the orientalist

Is its leaf one self-divided
Forked into a shape of strife?
Or have the two of them decided
On a symbiotic life?

I am single, I am double.
-----Ginkgo Biloba, Goethe.

This book, like its main protagonist, contains at least two stories in one. Ostensibly it is about the collapse of the old familiar European world and the birth of the historical and political movements that would shape our century. But at its heart is the tale of a wandering Jew and a love story.

Early on in this compelling book Reiss writes of how Lev Nussimbaum (aka. Essad Bey, aka. Kurban Said) despairs over the forces of revolutionary change-Bolshevism- that began by transforming the human face into a grimace. For a man so obsessed with masks and shifting identites this is a telling comment.

The life and times we are drawn into -brilliantly retold by Reiss- is the story of the escape and exile of the prolific and bizarre writer, Lev Nussimbaum. The world into which he is born into is one that will become hardly recognizable as it is increasingly determined by History and Biology (Communism and Fascism), the ideologies of class and race that would devastate the continent. Lev, like all escape artists, seeks to avoid any such fixing of identities or loyalties and this is what makes him such a complex character.

Along this journey from the 'wild west', oil-rich city of Baku to the cabaret and coffee-house culture of Weimar Germany we are introduced through a series of sketches to a whole host of strange and eccentric characters: Viereck, the writer and Nazi sympathizer, Ernst 'Putzi' , Hitler's Harvard-educated press secretary, Baron Omar-Rolf, Erika Lowendahl, a Jazz-age poetess whom Lev marries, Varian Fry whose mission it is to save two hundred of Europe's top intellectuals and artists from the grip of the Nazis and Italo Balbo, founder of the Italian Air Force who sets up a futurist experiment in the deserts of Libya.

But the real star of the story is, of course, Lev and this is in no small part due to the fact that the protean , ambiguous nature of his character deeply resonates with our modern sensibilities. Was he a Jew or a Muslim, a supporter of Mussolini or of the monarchy, a traditionalist or just a hopeless dreamer?

There is no doubt that Lev felt pangs of nostalgia for the old world; this is made clear in some intriguing chapters where his enthusiasm for the 'wild jews' of the Caucasus or his admiration for the silent infinites of the Turkmenistan desert , or his love affair with the lost splendour, the "fallen greatness" of the muslim world are made apparent.

But he was, if anything, a revolutionary conservative whose place was the "radical centre" and not on either 'side' of the 'left'/'right' divide that would tear Europe apart. In the collision of the old and new worlds, East and West, perhaps Lev's charm was in that his real loyalty was to his imagination.

As a Jew Lev must have felt the world closing in on him with the advancement of the totalitarian nightmare. Reiss doesn't cover much new ground here but it is interesting nevertheless. In some sense, Lev's partiality to monarchism was understandable. The Empires-by their sheer persistence over time- came to represent the natural order of things, a relaxed tolerance toward difference (Constantinople being the best example here) and a space where "one could be left alone". If anything, it was modern totalitarinaism with its absolute power to define people that was the 'closed world'. Indeed, Lev's nostalgia for the passing world is that for "the best face of Europe which was a radiant, carefree, cultivated countenance..light as a feather."

There a number of parallel stories running through this book and they raise issues that will strike us as of immediate relevance. For example, amongst the array of details that Reiss weaves into the narrative is the growth of the Freikorps who with their anarchic violence are the precursors to the revolutionary insurgents that we have become all too accustomed to in this day and age. We also come across Russian emigres and instinctively wonder what would have happened had the 'beautiful souls' won and not the Marxists. The latter represented, in some sense, another victory of the west (materialism) over "the East". Equally troubling is the portrait of the nihilism and aimlessness in German cities. This is a point that the anthropolgist Hugh Brody and the sociologist Z. Bauman would agree upon: in an age of liquid modernity it is the city dwellers with all of their restlessness who are the new nomads.

And when we read of the Emergency Act of 1919 to counter-act the 'threat from the East' we are immediately drawn to the State of Exception in our own times.

At the centre of this book, then, is the remarkable and captivating story of a person who has deep sympathies-like other Jewish orientalists- with the profound pluralism of the old world (European and Muslim, East and West). Perhaps this is a story for our times. In a world that is increasingly being driven into exclusivities: 'us or them', perhaps the story of Lev offers the opportunity of bridging such artifical divides...us and them perhaps?

But even if we put the politics of it to one side we are left with an account of a dazzling style of soul. It is what Reiss calls 'Zweieinsanikeit'- "grace-filled dual solitude".

I think back to those last days of Lev and imagine him writing frenetically, half-crazed by the excruciating pain of his illness, the morphine, and the desire to tell his story in his own words. Already an old man in a new world, a world where the spirit of the times looked to the past with a venomous hatred. And I picture him looking down below at the fishermen with their fixed routines and their immemorial ways that have existed since time out of mind. I can sense the growing unease, the gloom that presses heavily on his shoulders as the classical world behind him disintegrates, the centuries-old traditions of civility and restraint on the verge of going up in the blaze of collective madness that is sweeping across Europe. An unimaginable blackness that is no match to his illness.

But then he looks across the open seas and knows that there is a mystical union between sea and desert. And he is drawn to it. He feels safer here than any European does within his four walls....to get lost in the desert, to lose the way once entered upon, is impossible for infinite distances he feels a contact between himself and all the oases and clans....

-----http://www.theorientalist.info/

t

You keep your distance with your system of touch.

--Tears for Fears.

I reach for the cup of tea
Hand touches cup
I am aware of the touch.

In that momentary touch, that solitary moment, is there a 'subject' and an 'object'? Is the 'I' still I? Before this takes place I have already delineated an 'I' and a 'cup' that is independent of me, "pure extension". And yet, it is also true, on second thoughts, that I find myself in this world, at this particular moment, thinking of reaching out. So, there must have been the possibility of a person like me, a cup like that, and a desire just so. A desire to bridge the gap, a desire that would be impossible without the gap. So, the fact that I can posit an I' is itself a possibility (necessity?) of the world.

I can picture the world but does that (can that) picture also contain the act of me picturing? (Escher). Does the world create the desire or is it that the desire is what makes the world 'the world'?

End of the Road.
Thought may tell me what I can know, not how I should live. Knowledge is not understanding.

Beginning of the Road.
Now I think back to it, Mark had asked: Do you want some tea? Does the world come after language, after a question?

Do I sit there thinking whether the tea exists or not, that if I turn my face the other way it will no longer be? How self-centred! How mistrustful!

Is the relation to what is 'not- I' that which constitutes the 'I'? One could map the self by what it desires, by a series of absences. What would we be without that reaching out? Not: would we be the same person, but would we be a person at all? The tea, I note, has no such thoughts. But if I just reach out, thoughtlessly, mechanically, does this mean that I am just matter coming into contact with other matter or that I have no inner life? Everything, it might be argued, lies in having the right approach to the world.

I-It and I-Thou
Here I am; here it is. The chasm can be bridged; but other distances remain: It is not boundless space that separates us but Time..Time is the Space between me and You. And time yet for a hundred indecisions...

I reach for the cup of tea
Hand touches cup
Remembers it is hot.

~~~~

Celia writes:

Oh, Billo, This will seem facetious, but your post reminded me irresistibly of the following, which I'm sure you'll also remember:

There was a young man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
W hen there's no one about in the Quad."
"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

(Attributed to Ronald Knox, who was referring to the philosophy of George Berkley - 1685 -1753. I also seem to recall that E.MForster quotes it at the beginning of A Passage to India. Or was it Howard's End? Or? Somewhere, anyway.)

anton writes:

hi b, each time i come here i think one day i sit down and read all the stuff here. you'll see, one day i will really do that. have not read the april book by kadare but have another one here at home whose name i have forgotten and not yet read either....

"I am in no way interested in immortality,
but only in the taste of tea."
-Lu Tung

have a fine day

7:58 AM

lightness

in summer season, when soft was the sun.

snow fell, undated. light
each summer thronged the glass
...

perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
inside your head, and people in them acting...

rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
the sun-comprehending glass,
and beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

---Larkin.

At Putney station, old but busy. There's more than a hint of winter in the air tonight: hands in pockets, ice in the blood. For the first time the warm yellow lights in other people's houses look comforting, welcoming. Life returns to the interior. For the first time you want to look inside other people's windows, spy on the petty dramas that unfold. You, riddled with light, wonder how totally different lives can carry on so close and yet so oblivious to your own.

Tonight, wise mothers will tell their children not to stay out too late. The enfolding darkness and the bleak buildings have never looked so devoid of light, empty. Is it only us? Reality, whether shallow, dramatic or profound, is indoors. Living this veiled life, anything can be endured-even a cramped space-if there is light and warmth.

The sky is somehow mysteriously darker than it has ever been before-or ever will be. Suddenly, without warning, the station lights come on with a ping and a flicker and there is an audible sigh of relief. Light returns. Holds us. We measure our distance from one another by it; only our shadows criss-cross one another. The light in your eyes has grown old, become soft, sadder. Take a gentle step into this artificial light and smile. Remember summer.

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

I'm lost in my own thoughts for some reason and remain quiet for a long time. On the district line our train pulls into a station. I look across at another train that seems to be at a greater height than ours. Between its rusty wheels I see a shimmering arc of light. For a minute it appears as if there is another world beyond those lights and I'm nearly spirited away there. Then the train pulls away, revealing nothing but a simple and tired plastic white light. So, this is reality! Don't look too closely at it.

χαμαίμηλον

On the counter was a glass bowl green as the sea...This gentle hour, this comfortable room, this death. For everything, in fact, every plate and object, utensil, bowl, illustrated what did not exist; they were fragments borne forward from the past, shards of a vanished whole. We live untruth amid evidence of untruth. How does it accumulate, how does it occur?

--James Salter.

It was like a sledge tethered in the still of night, tethered like a wild animal becalmed. Shapes slowly crystallize, finding their form as the snow silently falls all around. The slowly accumulating ice on the window pane, frozen breath, like time itself. Only a flicker of colour remains there, the memory of the night before-sparkling conversation, the clinking of glass, discarded plates, embers and ashes, the last memories like a warm after-glow.

You dreamt of Maragall, or at least his book. Not to be found. Instead, you ask for a mirror, in 'the Catalan style'. Not for you, she said. You do not understand the world it comes from. Cannot see. For you it is a beautiful useless thing.

So, you write dark words to yourself in the dark of night. Your words your own kind of mirror. Wondering all the time what they'll look like in the morning light. It is good to write like this, without seeing oneself.

You wake because of the rattling of the door, the indecipherable stuttering cries of the birds. Some doors should be kept open. Held. You scribbled down something. And then it ended. How beautiful was the sleek blank page. How cold the shining , shimmering white page!

You hear yourself breathe again, the pulse of blood stirring; the hand quickening the heart.

The crow's voice: stifled, muffled, as if he was unsure of himself. Rhythmic measured utterances, dripping like a viscuous fluid out of the spell of the night. Crow, restless crow, has found peace again in his black heart.You realise morning has arrived when you see the curve of her back and smile.

Do flowers dream at night? The dreams of flowers at night are like the silence of things. They float effortlessly in the meadow but are not real.

Whatever I read, whatever I see radiates inwardly into a dream, like the petals of a sunflower or the hands of the sun. Tomorrow, I will keep a picture with me and gaze, and gaze at the beloved.

The Victory of Orthodoxy

The defeat of the iconoclasts is the 'Victory of Orthodoxy.' The Council of Trent in the west was a negative document in that it did not clearly set out the role of the image-only what was not considered permissible (see A. Blunt for further details). In this way, the Renaissance was consolidated. Are we, perhaps, not in the realms of the fundamental distinction: that between sound and image; or is this a disjunction within the tradition of the visual?

'Christ is describable according to his Person, remaining indescribable in his divinity.'Divinity is equally present in the image of a cross, not by virtue of identity of nature, for these objects are not the flesh of God, but by virtue of their relative participation in divinity, for they participate in the grace and the honour.'
--St. Theodore the Studite


'The honour rendered to the image passes to its prototype , for the person who venerates an icon venerates the person represented on it.'
----Basil the Great

The decisions of the 7th Ecumenical Council were signed by representatives of the entire Church including the Roman. But there was a mistranslation of "veneration" for adoration where the Council specified and emphasized that the correct attitude toward the image should be one of honour and veneration, not that of true adoration which befits God alone.

This leads to Charlemagne's Libri Carolini (see Peter Brown) that deprives the sacred image of its dogmatic basis (in the West), handing it over to the imagination of the artist.

'Through the denial of the image , Christianity became an abstract theory..it is not surprising that iconoclasm was linked to a general secularization of the Church , a de-sacralization of all aspects of its life.'

'God the Father is not incarnate and is consequently invisible and non-representable'
---From Ouspensky's Theology of Icons.

An act of humility would lead us to acknowledge that we can know something, but what is this something in comparison to higher orders of knowing, seeing?

To know and to understand is a command, is sanctioned by something that is beyond our own volition: philosophy is bound by the Law (Leo Strauss)

'The Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything. By itself it generously reveals a form , transcendentally, granting enlightenment proportionate to each being, and thereby drawing sacred minds upwards to its permitted contemplation, to participation and to the state of becoming like it'

[again, to Muslim minds, minds that are rooted in a perspective that emphasises utter transcendence, there can be no question of likeness..but then what are the Names, and what is the Law? No, the Pope was wrong on this one]

This implies a veneration of of what is beyond thought and Being and an acceptance of being guided by the light of Revelation.

Scripture tells of the Cause, Principle, Being, Life of all things and this implies two approaches: symbolic and philosophical. We can only 'know' being. We dot know God from His own nature -which remains ineffable-but from the order of beings that bear images of the divine exemplar...
..ascend both by removing all things from Him and affirming them superlatively, and through the causality of things..a ladder. Necessity is the veil of God.

The most perfect knowledge is that which binds us to God

Is the passage from the sensible to the intellectual itself an example of the move from the finite to the infinite? Creation is both a veil that reveals and hides. All points to continuity and discontinuity, similarity and distinction.

'God is known in all things and apart from all things; and God is known through knowledge and through unknowing; on the one hand He is reached by intuition, reason, understanding, appearance, name and yet on the other hand, he cannot be conceived, spoken, or named.'

Genesis: What is thy Name?

There is only a rebuke. Beyond assertion or denial, transcending them. The Divine silence which dwells in that darkness which is a superabundance of light

Divine distinction: the divine unity that overflows into a multiplicity: light of lights.

To praise God through creation: Good, Beauty, Love, Wisdom, Power, Peace..'These perfections which we discover partially in human experience..subsist in God in a distinct manner..He is there super-plenitude, Goodness unbounded'

'The affirmative mirrors the creative profusion of God, unfolding His generosity in a continuous cascade of perfections..on the other hand, the negative path recharts the ascent of finite beings , from limitation to transcendence and silence ['Verily toward God, for God is they limit'].

The negative path shows us the radical incommensurability of our capacities with the goal. 'The highest achievement of reason is to acknowledge its own inadequacy'.

He who knows the finite, knows the Infinite.

Not in a positive way, it must be added, but in a negative way of distinction, the Divine Darkness beyond the Intellect.

--citations, F. O'Rourke

the story of o

Still thou art blest compar'd wi' me!
The present only touchest thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.

---Robert Burns.

O, a letter without verticality, unlike b or p. Surprise or resignation? A number that is not a number; surrounded by 'real' numbers, searching for the one.

What's the problem?
Nothing.

There is something in us that wants to reach that nullity: to not be. To be a minimal self, an uncluttered soul, moved only by the elemental: a pure sound, not an image. The world is a concept. To smash the idols, the order of the world, which mirrors that of the ego. All is vanity.
So speaks the modern gnostic.

True, perhaps painfully true. But "we are ashes" very soon becomes "you are dirt". And if not that, the desire to lose oneself morphs into something sinister: the crowd. What happens when we lose that other image, that second space?

What's the point of living if you can't be beautiful?
----Howl's Moving Castle.

Does this place then become just another abstract space, a property to be possessed, indistinguishable, in fact, from anything else (exchange requires equivalence, a common currency, so to speak). What, then, does the earth become but a ground zero (when the Americans dispossessed the Red Man all they could muster was: this is a wilderness!) ; does time transform itself into something that can be counted, that is only a process without end? If this is true then what are we but some cosmic accident:

What was that acid spot in time
That went by the name of life?
---Leopardi.

What is the nihilist, the fanatic or the terrorist except one who searches for that ground zero, for that surface that disappears into a point, so that there is no more question of semblance and reality, no more tension between to and not to, between the 'I' and all that is 'not I'? The desire to come to a full stop, a place that is, beyond doubt, pointless, and without any weight. Nihilists live in a fantasy world (California), a virtual world, devoid of any of the rhythms of the natural world and the patterns of a human life. Texts are reduced to a pamphlet or a slogan, speech to a speech. It is almost as if one has to create nothing before reality makes us into nothing. Isn't that what that other extremist, Simone, once said? There is one truth, from that everything else follows; all else is 'innovation'.

What is this desire to be small but great at the same time, great in one's smallness? A question for the Germans?

The mouse may be blessed, but he lives in a hole. His nothingness is nothing because it is forced upon him. That is his destiny, after all. That black hole, his home, is a zero because, like hell, it is constituted by only so many fragments of time: a pure succession of moments. To live in an eternal present, de-void of memory, without regrets is, perhaps, a blessing for a mouse, but a curse for us. Man is, and lives in, a broken circle. And nothingness is only a stage, a moment, a stepping stone in the stream of time from which we return to the world and from where the presence of others, living and dead, touches our soul all the time.

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

'Och' springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women in extremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.

Things

Slowly, steadily, who wants to win the race. As long as one gets there, what's the worry, what's the hurry...

A song from my childhood-written, no doubt, by a Kashmiri! This was not so much about doing things at the right time like the rest of the 'things' in the universe or being in the right place, sliding effortlessly into the spaces in the arc of history that were reserved for you, but a refusal of system altogether. Slowness, like lightness, as a way of avoiding the gravity of the world. Like a snail without a care in the world, aimlessly zig-zagging through life, following the tracks that no-one else sees. Or like a star that caroms through the night skies in defiance of the mathematics of an abstract universe. Were we the only ones to break out into freedom as the others slumped back into Being, are we alone in nature with a finitude and imperfection that itself is a kind of perfection?

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

On trees:

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

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

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

My Favorite Things - John Coltrane

Fear eats the soul

On this blog I've always looked for beautiful things to post (on art, music, poetry) and in this I've been greatly helped by some readers with their own selection of wonderful images, music etc. But now and then I feel like reporting on the ugliness that I see around me.

[If you're a Muslim and reading this I would be particularly interested in your comments]

Here is one of my colleagues who, along with his group of zealots, is busy brainwashing the students. This is from a public lecture.

On Pakistan's elites:

"And here I will make a point and I’m not saying this rhetorically I say this with full confidence as an objective scholar. The elite in our country - they are amongst the most ignorant group of people on the face of this earth. It is difficult to find a group of people who are even close to being as ignorant as these people are. Not only are these people ignorant about their own country, about their own history, about their own religion, they are ignorant even about that other place which they think is the ideal. They watch fox news, cnn; they read Newsweek and Time magazine; they tell us: we know what's happening over there. They are utterly ignorant. It doesn’t take much to illustrate this."

And then this gem:

"It may very well be the case..again I will not argue this point ..that in Islam a woman is treated like a commodity…she is treated like property..I would not argue with this but what I will say in response to this that in the contemporary West a woman is less than a commodity. She is the thing to be used for you to sell your commodity. So she is less than a commodity. If you want an objective impartial discussion or description of the situation, this is the situation."

Followed by:

"I know them as classmates, as colleagues, as my boss and so on and so forth..And those of you who have had interaction with the West or similar experiences, I ask you the following question have you ever met a woman in the West who socially or culturally had the same status, the same dignity as your grandmother did? In thirty years of living there (the U.S.) I've never met anyone in that society who reached the position/honour that my grandmother got in our society. "

Similarly, a friend of mine, someone who has lived all his life in England, been to good public schools, worked in the top financial institutions, said to me: you know, K, my grandmother was very religious.

Well, what do you mean by that?

She never once took a step outside of her house.

Are you fucking serious?!

And here's some Qutb:

The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it

And all this from my colleague at arguably the best university in the country, someone who's got a book on Weber and speaks with the most awful American twang. I can't help but wonder at the delusional state some people are in. When will they realise it ain't the jews, it ain't "the west", but that the beast is within?

Common Place

{When I first posted this I was accused of being 'disingenuous', so I should clearly state that these are highly subjective and uninformed impressions-and nothing more}

There's often an overwhelming urge to revisit all that is familiar to us and a not inconsiderable charm in doing so; to tread through the paths that we have already traversed, to return again and again to the landscapes of our memory, to run our fingers over passages that dazzled us the first time we came across them...in all this the desire to repeat what is most precious in order that it doesn't slip away. At a deep and profound level a part of us wants to imitate nature's cyclomania, find solace in the ordinary, the commonplace, a ritual that leads home.

But I approach Constable's large paintings almost with a sense of dread. There's a feeling of stagnation and insipid dullness about them that reminds me of a dreary afternoon stillness. If art represents something of the spirit of a people than here is the expression of a mediocre and plodding soul.

Beyond the banks was cultivated, productive land, and he took a countryman's joy in fine weather and a good harvest. "The solitude of mountains oppresses my spirit.

What could be further from the Romantic spirit of restlessness and the striving for new and vast space than this bovine acceptance of things? Nature, not as it presents itself to man, but Nature domesticated, tamed by Man. Everywhere there is the presence of the work of Man.

There are two types of poets of nature; those who see her destructiveness, her wildness, capriciousness and utter remoteness from all that is human-the representation of a lawless Will that always remains unknowable, unfathomable- and those who see in her an image of tranquility, health, and comforting, soothing truths: a humanized Nature.

[I'm reminded of a great passage in Hugh Brody's 'Other Side of Eden' where an Innuit traveling in Suffolk with Brody finds it difficult to distinguish between town and country: "It's all built-up!"]. On the other hand,T, who had deep roots in rural Punjab, loved the Essex countryside.

Wordsworth: in these humble and limited themes, in the understanding that doesn't reach beyond itself but is content to fold itself over itself... "in them the passions of man are incorporated with beautiful and permanent forms of nature."

Personally, I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for these common places that always seem to me to be cramped and just a touch claustrophobic, teetering on the brink of collapsing into a sleep of the senses or a soulless summer afternoon. Sun-and-wheat-consciousness, a memory of all that is dead (whence the charm of them to a society that was increasingly becoming self-conscious of an England that was being lost to industrialization: an England of the mind).

But there is a reprieve. I am told (by Lops) to look at the clouds.

The whole mind may at length become something like a hemisphere of cloud scenery, filled with an ever moving train of changing, melting forms.

And then there are the small sketches which at once exhibit a type of vivacity and urgency that the finished ones do not. Here, at last, we come across nature in process. The 'Tree Trunks' appears to be at least two paintings in one; the traditional and beloved world of light and shade but then also a sort of mythical life or timeless scene as well. It is as if each is informing the other across an invisible boundary.

There is a delicacy and tentativeness in this picture-an effect that is no doubt enhanced by the shimmering light of the golden leaves. There is something both very old and very new here and the whole is charged by a mysterious atmosphere: how can nature that is so solid also be on the verge of disappearing...

postscript: Adamastor writes: ...[C]onstable is part of the iconography of England still- English culture refers across to Constable and his paintings and his way of painting so often, consciously or not, that you might say that an English childhood is a way of teaching people to look at Constable.

This is interesting because it suggests that there's an inherited way of looking at things, a deep continuity that is sustained by memory, history, and traditions; a training of the eye until it instinctively picks up on what is to be illuminated and what is to be relegated to the periphery of one's vision. What happens when those 'supports' fall away?

Stop. Look. Listen.

(quotes from K.C.'s Civilisation)

stirb und werde

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."

---Ted Hughes.

~~~~

Fluttering, zig zagging around the candle, some see this as infidelity on the part of the moth; but for others, this is a true symbol of his faithfulness. What he seeks is not light, but fire; the desire to be burnt to the core, disappear in a flash, be blinded, lost. This is the nature of the moth. This is the nature of the flame.

medusa

Better to be a diamond with a flaw than a stone that is perfect.

The gods are always falling for the beauty of humans. As if the very fragility, the very ephemerality of it was what tempted them. A constant perfection tires the eye, wearies the heart. What is precious is always at the limits of itself -and therefore on the verge of fading back into something greyer. A love that faileth is the only one they can take seriously, the only one whose game can delight.

In the knowledge of death we are superior to God
--Allama Iqbal.

The mortal coil. Perseus ends up on an island amid a vast ocean. He is brought there in a box (a bag?). Of the three , he pursues the mortal Medusa. Should this surprise us? The Gorgon lives on the frontier lands of the world, the borders of what is hidden and what is seen and known. She is the antithesis of Perseus , the winged one: lightness, speed, and invisibility. If Perseus cannot be seen it is because of the gift of the gods-for her, it is a curse.

The head of the Gorgon writhes with serpents, her hands are bronze. There is no subtlety to them, no flexibility. But still, mystery of mysteries, we are told she is " beautiful Medusa" (and the blush in her cheeks in Caravaggio's painting suggests as much). She is sad and funny, but don't ask why. Some say her hair is straight, others that one could lose oneself in her tresses.

The quality that makes for living things-mobility, flexibility, suppleness, warmth, bodily grace-all of that turns to stone [in Medusa].

Watching a re-run of one of the old Star Trek episodes. In it the Medusans, a race of sublimely intelligent , disembodied people have to be transferred from one place to another. But their form is so hideous, so grotesque, that it must be hidden from the eyes of Man and kept in a black box (bag?). One glance is enough to drive a man to madness, to murder. There are some realities that one must turn one's eyes away from, that can blind us. There are some truths that can only be viewed obliquely, through a dark glass. Is there any way in which we can attune our vision to such a sight? Perhaps to see such ugliness would only remind us of our own and that is itself a form of death. Are Medusa's eyes anything but a mirror?

But it is Perseus who has the mirror (the shield). Art is always a re-presentation of reality.

Then the ambassador who wants to see the Medusa and not just know its mind, its supreme intelligence, asks: who is to say what is beautiful and what is ugly. May it not be that we cannot see the Medusa because it is dazzlingly beautiful? Only the ambassador knows how to chose the right words to speak to the Medusa, as if the beloved behind the veil could only be spoken to in this particular way, not that.

Our eyes must rove since they cannot absorb, take in, the picture of something that is so spectacularly beautiful. Both the absence of light and an excess of it produces blindness.

From Calvino, On Lightness: Perseus, who is carried by the wind, the clouds, slays Medusa- the one who turns souls to stone, whose gaze is the weight and inertia of the world. But still he carries her head with him in a bag: as if to say that in a ‘thoughtful lightness’ one cannot look directly at reality but only its reflection. One doesn’t refuse reality, but carries the opacity of the world with one. Melancholy is not a dense, brooding inwardness, but a sadness that has taken on lightness.

Maneater - Hall & Oates

the drowned, reflected world

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 efface 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 lily pads 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 connections


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 on Monet, and R. Lowell)

snoitcelfer yarts

I was going

to gather flowers

my love waited

among the trees

the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart

---G. Hill

The park itself is unremarkable-except for a remote, older corner of it. It is as if this part of the park was more ancient and everything had been built around it, a world within a world. It had not only survived all the changes but, like an old tree, endured beyond all sadness. One could pause to think: how many promises were made under these trees, how many hearts broken? Here people had met and held hands and laughed together. How mysteriously ordinary it all seemed. Here the branches of the trees stoop to touch the water, twigs gently pressing on the surface, like fingers caressing the beloved's face. The water is black and to peer into it is to look at another world lying beyond a black mirror. Each thing in the world-ourselves included- has its other life, its double, and we only momentarily catch a glimpse of it...

~

The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light, glimmering individuals, and finally they disappear into the hidden depths...and then the sun is miraculously reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together and brought to the surface in a loving embrace..and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself endlessly, eternally, reminding us that what is lost is also found...

~

Perhaps the ceaseless movement of the stream allows the images to form; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change who knows if there'd be a reflection at all. Or do we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time against the permanent invisible presence of the sun?

~

Maybe it is something more mysterious altogether: my desire for it to be this way. Without that longing could there ever be rapture? The image is not nothing, nor is it a mere floating dream in a floating world; black suns do exist. But they are not the sun.

~

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream will return to its former self, to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without the warmth, the illumination of the sun the stream is nothing but a memory museum, a collection of stray reflections that exist only in the mind. Empty, abandoned and alone. And when the storm subsides there is no trace of the red or the blue, there is no trace of a me, or of a you. But yes is still yes, and yes is still no.

for the end of time

ah

for the end of time.

and what will tell you the meaning of "ah"

the sound, the sayer?

the silence in the fields?

what is meant by "for"?

this longing

for the end of longing

that some call death

and others life.

the light falls around us

never in us

it's there

in the seeping of the days

the darkening of your face

fall

now

like a cloak to the ground

silently.

"oh" and "ah"

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

---Rilke


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

--Wings of Desire.

the forgetfulness of a summer day

Sad, forlorn flower, distiller of liquid gold. Light condenses, thickens. Time slows, falters. You think to yourself: it is the light within that fails, not the light that falls all around us.

~

Some lives are brought to completion by the sun's gentle hand, by the sun's brilliant gold, bronzed by decay, by many, many suns. But the black sun leaves a shadow across the face.

~

The great flat land of summer, where distinctions are erased and time's sting forgotten, where there is no "me", and there is no "you". We play like children, our laughter as simple as the gold of cathedrals, our steps rhyming like those of the first people under the gaze of God.

~

What is remembered? A summer's day, a dream within a dream. That which is most real. I think I remember you now, dreamy-eyed and clownish though I be. I think I know you, even if I know nothing else. Why do you pretend, why do you make believe? You are like a child that lived for one hour, that was as free as the forgetfulness of a summer day.

Persian soul

(photo courtesy of roxana)

b[e(e)]

“Your Lord inspired [awha] the bee,” so begins a delightful parable in the Qur'an. It describes the labor of one of nature’s most productive Bricoleurs — the bee. Addressing the bee, the passage continues:

“Prepare for thyself dwellings in mountains and in trees, and in what [humans] may build [for you by way of hives]. And then eat of all the fruits and follow humbly in the paths ordained by the Sustainer. Then, from the bee’s innards a drink of many hues pours forth; in it is a remedy for all humanity. In all this, behold, there is a message indeed for people who think.”
--Q. 16:68-69

The parable of the bee is instructive. As a matter of habit, this insect draws from a diverse variety of sources – pollen and nectar – in order to produce a synthetic product that reflects all the colors and fruits of its immediate habitat. While the honey produced is in some way aggregate of many diverse types of nectar, it is simultaneously something very new and unparalleled. In the end, the bee not only produces a delectable substance but also furthers reproduction through cross-pollination that in turn generates new flowers and restarts the cycle for the future production of honey.

Similarly, in the reconstruction of ideas from fragments, it is often the case that ideas that were once the end products of a constellation of thoughts are now deployed in the reconstructive process as means for different ends….

“Bricoleur” is an appropriate descriptor for Ghazali. Extensive research has shown that he derived inspiration from a broad spectrum thinkers who preceded him…Not only did he reconstruct ideas, but he did so with an originality that was secreted into innovative interpretations.

…A Bricoleur “speaks” not only with things but also through the medium of things.

(This was taken, borrowed, from Moosa's book on Ghazali)

If anyone has a link to the picture of the actual cave image please pass it on. Ta!

Alabama

There's something epic about this, something that goes beyond the specific incident.

Of course, for the monkeys the world is full of plotting Jews, impure women and decadent music. But this sickness isn't too far from the mainstream either. And you can't just wish it away. What is twisted is not so easily unknotted.

"The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

About American music and Africans:

Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires...

Now, here's a proper monk:

Round Midnight - Thelonious Monk

Life is a Cabaret

Listen!
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means there is someone who needs it.
It means that someone wants them to be,
that someone dreams those specks of spit
magnificent.
---Mayakovsky.

The bourgeois's hat flies off his pointed head.
The air re-echoes with a cry.
Roofers plunge and hit the ground,
and at the coast-one reads-seas are rising.
The storm is here, the savage seas hop
On land and crash thick dams .
Most people have a cold
Trains fall of bridges.
--Van Hoddis.

Life is a cabaret, the world is a stage. There are no more carnivals since everything has been turned upside-down, inside-out. Now we celebrate the non-carnival day, the utterly boring and predictable Sunday where nothing happens.
The exception has become the norm, and everywhere is the circus..at first the circus, the half-way sphere of outsiders, an unregulated world, was far from the flatlands of bourgeois sentimentality and respectability. Now:the periphery is the centre.

The Feuilliton, the Vienna cafe: all is linked in the dancing swirl of gaiety and lightness. the short essay: wit, brevity, topicality, contemporaneity, satire..all the characteristics of the age. Karl Krauss would say that the breezy superficiality and subjectivism of the press would bring down the solid world of the bourgeois. We live in an impressionistic age, where all we see are snatches of a life. the London papers are designed to keep one's interest for at least (but not more than) half an hour.

Mere fragments, these sketches are of rootless individuals, ..a fragmentary life. Existence for the modern man consists of atomized glimpses into the lives of others and bits of conversation overheard.

Life is a cabaret.
Don't think too much about it.
You penniless little ..
Before you know it, you'll be gone.
So sing with me this ridiculous song.
Life is short, life is fleeting.
Before you go, turn on the heating.

The philosopher emerges when man ceases to take himself or life seriously. Laughter as wisdom (Nietzsche). The Name of the Rose?

A desire to shock the establishment out of its conformity, its conventionality. But what happens when the shock doesn't shock? What happens when the shocking is the establishment view of things? The spirit of the Cabaret is that of the ships, the bars of international ports, fun fairs, working-class streets. It is a war of the sea-gypsies against the brown-eyed land-dwellers. The salons of the modernists, the avant-garde, produced a spectacle, a parody of social and artistic values. Nothing is sacred and everything is dissolved in laughter and ridicule. The Cabaret programme itself is discontinuous, thus mimicking real life, fed by swift actuality.

Laughter implies distraction and entertainment and an attack on the worn-out prototypes of the Beautiful, the Grand, the Solemn, destroys the Religious, the Sacred, the Serious. [After a while, after the initial thrill of revolting against something, these attacks become all too predictable and rather tedious]. Popular culture and the Variety Show, with their entertainment and humour, are a form of critique of Art and the socio-political. [ The times they are a changin'..yes, how very conventional Bob!]

Improvisation, ruptures, the discontinuous , speed and shock, shock and awe. At last: to give the body a home, to reject the metaphysical. The modern must shatter the classical [let's play the moonlight Sonata backwards..yes, how very original Leonard]. Realism must give way to the dream, the banalities of ordinary life must be smashed (philosophy with a hammer) , the real must be exploded into the surreal. You want reality...you can't handle reality. The deranged and the dissident, dissonance and the degenerate..the sea-gypsies have landed but it is a ship of fools.

At the Cabaret Voltaire there is liberation through laughter, the absurd, of all that cannot be systematized by the accountants and the calculators, by authority. The sleep of Reason brings forth nightmares. Life is life. A process, a journey, a series of bizarre happenings, a montage. Is the Cabaret the modern, the urban, form of Romanticism?

Hugo Ball: the next step is for poetry to discard language ..abandon the word, a radical, raucous negation of the past.

Is it so surprising that the Sprachkritik should arise out of the ruins of Empire, from the splinters of the belle epoque and, most importantly, from the cafes and the Cabaret? Existence precedes essence...Life is a cabaret, old chum.

[from Lisa Appignanesi's book. Reminds me of the snippets of Qutb:the "decadence" of Jazz?]