The Black and the Blue

Multitude of the skies,
golden riddle of millions of stars,
cold, distant, lustrous, beautiful,
silent, unfeeling, unwelcoming.
Fulness of knowledge is their course,
emptiness of chartless ignorance,
a universe moving in silence,
a mind alone in its bounds.
Not they moved my thoughts,
not the marvel of their chill course;
to us there is no miracle but love,
lighting of a universe in the kindling of your face.

----Sorley Maclean, Multitude.

The blue entering the black; you entering the void. One does not become the other. The blue light that falls all around you, never in you. The blue time of your eyes, abstract and distant. The blue of your soul, still, like a soul unborn, a name with God from the black land. Vague, unredeemed, untrue. Blue, the mind that does not know, the hand that will slip, the heart that will lose the red.

the melancholy angel

This really is well worth a read.

Enjoy! :-)

"The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction." Walter Benjamin, the author of this statement, was perhaps the first European intellectual to recognize the fundamental change that had taken place in the transmissibility of culture and in the new relation to the past that constituted the inevitable consequence of this change. The particular power of quotations arises, according to Benjamin, not from their ability to transmit that past and allow the reader to relive it but, on the contrary, from their capacity to "make a clean sweep, to expel from the context, to destroy."

Alienating by force a fragment of the past from its historical context, the quotation at once makes it lose its character of authentic testimony and invests it with an alienating power that constitutes its unmistakable aggressive force Benjamin, who for his entire life pursued the idea of writing a work made up exclusively of quotations, had understood that the authority invoked by the quotation is founded precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by its situation in the history of culture. Its truth content is a function of the uniqueness of its appearance, alienated from its living context in what Benjamin, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," defines as "une citation à l'ordre du jour" ("a quotation on the order of the day.") on the day of the Last Judgment. The past can only be fixed in the image that appears once and for all in the instant of its alienation, just as a memory appears suddenly, as in a flash, in a moment of danger.

This particular way of entering into a relation with the past also constitutes the foundation of the activity of a figure with which Benjamin felt an instinctive affinity: that of the collector. The collector also "quotes" the object outside its context and in this way destroys the order inside which it finds its value and meaning. Whether it is a work of art or any simple commodity that he, with an arbitrary gesture, elevates to the object of his passion, the collector takes on the task of transfiguring things, suddenly depriving them both of their use value and of the ethical-social significance with which tradition had endowed them.

The collector frees things from the "slavery of usefulness" in the name of their authenticity, which alone legitimates their inclusion in the collection; yet this authenticity presupposes in turn the alienation through which this act of freeing was able to take place, by which the value for the connoisseur took the place of the use value. In other words, the authenticity of the object measures its alienation value, and this is in turn the only space in which the collection can sustain itself.

Precisely because he makes alienation from the past into a value, the figure of the collector is in some way related to that of the revolutionary, for whom the new can appear only through the destruction of the old. And it is certainly not an accident that the great collector figures flourish precisely in times of break from tradition and exaltation of renewal: in a traditional society neither the quotation nor the collection is conceivable, since it is not possible to break at any point the links of the chain of tradition by which the transmission of the past takes place.

It is peculiar that although Benjamin had observed the phenomenon through which the authority and the traditional value of the work of art had begun to become unsteady, he nonetheless did not notice that the "decline of the aura," as he sums up this process, did not in any way effect the "freeing of the object from its cultural sheath" and the subsequent founding of the object on political praxis, but rather caused the reconstitution of a new "aura." Through this new aura, the object, re-creating and exalting to the utmost its authenticity on another level, became charged with a new value perfectly analogous to that alienation value that we have already observed with regard to the collection. Far from freeing the object from its authenticity, its technical reproducibility (which Benjamin identified as the main corrosive agent of the traditional authority of the work of art) carries authenticity to extremes: technical reproducibility is the moment when authenticity, by way of the multiplication of the original, becomes the very cipher of elusiveness.

This is to say: the work of art loses the authority and the guarantees it derived from belonging to a tradition for which it built the places and objects that incessantly weld past and present together. However, far from giving up its authenticity in order to become reproducible (thus fulfilling Hölderlin's wish that poetry might again become something that one could calculate and teach), the work of art instead becomes the locus of the most ineffable of mysteries, the epiphany of aesthetic beauty.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in Baudelaire, even though Benjamin considered him the poet in whom the decay of aura found its most typical expression. Baudelaire was the poet who had to face the dissolution of the authority of tradition in the new industrial society and therefore had to invent a new authority. He fulfilled this task by making the very intransmissibility of culture a new value and putting the experience of shock at the center of his artistic labor. The shock is the jolt power acquired by things when they lose their transmissibility and their comprehensibility within a given cultural order. Baudelaire understood that for art to survive the ruin of tradition, the artist had to attempt to reproduce in his work that very destruction of transmissibility that was at the origin of the experience of shock: in this way he would succeed in turning the work into the very vehicle of the intransmissible. Through the theorization of the beautiful as instantaneous and elusive epiphany (un éclair . . . puis la nuit! ["a flash . . . then night!"]), Baudelaire made of aesthetic beauty the cipher of the impossibil ity of transmission.

We are now able to state more precisely what constitutes the alienation value that we have seen to be at the basis both of the quotation and of the activity of the collector, the alienation value whose production has become the specific task of the modern artist: it is nothing other than the destruction of the transmissibility of culture.

The reproduction of the dissolution of transmissibility in the experience of shock becomes, then, the last possible source of meaning and value for things themselves, and art becomes the last tie connecting man to his past. The survival of the past in the imponderable instant of aesthetic epiphany is, in the final analysis, the alienation effected by the work of art, and this alienation is in its turn nothing other than the measure of the destruction of its transmissibility, that is, of tradition.

In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmission and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical-traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.

An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former appear only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of nontraditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not at all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to enter into a relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on.

In this situation, then, man keeps his cultural heritage in its totality, and in fact the value of this heritage multiplies vertiginously. However, he loses the possibility of drawing from this heritage the criterion of his actions and his welfare and thus the only concrete place in which he is able, by asking about his origins and his destiny, to found the present as the relationship between past and future. For it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future without being hindered by the burden of the past. But when a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents, and on the other hand a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past.

The interruption of tradition, which is for us now a fait accompli, opens an era in which no link is possible between old and new, if not the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive or the alienation effected by the very means that is supposed to help with the transmission of the old. Like the castle in Kafka's novel, which burdens the village with the obscurity of its decrees and the multiplicity of its offices, the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat in which he can in no way recognize himself. Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.

In the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin employs a particularly felicitous image to describe this situation of the man who has lost his link with his past and is no longer able to find himself in history:

A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

There is a well-known engraving by Diirer that presents some analogies with Benjamin's interpretation of Klee's painting. It represents a winged creature in a sitting position, in the act of meditating while looking ahead with an absorbed expression. Next to it, abandoned, the utensils of active life lie on the ground: a grindstone, a plane, nails, a hammer, a framing square, a pair of pincers, and a saw. The beautiful face of the angel is in the shadow; the light is reflected only by his long robe and a sphere set in front of his feet. Behind him we see an hourglass (the sand is flowing), a bell, a set of scales, and a magic square, and then, over the sea in the background, a comet shining without any brightness. A twilight atmosphere is diffused over the entire scene; it deprives every detail of materiality.

If Klee Angelus Novus is the angel of history, nothing could represent the angel of art better than the winged creature in Diirer's engraving. While the angel of history looks toward the past, yet cannot stop his incessant flight backward toward the future, so the melancholy angel in Dürer's engraving gazes unmovingly ahead. The storm of progress that has gotten caught in that angel's wings has subsided here, and the angel of art appears immersed in an atemporal dimension, as though something, interrupting the con tinuum of history, had frozen the surrounding reality in a kind of messianic arrest. However, just as the events of the past appear to the angel of history as a pile of indecipherable ruins, so the utensils of active life and the other objects scattered around the melancholy angel have lost the significance that their daily usefulness endowed them with and have become charged with a potential for alienation that transforms them into the cipher for something endlessly elusive.

The past that the angel of history is no longer able to comprehend reconstitutes its form in front of the angel of art; but this form is the alienated image in which the past finds its truth again only on condition of negating it, and knowledge of the new is possible only in the nontruth of the old. The redemption that the angel of art offers to the past, summoning it to appear outside its real context on the day of aesthetic Last Judgment, is, then, nothing other than its death (or rather, its inability to die) in the museum of aesthetics. And the angel's melancholy is the consciousness that he has adopted alienation as his world; it is the nostalgia of a reality that he can possess only by making it unreal.

Aesthetics, then, in a way performs the same task that tradition performed before its interruption: knotting up again the broken thread in the plot of the past, it resolves the conflict between old and new without whose settlement man, this being that has lost himself in time and must find himself again, and for whom therefore at every instant his past and future are at stake, is unable to live. By destroying the transmissibility of the past, aesthetics recuperates it negatively and makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aesthetic beauty, in this way opening for man a space between past and future in which he can found his action and his knowledge.

This space is the aesthetic space, but what is transmitted in it is precisely the impossibility of transmission, and its truth is the negation of the truth of its contents. A culture that in losing its transmissibility has lost the sole guarantee of its truth and become threatened by the incessant accumulation of its nonsense now relies on art for its guarantee; art is thus forced to guarantee something that can only be guaranteed if art itself loses its guarantees in turn.

The humble activity of the τεχνίτης who, by opening for man the space of work, built the places and objects in which tradition accomplished its incessant process of welding past to present, now leaves its place to the creative activity of the genius who is burdened with the imperative to produce beauty. In this sense one can say that on the one hand, kitsch, which considers beauty as the immediate goal of the work of art, is the specific product of aesthetics, while on the other hand, the ghost of beauty that kitsch evokes in the work of art is nothing but the destruction of the transmissibility of culture, in which aesthetics is founded.

If the work of art is the place in which the old and the new have to resolve their conflict in the present space of truth, the problem of the work of art and of its destiny in our time is not simply a problem among the others that trouble our culture: not because art occupies an elevated station in the (disintegrating) hierarchy of cultural values, but because what is at stake here is the very survival of culture, a culture split by a past and present conflict that has found its extreme and precarious settlement in our society in the form of aesthetic alienation.

Only the work of art ensures a phantasmagoric survival for the accumulated culture, just as only the indefatigable demystifying action of the land surveyor K. ensures for Count West-West's castle the sole appearance of reality it can lay claim to. But the castle of culture has now become a museum in which, on the one hand, the wealth of the past, in which man can in no way recognize himself, is accumulated to be offered to the aesthetic enjoyment of the members of the community, and, on the other, this enjoyment is possible only through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of its poietic capacity to open its space to man's action and knowledge.

Thus aesthetics is not simply the privileged dimension that progress in the sensibility of Western man has reserved for the work of art as his most proper place; it is, rather, the very destiny of art in the era in which, with tradition now severed, man is no longer able to find, between past and future, the space of the present, and gets lost in the linear time of history. The angel of history, whose wings became caught in the storm of progress, and the angel of aesthetics, who stares in an atemporal dimension at the ruins of the past, are inseparable. And so long as man has not found another way to settle individually and collectively the conflict between old and new, thus appropriating his historicity, a surpassing of aesthetics that would not be limited to exaggerating the split that traverses it appears unlikely.

There is a note in Kafka's notebooks in which this inability of man to recover his space in the tension between past and future history is expressed with particular precision in the image of

. . . travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, it is not even certain whether it is the beginning or the end of the tunnel.

At the time of Greek tragedy, when the traditional mythic system had begun to decline under the impulse of the new moral world that was being born, art had already assumed the task of settling the conflict between old and new, and had responded to this task with the figure of the guilty innocent, of the tragic hero who expresses in all his greatness and misery the precarious significance of human action in the interval between what is no longer and what is not yet.

Kafka is the author of our time who has most coherently assumed this task. Faced with man's inability to appropriate his own historical presuppositions, he tried to turn this impossibility into the very soil on which man might recover himself. In order to realize this project, Kafka reversed Benjamin's image of the angel of history: the angel has already arrived in Paradise--in fact he was there from the start, and the storm and his subsequent flight along the linear time of progress are nothing but an illusion he creates in the attempt to falsify his knowledge and to transform his perennial condition into an aim still to be attained.

It is in this sense that the apparently paradoxical thought expressed in the "Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way" should be understood: "There is a goal, but no path; what we call the path is only wavering," and "Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to call the day of the Last Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session [ Standrechty]." For man it is always already the day of the Last Judgment: the Last Judgment is his normal historical condition, and only his fear of facing it creates the illusion that it is still to come. Kafka thus replaces the idea of a history infinitely unfolding along an empty, linear time (this is the history that compels the Angelus Novus to his unstoppable run) with the paradoxical image of a state of history in which the fundamental event of the human condition is perpetually taking place; the continuum of linear time is interrupted, but does not create an opening beyond itself. The goal is inaccessible not because it is too far in the future but because it is present here in front of us; but its presence is constitutive of man's historicity, of his perennial lingering along a nonexistent path, and of his inability to appropriate his own historical situation.

This is why Kafka can say that the revolutionary movements that declare null and void everything that has happened before are right, because in reality nothing has happened yet. The condition of man who has gotten lost in history ends up looking like that of the southern Chinese in the story told in The Great Wall of China: "There is also involved a certain feebleness of faith and imaginative power on the part of the people, that prevents them from raising the empire out of its stagnation in Peking and clasping it in all its palpable living reality to their own breasts, which yet desire nothing better than but once to feel that touch and then to die." And yet "this very weakness should seem to be one of the greatest unifying influences among our people; indeed, if one may dare to use the expression, the very ground on which we live."

In the face of this paradoxical situation, asking about art's task is the equivalent of asking what could be its task on the day of the Last Judgment, that is, in a condition (which for Kafka is man's very historical status) in which the angel of history has stopped and, in the interval between past and future, man has to face his own responsibility. Kafka answered this question by asking whether art could become transmission of the act of transmission: whether, that is, it could take as its content the task of transmission itself, independently of the thing to be transmitted. As Benjamin understood, Kafka's genius before the unprecedented historical situation of which he had become aware was that he "sacrificed truth for the sake of transmissibility."

Since the goal is already present and thus no path exists that could lead there, only the perennially late stubbornness of a messenger whose message is nothing other than the task of transmission can give back to man, who has lost his ability to appropriate his historical space, the concrete space of his action and knowledge.

In this way, at the limit of its aesthetic itinerary, art abolishes the gap between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission and again comes closer to the mythic-traditional system, in which a perfect identity existed between the two terms. In this "attack on the last earthly frontier," art transcends the aesthetic dimension and thus, with the construction of a totally abstract moral system, eludes the fate that destined it to kitsch. Yet, although it can reach the threshold of myth, it cannot cross it. If man could appropriate his historical condition, and if, seeing through the illusion of the storm that perennially pushes him along the infinite rail of linear time, he could exit his paradoxical situation, he would at the same time gain access to the total knowledge capable of giving life to a new cosmogony and to turn history into myth. But art alone cannot do this, since it is precisely in order to reconcile the historical conflict between past and future that it has emancipated itself from myth and linked itself to history.

By transforming the principle of man's delay before truth into a poetic process and renouncing the guarantees of truth for love of transmissibility, art succeeds once again in transforming man's inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action.

According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.

unbknown

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.

--Hardy.

Unreconciled, unredeemed, unbeknown and unraveled. No words-plain or otherwise- will explain it. There's no saying of it, no swaying from it. Literature, music, as a consolation for lost time. Already, by saying time you show how far you've slipped. To yourself, at least. Why, is there an other? But not a return to life, either. Tell me, gentle one, is there a way out that is not a way out? And shall you always be gentle or will you grey, become wiser, keep my yellowing picture stored away, as one does with the dead? One's fate, another's freedom, like steps that never rhyme.

Estranged. But not deeply, madly so. It will pass. Again. You and I know it. And everything shall be as it was before. Except it won't. Things will happen, stars will tic over, the metaphor fade, the song go unsung and you shall ask me once again, me the bungling fool, to unbreak my heart for you.

b

cherry

Seven Seconds.mp3 - Youssou NDour and Neneh Cherry

The Red and the Green

O Physician, come back! my life is ebbing away.
Compelled by love, I dance, I dance.

This love has set up camp inside me.
It is I, who filled the cup with this poison and drank it.
Come back right away, else, I will surely die.
Compelled by love, I dance, I dance.

The sun has set, its glow remains.
Grant me a sight of you again! I would die for it!
What a mistake I made, not going with you.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.

Mother do not bar me from this love.
Whoever turns back unloaded boats that have left?
How foolish I was, not going with the boatman.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.

Peacocks sing in the groves of love.
My beautiful beloved is my Ka’ba, my Qibla.
He injured me, then turned away.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.

Bullhe Shah, I sit at Inayat's door,
He clothed me in robes of green and red.
When I stamped my heel, I found him.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.

--Raza's translation.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let us go the land of the blind, love
where no-one knows anybody
Your footsteps mixed with mine
my green desire mingled with your blood

It is bitter, it is sweet
What type of poison is this
that you slip to me with black hands?

Sway and glide and fall
in the circle of my being
Until neither you nor the fire remain

Let your hair down for me
And float and turn and spin
Until nothing exists finally,
but the red and the green

we're on the road to nowhere

Aint No Stoppin Us Now - McFadden & Whitehead

Road to Nowhere - Talking Heads

The Dark Path

A shade of yellow, that once stood opaque
in the rainbow of each glitzy morning,
now became translucent, as if the sun
broke against his own window....

I must tell you
how he managed as the lights went slowly out
to look inside the top glow of each object
and make in his mind a spectrum of inner
texture, of an essence isolate from the
nervous trembling of things struck by light.
---Marvin Bell

How sad we are together!
On the walls-flowers and birds
Are languishing on clouds
The windows are boarded up forever
What is out there-frost or storm?
---Anna

..[b]efore the metal shaving mirrors
and see the shaky future grow familiar
We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...
---Lowell.

b, locked in, a life in parenthesis. K, open, out-reaching, crooked. Grammars of the soul: asking too many questions, Bulleh and Augustine became questions to themselves. And you?

I am as one coarsened by feckless grief

Storm cloud and sun together bring out the

yellow of stone.

Why is yellow the saddest colour on earth? Isn't that what you asked in your oblique way?

We do not care if this has been the century of departures, or emigrations, only your own, your own black path out of here, is of any concern to you, for we, wir negativen, have found a lonely road, and stumble without guidance or an inheritance..I say we out of politeness...

Night falls. Our faces darkened with meditative thoughts and strange premonitions. Lord, you make us blind to ourselves. And this is a blessing-we are told. Distance is the soul of beauty. You want everything to fall, to be lost, so that you can reach out your hand, or someone can, in your name. But you have forgotten, or maybe you could never have known: if you walk on a path for too long you forget that it is a path, or where you are going. Sadness slows us down.

Age is our acceptance of dullness. I've forgotten your face. I should have painted it in my heart and become an infidel. But now it only shimmers, as if infinitely distant, like the reflection of the pale moon on a stream. And I, like a drunk Li Po, want to drown myself in it. And now I think to myself: you were impossible, and perhaps this dark path wasn't a path after all. It was the light from within that failed...

the stalker

You do something to me - Paul Weller

Once, when we were young, we could see each other without feeling ashamed. And so it shall be in the last days. But in the time in-between, the mean-time, all you can do is plot how to kill me, with an image, a few words...those murderous thoughts, sickly sweet to you.

I look over my shoulder to see you, a pace behind, enter my shadow, taking root. As close as a whisper now, the time between a heart beat. The hunter becomes the hunted. The princess smiles, the prince weeps.

Childhood has passed now. Let us not give a second thought to it. The autumn breeze rustles through the burnt-out leaves. Goodness has exhausted itself. And we cannot stay here any more. Already, there is a premonition of spring. Glaciers and hearts will melt. But this second thought fills me with dread. For it was on a day like this that Ymir was slain.

a city of dark lights

Dark-lanterns over the incumbent Thames.

-

You are in the habit of reminding me of what I am not, of places that I no longer see or feel. Such is your custom. For ten nights I have talked with you in dreams, and woken to see the form of your absence, as if the outline of your body was traced on the floor with chalk, your heart on the ground next to mine.

-

There is an unknown place where the unrelenting mind finds you. The green in the blue washing up, sloshing against, the steps that lead nowhere. Past Cleopatra's needle. Remember? Why would you? There, I saw you with your tangled hair talking to someone deep in the shadows, knotting his unsuspecting heart, and it is there I first thought of murder. Perhaps I, too, am but a shade or the drowned out life of another, my words like the petals you aimlessly fling into the deeps.

-

There, under the bridge, where the hidden river meets the Thames. Like the dark waters under the land, unredeemed, I waited. In the dead of night, your voice distant and strange, like a foreigner in my city. Speak, now, or forever bite your tongue, since the midnight hour is upon us. And the ruins of generations is in my blood, slowing my fingers, darkening my face, sharpening my eyes...

Seize the Day

For Nichole:

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
----Herman Melville

Did that other, older place really exist or did we dream it, wish it that way? When one is young nothing is more real to us than the day we live; nothing is more real (though irrelevant) than the day that has passed. This is quite the opposite when we grow older. The past is another country.

I described Lahore to someone as a very large village of seven million people.They replied:

Don't you know it was once the capital of the Mughal Empire.

But Lahore is the centre of the world (if not the universe) and has no concern for the passing splendour of insignificant things like an Empire! She remains a ramshackle collection of villagers, acrobats, vagabonds, prostitutes, pimps, dreamers, poets, broken-hearted fools, bumpkins, fanatics, pseudo-intellectuals, and malicious gossipers (and that's just the elite!) Nowhere else will you see someone dress up in a housecoat, burn fires in the late afternoon, start the day at eleven o'clock or people sweep up rubbish in the early morning fog with such grace, one arm behind their backs. The aim always, and everywhere, is to do nothing. With wonderful indifference the Lahori will characteristically say, If not, then not.

The old, run down part of Lahore is still called the inner city-and rightly so, because what remains but memories? ; for the Lahori his city is greater than Mecca. He who hasn't seen Lahore hasn't been born, so they say.

This is the way things were, the way things are. Lahore, eternal Lahore, indestructible to the very end.
-------------------------------

Was listening to a tribute to John Arlott. Some of his famous quotes:

1. Of Derek Randall, a cricketer bursting with nervous energy:
"And he walks to the crease like an unmade bed."

2. Of a cover drive played by Wally Hammond:
"And the whole of summer was rolled into that one stroke."

I like that. Everything summarised by a single action or phrase, like volo ut sis.

When someone says something that distills the whole story down to a simple but elegant phrase, when they can say that it "all boils down to" in a poetic way then we say: he has caught the whole river in a small cup.
---Swami.

--------------------

The Dougal tells me of a Turkish man who has joined the BNP. They call him half-wog!

Was reading that there were 60,000 Mandaeans in Iraq in the 1990's; there are now just over 5,000.

Reading the story of Toni Balestra. Walking back home after appearing on University Challenge he stops, inexplicably, to help someone having trouble starting his car. The man offers him a lift. The car crashes. Toni cannot remember anything that happened after. That was 1975. Thirty two years on he has near perfect memory of events prior to the accident but nothing-not even short term memory-after. It is as if life has stopped at that precise moment, as if the whole of one's life depended on that one fatal decision. One juncture in time structuring the whole of time.

Plenty Coups says of life in the reservation: And then nothing happened.
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The more I think about Bellow's Seize the Day the more I think of its religious undertones. Reading backwards always means we read another book. The main protagonist changes his name, tries to find his real name, which is the freedom of the individual, not of the generations, the species.

And the father refuses to carry the son's burdens. He will have to suffer on his own to come to the truth: I am not going to pick up a cross. I'll see you dead, Wilks, by Christ...

On the chaos of a life with no order of the soul, a life that isn't strung together in any theme but only progresses in fits and starts: Everything was like the faces of a playing card, upside down, either way.

Wilks must learn: Bringing people into the here-and-now.The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us..Only the present is real.

And what is real, what is imaginary?
Dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects.

The worst kind of people always want to look at you in a clear mirror or a camera. But extreme beauty (and ugliness..Medusa) cannot be perceived directly. What is the right way to look?

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own which he figured out by private thinking..you had to translate and translate, explain and explain, and it was the punishment of hell not to understand or be understood and yet the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone..There sons and fathers are themselves, and a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel's mouth. There truth for everybody may be found...

the summer of '85

Or was it '86? Anyway, Amer, my cousin, the ultimate cool dude (something like 'the Swede' from Roth) showed up out of the blue, straight back from Venice Beach. Who else amongst the Paks listened to soul and blues (er, well, except for the Dougal, but then she was also listening to Rimsky-Korsakov as well).

And this was the one song of that summer.

Summer.
Victoria park, stealing a court to play tennis in, or one-touch football on the patch of grass we called 'Wembley'; lazy summer days sucking berry-flavoured icicles, or playing cricket against the old tree late, late into the evening. Bjorn Borg, the man of all seasons, beyond the seasons. Reveling in the Windies crushing the English-Welsh and immigrant sentiments swirling, taking delight in the defeat of the beast. And to this day, still find it hard to admit that white folks can be revolutionaries! Though there is E.P.

Miles: white musicians: always one beat behind the tempo.

Yes, there was the racism, the encounters with the occasional yobs (running for my life in one instance) but the strange thing about childhood is that you don't think about distinctions (Roxana: please take note!). Not Welsh, not Pakistani; neither muslim nor christian, not black or white. Not this, not that -the Hinus would say. And why do I need to read about this later: neither Greek nor Jew, neither of 'the West' or 'the East'.

Still flinch at the word 'true': a true muslim (baloney!) or a true patriot (nonsense on stilts). These are meaningless words to me. Hannah was, as always, spot on. I feel like being sick when I see people waving their little flags, all starry-eyed. Or Jewish settlers with their fake beards, 'pious' little christians with their sunday-school, Ned-Flanders drivel, or muslims with their suffocating cardboard morality.

So, how did I end up like the black sun? Listening to Chopin and Bach, for Christ's sake! This defeats me. [Answers on a postcard].

Minefield - I Level

different trains

Steve Reich - Different Trains (1988) - Europe--During the War - Kronos Quartet

On this day more than any other I want to be alone. To be alone is to be complete, she said. But sometimes one finds things, like a flower growing in the cracks of the abstract city, or a mushroom slumbering in the tall grass, lazily, aimlessly dreaming away, running down time and one is amazed that all that is incomplete is so fragile, tender, and precious. At Mile End thirty small children scramble aboard, the crackling of their laughter disturbing the serious world of the adults. They are herded in, though they don't seem to mind this. In other times,on other trains, in other places, there would be no such laughter.

as straight as the crow flies

Dark, wounded, crow sat on the rooftop, alone at last, above the world, his mind slowly turning, glistening with dark thoughts. Nothing is nothing. And nothing brings peace.

From a distance he spied her beyond the window. Sees her clearly. Surrounded by people, engaged in glittering conversation, her head tossed back now and then in convulsions of laughter, her image in the mirror like a painting; the clinking of ice, the crackling of fires, the sparkling, illumined world of humans with its light bouncing off objects, spreading fan-like through green glass; the warmth of human fellowship, the solidarity of being, of two-ness. The rich, luxurious patterned life, a life that is woven from repose and joy and deep still moments...all this was like something out of a story for Crow.

Crow. Above the world, alone at last. Spiked existence, nothing like the angular mind of the humans. Crow, God's failure, felt the warmth of his own body against the bitingly cold northern wind for a while. Then some ice fell into his eye, like a shard of glass, or stinging grey ashes.

Age after age, generation after generation, carrion-crows had survived on the morsels of the one thing necessary. A single thought and sharpened insight had seen them through the passing seasons, the thawing of the great seas, the migrations from warmer climes to the barbarian lands. But now existence was sinking into essence, his silver-pointed words inheriting the black, the summer-gold of his heart fading the more he remembered. Tongue-twisted, he would remain silent, speechless. The frenzy of a chaotic mind, the soul wandering through the endless night, the blueness that leads to blindness. He sees his lifeless shadow on the snow, like a discarded kite, paler and uglier than he imagined, and he thinks to himself: I am not me. I am another.

in the heart of the cave

A presence revealed by pleasure. Each creature here is at home in man..They are making a single sign, and they are dancing in a circle to make this sign..They were for the dark. They were hidden in the dark so that what they embodied would outlast everything visible.
--John Berger.

A hand, a smile, a sign. The sign. Of your presence. But a sign is sign of what isn't here, but there.
The name that names least is the name.

Crow asked Man what it was like to live in a cave, all alone?

You tell me, replied Man.

But the cold, the absence of light, the waiting for the sun over the horizon... how can that be endured, asked the dark one.

Yearning makes the heart grow deeper. In the darkness we do not look for footprints, but summon all our strength and wait attentively so that what was lost may be found again, and again.

Crow was exasperated: You're such a strange one, poor Man. Don't you miss the open, don't you dream of other lives, other realities? Have you no desire to break out of the circle?

You ask so many questions, dear Crow! Here, in the heart of the cave we see many things, dream much, and make many long and arduous journeys. Here, in the inside city there are many strange, exotic, and wondrous places. And is it not said:

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.

Crow could not fathom man's words: You speak with such a twisted tongue my friend and it saddens me to think of you down here, afraid and unknown.

The man laughed and Crow flew away.

Crow, you are like a black sun, soaring above the real world, with the essence of man in your heart, your flight in the white sky like a stroke of black ink from one of my brushes.

And with that Man, sad at the thought that his friend had left him, took out his knife and carved an image of the crow into the heart of the cave.

You shall always be far from me, beloved Crow. But you shall always be near as well.

Bowie 1, Taleban 0

Latest score just reaching us...

Under Pressure - Queen & David Bowie

for China girl:

China Girl - David Bowie

Life in Stone

The night is also a sun.

And for many a year thou might have seen the sun, on its rising, incline away from their cave on the right, and, on its setting, turn aside from them on the left, while they lived on in that spacious chamber.
---Q:18:17

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

From Celia:

Here's a poem for you, too, Billo. Anna, of course - first, last and always:

Yet somewhere life is simple, after all,
A light to warm and cheer and glisten
A neighbour there at dusk across the wall
Chats with a girl, with only trees to listen
To this, the tenderest talk of all.

The life we lead is decorous and wearing,
Our bitter trysts impend, like rites to preach,
While with its gusts a harebrained wind is tearing
The clauses off a scarcely started speech.

For nothing, though, are we prepared to lose
Our granite city great with fame and woes,
Its spreading rivers with their crystal floes,
Its gloomy gardens dusky green repose,
All those half-heard accents of the muse.

Beneath the chill roof of my empty lair
I count not the days that are hollow,
The Apostles letters I study there,
The words of the Psalmodist I follow.

But blue are the stars, the frost all lace;
New marvels each tryst heaps on,-
In the Book a red maple leaf marks the place
Of the High Song of Solomon.

Anna Akhmatova. From White Flock. 1915.

10:49 AM

out of place

Out of touch. Out of sight, ought of mind.

Previously the barbarian had always been recognisable, always hovering around the city gates, menacingly. But now, who is to say what is inner and what is outer? We live cheek by jowl with strangers and there is no place to where we could expel and confine 'the other'..we're running out of wastelands. From now on we will have to exclude the undesirables from within the city walls. The exclusion of the underclass is one template for this, one way of making the poor invisible. Millions of people may live in slum conditions in Karachi but if you live in 'Defence' chances are you will be shocked to learn that such places really exist, that people who look like us, who speak the same words for loving kindness are, in fact, real people.

How to build a city within a city.

Exclusion zones and CCTV...a surveillance society; the law itself can be used to prevent "anti-social behaviour," keep people from trespassing, strengthen immigration and naturalization laws. Apartheid is only the most blatant form of these interdictory spaces.

Virtually all cities across the world are starting to display spaces and zones that are powerfully connected to other valued spaces across the urban landscape, as well as across national, international and even global distances. At the same, though, there is a palpable and increasing sense of local disconnection in such places from physically close, but socially and economically distant, places and people.

They roam the streets like ghosts, shadows, mirror images of the virtually connected elites. The nightmares of the latter are centred around these steppenwolves: prowlers, stalkers, loiterers, beggars, travellers & gypsies, paedophiles in the community, Islamic radicals ("the Islamic threat"). Be afraid, be very afraid. Car bombs and unknown diseases, dirty bombs. According to Stephen Flusty the paramount concern of urban developers is to bar access to these undesirables, "losers".

Community living. Sure. But who, exactly, is my brother. Across these 'internal moats' one can be excused for thinking there is only Friend and Enemy.
---from Bauman, Liquid Times.

Venice.

The power of the economic contract trumps all and something the State is forced to recognise on pains of overlooking the dominant form of power; even Christian fellowship or fraternity is ineffectual in this regard. Venice is a city of strangers, a floating, shimmering world. Is the intense feeling for community a reaction to weak ties of citizenship?

The Jews represent pollution (a familiar theme in the sordid history of antisemitism). Merchants bow to them when agreeing to a contract rather than face the ignominy of bodily contact: a simple handshake. The market does, indeed, provide for the needs of strangers. The Jew is the stranger to the common (Christian) body. Venice's fear of decline, her self-loathing, is projected on to other people (a message for today, perhaps). The city cannot bind people together any more, the polis is falling away at the seams..only fear and creature comforts can produce that warm glow of belonging now. In 1397 they have to wear yellow badges. In 1416 prostitutes have to wear yellow scarves. Both are polluters and lax morals lead to moral and political decline.

The ghettos. Purity and danger: the old tribal instincts yet again. But from this separation, from within this accursed land, something holy could emerge...
--From Flesh and Stone

Night on the Sun

Hush, gentle one, the roar subsides, the seas of light settle. What was meant to be, now is. On the far side of the moon there are people identical to us living different lives, the mirror image of our own. There, black is white and in is out. And it is night on the sun.

Night has fallen on the sun, has come to rest there, give her solace. Darkness has made her visible again. And so we gaze, and gaze, intently and with ever greater longing. No more reflections or looking through the glass darkly; but eye to eye, and face to face at last-a different type of blindness at the still point of the heart.

And you walk beside the beloved, lost, and found, like the sea and the shore, when it is night on the sun. But here, here on earth, only black keys are struck, out of tune, with no reason and no rhyme. Here there was a kind of coldness in your stare even when it wasn't night on the sun. And when it is night on earth, black is still black, blue is still blue; I am still me, and you are still you.