The First and the Last

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The Last Day.

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Life returns to the city. I venture out..or, rather, downwards. Find the old bookshop/art gallery I was looking for. It is hidden below KFC of all places. I admit to myself that the strangeness of Lahore is totally inexplicable. What am I doing here. For the mysterious to retain interest it has to be at least partly knowable. My association, on the other hand, amounts to little more than the shards of loved ones' memories from a bygone age, and the beautiful, tragic, fading winter light that barely holds everything together...

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The walls of the gallery are washed brilliant white. The narrow corridors and the low curving arches give the impression of entering a labyrinth, the catacombs. Strange that the word should find a home here. Alpha and Omega. I find a painting I like: dull browns and blues; it is a city and its underground reflection. Reminds me of St. Paul's on a rainy winter December, from the Number 8.

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Appropriately, the place is called the Crow Eaters! I don't give a second glance to most of the books (Islam and Pakistan studies dominate). But I do stumble across Ruskin's Unto the Last. I make it a point to be sure that his words are the first I read this year. After all, the entanglement of fact and value, ethics and economics, is just what I need to concentrate on...

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For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

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Notes From the Underground:

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The Mundus: a sacred or accursed place in the middle of the [Italist] township. A pit-originally a dirt hole, a public rubbish dump. Into it were cast trash and filth of every kind, along with those condemned to death,..[and any] infant which he did not lift from the ground and hold up above his head so that it might be born a second time...

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A pit, then, 'deep' above all in meaning. It connected the city, the space above the ground,..land as territory, to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which were those of fertility and death, of the beginning and the end, of birth and burial.

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The pit was also a passageway through which dead souls could return to the bosom of the earth and then re-emerge and be re-born. As locus of time, of births and tombs, ..cavern opening to light, ..the mundus terrified as it glorified..life and death, fertility and destruction, horror and fascination..

Pasolini, Fassbinder, and Rumi

I don't want to sound like a Philistine-actually I do! -but all this wanting to appear "deep" or "dark" can get terribly boring. A sort of brooding northern melancholy of the soul that wants to be alone in Paradise, to be all or nothing. Like those insufferable bores who want to talk about "the truth" or who think that everything can be the subject of analysis (even Rumi's become an idol), the radicalism of the blue-eyed ones is abstract and atomistic.

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Kirk Douglas: Melancholy is the inability to get out of oneself.

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And how right Nietzsche was-what we lack more than anything are healthy instincts;what we lack is the self-repose that casts away despair, that knows how to live with sadness, how to dance...a lightness out of profundity. Do we have to learn how to cultivate a bit of superficiality, how to be Greeks again?

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Gawd! Sorry, D, but Fassbinder is crap. I swear, if you can watch the whole of Merchant, I'll buy you a chocolate eclair. Grim beyond belief. And Passolini's Mama Rosa is not much better. Most of the film is about some kid prancing about. (But I don't want to give the plot away!). What a delight it was, then, to return to The Leopard. I know Said talked about the triumph of style over content, but I'm not sure. Sometimes the style is the content.

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Books I haven't read but should are piling up. Should? Today I can laugh at the book lists in The Culture (the name gives it away!) Communism and capitalism aren't that different after all. What separates them? Only this: one is at a slight angle to the other: The Culture. Recently, I read someone saying, 'anyway, back to breakfast'. How wise that seems to me!

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The philosopher does not permit his wonder stand as it is, to be released into the flow of life. Of necessity, he must "hook" the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought's "object" and "subject" from the flow of life and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates and is perpetuated in the motionless mirror of his meditation; that is in the subject. He has it well-hooked; it is securely fastened and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive, statuesque, subjugated. The solution and dissolution of their wonder is at hand-the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a wonder to eachother; they are in the very heart of wonder. Life becomes numb in the face of death and dies. The wonder is unravelled . And it was life itself that brought the solution.

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---Franz Rosenzweig.

Refracted Light

"I have a gloomy premonition...that we will soon look back on this troubled moment as a golden time of freedom and license to act and speculate. One feels the sinews of the tiger, an ascetic, "moral" and authoritarian reign of piety and iron."
-------Robert Lowell

Yet there are mornings when
Even in midwinter, sunlight
Flares, and a rare stillness
Lies upon roof and garden-
Each object eldritch bright,
The sea scarred but at peace.
------Derek Mahon.

Dwelling in divided beings:
From stone to tree, and the myriad flowers.
Passing through sadness and the curvature of time.
But this dance of the soul fades into insignificance
Before the kindling of the loved one's face,
the darkening of ours in the mirror.
----b.

Why do you want to know why you are sad, why you sigh? Sometimes you hum a tune without the words. Drink up or weep, dear soul. Do one or the other. Or both. It was not given to us to know. And we, the weary ones, have inherited only fragments and faded photos. Keep them safe, in locked boxes. For yearning makes the heart grow deeper.

Triste:

Some faces are beautiful, all the more so for not being perfect. Not quite ordinary either, but something that is neither one nor the other, utterly distinct and a true reflection of their being. Always well-set, fully formed, but always open to change with a simple smile.

Nomadic thought which only has "stations", orienting points, where the journey, the wandering, and bewilderment and wonder are more important....

The profile is everything, "an imagination reared on the silhouette of the forest tree against the sky."

The Death of Ivan Illych.
The wonderful way in which an essential characteristic of a human being's life is rendered in the most elementary of gestures-the hesitation before the mirror, the turning-up of the upper lip, the quivering of the hands, the twisting of the neck away from the gaze of a loved one. Death makes the most basic things, those which we never remember, look like the most important ones.

Adulthood: to see a tree and think "table".
Childhood: to see a table and wonder what is meant by the word "legs".
To think and to wonder...logic and poetry.


I felt what the Aztec felt,
lying in wait for time's
uncertain return through
the cracks in the horizon.
---E. Bishop.

Robert Hughes on Surrealism.
The action of the dreaming mind in paint: It valued the accidental, the involuntary, the unsought shape...the image that rose unbidden from a chaos of marks. But unrelenting spontaneity is chaos.

Nomadic space is not made up of "places", permanences of fixed abodes, storehouses of memory, or objects of contemplation, but is constituted by a number of points of reference, a set of relations, orientations: the whistling song of the sand, the brilliance of the stars and her pathways, the undulations of snow and sand that follow hidden lines, the sudden emergence of a trace of life amidst infinite barrenness; a spirit that can never be 'housed' , but that blows where it will. A blade of grass that inches its way into the open signals that hope can survive in the human heart even in the most extreme circumstances. Love is never lost, only forgotten, only sought after along the tracks of a desert...

And yet, and yet, we return to the city. The sun was low in the sky and refracted in the window. He could see his own reflection, and through that, flickering in the glass, the reflection of what was ahead... coming back to the city is always nicer, in a way, because you travel in the same direction as the river.(Peter Cameron)

Once you are a prisoner, you never escape being a prisoner.
---Ronald Searle.

The poet edges open the door to what is confined to the past; just enough to catch a momentary glimpse of that lost life, of all that awaits him....

End of an Era

This was not just an attack on one person but on the ideas and ideals that she stood for. Independently of whether her governments were corrupt or not, the Party at least represented the hopes and aspirations of millions of ordinary people. One wonders if this is just the beginning of the end of secular politics in this country. If so, I hope all of those sonofabitch maulvis rot in hell.

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What was so heartening in her press conference after the initial attack on her a few months ago was the return to politics-old style: 'The problems are political problems and require political solutions. No military dictatorship, no bombing of people can resolve issues'. And as she rightly pointed out: military dictatorships only offer a false security; in fact, they undermine security ( a thing American Presidents, past and present, simply do not understand).

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This is a country of peasants, of cultivators of the land, she continued. A land of hard working people whose fundamental commitment is to tolerance. I still believe that (despite the cursed mullahs and their Saudi pimps). Every time there have been elections the mullahs have been trounced.

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What is there left to say?

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May her soul rest in peace.

Nomadic Thoughts

For the moment I've given up on trying to think of anything on my own; the only other option is to follow the path of others, let them do the work; perhaps this trail of ink-marks* is futile without the voice of the Beloved...


"The Arabs, roused from the nodding torpor of weary, empty hours, pointed with their sticks, shouted and broke into a sudden spate of talk. We camped that night among some ghaf , large mimosa-like trees. Deep down the questing roots had found water, and their branches were heavy with flowering trailing fronds that fell to the clean sand."

"Arabic, evolved as a dialectic of nomadic herdsmen in the desert, developed into one of the great languages of the world, flexible enough to translate every shade of Greek thought and pass it back to the west...the resulting muslim civilisation was profoundly influenced by Greek thought, but while it assimilated much it was never merely imitative."

(Iqbal, on the anti-classical nature of Islam)

"My share in all that is happening...I think to myself as I lie under the friendly Arabian stars. I-this bundle of flesh and bone, of sensations and perceptions-have been placed within the orbit of Being, and am within all that is happening..'Danger' is only an illusion, never can it 'overcome' me: for all that happens to me is part of the all-embracing stream of which I myself am a part. Could it be, perhaps,that danger and safety, death and joy, destiny and fulfilment,are part of this tiny , majestic bundle that is I ?"

"Sometimes we find..that we are lulled by it into a laziness of the heart; that it has made us forget the tightrope walk of our earlier, more creative times-that reaching out after intangible realities. In those earlier times they would have perhaps have been called 'intangible possibilities', and the men who went out in search of them-whether discoverers, adventurers, or creative artists-were only seeking the innermost springs of their own lives.We late-comers are also seeking our own lives but we are obsessed by our desire to secure our own life before it unfolds itself...

Because this unfamiliar world is so entirely different from all that you have known at home; because it offers so much that is strikingly strange in image and sound, it brushes you sometimes, if you permit yourself to be attentive, with a momentary remembrance of things long known and long forgotten: those intangible realities of your own life. And when this breath of remembrance reaches you from beyond the abyss that separates your world from that other, that unfamiliar one, you ask yourself whether it is not perhaps herein-and only herein-that the meaning of all wandering lies: to become aware of the strangeness of the world around you and thereby to reawaken your own, forgotten, personal, reality..."

And these lines, a move to an abstract space, an Arcadian mountain, a zero of ice and endless horizons:

"The power of nature is sometimes very calming, and this was a calming place, calling a halt to your trivial thinking without, at the same time, overawing you with reminders of the nothingness of a life span and the vastness of extinction. It was all on a scale safely this side of the sublime. A man could absorb the beauty into his being without feeling belittled or permeated by fear....this great bright arched space, this cold above ground vault of a mountaintop cradling at its peak a largish oval of fresh water frozen hard as a rock, the ancient activity that is the life of a lake, that is the formation of ice, that is the metabolism of fish, all the soundless, ageless forces, unyieldingly working away it as though we have encountered each other at the top of the world-two hidden brains mistrustfully ticking, mutual hatred and paranoia the only introspection there is anywhere..."

The sea cries with its meaningless voice
Treating alike its dead and its living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.

Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned
Like nothing in the Universe.
Created for black sleep. Or growing
conscious of the sun's red spot occasionally,
The dreaming it is the foetus of God.

Over the stone rushes the wind
able to mingle with nothing,
like the hearing of the blind stone itself.
Or turns, as if the stone's mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions.

At the frontier, the death of an Indian...
(from Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden)

On the outskirts of a small town an Indian, Jimmy, is attacked by three crazed white youths and his body dumped at the riverside...

"In the spring when the snow melted and the rivers flooded, Jimmy would no doubt be swept away to the river , on currents that carried the logs and rocks and earth of the interior to the Great Slave Lake and beyond towards the arctic ocean...Think of those four minds. The one moving in a country that was his , of which he knew every corner, that he could explain and explore and use and delight in. The other three looking at a "wilderness", with a tough indifference or resolve, somewhere and somehow, to get get some hold of some part of this place and transform it from nothing into something, from mere land into money, from frontier into a ranch or an oil well or something, just something. Think of one mind filled with knowledge of place and the others empty of such knowledge, filled instead with determination and craziness and anger of youth, reinforced by restlessness and nomadism and technologies from elsewhere....this meeting of minds, this murder, could have taken place-has taken place-on all frontiers between settlers and hunter-gatherers.This time, in 1998, in this place, it was Jimmy Field, Dunne-za. He was man who travelled time in dreams and moved on his lands with awe-inspiring skills...the pain of his death contained all deaths, in all places and all times. The bodies of hunter-gatherers continue to be swept under the ice, frozen , dead, towards the oceans."

"All great civilisations are based on parochialism... To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience."

(Patrick Kavanagh on the universal and the parochial)

But we are in one place and one place only,
one of the milestones of earth-residence.
Unique in each particular,
the thinly Peopled hinterland serenely tense-
Not in the hope of a resplendent future
But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature

Derek Mahon

....which I read as meaning: he who knows the finite, knows the infinite.

A nomadic thought: "everything is perishing save His face"

But beyond earthly destructions there is the
Indestructible: "every form you see" says Rumi, "has its archetype
in the divine world,beyond space; if the form perishes what
matter, since its heavenly model is indestructible?Every beautiful
form you have seen, every meaningful word you have heard-be not
sorrowful all this must be lost; such is not really the case. The
Divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without
cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped
wherefore do you lament?...from the first moment when you
entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before
you

The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is not but a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What is the Sufi's possession?- foot-marks.

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's track and follows her footprints.
For a while the track is his only clue,
But then, the musk-gland of the deer is his guide.
To go one step led by the invisible
is better than a hundred following the path, roaming.

Quintessential

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.

(citations: D.H.L and ?)

Misch, Mish, du bist ein fisch

Whenever they are granted fruits therefrom as their appointed sustenance, they will say, "It is this that in days of yore was granted to us as our sustenance!"-for they shall be given something that will recall that past.

---Q.2.25

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There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

---Ecclesiastes.

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'He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality...[His poems] remind us that he was a fiddler's son, with music in his blood and bone., who danced to his father's playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him,a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious , ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.'

---C. Tomalin

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If there is 'one thing necessary' then everything else is sin.

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We live our lives... Do we?We want to live a life where everything is reduced to the black and white strands. Perhaps a religious life would be just that: no more an individual, our ego finally broken, the mind at last grasping what the hand did. A religious life has no need for stories, or the consolation of art-it is sceptical of false infinities, illusory redemptions, aesthetics. This iconoclasm of the soul allows for no gods; the past, if it is anything to us, is the absolute past: sin precedes existence. The fanatical rather than the fantastical means becoming a stranger-to the world, to others, and ultimately to oneself.

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But our lives are grey. And necessity is mixed up with chance, contingency and freedom. A small incident, a stray word, illuminates the others. The fragment is in the whole, the whole is in the fragment. And who is to say what is 'inner' here, what outer? We gaze at cracked mirrors: it makes no sense to say one image is truer than another. Even that first moment, open to all possibilities ( "outside time") or the void, is this, too, anything but an imagined past? Ex-stasis: to stand outside. But the joy is in the re-collection of it. We will have our stories, weave our fictions. Only part of us wants to unravel the threads...

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We are, as people, unfinished and full of blankness and jumble.

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Death, like religion, destroys the illusory whole of the unified self. The truth is startling, the Beloved like no other. But if this was so then there would only be fidelity, only necessity...a magnetic source that draws us closer to it. But life and love are deeper because they draw a veil over such things, render everything mysterious, absurd even (Misch, Misch...)

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The one thing necessary.

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But if God is the sole and unique end then what is everything else? Are we but puppets in this cosmic joke? (Religious people-and God, too, presumably-do not laugh). God is not really an end at all. He is a finality without end.

And what of it if this is a joke? Should we lower our gaze, stoop again..or should we learn to laugh? A saint might say: ex-posure to the pointless necessity of the world, the evil that is the very way of the world, is itself a blessing. Grit your teeth. Walk on!

But we are human, frail, full of jumble. One cannot easily endure the loss of meaning. We need our bridges, our immediate past: Give us this day our daily bread.

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Have you not wanted to pray? I mean, to pray all the time.

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There is silence. I am stopped in my tracks by these words-and from the most unlikely of sources. It is as if these words, this question flung so innocently, are like the ordinary words we repeat or hear in our lives but that come to mean something quite extraordinary when thought about, when put in the right place. All I know is that to speak now would be an evasion.

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No, I guess I haven't.

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There is no compulsion, no obedience, no fire within. One cannot always think one's way out of a hole. But I think to myself: these are the times we live in (as if that would do!). We walk through a bleak landscape, surrounded by nothing but ruins, objects upon which our gaze can never rest and from which we can derive no solace. But part of us knows that this is not the case. Our fingers brush gently against them and our hands lovingly stroke them. We have shored up our lives with ruins. What is outer here, what is inner?

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If you live a life of contradiction you will break. This is the law. Something must give-you or reality.

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Daud's gnomic utterance is a little too close to home to take seriously. But yes, we are in love with the image of ourselves, a picture of completeness, a unified life. The future mirrors the past. But for the other light to flood us we must first break, we ourselves must become artists and make ourselves into broken circles. As Simone says, if we don't then reality will..one might as well say: Time will. And yet, is this not just another image?

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In this day and age, in these times, what can we give? What gives? If we are nothing -like a ring thrown in a wasteland, or if we make ourselves nothing, make nothing happen, then what can we give, what can we sacrifice? It is impossible. All the gifts are with You. Life passes us by, misses the mark. It whistles through us, like the chill breeze that rustles shimmering leaves, like the winter light that rests on stone, never to inhere in it.

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And what if we do not learn through suffering? Is this not, precisely, what suffering is-the total absence of meaning, an unfathomable disproportion between 'knowing', an utter pointlessness (the banality of evil?)

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You say: I am with those whose hearts are broken for My sake?

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Is there any other, Lord?

To the past
we offer
only the streaming tresses
Of our hair
tangled
by the wind.
----Mayakovsky.

Nothing happens. This is the way it is. Stars tick over. Search for a name, if you like. If you must. Return. Only traces. Otherwise nature's infinite silence haunts us. Dark mirrors prolong it.

Cellophane sparkles. For a moment. At the right distance, with the right light, anything can be precious. There is a kind of peace here, under these tents. The crows know it. Black eyes survey the trash. The canvas flaps in the breeze. Hard to tie it down. Strange to think it could end in the blink of an eye. Rolled up.

Listening to this music. Mysterious because it hints at other lives we didn't live, or long forgotten ones in a distant past; a life that escapes our memories but remains, nevertheless, like a discarded object in an open field...waiting to be picked up. It's under my skin: I am not me.

Each soul, each patchwork heart, is woven together by but a few threads. Some are blue, some are red. Now and then we see them in an other's eyes, in the soft morning light when the earth still forgets, and is full of promise; when the fading evening light makes the world appear to be full of shadows, less real than it is. Things sink back to their essence. Now. And then. Words break under the strain..like everything else. All is quiet now.

We live in wells. Tell it slant. I live in a well.

Rosebud

This has gotta be a hoax, right?
There's a certain category of film that one must see; more importantly, one must recognize as a great. If one wants to appear deep just nod and give your assent. Tarkovsky, Kurosawa....brilliant!Even if you really thought The Seven Samurai was naff, or The Mirror was, well, unbearable tosh. Perhaps the same applies for music: Dylan (again!) ..and wouldn't you simply die without Mahler..and there's a certain style of writing that is, perhaps, valued for being incomprehensible, obtuse. It's as if a genuine esoteric perspective, having been displaced, must be replaced with a fake one. Can't help think that philosophy/science only touches the outer garments of religion, only elicits interest by being a fragment of theology...

Rescue Dawn. Don't get it. What happened to old Werner? This was little better than the typical Hollywood candyfloss. And yet it was passed off as mesmerizing. Okay, leave the politics to one side, try and forget that the protagonist was actually dropping bombs on the goons- how fucking civilized! Instead, let's believe, for a moment, that what's important was the sheer love of flying.
Open skies and white man loving freedom and all that..But even then, the sheer lack of realism leaves one wondering. Must try and and get Ronald Searle's biography to regain some sense of perspective...

And God Created Woman.
Strange. Watched this again after 15 years and couldn't help but cringe. The dance scene reminded me of Helen!

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The tents are up again. I don't think I enjoy anything more than walking under them late at night or early in the morning. I must have worked in a circus in my previous life.

The monkey was on again last night. This time arguing with a Hindu who told him, 'what's the point of arguing over everything, trying to convince everyone that only you are right, that everyone else is damned to hell. Try and talk about things that bring people together. Logic will only get you so far'.

The point was lost on old Zakir who continued to tirelessly churn out quotations from the Qur'an and hadith. Chapeter 27 , verse 34, chapter...give it a rest bro'.

Someone from the audience asked him if cricket was 'haraam' (forbidden). He spent 10 minutes on that! That's the level of discussion here. These guys are so simple -I'm being polite here, 'thick' is a better word. Reminds me of Roger, the Protestant missionary who tried to convert me by giving me a book on why God loves me. (How reassuring!). Except that it was just a book full of cartoons! And when I asked him about saints..why, I'm a saint, everyone is..there's no such things as saints. Yeah, like, when did you come off therapy?

Anyway, Zakir's 'learned' conclusion? 'It might be, but personally I feel it is a complete waste of time'. The Indian audience stirred. Religion is one thing, criticzing cricket in these parts is another, boy!

Met a friend over the weekend-usually the most reasonable fellow one could hope to meet. But then: "Do you know there's only one country Israel is afraid of?"I nearly burst out laughing when he said Pakistan. "You know", he continued, "they won't rest until they've establish their kingdom..and I've got a book to prove it"

Me: "Er..it isn't the Protocols by any chance?"

A: " Yes! How did you know?"

Me: "For fuck's sake, get a grip of yourself , man"

The tents are up..enter the clowns...

Song of Sorrow

I-We

Does man break stone, or stone break man? What is this hidden essence of stone, this infinite patience? The grey evenings of the mind. It accumulates. It is everywhere.

Better to be an imperfect diamond than a perfect stone.

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Blah. In Late Antiquity everyone lives within themselves, drowsed out, oblivious of the world: Me, myself and I. And at the same time, precisely because one feels so isolated, alienated, one has to expend great energy on talking about oneself and confessing each and every detail of one's rather mundane life, whipping up some sort of a personality from very little material. The introvert dreams of being glamorous, is captivated by other lives, spellbound by a distant light.

Okay, I've never quite understood why people write biographies, diaries, or memoirs. And why people should want to read them is an even greater enigma. But the same holds for blogging! How sad is that!

The New Yorker's three 'theories':

1. The delusional: I am the centre of the world. What I have to say is funny, exciting, and unique (though I secretly know it probably isn't). What I have to say will shape other people's perceptions. Even the day-to-day trivia is worth noting.

2. Writing is neurotic: expressing the lives, desires, I do not live; the 9-5 is a sham. This is the real me, not that dumb clerk with his bourgeois pretensions you see before you.

3. Written a letter to daddy: Recognition. Please notice me, wise and benevolent reader. I'm messed up, messed up bad, but surely that resonates with your own story of human failing? In a gnostic age, this desire for acknowledgement, this search for a witness in a fake world, sounds plausible (Comments?None? Thought so. Damn you!).

For Rinku: lost in space

the commodification of self :

" The movement in self-anchorage as a movement of the 'real self' along a continuum from 'institution'to 'impulse'...a deep, unsocialized inner impulse"... institutions, norms, public spaces, authority, are so many artificial constraints on the authentic self ('self', not being)...a self that is "waiting to be discovered and spontaneously expressed".

But this was old hat, even in the sixties. Perhaps it was even old in the '20's. The Romantic impulse, straining against bourgeois sensibilities, stifling conformity, medieval or feudal ideas of a fixed identity. Norms, goals, public standards, an order of being, 'nature' or essence, are all things lyingly added. What's important is finding one's own unique voice, expressing one's intimate feelings. The rebel without a cause. How city-folk love to imagine themselves as nomads!

And nowhere is it suspected that this freedom to construct oneself or to express oneself is, far from being a sign of our freedom, instead, an indication of our entanglement in liquid modernity.
I am what I am. (I thought only God could say that!). How very convenient that the counterculture should just happen to feed into late capitalism's break from mass production and the growing influence of images and brands..."hip consumerism" (In universities, too, one is indoctrinated into "critical thinking"!). Pleasure without identity.

Is it any wonder, then, that at the theoretical and political level we have such great difficulty in saying 'we'? What else is methodological individualism in the social sciences? (one wonders if the subject even survives in science).


glamour and the end of irony

To imagine oneself without a past, to exist only in the present, to seize the day..isn't that the American dream?

All we really want to do is get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.

----Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'

Loops

The first note contains the possibility of all others.

But the first is closest to the image of the last more than anything else.

One cannot play the first note unless one has in one's mind what the last one is.

--Daniel Banenboim.

Minimalism: to express everything in a single note or the simplest and faintest of brush strokes on a blank canvas that is at once entirely free and spontaneous and at the same time the product of great learning and technique. A single note that expresses the different worlds: the natural, the human, and the cosmic. It is reached if one slows down the passage of time , frame by frame, to a single point.

There is nothing to say after the point has been reached. The first note emerges from silence and holds that silence within its innermost chamber; its very structure is permeated by that nothingness; and it must return to that primal state.

If one unravels the note one can hear ancient and modern tunes: the co-mingling of a timeless Japanese stillness that dreams itself into the pain of longing from a Persian poem...and then, with a slight shift of emphasis, to a Highland lament. If one is attentive one can just discern a return to 19th century classical Vienna or the onward rush of the first settlers, frontiersmen, seeking out open spaces and new futures. The first note is always old because of its relation to the origin but also always new because it contains the unexpected, all that hasn't been thought of...

The first note has all the freshness and innocence of the first times, but all of the regret and sadness of the last times as well. A sound thought: a thought without mind. Each voice is present, each vital-as in an infinite stone bridge; to take away but one would be reduce the whole to nothing....

A line of stars would be of no interest to us. But a pattern where some are bunched together and others are hopelessly isolated in the infinite distances, forlorn, as if rejected by fate, is a different matter; in other regions some burn with a scintillating brilliance whilst others quietly fade into insignificance; these fantastical differences remind us of our own fabulous story . ("The creation of the universe is as the creation of a single soul").

The constant star that never wavers, that is a sure guide; the one that dazzles all others with its white light; the blue , mournful one; the star that never stays in the same place, that one has to search and search the skies for until it is found; the one that zig-zags through the universe. Is this not a better way of thinking of life?

-----Swami.

I originally wrote these words after listening to John Adams, but have to repeat them-and if I could understand the nature of this compulsion there would be no more point of writing-when thinking of Reich.

Structure and light. The red tower