love television in other cities, the assurance of looking up from my chair in some strange room to see a familiar newscaster talking in his familiar accent...In me it fostered an odd assurance that some things outside my life were okay still, that the same men and women...things were knowable, safe and sound. Everybody with what they need or could get. A perfect illustration of how the literal can become the mildly mysterious.

We take all the solace we can.

Only suddenly, then, you are out of it-that film, that skin of life-as when you were a kid. And you think: this must have been the way it was once in my life, though you didn't know it then, and don't even really remember it..a feeling of being released, let loose, of being light..this time you want to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it might just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time you ever feel this way again.

---Richard Ford


At a certain age the clothes fit. There's an equilibrium between biological and social worlds. It is as if one has grown to one's limits, being has filled us out and there is a certain peace about this, like two overlapping circles finally becoming synchronized. But from here it appears that there can only be a decline, a falling away. It is haunted by the thought of its own disappearance, just as the fading winter sun is burnt out by 2 o'clock, and already has a premonition of the lengthy shadows it will cast. This perfection cannot be consciously designed by a political system or even by religion since it depends , crucially, on the awareness of our fittedness with all that has passed in the universe, a sense of not being estranged from oneself or from the times we live in. And that type of self-assuredness is fragile, temporary, and not something that can be aimed for or re-constructed once it has passed; it is pure gift.

There was a time when I was and you were not, when I looked for fossils on the lot next to the library and threw stones whilst you slept in your mother's peace unaware; a time when you will say "I am" when I cannot, and you will look at photographs of your generations, perhaps throw some stones back. Is that now? Is time another name for irreducible distance? There was a time when you hopped about on the cracks in the cement, like a high-wire acrobat, ate strawberry jelly, played by the sea. If time heals all wounds then there was a time when time was not time.

loops

The first note contains the possibility of all others.

But the first is closest to the image of the last more than anything else.

One cannot play the first note unless one has in one's mind what the last one is. (Daniel Barenboim)

The one circles around itself, waiting to break, to become two.

Minimalism: to express everything in a single note or the simplest and faintest of brush strokes on a blank canvas that is at once entirely free and spontaneous and at the same time the product of great learning and technique. A single note that expresses the different worlds: the natural, the human, and the cosmic. It is reached if one slows down the passage of time , frame by frame, to a single point, the whole point.

There is nothing to say after the point has been reached. The first note emerges from silence and holds that silence within its innermost chamber; its very structure is permeated by that nothingness; and it must return to that primal state.

If one unravels the note one can hear ancient and modern tunes: the co-mingling of a timeless Japanese stillness that dreams itself into the pain of longing from a Persian poem...and then, with a slight shift of emphasis, to a Highland lament. If one is attentive one can just discern a return to 19th century classical Vienna or the onward rush of the first settlers, frontiersmen, seeking out open spaces and new futures. The first note is always old because of its relation to the origin but also always new because it contains the unexpected, all that hasn't been thought of...

The first note has all the freshness and innocence of the first times, but all of the regret and sadness of the last times as well. A sound thought: a thought without mind. Each voice is present, each vital-as in an infinite stone bridge; to take away but one would be reduce the whole to nothing....

A line of stars would be of no interest to us. But a pattern where some are bunched together and others are hopelessly isolated in the infinite distances, forlorn, as if rejected by fate, is a different matter; in other regions some burn with a scintillating brilliance whilst others quietly fade into insignificance; these fantastical differences remind us of our own fabulous story: the creation of the universes is as the creation of a single soul.

The constant star that never wavers, that is a sure guide; the star without a name; the one that dazzles all others with its white light; the blue, mournful one; the star that never stays in the same place, that one has to search and search the skies for until, by chance, it is found; the one that caroms through the night sky, zig zagging erratically through the universe. Is this not a better way of thinking of life?
---the swami.

Question me an Answer

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)



The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?---- foot-marks.....

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.
--After Rumi

Sat with Rinku and Sarmad for a while. Rinks told of her Buddhist friend who said: haven't you read enough. This struck me and reminded me of: only read as much as you can live. Not a putting away of books, no. But more like a question that is not a question, a kind of answer: what would it be like to have a practical wisdom, to not always look for fragments, or strive for completeness, answers?

At 'Readings' after that. Came across, surprisingly, W.S. Merwin's collected works, A.R. Ammons, Updike, Bellow's Ravelstein, and much more. But I didn't want to even pick up a book!
How good that felt. Even when a car crashed into the back of mine I was strangely calm.

Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said I think, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.

But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, our mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is, ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes us -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.

Most importantly, there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.

What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?

There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...

Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)

A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).

Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).

G. Bataille: To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

It is the unknown that compels us to love. The key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul
D.H.Lawrence.

God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'

between the lines

Eventually found the entrance to this rather curious gallery just off Old Street. It was a side door into a cubical building that must have once been a warehouse but now had doubled up into something else. One wonders how many layers of history lie submerged here.

Idris Khan's work is about that just that: repetition and persistence over time...simultaneity. The work is a series of overlapping, superimposed photographs of an artists work so that one can see the whole story , as it were. Above, are the scores for Bach and Beethoven and it is as if we can see a magical pattern that tells us something essential about each of them; the Bach photograph looks like a huge computer printout, a single, vast and intractable mathematical equation, or a series of functional relationships that asks us to decode it. It is as if the very structure of the universe is hidden in the truth of them, a harmony that is at once static and brilliant and one that underlies the dynamics of all that is organic and inorganic. In this way it reveals a correspondence also between matter and the spirit.

The Beethoven is a force of will and effort. There's a vibrancy and urgency about these lines that represents a striving for greatness: the heroic individual. But perhaps it is also possible to read the dark lines as the terrible silence that erases Beethoven's connection with the world. Maybe they point to the enigmatic result of the interaction of history with genius.

Mozart's indicate a return to elemental simplicity, a primordial mind or that of a child-clear and light and unencumbered by memories or history. It is as if there was only a single pattern in this case and variations of it were only so many experiments in lightness.

A great review:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1863044,00.html

Criticism sometimes achieves the condition of art; certain works of art are also a form of commentary or criticism. Roland Barthes's meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, is a classic example of the former. How to respond creatively to a book that has profoundly shaped the way the medium is regarded? A writer might feel compelled to follow George Steiner's grand advice and "write a book in reply". And if you're not a writer, but a photographer? If you do what Barthes is writing about?

Idris Khan's response was to photograph every page of the book and then digitally combine them in a single, composite image. The result of this homage to - and essay on - Camera Lucida (English edition) is a beautiful palimpsest: a series of blurred stripes of type in which the occasional word can be deciphered and one of the images reproduced by Barthes - a portrait of Mondrian by Kertész - glimpsed. Khan did the same thing with On Photography by Susan Sontag. The whole of the book can be seen in an instant, but the density of information is such that Sontag's elegant formulations add up to, and are reduced to, a humming, unreadable distillation. Already slight, the gap between texts and Khan's images will shrink further if the books are reissued with his "readings" of them - surrogate author photos? - on the covers.

It's not just books about photography; Khan also photographs photographs. Bernd and Hilla Becher compiled a comprehensive inventory of architectural building types, such as gas towers, all photographed in a stark, neutral style. Khan's composite, every . . . Bernd & Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, transforms their rigid geometries into a fuzzy, vibrating mass, more like a smudged charcoal drawing of a shivering iron jelly than a photograph.

These - the Sontag, the Barthes and the Bechers - were the first things by Khan that I came across. It was obvious he was on to something. A better sense of what that something might be can be seen at the Victoria Miro Gallery, in London, from today. Practically everything in this, Khan's first UK solo show, is a composite of some kind, but the range and depth of the idea have been extended with uncanny success.

Freud, in his famous essay, mentions "the constant recurrence of the same thing" as a symptom of "the Uncanny". In Khan's picture of every page of the recent Penguin edition, the black gutter at the centre throbs like a premonition or memory of an Optical Art void. It makes you wonder if, as well as psychoanalysis, Freud invented the Rorschach blot. In the background, two of the paintings discussed by him, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, peer through a shifting sleet of type like emanations of the unconscious or something. It's only a book - only a photo of a book - but it pulses like a living thing.

Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978. His mother, who had trained as a pianist, worked as a nurse. She converted to Islam after meeting his father, a doctor. It was his father's idea that Idris - himself a non-practising Muslim - photograph every page of the Qur'an. Since a significant part of the population believes that the complexities of the world can be resolved by this one book, there is a certain logic in taking things a stage further and reducing the book to a single manifestation of itself. The result is incomprehensible. And lovely. The patterns bordering each page are turned into a solid black frame so that the book becomes - as is often said of photography - a window on to the world. Inside this frame - rigid, unalterable, definitive - all is in flux. Fixed meaning dissolves in a blazing grey drizzle. Words, as one of Don DeLillo's narrators says when confronted by a swirl of Arabic script, are "design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation".

Working in a medium wedded to the visible, photographers, perversely and inevitably, have been preoccupied with photographing the invisible. Given his mother's training, music has an allure for Khan. Struggling to Hear . . . After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas is a picture of all of the composer's scores for piano, the impenetrable mass of black serving as a visual corollary of Beethoven's increasing deafness.

Each art form has its own advantages and limitations. Words and music unfold successively, through time. Photography is about an instant. By analogy it can ask the impossible: in this case, what if you could hear every note of Beethoven's sonatas in an instant? What would that look like? And when we think of a piece of music that we know well, don't we sometimes remember it, not phrase by phrase, but in its amorphous entirety?

It is often said that photographers freeze time, but Khan does the opposite. This can be seen most clearly in his remixes of Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies of the 1880s (a well-documented source of inspiration for Francis Bacon). Muybridge used fast-shutter speeds to break action into moment-by-moment increments, rendering movement stationary. Khan takes these sequences of isolated moments and unfreezes time by combining them in a single image. Muybridge's strictly mechanical record of a man getting out of bed becomes a vision of the unconscious lifting clear of the body, a dream of waking. It's like a photographic equivalent of Henri Fuseli's Nightmare, an out-of-body experience made flesh - and vice versa.

To learn more about artists' working methods, some paintings have been X-rayed so that preliminary versions of masterpieces are brought to the surface. Khan's photographs are a kind of reverse X-ray, laying bare by accretion. Marrying up the eyes of all Rembrandt's self-portraits, reducing them to the same size and layering them digitally together, Khan effectively photographs him with an exposure time lasting the length of the artist's life. Rembrandt by Himself offers an experience akin to the painter looking at the mirror in the moment of his death, when the evidence of a lifetime of intense self-scrutiny flashes before his grave-dark eyes in a single instant.

There are precedents for these essays in visual condensation: most recently, Fiona Banner's paintings in which a film is verbally transcribed in her own hand so that an entire movie can be seen - but not read - in an instant, on a single canvas. In the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing empty movie palaces and drive-ins. Using an exposure time equal to the duration of the film, Sugimoto reduced the contents of whatever was on screen - car chases, murders, betrayals, romance - to a single moment of radiant whiteness. The most explicit precursors, however, are also the earliest. They also enable us to view Khan's situation and methods in a broader historical and contemporary context.

In the late 19th century, photography became an important tool in an alliance between some of the "scientific" fads of the day - physiognomy, eugenics, racial taxonomy - and attempts by the police and the state to isolate types likely to commit crimes. Francis Galton believed that there could "hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomic type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture". His composites of convicted criminals duly showed "not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime". Using similar techniques, Arthur Batut, in France, made "type-portraits" to identify the defining traits of particular races, tribes or families (including his own). In a phrase that might have come from Khan himself, Batut spoke of these composites as "images of the invisible", images that shimmer with the same ghostly air that we see in Khan's.

Khan is himself a composite of artist and photographer. For more than a few current practitioners, the advantages of identifying themselves as artists rather than photographers can be summed up as a six-word hustle: Print bigger, sell less for more. For my money, Khan is as much of an artist as any other photographer currently working. He is a conceptual artist in the straightforward sense that thought is implicit in the act of looking at his work.

A lot of contemporary British art flogging itself as conceptual has the intellectual depth of a paddling pool and the gravitas of a helium balloon; Khan's work is dense, multilayered (literally) and profound.
The danger is that this composite thing could just become his shtick. He could do every page of every book, every this of every that. Every . . . Photograph Taken Whilst Travelling Around Europe in the Summer of 2002 seems a rather pointless novelty - there's nothing to see. Its relative failure suggests that Khan's method tends to work better when applied to existing works of art. You can almost hear certain books summoning him to them. It is only a matter of time, surely, before he does every page of Borges's story "The Aleph", in which the narrator discovers a spot where "all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist".

Needless to say, not everything lends itself equally fruitfully to his attention. Garry Winogrand said that he took photographs "to find out what something will look like photographed", and Khan, in his mediated way, is motivated by a similarly random curiosity about what might emerge when he opts to give an image the treatment. I'm guessing that a fair amount of stuff gets processed and then discarded once the preliminary findings are in.

In tandem with the Miro show, inIVA is showcasing Khan's six-minute film of Gabriella Swallow playing bits of six cello suites, with sound and image repeated, overlain and mixed together. It's interesting to see Khan expanding his repetition compulsion into the realm of the moving image but, for me, A Memory After Bach's Cello Suites lacks the eerie concentration of stilled works like the huge Caravaggio: His Last Years. Fifteen late works by the painter who, according to John Berger, depicted a world that "displays itself in hiding", who found a promise "in the darkness itself", are turned into a tangled kaleidoscope of disembodied bodies, a swirling knot of light.

In the course of these negative excavations a form of auto-interrogation is at work, as Khan's "discoveries" question the ways in which accumulation can both reveal and obscure essence. Every . . . William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain transforms these great paintings of light and air into a brooding soup with an amoeba-mushroom curdling in the swampy twilight. And yet something glimmers, faintly, through the murk. What could it be?

Walter Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, the process of which Tate postcards are symptoms and which Khan has pushed to an extreme, stripped artworks of their "aura". Ironically, Khan's obsessive reproduction invests works with an aura buried within them. Consistent with Barthes's notion of what makes a photograph special, this is, simultaneously, something that Khan adds to the originals and which, none the less, is already there.

lost time and the redemption of time

A moment, from many years ago. Vaguely recalled. But if the hands of time are broken, the radiant white face still yields..

the song of the fisherman

Amb quins altres sentits me'l fareu veure
aquest cel blau damunt de les muntanyes,
i el mar immens, i el sol que pertot brilla?
Deu-me en aquests sentits l'etema pau
i no voldre mes cel aquest cel blau.
----M.

Once upon a time there was a little fish who liked to swim by the side of the big fish. She even liked it when the big fish was silent, in one of his quiet moods, just contemplating Very Serious Things. Well, one day the little fish asked the big one,

You know, they say there's a vast and endless deep blue sea around here somewhere. That's what they say.

Well, what of it?

Oh, nothing in particular, she replied. Er...I was just wondering if you've seen it and if so whether you wouldn't mind telling me how to get there ?

Well, you ask too many questions little one. But, since you're a friendly little fish and a good companion in these murky waters I might as well tell you this: there is such a place, an infinite sea, but one has to be out of it before one can see it.

Oh, I see, said the little fish, somewhat disappointed since she had always set great store in knowing things. Now, she thought to herself, I shall never know this great and wondrous sea. But since she had a restless nature she continued:

Wouldn't one die like that?

That is true, my friend. But once you pass through beyond death it isn't so bad.

The little fish now thought that big fish was really quite silly after all-and he wasn't that big either! He was speaking of things he hadn't seen, speaking without thinking, as he often did.

So, where is this place, 'beyond death'?

Oh, they say it's a place around here somewhere. That's what they say.

The small fish was infuriated by big fish's general stupidity and his evasiveness. She could never catch him out. So, she swam away when he was lost in his own thoughts, delivering one of his sermons on the General State of the World Without Crows.

Then, as she swam faster and faster, she suddenly felt lighter and could see that the water had become the clearest, the most bluest and tranquil that one could ever imagine. Except, there was no-one around as far as they eye could see. Then she wondered to herself, was I really only dreaming when I was talking to big fish or is this a dream that I find myself in now.

It made her sad to think of big fish wallowing around alone like that at the bottom of the dark sea, like a fallen star. And even though it hurt her, she was very happy that she had remembered him, thought of him.

Perhaps he'd been caught in one of those nets that human beings so like to cast into the sea, so as to prevent fish from reaching the refracted light. Or maybe he had simply forgotten her. For the first time in her life she thought:

I am a fish without the Tigris
I am the Tigris without a fish.

against the world

One must hate the things that prevent one from loving.
Today, an attack on a shrine.

Meda Ishq - Supreme Ishq

the estranged soul

I fell asleep. Forgive me. Unfaithful, renouncing my heart, my city, like a bird that dreams of a star. My medieval lamp still on, glowing dimly, but glowing. When I awoke I dreamt I was somewhere else and that I was someone else. Led down brilliant white streets in Cordoba by the memory of you, the lustre of your eyes. The whole world was in flower, and you were the soul of the world. Or an unknown street in Buenos Aires, stumbling to speak the word. In Bukhara, where 'potato' means plum, and darkness falls all around me, near the 'hat bazzar'. There I saw you, and became someone else.

another day on the Titanic

Well, another day, another attack. This time off Liberty Market, which I usually pass on my way to Variety for my books. What to say? Not much that hasn't already been said, actually: the deepening sense of an impending doom; the growing fear that the country is, given a year or two of more of the same, ripe for a takeover by the apes; the slight apprehension that we might be next since we promote western decadence (read: reading!..and girls wearing jeans).

Here, European colleagues want to talk about the 'dangers' of the Enlightenment and the alienated 'I'-and that's always more exciting than the pedestrian, plodding thought of the liberal, with his leisured ambivalence. But one can't help thinking that what is needed here is more reason, and less exciting thought.

A few Lahori responses:

1.Well, that's one way of saving the match!
2. This was the hockey team's way of saying : don't forget us.
3. It was the Tamil Tigers.
4. An international conspiracy so that the World Cup isn't held in Pakistan
(yeah, I particularly like that one: cricket is the centre of the world and Brown and Obama- though neither can understand cricket- simply can't stomach the possibility that a Muslim country might win something).
5. It was the Indians. No Muslim could do this.
6. There was no security lapse. (I kid thee not)
7. There was fuck-all entertainment here before, so now what do we do?

the silence

When the words are lost, does the silence come across? You've remembered how to forget me after all. Grammars of the soul unlearnt; the wrong word in the wrong place. On a blank piece of paper write my name. No-one will understand.

Do we die of some kind of volition, even if it cannot be understood?
---James Salter.

'Is it impossible? Is the intangible in our arts and our natures, the space between our words, the things seen in between the things shown, inevitably discarded in the remaking process, and if so can it be filled up with other spaces, other visions, that satisfy or even enrich us enough so that we do not mind the loss? To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential - in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives.'
---Salman Rushdie

dunces against the world !

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality.
---Sen.

There's a tendency to think that only we are truly free, really rational and, therefore, only we can with any justification call ourselves human. Everyone else, the sages, the saints and artists, the philosophers, poets and prophets: everyone before the Enlightenment wasn't quite there-and this includes Russia, the 'otherland,' with her suspect distrust of reason. Despite the monstrous absurdity of such a thought there arises the question of what is meant by 'true humanity' and why "the west" has thought of those who weren't 'modern' as dunces, as being 'without mind' (Hugh Brody, 'The Other Side of Eden'). [The same can and has been said of women, black people etc.] Of course, it goes without saying that this confidence in reason has itself been undermined. One only has to mention the word Auschwitz to regain one's humility. And what of the Trenches, the Bomb, the Gulags-and at another level: Freud, Darwin...

No, sorry, one cannot take seriously the claims that the Enlightenment represents the only enlightenment, that humanity reached its apex in the 20 th century, or that socio-economic progress is an unequivocally good thing. That doesn't translate into: you're 'against' the world-you'd still rather live in this period rather than any other (who wouldn't?) and why always this stark choice? Might we not return to the fundamental questions, not to reproach, not to score points, but to simply ask again: what does it mean to be a human being. That we have to ask already says something...

From Jacques Maritain, 'True Humanism':

For the medievals the mysteries of man's nature were not studied for themselves (scientifically, psychologically). The focus was on the objective side, rather than on the subjective. Man was guaranteed by the 'object', so to speak. A certain richness of comprehension was foresworn in favour of a 'metaphysical modesty'. It might be said, that modern man wanted to know himself in time, and not just in space.

It would be absurd to pretend that in the Middle Ages the act of self-awareness in the creature was not implicitly accomplished, in the very movement of metaphysical or theological thought towards being and towards God, and in the movement of artistic and poetic thought towards the work of creation. It was on the side of deliberate and express reflection that this self-consciousness was lacking.

They lived these things, experienced certain interior states and did not need to reflect on them. They were known in life, more than in an act of reflective consciousness. The 'deed' is both thought and action.

The dissolution of the Middle Ages is the birth of an 'anthropocentric rehabilitation' of the creature, it is the very rehabilitation of nature. Man is the measure of all things. No longer is man a half-fallen angel; at last he can find his home, here on earth.

The three R's: Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution:

The 'Protestant discovery' is a solution of despair: the creature declares its nothingness. But this declaration is its own. Calvinism is a theology of grace without freedom. The absolute humanist theology, on the other hand, the theology of naturalism, seeks to save human freedom at the expense of divine causality: freedom without grace. Man makes his own destiny-the self-made man, the man without any qualities. The universe is given over to geometric determinism, necessity, and man barely exists as bright spark swamped by so much gloom (Gnosticism).

Humanism suggested a perfect natural wisdom independent of faith or revelation. Nature was the explanation of itself (a substance in Spinoza's terminology, rather than a mode of substance). The perspective of 'heaven and earth' becomes a mechanical dichotomy rather than an organic subordination. We now have knowledge and faith, and it is not too hard to imagine the latter's importance dwindling, shrinking to an unreachable point beyond the horizon, only to be reached by a tremendous leap. 'Heaven' becomes something heteronomous, something imposed on truth, lyingly added, and therefore something that can be rejected. What remains is natural man who is naturally good.

Hegel dissolves the whole content of religion in the supreme metaphysical enumeration of the pure reason and makes of the State the mystical body through which man attains to the liberty of the sons of God. Man, completely detached from the supernatural order, makes himself his own centre.

Pessimism cuts every connection between the creature and a higher order. Then, since the good life is necessary, the creature takes things easy and becomes himself the centre of his own lower world. A rehabilitation of the creature turned back on itself and cut off, so to say, from the transcendent principle of its life.

The incontestable enrichments of of civilisation have given entrance to the interior torture chamber of man become a prey unto himself.

He who sees Ratio sees only himself (Blake)

The polemic of rationalism condemns any outside intervention (revelation, grace) or the authority of a law which has its origins outside man.

A miracle is simply not admissible to this way of thinking.

useless knowledge

Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere.

"Difference in the community is a sign of Divine Mercy".
'This was the guiding principle of Muslim communities until their encounter with European modernity.'
--Zizek

Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life. And if God had so willed He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise]...
--Q:5:48

Faced with 'the other' there is a tendency-perhaps one might say, a natural tendency-to reduce everything to the terms of one's own self-understanding. This is my way. At the cultural level this expresses itself in such sentiments as I don't understand how [...] can believe in such and such a thing. Faced with the plurality of beliefs, ways of life, there is an inclination to simplify by positing one fundamental motivation behind our interests (power, self-interest , evolution) and/or to neglect the possibility of varied manifestations of human nature.

Of course, much of this is done in good faith; the plurality of the world is, from a certain perspective, disconcerting and we can only live in one segment of space and time, thus often finding concepts derived from other segments wyrd or flawed. One has to admit, though, that much of it stems from sheer ignorance and a poor education (and by education we mean a temperament that is fundamentally open to the world, to the wonder of its strangeness).


Here in the west the easiest target of that irreducible strangeness is, perhaps, Islam and so one often hears outrageous things said about the Prophet that bigots would not dare not utter against Judaism for fear of being tarnished with the label of anti-Semitism (and here the whirl of competing claims of victimization gets under way). And the same holds in the land of the pure: the Jew, the Hindu. Again, such an outlook is not to be wholly unexpected given that we live in an age that does not how to talk about anything that is holy and that finds it difficult imagining that some things are sacred (Cavell's wonderful essay on Kierkegaard and Authority). Everything is up for 'scholarship' or comes within the scope of the artist's freedom. To say otherwise is to return to fanaticism and obscurantism.

But what this overlooks is, first of all, our public reason which demands that we talk with others, strangers, in a reasonable way -even if we privately think their views are a bit odd. This is, of course, only a first step, one of common decency and civility. In the cartoon controversy the British press and public made what I think was the wise decision that fraternity and the desire to get along with other people was a better view of liberalism than the abstract notion of rights (the right to say something). It is a version of Gawain: courtesy is the matching of inner and outer, of knowing when to speak and when to keep quiet...reasonableness triumphs over reason in a quintessentially English way.

[In discussions with Hindu friends. Very rarely would they discuss 'controversial' matters -and if we did it would invariably be in private and with kindness and consideration. I think this has much to do with a sub-continental approach to life: there is a sort of fanaticism in a person that wants to speak openly about everything (one thinks of Oprah Winfrey and the American love of confession, the settlers' hatred of the Red Man for his 'secretive nature')]

A second point is that we surely have the capacity to understand much of what is apparently alien. 'Understand' does not mean that one adopt the other point of view but that one understands where 'the other person is coming from'; one understands how it might be possible for someone to take up a position that is not your own. Berlin, in his essay on Vico called it fantasia-imaginative insight, I think; the capacity to conceive of more than one way of categorising reality; Einfuhlung, empathy, informed imagination, something that depends on more than 'facts'. Com-passion: the ability to suffer with others, is the highest form of understanding. What would we be without the ability to get out of our own skins, imagine other selves, other ways of life as profoundly human ways of life?

It seems to me that the hypertrophy of the mind in the modern west is no substitute for this integral intelligence. Technical brilliance and a dazzling array of skills is not a compensation for a broad and humane outlook on life (George Steiner, Errata).

'What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information , but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals , and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos-all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.

Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful than the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the source of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of the intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space.'

---Bertrand Russell, 'Useless Knowledge'

my share

Outside, the suicide hour has come and passed. Inside. The hot dust sinks, settles, accumulates. What else can dust do? The evening sky darkens, like a face; the light sucked in so there's only a simpe pure blue left, sea-like in its quietness. Crows, lovers of flesh and the earth, without faith or religion, nestle together in the tree tops, afraid of the darkness, and craa to one another to blot it out. One or two? One is not a number.

Today. No words. No words that were yours. How to recognise what's yours in this light, this dream? The shadows are real. What's inside here, what outside? There are other places. The swami had said, one day I will fly from here, since I have no share in the world.

the generalist and the amateur

Well, if you hadn't noticed yet, most of this blog is a fraud with its extensive quotes and half-baked ideas [I hope you appreciate the 'distancing' from myself here! :-) ]

Priorities: Of course, it's important to re-iterate the importance of scholarship-that's what you're supposed to be doing, isn't it?-and of detailed, nuanced argument. Especially with the barbarians at the gate, mullahdom around the corner; especially given the appeal of bread and circuses and the quick fix, the bottom dollar. Also, you want to rail against the semi-literates, the really dangerous ones with their easy generalizations and caricatures-and that includes looking honestly at yourself as well for once.

But, secondly, you want to talk about the arrogance of academics in a dispassionate tone. I mean, yes, that's better, I mean, is there a point where specialization degenerates into a trivial pursuit? Why this suspicion of one-sidedness, endless revisions, "theorists"? That's what I loved about Celia, Jonah, and Turab (to a lesser extent..sorry old boy)...an intelligence that doesn't take itself too seriously, that isn't opaque, is still amateurish...second-best, if you like.

I guess what I find most disconcerting, though, is a sort of hostility to other people..yes, it really is that, I think. Turf wars. As if one could only talk to one's tribe, as if the plebs. really don't or can't 'get it'. Russell, Berlin, maybe Nietzsche himself...weren't they all generalists who would be ripped apart by modern scholarship?Analysing and dissecting things to death.

None of that is important. What is, is the ability to speak with a human voice.

Nietzsche in Turin

For the Dougal, who still wants to talk about transcendence at this late stage in the day. Thank God!

God is dead.
God is dead.
God is dead

....And Man isn't feeling too well either!

Western man is stuck in 'la'. Nietzsche mistook the stepping stone for a place of rest.

'The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction'

---Susan Sontag, NYRB


Notes from Lesley Chamberlain's book and Heller's The Disinherited Mind:

'Yet he still saw the world as essentially illusory'

'How to live, then? Art and imagination as a substitute for Tradition, a way of creating one' s own world. 'The noble soul has reverence for itself'. The dissociation of faith from knowledge, faith from sensibility. If Tradition is invalid then there is only the world of absolute immanence. And after Auschwitz, the Trenches, does he still affirm?

Nietzsche: " He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere-he must either deny or create it."

Rilke's Tuscan Diary: " We need eternity; for only eternity provide space for our gestures. Yet we know that we live in narrow finiteness. thus it is our task to create infinity within these boundaries, for we no longer believe in the unbounded." We can no longer be sure we love the lovable.

'The battle in his soul with the southern light; high style against northern restlessness; pleasure and ease against a brooding, shifting inwardness. Isaiah Berlin: Verdi marks the end of naivete.

'With their [Wagner's , Schopenhaeur's] embodiment of the restless will, the creative life which enjoys wildly, gluts itself on excess and longs for metamorphosis..they offered an intoxicating vision of life which might entrance but never lead to a this-worldly, healthy, Greek kind of happiness. A rejection of the intense, glittery life but also the flat, prosaic one that required such intoxicants. The nervous excitement of the Romantics was never his style; they placed happiness outside of themselves, outside of life.

The South: self-assurance, resilience, serenity and calm joy..the willed lightness of being -as opposed to the heavy Nordic pessimism (D.H. Lawrence: the brown-eyed and the blue-eyed). ..Light feet, humour, grace and freedom; the tremor of southern light,; the smooth sea perfection.

'The collapse of benevolent certainties, the emergence of an edgy, rootless spirit..and the eventual emergence of a hypnotic and instinctual popular music ("trance" !). a music that is beyond the rational vs a music that is tunefulness, in the right key, on the right wavelength.

The divided self: 'German fascination with asceticism and mystical delivery from it' . Mass intoxication, the seduction of the spectacle, the relinquishing of the soul, of individual responsibility in favour of the Father(land).

How to live confidently after the death of God? Only with strength and courage: "Man is the creature who must constantly overcome himself to live fully." To accept one's fate and from it create a life..an art of living. But in a decadent culture, 'mankind would simply run out of energy and individuals would fail to find their own tragic strength.

A collapse of the common world, of the cultural world and its rituals, customary consciousness and norms. From now on one would have to find this strength on one's own.

'Nietzsche wanted only some kind of music to lead the modern heart back , or on, to a summer, more open..searching to lose urban nervous tension and northern formality in a glorious blaze of colour and light..and the simple life. ' [Not the only one: Van Gogh, Gaugin..Matisse: The Dance]

Neither from nor towards; at the
still point,
there the dance is
But neither arrest nor movement.
---T.S. Eliot.

Never trust a god who doesn't dance.

Demythologisation: the body is mere body, the symbol mere symbol.

A kiss is just a kiss, a smile is just a smile...

"He was most at home where there was least 'reality'-in music. The music of modern Europe is the one and only art in which it surpassed the achievement of former ages. This is no accident. It is the speechless triumph of the spirit in a world of words without deeds and deeds without words."

The sun-drenched art of the early 20th century. The new primitivism, masks. Colour replaces sense and meaning after the death of God. For Van Gogh: the sun is presence.

'The power of light to transform , and especially the moment of transformation, fascinated Claude, as it did Nietzsche.

'For something to shed its veil one requires patience and hospitality. 'The act of knowing involved an act of laughter, an act of mourning, and an act of cursing' (Spinoza).

There remains , perhaps
Some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day;
There remains for us yesterday's road...
----Rilke.

"The portraitist of this situation is Van Gogh. He painted the tree of Rilke's elegy, the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are chance receptacles of all the homeless energy of the spirit..It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism...the absence from our lives of common accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade the empty shells of fragmentary memories, hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning."

From now on: the life of man: 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'

Mapmakers

Two of your friends-so supremely intelligent and charming that you think twice about writing this-have written the same thing: effectively: the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Always the same: not the artist with a vision of the good, a loving attention to the world, but the "unthinking and amoral" artist, with the 'will' of the artist, the sheer ability to create and destroy in itself being what counts. Whether it is a 'demonic' will or not does not ultimately matter. Jonas was right after all: in the Gnostic age there would only be talk of "autocratic power" and pleasure that is "consumed".

Something in you rebels at this 'nonsense on stilts'. Corruptio optimi pessima

Is it not still the tent of scattered stars
the high transfigured world that love has made?
--Goethe

What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we might be doing at a given moment , we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self…’

—-Basho.

‘Since the willful Twenties, the committals of the Thirties, it seems to me that my life as a man and as a writer has been spent on crossing and re-crossing frontiers and that is at the heart of any talent I have…Frontier life has been nourishing to me. Throwing something of oneself away is way of becoming, for the moment, other people and I have always thought that unselfing oneself, speaking for others, justifying those who cannot speak, giving importance to the fact that they live, is especially the privilege of the storyteller, and even the critic-who is also an artist. A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at the streets and their architecture much longer and more intensely and at Nature and landscape. I gaze at the plane tree at the end of the garden , studying its branches and leaves. I look a long time at flowers. As I am always on the watch for dramatic changes in the London sky… I store up the procession of headlands and terrifying ravines..and all of the landscapes that have formed me. '

—V.S. Pritchett, As Old as the Century.


‘ One of our contemporaries is cured of his torment by simply contemplating a landscape. '

---Camus.


'…[t]hat not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.’

—-Joan Didion


‘These fragments I have shored up against my ruins.’

—T.S. Eliot


Some of these words are tinged with despair whilst others suggest a cool equanimity in the face of the dissolution that time and the world bring about. In both there is an attention to detail and only a hair’s breadth separates the different tempers. Pritchett’s fabulous essay is the perfect example of a slow-burning happiness, of a style of writing that conveys a rock-like understanding of the world: a serene accumulation of experiences, an age-old trust in the certainties of the world, a keen awareness that in time all that is superfluous will be worn away and only the simple will remain. Perfection lies in the cadence of the voice, the eagle-eye that picks out a word from the many possibilities, in the miracle of how a word evokes not just its own lineage of comprehensions, that deep store of transmitted meanings with their subtle gradations that is embedded in the language-consciousness of a writer, but also in the way in which a particular word will interact with both those that are not chosen as well as the silences between it and other words.

It is as if the sheer passing of time confers on the writer a deeper sense of his surroundings, a greater appreciation of life’s still moments. There is a way of knowing that derives from becoming increasingly estranged from the world and one’s life and there is another that comes from finding one’s place, the meridian of one’s life, and growing ever more deeply in love with it. There are mapmakers who never leave home and then there are those for whom the lonely, high seas beckon. For the latter it is the fragments that are the ruins…

But let us also say there are two souls in one...rooted, open: a broken circle.

The Romans kept an image of Terminus [the god of boundaries] in the temple of Jupiter...and the interesting thing is that the roof above the place where the image sat was open to the sky, as if to say that a god of the boundaries and borders of the earth needed to have access to the boundless, the whole unlimited height and width and depth of the heavens themselves. As if to say that all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space. And it is that double capacity that we posses as human beings-the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us-it is this double capacity [that is the truly human]
--Seamus Heaney

Der Sterbende Auf Der Brucke

The flecks of the first raindrops.
The sun.
Bread and wine.
Skipping.
Easter.
The veins of leaves.
The fluttering grass.
The colors of the stones.
The pebbles on the river bed.
The table cloth in the open air.
The dream of the house..

anton and roxana both write today and I feel compelled to argue with them, put my muslim hat on...

In our knowledge of death we are superior to God.
--The Allama

Life is one and continuous. Man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illumination from an Infinite Reality which "every moment appears in a new glory". And the recipient of Divine illumination is not merely a passive recipient. Every act of a free ego creates a new situation, and thus offers further opportunities of creative unfolding.

And my muslim readers will immediately recognize the context of these sublime words:

His eye did not wander, nor did it rove.
--Q. 53:17

Not "surrender" nor the undivided light. But a deepening, a widening of the circle. A broken circle. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, said the Rabbi. The green waters beyond the black. Into the blue again. The wild blue yonder, the open. The open hand that gives, ceaselessly. Solar generosity. Not "detachment" but Iris's: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding. Hannah, the princess: for the love of the world.

Finitude is not a misfortune.
--The Allama.


Must we now learn again to name the things we love but do not possess? Not sweet paradisal words, yet an elegiac song for all that is destined to pass away, all that is touched by finitude. One cannot but help think that we only love things that can die -even the gods fall for the mortals. When all is said and done, can anything surpass this transient spectacle?

The smell of fresh coffee. The darkening of the clouds before a storm. The last flaring of the sun on a late summer's evening. The peace of a Sunday morning. The alternating patterns of shade and light cast by a tree. Walking alone under tents in the night. The greying wisdom of an old dog. The final page of a book. Winter fires fragmenting. Your sad sweet smile.

heartlands

For anton:

After following the Bandar Shah a little while back, we turned to the right down a track between wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an esturay, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. In other greens, of emerald jade or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengali jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland...the heavy full-blown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself.

The sun was warm, the larks singing up above. Behind rose the misty blue of the woodland Elburz. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth.

Bearing, landmarks, disappeared as they would from a skiff in the mid-Atlantic. We seemed to be always below the surrounding level, caught in the trough of a green swell. Sitting down we might see for twenty feet: standing up, for twenty miles-and even then, twenty miles away, the curve of the earth was as green as the bank that touched the wheels, so that it was hard to tell which was which. Our only chart was by things whose scale we knew, groups of white kibbitkas, dotted like mushrooms on a lawn-though even in their case it needed an effort of reason to believe they were not mushrooms; and droves of cattle, mares with their foals, black and brown sheep, kine and camels-though the camels were deceptive in the opposite sense, seeming so tall that it needed another effort to believe they were not antediluvian monsters.

As the huts and animals varied in size, we could plot their distances: half a mile, a mile, five miles. But it was not this that conveyed the size of the steppe so much as the mutliplicity of these encampments, cropping up wherever the eye rested, yet invaraibly separate a mile or two from their neighbours. There were ..of them , and the sight, therefore, seemed to embrace hundreds of miles.

As plans of cities are inset on maps of countries, another chart on a larger scale lay right beneath our wheels, there the green resolved, not into ordinary grass, but into wild corn, barley, and oats, which accounted for that vivid fire, as if a life within the green. And among these myriad bearded alleys lived a population of flowers, buttercups and poppies; pale purple irises and dark purple campanulas, and countless others, exhibiting all the colours, form and wonders that a child finds in its first garden. Then a puff of air would come , bending the corn to a silver ripple, while the flowers leaned with it; or a cloud shadow , and all grow dark, as if for a moment's sleep; so that this whole inner world of the steppe was mapped on a system of infinite minute recessions; having just those gradations of distance that the outer world lacked.

Our spirits had risen when we left the platteau. Now they effervesced. We shouted for joy, stopping the car less the minutes that were robbing us of the unrepeatable first vision should go faster. Even the larks in the paradise had lost their ordinary aloofness. One almost hit my hat in its inquisitiveness.

---------Robert Byron, Road to Oxiana

...[H]e could never have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were-a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence...a breathing without returns to a starting-point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.

Wlateau's Drapery: Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation-inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand-of tone into tone, of one indeterminate colour into another.

--------Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception

Ex-stasy: to stand outside of oneself; the urge to escape from self-hood..doors in the Wall (H.G.Wells)

The garden is the verdigris on the mirror of the spring breeze

---Ghalib.

Beyond the black night of the heart is the emerald mountain, we are told. Beyond all loss is the other life in the heartlands, a place where we shall roam, aimlessly, you and I.