stray reflections

I have borrowed/stolen this stunningly beautiful picture from flowerville (I hope she doesn't mind!)

"Merton sought fullness of man's inheritance; this inclusive view made it impossible for him to deny any authentic scripture or any man of faith. Indeed, he discovered new aspects of truth in Hinduism, in the Madhyamika system, which stood halfway between Hinduism and Buddhism, in Zen, and in Sufi mysticism. His lifelong search for meditative silence and prayer was found not only in his monastic experience but also in his late Tibetan inspiration. His major devotional interests converged in what he called "constantia" where "all notes in their perfect distinctness, are yet blended in one" ... Not only in religion and religious philosophy but in art, creative writing, music..."

~~~

'the sufi is he whose thought keeps pace with his foot'

I love that saying since it not only indicates the importance of a sense of proportion, of not letting one's thoughts run wild, disjointedly into a realm of fantasy, but it also suggests that thought must be lived by the whole person, 'incarnated' or anchored in our being...that our spirit is not opposed to earth and that finding one's own pace, one's own "groove," is the same as finding out who one is-even though 'finding' is not 'knowing'. And since we always walk on, thought, in this deeper sense, cannot be fixated with an object, but is in itself an approach, a living of life, a real life that is open, creative, attentive, full of unscripted ways..a broken circle.

Stray reflections always start out from a point-and our fidelity to ourselves and to others means that they never really leave home.

When the swami turned her back, my heart turned with her.

unbeing

Lucian Blaga is silent as a swan
In his land
the snow of being stands for words.
His soul is on a quest,
a silent, centuries-long quest,
since forever
and until the last boundary mark.
It seeks that water where the rainbow drinks
It seeks that water
from which the rainbow drinks
its beauty, its unbeing.

I sit alone, now. Dreaming much, so that by mid-morning I am nowhere. And you are nowhere too. I stand by the window with my back to the door, learning of other directions. Learning off by heart. Like my silver watch kept safely in a velvet pouch, in a dark cupboard, keeping time silently.

und seh meiner Hand zu,
wie sie den einen
einzigen
Kreis zieht

Time falls all around, like golden pollen. Melts all around her. Time's in her pocket, ticking loud on a stalled hand, and time will tell, even as she wounds. But for now he stands alone, with all the time in the world, like a watch counting the hours, stuck on that first moment when he saw her, by the first light, the light before the darkness of their being.

.

A white flower grows in quietness.

ice melts in the sea, says: "I am nothing.
all images have melted in this fire!"
she said: " then why do you still talk of 'I'?
is this not a remnant of the snow?
as long as the snow remains, the red rose is hidden"

---after Rumi.

the morning snow was without blemish. quiet, like a blank page. no foot marks could be seen. there were no journeys. so followed you blindly.came to a full stop. my heart became still. near the rose garden: lost myself.fell in the infidel well. found the moon (like Li Po).saw your face, and the lovely mole above your lips. wondered: how many others had drowned in you.

End of the Line

The poet-keeper of the High Line is the photographer Joel Sternfeld. He has been taking pictures of it in all seasons for the past year, and he has a gift for seeing light and space and color-romantic possibility of every kind-where a less sensitive observer sees smudge and weed and ruin. The High Line does not offer a God’s-eye view of the city, exactly, but something rarer, the view of a lesser angel..
---Adam Gopnik.

I never quite get to the last stop but it's always there, shrouded in mystery. There, other people live. The strange lives of other people; so ordinary that your heart could break. The final stop on the central line borders an infinite white space and maybe has absorbed something of its nothingness. As we approach it the train driver announces: this train goes no further. All change, all change, please.

You won't find a new country, won't find
another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods,
will turn grey in these same houses.
You'll end up in this city. Don't hope
for things elsewhere:there is no ship for you,
there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this
small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
---Cavafy, 'The City'

Never make the mistake of dying in this city.
--Swami.

Never make the mistake of growing old, son.
---Ubo.

A path that is walked on long enough ceases to be a path.

The beaten path, the end of the line. We retrace our steps there. Just beyond the edge of the known world, the deeply familiar streets that you could run down blindly, is another place. Is it the origin or the nether land? Perhaps it is the promised land? Here one encounters reality beyond words and books, beyond the pretence of status and accumulated meanings. There's no time for that. If you speak at all, then speak plain English. Let your voice ring true.

You walk through the streets like a ghost. Things only seem vaguely different, as if the world had been displaced by a few degrees or the watches were all five minutes behind schedule. The faces are no blanker than others and yet an eerie feeling shimmers through the ordinariness reawakening the power present in all of us to become strangers to the map of places and paths that we call reality...

We, we latecomers have nothing to do but transcribe the words of others. Like the barbarians to whom we once denied entry to the city, we have dreamed with great longing for an escape. This other zone is a hidden, quiet corner of the universe. There we imagine we can undo the certainties of place and once again allow our destiny to become a direction, opening up to wide inner vistas. At last we will become comfortable in our own skin, and re-work all those settled materials; look lovingly back on all we knew and still find something unexpressed. This Late Style means becoming like one of Breughel's hunters, means returning to the world and looking at it from an angle, our unique angle, and realising that the world is not the world any more.

We go back to all that was unsaid. Return to texts we underlined, to dusty books, wondering why this page and no other has its corner turned. So much now seems unexplained. We look for other connections, those that were only dormant, like the bright veins of dazzling minerals set in stone. Try to remember all that was glossed over once again. And all this, let it be added, not to bring things to the surface, to a final resolution-for there can be none- but to deepen what we already know. Nothing is neglected. Every possibility is kept open in these acts of second-thought, re-vision....

A Late Style avoids linear narratives. The ink is not dry. To adopt it is to realise that one's life is infinitely stranger than it is. At the centre of all that strikes you as simply ordinary, plain, or mundane, is the most extraordinary of tales. In the final analysis there is no reconciliation and none is desired. An old man gently touches a flower, as he did when he was a child, and understands now that all life is precarious.

Millions have become strangers to themselves even before they reach this place. Disenchanted, they think untimely thoughts, not identifying with the place or time that has been allotted to them. This sense of lateness resonates with the promise of latent possibilities, the unfolding, ripening of certain potentialities; a trace of what was unthought, of all that was, survives. The line becomes a square, the point a circle.

Without a future, late man returns to those things he once loved. But this is not a final, homeward-bound journey. There are no more journeys, only a longing for what disappears.

Timelines.
Everything has a season. This place is run-down and for some of its inhabitants only survives as long as their memories do. With them the city will also disappear.

old age

A friend recently said to me:

A child is the purest form of humanity. He or she has no concern whatsoever with the distinctions that structure so much of our lives: those of wealth, race, colour, religion, gender, and caste. All she cares about is whether the other person she has contact with loves her or not. If they do, then all is well, and the other is a friend, the beloved. Then there is no question of who loves who more, or which of the two is more dependent on the other. Each is caught in the other's gaze, starstruck.

T chipped in: But surely that isn't the full development of our humanity because it is instinctive, not thought through.

Z, not following T's train of thought: Precisely!

Must we learn, once again, to become like little children, wise children?
~~~

Late style:

Hardy/Berger/Huxley (themes and variations)/Said (late style)...

The strange affinity between old age and conservatism, inflexibility, and pessimism. Not as a rule, of course. But it does seem fairly common nonetheless. And for many people who are morally and intellectually conservative-well, the latter is a genuinely rare phenomenon in these parts-the very word liberal suggests decadence and licentiousness.

The attitude to the west (to take up Mani's theme again) is very much like that of the maulvi's toward a beautiful woman: one may reluctantly acknowledge a noteworthy feature or two but he is led to conclude that she is, after all, only a woman!

This deep-rooted conservatism means that many reach old age prematurely. Doors are closed. Change is an inevitable falling away from some prior state of bliss. This is not the same thing, mind you, as the admirable conservatism that can be given form in Montaigne's words (roughly): "to learn how to die is to learn how to let go; to learn how to live, however, means knowing how and what to cling on to"

This is surely an inescapable human trait: the capacity to discern what is valuable and cling on to it, the reaching out into the darkness, holding on, steadfastness..all of this seems to be of a different order to that of the irritable and tired conservatism of the aged which doesn't know how or when to let go, and that is fixated by habit or instinct to one point of view-rather like a child,as Rumi once said, that only knows the breast in one way.

the lawless heart

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition, and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definition. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form.

Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe the imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.That entire philosophical and dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immaturity which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

Gombrowicz

I shall not refrain [he says] from including among these precepts a new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is none the less of great value in quickening the spirit of invention. It is this: that you should look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some setting you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills, and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, expression of faces, and clothes, and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose strokes you may find every named word which you can imagine.
---Leonardo

Moments of Vision

(photo by Roxana).

Tree, moon, sun rain.
When all was one.
Tree, moon, sun, rain.
When you were mine.

Light falling on a tree takes on its dark structure, illuminates a pattern, is opened up by it; or a tree, done with its ingazing, flows to the moon, grows in lightness. A moment of vision is born of solitude but, like a series of ripples in a pond, reaches out in an ever-expanding series of concentric circles. "One" meets "one". One on one. Rain and the sea are one. And the sea is one. Distinctions suggest indistinctions.

Outside William Morris' house.

The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light and finally they disappear into the hidden depths....and then the sun is reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together again in a loving embrace...and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself, endlessly, eternally. Perhaps it is the ceaseless movement of the stream that allows such an image to form in my mind; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change it is doubtful whether there would be a reflection at all. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time because of the permanent presence of the sun?

Or perhaps it is something more mysterious altogether..my desire for it to be so. Without that longing could there ever be rapture? The image is not nothing, nor is it a mere floating dream in a floating world; black suns exist. But they are not the sun.

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream return to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without its illumination the stream is nothing but a memory, a thing that exists only in the mind as a possibility, empty, narrow, and alone.

Art and Islam (or broken circles)

The divine is a Being whose centre is everywhere, and circumference nowhere.
---Nicolas of Cusa

Islamic art is the silent exteriorization of a contemplative state and...reflects no ideas, but transforms the surroundings qualitatively, by having them share in an equilibrium whose centre of gravity is the unseen...

Aniconism, by precluding every image inviting man to fix his mind on something outside himself and to project his soul on an 'individualizing' form, creates a void.The proliferation of decoration does not contradict this quality of contemplative emptiness; on the contrary, ornamentation with abstract forms enhances it through its unbroken rhthym and its endless interweaving.Instead of ensnaring the mind and leading it into some imaginary world, it dissolves mental 'fixations,' just as contemplation of a running stream, a flame,or leaves quivering in the wind, can detach consciousness from its inward 'idols'.
---Titus Burckhardt.

There are two ways of thinking about the relation between Islam (or religion in general) and art that are quite unsettling. The first view, often propounded by fundamentalists, 'levellers' and iconoclasts, claims that 'pure' Islam actually has nothing to do with art or the the arts. According to this dry, legalistic, puritanical view art is a distraction and, even worse, a grave error since it attempts to take away from God's unique creativity and tarnishes His utter and complete transcendence (I think the Pope alluded to this by pointing to the unfathomable essence of God (or God's apparently arbitrary Will), and the lack of relation with the world (cp. the logos).

A second, somewhat overlapping view, is sometimes made by art historians. What is suggested here is that a desert, nomadic religion is at key points at odds with the aims and driving impulses of Art (yes, with an "A"). Of course, I don't think this can completely be dismissed (though it does miss the mark), but neither can one totally ignore the bad faith and mutual hostilities between the 'civilisations' (historically speaking) that often form the backdrop to such views. If Islam produced any worthwhile art, anything beyond the minor arts of calligraphy and decoration, it was, according to this view, only grudgingly, against its "real" tendencies and better instincts. More to the point, the historical argument continues, to the extent that it did produce wonderful art, this was a borrowing from other civilisations (Byzantine) and urban centres (Hagarism). The fundamental underlying sentiment remains, it is claimed, that of a sober, puritanical disdain for complexity, ambiguity, and the unnecessary (see Iris M's brilliant The Fire and the Sun).

1. It is very odd, very odd indeed, that a religion which allegedly focuses on a rigorous transcendence, on simplicity and austerity, could be so deeply connected to poetry, architecture, handicrafts, and music. One can, of course, take Gellner's way out and claim that the 'high church' indeed represents the orthodox view whilst the 'low church' of folk culture, syncretism and heterodoxy (shi'ism) makes concessions and allows worldliness and representation to sneak back in. But, as Peter Brown says in The Cult of the Saints, such terms are often loaded and the distinctions erroneous.

In fact, it would be truly amazing if religion didn't touch on and vivify what we take to be so central to our humanity. And any muslim would immediately ask: how can there be jalal without jamal?

2. The historical argument is a weak one. I mean, it's fairly well recognized that early Christian art, for example, took on a particular form and that it took time for art to catch up and adequately express the truths it felt important. There's nothing surpising in that, or the fact that there can be borrowed elements. The Crucifixion, for instance, was not central intitially, and even when it has been it has been so in different ways (from Christ Triumphans to the Suffering Christ in the 'West'-and that too very late: Assissi?)

Ikhwan al-safa

Combine Arabic faith, Jewish intelligence, Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism and the Sufi way of life - this would be the perfection of humanity.
---The Brethren of Purity

In trying to make themselves angels, they transformed themselves into beasts.
----Montaigne

There's certainly something about you that gravitates to the simple, to slowness, silence, and starkness. A puritanical soul, lacking in all suppleness. An inflexible mind that has repetitive thoughts. Why else would you find Rothko so appealing? Why else the tangible sense of relief when looking at the everyday winter scenes at the National, away from the stuffy, overwrought, tangled sensibilities of so much before? Abstraction and ideas are, ultimately, more real to you, no?

But, you'd like to think, there's also something that pulls you to the messy pluralism and complexity of the world. Why else would you be inclined to Rembrandt's humanism or to Rothko or to Bellow? And there it is again, rearing it's head, the wahabi instinct that flinches and says: isn't "humanism" a sign of your facetiousness?

five easy pieces

Never read more than you can live.
I can't remember where I read that but it's always sounded right. All those boffs with their dry-as-dust knowledge, those technicians of the spirit. Reading, thinking, not as a way of living but as a career, a way of creating a distance between you and the plebs, a way of appearing profound in a superficial world.

What would it be like to live through a thought? A thought that we could touch, that illuminated our whole being, not just our mind. For eye, mind, hand and heart to be one. A sound thought.


~~~~~
Find your deepest instincts and then stick to them.
Nobility of soul is courage and the sublime virtue of trust. But isn't this given to us, a matter of grace? Who amongst us has the strength to live with mystery, to follow one's instincts trusting that things will work out, this animal repose? The bourgeois soul's love of security.


~~~~~~
Laugh at the whole world and the whole world will laugh at you.
Don't expect "success", don't think non-conformity is easy or complain too much that you are misunderstood. Don't expect other people to do anything but laugh at what you take seriously. "The world loves to blacken all that shines". Folly. Wisdom. Don't stop laughing-at yourself and others..and with others.



~~~~~~
Knowing isn't everything. "Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality".
Not a pleasure that loses itself in flights of imagination, but one that finds home, that is more rounded, at ease, proportional, one is tempted to say. Proportional to the good. Not the incessant compulsion to know everything. There are many things you do not know, that you will never know. It doesn't matter. Not this desire to dissect, analyse, calculate, break-up everything. But to accept the unknown, the hidden in one's life. To keep this sense of wonder that resists 'knowing'.

To understand that life is full of tragedy, farce, comedy, stoicism, good sense..that there is no 'ranking of rankings', there is no one thing. Well, maybe there is. But more than that. That life is full of blank spaces and that even the full ones also sometimes appear empty. And that that is truly a mystery. An acceptance, an awareness of what is given to us.


~~~~~
Volo ut sis.
The supreme wisdom. The quintessential, the 'queen' that moves in all directions; the openness of the hand. A fundamental openness of our being, to others, to the world. If God judges us by appearances then another name for this dazzling freedom is Beauty. But no, more than this: it is the ability to say "yes", the pure desire for the beloved.

Second Thoughts

Sometimes the mechanisms of thought are there, but the content is weak or just barely present, like a low flame, or background music. Like that of a child, all star-gazed, dreamy. Is that because of the relations between the 'I-world' are still fluid, in the process of being moored, anchored to some fixed point? The senses still coming alive, rising to the surface, as it were?

And is this unknowingness also, later, something we aspire to: a creative leap out of the mind and back to life? Not a return to an undivided condition or a pleasure that doesn't sting, but a lived experience of contradictions and distinctions? Of time.

.............The water
flashes
each time you
make it leap-
..................arching its glittering back.

---Denise.

A thought about what passes and takes leave is only a thought. It passes too. Do not give it a second thought. But we do, and that's okay. Necessary. To be human is to have second thoughts. Much is left unsaid; much, too, is unsayable.

First Light

Poplar and oak awake

all night. And through

all weathers of the days of the year.

There is a consciousness

undefined.

Yesterday's twighlight, August

almost over, lasted, slowly changing,

until daybreak. Human sounds

were shut behind curtains.

No human saw the night in this garden,

sliding blue into morning.

Only the sightless trees,

without braincells, lived it

and wholly knew it.
--Denise Levertov.

Light slips into the room. the real thing. blurred objects become clearer, well-defined, as their shadows fall...things sometimes find their shape, their true form at last, even if only briefly-for a minute or so. nothing like right-seeing, by the first light of the day, even if your heart isn't true. then the colours. the grey slowly dissipating, lifting. the weight of the world returns. squares of yellow light gently slanting on white walls like the last remnants of a sad dream.

at night a bird in a tree dreams blindly of a star and remembers nothing of it when morning breaks. you, on the other hand, are still dreaming of green and orange stars at noon.

If (ribbon bow)

If I'd never fallen
or you didn't look
no-one would know my heart

If your love was true
and my heart was yours,
No-one would know who was who.

If I never knew your name
and you didn't know mine
no-one would know my soul

If I was ever fair to thee
and your eyes were dark like mine
then no-one would know my sorrow

~~~~

Sparrows:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another. Whilst he is within, he is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.

- Bede, Ecclesiastical History: Book II

--via Celia

True Colours

She not only gets inside me, she worms her way into my heart like a snake. Deeper. All the way in. I take her in like a slave. I play my part faithfully so I, too, can get to her heart...

---adapted from Lust, Caution.

Love wears forbidden colours like the blue beneath the black. The world carries on in astonishmnet, merriment, gracefulness. The settled quality of a life at ease with itself, the splendour of abundance, of borrowed finery, the peace of not knowing. The given-ness of the world, Their love of fate knows no bounds. Your lip curls, even though you're an oriental.

But elsewhere, far away, there are hands that would know, eyes that would tell. The grey of time passed through us. For a while it seemed as if the universe itself was nothing but a series of grey lines. And it lasted but a moment, like a snowflake falling on your face. But the moment was all. The queen shed a tear, and it fell like a shard of glass into my eye. Now everything is tinged with the blueness of her soul.

the clearing

to love clearly is to see clearly-or something like that. to love, clearly. claritas and caritas. the field that simply exists, unfenced. years of pruning and paring down, fruits that fall, or a labour of love? when all is said and done you're amazed to know how little you know, how much of it was like the sleep of a child. and yet, the dreamlife holds, is sharper, more real. and when we age, we sometimes know eachother blindly, as if a few footsteps in the snow were enough.

awakened from a dream, we are closer; your breath in mine, our souls truly alive only in darkness, quickened, frightened, out of their slumber. I catch a glimpse of you in the cold mirror and am startled. I remember your face, your forehead near mine, as if you were drawing me to your nature. my heart is clear now. there was really only you.

From Denise Levertov:

....

the mirror caught in its solitude
cannot believe you as I believe.
...

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies
within something of another nature
in repose, distinct.
...

Or, to believe it's there
within you
though the key's missing
makes it enough? As if
golden pollen were falling

onto your hair from dark trees.
...

all the while
you are indwelling,
a gold ring lost in the house.
...

not even a wise man
can say, do thus and thus, that presence
will be restored.
...

[without a shadow of a difference]

Sun.
light.
Light
light light light
....

A man growing old is going
down the dark stairs
He has been speaking of the Soul
tattooed with the Law
of dreams
burnt in the bone

Starladen Babylon
buzzes in his blood, an ancient
pulse. The rivers
run out of Eden.
Before Adam
Adam blazes.

"It's alright,"answers
the man going down,
"it's alright-- there are many
avenues, many corridors of the soul
that are dark also.
Shalom."

ethics, economics, and citzenship

R.I.P. Michael.

...

Here's a very interesting collection of short pieces by different people (journalists, writers, academics, activists, politicians).

Underlying most of them is a critique of the narrow view of the self or the individual fostered by the market, the distortion it creates in how we view our relation to others and to the world.

In particular, Mark Vernon on friendship:

[Aristotle's definition of a friend]: "another self":

1. the other self remains 'other'..."unlike erotic love, in which there is a powerful desire to meld with the other, to become wholly dependent upon another...friendship wants the friend to be himself or herself"

2. the other self is a reflection of your own self. a mirror by which to see oneself more clearly. the ability to connect.

3. I-we: the other is distinct, different, but also part of one's life, and from this emerges a totally new way of seeing and being in the world.

Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark—a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.
---Robert Graves.

STAND still, and I will read to thee

A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.

These three hours that we have spent,

Walking here, two shadows went

Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd.

But, now the sun is just above our head,

We do those shadows tread,

And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.

So whilst our infant loves did grow,

Disguises did, and shadows, flow

From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so.

That love has not attain'd the high'st degree,

Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,

We shall new shadows make the other way.

As the first were made to blind

Others, these which come behind

Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.

If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,

To me thou, falsely, thine,

And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.

The morning shadows wear away,

But these grow longer all the day;

But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.

Love is a growing, or full constant light,

And his first minute, after noon, is night.

---John Donne.

new sensation