It is as if there is only a single hour,& in that hour all the provender must be gathered,..He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...
--Salter.
Broke(n), he remembers the silver coin kept in his deep inner pocket, stored all this time just for a moment like this. & he recalls a word found in no-one's heart, "carried by silver and star and reflection" (Anselm Hollo).
A surprising dust storm in mid-afternoon. The dust whistles through gaps in the windows, rises elegantly from the dried-out playing fields, makes my hair tangled, blows into my eyes. I gather rocket and salad leaves. On the way back, this pale fire fluttering in and out of existence. Wisps of seeds from a tree around it, ghost-like, perhaps forming the beginnings of a shroud. By evening the flower would have closed and the clam stillness of the evening returned but for the moment the earth is alive.
In this last year it seems as if a hundred years have passed by in a flash. What is left of my old life seems like an inscrutable mystery to me. And now the shadows have lengthened and become more distinct I find myself wondering if there are only these islands of the heart that remain...
You find yourself more alone than you could have imagined. So much time has flowed under the bridge..the old stone bridge itself, Tu Fu might say, is nothing but a dazzling moment under the eye of heaven, a dim reflection of some other place and time that we witness darkly. The days of our lives like the days of the world now...
And so now your relationship is to one of absences. The past has not disappeared but changed shape and lives within you now in a different way...
Loss: the point becomes a circle, the line a square; what grows in me day by day is my own diminishment. A part of me wants to cling on to the idol of the old days since the path that has now opened up before me leads who knows where? And who would this "you" be then? I have become a question to myself...
I need to weave fragments of texts, sentences that spontaneously emerge, into my thoughts as a way of establishing some kind of continuity; either that or face the prospect of silence, of coming to terms with the lack of words for the way I'm feeling. What kind of place is this...
There's that scene from Offshore where the tide turns and objects slide, move about, swap positions. Nothing's steady anymore against these interruptions that weave their way into a life. Thinking understands the limits of thinking and ceases to be 'thinking'. Like Drummer Hodge you're now a northerner living under a strange southern star. Or maybe that star, north by northwest, continues to flow glistening darkly like the Roding in its season of despair. How to find a sense of being at home in your homelessness...
This song reminds you so much of a time of your life that is so distant and yet, weirdly, all the more real for existing on the borders of your consciousness. You can't name it but it drifts your way...
You've been drifting for so long. Perhaps you need to be truer to this de-centering before "the drift find the drifter"?
When told by the doctors that nothing more could be done the swami, citing Knulp, said: "The desire to sleep overcomes all other desires." Only she could have said that, half wanting to communicate her feelings and half wanting to remain a mystery.
One of those 'strange reversals' (Rumi). For so long you'd asked not to become religious and now you find yourself willing but unable! Taste and see!, said the poet. And yet the words of poets and novelists mean much less to me, strangely superficial..a shallow form of intelligence. Was I the only one who didn't grow up?
These lines by Hadot deeply affected me: Cut out everything; welcome everything. Familiar -at one level-to any Muslim. The question, as always, at what level?
Too try and grow into simplicity. To be less, to speak less in the time that remains. But to speak is to allow stilled time to flow again. 'Allow' suggests too much agency when you know it's otherwise. Does it make any sense now to ask where?
There is just one thing I can say- and maybe it's all I've got left:
Free speech has become the last thing western civilisation can believe in now that religious redemption is a distant dream, and now that climate catastrophe and economic stagnation loom on the horizon. It’s threatened by wokesters, Muslims, a cancel culture, the enemies of liberty...
The last convulsions of a dying man. Free, free at last.
It takes a long time to find your own voice.
Miles Davis said that.
Can you think about ‘free speech’ without talking about the meaning of freedom under late capitalism? Freedom as being ‘free from’..a lonely kind of freedom, negative liberty.
I have nothing to say and I don’t know how to say it.
What matters is the abstract right to say whatever one wants. Freedom here is not related to restraint, obligations, society, silence, truth. The freedom to not always say what is on one’s mind, in one’s heart. Austerity, techniques of ‘right-speaking’, ‘right-seeing’. A kind of austerity that is kind. Reserve, reticence, speaking in turn, at the right moment.
In paradise there is no idle chatter.
—-The Qur’an.
To speak freely with a loved one is not the same as speaking in public, which is subject to all kinds of norms and disciplines. Twitter-speak is free in a limited sense of the term...free to say whatever comes to mind, free to spontaneously react to any provocation.
Even in intimate situations do we speak freely or is there always an element of formality? Does care-feee speech become careless? And who is it that is speaking? The empirical self? Are you talking to me? Can we imagine speech without listeners, without conversation? We tend to think of free speech in individualistic terms.
Rod's excellent comment on the film misses: the absurdity, deception & demonic that make it a 'home' you rightly want to escape from. Not simply conservatism. Existentialism! A world drained of meaning means there is no 'world'
Crows swoon down from out of the shadows; the old light is frail, falls gently; you read and text, hand and mind are all mysteriously part of this intertwined moment. Thought wanders. A path must also be a path back to the world.
The wall is the end of the story, a boundary condition. A border is a meeting place, a liminal space where people meet, where those who are rejected find themselves..ec-centrics.
A still point has been reached. The windows are left open for longer. The seasons turn and a new light enters my rooms. But my heart is lost near the Roding. ‘He sings time in the darkness of times’. The song of joy and sorrow is always with us, Mir.
Where have you been?
I’ve been to London.
Where have you been?
So hard to answer without the human voice. A disembodied sentence, as if we were two ghosts [talking] to one another!
What is left to say in the time that remains? Can one really grow in silence, as Maggie Ross says? The background silence that is the stability of time in our lives, and out of which form the necessary words. If there is time there’s forgiveness. God has infinite time.
The pattern, the warp and woof, joy and sorrow. Who weaves?
The original lines
C. Forche.
She sings time..
[where?]
The lateness of the world.
The lines unattributed: Mir: The song of joy& sorrow.
I don't know why you loved this song so much but I do as well. The music, like everything else, all seems like from such a very long time ago now. Life is a strange and mysterious dream. You would say, of course, that it's also a beautiful dream. But right now it doesn't feel like that, Ubo.
Today, in the late evening never have the streets seemed so empty, never the world so paper thin. It's like you can see only the polish on the table and not the table itself... So many journeys together in the 275- and now I make it alone. You'd always ask at least five times for me to sit down so that my legs wouldn't get tired. I'm sure you remember that. Or try and pick up all the bags yourself. Well, not today, Ubo. Why does this light remind me of so many other summers? Like the time we stayed in a caravan. There is no more time, not even hours and minutes, just these memories that go around and around. How I have longed for you today. How I have wished you to stay.
~~~
I won’t write much more.I know everyone has their own life and grief to carry on with so I won’t burden you but..
Do you believe in signs? I think the distracted mind will always look for coincidences and patterns. We always “ intuit unity”, join the dots. On the other hand, Over the last few years I’ve come to believe that there are signs, it’s just that we don’t know how to read them.
Last night I wrote something ( for myself, about my father) called the ‘long road’. In the morning I woke up with the ( ridiculous?) longing for some sort of sign to try and ease- is that the right word?- the emptiness.
I picked up a book at random ( only read bits of it before) and turned to an unread poem at random.
It says something about driving in the late afternoon on the 19 th of June, passing a dark cloud from a freight truck from Budapest ( I’ve been in regular contact with a dear student whose brother died in Hungary just now).
Even if you don’t believe it, it’s okay..the poem itself is beautiful..it goes on..
Hours after your death you seemed
Everywhere at once like the swifts at twighlight
Now your moments are clouds
In a photograph of swifts.
It concludes with:
Dead, you whispered, ‘where is the road?’
There, through the last of the sentences, just there-
You said, “There is a time and place for everything.” Already this ‘you said’ sounds false, a way of creating a distance from you when your actual voice was always close by. When your spoken words, however plain, were real in comparison to the ghostly memory-voice. Moocha phoned and the way he abruptly and half-quizzically says ‘yes’ at the end of his sentences reminds me of you. Did you even really say that? What if my memory fades, falsifies? How many false notes before it becomes a different tune? Or is that just another way of living: through stray words, images, the things you once held or wore? I half expected to see you cleaning the kitchen when I woke up. In the park I catch myself looking for you. What a mystery. Today I thought, for some reason, of the moment you were born, how you must have played as a kid. And this I remember clearly because the image is deeply lodged in my memory. Do only jokes and tears remain after all? You had dressed up as a fakir and, as a lark, went about with your friend collecting money, from street to street. You went to your own house and even nearly got some money from your poor old mother. But at the last moment she recognised you and then beat you proper! What a mystery. A bird flying through one window and out the other. Is that it, then, the time and place? But you would never have settled for such an ascetic view, never held it to be the whole truth. It is true-and I have to agree with you here- that life on earth will always have some kind of imperfection and that it will never be complete. But that’s only the half of it for there is so much wonder in life. I think you would have liked this: "In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen and enough to rot upon the ground." I know you would have appropriated it and pretended they were your own words! Nothing happens all day. Some letters are still arriving for you. I hate to think what will happen when they dry up. Well, what time would you call this now? I think you’d have been amazed yourself to see it. But even this no-time you would have passed through, worked out. Even this rotten time is part of the whole of time you would say and that it has its place. But more than anything you would have shielded me from it, negated the negation, and let time flow again for me. It won’t last. Everything must fade. Perhaps even our memories. Maybe that’s true. Let’s see. Right now, all I can say is that I know that nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.
