stray reflections

The lack of direction in our lives is startling, a kind of 'way'...I guess. Of course, there are paths chalked out by religion, tradition; others that are marked out by professional commitments, the need to simply get by in the world. The seasons and other greater circles working in you. Some ancient feeling down in the bones, caused by some particularly melancholy ancestor no doubt-if that doesn't sound too melodramatic for a lovely Spring morning.

All the leaves are swept up, for no apparent reason. Even before the sun has spread its warmth before us. You read a few lines on 'ethics' but that doesn't hold your attention. How could they?! Knowing is not understanding. Putting your Jewish hat on: the 'fist philosophy' is not a philosophy at all. Take off your hat, step in doors.

Little r is surprised to see the birds so active in the morning.

"Come down from there!" she calls out to them. "Why don't you catch them, then, and bring them to me?" she asks, like a little princess.

Because each thing in the world has its own scope for freedom, its own angle to the universe, I try to reply.

"Oh...but that's no good" she says, not quite sure of herself. At last, I've caught her off balance. She wants to narrow down the angles, bring them back to herself, see the birds close up. Another bird flashes by,waist-high, its red breast like a sudden pulse of life.

She continues, "if I could just hold one for a while..then when she flies off, in whatever direction she likes, she'll come back to my hands, or at least remember me."

When you write again in your diary

Remember

To see the golden leaf in the summer sun

Or perhaps the blue rock-orchid

On one of our absent wanderings

On Table Mountain

I who have mingled my blood with the blood of

The sun at evening in Lisbon

Have carried you with me like a mirror

And I have written you

On the open page

Of my desolation

Your nameless word

When you write again in your diary

Remember

To see in my eyes

The sun that I now cover for always

With black butterflies.

---Ingrid Jonker.(courtesy of Bree)

song, courtesy of Roxana.

always returning, always going

hold. the bright pieces in your hand. bright and clear, the last light of the sun still on them. a rabbi had once said, 'no heart is as whole as a broken heart'. who will think of you on empty pages. at the given hour, which way will you look? oh, how we come and go...

metaphor comes under suspicion at the hour of death.

we have our suspicions. that autumn was not a season, that fish lives on without the Tigris, that your silence was a kind of last word. to be religious is to think in images. your picture fades, the colours drained of strength by the hour, becoming softer, greyer, yellowing and curling at the edges like dying leaves.

'light is supposed to be fast

but it doesn't reach me'

the light within falters, fails. the eye forgetting its time-honoured role. so you take a step towards. what? in some direction. does it matter when in the mirror your face darkens, finds its final form, when your late-summer soul flourishes, ripens into a likeness unbeknown, when hands that would know your face fall...

'seeing in that mirror

a water without the life of water,

a face aging

to less generosity than it had'

today. no verb for tomorrow. rooted, for a while, that's true. but as nomadic as yesterday's vanishing snow. what sad clowns we are. and, after all, why should a jester mimic weakness, frailty, unreliable memory?

'we are things thrown in the air

alive in flight...

our rust the colour of the chameleon'

it wasn't always this way. do you remember when we were like children, when

'we could see clearly

before the glass hurt'?

(from Robert Lowell)

~~~

Why ought I to be moral? Does anyone really ask that question? We might want to know what could constitute an answer to such a question. But we might simply avoid the question altogether.

1. To think that one must first have reasons for acting morally strikes us as slightly odd. What purpose do reasons or theory serve here? To bind us, oblige us, to act morally, I guess. Otherwise, is the right act contingent on all sorts of details: the degree of sympathy one feels with the other person, the intensity of our identification with his or her plight, the conflicts with our own interests ...The vagaries of the emotions, the lack of imagination, all that means we far too often close our hands to our brother.

2. What guarantees can there be? Religion, reason? The 'face' of the other may not elicit a response if we're not attentive.

3. Is it a 'moral act' or moral character we're talking about? The need to move away from the notion of choice and the isolated acts of the will. What is the background fabric, so to speak, which allows us and encourages us to act morally, to refine our intentions through self-understanding during our lives?

4. Do we really seek the 'grounds' of morality or the specific content of it: how should one act, not why?

5. A life without rituals, sustained practices, the time and space for self-reflection leaves us with what? Abstract principles, rules, do not engage us unless they're already intuitively grasped-and how can they be unless they're-at least at some level-already lived. In any case, their appeal sounds too distant and too dry to our modern ears. We want to work things out for ourselves.

6. So, here we are, without any coherent picture of ourselves, or any central notion of human nature or our place in the universe. We stumble along.

This is fine. Only this groping for certainty is to be avoided...and can only be avoided if one is already in good health.

The remarkable thing. We do get on by. Each child that is born is another opening up of hope, a new, bright, fresh angle onto the world. A child extends her hand, and it is taken up. In some sense that is all that matters. We, the wise children, understand all that follows and precedes such 'acts'. The act is not mere outward behaviour, an empty gesture, but nor is it an "expression" of thought or one's intentions. It is an inscrutable bundle of all three, something that one learns and understands over time.

Finally, the eye sees what the hand did, and the human heart follows its trackless way...

fusion...

From one of my favourite CDs.

What is a trance except the forgetting of oneself, the remembering of the beloved? How can freedom and openness exist in such a constricted heart?

Putting my political hat on for a sec.
...

Last week a Balochi leader was asked: "Is it true that you're getting help from outsiders, from the Indians against the Pakistani army"

[Earlier, Mengal had said: "it's the Punjabi army, not the Pakistani army...]

To which he replied: "Even if we need to get help from the devil, we'll take it".

In the meantime, the killings and abductions go on. You sometimes think: the beauty of art and music doesn't make a jot of a difference. Drink up, Khayyam,time's heavy hand is upon our heart...

~~~

In this music you can hear strains of a home long abandoned. The older the music is, the more you think the first note contains all other possibilities (Barenboim). From one to two. 'Me & You'. Not quite the shortest poem in the world, but one of the most beautiful. The religious purists and the patriots, on the other hand, go from two to one: one true religion or 'one nation, one people'. Both have difficulty with the messiness of the real world, of real people. And both come on the back of determining who isn't quite a true believer, who isn't really a 'person' (read: jews, gays, the poor, women, ethnic minorities...).

half-moon

I'm in half a mind...you don't half talk. When the moon wanes, you half-heartedly recall another place. Two legs bad, four legs good, he says, half-seriously.


She said:

so
]

]
]
]
]

---Sappho.

Broken, he replied:
[

[
[
[
[
what?

Dream-vision

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here.
---J. Berger.


W.S. Merwin: I don’t think it was an urge to improve the world. It was an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed. I think I felt that as a very small child. Though how much of it I owe to my father or his family, I can’t say.


The world around me did not seem to me to be satisfactory. There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement—and I did have a very strong sense of growing plants and trees and so forth, and still do. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jer- sey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there. I’ve talked and tried to write about that, but I feel that I haven’t even begun to say it. But that hunger, that tropism, is something that I don’t believe we can live without, even if we aren’t aware of what we’re missing and by now many of us aren’t aware of it. We’re missing it just the same. We’re deprived of something essential.
(courtesy of anton)
~~~~

Talking to a distant relative last night:

her: Is your heart settled here now?

me: No! (I can't be bothered to be polite). How can it ever be settled?

her: So, it's a matter of compulsion then?

me: Isn't it always when it comes to such things?

She then talks about how she's lost a lot of her friends. They had to go, it was their time, we all have to go sometime. We all have to go back to the Creator. And then she laughed.

You know, I'd just been reading about this, about how everything moves in circles, how everything in nature must "return" to its source, and it had seemed quite profound-though something nagged away at me even then.

I guess if someone had actually lived those words, those thoughts, it would be fine; but it just seems so fake, such a cliche in these parts..one hears it all the time from 'the religious': this world is temporary, the Real is somewhere else.

And then she said: we are suffering and God is showing us a glimpse of hell now.

Well, I said, wouldn't it be better if He showed us a glimpse of Heaven now instead?

Anyway, there's something not right about that type of equanimity.

Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world.
---Iris Murdoch.

songlines

(Courtesy of Bree. Her wonderful page is here )



Love the old small-town feel to this. Crikey! This is a million miles away from the small Welsh town I grew up in. And then again: spirituals!



Is there a song, a line, a word, a feeling like love that is so old that it contains all others? The First Man, the First Woman. Already old, so many days of the sun on their hands, the history of what would come to pass already caught and reflected in their gaze. At the last moment, we see trees, and clouds, and stars, once again, free and open, with a true heart, just as a child sees them.

When I hold little r's hand she skips about, as if the concrete floor was nothing but a beautiful garden, and she a rabbit. But you don't half talk a lot of gibberish, little one. To which she replied: "Ha! Have you seen your blog recently?!" Little r, the great key-master, who can wind up anyone in a flash.

What lines we draw! Some in the sand, some around ourselves, and lots between one human and another. Some seek a word that is 'true and living'. By sheer luck, I've come to love nonsense. I come from a family of clowns, and recognize them everywhere.The line became a curve, and life a broken circle.

the secularization debate

"Curiosity is vital. The finest gift you can give your children is a magnifying glass, so with a little effort they can make their own discoveries."
---Tommi Ungerer.

~~~

Got roped into chairing a session on 'secularization'. Probably the absolutely worst person to do so because: 1) I couldn't give a flying fuck about the debate and 2) there isn't really a debate anyway.

First point: the people who want to talk about secularization here in the land of the pure are usually alienated intellectuals who see "disenchantment" everywhere. In the 'west' and in the good ol' muslim heartlands, there's been a falling away from 'unity' (the fragmentation of value brigade: there's no more over-arching religious perspective and that's a real loss). And, the pseudo-intellectuals go on, in the 'west' what we see is rationalization, capitalism, modernity, call it what you will, with its pernicious effects on the family and a decline in values such as respect, decency, empathy etc., etc.The de-sacralization of the world, the radical disjunction between ourselves and 'nature'. Old hat, really, and ever so tiresome.

One of the speakers (a German fanatic) harps on about how you have to be a 'whole' religious person. You can't be a Christian just on Sunday, and you can't, if you're a Muslim, put your religion in a drawer and take it out whenever you want (you can, actually. Mine's in a cabinet that I save for special occasions). Secularization, the fanatic continues, is the transposition of western categories on unsuspecting Muslims who do not make this distinction between sacred and profane, between the body and the spiritual (if you'd actually seen some of the bodies, you might suspect them of poor aesthetic judgement here!). Jesus! Where's my pistol. More to the point, where's the tea and sarnies?

Those who don't want to talk about secularization are much more straightforward in that they just kill those who oppose their notion of an Islamic state and sharia. But the talkers. To them, to be secular is to be a licentious scoundrel, debauched and drunk. 'Wine, women and kebabs' as the old saying goes. If only!!

Desire

Tastes are given.

Something quite fundamental in economics that means we don't look at how preferences are generated or even evaluated (beyond first-order desire). That I desire something over something else (economics deals with comparative wants) is all that counts. To think otherwise is to open up the discussion to ethics-and that is something economics studiously avoids. To question why these desires and not others, or whether these desires are good is, at heart, to ask non-economic questions.

Of course, the satisfaction of preferences is a good thing, but there's no real focus on a substantive view of the good. Would the satisfaction of any preferences be a good thing, then? It seems to me that economics is vague on that question. At the very least, then, it seems that it is really interested in the 'structure' of the good and not the good per se. i.e the dominating notion is that of 'betterness' : I prefer x to y, and getting x over y is better for me.

Note: this is not meant to mean that there is anything like 'objectively' better, independent of my desires, and, secondly, 'better' is a comparative term, and thirdly, I do not desire something because it has more goodness to it. Desire comes first. It's just there. Fourthly, the satisfaction of my desire is a good thing, for sure, but why or what kind of goodness? Why should the satisfaction of my desire for two cinnamon rolls (x) over reading Bento's sketchbook (y) necessarily be a good thing, except in a purely formal sense: because I desire it so?

Of course, the connection with freedom, autonomy. But if we're not even concerned about the formation of those desires how serious are we in espousal of freedom?

Taste is not about judgement (as in the older sense of the word: a wine taster doesn't say he can go from 'I prefer x to y' to 'x is better than y' in the same way that he might say I prefer chocolate ice-cream to strawberry). Same with aesthetics. In the modern sense, taste becomes undiscriminating, a raw sensation, unmediated by culture or social norms or tradition.

What limits or what reflection can there be on our desires then? If desire is hooked to the imagination, if pleasure is not bound to our natural bodily limits or to socially defined boundaries (the absence of which is hubris: the Greeks and their fear of infinity), then what is the end, can there possibly be an end?

The definition of economic man (the irony of having a 'definition', which is a delineation!)...

'Man has infinite wants and limited resources'

Of course, we have to remember that 'wants' are not 'needs' but, rather, desires. But if we have limited means to achieve those 'wants', isn't that a recipe for disaster? Aren't we in a permanent situation of scarcity? By definition, we always lack something. Happiness is always around the corner, never here. We are 'constantly moving happiness machines'. The pursuit of liberty, happiness is what it's about.

What would it mean to take step out of this equation? What would it mean to have repose in the face of our insufficiency? To desire much is to miss much. But that is part of our humanity. To renounce desire seems neither possible nor 'desirable'. Should we, then, focus on what is (or should be) the 'object' of our desire? There is a danger there. And this line is always tempting: love is not a reason, but the origin of reasons.

"There is no true connection between love and poison and yet they seem to be points on the same map"
---John Cheever.

The old coast, of days long gone, brought back in the hazy light of a late afternoon. The intensification of light, the whiter it gets, the less clear you are. The light that distinguishes, draws out your shadow, is real. Somehow, you believed the quality of the light, its apprehension, was linked to your moral understanding.

The darkening of our hands, the narrowing down of our eyesight, trying to pick out a word like a blanched bone. You, with your white glance my way, loving what you hate, veiling your desire. atone-ment, when we must stay partly lost to find each other...this shrewd obliquity of speech, the broken word,and the white lie, the bleak skills we learned, to get on by, without being noticed.

waiting...

Blue and gold, and the lilac flower on your heart. Blue and gold for me, and the lilac flower of your heart for the other. It fell to the ground, and you laughed. "And tell me, why shouldn't I laugh?", she asked.

All the smiles were from your side; all the tears from mine.

How the blue mourned the loss of the red, your absence as real as a dream remembered, a dream forgotten. And when we wake? The world will still be muted, the lights darkened. Then this will seem like a flash of lightning on a summer's day. Then this.

Inwardness was a ruse, the smiles feigned, the sweetness faked at will, the hollowing out of your words with time...and all this, for a fleeting glimpse of a reflected image, a drowned world that we once shared.

goodwill hunting

"Standing, I pray to understand the transports and infirmities of my flesh"

Who said that, and when?

It does sound very ancient. Maybe Augustine? Nah, it was actually Cheever, and the full quote is: "Standing on the porch..."More contemporary, was this: "I am tired of this thread of love and whiskey, of courage and memory that is the only thing to hold my world together." But there are other times where you're drawn back to what seems to be very old, perhaps one might even say 'perennial' concerns: "Reason cannot instruct the carcass to be cheerful". Carcass?!

~~~

There's something to this; the notion that good spirits, a good will, and good health are simply given-or not. And if they are, then all seems right in the world and there is no use for speculation or memory or philosophy. The idea that one cannot work towards achieving this and that tranquility of the mind is as random a thing as the weather. A short burst of light, darkness and gold and silver. The awful thought: the parceling out of human fates...

~~~

Too much introspection is bad for you. You can only imagine unhappy people blogging. Today you turned on the shower and there was a sudden gush of fresh air followed by a burst of Spring-clean cold water. Gradually the pipes above your head started to creak like an old ship and there was hot water, the glazed windows rapidly steaming up, producing a kind of insular world that is at once comforting and impossible to leave. The beauty of invisibility!

As you shaved you noticed how sparkling clean the edges of the mirror were, more crystal-like than the dull central space. You thought back to all the faces you've seen over the years. You get to see a lot in this profession and sometimes you think you can pick out telltale signs of dark depression, or a strange unknowing sadness. Other times you think you can discern the 'aunty-ness' of some of the girls, the bovine acceptance of things already exhibited in their late teens.

Yesterday a group came swaggering into my room; all three had unique names, very distinct. And there was this brashness and arrogance about all of them which meant they looked straight through you. You could tell straight off that there was this slight contempt in their eyes and it was so refreshing to see that! "No, it's spelt with an 'E', not an 'I'", said one of them.

"What was the relation between Smith's and Hume's ideas?" another asks. It's all so charming, this desire to see me fall flat on my face, to make me look like a fool (of course, there's no fooling an old fool). How the fuck would I know what the relation is! The young girl, with her small and dazzling face. None took notes, and none were interested in anything I had to say. Life is elsewhere.

You don't really remember many of the faces. But now and then there's a 'goth' who you recall with fond memories, or someone who has some striking or peculiar features. Yesterday, one of the boys who came in to discuss his paper...sworn he could have been a young Afro-Caribbean man. Even the way he wears his clothes. Or S from a few years back; not only very beautiful, but very European. You could tell by the way she did her hair that there was something that set her apart.

the ant

"Sometimes you have to be knocked out, just to stop; when you're in that state all you want to do is just sleep, and rest your body and your brain. But being on antidepressants, if you're not careful you can just be sitting on the couch looking at daytime TV, eating and doing nothing at all."

There's something incredibly sad about 'survivors'. Long -forgotten, their best days behind them, hardly recognizable-to others or themselves. If I ever had the time I'd love to write a book on this theme.

Meantime, must get back to Exley's Fan's Notes. J.C's journals are full of a slow-burning sadness. And you can't but help think of R. Searle's: "Once you're a prisoner, you're always a prisoner".

What I pick put are the most ordinary words or phrases. They seem to mean the most. Like 'steady rain', 'the accrual of many summers', 'her speech thick', 'the curl mysteriously slips out of their hair'.

Some brash young thing wrote in an otherwise fine review: 'this book is about accepting (living with) your "corruption". Perhaps only a young person could say that, could totally miss the point.

same difference

The creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and of your colours are many wonders for those who reflect.
---Q:30:22

May our love not be centered upon ourselves! May this love not incite us to love only those who are like us or to espouse ideas that are similar to our own! To only love that which resembles us is to love oneself; that is not how to love.
---Tierno Bokar.

He who only sees ratio only sees himself.
---William Blake.

It is important to find one's own space (not to 'own' space), to find one's name, but it is equally important to find the right direction and pace; there's a skill in that...working with time and not against it (and for that one surely needs a sense of the timeless?).

There are many things that cannot and should not be said, spoken of. Stop, look, listen. Look both ways. But there are many beautiful, wondrous things, many different types of good-and beauty always shines through.

Every direction you find is chosen by you or chosen for you. The line between is incredible. Some stars are constant, others less so. Each lives in relation to another.

~~~

This is a tough one. On the one hand there is, at the political level, respect for difference, the uttermost need to respect the individuality of the person in all their uniqueness. Religiously, too, the notion that you can or should view other people and traditions through the lens of your own particular perspective, as if everything could be reduced to the terms of your own self-understanding is the door to fanaticism. What place, then, for mystery,for uniqueness, for 'unknowingness'? Is there not a kind of violence involved in (or implied in) looking at the world and other people in only one way? You must do as we do, or else..., the domestication of the exotic.

And Bokar...are these not startling words that shake you from any preconceived ideas?

On the other hand, though, is there the possibility, at the political level, of marking people off as radically different in order to dispose of them or, less extremely, to deny them certain rights? Is the idea of 'sameness' the same as 'universalism'? To see someone as fundamentally the same as you, with the same rights, the same aspirations, the same loves and failings...isn't that the meaning of the Enlightenment project (a project that has such a bad name nowadays)? How to be attentive to difference whilst at the same time affirming one's shared roots ('unity in diversity'...tawhid). Simone Weil: rights and obligations.

Bokar: This is where you stumble. What do we love if not ourselves! How do we see if not through our own eyes? Do we seek contact with some radical other or do we seek ourselves in the other, the other in ourselves. Mirrors. Tarkovsky.

This love of home, the nostalgia for it, for 'coming home'. Does it not exclude too much? The narrowness, hierarchy and conservatism of 'home'. And yet, it was always here. Mystery is not to be sought outside our human lives. Why are our images of God always human? (Thoba! So much for Muslim sensibilities!). But no, even here, the 'attributes'. We talk of God's 'hands' (if not his eyebrows).

What do we seek? We. Not 'I'. Not 'the other' as some vague, non-specific being, but a person. A reflection, not a projection, of ourselves.And to be reflected in turn. To be on the same wavelength means what, exactly? Is this image of 'brokeness' and completeness, that has been with us since God knows when, the story of our lives?

school iz out.

'Every child is a thinking, creative, active, person'.
---from the NYRB.

You can't but help think that school is really a colossal waste of time. As is much of what counts as a university education. Stuffing more and more people's brains with facts, theories, or teaching them techniques that will prove to be useful in their careers; instilling discipline, the ability (desire?) to work hard, to question everything, prepare for better scores on tests, get 'the right answer' (without even knowing what the question is). The whole approach is so mechanical and mind-numbingly tedious. Foucault was surely right here to draw attention to the similarities between the school and the factory.

What could there be instead? First principle: whatever you do has to be connected to pleasure. Secondly: more music, more history, more art, and more work with one's hands, a greater contact with nature. Theory, yes. But above all: practices and practical thinking.

D.McCloskey has this line about Dutch schools. Don't know if it's true, but the relation to natural light is important.

the death of the heart or, as the iranians say: 'death to the heart'

Is there no end to the insidiousness of these jews (Hallmark)? first it was birthdays, then anniversaries, now this! No wonder the Ummah is in such disarray! Who would have thought, religion finally undone ..and not at the hands of science or philosophy, but by those cute little teddy bears!

V-day, the source of all our problems, says an email from my enraged friend. Now you're talking, brother. Look carefully, you'll see the sign of dajal on those teddies (or was it in my cornflakes today...I forget). Anyway, I digress...these bloody romantic kuffar must be shown a lesson. Muslims do not believe in romance. Only sex.

The sisters, the revolutionary guards, are showing us the way, brother Junaid. (Although they should be whipped later for coming out in public). And what r u doing about it? Making more money for those shias and hypocrites in Bahrain? Shame on you. The Arab Spring, the Persian summer, the Paki autumn..soon we will have conquered all the seasons of the year.

~~~

'When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover's wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion...'

---D.P.

are you..er..experienced?

From an interview with Marilynne Robinson, Paris Review.

"You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marksto be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper...

I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not."


~~~

I don't really think of myself as religious and that view is confirmed by friends and relatives alike who see me as either too serious for religion or too much of a joker to take religion seriously. Yes, well...religion "vs" religious".


Would love to get a copy of M.R.'s talk, 'Metaphysics and Value Statements' where she, apparently, lays into Macintyre. There does appear to be a strain in modern thinking that is resolutely anti-modern. Which is not to deny that there are some things towards which one should be opposed. However, the tone of it all is a bit sad. It's the usual culprits, the usual morose tendencies in play: the falling away from Truth, Beauty, Meaning (all with capitals, please note) and the only thing left to do is to determine when this veritable second Fall took place: the Renaissance and the monstrous assertion of the 'I'; the Reformation and the reliance on conscience, an 'inner' I over the weight of tradition and accumulated wisdom; or was it industrial capitalism, bourgeois society that produced this Frankenstein, at one stroke rebellious against both nature, society, as well as any notion of 'place' or order of the soul?

And of course, that view of 'atomisation', 'fragmentation', alienation will always, I guess, appeal to a particular type of person (estranged intellectuals, for starters; unhappy teenagers for another). Oh, and of course, the religious radicals will latch onto any semblance of a critique, since to feed on negativity is always an easy option.

I do love Macintyre's essays on 'Faith and Reason' though.

~~~

Not a religious bone in my body. Except my funny bone. You hear the call to prayer each morning, since the loudspeaker seems to be located two yards outside my house. (loudspeakers, now, there's a Jewish invention for you, if ever there was one..if only I could convince them of this!). Now and then you'll have the odd dream about not praying but by and large you don't have any sense of guilt about this. What was that line by Fenelon on indifference again?I'm reminded of my old buddy, Piracha, who swears he's going to get his shotgun out and blow the maulvi away.Religious people are a curse, or simply too boring to be worthy of consideration.

Steady on, b. Genuinely religious people are fascinating. all you've got here is religion or religiosity.


~~~

Have you had a religious experience? Well, that type of question is really frowned upon. Even if I had, you hardly think I'd share it on blogland do you?! But yes, I guess Rothko at the Tate comes closest (followed closely by coffee and cinnamon rolls).

But what is a religious experience? Should it be "marked off" from other areas, scientific endeavours, artistic creation, being a good citizen? (Dewey). Is it the "quality of an attitude" or can we pin it to something more objective? Must there be an appropriate 'object ' of faith?

Ch

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past , that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, that habit which gives us shape. ..He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour , and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...

---James Salter.

Cheever and the lost life, the lostness in life. On the edge of everything, this cold glass, these black keys, the fuzzy hiss of the speakers is this tangible sense of something that is lost, not quite there. Didn't make it. On the edge of the life of things is a blue line...

The sense of falling, of falling away, of fallen things. The grey pallor of puffed-up, sullen faces, the forlorn look you see on some people's faces, even in the brisk early-morning light. The sense of being a tremendous failure. The word tremendous deriving, in large part, its substance from the fact that it was, in truth, an ordinary failure, no different from anyone else's mediocre stab at life. But it was tremendous in a different and special way, even though he wasn't even unique here either. It was this: that he couldn't even imagine what 'success' would mean or if he'd be happy if he got it. 'Success' is an American affliction that blights a man's life, and clouds his judgement.

What would it mean to succeed? What could it mean? Some form of recognition by a half-assed drunk, a steel bar to mark the fact, a brief moment of fame amongst one's contemporaries and then the inevitable slide into oblivion? The revelry and irreverence in that punk go-getter's eyes, reading from the script like a whore.He hoped that he might see him in another light, with the moral clarity of a saint, or with the judicious wisdom of a cardinal. Why these religious metaphors? Somehow he imagined good sense returning to him, like a natural balance; thought that a gentle forgiveness might make its way to the surface, instead of this unrelenting narrowness of vision, the cool irreversibility of a fixed image. To see him (and therefore himself) with the eye of a drunkard, as if he was viewing him in clothes two sizes too big, which is to say, as slightly ridiculous and nothing more.

Walks past the monolithic building in the morning, its imposing dullness can't hold a candle to the irreducible dullness of what happens inside, the narrowing down of sight, the collapse of imagination. At least the early-morning shadows are soft, softer than those at the end of the day that cut across it at acute angles. How much light and shadow this building's absorbed already! It has this unlimited capacity to do so, and that makes it timeless.

But for now, everything's soft, like the heart of the sparrows, or the ginger cat licking its wounds on top of the trash can. There's a degree of gentleness or drowsiness in the voices overheard in the corridors. The mild excitement of trembling in the uncertainty of first love. Or so it seems from a distance.

"Ch", she wrote, and he, imagining himself to be Jewish, thought this was a word of disdain or mockery: 'Ay, ay, ay'. Nothing he said could explain what he meant. And her words were lost in the translation. "Ch" reminded him of currency, an amount to be paid in compensation. Or maybe it was a word, followed by a click of the tongue, used to frighten beggars away.

What was that one line, that one word by which we may know ourselves?

the bridge

From silverpoint to bluesmoke, jagged edge to smoothable curves, things merge into others, if looked at in the right way, with sufficient attention, detail, and care. A shift in perspective, a movement within the stillness, a change of heart, the first word like the first cool autumn clouds after a dry summer. Brown to grey. The receptivity of a hand, that knows shapes in the dark and trusts...

A mirror, where additions and subtractions are made, time working behind its timeless surface. A bridge that leads from one person to another; and each person is a bridge, a frontier.

'Let me show you something, she suggested, it's a prepatory position we take on the floor and we call it the Bridge because our weight is suspended between our left hand palm down on the floor and our right foot also flat on the floor. Between these two fixed points the whole body is expectant, waiting, suspended.'
---John Berger.

~~~

And now, for 20 seconds of something totally different. Rita

the inexorable slide to fanaticism...

Well, since c, anton, and now roxana have abandoned me I might as well write about politics...

In a discussion with a beard. He writes:

" If you are a non-theist, you have no claim to rights"

But how did this start? A few days back a group of lawyers decided to ban a product because it is produced by Ahmadis. Of course, this is the beginning of fascism. No, not quite. When the state makes it mandatory that you declare on your passport that you are not an Ahmadi, when you can go to prison for 3 years if you wish someone 'salam' and you're an Ahmadi, then this isn't the beginning but just a continuation, an escalation of the madness.

(It should be remembered that it was a group of lawyers that vigorously defended Qadri, the murderer of the Punjab Governor, because they thought he was defending blasphemy by speaking out against the blasphemy laws. So, here you get an idea of how far human decency has been forgotten. These are, lest one forget it, people from the middle classes, people with some sort of formal education).

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, there's been the story of the good people of Chiniot. There the panchayat (tribal council) decided that a woman from the aggrieving party in a dispute should be 'given' to the aggrieved party.So, get this-and this is proof of how fucked up this country is, if further proof be needed- the 14-year old girl is given. She comes back dead, of course. There's no need to spell it out. But that's the level of 'honour' in what is an utterly barbaric place.

So, as Leonard Cohen sings, this place is going to slide. That much is obvious. The real question is: can I get out in time?

tinker, tailor, ...

"This is about the life of the book – and the future of the defiant craft of the illustrator and his pencil, "the hand of the artist", as Selznick puts it, in a computer age, and of materiality in a time of virtuality."

By sheer coincidence, the book you picked out yesterday was Tinkers by Paul Harding. It was either that or Esmeralda (D.D.)...too expensive by far, or Savage Detectives (no time to read). So, given M. Robinson's endorsement, it had to be this (only later did you realize he was her student and the cynicism started creeping in). Anyway, the reviews for Bolano were worse: this shows that literature is still alive...blah, blah. Don't care if it is, really. Or if it is dead. The voice of the American Salesman. Oh well, guess it can't be avoided and so go along with it.

Let's see.

And maybe the singing detective, not savage?

To turn back the time. Now, there's a skill for you.

inner vision

My heart hears across the silence; and I think of you, and therefore find you. On an island, an island in the North...My black heart finds you & therefore itself, fair as the first day we spoke, images and words, and letters falling away to the first moments of your silence, Ariadne's startled gaze. Your breath on the mirror, spreading like a fine web around my soul.Introductions were made, tea was poured out in the best china.

A stone statue looking out to the blue Pacific, his heart spinning, turning,for the days that were lost. What was said was false; what wasn't said remained true.The finality of her 'are we done now?'. A word to be erased.

The gold of the wheat lying on the ground, or the sadness of cathedral gold, like days of summer we remembered together, for gold always unites; and if not summer, then what? The creases around my narrowing eyes,the senses once so quick to flash out, like shaken foil, or a silver fish in the darks, now slowed down to notice the movement of shadows. I see you now only inwardly, darkly.If not winter,

the chomsky brigade

'During the past 20 years America has been unhinged by ideological hubris – a disorder that Chomsky cannot analyse or even properly comprehend, since he embodies it himself. As an unsparing critic of American policies, he has at times been useful – there has, after all, been plenty to criticise. But like the neocons, he belongs in an Americo-centric world that has already passed away. In any larger view, Chomsky's view of the US as the fountainhead of human conflict is as absurd as the Bush aide's belief that America can create its own reality.'

---John Gray, The Guardian.

A few years back one of the beards here started his tirade against 'the west' in the following way: "Ayatollah Chomsky says...". Other notable beards implored the audience to consider what they've done to us in Bosnia (which is, no doubt, more comforting that thinking about what we've done to us in Sudan, East Pakistan, Iraq,...)

Well, of course, that's unfair. You can hardly blame Chomsky for the dull-headed readers he gets. Maybe. Is there something about the tone in which someone writes that appeals to a particular mindset?

You can't but help think that this is connected, somehow, to when you read Chomsky. If you're 19 he can seem utterly convincing. I did read his Pirates book when I was 19, as it happens, and thought he was the cheez. But, either through good old Kashmiri laziness or through the inheritance of common sense passed down lovingly by my parents, I only skimmed through some of his other work. 501. Like porn: you've seen one, you've seen them all.

For muslim ideologues and zionists Israel is the centre of the world. For islamophobes, muslims are at the centre of the world's problems. It's getting a bit cramped in the centre!

Ammons: renouncing centre!

~~~

The other article I read today was about the decline of romantic comedies in Hollywood. What's strange is just how appealing a lot of American culture is when there's supposed to be all this anti-americanism around. Is it that real people can see through the rantings of politicians and intellectuals alike?

Of the latter, the usual appeal to (European) snobbery. How can you like ze hollywood..it is for, 'ow you say, the philistines, mon ami. Well, a lot of European cinema is pretentious crap.Please don't talk about Pasolini. B-bloody b o r r r ing. Or the anal, convoluted writing. To be sophisticated is to be misunderstood by the plebs.

'The unbearable lightness of being a prawn cracker.'

&

There are some questions that don't interest you, and require nothing more than good sense in avoiding them. Like East & West. Distinctions become increasingly meaningless with time. Is this because your vision blurs, or because you see more clearly now? With time.

The width of the interval between people is no-body's business. A distance is overcome only if one first imagines there to be distance. A bridge can fall away-as in the old myths and stories-once you sense the truth, get a scent of it.

Seven seconds is a space, in which we are contained, in which we find ourselves.

~~~

Dersu.

Couldn't watch through the whole thing. Some nice photography-but then again, i could have just watched National Geographic. Irreverent, I know. But it didn't work for me. I don't know why, but increasingly everything seems fake. There's a temptation to internalize that and conclude that that's because there's something fake in your own life; there's the tendency to dismiss and sneer at everything (words, film, music) because they're not the "real deal". It's one of the strangest things you've come across-perhaps because you're so naive; this scepticism towards words and language. As if what was real was lurking strangely and tantalizingly behind the scenes. Either that, or the bizarre notion that the surface is all there is. You can veer from one extreme to another.

But here's the thing: you don't for a second buy into the idea of the 'mystical east', nor do you believe that people in 'the west' are "alienated" or that they've lost their moral compass. If truth be told, we're all middle class now, and there's no going back to the virtues of the saint or the pagan aristocrat.

Instead, we have to find ourselves where we are. "This is where it's at" says Walter Matthau in The Sunshine Boys. It's all slightly ridiculous, of course. There's nothing great about the soul of the bourgeois and even less so does he possess any heroic or noble qualities. But the "brotherly love" of the commune or the monastery went hand in hand with hatred of outsiders and the lower castes, the unbelievers, women, jews , niggahs...

If western civilisation is a very good idea (Gandhi) then so is religion. Gandhi, now there's a fake for you! FFS!

Dersu:

The 'Mongol'...you'd think after all that arduous trekking he'd have lost some weight! Jesus! Get out of here! And the translations were awful: "Bird stop sing. Rain end". Yeah, okay, be a good chap then and pack up the tents Tonto.

etc., etc., ...

"And finally, when you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries."

Something will be lost when those geeky bastards manage to put everything down on a computer or on the web. At the book fair I managed to pick up a lovely little copy of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and M. Peake's Gormenghast.

Wendell Berry continues to delight:

'He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars'. I'm sure there's a common phrase about 'small kindnesses' but I can't remember it off the top of my head [would an American say off-eh the top] Probably because I've never used it...not: never had the occasion to use it, and not: never been aware of their importance but, rather, never affirmed them or really acknowledged them).

Smallness. The world in miniature. Not in a book. A book is in the world. Living as an outsider, a stranger, means that home is that world. You are scpetical of people who take that further and talk of the original home. As if to say: we must now move on from reflections and fragments.

Satanic mills, the wheels of commerce that move in opposition to one another, Man against Man (man against woman); humankind against nature, the timeless against time. Conflict and distinctions being what defines us: politically, spiritually. What would it be like to think with someone, for someone, of someone?

& (or the chains that bind)

I would bring my life complete before you
...
When I summon intellect it is to the melody
of this longing. Thy hand,
Beloved, restores
the chords of this longing.
Here, in the thirst that defines Beauty,
I have found kin.

---Robert Duncan.

'The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.'

In an age that privileges the foot-loose, the radically undetermined, the ability to read and write the script of one's own life, what place is there in our thoughts and lives or loves for austerity, or restraints, or "bindings"? Why should I be bound to a particular place, or person, or job? Why resist the flux of time? If all is sovereign becoming...

The market and the dissipation of the solid structures in our lives. More generally: liquid modernity. You sometimes think that it is only memory and love that holds back, holds your hand across the bridge.

Mystery of mysteries: that eternal longing manifests itself in a particular place, a certain face. This, not that. And far less anything abstract or general. The view that from the narrowest angle something profound might open up, that each detail was like a gem in the dust, a ring in the desert.

What binds one human being to another? Is it not the other way: what binds makes us human? (of course, there are inhuman bonds as well: the bond of blood and country is utterly false unless it is between human & human, without exclusion or malice).

&

love: I wanted you to be.

& points forwards; points back. Is now.Joining what never was, what might never be.

& is, if you are attentive enough, both open and free, as well as closed and small. Is both 1 & 2. And not a number at all!