Zzzzz

"all I know is that so long as I am asleep I have neither fear nor hope, trouble nor glory; and good luck betide him that invented sleep, the cloak that covers over all a man's thoughts, the food that removes hunger, the drink that drives away thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that tempers the heat, and, to wind up with, the universal coin wherewith everything is bought, the weight and balance that makes the shepherd equal with the king and the fool with the wise man. Sleep, I have heard say, has only one fault, that it is like death; for between a sleeping man and a dead man there is very little difference."

Strange black tide...brings forth such dark mysteries. Her, panting like a well-fed dog: to shrug it off, or accept this mortal collar? Desire is not a reason. What then, dear Knulp, can you mean? Is there a dream within a dream? A room you didn't know?

Increasingly, I feel like ending it (the blog, I mean). Hurrah! I hear you shout. No matter what one says or thinks, whether one has faith or none, is drunk or sober, the snow drifts down, generally, all over.

Even the most beautiful thing in the world is, alas, a thing in the world. Knulp, you old joker...

end game

no-one loves no-one, said red to blue.

but in the saying of it, she allowed a shade of blue to enter her life, and became no-one for a while.

In game theory, in a 'finite game', when you know the end, then you know what to do in the beginning. But no human has knowledge of their death...and any given life is full of deaths.

from russia, with love

Showed Solaris to the students last night. Surprised that a number sat through it. Was asked to say something on it and very gingerly agreed...

What can one say? What should one say. I don't know much about the technical aspects of the film and I'm not sure whether the biographical ones are important. It's a poetic vision by a unique individual that requires a unique response. After all, Tarkovsky once said (of Andrei Rublev, the great painter of icons), Traditional truths remain truths only when they are vindicated by personal experience.

So his films are not about 'explaining'-and I couldn't explain them anyway-but only showing us what is somehow familiar-if it touches us, that is. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't. I think Mark Rothko, who was Russian in a way, would have understood how feelings open the way to what Milosz calls a 'second space'.

In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says:

The aim of art is to loosen the soul, to render the soul capable of turning to good. Showing, not telling.

So, I don't like this film because it's a so-called intellectual film or because I like the"ideas"-Tarkovsky was right here when he said: thought is brief, but the image leaves an impression-but because, to take a deeply Russian notion: the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Of course, this is a slow and complex film with lots of 'inter-textual' references (Rembrandt, Breughel, Bach, Don Quixote, and others) and a particular emphasis on time. Tarkovsky himself was wary of films that aimed to merely pass time, or kill it, or forget it. His view was quite the opposite since bereft of memory a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence. So, memory has a spiritual quality to it.

I'm reminded here of a true story that I read in the papers some years back about a man who would forget all he knew every seven minutes. He described his life as like an island in a vast ocean. Incidentally, the only thing he could remember was music.

Finally, I don't think this is a science-fiction in the traditional sense of the term. Why I love this film is because it is, at least to me, a profoundly religious film, a film about the mysterious and that is something which leaves explanation open, but not too open. Like a broken circle, perhaps? And that brokenness implies an understanding of the truth, as one of the characters in the film says, that you can only love that which you can lose.

An education (wanderlust)

The vagaries of the internet world mean that you can put up a song today and it will be gone tomorrow. Oh well, such is life: what is lost was never yours in the first place...finders, keepers we used to tell each other as children. And now?

"Not to find one's way in a city may be uninteresting...but to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling."

What you look for is what you never find. But then, all of a sudden...there..stolen glances, borrowed time, how strange the heart of a city is:now a landscape, now a room...Paris taught me this art of straying. Her lawless, deviant soul. And you, a slacker, a silent poet?

He saw her, fish, in a crowded stream of people and remembered home: there is no fish in the Tigris; there is no Tigris in the fish.

A net snared a net.
Embracing we sever.

"Some writers and walkers had cherished this idea of the city as a kind of wilderness, mysterious, dark, dangerous and endlessly interesting." What is this fascination for dark light?

I stood motionless, preoccupied with linking the present moment to the preceding year's, to make them one.

What is united in memory is untied in life...

He sometimes followed women with small feet and high heels...she said: "I can't convey how much my boots delighted me" (and him, too!). "I came home at all hours..so that even when I was away from home I felt at home everywhere". Paris as a bedroom, a labyrinth whose centre is a brothel, a virgin forest.

"I was like a boat on ice," she said...and "I always forgot to lift my dress." Him: "like those wandering souls who go looking for a body...he enters as he likes each personality."

The damp, intimate, claustrophobic, secretive, narrow, curving streets...

Startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence. A one-way street. With a door. And a room. And the world.Thanks to her. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain. And he saw innocence in the face of experience.

But language limits what can be said, just as walking, with its turns and detours, limits what you can know.

(all quotations from Wanderlust and one from Celan)

back to the sun

turn your back to the sun. the slow bare light of winter, the burnt light, makes everything float effortlessly. ancient chaos of the sun, turns back the time. you think. the road back fading with each passing day and hour. for us there is no season, no deadline. our pact with light, promotes our going and coming, as shadows in expressive light.

tell me, was this the way? what weight the hands have now. did you by some strange chance believe I would leave you, leave you where i left you thinking i would return?

butterfly

R loses an argument (surprisingly!)

Oh, Ssshh, for heaven' sake! Can't you see, black sun, I've got things on my mind. Got important things to think about. Can be stuck mulling around on dark things all the time. Dear me!

But thought is brief; the image leaves a lasting impression, little one.

Ha! And all along there I was thinking you were a Muslim! This won't do, this won't do at all I tell you.

Oh, you silly clown, why don't you agree with me.

Oh, okay, I will if you buy me a dress, a new dress woven, From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven

The Queen that dwells in the dark
feeds on the death of stars,
comes to eat at my heart-
a poor feast for a poor soul.

She reminds me of a song
I've always somehow known.
We walk in tune, until I forget
everything I'd remembered off by heart.

half-hiding

How did it begin?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age
I know nothing of cities
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside.
---Kavanagh.

To come accidentally upon
My self.
Like a fool,
who finds himself
Lost.
"I caught myself...," said the Buddha-soul.
How strange your fall.

The placeless heaven.
was always there.
never here.

I have become a question to myself,
I think I am.
We hide ourselves
from one another.

and you?
where were you
when the questions stopped?

But when did it begin?

Why, my soul, do you sigh within?

...

me against the world.

Well, fuck this for a lark. If the terrorists don't get you the mosquitoes will. Dengue fever has spread. Estimates are that 2,000 people have been infected in Lahore alone. Two thousand and not counting. Fumigate the rooms and do a Howard Hughes. Q U A R A N T I N E . Mosquito repellent lotion (after deodorant, talc, sun block etc. etc...)If the mosquitoes don't get you the chemicals will. Damn those multinationals and Zionists.

At the same time you're supposed to be working on a talk on ethics and economics for the policy centre. Right, the last thing on my mind right now is the connection between logical positivism and early 20th century economic thought.

~~~

Met an old uncle. Ex-army man. No nonsense sort of person. Doesn't think much of "intellectuals." Or "pseudo" intellectuals. Not real men. A bit gay, in the final analysis. He's been shot three times, caught one of the most notorious Balochi bandits, and had a testicle blown off while retrieving a tank that had strayed across the border during the '65 war. Wasn't even his.

Commanding office: bailed out. Crikey! There's a good chap and go and get my tank back for me , won't you? Well, that's the upper classes for you. If the capitalists don't get you, the landed gentry will.

He asks me: "what do you think of the economy's chances?"

Me: "Have you seen the film 'The Titanic'?"

Him (very seriously): "I think I understand what you are saying."

Meanwhile, Ubo is in great form, spinning out stories about legendary cricketers he's seen (the three W's, for example). As if by talking incessantly we could stave off the impending doom. He doesn't take very kindly nowadays to anyone who he suspects of being an "optimist". To anyone of such inclination he shakes his head as if to say, "you silly bastard, can't you see this country's ruined, have you lost your marbles, you silly old goat?".

~~~

So, I was standing in line waiting to pay for my creamy tea (don't ask) and this student turns round and asks me:

Is it true Ghazala Irfan has a 3-series?"

Me: What?

him: "is it true..."

me: sorry, what are you saying.

him: "is it true...."

me: listen, I'm sorry, but I simply don't understand what you're saying.

him: "a 3 series, a BMW."

I turn to a colleague. Well, looks like when it comes to the non-crazies it's me and you kiddo. But even here I'm beginning to have my doubts about you!

There are a lot of weird people out there. Much safer in here, blogland, talking to the girls.

In praise of folly

By a strange co-incidence Paris, London, fundamentalism and 'conversation' seem to be finding their way to these blogposts. One of the disadvantages of never actually finishing a book, of reading bits of books at the same time, is that one's mind strays and finds such senseless connections all the time. Freud: 62. No doubt, if I'd been reading Gibbon this post would have been about fancy, instead of folly.

"To them (the zealots), freedom of mind, a mastery of sense and a liberty in thought and action imply debauch, corruption, and depravity."
---Shaftesbury.

"In primitive societies people tell tales and expect their listeners not to question them...without intelligence man is not social, he is only gregarious."
---Samuel Johnson.

"There is... a real satisfaction of living in Paris from the great Number of sensible, knowing, and polite Company with which the city abounds above all places in the universe...Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company.
---Hume.

"Every woman in Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she."

Conversation is for wimps, as my friend might say.

"Bring a wiseman to a party: he will disrupt it either by his gloomy silence or his tedious cavils...If he joins a conversation , everyone suddenly 'clams up.'"
---Erasmus.

the black and the blue

Not only kids, primitives, and southern women love bright colours-war does too.

---Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?

~~~

Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art. He was ruled by 'freedom and laziness.'

---Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne.

~~~

Free spirited people [are perfectly satisfied] with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up in a way to live that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with it.

---Nietzsche.

Music: well, could have been Pink Floyd's 'Us and Them' but I guess it has to be the great Louis.

WtF !

WHORE: hore [hoere, Dutch]. A prostitute. A woman who receives men for money. Dryden. A woman who converses unlawfully with men; a fornicatress; a strumpet.

"The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression."

Interestingly, the modern urban dictionary concurs.

So, what makes for a good conversationalist, or a good conversation (in our sense of the term, not Johnson's above)? What makes for a bad one?

1. a good listener (does such a beast exist?)

2. must have wit, charm, but only when not called upon to exhibit these characteristics.i.e naturally witty...or must at least appear to be natural. But not too witty.

3. flexibility:
a) ability to converse with both sexes
b) doesn't make silly sexual innuendos (some of you may think a) is an example of)
c)shouldn't be patronizing (some of you think b) is a good example of)
d)shouldn't be too self-conscious (some of you think a), b) and c) are.

Flexibility: not dogmatic (fundamentalists and ideologues of all stripes make poor, very poor conversation. Inveterate bores.

Flexibility: to not always talk about the same thing..like 'flexibility'. Fielding: "He can talk of Fashions and Diversions among the Ladies..can likewise talk on a Fan, or a Horse-Race."

4. Sober. Not too sober.

5. 'Anals'. Always talking about themselves, their work, or what's wrong with their body. Intellectuals and academics tend to be anals and are to be avoided at dinner parties where they usually discuss their own petty politics.

Too much to say is nearly as bad as having nothing to say.

7. Raillery. Nothing like it! Love it. But not too much and not the kind of vicious 'taking' that is part of Punjabi culture. Not too rude, not too polite.

8. Not always light. Not always dark. You know the type I'm talking about: existential angst, wears lots of black, very profound, has to fit in some Zizek or Derrida in every line of the conversation..doesn't "do" trivial. Chit-chat and small talk is for the bourgeoisie. We're talking about VERY SERIOUS things here indeed.

But too light as well. The airheads and buffoons. Always smiling..."those men and women whose face is ever in a smile, talk ever with a smile, condole with a smile, etc." (Swift)

Get this, the other day I was told (not for the first time I might add): come over K, always need some light entertainment. WtF ! Swift: : "Your Business is only to laugh in Season..while this merry Companion is acting his part."

9. Name-droppers and people who feel compelled to sneak in foreign words into their conversation.

10. People who always agree with you and those who suffer from "the Itch of Dispute and Contradiction."

And I'd dearly like my friends, both
Young and old up there to gather
All of us in German babbling
Paradisal words together
---Goethe

The Real...

"Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak."

---from William Hogeland, The Boston Review.

Much the same from Jonathan Raban and a slightly different angle from Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker. Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions: small-town America against the cosmopolitans.

Anti-elitism. Anti-state: John Birch (great song by Dylan, of course).

Easy to dismiss "them" as simply paranoid, nuts, like all the other right-wingers: Hindu extremists, Muslim fanatics, Israeli settlers, the BNP and other thugs/racists.

Easy, but correct! Their so-called "legitimate grievances" are really, for the most part, just the inability to accept other people and the decline in their own power (Norman Mailer may have been on to something here). If you believe in universalism and are against ignorance you're being elitist! Gawd help us!

And the "real Americans", the "pioneers" were really slaughtering the Red Man, creating a wilderness for him, one that matched the wilderness in their own hearts.

In a similar vein: the nihilism of the Muslim fundamentalists and the degeneracy of the conservatives who support them or turn a blind eye to them.

Once you start talking about the real American, or who's really a muslim, then you set up all sorts of distinctions: the pure and the impure, the true and the untrue.

David Marquand makes the intriguing point in The Decline of the Public...

the dougal

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the sources of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

and this, of course.

the open field

somewhere. not here. someone. not you. what goes to make up a life must be that which goes up. the hour before the hour. it goes on. with or without you. when life would be in the finding, the clearing...an open field, raw, broken, that does what it knows the case to be, is what its own silence tells it, has learnt to dispense with mirrors.

stone, tree. your absence. shaking my heart like a storm in old trees. the affinity of the high leaf for roots, the richest vein, there from the beginning, in stone. open to the light, vertical shadow. morning brightness, spiked, startling, loosened into deathless afternoon conventions. fearless timekeepers mark the abundance of time, which is really the lack of time. this was you, after all.

speak for yourself. who else could? you're so full of yourself. unselfing: as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else. but the act of hiding is still an act. light reflected, with all its settled qualities, is still not the thing.

~~~

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the sources of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told

often i am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos.

---R. Duncan.

From Russia with love

Started Lesley Chamberlain's Philosophy Steamer (wish I had got Applebaum's Gulag instead). So far, not half as interesting as her fascinating Motherland.

Started with a conversation about Berlin and whether-or to what extent-he was attracted by thinkers from the counter-enlightenment. Was there something very Russian in this? (and what of your own fondness for Tarkovsky, Rothko, icons, Akhmatova?)

Part of me-and not just the wahabi part-isn't very interested in the "mystical"...in fact, reading about Berdyaev one almost longs for a cool autumn mind to dispel all that fogginess and bagginess, the mystifications and darkness, the emphasis on folk, the land, and tradition; and one needs to assert, again and again, the 'I' so that it is not subsumed by the 'We'. There, see, even there it creeps in with a metaphor! Where's Bronk when you need him?! Did Spengler really say Russia was the future?

A bit like at the National, when you suddenly come across Poussin or the Flemish painters (winter scenes, Vermeer, northern sobriety, austerity, the solid, plain world of the bourgeoisie: black, not the sun) and heave a sigh of relief: Thank God! Or when you return to the patient, sombre, unfussy reasoning in economics. One wonders if others felt the same toward the end of the late middle ages (Huizinga is brilliant on this).

Rilke: "Russia because for me...the deep, daily insight that reality is something strange, something that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience."

why so blue ?

A reader once asked why the black sun is so blue. Well, yes. My thoughts exactly!

Does anyone know which city this is? A city with so many bridges must be great...

I walked across the 'millennium bridge' with the swami, the very first day, when it shook and swayed from one side to the other. Linking the old (St. Paul's) to the new (the Tate). What else is a bridge but a quivering memory spanning differences in time and culture? We all held hands and I looked down. Remembered the sea. Only then realised it was with me all along...

Montaigne on a lazy Sunday morning

Nothing could be better than picking up some useless book on a Sunday morning, when everyone else is asleep, and sitting quietly in your room, the sun lovely and weak, as you eagerly await the perfect breakfast (hash browns, grapefruit juice, baked beans, a French scrambled egg and some good, strong coffee).

Well, perfection never arrives and was more in the anticipation of it. (Made do with Cheerios and toast, if you must know).

Montaigne's cat:

'We have some mediocre understanding of their meaning; so do they of ours, in about the same degree. they flatter us, threaten us, and implore us, and we them.'

There's something quite appealing in the idea that we should make do with what we have, with what we are; gratitude for the time we have. The idea of perfection on the other hand...there's something fanatical about it. Not just the religious zealots and settlers, the moral brigade and inveterate do-gooders, but a certain kind of academic, too: like a man who walks alone, and in the dark. If things aren't perfect then does it follow that the world must be a dark place indeed?

Always been sceptical of people who try to paint a picture of modern society as somehow angst-ridden, full of existential doubt, plagued by meaningless desires, etc., etc. Modern-day gnostics, really. A leap out of the mechanical world into faith. Isaiah Berlin was right here: two extravagances: to include only reason; to exclude reason.

You read a silly quote today: all progress comes from the unreasonable man. I'm sure that appeals to a certain temperament, or is popular amongst undergrads., but it comes across as childish and naive. Much prefer, this lazy Sunday morning-even without my coffee!-these words:

We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside.