live recording

In the old days-and when weren't the days old?- there was something called live performances and live recording. Can't imagine what listening to Marley's Exodus at the Rainbow must have been like. On LPs (what dem, boss?)you could hear Otis Redding or B.B. speak to you.."Take your shoes off, ..get soulful, y'know"

When it comes to live performances you guess these two must have been the cheese (to use an old Anglo word). 

Of course, in terms of smoothness there was Sam Cooke, Curtis..later, George Benson, Al Green and so many others. But if there was one singer, the man, it was Marvin (and no, not his 'What's going on?', beautiful though that is). More like:

I read a page of Marjorie Watt's collection of short stories and instinctively felt this has got it. Can't really say what "it" is, but if pushed I'd say it's a sound, a tone, a kind of background sadness. Charles (from CB editions) was spot on. 

Read twenty five pages of Buchan's Slide and have to say that it's not something I'm warming too. Hard to put this is in words and at the risk of being misunderstood I'd say it's too much of a white man's book. Wankerish.

Onwards and upwards. Renata Adler's Speedboat. Clever, vibrant, free-floating. Too early in to make any judgements but there's a sense of being too clever, too 'cool' by half. Still, will give it another go.

Exley. Started at least six or seven times. Last time made it to page 165. Don't know why there's a reader's block when it comes to this book. Got a bit claustrophobic, self-absorbed. But since Richard Ford rated it so highly must give it another go.

~

Another kind of writing, one that anton (flowerville) often points to: the quiet, ordinary dailiness of life. There is something of a leaning inwards, a sense of a life lived away from the glare..one has made accommodations, found a small, second space, a refuge, a blank page in one's private journals. All of which makes you think of Walser, Pessoa, the simple recording of a life. But also of the beautiful opening pages of Raymond's Dora Suarez. Is the only sanity today to take a step away (and down) from it all? 

'Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

Remembering and Forgetting

You remember, don't you?

...


'When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains'.

The song the whale sings, away from the world, heavy as lead, a single, extended note, the bell-gold of the sea, deep in thought.

~

Do you remember the hours, the days, even for a while? The days that have passed and passed between us? All the great intellects today teach us to forget.

The old forgotten language is all we have to remind us of all we've forgotten; and it can't be said, this tremendous draining away of words and worlds, of styles of thinking, modes of being. The habits of the heart, the habitat that grounded us. This old way of speaking found only in dusty books now. An image, then, in this late, flashing hour. The last man, here, without any names.

It is imperative to get the timing right, the shy experts said, once upon a time. Holed up in their bunkers, or snug in the silent high-rooms of the world, with their calculus of pleasure and pain. We will "reduce this nation to a nomadic people." Deep down settlers have always hated the settled. Burn down the mosques, the babies, the olive trees, too. Freedom's just a word.

And now the fires burn everywhere and the ghosts come back to haunt the living. Scorched earth is a policy, a goal. The American woodsman (Calasso)-and we're all American now. Except i ain't. 

If this is man, then I ain't man enough. 

Of course, the true existential threat to us might come from ourselves. If we can look at another human being and categorise them as “illegal”, or that chilling American word “alien”, then what has become of our own humanity? To support policies that dehumanise others is to dehumanise yourself. I think most people resist that, but are pressed towards it by an increasingly sadistic elite. If you’re worried about threats to your way of life, look to the people who are selling your public services out from under you. The people who will destroy this society are already here: printing their own money, printing their own newspapers, and responding to undesirables at the gates by releasing the hounds.
--Frankie Boy.

~

Do you read the blurbs on a  book? Do they influence you in any way?

Books to be generally avoided if blurbs have any of the following words or phrases: 'profound meditation,' 'lyrical', 'loss', 'says in a few pages what most writers say in a book-or don't say,' 'elegiac,' 'haunting,'...

~

Simone Weil: money and the state are the only gods left in town. The cold, abstract gods that induce a strange kind of loyalty. 

Of course it goes without saying that they are in a very real sense the most powerful forces in the modern world and those who stand opposed to them and the mindsets they are associated with will in all likelihood be crushed; at best they'll find themselves something of an outsider, a misfit..someone who suffers from a terrible naivety. On the other hand, it is an error believe that they constitute real or lasting power, genuine wealth or true identity.  

 ~

Quarterly Capitalism

https://hbr.org/2011/03/capitalism-for-the-long-term

There is some interesting stuff coming out from Andy Haldane (chief Economist at the Bank of England). If even someone as mainstream as the Bank and as H. Clinton can point to this you know there's something to it, some dim intuition that at the very least there's a  fault line in capitalism. 

For others this is suggests something quite profound: a symptom of an imminent crisis. 

What the mainstream doesn't want to countenance, however, is that this short-termism and myopia is now a structural feature of capitalism-the economy and the culture closely associated with it.No-one wants to join the dots and so we talk of the decline of reading, the destruction of the environment, the fragmentation of consciousness by trivia and virtual reality, the disorientation that comes about with the loss of a sense of place and stability, the de-skilling of so many people, the substitution of tradition by fundamentalism as so many isolated and separate developments.

This is not just about speed, planned obsolescence, waste and redundancies; it is also about the fragmentation of time and the emptying of time, the hollowing out of the very notion of durability, preservation, conservation (which makes one immediately think of the environmental crisis and the destruction of habits and habitats). 

And here we're forced to go back, a long way back, to see these attitudes as being coeval with the beginning of modernity itself and the rejection of the teleological view (telos = boundary and goal). From now on life is life ("bare life") and a life lived well is determined by the individual himself (not by any norm or standard). Also, the good life is not a life as whole but a series of subjective states, which is why the expansion of choices, the constant referring to infinite desires ("non-satiation"), sounds both modern and old. 

Tastes are simply given. There is no question of 'ordering' pleasure in terms of 'the good' or the reasonable, subjecting them to reflection, to a determinate view of either human nature or the good. Go with the flow. Sovereign becoming.

Life is short. The affairs of the heart.

Life is short, nasty, and brutish. We are only animals, after all. What drives us is self-preservation or greater and more intense pleasures (in the former view pleasure serves the instrumental purpose of furthering preservation).

For Aristotle 'preservation' is "participation" in the divine being (for the Muslims: a memory of the Garden,a memory of the future).

We move from desire to desire. Life is short, a flash in the pan. We look back. What was out life? a few good meals? Live for the moment because that's all there is. 

In Crary's 24/7 we can trace the end of the future, of the very existence of temporality. Time doesn't pass (boredom) because there is no future or past any more. 

Will capitalism end up devouring the very foundations and framework on which it rests? Not just the solid public world but the commons (of the mind and the land) as well?

'Prisons we choose to live in' : A Life in Squares

'Universities are traditionally non-market institutions. They have grown up with governance structures more suited to ensuring the equitable distribution of public money across their range of objects, such as the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. This is instantiated in charitable status, which requires that the institution only pursue public goods.

This is the major fault line in the coming years. The mindset of policy champions, politicians and executives revolves around entrepreneurship, social enterprise, knowledge transfer and exports, where revenue generation is primary (particularly if run through joint ventures where equity investors must be compensated). We are constantly reminded of the role of universities in local economics, industrial policy and macroeconomic growth: 600,000+ jobs, more than £5.3 billion in exports and an overall output in the region of £60 billion.

But pushing towards business is not just one component of privatisation: it leads away from charitable status.

This is the acid test for what is meant by ‘institutional autonomy’. We are used to it indicating freedom from direct political interference; it is increasingly used by senior management to mean the freedom to act like a profit-led company.'

--McGettigan.

'Do any of us ever complain about the overproduction of research and ideas in academia, particularly in journals, time that could be better spend educating, writing thoughtful and groundbreaking books developed through a decade of scholarship, making creative use of social media, forming alliances between society’s growing but marginalised intellectual class?'

--from bulliedacademics.blogspot 

~

Working in a university is a highly privileged job-especially if you're at a mediocre place in some backwater because then the chances of avoiding all of the needless pressure to do any work are actually quite good. 

But what is happening in western universities sounds quite horrific and since 'the East' is always trying to ape 'the West' it won't be too long before this madness comes our way. In fact, it's already started, but given our lack of organization, discipline, and given our inability to take a methodical approach to anything the structure of power remains largely old-world, feudal, and ad hoc. For the moment. Nothing like the institutionalized control and political and economic intrusion one sees in an advanced capitalist society (for the strange twining of greater bureaucratization and market expansion Graeber's new book is indispensable).

I suppose what is most startling is the pettiness-perhaps to be expected given that the stakes are so small. Really, get a life! The administration's shenanigans are a great source of amusement, though. 

~

It's probably fair to say that "it" hasn't gone yet but if one were to guess by the trends then the following things are on their way out and nearly dead: books, universities, society, religion and conversation.    

blue notes on the end of the south

.. ;imagined suddenly the vast companies of humankind journeying from birth to death through the trackless wastes of time since the world began. Tears spilled...'
--Marjorie Ann Watts

There are some lovely stories here.. 

Southend on sea tomorrow. 

blue peninsula

'Absence is a form of presence.'

The human heart, stranger with time.

The blank mirror, the faceless clock: memory lovingly holds us still. A world in a box, a life in a single block. Stay within the {parameters}.

The chain of being: driftwood..the stars are adrift, our star, too. The sands of time. 

The hotel as a metaphor: the decaying luxury within..through the revolving doors, a new person emerges. "How long will you be staying, Sir?"

"Keep it on hold".

Finders, keepers. 

Rummage though the second-hand stores, the heat oppressive for this time of the year.. this suit material is far too thick; hand held at an oblique angle, to protect your eyes from too much sunlight..like a captain looking out to sea. To find the right shore.

The journey to the city on the old tracks. red noW. Matisse!

The brilliance of the light in our lives unmistakable, though we are sadder than we know.

Maps. If only there was a map of the human heart. The fine balance of the dancers, the performers. The delicate human gestures honed to precision after so many years. I wish I knew what to say. The bewilderment with each passing day. The great human endeavour to match ephemera with permanence brings astonishment.

The small life that is ours. The quiet hours lost, lost. Keep silence. The blue peninsula was here all along, nowhere else.

'May I run, run, and never find.'

London Extremism

'A three-year-old child from London is one of hundreds of young people in the capital who have been tipped as potential future radicals and extremists.'
--The Independent.

The first day of winter

The  first day of winter, in the middle of summer, reminds me of all that has been lost, flitted away. For gods and beasts there are only blue skies; for us, the many shades of pink and grey. All of a sudden you are reminded of something you cannot name..and if it was named it would be lost again, in a worse way. The quality of light is the quality of our attachments.

'Human life is like a day in the existence of the world. '

K. Irby.

I see it now before me and it's like that early morning mist has always been there, a constant presence and all you could do when you put your head to it was wait for it to clear.  This hour in the wave neither yours nor mine. This old way of speaking is not mistaken.

An old friend, down on his luck, his mind calmed by medication, can only sadly reflect on the years...sometimes floating, sometimes howling. There's no bringing it back.. And worse, not much to bring back since so much time has been consumed. 

Up near the top of the house, the high-world, with no false note: look up at a sky with no stars. A procession of a thousand clouds, icebergs floating, marching, drifting..a tortoise, a declining Greek goddess, a crouching tiger..all catching a reflected and refracted city light..another kind of beauty emerges, artificial but true. The myriad strands cut loose, aimless, fluttering gloriously like a flag or the kites we used to fly; sip it slowly, take the image in without greeting it because you're empty and don't understand any more.. 

Catch a hold. "Do you remember when...". Childhood no more than a small box now. The bones sense it somehow, miraculously, he thinks to himself. Light the fires, keep a few frail lights going.. Can still feel your way around the old house like a blind man. Don't understand the words no more but I could swear the voice..

Small fires in August, yeah, that was it. The smoke sharp, hands dry as hell..that warmth we mistook to be from within. Days shorter. Brief days, hardly get your bearings as you stumble out and it's half gone. Stay strong. Won't break like A..no, not like that. Christ.

London, 1862-2012

Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky quickly realised the world-historical import of what he was witnessing. “You become aware of a colossal idea,” he wrote after visiting the International Exhibition, showcase of an all-conquering material culture: “You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal.”

Russian writers from Pushkin onwards had already probed the peculiar psychology of the “superfluous” man in a semi-westernised society: educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but rendered adrift by his limited circumstances, and exposed to feelings of weakness, inferiority and envy.

The sacral sense – the traditional basis of religion, entailing humility and self-restraint – has atrophied even where the churches, mosques and temples are full. The spectres of power reign incontestably where no gods are...So extensive is the rout of pre-modern spiritual and metaphysical traditions that it is hard to even imagine their resurrection, let alone the restoration, on a necessarily large scale, of a non-instrumental view of human life (and the much-despoiled natural world).

[T.S Eliot] asked if “our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises” was “assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?”

---Pankaj Mishra.

post-notes

The sense of an ending has probably been with us from the beginning. But, no, this time.."life is short...". What does it say about the times we're living in when a robot can kill a man for no apparent reason; a company can promote infidelity; and people can get excited by a pointless expedition to Pluto (isn't that what defines Man, after all, the detractors will say: knowledge for knowledge's sake, art for art's sake, the anti-utilitarian philosophy..."just do it").  

[ A brief flicker of optimism: they've found a planet not too unlike ours in the sense that it has all the conditions to sustain life. Ironic, really. It's a billion years older..which makes you think: they could have developed the technology to visit us by now but, maybe, just maybe, thought against it.]

Post-colonial, post-industrial, post-natal, post-modern, post-religion, post-nature..we're so far past the post that 'post-' itself now seems outdated. Once everything has a date it is only a matter of time before it becomes outdated.

What has emerged this week is that we may also be post-Labour. Socialism and the left is now really, at best, the centre. The metropolitan attitude to it all, as foreseen by Simmel is, predictably: "yeah, like, whatever". In the grey century, the grey evenings of the mind, we secretly pride ourselves on our grey neutrality.

The devil's and the Tories' greatest trick is to convince you that you will never miss what you once held in esteem.

'The confident centre is, I think, unrecapturable.'

'Our forward motion is immense and obvious' (technology, say) but the idea of a future isn't. Not just the idea, the very possibility of it (post-Copenhagen the coastal cities might still be drowned) . Does anyone still seriously believe in the great linear narratives of progress, 'advancement'? What we want to know is what happens post-apocalypse. For what may I hope?

Store everything up on a cloud because for the life of us we cannot remember what all the fuss was about in the first place. Post-book, post-literacy, the modern Eloi content with Ibiza and unlimited variety of fat and sugar.

As with addictions there is no end-except exhaustion; the moment is all there is (the "raw nerves" of the present, isolated from reality). 

The university, as we once knew it, is also to all effect 'gone'.  In a post-university era you will be able to get an 'education' using your smart phone and probably, dispensing with the need for words, be able to represent all you know (accumulated) in a series of images or cartoons.

Everything now comes to us through a screen. Post-reality. 'No previous society has mirrored itself with such profuse fascination.'

Can there be a coherent society, a sense of continuity and meaning, without 'shared recognitions' or a 'common symbolic order' (P. Fuller)? Without them does culture become a museum piece, something to be staged, an "event"? Post-culture.

'Already a dominant part of poetry, of religious thought, of art, has receded from personal immediacy into the keeping of the specialist.'

'An archival pseudovitality surrounding what was once felt life...Academy and populism. the two conditions are reciprocal...between them they determine our current state.'

Remember off by heart. "I swear and hope to die". How many words, figures of speech drop away and how many human actions or possibilities fall with them? "I give you my word". Who, today, can utter such a phrase?

'The catastrophic decline of memorization in our own modern education ..is one of the crucial symptoms of an after-culture.'

'Increasingly the word is caption to the picture'. Snapchat.

'The electronic alphabet of immediate global communication and "togetherness" is not the ancient, divisive legacy of Babel, but the image-in-motion.

'More and more of the informational energy required by a mass-consumer society is being transmitted pictorially.'

'The classic speech-construct, the centrality of the word are informed by and expressive of both a hierarchic value system and the trope of transcendence.'

All music can now be heard at any hour, at any place, as background setting. 'Place' gives way to a "space of flows," a vacuum that can be filled by the latest marketed product. In an amazing Newsnight interview much was made of a new gimmick that would allow listeners/customers to freely move about while attending a classical musical concert. The presiding idea being: we need to attract younger audiences (Bob on the overgrownpath has written a lot on this) and given shorter attention spans, given that so much else is 'happening', well, why not? Why should someone be stuck in one place? And what is all this false reverence for silence? The constant and ceaseless flow of images and music (noise) also signals the end of reading (if not the book). Privacy and the claim to silence are what at once most suspected.

'Conceivably, the ancient circle is closing'.

Time, perhaps, to revisit Guenon. The sign of the times.

'Analogue and digital computerization are transforming the relations of density, of authority, between the human intellect and available knowledge.'

'The struggle of our generation'

“It cannot be right,” he said in the same speech, “that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths.” That’s true – and it applies as much to Eton as it does to faith schools in Birmingham. On social media, Cameron’s Bullingdon Club photograph is circulating, attached to another quote from his speech: “There are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here.”

“The rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its wellbeing except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.” We suffer the same curse: a ruling class whose wealth lies offshore, and which identifies more readily with a transnational elite than with the other people of this nation. 


~

'Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison. What appear to be great crises are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady trickling away of our subsistence.

The avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all. Our insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and water, but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only by people who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are therefore unaware of the contingency of existence.'

--G. Monbiot.

Game Theory

'I wonder whether a yet further mechanism might not be doing most of the damage. Philosophy and economics are both distinguished from similar disciplines by a marked tendency towards scholasticism. Much work in both subjects focuses on technical minutiae whose relevance to larger issues even the experts are hard pressed to explain. Of course, serious academic work need not always be transparent to the general public, but much in philosophy and economics isn’t even of interest to those in adjacent sub-disciplines. One doesn’t have to be an enthusiast for “impact” to suspect that the main point of much of this technical work is to enable young scholars to display the kind of super-smartness that their elders so prize. Placing a premium on brilliance creates a pressure to work in a style that requires it.

This may turn women away from the brilliance-prizing disciplines, not because they can’t play the game, but because they won’t. Most young people come into philosophy and economics because they want to address important issues, not to make the next move in a technical exercise. When they discover that they need to dance on the head of a pin to get a job, women and men are likely to react differently. Where many men will relish the competitive challenge and enjoy the game for its own sake, many women will see it as the intellectual equivalent of putting balls in pockets with pointed sticks, and conclude that they could be doing something better with their lives.'

--TLS.

Human beings: the animal that specializes in the pointless.All one great diversion, really. Exploration to the furthest reaches of outer space-because inner space is, well, so 19th century. What are the spin-offs except, perhaps, better non-stick pans.Found Pluto- but no-one's heart is really in it any more.It's too late..never really in the game. It's status has been downgraded anyway and we now finally realize that like some god-damned immigrant it doesn't really belong here..was just on our trajectory, in one of our loops, like so much other rubble. Caught our fancy for a while, this dark unknown star but there's so much else out there and life is short...

Stray thoughts

    Late at night, the last train on the hill above, the dull thumping of its engine, a single drumming heartbeat as it disappears. It's later than you think.

    In the early morning hours a sound that is a clear as it is piercing. Are these gulls or geese? Do geese fly that low? Sibelius.

    'It is the path of virtue to regard some options as closed'

     --S. Blackburn.

    The situation is fluid. The false openness that is dreamt up by the machine: anything is    possible..."find your beach".

   A great aunt, austere and imposing, unknown, really, once said: Life is a closed envelope. Leave it like that.

    'In our age Man is not defined by his specific nature-which cannot be defined otherwise than  in a divine context...'

   --F. Schuon.

    It is true to say that in a former age there were far more many limitations; life everywhere  was narrower, more confined. The hierarchies of class and gender dealt a crushing blow to  individuality. But now that the 'self' is a surface illusion, a collection of trivial thoughts,  riddled with confusion and anxieties, it is worth doing a bit of accounting: what has been  gained, what has been lost?

    In a conversation with the mighty Q: the deep cynicism of politics is reflected in how the only perspective that is of any importance is the one that promotes my own interests. "That's precisely," he adds, "what you learn at public school". The only principles worth espousing are the ones that serve my interests. But it's not just politics and the media which have been thoroughly corrupted. In banking or higher education it's essentially the same thing, namely: gaming, showmanship, the relentless jockeying for position, pettiness    magnified to the nth degree by the delusional belief that one stands, somehow, above the fray.

   Of course, you thank your lucky stars: you couldn't have survived for a single day in the so-called real world. But it's always been a temporary respite, a refuge and not a home. Really is a  grand fraud. To live a life negatively, as a form of escape from the shallowness of the times, mere survival..this may be the only option open to us, but it is the possible starting point of something else. To find a centre elsewhere is, from the mainstream perspective, to be an ec-centric.

   All the tidy photo albums, the pictures carefully and securely placed therein...how we crave order in our lives! We think memory, that bag of tricks, will do the trick.

      Dennis Potter says there is only 'now' and that is true. But the present is only present to us when it is bound by the future and the past (bound not in the sense of being hermetically sealed since the boundaries are porous). Without a sense of the past and the future the present is lost too; it becomes something light, open, empty, a pure succession of fragmentary moments that cannot be stringed together. We imagine the passage of time for an animal is something not altogether different. 

    Everything in capitalism works to break up narratives, to destroy the notion of a coherent self. The inner form of life is replaced by a kaleidoscope of shifting images. The profound challenge of our time, to paraphrase Cameron, is to cast off the deep shadows cast by Thatcher, to undo the knot in our heart, and find our time again.

The BS Machine

If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.

The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.

I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach...

Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter. To the BS machine, the only value of a book is its current salability. Growth of capital depends on rapid turnover, so the BS machine not only isn’t geared to allow for durability, but actually discourages it. Fading BSs must be replaced constantly by fresh ones in order to keep corporate profits up.

This fits well with a good deal of reader desire and expectation, since to many readers much of the value of a BS is that it’s new: everybody’s reading and talking about it.

Once it’s less read and talked about the BS is no longer a BS. Now it’s just a book. The machine has finished with it, and it can depend now only on its own intrinsic merit. If it has merit, reader loyalty and word of mouth can keep it selling enough to make it worth keeping in print for years, decades, even centuries...

Its ideal book is a safe commodity, a commercial product written to the specifications of the current market, that will hit the BS list, get to the top, and vanish. Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing. No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/endless dissatisfaction. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

---U. Le Guin (from her blog)

It is a rare thing to hear anyone today write or speak in a way that isn't somehow affected by all the claptrap that has entered the mainstream since Thatcher.

Not just the old working class sensibility, but the easy-going pluralistic style of thought, the old-world mannerisms of a surer and more relaxed milieu, now seem to a younger generation to not just be dated but to be positively incomprehensible.

A common world, common sense, dissolved under the glittering surface of a false ideology.

Still, in our time 'in our time' survives.

  

Dennis Potter - Conversations in B&W from Mike Saunders on Vimeo.

The time of the sun

'One day we’ll look back on it       the time of the sun
when light fell on the smallest twig
on the old woman the astonished girl
when it washed with colour everything it touched
followed the galloping horse and eased when he did

that unforgettable time on earth
when if we dropped something it made a noise
and like connoisseurs we took in the world
our ears caught every nuance of air
and we knew our friends by their footsteps

time we walked out to gather flowers or stones
that time we could never catch hold of a cloud

and it’s all our hands can master now'

---Jules Supervielle.

translation by The Flat Cap

In time we find distances, paths that no-one has used. 

'I stand and watch the rain

Falling in pools which make

Our grave old planet shine;

The clear rain falling, just the same

As that which fell in Homer's time

And that which dropped in Villon's day

Falling on mother and on child

As on the passive backs of sheep;

Rain saying all it has to say

Again and yet again, and yet

Without the power to make less hard

The wooden heads of tyrants or

To soften their stone hearts,

And powerless to make them feel

Amazement as they ought;

A drizzling rain which falls

Across all Europe's map,

Wrapping all men alive

In the same moist envelope;

Despite the soldiers loading arms,

Despite the newspapers' alarms,

Despite all this, all that,

A shower of drizzling rain

Making the flags hang wet.'

trans. D. Gascoyne.

In time we found distances the ordinary stuff of existence, stepping stones that we were unsure of. 

We've gathered and collected for so long now. Through brambles, down past old houses from the 1930s that to be frank would look more at home near the seaside, through the well-worn path reduced to straw and dust, past the electricity grid-is this safe, Ubo?-you make your way to the huge shelter and containers. A thin old man from Goa, all smiles and bobbing face, directs us. 

We walk back, the old sun on our backs but an old memory, from the summer of '76, is something we cannot get rid off.