...

It takes a bit of time
It takes a bit of time getting used to the strange techniques Peter Watkins uses in his film, Edvard Munch. After a while, though, the questions blend in with the narrative. There is a delay in time's passing. A few images return, again and again, as if Munch could never escape them. Sometimes one wonders who is speaking, or whose thoughts are being expressed..and you think to yourself: does it really matter? What thoughts or words belonged to anyone? 

He paints a hand and a face, the only receptive flashes of life in all the darkness. He erases all surrounding details, all that will fade, searches for greater individuality in the expression itself. He wants to forget, to remember, to name a feeling with the precision of a master. There is a moment and there is nothing to say or no-one will understand, today, the day after. Is it mysterious, the life not lived? The thin lines that briefly connected us, like a floating bridge. The storm-light is still with us in the morning and there's a brightness in the dappled shade still; it reminds him of a coin that she let slip from her hand.  

The Last Romantic

"Why do you start every sentence with a 'No'?" asked my venerable uncle.

"No idea"

|||

For a while it's as if there's been an extended summer, a late flaring of sun keeping or weaving last season's warmth deep into this one. It feels as though we've lost days, weeks, months. The sun has finally relented and become more gentle and more moderate in its outlook; it's as if it has decided to take of his outer coat and finally sit down. Which means that I can walk out of the shadows and not shield my face. The turning, and the old sun is on my back...

||

"Do you like the past?", Hart Crane was asked. That was the last thing anyone said to him, or the last recorded thing said to him. He smiled or frowned and walked away. It was that simple. After that it's a blank, pure negation, a stepping into the shadows, the sidelines. I want to be nobody, I am nobody. What to say?

There are two types of people, and each one is divided: those who accept the past and those who don't or can't.

Breece wrote one book and then died. Read what you will into that. 

|

While ironing a t-shirt and trying to get rid of the toothpaste marks you see a pamphlet lying on the ironing board: 'How to be a Success'. The first lines, from memory: 'There is the call to prayer. The Muslim gets up to pray; the non-Muslim does not. Are they the same?'. Quickly close the book. My heart's not in it. The stain is not easily removed.

Religion, even in its most benign form, has become a practice for the accountants nowadays. Tot up all the good on one side of the ledger and pray to God it outweighs the negative deeds.

||

There is no time for lies, no time for the truth. Time is carried over. Put the book in a cellar, cancel it, abandon the projects and stop reading for forty years.."I can't be bothered with writing". (Elizabeth Harrower). "No" and "Yes" in my true love's eyes, she thought. The book of life is not a book, but a tree before the word, image or sound. I find myself lost again, he thought.

||| |


Tony Judt on Hobsbawm:

In other words

Reasonableness sounds much better than 'pragmatic rationalism', which is far too clunky and abstract. The former implies limitations: we may not able to know everything and striving to do so or acting as if we did may ultimately turn out to be at best an excessive flirtation with error, at worst a recipe for personal or political disaster.

We are made aware-by what process?-that reason comes up against limits-and these limits are fundamentally those of the human condition. But that is not the same thing as excluding reason or the attempt to make sense of our lives and the world. There is no return, no leap of faith, no abnegation of one's responsibility to oneself...

Reasonableness: to temper one's own claims for rationality, understanding, one's own interests, in the light of experience. Other people, with their distinct interests and motivations, are not simply constraints to one's own behaviour or preferences and nor can they be squeezed into the framework of your own understanding. Does reason always isolate, abstract, or can it relate, connect?

Reasons of the heart, the seat of the intellect. Of course, the need for distinctions, to see clearly. But it is a mistake to think that one can see the world with clarity before one has tidied things up at home or that, even, there is a simple picture in your head to which everything must conform and against which everything must make sense.

Can reason be understood without plurality, freedom? In Sen's formulation: we have reasons to value things. Reason, then, is not a logical relation, an internal mechanism, a notion of consistency-or it is not exhausted by such characterizations. Instead, our reasons are contextualized and made comprehensible by our aims and purposes.

Reason is not cold, but it does lower the temperature and is "sober".

"The nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error..."

[The chemist must perforce describe the world as it is, and the precision and simplicity of this requirement seems to have conformed closely to Levi's own distaste for gloss, commentary, for excess of any kind.]

'A definite language, essential.'[The appeal of medieval plainsong]

Point by point.

[Being good at your job and taking pleasure from it constitutes "the most accessible form of freedom"]

There is a longing for sameness but there is also impurity "which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life."

In other words.

~~~ ~

There's a fascinating talk by Adam Gopnik on Camus here

The quotes are from Tony Judt's essay on Primo Levi (there's another on Camus in the same book). 

What does it mean to strike the right key these days? How to find the register, the exact tone of voice that needs no explanation or justification? 

It is not true that we live in unreasonable times-though it may seem like that if one is feeling down. Shallowness: yes, that is always there, but a superficial life is pointless rather than unreasonable. 

In the land of the pure there are many-a growing number,actually- shrill, pointed voices, and with that goes the hand that waves the damned to one side, the saved to the other. But-and this may in the long run be more significant-what really strikes you is the sheer volume of incomprehensible chatter and the mounting fascination with trivialities. And of course, one may feed into the other: a life full of banality and mediocrity may reach out for the excitement and surety of authoritative, commanding voices. Who, today, wants to hear "perhaps" or "maybe"?

And yet by profession and perhaps by temperament too, you are committed to a view that rests on no firm ground. The most difficult thing to achieve with the passing of time is to remain open, curious. Children can help because there is much to be learnt from seeing the world afresh, with innocent eyes. But by evening you have to face this alone and the aim is,as before, to remain half-hearted and resist being single-minded.

Of course, the heart longs for 'wholeness' just as it longs for broken-ness and the mind will always try and find a pattern, "intuit unity" (Iris M). Instead you drift or choose to drift in and out of the morning hours (this could be the confession of an opium eater!). In other words, the words you hope will be true, like the flesh behind the clothes, the road back, the road north, is a narrow and arduous one...

   

fractured times

From Berlin, 1907, ...

The hours that rolled into days, before we knew it. The time spent, exhausted; the most important thing of all: to keep oneself in good spirits. I look back with narrowed eyes at all the half-closed doors behind me. A chapter has come to close and I have to muster the strength to keep my heart free. Smaller, the world makes me so. It's fine, understandable, given everything, there are techniques for letting things pass, you know. A ship sails softly in the black night. Now, are you sitting comfortably? Finish your soup before it gets cold.

***

The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead or sad.

I am not conscious of my existence, and am neither happy nor sad. I am lord of the manor and nothing at all. Up above grey skies; I want to close my eyes and imagine the most perfect green. This half-heartedness and drowsiness beneath the green. Today, in the blustery light, everything seems like a dream. Perhaps that is where we find beauty, me and you?

In a single hour at least seventy leaves fall to the ground. The streets and shops are closed. What kind of dream is this where I'm the only one awake? This talent for not being able to make any sense of anything. You tried to hold too many things in your hands with the result that everything fell to the floor. A lesson: one thing at a time.

*
1908,

A fire stops everyone, draws people together in an artificial way. Bodies jostling for space. It strikes me: everyone sees the same thing in a different way; no-one knows nobody.

An old train station. Pleasantries are exchanged: a smile, a nod, timetables and authority. This is one of the few places where the hands of strangers will almost touch one another in their daily transactions. A thousand feet, a final whistle, a man holding up a yellow card to announce the last chance. A few lunging bodies. Who will make it and who will give up the chase at the gates?

*

What became of me? I once had a fine head of hair and knew how long the day was, down to the last seven seconds. I could name many extinct animals and play the first seven notes of a tune. Now when people see me they see someone else. Much of what I have experienced in the wide world has vanished completely from my head.

What became of her, she who sat under a plum tree and grew old and whose child had grown tall. Food for thought. Her sorrow cast a romantic spell that made her appear beautiful. Is it enough to know that a beautiful woman once looked at me? Something like a beginning, something like an end. And still I say Yes, No, Yes, like time. This much has been permitted me.

"What is it you want from me?" she asked.

My mind lay as if broken in fragments before my grieving eyes.

Summer has passed in silence. I expect you to say even less in fall. Time is fractured, when will it heal?

When I look back I think to myself, certain states, circumstances, and circles are there only once, never again to appear, or only when one is least expecting it. Are not expectations and presuppositions unholy...

Find your beach

'Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty...

When I am in England each summer, it’s the opposite: all I see are the limits of my life... In England even at the actual beach I cannot find my beach. 

Here you will be free to stretch yourself to your limit, to find the beach that is yours alone. But sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next.'

---Zadie Smith. 

||||| ||||

The good old days when everything was worse.

'My hands were empty and cold.'
---Breece D'J

Small quotes from 'The Market', 'Aschinger', 'The Fire' and 'Frau Wilke'...after this digression..

The market, as a place, was always more interesting than the market as a principle. Sunday markets, full of shoddy wares, the promise of a bargain, though you'd settle for an 'oyster delight' and a quick return home for the Big Match. Now and then a 'French market' springs up in Walthamstow or Wanstead and you suddenly realise how ordinary a lot of cheese sold in the shops is-the standard fare, that is.

At Walthamstow market there is a young Englishman who has taken to shouting out in Urdu to attract some of the desis to his stall. You can be sure to bump into an old aunty with a trolley, moving forwards, looking back over her shoulders and thinking about the shops 30 m down the lane. Did I say 'moving'. It's more like a confederation of WW1 veterans swaying on their stumps from the good leg to the bad one, a sort of horizontal shuffling. Will I ever get out of this alive?!

There are no attractive women at Walthamstow market. Lots of people have fake hair or highlights. The burger stalls with their fried onions are like some ancient relic from the past. 'England's gone,' and all that.

The Chinese man has a remarkable collection of watches on display. Four for 10 pounds..or 10 for...But what would I want to do with ten watches?! Micky came back from Thailand with four watches on his wrists and sold them for a small profit and a friend once brought a suitcase of ties from the land of the pure to sell back in ol' blighty. He's now a t.v. celebrity, selling something else. 

Asad gave the toffs a real speaking to at the William Morris gallery. "No wonder there are no black people or brothers here: who's going to spend four and half quid on a sandwich?"

The problem with rich people is that they're always so accommodating and never lose their temper-unless threatened with decapitation. "Yes, excellent point, young man, do you have any other ideas on how we might encourage greater community participation?" And so he was roped in and got his free sarnies-which, I suspect, is what he wanted all along.

We go down Brick Lane and are sickened by how good it looks. "It was a real dump in my day," I say, sounding like someone from a Monty Python sketch. He brings his crazy Canadian-Irish friend with him and no-one can understand a word he's saying. Not just the accent. A physicist who thinks everyone else knows what he's on about. He has gentle eyes and wild, curly hair. "What do you do?" 

"I design Marxist computer programmes" 

I was about to laugh before I realized that he was serious. The revolution will be televised, brother.

k

Is Bach enough?

Is it possible, or correct, to see Auschwitz as the end of a line in thinking that stretches from concepts such as the nation-state to 'state racism'? Was Foucault right?

The idea of a people, the birth of the nation. But who is this 'people' if not an Englishman, a Frenchman? Not: the abstract citizen or individual, but a specific man from a particular place and not Man, which might include woman, at least in theory. And not the Red Man (who is not included) and not the Black Man who is only a fraction of a human (White Man). If you lack will, reasoning abilities, if you do not have property or not at the right level of civilisation then sorry, go to the back of the line and wait your turn. In a comparable sense the poor, gays and Jews are also not really to be thought of as Man. Is it possible to think of who is human without thinking of who isn't?

Who is this black man, and what colour is he? 

||

Lest we forget (or, more accurately: let's forget!)

We do not need to be reminded of The Trenches, colonialism, the Gulags, the Camps, the Bomb, and the destruction of our natural habitats. Which line of poetry shall we read today to stave off the memories?

Of course, there are those who want to say that religion is the cause of all or at least most of the hatred, violence and cruelty we see around us-and looking at the growth in fanaticism it is hard not to see their point. But, really? If we extend our horizons: Vietnam, Cambodia, the Great Famine, Rwanda, Congo, Iraq, Kashmir, Palestine..were these fundamentally about religion?

|| |

The evos are on the march. All that hand waving and swaying in the aisles, the susceptibility to being easily moved to tears a sign of one's receptivity..one can only imagine how that's going to go down in middle England! 

Now, there's fundamentalism in Wolverhampton, South Punjab and Sao Paulo. If you had to take your pick..er...

Little r now sings 'When the saints..' I will not teach her 'Onward Christian Soldiers' but am very tempted to persuade her to learn 'we shall not be moved' or was that, 'I shall not be moved'?

Ghost Dance (the Penultimate Speech to the White Man)

There is no time now to stitch together the song of what is lost.

|| |

It is true that Malcolm only became a problem when he stopped talking about "the white man" but something needs to be said. Of course, that is not to say that "the east" isn't a sham, the "mystical" east of the swamis, sufis and fakirs. You'll still take the secular and progressive Quaid over the religious and backward-looking Gandhi any day. If truth be told, though, neither matter today.

|

'...The white master will not understand the ancient words...
because Columbus the free has the right to find India in any sea...
and the right to name our ghosts...
but he doesn't believe people are equal...

Take the gold of the earth and the sun, and leave the land of our names
and go back, stranger, to your kin..and look for India.

So do not bury God in books that promised you a land in our land
as you claim...

You will lack an hour of meditation in anything that might ripen in you.

[He said]: " I am the master of time, I have come to inherit your earth."

[but] Time had enough time for us to be born in her, and return from and to her.

Don't write the decrees of the new god, the iron god, upon us, and don't ask the dead for a peace treaty...
we had longevity here, before England's rifles, before French wine...
and time is a river, when we stare into the river time wells up within us...
Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?

I will not sign my name to the peace treaty between the murdered and the killer, I won't sign my name to the purchase of a single hand's breadth of thorn around the cornfields...

I wrap myself with my name
to fall into the river.
And nothing remains for us in the new time.
Here our souls glitter, star by star, in the space of song.

There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build..
there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct
there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead
who come by dawn to drink their tea with you

so leave

some vacant seats for your host..they will read you
the terms of peace..with the dead.'

Darwish.

||||||||||||

It is hard not to see this in the context of Palestine: I will not sign my name!

But there is something more general here, something that needs to be said (not just in reference to the destruction of the Earth...50% of wildlife destroyed over the last forty years). 

What will the historians write of all the defeats, of the nameless ones who don't make it to their books? Shikast: already we have slipped off your page, out of your memory, the last word on your lips our freedom. To imagine that here, too, were human lives, broken hearts, is not admissible in an age of minerals, and the iron cross. What music will you play for us now in your chambers if not a death march or something out of tune?

  

why can't everything be purple?

'Blind certainties that were going to prevail
Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch...
Make free
Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife
high on a windblown hedge.'

How to get back, you know, eye-level, leveled breath, down to the last moment, square with me. What goes on after the cards are dealt, face-up, telling it like it is?

north

 I love the sea and the mountains. Brooklyn really had the same sense of being beyond measure.
---D. Nurkse.

No one missed him.
The pool players cleaned the table,
rack after rack, adjusting the score
with beads on a string in midair,

the dart players paused, with pursed lips,
pushing the feathers through air
as if they had just found an opening,

but my father had not returned,
not even as a ghost, not even
as a tremor in a punter's hand.

I locked the iron door at first light,
lowered the steel shutters,
clicked the seven padlocks,

and instead of my father,
to whom I'd spoken all my life
with bitterness, with sarcasm,
I spoke to that uncertain moment
between false dawn and dawn
when the traffic roars north,
just streaks of trapped light,
lamps go out in the charity ward,
and the tenements light up,
the highest floors first:

why can't you rest, I said.

|||

I woke in the middle of the night in perfect calmness, except not knowing what time it was troubled me; the clock still in darkness, a blank face on a blank wall. You tricked yourself into believing there was some special insight, one particular word, that you carried with you all this time, like a seed in the dark-and that it was important not to forget it in the first light of the day. 

Your calf muscles still twinged and you pictured yourself a few hours back: at the ice-cream parlour with little r, at the gym before that, looking down at your life as if from a great distance. Little r had asked why we needed words or names at all, why couldn't we just point to what we want. Why did God give names to things (there she was again, about to go off on one of her 'religion-tangents').That is hard to say. 

"Why aren't the traffic signals purple or different?" We need something in common to recognize or else we'd be all at sea. 

I return to London, two or three times a week in my dreams. Before, in childhood, dreams were about running; now I seem to always be on a train, looking out of dark windows, or looking back at my life.

Coffee

The great combinations in the world: coffee and chocolate; chocolate and orange; chocolate and cherries. Some things by their very nature like to combine with other things (There, a bit of old-world mysticism for you!).

Stilton and coffee, and Frau Wilke by my side...

I think I've read those five pages at least five times now. Makes me think back to Connaught Hall, just off Bloomsbury, and of the wide stairs in Wise Blood. The spaces between us that are not a distance, the importance of the word 'and' in human history; at any point in time we are known by the depth of our connections: between East & West, between the past & the future. 

'Trane: freedom and structure, each breathing out matched by a breathing in, the old song of joy and sorrow...

ghosts

There is a way
if we want
into everything
I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the
    small and glowing loaves of bread
I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night
The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese
    poems
You eat the forks,
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables
What do you love?
I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on
    despite worms or fire
I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth
There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave
Both
My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air
particles of skin
The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned
    helix of dust and cinnamon
Breathe in
Breathe out
I smoke
unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes
from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them
here, and I’ll smoke them
There
There is a way
if we want
out of drowning
I’m having
a Gimlet, a Caruso, a
Fallen Angel
A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel
    Face, a Corpse Reviver
What are you having?
I’m buying
I’m buying for the house
I’m standing the round
Wake me
from the dash of lemon juice,
the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,
and the two fingers of gin
that make up paradise
There is a way
if we want
to untie ourselves
The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark
There are lots of stories about intestines
People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake
The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new
    bright plastic curled around the older brother
Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned
Some people climb them into Heaven
Others believe we live in one
God’s intestine!
A conveyor belt of stars and saints
We tie and we loosen
Minor
and forgettable
miracles.

---M. Dickman.

Our love of: abandoned places, the ruins of the heart, rich pickings, the sudden moment of discovery when the wall falls. We love our loves; our failing love, too, is not without interest. The moment frozen, the crowd shuffling out for the last time. Each day underground begins again, unseen, unknown. The parallel lives, the lost glances, the loves that were one step away. We look back at the ghosts of our lives, touch the shells we carry with us in deep pockets and recall each journey and the brightly painted numbers. The map of endless possibilities opening up like the palm of your hand. Here we are, in the belly of the beast while up above gold is greedily exchanged between blind men. 

The long steps, the short, squat tunnels, the flickering white light making no impact on the grime. The city folks in from the suburbs, numbers floating through their heads, the Japanese on their way home via the deep blue. The university students bright and keen, the only ones left with a sense of the future. You run up, burst out into the open, and see lines of friends and lovers waiting by the overpriced flowers at the flower stand. I thought I knew you Holborn, the central line to my home, but all I really knew were the exits, the ways out. There is another station here and maybe there always has been, but no matter how hard I try I can't remember it.

burning water

Some thoughts on climate change: the question is not whether average temperatures will increase or not; the question is by how much. We are faced with a "cascade of uncertainty" (IPCC, 2007): how will economies and technologies develop? What will be their impact on emissions? How will those emissions translate into temperature increases and, finally, how do you put a price on the damages to work out the cost and benefits of mitigation? Uncertainty could be the central feature of it (Weitzman).

The current consensus is that the Copenhagen figure (stabilizing at a 2 degrees Celsius increase-on average, mind you) will not hold. What type of ethics or politics will put a hold on it? Don't think markets are the solution (since they're actually the problem...still waiting for N. Klein) and Utilitarianism is too abstract, doesn't motivate ("from the point of view of the universe") and erroneously tries to reduce all value to preferences. More specific problems: it doesn't deal with future generations very well (Discounting: W. Beckerman). A global solution without global institutions?

Which leaves us with community, local solutions (Wendell Berry), an inter-generational moral community (to paraphrase A. Baier). Except capitalism and the markets focus on the short-run and work to dissipate the chances of 'the long now' taking root.

We're in a fix and about to spin out. No-one wants to say it but our insatiable desire for more and more looks like it's bound us to a desperate trajectory of catastrophic changes. Austerity: joy within limits is something we can work to, fashion ourselves, or it will eventually be imposed on us.

(Don't know why, but the light reminded me of Strand's wonderful Mexico pictures).

 |||

Pitanguy: "The most important thing is to have a good ego and then you don't need an operation."

Somewhere when

'The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness.'
---D. Athill.

'I had something to say..
your voice-
it would be faint
and strange,
belonging
as it does now
to another age.'

What time we have, what time there is. No-one knows. All the things we couldn't name, in time.

"Why is there so much dust here?" the little one asks. She rants like a born-again: "We are all the children of Adam. [She just needs to add a " I tells ya" and we'd be deep in Bible territory].
"Okay then, where is his uncle, his aunt?"
 She smiles, knowing she's been stumped but carries on.  "God made everything, he made Himself."
"How did he do that, then?"
"He got some help from someone."

Storm House

It is hard to imagine, I know.

From Mirror, Mirror:

'It is the path of virtue to regard some options as closed. What if the self is unknowing, all the way down?'

Which is to say: one must take into account the passing of time. How do you do so, though? We imagine or posit some deep structure underlying all that is ephemeral, the blue skies behind the passing clouds. There has to be something more to all this. For Christ's sake.

"I was not myself" we say to ourselves as we recover from some bout of confusion. But who were we, then? Who were we all this time? You fall in the direction you're leaning.

You veer from one extreme state to the other: you are everything, the centre of the world; you are nothing. The intellectual history of the world is not so different: materialism/idealism.

'..the Real Me, a butterfly escaped from the chrysalis of the social and conventional, a self untrammeled by the artificial restrictions of society, beautifully free from the sleepwalking and the mechanical drudgery of modern life.'

Not the repetitive and predictable bourgeois self that leads a crab-like existence, half-resigned to mediocrity and plain speaking, a self that looks forward to "special deals" and whose only escape from it all is a daydream or a drug-induced stupor. 

We think of ourselves (but not others) as inhabiting some special zone, as having the ability to shake off the powder to reveal a wild, romantic, creative and wholly original-but misunderstood- person. Underneath all that dull metal was gold all along. You have my word for it. Just waiting, waiting to be discovered, recognized, spoken to in the right way. The storm was over, order was re-established. No ambivalence, only the surety of undivided desires, the clarity of sound thought.

But what if there is no high road, no low road to the True Self? The purification, the analysis, the cool self-reflection, the mind straightened, the honest attending to all that has passed, the grieving, the lapses and the harshness finally owned. What if there were only fragments, stories along the way, one no more real than the other. Where we are is where we are. 

To imagine wholeness today, an image, peace, is to strike out against the dominant tendencies of the age. We love our brokenness, the fierceness of our conflict-ridden inclinations, the fragmentary point of view, tentative, resisting all absolutes, all definitions. A rose is a rose. Anything else stinks of metaphysics, childish stories of simplicity, or old rehashed ones of completeness and redemption. Men and women without qualities. Everything is reduced to the question of power or is mere play, a game, a stage in which we stagger, drunkardly, half-forgetting our words. "Every answer is a part-answer". Nothing to say; everything is for its own sake and ends there, or it is for less, the way everyone is for themselves or sold on something.

When the day is done

And all the times and all the places
where I pitched my life in shadow

"For the life of me I cannot work out where it all went wrong," he says, deflated by a series of wrong turnings, events turning pear shaped. "The strangeness of it all," he says. All those hours, years, drawn into the curve of a life, a life I do not recognize, that I could never have imagined would be mine. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Am I part of a mystery whose origins lie in some fault line, some fracture, that is destined to remain hidden from me? For the life of me. So we begin...

||

There was a time when I didn't know you or myself. That time is now.

|| |

'And he thinks his way much further back
through ten, through a dozen years
with giant stumbling, backward strides.'

We have our backs up against it, the future. He thinks further back, with a rare determination. I must get back. As if to say, as if to say. All the time, the plague of thought: what if there is no time? What if you get back and everything is exactly the same, right down to the medieval paintings, the vase and dry flowers, the door about to come off its hinges, the one patch of wooden floor boards that creaks, the wrecked light, the silver still turning to white in the old photographs, the books to be burned, the inheritance letters tightly wrapped in blue ribbons...all that you know, every square inch..but what if you look finally in the old mirror, framed in dark wood, and fail to recognize yourself, the inner life as insubstantial as the outer, as plain speaking.

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She stood with her back to the kitchen window, dunking a biscuit in her mug of tea. The best cups kept for special occasions. Where was everyone, she thought to herself.It was too painful to ask this question with too much awareness. What if this was it? The sound of the clock in all that vast silence, the evening frost rearing its head on the darkening windows, the gnarled apple tree untended. 

The boys were settled, she tried to convince herself, though she knew that their lives were being upturned, that something dark was being sown. Must each suffer on their own? At least darling M had found if not love, then warmth. Yes, that was all one could hope for. Our times, out time...don't think too deeply about it. The ground of faith stood.

Fall was in the air, winter on the edge of understanding. It is impossible but has happened, is always happening. These wounds we live by are nothing new. What is there in the books, after all? Sign up or refuse. And it is over. Another day is done, she would say to herself and everyone's heart is broken by their final face.  

Mirror, mirror

'There is no royal road from anatta to agape.'

---S. Blackburn.

Then what kind of road is there?

'We find ourselves in our world.'

To find yourself, be found, in the time and space in which you exist. There is no 'I' without the other..the 'I' itself is a mirror...There is no 'I' in itself (except a small one). The small 'i' of islam is a way, shared by others. The large 'I' is crystallization, an oasis, a place of determination and settled natures. The small way carries with it the sense of loss, of being lost, signals second chances. The rose is a brief flame and would not be a rose otherwise. What you hold on to is the memory of red, and he pointed to her. "And you, black crow?" And she pointed to him.

One does not talk of roads in the desert...

Clarification is not negation. Distillation is not "purity".

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'Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 

---Thomas Merton.

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“A leftwing vision of the world requires you to imagine a future utopia, but one doesn’t have the right to forget that the most important thing for every human being is the life they lead now,”

“All we are doing is recognising something as old as humanity,” Mujica said. “The best thing is that people can live as they want to live.”

“I don’t think it inevitable that the world should live in capitalism. That is the same as not believing in man, and man is an animal with many defects but also with startling capabilities.”

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The small world you inhabit is not really a world to most people (the world of big money, politics, false mirrors, staged (guest) appearances..) but it is the world to me. We find ourselves in our world. Of course, the kind of continuity now available is likely to be supplied by memory and a few dearly cherished individuals rather than anything material. Work , for example, is you imagine very rarely anything like Wendell Berry's description here

writing home

'I could go on, about the cases of colleagues and their experience of managers’ ‘instructions’, arrogance and ignorance, and the devices they adopt to impose their will, but individuals like Anthony Forster and the executive dean for humanities are not single spies. They’re minor but willing operatives in a larger mechanics of power. Within this structure, they have been allowed to wrest authority for themselves, and neither literary scholars nor long-serving teachers have a say; individual students, once enrolled and committed, are not much attended to either.'

---Marina Warner, Why I quit.

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In a dream you find yourself at a familiar crossroads, the whole of London opening up before you. Bridges and the river one way, crass materialism the other. 'Every step an arrival,' every step a departure.You spend ten pounds on a poppy and think of a long walk (you have the tanned legs of a mountain walker). In a book you write a note: 'for all the people who have died in wars'...such universalist sentiments obviously quite unpopular today, so you add: ' especially for the people of my city, London'. And I get the approving glance, though belonging is a mystery to me. Later on Ubo out talks a lanky black Jazz musician who slumps in his chair, resigned to his voice not being heard

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Two biographies on Denise this year. The Dana Greene one in particular looks quite good. The Welsh/Jewish roots appeal-for obvious reasons.

'...and like Lear unable to say if your hands were your own'
---Tim Liardet.

What does that mean? You'll have to ask the old dougal who has probably read Lear a hundred times. 

But you get the drift. Most of what you understood-which wasn't much-was always second-hand, derivative...about right. As you age there are no new things to understand (or, more accurately, that you want to understand).Instead, you fumble over the few familiar things, trying to tease out something different...

Everything seems to be moving away from you, at an angle, with greater speed (and for that you are also grateful).

Back in the old country the first days were spent peeling off wallpaper. There were at least eleven distinct layers and it seemed we'd never get to the first wall, primal, pure, the beautiful blank space. Each layer put up was someone's life. How many hands have changed? 

We lived without colour for a month and warmed ourselves with coal brought from thick sacks from the garage. There was an old piano, on which false notes were played. Some of the keys were mute and when pressed only produced a dark thud. The central keys were bright, on which we started Once in Royal David's City. Gradually we forgot. We were among the many who disappeared. 

Turn the pages, peel them back, finding, not finding, the hand's fixed pose, the word, like love, stuck in your throat....everything is a return, to a broken world, where you are still. I can't even remember the last time I spoke, I mean, spoke. The lost self, the dream, the name you can't recall. That's the least of it.

Tony said: you always have books in your hand; your hand has permanently curled around them, even when you walk. I carry books with me, not to read, but in the way a religious person wears an amulet to ward off evil.

What will you re-read? Cheever's prison book, perhaps when you're out of prison. I have books in hand, I have time on my hands.