Je suis

'I don’t want to read about how “we’re all” anything, because wishing away complexity is inadequate and juvenile...

The caricature of the jihadi as a medieval throwback, animated by ancient passions, may be comforting to those who would like to wrap themselves in the mantle of civilisation and pose as heirs of Voltaire, but as a way of actually understanding anything, it’s feeble. Understanding is the very least we owe the dead.

The jihadi movement is a thoroughly modern beast, which ironically owes much to the French revolutionary legacy of 1789.

--Hari Kunzru,The Guardian.

This is the best piece I've read so far. It's so great to believe in something after all these years ("the pen")and you have to wonder if the nihilists aren't succeeding-at least for now- in furthering binary thinking: us and them (forget the East-West Diwan, bro').

It would be interesting to read about the history of satire. Wasn't satire about ridiculing the powerful? So, yes, the Church certainly falls in that category (or at least it used to) and religious authorities, too. I see the courage in satire but I don't see the "generosity" or "humanity" that people are harping on about.

I don't know what 'we are' is in French but I prefer 'I am'.

~~~

A Muslim Problem ?

Bob, over on the overgrown path ("music box") points to some interesting music, 'Become Ocean'.

When you think of Peshawar, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan..and now (probably) Paris, do you think there's a Muslim problem? Boko Haram, al-Q, IS (or whatever it's called now). Which is-obviously-not to say that all Muslims are problems or all problems are Muslim but, rather, that there's a specific problem in the so-called Muslim world-a (not the) Muslim Problem? You suspect that neither the right-wingers nor mainstream Muslims have the ability (or perhaps desire) to take a step back and honestly ask this question. And to be honest, neither have you. James Kelman's Greyhound and Agee's Let us Praise both came in today (highly recommended by James Wood and Charles from CB respectively).

The question cannot be framed any longer in terms of nationality or self-determination-if it ever could. As with Walker, this is about an 'endless war', "infinite justice". 

The shape of things to come? You remember an old Parsee, a retired army person who used to work at the once great Ferozsons book shop-a dark and cool oasis in the heart of the higher end of the old city. And you remember the seated old man shaking his head, as if he'd arrived at some hard-won bit of wisdom: "To be honest, I spend most of my time with my dogs and cats...I've given up on human beings".

~~~

Todorov-whose excellent book you happen to be reading at the moment-was on Newsnight and said things people probably didn't want to hear: the first principle of democracy is not freedom of speech but the limiting of power. He then went on to imply that the media acts as if it has unlimited power. Don't put those two together or else you have an uncomfortable equation.

Does negative liberty (rights, or those of the market) exhaust the concept of freedom? Do we want to ask Brando's question?Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Well, okay, liberty and equality. Bugger...liberty, then!

Is free speech a necessary but not sufficient condition? Is the dominant (and correct or more important) idea of freedom really 'freedom from'...feel free to fill in the blanks: the state, church, religion, other people, society...)?

Are other people, bonds, dependencies always a constraint on our freedom? (That is the dominant idea in the social sciences and-if Todorov is to be trusted-for a lot of western philosophy). Robinson Crusoe as the foundation (or the war of all against all..see Sahlins). Or some form of suppression of our primal drives and instincts (by an artificial civilisation). We start off lacking something (scarcity has to be posited as getting the whole thing in motion); we start off as conflicted beings, at war with other people (Mother, Father) and with ourselves. What we want above all is autonomy, to be left alone (which makes you wonder about the role of friendship and love in philosophy).

~~~

songs from the broken world

Ernst Reijseger // Mola Sylla - Sanctus from ...El Exilio...y...El Viaje... on Vimeo.

'When I drink wine, I understand previous centuries; they too, I tell myself, consisted of things contemporaneous and the desire to find one's place among them. Wine makes one a connoisseur of the soul's vicissitudes. One feels great respect for everything, and for nothing at all. Wine shimmers with tact. If you are a friend of wine, you are also a friend of women and a protector of all that is dear to them...All the songs to wine that were ever composed ought to be acknowledged as justified'.

--Walser. 

~~

The obvious: if it wasn't for women there would be so much more violence in the world. Perhaps there has never been any balance in society, the world, but one can't but help feel at times that a few more twists and turns and what once bound us-human-to-human-will unravel. You imagine some fundamental human gestures persisting through it all: the arrangement of certain words, the tipping of a hat. And you can't bring yourself to accept anything else (the wisdom of men in hats, the professional mourners) as long as you're permitted to walk the tightrope.

~~~

'It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends'. What drink is that when I look in the mirror I think you remember me?
We know no more songs..fill the cup, saki, for we are still homesick for the earth (and many other things).

'One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others,
know how to keep it'

--Jules.

Out of the blue, a red fox appeared; her demeanour was sad and funny, restrained, a few joules down from her normal self. A septillion joules is what it takes-apparently- to warm the earth's waters by one degree. When it comes to the energy balance time is against us. Copenhagen's probably gone.

Only a few can name it; the rest want to forget or imagine it will always be like this, as if everything could carry on in good faith. Couples walk hand in hand under a winter sky, past bleak trees and under arches with a great sense of unknowingness, as if this could be the last day, the first day. London on a dark night is bluer than any city, thanks to the reflected light, a brilliance that once existed in people's hearts.  

From the old days...for the old days.

Listen, that's not how it works. How many days have been nothing but the idol of the days? Listen you sonofabitch, life isn't all a goddam football game!

How many days with no name and with time on your hands.

~~

"Ain't nothing going to fall your way; never has, never will". He thought, when people get all folksy on you, you know you're in a bad way. D told him, "I know they don't mean bad but I can tell by the way they look at me, look through me that is, that I'm finished here". 

~

M said, "I hate to say it, and God forgive me for doing so, but you can't trust anyone nowadays. Even my wife and kids. By thirty I thought I was there..the house paid off, the money rolling in, but I didn't realize it was all a test. Plan all your life and it doesn't count anyway. I was in my robes, ritually cleansed and I thought to myself, yeah, I'm ready to die".

The Iliad of broken sentences

The light is always brightest at the beginning of the year. Nothing is redeemed, but it does look new. Time flows, and our faces are greyer. The cyclical time of nature outlasting our individual perspective. The trade-off we want but can't have: a broken circle.

The Roding finds its direction, it's inner pace, the way Latin words survive in another language; it considers the contours of the land and gently slows down or curves around at the right time. You wonder about this, how there's a kind of wisdom in its detours. 

A wonderful line or two from Exley:

'I don't know how long I stood there, breathing in this terrified way; but at some moment-a moment wonderful in its protectiveness-the listlessness of defeat engulfed me, and I walked, trancelike,to the bed and lay down.'

Never read more than you can live. The arc of experience of your life so narrow that most of what you read brushes over you. Nothing inheres. Or maybe it's the lack of depth and not the narrowness itself since if you look hard enough you'll find enlightenment anywhere. The narrow road to deep north is the deep north. The times we live in, you like to think. How do you find a way around the shallowness, what kind of reality do you bear witness to?

There's less and less time for the false notes, for even the mockery of them. Buckle down, stay inside, keep warm, find some words. 

red (and blue) light district

 As the brim of the life is lit,
And breath pours softly over the earth,
And as Heaven moves ahead to the next city
With deep airs, and with lights and rains,


He plunges into Hades, for his search is desperate!
And there is so little risk...down there,
That is the benefit of searching frenziedly
Among the dust-shops and blind-alleys
...there is so little risk of finding her

In Europe's old blue Kasbah,  

~~

On the other side, this will be no more. Departure dates etched so firmly to remind you of the transience. You're passing through. On arrival: the green lane: nothing to declare.

Fires fragment this winter: the red and the blue...

A Bedouin in London Town

A young woman with two-toned blue faded jeans and a strong, distinctive face; her hair light purple, she speaks in an unselfconscious way that only a foreigner can truly possess in this country..beautiful, rolling words in Italian...

~~~

At Foyles a middle-aged man, greying stubble, balding head, faded light jeans and a leather jacket..." I am looking for a love story"

[Well, who isn't, my friend?]

No Englishman would be seen dead asking that to a woman half his age. Not the done thing, old bean. You hang around the corner to pick up the rest of the conversation since you can't afford any books...

"This is really, really popular. I mean, really, really popular. Er..girls really love it".

Is he buying the book for his daughter, or his wife? Bizarre!

~~~

You have a great desire to find some new road today. It's easy, so you spontaneously side-step the sleep-walkers into some different path and a new world of gleaming lanes and forgotten pathways suddenly opens up before you. Down Newman Passage (see pic. above) and Percy Passage onto more familiar terrain: Charlotte Street, your old haunt. It would be interesting if at each juncture some love had been lost. Now, that would have been a story [he says in his best Jewish accent].

You stumble across a bookshop you've never seen before. Occult books, Jewish mysticism (no Islamic mysticism, I note..well, who can blame them?), a fake Red Indian feather head dress and tarot cards laid out on a table in front of you.Death or love, I want to ask the woman. She's slightly desperate, as if she's ready to fall in love (or maybe they just haven't had any sales today). You buy a book on Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry for a pound for the dougal. Inside is a thin sheet of lined paper: a list of names for some literature class conducted by Elaine Ross (1977). The 'E' is signed with a wonderful old-world flourish that one very rarely sees nowadays.

She takes the pound coin in one hand and then-remarkably-kisses the bookmark she places in the book. For good luck? A spell? She says, "Can I tempt you [steady on!] with some Iain Sinclair (I shouldn't have asked for that blasted book on Blake when I walked in..trying to appear clever you always fall flat on your face).

Er..maybe next time?

~~~

At Judd's you wish Sandy, the tight-lipped Scottish bastard, a happy new year. He is genuinely surprised-and perhaps even touched- by my gesture. Pick up Dewey's wonderful Common Faith for under a fiver. Harrower can't be found anywhere.

~~~

Waterstones will collapse someday soon, you can feel it in your bones. How much is a Kindle again? Och, I canna give in.

~~

You note that quite a few of the second-hand books are the same ones that make it to the land of the pure. This makes me think that only time separates people, things. It is only a matter of time-centuries, perhaps-before all the books in London make their way to me.

You have no money and no time. Drink a latte as you walk past a spiny, evil-looking woman trying to palm off a Hare Krishna book onto you. If it had been soup I might have stopped. Jesus, I'm wahabi, don't you know!

You feel three-quarters dead in the cold as no words are spoken, no glances exchanged. You feel alive, perhaps the only one so. There are no camps, the ashes in the wind now, former warmth a distant memory, just like all the other Bedouins. Walser is found at the Italian brothers' place for four pounds. You will probably never read the book so you count the money you've saved instead. 

You look for a Brooklyn poet, for some Denise. Build a wall around yourself, become even more invisible. Our faces don't lie in the the bright winter sun. Being Mortal looks interesting.

~~~

Past Soho books, selling knickers that in former days only high-class prostitutes would wear (er..or so you imagine). At he park you sit on a bench and devour your fish sarnie (wrapped in silver foil, for old time's sake). On the bench next to you sit two lesbians, wearing the same black woolen gloves, looking at each other dreamily. They sit awkwardly, straining their necks, so that they can look at each other's faces full on. To the East a single red brick tower of a now disappeared (?) Church, the high light fragile; at the base the shadows extend themselves in one large square block at a time. By 2.30 the sun will be gone. The old days come around again, with no false note in your heart. 

~~

Down Shaftesbury Avenue-this being the only square of land I know- you overhear a mother say to her daughter, with great precision and equanimity:" The matter of the fact is...". The words trail off and this single sentence is all you have to go by; what happened before, what led up to this declaration, and what followed it, God only knows. 

Later, near Russell square, the old red cafe, Valencia, where old Naim-now deceased-used to go. Died of heart failure but also from heartache for much longer, much before the final act. "What's your story?" he asked me the first time I met him. "Haven't got one, mate. Work in progress".

~~ 

A poet, so fiercely independent that she had to either break or find some kind of inner revelation. She ends up disappearing for forty years, burns her books, destroys the pagan gods her aunt had given her, and any notion of the east is disbanded, even though it had held her still before, and lives out her life on the coast, watching the sea, year after year.

I will write my name in the sand, she says. The desert is here, right now. The territory of the bed, the street, the heart, half-lit.

true colours

'There's something much kinder about a house which has been lived in for generations than a brand new one...old glass still diffuses the daylight on the latest hats as softly as it did on the rugs of the 18th century.'

'What remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before.'

--J.B.

~~~

Starter for ten: Berger, Barnes, Burnside or Betjeman? 

Life's a  ___

~~~

the nth

For the n th time you return, fall into it, the sharp descent, the endless waiting, the floating through the unreal corridors and hallways at the airport. The stammering words, the checking of one's identity..is the face the same? Behind the counter she imagines his face from ten years ago, more understandable, less complex.

"Where are you coming from?"

Are you serious?

Points of departure, the line you walk. 

"How long are you here for?"

Keep it vague. About...

~~

For the 5 th or 6 th time you return to Exley's book and it makes sense now. Start, you should say, not return. Twice you'd fell asleep reading it, despite some interesting passages. Your head never quite clear, drowsy with stray thoughts, your mind straining to piece it together. But never beyond 57, that mystical number again. 

But it was that simple: the quality of the print! This text is clearer, well spaced, the page is clean and you see the words, pick up the thread, with greater ease today.

~

The desire to return, see things with greater truth, an image finally finding resolution, gaining sharper focus with time. The inessential removed, forgotten, for once.

~~

The Roding reaching its upper limit, its memory of summer's dry bed remote even as it carries sheets of ice along. Brambles and the frozen roots of berries near the bridge, a system of still-points, like a dream behind glass. A Church spire against a clear northern winter sky, the frost freezing a wave of grass in a startled expression. You find your old copy of Huizinga's Waning. Books and the inner world the last islands of the heart.

You watch your steps, you watch your frozen breath: Buddhism in the suburbs at Christmas.For the n th time-though you've lost count-you wear clothes that don't belong to you...

In the dry

He'd lost his mind for many years now. His face sunburnt from all that standing in the open, his eyes had narrowed with time, giving him the appearance of a wild man from the steppes, only his eyes were more melancholy if you looked carefully.

For large stretches of the day he would stand by himself by open doorways, shielding himself from the cold, not letting it enter his bones or his thoughts. He would stamp his feet, keeping it at bay, cursing, mumbling to himself as he did so.This is it, this is it. 

The rain would fall for hours. He'd drift in and out of his dreams and the days would not pass or hold anything together. He saw himself from a hundred different perspectives each day: with the eyes of the obese mother with three kids, with the strange looks of the Indian from the bottom of the road; the black man who walked with a cane in his left hand and no shirt on his back..

Our lives, our lives as brief as these images. I nearly said loves...

In summer he put that behind him; he kept his pipe safe in his deep inner pocket and found some green shade under a tree or next to a wall. There is no place to rest my head here...

"Are you from around here?" he was once asked. Not that anyone spoke to him. It was a sentence thrown at him and the feeling of being addressed was so strange that he just glared back in confused silence. Originally?, he asked himself in a childlike voice. 

More so than others, perhaps, but that didn't count now. Around here? People always wanted to know how they got to where they were. What if he only got here by chance, what if that other, aborted life had carried on...His strayed ancestry could be read off his face or maybe his lack of money made him look strange. He saw no-one who looked like himself and often imagined he was shipwrecked, or a man free-floating in space. 

Today, for the first time in a while he had felt there was no need for mirrors or books, so much of his life having being lived in darkness, not really understood. The soul soaring, fading with the seasons, the world still the tent filled with scattered stars...

Shops opened and closed, were boarded up and then wired up. A sign of the times. Small lives were lived out in small ways and stray dogs flitted in and out of his life. Removal vans and ambulances came and passed. Children were born, first words were learned, the Churches emptied and became truer. Was this what it was like to be dead? To see and not be seen?

He looked for dry places to gather himself when the frenzy was too much but there were fewer and fewer as the years passed. The great defeat was upon him, working its way to its inevitable conclusion. It was only a matter of time. Only a matter of time.

What words would be read over him, what faith was left? If he stood still for a while it would come to him unbidden, a long-lost memory of childhood days, of excursions to places where butterflies and books were kept behind glass, of days when he was surrounded by people and could feel the warmth of his father's hand on the back of his head and then, and only then, was he in the dry. 

(The title for this post comes from a great short story by Breece which can be found here )

I imagine all the places I once lived, books and friends and loved ones left behind, the ruined tapes and the music stacked up for safekeeping. Tunes warped, words garbled with the passing of time.

I walk in the fog, past the orange trees and brambles keeping my heart free but I remember less and less each year. I walk lightly and grow older by ten minutes.

A woman/girl once wrote to me and had to use Google translator to understand what I meant. She delighted in finding all these foreign words for time, for the passing of time. I dreamt of her that was dreaming of me, even though there were no words for it.

I walked across the field, the sleepy-eyed yellow roses nodding in their internal drowsiness, the dense fog coagulating into drops of water on thick leaves. I saw myself from a distance, as if walking to get the old sun off my back, out off my eyes. I am alive, even if from afar. If I could speak with God I would say, it's time to speak in plain English, my friend.

I walk without any appointments but can't return to anything. Individual crows follow me unknowingly. All the roads that find their way are knotted or weaved into one single memory, as tangible as the book I hold in my left hand, as real as the lined, empty pages it contains.

(words, borrowed from Darwish).   

In the land of the Pure

“My body was shivering. I saw death so close and I will never forget the black boots approaching me – I felt as though it was death that was approaching me.”

Purity is brutal, cleansing, cathartic.

What can one say? I think there is a growing realization that maybe, just maybe- as the kid says in The Lord of the Flies- "the beast was within". It wasn't the Amrikis, wasn't the Injuns or the Jooos. Just plain old religious folks, tribals, who wanted others to taste what they had tasted, "the pain of their children dying". 

Mimesis: everyone's trying to outdo the other in evil acts.

In Australia there's a saying, apparently, that goes like: 'I'll ride with you'. Well, over here all I want to say is: let me off, I don't want to ride with anyone any more. 

Schuon once wrote: if there's an avalanche, don't walk towards it. There's no courage, no bravery in it. 

~~~

You feel like a Russian aristocrat in a novel who has suddenly realized that his country is fucked and that he will drown along with everyone else, a horrible and meaningless death.

A candlelight vigil with 600 students. Some prayers and a minute's silence is all we can offer. A drunk ex-army officer starts to blabber, with tears in his eyes, pointing to the shrapnel still lodged in his leg. Someone from the crowd shouts, "we are proud of you, Sir". I amble away. It was the army that created this monster in the first place.

a time of gifts, a time to keep silence.

A story book, is what she probably thought. Little r had hidden Fermor's Time to Keep in her shelf, behind the slide. Kids, like primitive communists you imagine, have little understanding of private property. Of course, I hadn't even realized it was missing before she told me. Which reminded you of A, who kept two large leather-bound ledgers of all the books in his library, typed out, you know, in the old way on a type-writer. 

For seven years now A has been living on his own in a one-window room. Is he locked up there against his will? The thought does cross your mind sometimes. He is "getting better" I am told but the only threadbare signs of this are that he occasionally brings his books down to read and watches American sitcoms. But it is more likely the land of the father that keeps things the way they are, binds everyone in this horrible tale. When it comes to land, blood means little. Property disputes can run for centuries down south and whole families are defined by an initial skirmish whose factual truth is only vaguely recalled or understood. Passed down the generations, fragments of a story laced with hatred.

The gates to his house are eerily locked- even in mid-afternoon- and the moronic guard from the village is on strict instructions not to reveal to anyone his whereabouts. 

This extreme seclusion, this need for distancing yourself from everything you'd previously known, so that nothing can take root, like a desert monk, is a form of madness. Not the impulse itself, but it being pushed to the extremity.

~~

But this is my book, don't touch things which aren't yours. Got it?
"Why?"
I have no answer. The most authoritarian answer springs to mind: "Because I said so". An apparently harmless turn of phrase until one says it slowly to oneself. 

Would you like it if T& B came to your room and played with your toys?

"I shared my toys with them last time they came here"

(There is no outfoxing the little devil).

But some things are to keep for yourself, that are only yours.

"Which things?"

||

Our hearts, we keep to ourselves, expecting a singular moment, like a flash of lightning, to reveal our face, for the world to see, or for the contours of our lives to be inked in, the islands defined, or the shape of our heart to be seen without mirrors or glasses, its final form known, spoken by the one who should speak. Oblong, wasn't it?

||||

A few pages snatched at while standing up in front of the gas fire. He writes with the great ease that only comes to those who have a deep familiarity with the language, a sure sense of an abode in the structure and rhythm of the sentences and phrases, its cadences and different registers. He moves through the language in the same way that you move though varying kinds of silence...

on the table

the years radiating

toward the so-called first days,
toward the so-called last days,

inadequate boundaries

of the heart you hold to.

---Duncan.

~~~

A flower. A hand. The hand you've been dealt. The hand that held a flower to me.

The dealer's hand, as old as time itself. The cards are on the table. The days are lost.

I, mortal, that live by chance
and know not [who] you love.

The precision of your hand's gestures. Ancient offerings. A heartbeat lost in the shadow of another. The red and the black, falling, revealing an infidel's heart.

Your eye, skimming for the word, as it hunts the image. Breeze through it, as if word or image could be solace, the solstice of the heart.

The stars through centuries return
rimes of light to burn in this moment's eyes.

The moment anticipated. Found. Understood, registered, taken note of. And now for tea and a biscuit, which I must give up one day.

Are we thrown into the world? How time falls! Chances are parceled out on the rickety, second-hand table-and you wonder to yourself: when was that, and if there was only ever one game in town. The random acts forming no picture. "Take a chance?", she says. Shuffle. Turn. Do you back down? Raise your game, kid, he says, his hand trembling. I'll see you. Yes, no. What have you got that can trump it all, make amends? Diamond heart, a two-faced queen (eye, stone-cold), a lucky seven, a bemused, luckless king, an ace up your sleeve that will outshine the rest? The ruined pattern made whole, perhaps. A late escape, flowering, a second chance. What's the deal: Dark spade, flint-like, to turn the tables or another joker, spoiling your hand?

~~~

The most ironical photo of the year:

square one

'Eating with disciplined excellence is a search for wisdom'
---NYRB.

'Somehow, as if

what's missing left me with a mystery,

its absence makes me love it twice over'

--Walser.

You look inside the room, the plates set, the order of a small and known world. We enter the season with great knowingness. Everything and everyone is in their place. For a moment the cosmos has aligned itself with us. And yet there is a fourth shadow, adding a shroud of stillness to the scene.

Outside the decaying hours of the sun, the first ice forming a fragile latticework over the grass. We laze into the afternoon, glutted on memories of former times and forgetfulness. Without any longing for outside, we are ourselves for a few wasteful hours. 

In this winter light, the light that tarries inside our homes, we see ourselves and others less harshly. Leftovers are cherished, images on the screen from many years ago are so familiar that they enhance the belief that nothing has changed-even if the world has moved on. Black and white photographs held in thick, plush covers are brought down and we wonder where all those people have gone, where are our own lives have disappeared to.

We decline, we refuse. No & Yes in everyone's eyes. The small, the last ritual we hold on to as we unbind everything else. 

Save some space for seconds. We take off our hats and become wise. Our second thoughts: what was all the year's striving for, we wonder. We can't even describe it to ourselves. Some nameless sleep that curls up on itself, an imaginary happiness, perhaps? 

We find ourselves again on deep earth and are not sorrowful.

if not winter

There’s precedent for it. The angular sun on windows or the blustery light through the wind. The leaves and trash raised an inch, dying down, settling again. It gives me great pleasure to view this ancient power fading, to see this orange disc through the latticework of a leafless tree.

Today, a day for gathering: loose money and fresh walnut bread, apples, old white shirts- starched and dry-cleaned. To look at one's own life from afar, as if one were viewing one's hand with a great and mysterious detachment. 

The words we know and the words we don't are mirrored in our gestures. Nothing translates in winter and our heads are filled with second thoughts. My hands are dry and empty. 

A story by Breece sounds hollow,contrived. There is nothing to follow, no letters, no staged performances, just this slim volume, a life condensed within this thin jacket, the imprint of a hand on a windowpane. If this is not winter, then what is?  

[F]

Fragments. Text. Life. No. Yes. That's what is. The blank spaces: not before or after, but now. Don't miss it! [?] Take back the words, undo, unlace it all. 

At the time, that very moment, on the small piece of ground you stood on, shadowless, there was time.

The black sites of the heart.

The reconstruction, the reconstitution of the word from scraps. Glue it together with clumsy fingers: the whole picture is in my mind/heart.

If we had time to see (or see through)the complete sentence, then what?

The dissolving hour, the crumbling of an idea, the folding of a thought. I find a kind of hope in this place where nobody knows me (Robertson). The thinning out, the withdrawal, so that less is said, but with more truth.

Names on envelopes of the places I once lived. The solid-square names I no longer recognize. The hours, the days and weeks, brought into an arc of a life. We half close our eyes to recall what has passed, just as we do when the light is too bright and we need to shield ourselves from the glare. 

On a winter night, with the stars up above fixed, resolute, indestructible, you remember a cold November night from many years ago. When will the true self take a step forward, walk into the bright empty space and not stumble, not speak without faltering? Fractured time, the time of fragments is upon us. It is true today, as it was yesterday, we need the word &.

Beautiful lines from anton/[F]lowerville:

In Grenzwald, his last novel, the depth of time is often compared with water, water through which one can see, transparency, one can see almost through to the ground. It is presented as an insight, time and its depth, a visual metaphor, water, fluid. To become older means to sink deeper into time (= to sink deeper into transparency?). To von Doderer quiet is the actual opposite of death, not activity; quiet carries everything. a quiet described as the sun shining on the roof of life. People suffer but without wanting to explain their suffering, this not being necessary. The few important things in art are to find uneluciated, unknown rooms and spaces in the crowded mines of life. 

I said, hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side...

The flyers fell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.”

"There’s precedent for it,” Cheney had said. In fact, the history of the trial is inseparable from the histories of evidence, torture, and punishment. An ancient form of adjudication known as trial by ordeal became commonplace after 500 A.D.;...In the end, man is judged by God alone. Trial by ordeal was practiced throughout Latin Christendom. It was a favorite device for trying traitors, slaves, and foreigners. In medieval English law, the ordeal was an appropriate trial for “the foreigner or friendless man.”

Ex Parte Quirin.

The past is often figured as dark, a prison, a tomb; the future, bright, blue sky, a spaceship. This is an inheritance of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress and reason and law. Part of the terror of September 11th was the gleaming skyscraper become a tomb, the seeming backward march of time, the horror of the unreasonable. What, then, of the assassin become an unmanned flying machine?

---Jill Lepore, The New Yorker.

This all makes for sombre reading. A lot is made of religious violence-and rightly so, in my opinion. It goes without saying that religion, as it now exists, is one of the chief ways in which barbarism and backwardness is furthered in our world (which is not to say that that has always been the case or, indeed, that that is what religion is).

But the big question that never gets asked, the elephant in the room...most of the horrific violence of the 20th century was perpetuated by state powers (think: the Bomb, the Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps). Foucault was on the money: Nazism = state racism.

"Terror", it has to be remembered, was first used in relation to state power. The structure of dominance both supports and is reinforced by economic inequalities. An old question (Dahrendorf): how can there be political democracy without economic democracy?

'Like snowflakes in December in Chicago' is a great title for a book!

the swimmer

'The pool is real enough and is the crux, the truth of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of the year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm in the sun...'

---Cheever.

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Don't judge a book by its cover. Why not?

This is an old library book (in English, of course)given to me by a German friend who is on her way back again. Strange, but we had so little time to talk...

A small life, with few moments for reflection. Time passes. Listen. Out of time or just late? The days of our lives are all reflections of a single day. For some childhood is not a stage to be transcended or forgotten.

The arresting lines by Dupuy on Girard on Camus on Mersault: his desire to be left alone, to live a solitary and marginal life [work this in to the Walser/Pessoa theme of 'smallness', 'lostness']..the kind of story that no-one reads. No blurbs, no quotes, no reviews. Swim against the tide or sometimes just let yourself drift with it. At a certain time in your life the clothes fit. 

Absence

No, haven't read any of his poems, but the gentle face makes me want to.

Why does every sentence of yours start with a 'no'? The Welsh and Jewish connection again, no?

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In the mildew of age
all pavements slope uphill

slow slow
towards an exit.

It's late and light allows
the darkest shadow to be born of it.

Courage, the ventriloquist bird cries
(a little god, he is, censor of language)

remember plain Hardy and dandy Yeats
in their inspired wise pre-dotage.

I, old man, in my new timidity,
think how, profligate, I wasted time

– those yawning postponements on rainy days,
those paperhat hours of benign frivolity.

Now Time wastes me and there's hardly time
to fuss for more vascular speech.

The aspen tree trembles as I do
and there are feathers in the wind.

Quick quick
speak, old parrot,
do I not feed you with my life?