At King's Cross

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
---C. Milosz

These steps were once nothing but a vague notion in someone's mind...and before that? Between the thought and the act how much time must have passed...

One day, in the distant past, they gradually took form, congealing like wax that cools in the early hours of the morning. But the form retained something of this flickering light, borrowing something of its transience. At this moment of transition between states the poet would ask: What is inward, what is outward?

Few stop to notice them though; they are the temporary home of the tramps since their shade provides much solace. The city dwellers, the new nomads, think of them -if they do at all- as a place where all journeys begin or end. Looking up, they think to themselves, where does nature end and civilisation start?

But today these stairs are mine; in the instant that I ascend them I am alive again. Without thought I climb, drawn upwards by the sun's brilliant rays, the threads of Time; the warm air that they have absorbed acts to remind one of something profoundly familiar.

Breathing the morning openness of their world, a soul can be dazzled by all that is not 'I'. A deep reverence settles for the stillness that is cut out of dreams.

Fear and Trembling

What is there left to be said of the remarkable and provocative speech of the Pope? That he should draw such a stark and bold line between Islam and reason is quite surprising, to say the least. A few points here. Surely each tradition acknowledges the excess of truth over reason: can one ‘know’ Christ except through Grace or the Holy Spirit (even to use the word ‘know’ shows the bias of the Islamic perspective since ‘love’ would be more appropriate); Leo Strauss has Maimonides and the medieval Jewish tradition concurring and the reservations about depicting the ‘Father’ in the Orthodox Tradition are surely an indication of the fact that the divine essence is unknown.

The whole idea of mystery and seeing through a glass darkly also points to this excess and if we are ‘being’ then God is ‘beyond-being’ , the divine darkness. So, whilst all traditions can hardly dispense with transcendence one does not have to deduce from that that there is no immanence or analogy between the divine and the human. Any religion must have both and differences can only arise as to on which there is an emphasis.

Now, to claim that Islam is essentially or fundamentally irrational in that it conceives of its God as a Will that cannot be known , that is arbitrary , is quite remarkable in itself. Firstly, it ignores the whole tradition of philosophy in general and Islamic Aristotelianism in particular. The issue here is not whether Greek philosophy is alien to the spirit of Islam and , therefore, not something that one could reasonably cite as an example of Islamic thought that contradicts the Pope. Such a claim could, with some justification, be put to all of the Semitic monotheistic faiths: is there an irreconcilable difference in outlooks, aims and motives between Athens and Jerusalem? The point is, rather, that as a matter of fact, history, there have been traditions of an incorporation of Greek philosophy into the fold of Islam. And it is fairly well recognised that Islam was a continuation and transmitter of the classical heritage.


The second point is distinct but related to the historical argument above. Is it not true that the very possibility of Revelation , the very fact that there is a revelation, indicates that there is the ’entry’ of the divine into the world? (here one must be aware of differences in perpsectives: for the muslim it is the miracle of the book that is analogous to the logos-and not the example of the Prophet) . In addition to this, the contents of the revelation-and not just the fact of revelation- also establish a relation between transcendence and human affairs. The Law id the bridge betwen the two realms and it is in this way that something of the divine will can be known. Here one could add that the Names (or Attributes) have always been another way in which we can ‘know’ something of God-even as His Transcendence remains unquestioned and unquestionable.


Another way in which reason can know something of the ultimate reality is in the aim to establish political and social justice for these must also conform to human values and aspirations -or at the very least, take into account the human margin, human nature as it is. One could also add that God is closer to us than our own self (our own “jugular veins” is the Quranic phrase) and that “he who knows the finite knows the Lord. To this one could multiply examples of the importance of seeking knowledge and of education. And as with social and political justice, knowledge of Nature and History are not thought of as radically opposed to the spiritual message of Islam. In all these senses, then, the notion that Islam is somehow less related to reason and the world of human affairs is quite an astounding one. It remains to be noted that Gnostic tendencies are far stronger in Christianity than in Islam which was , in its early days, always accused of giving too much to the world and to sensuality, the body!


I think the really intersting issue is not whether Islam is essentially anti-classical (Allama Iqbal would famously say that hsi whole work aims to demonstrate just that point); no, the interesting thing is that what seems to underlie the Pope’s words are a fear that the thread that bound reason to Christianity has come undone: there is now a chasm between the human and divine. The divine is so far off that he can only be reached by a “leap of faith”, through ‘blind faith’. The very notion that thought and faith are deeply intertwined, that there is something unconditional before thought, that we believe in order to understand , not understand in order to believe (Anselm) is a view that has progressively become unhinged from the European tradition. Reason now stands autonomous , philosophy is no longer bound by the law (Leo Strauss). In the economic, political and cultural realms what relation is there between thought and action and a Christian perspective?

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Autumn Thoughts

A cloud in the wind, at the corner of the world.
---Tu Fu.

Clouds in the wind above the passes
touch their shadows on the ground.

In depths of shadows frozen for centuries ..
the wind which roams without design
cleanses of passion's transient strife
and for a while the dust weighs lightly on my cloak

Useless to call this spiralling wisp of life one
strand in the the web that heaven and earth weave.

Less than a day in paradise
and a thousand years have passed among men.
While the pieces are still being laid on the board
All things have changed to emptiness.
Nothing is what it was but the stone bridge.

Where shall there be an end of old and new?
A thousand years have whirled away
in the mind.
The sounds of the ocean change to stone.
Fishes puff bubbles at the bridge of Ch'in.

The drunken eyes.
How many men grow old before the wind?
Dim, dim, the path in the twilight,
branches curl on the black oaks by the road.
Darkened torches welcome
a new kinsman:
In the most secret tomb these fireflies swarm.
Passion too deep seems like none.

They rejected life to seek the Way. Their
footprints are before us.
They offered up their minds, ripped up
their bodies; so firm was their resolution.
See it as large, and a millet-grain cheats us
of the universe.
See it as small, and the world can hide in a pin-point.

The amber, when it first sets,
remembers of a former pine.
If we trust the true and sure words
written on Indian leaves
We hear all past and future
in one stroke of the temple bell.

----Li Po.

The Unthinkable

The pebble is a perfect creature, equal to itself, mindful of its limits.
—C. Milosz

HAMM. I’ve made you suffer too much
(Pause)
Haven’t I?
CLOV. It’s not that.
HAMM (shocked). I haven’t made you suffer too much?
CLOV. Yes!
HAMM (relieved) Ah you gave me a fright!
(Pause. coldly)
Forgive me.
(Pause. Louder)
I said, Forgive me.
CLOV. I heard you.

Can there ever really be the right amount of suffering? Isn’t suffering -any suffering-meaningless and what of the attempts to explain or justify it? How can one talk about an amount of suffering? Can we ever know the cause of it? What does it mean to say that we are commanded to forgive?

Perhaps all thought is premised on the notion that we can know who we are, that we can figure out the roots of our condition. To think is to believe that we are God, that we can will ourselves into existence, that we can know ourselves perfectly and see sub specie aeternitatis: I think therefore I am. To think is also to create meaning when there may be none, to see a pattern out of contingent , haphazard events. Thought imposes order and also takes us to a timeless zone. Where are we when we think? Thought, then, is perhaps nothing but a way of staving off death, of clawing back some of our humanity from the inorganic that weighs us down. To reduce something to a thought, a concept, is to capture it, to name it. But if we did not think in the first place death would be of little concern to us.

Are there limits to what we can know? In the wake of the Pope’s recent words should we stress the harmony of thought and the world, the contours of the mind with those of the universe? Can we once again talk about the cosmos, about how everything has its own place and time, how there is the right amount of every thing under the sun?

Are there things that we simply cannot know, that lie beyond the bounds of reason? Does it make sense to claim that we know the limits of what we can know? For the Occassionalists the Divine Will is shrouded in mystery. Does it follow from this that the universe is one of chaos, arbitrariness and that only, or is it possible that there just the right amount of chance in our lives? On the other hand, the philosophers would promote where reason is completely autonomous, that the divine can be known independently of Revelation. Does this imply a limitation of divine freedom? Is God constrained to work within the laws that He himself has created as the deists would maintain?

Ebrahim Moosa: ‘Metaphysics of Belief’:

Something can suggest multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. Abu Bakr would say ‘to acknowledge the inability to comprehend somethign is itself a form of comprehending.’ Is there an intermediate position between the Aristotelian one of a fixed universe and mechanical processes and one of unbounded freedom, a universe that remains essentially open? Might not evolution with its mixture of randomness and necessity be one such position? The range of possibilities of nature may be fixed but unknown: necessity is the veil of God.

God creates our acts eternally but we acquire them (choose them) in time. Perhaps, then, the question of possibilities and the degree of freedom with which they are generated is really a question of time-and that remains a mystery. The world is a unity in so far as it is timeless. Creation is both a timeless act and an unending process, the ‘twinkling of an eye’ and something that is extended in time and space.

The opposite of the philosophers’ stance is , then, not a world of complete randomness and the negation of reason, but the admissibility of the fact that she is woven from two strands: freedom and truth. The mathematical and the biological co-exist and who is to say where one ends and the other begins? From Ghazali’s point of view the ultimate cause of things is not in nature (does this allow for other, partial causality?). The philosophical critique of philosophy is only a setting of limits of what one can conceive and what is unthinkable; it is not the negation of thought altogether. It is there being just the right amount of thought. For the philosophers, the ‘principles of existence’ cause cotton to burn whereas for Ghazali fire is only an instrumental cause, not a necessary one. For the former, temporal events follow from the principles inherent in the nature of things and God has wound the clock up, as it were, distancing himself from the laws that now govern things autonomously. God has repented.

Can there ever be a breach in such a framework, are miracles or square circles possible? Everything rests on the word ‘possible’ Is it possible to imagine or know the impossible? Is imagining and knowing (by reason) the same thing or does the heart of the problem lie along this fissure? The philospher’s critique of Ghazali rests on attributing to his position the belief that anything is indeed possible: that water can be turned into wine , that a book may be transformed into a horse had God willed it so. Is it really only our habitual experience that tells us that the book is indeed a book and is this an argument from experience or thought itself? Ghazali turns the argument on its head and says that it is they who are the nihilists by going against reason. For in the hypothetical argument it is they who are using the possibility of the impossible.

I think what Ghazali’s position is is this: One may be able to imagine anything is possible but its realisation is beyond the bounds of reason. If that is the case, how can one say that one knows that the impossible is impossible? If something impossible actually happens then it ceases to be a miracle or impossible. Their perspective cannot admit the possibility of the impossible in the first place.
Another angle to the problem is to focus on what we can perceive..i.e subjectivity. Perhaps we can only conceive of a range of possibilities and there are other beings for whom what we deem impossible is merely one of many possibilities. Can one rule out, can one know that there aren’t other levels of reality and being? In such arguments, it may be that it is our limited knowledge that rules out ‘anything’. With God all things are possible.

So, the main line of defence seems to be that there are possibilities that may or may not occur. The theoretical possibility of something (in the imagination) is distinct from it existing, from the necessity of it existing. A miracle, because it is not a habitual occurrence, is beyond the scope of reason and knowledge.

Ghazali: there are three things of value: an articulate book, an abiding tradition, and the ability to say I do not know. This allows us to create room for knowledge and wonder. There is the possibility of not-knowing, of a non-totalizing order of reality. Rationality binds us to one level of reality whereas the truth may be that there are multiple notions of time and reasoning and these co-exist contrapuntally within a single narrative. There can be different ontological levels in relation to the thinking self: what is true in the order of love may not be true in the order of being.

Might it not be said that the slight asymmetry, the minuscule preponderance of matter over anti-matter is what gives rise to the universe? Not a blotting out of existence , but only of some of its possibilities, certain lines of development? That in addition to the mathematical, the inevitable, and the realm of necessity, the streaky, the irrational and the fragmentary also work their way into the what is possible? How, it might be asked, can there be a ‘flaw’ in creation or ugliness and suffering. But at the same time we are reminded that even in the ‘garden’ there was the snake of anarchy.

As there are figures of speech are there, too, figures of speechlessness? What else is death but an inevitability that cannot be known? Death is in the heart of life and therefore a possibility and yet still we cannot experience it, still it remains unknowable. It is a private matter, private matter. Is this not a refutation of the philosophers? And this, it seems, remains unanswerable -and therefore why is it still a question: how is it that we who cannot imagine or experience death, for whom it is an impossibility, think that it is something that is made possible. If God can imagine a death for us then we imitate Him in this: the camps were nothing , nothing but the imagining and the making of the impossible. And have we not ‘killed’ God as well? We come to realise the unpalatable: that at the heart of life, the heart, the human spirit, there is the possibility of the impossible, the inhuman, the non-human.

To be able to act is human; For 'anything' to be possible is inhuman

Light of the World

Earth poetizes, field to field
with trees interlinear, and lets
us weave our own paths around
the plowed land, into the world

Blossoms rejoice in the wind
Grass stretches out to bed them so softly
Heaven goes blue and greets mildly
soft chains the sun has woven.

People go about, no one is lost-
Earth, heaven, light and forest-
Play in the play of the Almighty.
---Hannah Arendt

Anything can happen.
Those overlooked regarded.
Ground gives. The Heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
---Seamus Heaney.

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it?-Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.
--Anna Akhmatova

Black Sun
The sun's fire doesn't flare.
I think and feel it, everywhere.
Angels burnt to the core, mere silhouettes.
Forgotten lovers, darkened with regrets.

I see it on the glistening feathers of the crow.
In the shadows that make the earth go slow.
It lingers on the face of all that lives and dies,
But still it dazzles in your burning eyes.
---b.

Lord of the Flies

Why does the desert or the desert island always tell us something essential about ourselves? From the nomadic spirit of religion to fantasy islands to economic and political models. Islands are also Utopian places, spaces where nature is uncorrupted and primordial innocence is regained.

Lord of the Flies. It is the conch that unifies everyone-big ‘uns and little ‘uns alike. Sound as the unifying factor, the shell as a symbolic axis around which people can gather. This is not the simple story of what happens to society when order breaks down, when the rules are relaxed-at least that’s not the most interesting part of it. It is the little things that are equally revealing: The way in which there is a reluctance to shed blood but also how, once this has been done, this violence can be transferred to other ‘objects’. It is the frenzy of the first kill, the sheer thrill of it , the heightened sense of awareness that ensues as a result of the pursuit, the release of energy in the kill that fascinates. It is all these things that make the tearing of flesh such a memorable experience and something that stays with mankind.

But there are other themes as well. ‘Piggy’ is the first storyteller, the unsung hero who is always rejected, but who was there before everyone else. Ridicule and laughter are also something that can unite the tribe. But it is ultimately his stories that help pass the time, that soothe the nerves of all those who fear the onset of darkness. It is Piggy who can hear and relate what cannot be uttered: the presence of the Beast. What would a tribe be without its storytellers? It is he who knows how words acquired their original meaning (Camberly). Is it the storytellers who first learn how to bind men together and initiate us into the first political community? Even if their influence is sporadic and tentative, it still has its functions, and we are still spellbound by its rhythms. It is also his glasses which serve as the key to their survival: fire.

Ralph and Jack are the first estranged brothers. The election of one sows the seeds of resentment that fester in his heart until a break from the original unity is affected. From then on he is to remain a wanderer, an outcast. Ralph is the Socratic King , with his practical wisdom. He understands that the little ones must be cared for. For Jack and his pack of hunters such compassion is of little use. Other children are only important in so far as they need him, the provider, only as long as they affirm his power over them. The hunters were , it must be remembered, first of all the ‘priests’ (the choir). The original split: royal power and the power of the priest-king.

And then there is the final scene, as the elements rageand fire and water are mixed, the crowd forms, swarms, driving itself into a delirious state, into the realm of pre-consciousness; the rhythmic music reinforces this cosmic unity. They all dance around the fire-man’s first stomping grounds. Is the murder intentional or unintentional? This question can never be resolved. But perhaps, as one of the small children hesitatingly says, the true horror, the unfathomable mystery, is that the beast is in us.

Two Hands

Quintessence. n. 1. Most refined part of any substance, refined extract; purest and most perfect form, manifestation, or embodiment of some quality or class. 2. (Ancient Philosophy) Fifth substance (besides the four elements) forming heavenly bodies and pervading all things. 3. Hence quintessential [Medieval English] in sense 2., f. F, f med. L. ‘quinta essentia’ fifth essence.


The quintessential is all that eludes definition.
Als das Kind Kind war,
warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch

Each act, each act of perception, discloses something of our style of soul-whether we would know it or not. Each movement of the hand is a self-revealing gesture of the soul and bears witness to what and who we are. The poet would say:

My eyes have seen
what my hand did

There is no disjunction between thought and action, self and the world and a semblance of unity is achieved. We strive wholeheartedly to find this innermost self, this image of perfection and completion haunts us; to touch all that comes our way and imprint on it something of our unique essence. But this emphasis on knowing who we are is doomed to failure for our path, unlike that of the stars, can only be traced when it has run its course. It is a line still being drawn…the ink is not dry.

Augustine would say that we can only know what we are, not who we are; that only God can know. There are acts which the left hand should not know, that should be done in silence, that must be suffered…and lest it be forgotten: God created us with Two Hands.

Have we not darkened and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
—-A Passage to India.

But this is not a simple return to innocence-it is an achieved naivete, an ability to sustain ourselves beyond sadness. The innocence of doves and the wisdom of serpents.

Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself a space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the warp and woof of the universe, that sets us riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of that order of being but we remain, quintessentially, unknown.

Life

Is it possible to fall in love with a film on the basis of a few scenes? Can a few 'stills' be so chiseled, so jewel-like that the failings of Life can be overlooked?

This is not a commentary on post-war Japan and its interminably complicated bureaucracy. The main purpose of the film is certainly not to convey the horrors of a world that is over-run by functionaries and the impersonal. Perhaps only a modern European imagination could really talk seriously about organization and a really old one (Greek) about Labyrinths. No, the portrait of the obfuscations and willed deafness are light and almost comical-perhaps even superficial- to our eyes.

The film's central preoccupation is elsewhere. But how to make a film about life, the living...except by talking about death. There is no heroic striving for immortality against this inevitability but nor is there a passive acceptance of Necessity. Death is, and can only be, something that is ambiguous: Thanatos and Eros.

The film starts off with a depiction of a life that is not lived but simply passed.
(Back in my school days there were the following categories: distinction, merit, pass, good fail, and fail). Everyone goes through the motions and this is what qualifies as doing just enough. A good fail. The whole aim of such a life is to avoid life, to look busy and run down time. What would we do without our clocks and watches! To do nothing 'is' to be nothing. Already, one wonders how deep rooted these ideas -of death and nothingness-are in the Japanese spirit.

The main protagonist of the film devotes himself to his work (which is really making sure that no work gets done). A singular dedication to an ideal, replete with the bourgeois markers of respectability: a hat, a certificate in honour of all those of years of service, are what bind a life and its serial moments together. Otherwise, as Watana-be says in a moment of reflection, I can't remember a single day . After the death of his wife he decides to live a solitary life-ostensibly for the sake of his child , but in reality we learn that this too is a farce, an excuse. For how long can we blame external circumstances for our choices? When all is said and done we are what we choose to be. He is given the nickname of 'the mummy' and this is highly appropriate for one of the world's living dead, for someone who has tried to freeze time.

To escape from the inevitable by creating a routine for oneself. Perhaps the whole of human culture is nothing more than this. Work, too, is one such social construction, as are our intellectual endeavours. As long as one is active one is alive. But in work the aim is not just to feed the stomach. Man shall not live by bread alone. Gradually, he realises that he is being eaten up from within. He has a disease that everyone knows of, but which no-one has to courage to name...

The first sparkling moment comes when he is torn between telling his son about his stomach cancer and patiently keeping it to himself, as he has with everything else. Then in a moment of utter decisiveness (or is it desperation) he rushes up the near vertical flight of stairs, clambering on his hands and feet. But in the dark he comes to an abrupt stop. How to speak the unspeakable? Can the father ever initiate the son into the inevitable? Would it help either of them? If one has to stop to think about an emotion was it a true one in the first place? As he halts the light dramatically fades away and he is rooted to the spot, half way between different worlds, as it were, hesitant and unsure of himself. Can one unwrap the cloth that has bound a soul for so long and then expect love to still flourish? In that moment-which lasts for an eternity- he is made acutely aware of the infinite distance between himself and his own flesh and blood. It is not death but life itself that alienates us from the life of others.

He thinks back to those early years with his son. Has his life with him been anything but a catalogue of unforeseen and unpredictable departures (the death of his wife, the son going off to war, him having to miss his son's operation)? Is life itself anything but a series of departures ? Even the only moment he can remember with any pride soon turns into a reflection on his helplessness before the uncertainties that his son faces. He can, like a mummy, provide security but not love. Later, when he recalls the distance between himself and his son, he says it is like drowning, sinking in sheer darkness, reaching out to cling on to something. We fall into love and we fall out of it.

The next magical scene occurs when he is told by a co-worker over lunch that despite all of his denials he still loves his son. This is, perhaps, the most amazing shot in the whole film. He looks up, shyly, almost embarrassed, and then his face radiates with a smile as he comes to recognize the truth of this. It comes to him like a revelation, a light shone on the dark corner of his musty soul moves to the surface, illuminating the old man's face. This is the beginning of his redemption. The earlier attempt-which had seen him abandoning himself to a night of pure pleasure-was utterly futile and he had known it to be so as well. For what value can there be in fleeting sensations that live for a day then die? He may change his hat, temporarily adopt a new personality, but none of this will do: The reality of poetry is nothing if not lived. One can never drown out the pain and a life without thinking about, working for, others eventually ends up in the intoxication of the self. Melancholy, Kirk Douglas once said, is another name for egotism.

The solution-if it is as solution-comes to him at a restaurant where someone else's birthday is begin celebrated. And we are not surprised by this for we are really witnessing a new birth.

There are other stylistically interesting features-like the way in which the siren goes off at precisely the last time that we see Watana alive. Perhaps the most memorable scene , though, is when after a few frenetic songs have been played and danced to in a night cub Watana starts to sing an old song from the 1910's. Everyone stops what they are doing, at once fascinated and repelled by his hauntingly tragic voice that seems to be coming to them from elsewhere. They are transfixed by his unearthly voice but the song itself is really about the earth and life. A few people move away from him, unable to bear the telling of it. There are some truths that not even song can carry.

It is as if Death himself is singing but a death that is tired of dying and that wants to remind people of life. Up to that moment the people in the nightclub had been dancing crazily to a music that was not their own. When the real beauty of life is in accepting its transience and being finely aware of it, not an overcoming of it or a forgetting of it. But Watana also knows that the bitter-sweetness of life is that life is blind to its own end, that only death can remember what life really is....

SOS

London, AFP. A six-year old girl on the east coast of Scotland sends a message in a bottle thinking that it will reach Norway. Forty seven days later it turns up in New Zealand and is picked up, by co-incidence, by another six year-old.

What was written was of little importance-it rarely is. What remains true is the hope that the message will survive, that some deep currents will take it from the infinite green sea to a place of safety, that it will be picked up by some stranger on a far shore who will be able to decipher it, and that there is still some level of compassion out there in the wider world. What does one think before this immense expanse of unknowingness, this troubled, unpredictable sea?

Reflecting on the late Richard Pryor a co-actress said that there are some people, the 'walking wounded,' who carry their pain with them so intensely that one can only wince when one comes across them; that is, only a person who has understood what pain is himself. Wittgenstein was right here: what need, then, to say I am in pain.

But there are many such people who walk amongst us and they go unrecognized under a starless sky. It as if in a storm where one can only see and think about one's own self. V.S.P. writes about how at the age of eighty he'd almost become invisible and how only he can see other such invisible people, hanging around street corners or park benches. And Joan Didion says the same about those who carry the grief of the death of a loved one with them. She can see it in their hunched shoulders, their lost, abstract look. One has to be dead before one can see the dead. Like for like. The fire in the eye can know something of the sun. And the shadows?

There are many mad people who drift across our paths, more than we would care to imagine, and ghosts who are really people who wish they had never been born, shipwrecked on life, rub shoulders with us without our being aware of their presence. The cruelty of fate is that all these people live in different dimensions, times and places; but the universe's grace also resides in this.

Tell it but tell it slant.

Faith And Reason

Notes From the Underground: Who is to say what truths lie below the surface or how many escape, transcending our field of vision? Fides et Ratio rejects the idea that philosophy finds its end, all answers, in Revelation. If that were not the case then thought would be essentially redundant, superfluous. But what is also rejected is the idea that there can always be definitive answers. In the face of ultimate mysteries what use is thought? In this sense, philosophy is only a necessary prologue.

Revelation impels reason continually to extend the range of its knowledge. Our habitual patterns of thought are in no way able to express the wisdom of Revelation in its fullness. Faith illuminates reason, and faith is the basis of reason (Anselm). Is it not a corruption of one's self to believe that we can attain self-knowledge (He who know himself knows his Lord)? Might it not be the case that there is a higher knowledge which knows the limits of thought, that there will be whole realms of reality that remain unknown and perhaps unknowable?

To acknowledge our dependence on that law of which God is the author.

Questioning is so central to our nature ('man was created restless') that even when nature is transformed by grace it does not or should not cease from asking questions (The Allama: even if God reveals His Face I'll still take 'maybe' and 'perhaps'). Ceaseless Reward.

Truth is the adequacy of things and intellect. (Isaac Israeli). Do we assume this? Is it the infinite that is placed in us that allows such a thought in the first place? Can philosophy know this or is it itself imitated, commanded by Revelation? The question then becomes what type of questioning:

What is it to live?

or 'What is it to live well?'

No, the first question.

But this is a question that cannot be answered.

What are we compelled to ask what we cannot know? The Tree.

Who knows who I am?

To think is a curse, takes us away from the Tree of Life.

To think is a blessing, a gift.

Shall I think about this?

Do I think about it.

Pascal: we conceal from ourselves how desperate our true condition is by diversions , 'entertainments'. Court and culture. Is thought one such diversion? The philosopher protects himself from singular and the particular in favour of the abstract and the general. When we want to 'speak the answer in kind'. Can there be a philosophy that is completely autonomous? Blake: he who sees Ratio sees only himself. Philosophy must be a dialogue.

But neither in life nor in enquiry is it possible to encounter the particular except as an instance of the universal and general. As we should have learnt from Aristotle, every 'this' that we encounter is a 'thus-such'.

The finite is only finite against the invisible background of the infinite; the singular against the multiple: unity in diversity.

----borrowed from A. Macintyre, the Task of Philosophy