A kind of silence

There are many kinds of silence. Which holds me now?

I spend a lot of time in silence. Reading by the window, sipping my coffee or tea, looking out at the trees, the runners, the kids playing in their carefree way on the swings though it will abruptly end one day; a man digging a hole, a colleague returning from the gym. 

There are flashes of insight; something deep is remembered. I can't pull it all together. There is no 'together'.   

At times I do wonder. Wouldn't say that I'm gripped by panic but there is a sense of a constraint, a closing off. Silent words. Time is passing sentence on me.

At other times I feel I'm living a charmed life. Here I am, reading whatever I want, not knowing how things will turn out or how any of this will-if at all- settle into a pattern. What will come of this aimless reading? 

I have always greatly enjoyed people's company and have also loved to joke around-as befits a clown of the very first order. It's not that other people irritate me. No, it's not that at all. Nor am I on any high horse. I'm not any horse at all! But I can't engage in conversations about money or property or even academic ones since I find all of that unreal (not boring or pointless, but vacuous).

My silence is not something that one could call religious in any way. It is not connected to any 'practice' and nor does it deliberately seek some 'end'. It's just the way it is. This blog, too, is a silent space now that I think of it. 

Is it connected to a general slowing down in your life? It seems like a plausible explanation (not that you're overly concerned by such questions because you're not really interested in yourself that way). 

I don't think it's depression either. Sadness? Perhaps that's closer? But then there's nothing new there.

On the whole the overriding sentiment is: let it be. See what happens, what it does to you.              

In-gold

Here Ingold is referring to two kinds of toolkits: the'learner's toolkit' on his computer (which is represented by three icons: a disembodied head with headphones; a mobile phone; and a face with sunglasses) and his own 'toolkit': a pencil, a pair of glasses and a notebook.

"Comparing the two toolkits says much about the difference between the idea of learning, as it is increasingly understood today, and the idea of study I have advanced here. The iconic triptych of headphones, screen and shades paints to my mind a frightening picture of the idealised learner as currently conceived in a state-of-the-art, IT-obsessed educational environment. The learner of the toolkit appears to be an isolated individual, securely locked in and shielded from any sensory contact with the surroundings – from light by shades, from sound by phones (the head has no nose for scent, and being just a head, lacks hands to feel). This individual is completely immobile, but also placeless: indeed the blurb that accompanies the toolkit makes much of the fact that it is accessible on line, anywhere, anytime. But while blind and deaf to others, and to the world, our learner is fed with a continual stream of information, downloaded from remote sources into his head: visually, from the screen of his smart-phone; aurally through the phones that cover his ears. What kind of learning is this, which calls for no productive effort on the part of the learner, nor even for his presence, which replaces the teacher by a programme, which severs head from body, mind from world, and immunises the learner from the potentially corrupting effects of any disturbance from outside by means of a protective shield? In recent decades it has given rise to an entire industry, complete with its legions of providers, brands and watchwords. Biesta calls the industry ‘learnification’, a word whose sheer ugliness reflects his abhorrence of that to which it refers."

To affirm the wonder of pencils! That makes me feel ancient but also realize that I don't care. 

K-punk

k kkkkkk 

Love this little clip...

Capitalist Realism

"Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'. What we are facing here is not just time-honoured teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems.

On this account, 'boring' is not opposed to 'interesting'. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, MTV and fast food, to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche."

Some very interesting thoughts on burn-out, the future and the conversion of culture into museum pieces (which is reminiscent of Agamben's great essay).

--Mark Fisher.

Well, that's how it is. The book is over, as are slow reading (Haldane) and slow food. Cut to the chase, get to the bottom dollar.

Defeatist? Maybe. It's not a question of pessimism or optimism though. Just about thinking, in a cool and calm fashion: if that's the way it is, then what next? What next for you?  De-linking, withdrawal- as much as possible? Illich's question haunts you: what would it be to live a life that wasn't so structured?

I don't think 12,000 years of neolithic logic can be upturned. If history is cyclical-as the great traditions teach- then isn't there a point where the wheel stops turning? The Kali Yuga? 

Let

Let your self go, man. You been perched up there a long time, bro'
Let England shake, I don't give a damn.
Every white artist that dies is a genius, a lyrical, misunderstood prophet against his age. 

Let go and let equilibrium be restored. 
When night comes it's just me & you.
The prison walls fall.

The black sun shines,
but you can't see it.
Loss holds us in circles
-- broken.

The story of an artist

 Lend me a dime and I'll tell you a story. One you probably know, but I'll throw in some feelings this time.   

The way things are, the way things will be.

C3 B4

 The end of summer..

The end of summer was like no other day. There was no time for farewells, no space to give time to what the heart had stored. The main door was left open, the gate flung back; indecision and haste wrapped around you. The moment which you breeze through without a proper accounting for-as if there ever could be one!

Through the porthole, back to this inner chamber. The light flickers, falters, and then fails. The great summer sun of your days in the open are over. All that remains are eyes that are narrower, less reliable, and hands that have darkened with time.   

nobody knows no-one

Nobody knew

As time passes...

In mid-afternoon, the still hour, some things remain true.

~~~~~~
As time passes try and make a bigger circle.

That's what Joanna, the physio, said. Meaning: slowly move your arm outwards and trace something in your mind. Keep your hand straight, keep the tension in it even though you're not holding on to anything. The world is not a number. But sometimes count your breath and drift..

Sometimes the drift finds the seeker.

Keep what you can. The days shorten. Fewer words to say how you feel.

The end of a day

And how does a day begin? With what light, and whose hand brings it forth? Not, 'how did time enter the world', but how is your own life formed by the warp and woof of time and silence. Which gifts will you deny, asks the Qur'an. 

Denise:

And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along
the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

Another (extra)ordinary day in London

A perfect ending already contains another beginning.

There was news of falling stars - or was it just what remained from another world, from some distant, deep time?- making itself available to us, even if only briefly. Stay with the news. In the darkest hour such wondrous gold and silver flare and shine, these silent journeys flowing into our lives, like a dark fish, like a shadow cast by the black sun. 

Remind yourself of small circles, how much is mercifully unknown. There was something of Blake about the time. Seeing things in a dream can be more real than reality...

Over the years some beautiful poetry: Supervielle, W.S. Mewrin, Sappho, Transtromer; and some very good poetry as well: Gunter Eich, Ceravolo, K. Irby- each with their moments. And now, Denise's sublime Evening Train.

What are these lists but a concession to a bourgeois point of view? 

Our own endings a series of imperfect deaths.

Another day: what was sent forth, and what was received? 

The season draws to an end. The light of a late summer day falls suddenly as an autumn evening arrives out of nowhere. The back doors are no longer left open, your hand finally understands something of the heart. You're more aware of your clothes now, your ageing body, the distances, the empty roads, the memory of arrivals, departures.

~~~

You sit on the bench with the swami, waiting for the W14. It is evening and the street is deserted. We sit and silently remember all the meals we've had, all the time that has passed and seems so long ago, so recent. We sit there without much to say. We both look out to the road. Long pauses. In the 14 minutes it takes the bus to arrive she grows younger by 20 or 30 years. There is a wondrous blue light all around us and no time whatsoever. 

The way

The way to your heart is long. 
Don't rush!

The unbuilt moment

My father has lost his way out of the present..

The act of forgetting used to take time.
Now it accompanies him through each day..

What unlocked this emptiness?
He knows not to ask. He knows how small he is,
how small his island, how small his spell.

Lavinia Greenlaw.

Through the built up countryside, its lines, tractors, and terrible sense of being manufactured (Hugh Brody was so right here!). Death itself is manufactured here.

This was an impossible day for me. I don't think I can write about it. The last day I will see my dear, dear uncle, who I love so very much. Old world style and charm, an even older Jewish-Kashmiri intelligence, a mind always keenly alert. He introduced me to Peter Fuller's lovely book. I feel I have to somehow keep that safe now.

And now he has just a few sentences left. He keeps repeating, "this is terrible, this is terrible". Keeps his hands busy. Writes down a sentence in a beautiful script but barely recognizes what he's written. The struggle to say something is unbearable. I do my best to hide the horror and sadness in my heart. I just hug him and say "it doesn't matter". I have tears in my eyes now. He doesn't want to let go. I can't speak now. 

The world carries on. The taxi driver utters something utterly pointless. I don't blame him. He wants to drive away as far and as fast as possible. I don't look back. I can't. Everything is falling away in this dullest of environments, the sun-and-wheat consciousness making me choke.  

So, here we are, bewildered in this unbuilt moment. Everything will pass away, but I will still love you. 

Meditations

On Hillside Avenue you were witness to the timeless enactments of the human story.

On Hillside Avenue in the silent rain.

The darkness there around you in the falling light.

~~~

A young girl walks in the rain, with just the hood of her coat on her head, her arms free. A double decker bus heaves up the hill in its low gears, its passengers staring into the infinite distance, imagining other worlds. They see me, perhaps, unshaven, unkempt, a wild man from the east upsetting their bourgeois stupor. A woman asks a mother walking with her child: "How old is she now?"An old West Indian man walks ten paces behind his grandson and tells him to wait, wait. On the radio: the pound buys one dollar twenty five. Two Romanian women-fairly attractive (or maybe I'm just old)- take deep drags of their cigarettes and remember a warm summer's day from only a few years ago.

The voices change, the accents too. Even the modes of transport might be different. But, yeah, it's there..know what I mean, Roxana? Not all good, but mixed up with it. It all goes on. That's the way it is. Am I here?  

You made it to the centre but had one hour to find the place.

At The Lebanese Bakery you met an old friend, an Islamic scholar, and over delicious flat breads discussed Ibn Taymiyyah and the importance of agency in the structure of Islamic thought. "I doubt," I said, "that the universal and singularities has ever been discussed here". 

"Yes," he replied. I bet it's usually: w'ala..Gucci..al shaikh..Armani..brother.."

Strange to learn that he's into minimalist electro. But then again, that could be because he's a wahabi...voices and lyrics distract him; the slight modifications of the same tune bring an openness with them. Like fiction, I said, so much of it is simply padding for western sensibilities hooked to bourgeois security (paraphrasing Ghosh's thoughts in The Great Derangement). M. Asad had written, all those years ago, that there was something monotonous-almost hypnotic- about the way 'eastern' music circles around a still centre. 

Maybe that's what we've always wanted, I suggested..a broken circle..or maybe a spiral?

¬¬¬

Outside of Foyles you saw a man with a shock of henna-dyed hair, suited in  the kind of lawyer's garb that one only sees in Lahore. I had to take a second glance to make sure this wasn't an apparition. Am I here when I'm here?

In the time I had I bought Murnane's Plains book and Byung-Chul Han on the expulsion of the other (really good, as usual). there was still time to quietly read the first half of Lavinia Greenlaw's moving poems on her father's dementia. 

¬¬¬

Kempowski's book was a disaster. All for Nothing. You said it. The desire to immerse yourself in fictional lives wanes by the hour. It's not that all has been said and done; it's more that there's never any real engagement with reality- just a childish rolling out of cliches. I'll write more about why it was such a poor book later- or maybe i won't.

Black Sun

And in my heart it feels like the end of the world. I want to and do not want to go to a different land. You know me? I was born old; wrinkled and mournful for lost time. 

At night, when all is quiet, and your heart is still, you walk in a strange light. Like a dream of some form of life that I can't name. The birds stare at me even though not awake at this hour. The moon is clear and broken. And I danced in circles one day, all those years ago...

Walk close to the flowers in this dark hour. What distance the stars travel! Everything I have wears thin and it's a beautiful-sad feeling to think how short lived all we hold is against them. I know the sun is out there, so far and high- and yet its heat is here on my hand, now. It is moving closer, I can feel the black sun in my bones. No-one sees my face at this moment. Daylight will come and the shadows will fall on my raven heart. And then I will draw a line to your heartful mind.  

End of term blues

Yachchideralum, putzele, mutzele __
who will remember and who will forget?
Twirling down time's corridors i see your shadow dancing..

My father danced and then he died and his name
is a long time gone..

Yachchideralum, putzele, mutzele
Now if I couldezele I'd speak to you true:
but your dance is ended and all tears expended __
so sleep on and take your rest, my father, my Jew.

--Olga Levertoff.

End of term blues

The term has come to an abrupt end. Look back not in anger but in bewilderment. Was that time passing, not passing? Enter the marks. Do the needful, as they say around here, and be gone. You weren't really here anyway.  

I don't know, each year of your life becomes more unreal.