Babylon & Byzantium

Rowan Williams: ethics and economics:

'Sandel is describing an alienation of the subject from the body, of the will from the material world. What is lasting and “real” is the abstract ego, independent of its physical nature, its environment, even its actual history. The fundamental model being assumed here is one in which a set of unconditioned wills negotiate control of a passive storehouse of commodities, each of them capable of being reduced to a dematerialised calculus of exchange value. If anything could be called a “world-denying” philosophy, this is it.'

[Sandel's Tanner lecture is online, btw]

~~~
The great Peter Brown, writing in the NYRB:

'Far from retreating into the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely unmolested.Most surprising of all, we can now suggest that the spread of Islam did not happen overnight. It was not imposed by force on the conquered peoples.' 

Disappointing, I know, if you've get set ideas about violence and Islam; disappointing, too,if you think about just how backward and intolerant lots of Muslims have become. 

This is not about nostalgia or going back, of course. It is, rather, about moving forward, listening and learning, and keeping oneself open. The ancient and the modern way has to be pluralism.  

Stokowski, Nikki

Listening to that awful Nicki Minaj. I won't repeat some of the lyrics here, lyrics which make Prince's Nikki seem tame in comparison, but if that's what passes for music these days then God help us!


On the one hand, we're told (yes, told, the irony!) that individualism is about the free expression of one's self or true self, once one has cast off all the socially defined constraints: to see oneself clearly, find one's true name (or, rather, create it since existence preceded essence). Spontaneity, creativity means being true to what, exactly? 

Spontaneity is a response to the conditions of life


On the other hand, there's a sneaking suspicion that 'the self' itself cannot emerge without a social world and set of 'languages' (words, meanings, practices, concepts, traditions, norms) that it's born into; moreover, for autonomy to kick in, to take root, we need 'bridges', and relationships that both sustain us and allow us to help others as well, now and over time. What lights are lovingly handed on, nurtured, and what circles we weave for one another.

So, broken circles. Freedom is neither arbitrary nor is it asocial. 'I-We', even if there isn't an 'I-Thou' any more.

post-punk vs classical

Today, an article asking whether classical is relevant or irrelevant, something that can be appreciated or not. Other questions might be: class? Or, does it speak to the times we live in? Our lives?

Word on the bridge, strange script, fallen, half-forgotten; the lives that slipped away, half-remembered. All the words that were said, all the thoughts you had, the images seen, the music heard. Add that all up, fold it, and still something's missing...

Don't set up house on the bridge; and when she turned away from me, my heart turned as well. The last bridge, at the city's limits in mid-morning, where I find myself, looking out. Here we are, alone, together. There's no place for the way I feel, said the fox.

But anyhow,

It is in this way that a man travels through time,

Leaving behind him a lengthening trail

Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes,

Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown

Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers.

---Howard Nemerov.

the question

Fascinating talk yesterday by my new friend here, a South-Asian historian. The question being, for me at least: why is the 'Ahmadiya question' a question at all?

So, why is it that that the usual fractious and bickering perspectives of various mullahs came down to this? Why (and how) did the rather obscure debates and polemics, the theological disputes, get translated into victimization at the political and societal level? Why, precisely, after all these years did it become a question at all, and for who?


A's point was quite interesting. Basically, irrespective of theological positions, when the rituals of two groups are so similar then there's a greater demand for making the lines of demarcation clearer, less porous. The historian has to look on, with some detachment, at the actual texts and look at the social and political context to try and work out how and why particular aspects of a text are highlighted or understood in a particular way at that very juncture in time. A didn't really do that. He described the changes but didn't offer an explanation as to why they might be occurring. 

Of course, there's probably some deep psychological need to set oneself apart from the rabble, the impure (ethnic, economic, gender and religious distinctions would surely never have such force if they didn't appeal to something in our nature). But surely there's a distinct sociological explanation as well? For example, do class differences play a role here? Or could it be that with urbanization and the loss of the older, rural flags and markers, that greater level of intimacy and tribal warmth that meant we could tell who was who, there was a renewed sense of urgency in the desire for determining who was the saved and who was the damned?

And of course, there are political factors: why did the so-called liberal, secular PPP go ahead with it? Why did this become a political issue, something to be determined at the level of the state? And once at the level of the state is it inevitable that we get a singular view of things? Was it anything beyond a cheap shot at popularity (there are other fascinating and disturbing aspects to this: the role of Shia clerics in having the community declared non-muslims). Perhaps, my Indian friends will say, this is an inevitable consequence of setting up a homeland "for muslims". From then onwards the race is on to define who is the 'true' Muslim. Is Israel really any different in that respect?

~~~

Anyway, you came away from the discussion quite jaded; disappointed to recall that you live in a place that is so backward, regressive. Turn to your notebooks, as if you could blot out the slide to insanity, fanaticism, petty hatreds...

'It is not a matter of exclusivity and "purity" but of wholeness, wholeheartedness, unity, and of what Meister Eckhart's 'gleihheit' (equality) which finds the same ground of love in everything...

Freedom from domination, freedom to live one's own spiritual life, freedom to seek the highest truth unabashed by any human pressure or any collective demand, the ability to say one's own 'yes', one's own 'no' and to not merely echo the 'yes' and 'no' of state, party, corporation, army, or system...

Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 
---Thomas Merton.

...

"The narcissist returns to the dream of perfection"

The other day someone said to me, as a casual jab at my supposed insufferable self-importance, "the problem with academics is that they're in their own dreamworld". Well, yes, I thought of replying: do you expect them to be in your dreamworld. Of course, I'm largely exempted from such withering remarks because I'm not really an academic and so I have to make do with my non-academic insufferable self-importance. The serious point-yes, you just knew this was coming, didn't you- why must we put up with a reality devoid of imagination?

~~~

A discussion with F.B., whose gentleness is almost Buddha-esque. Why is the burqa banned? Give it a rest, bro'. I'll agree with you as long as you bring me a copy of the selected poems of Howard Nemerov. Deal?

~~~

'Every individual is born with a mill-stone of ideals around  his neck...The great lesson is to learn to break all the fixed ideals, to allow all the soul's own deep desires to come direct, spontaneously into consciousness'.

--D.H.L.

Gosh, does seem a bit extreme that! Are all our 'deep' desires always and exclusively our 'own'? What's wrong with making space for our frivolous desires? And to say 'direct' means what, exactly: unlearning, letting go? As if spontaneity is necessarily opposed to the world, a sort of animal instinct against reason, learning, all that stuffiness that inhibits us, dries up the well-spring of our natural, creative selves, the 'vivid quick'?

~~~

My heart's all out of time...

then a tear in the clouds,

the land brightening in its lantern,

of sun and rain

the sudden rainbow

then all of it, inverted, miniscule, in each speck

of rain in her black hair

And I let it slip away again.

---D. P.?

on the road to Damascus

Today, some 36,000 people will attempt the marathon, a flow of human traffic that courses from Greenwich in the east to the Mall in the west, passing the meridian and numerous other personal and physical milestones along the way. Each runner will have their own reason for attempting to go the distance.

Some run to honour dead loved ones; some because their physical efforts may help charities working to alleviate the conditions of those less fortunate (Food for the Hungry, a small charity specialising in providing disaster relief, in my case); some people like to dress up as superheroes in front of tens of thousands of people...

We run because much of life is frustrating and futile, and only by countering it with some sort of painful, time-consuming, hard-won conclusion to months of repetitious slog – which has kept us from friends and family and beer and sanity – are we able to make an act of defiance to the Fates who conspire over our lives.

We run because it allows us, albeit briefly, to enter another world. Often this may involve discomfort or even pain, a sense of alienation from our normal comfort zone that reminds us of our mortality and makes us respect our capabilities and limitations.

In turn, we are rewarded for our exertions with a form of release, a smoothing out of those toxic feelings of anger, anxiety, injustice and sadness that plague our everyday lives. In short, we run to achieve a sense of inner peace, a recalibration of our souls.

---from Saturday's Guardian.

Remembering the colours

'There is,' he said,...'a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you--not in the emotional, loving plane--but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman--so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever--because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies....I don't *know* what I want of you. I deliver *myself" over to the unknown, in coming to you, I am without reserves or defences, stripped entirely, into the unknown. Only there needs the pledge between us, that we will both cast off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in us.'"---D.H.L.

He seems to me equal to gods that man whoever he is
who opposite you sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing –
oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all,
greener than grass I am and dead –
or almost I seem to me.

---Sappho.

the grey of your absences, the grey of the mind that recollects. the primordial pulse of red flowering open for you a dream, a mirror broken but not yet fallen. Lincoln green, and I shall wear scarlet red, you said.

the lead strikes up, sparks. lead from deep quarry, the words stilled in the vertical of the pencil, crouched, tentative like an animal, like the names for you i have in my heart.

i wake from some profound sleep, my mouth dry, your face against my face. every inch of the glass is filled with sunlight so that there are no more distinctions between outside and inside. all of the cupboard doors are flung open, have been like that throughout the night, like those wide, accusing eyes of yours. everything points to a complete and naked revelation of your soul. when it was the openness of your body that reminded me of the red and the green.

He said:

This love has set up camp inside me.
It is I who filled the cup with this poison and drank it.

Grant me a sight of you again! I would die for it!
What a mistake I made, not going with you.

She injured me, then turned away.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.

She clothed me in robes of green and red.

---Bulleh.

the human chain

When the coal fields were open they were a link between us, and between sun and earth; glistening coal of my homeland like the dark soul of crow.

We have been homeless for so long. The migrations, as predictable as the stars. The slow divestment of words, accents, tones.

Question-answer-question. The dance of our lives reignited in each child's face. Blue Milan tie, too perfect to knot; your favourite picture books, of the Red Man and Eastern Kufic, lovingly wrapped in navy blue striped thick white cloth, kept in the dark, in a closet or under the bed, thickness muffling the sounds of the house, too perfect to read; the perfect loves, too perfect to love...

Stare and stare into the faithless mirror. The untrue mirrors of our lives. She who speaks last, echoes my thoughts with her silver-smooth silence, reducing my image, bit by bit, to its archetype, its golden beyond. Matches splintered, their black tips like ancient arrows or flint recovered from peat; the burial of the centuries, carbon returning, bit by bit, to its first Form...

Obsession, 212 New York, Opium, the sweet sickly fragrance of decaying East, the death-sickle and the field, the years spent with bent back asking under the sun, imagining fresh north. The hours flitted away, heaved out to satisfy the gleam in your eye, brother, or the whim of your hands. Distant cousin, who gold and fate took from me.

'Struck by lightning...
Like a girl taking off her petticoat.
White linen eblouissante
In a breath of air...'

The breathlessness that arises from my station, the awareness of my destiny; the penitent's chains dragged in the dust, inescapably bound and free. I stand bare-chested before you, sweet mirror: the flesh weak, marked. We circle around one another, our offerings like a land fertile from decaying mass and abandoned objects, like death's rich pickings. My heart lies open to your open hand. The invisible bond as frail as a chain of dew, as dark as the salmon in the deeps, as elegiac as the evening shadow in the dying grass, as beautiful as when the snake enters the snake.

...

Frogs sit more solid
than anything sits.
In mid-leap they are
parachutists falling
in a free fall.

They die on roads
with arms across their chests and
heads high.
I love frogs that sit
like Buddha, that fall without
parachutes, that die
like Italian tenors.

---Norman MacCaig.

~~~

Why am I so fond
of the double bass
of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding
In perfect accord
To one another
Across the pond--
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew's harp
I hear in the dark?)

---Menashe.

~~~

'No false note was permitted'.

I think of the Arabs and the desert, the falseness permeating even their gestures (so much for Thesiger and the allure of the wilderness, the sanctity of a place untouched by the trappings of modernity and the snares of technology! So much for tribal hospitality, the fierceness of pure hearts and other nostalgic tosh). There is something harsh, crude and abrupt about the Gulf Arabs, something that makes you queasy.

~~~

"...ended up on a hill above San Fransisco bay, a sage on the mountain, maintaining the gravity of being even as he inhales the increasingly weightless, late-capitalism, post-modern air of California...the picture of a man hallucinating at the centre of the world of real politik, a man in thrall to memory,..a man at work in mineshafts of the language..."

--Seamus Heaney.

A moment of clarity, a small moment of melancholy understanding, the stare into the golden beyond. "I'm totally out"...

the five star empty quarter (or Buddha finds the void)

The desert is strong; it's light encompassing, all-embracing. It was like we were nothing, like nothing in the world; an image maybe, an image refracted deeply in a dark mirror...

There are reclining chairs in one section of the airport, overlooking the runway. You sit there uneasily, since you're far too accustomed to sitting on the edge of your seat, to not relaxing. the distant lights are stacked up there on the horizon; cream, light green, sage green, an arc of white spanning out into the night sky, slightly unreal, timeless. Passengers collect a token and wait, look, readjust their bodies until they've reached a perfect still moment. It's like some ancient ritual, this wandering of the mind in the dark, this looking into bright lights for some kind of solace. These lights, burning without religion...

Some look at their laptops, connected by some invisible forces to home, the past, loved ones; others just huddle together, seeking some human warmth or conversation. Sit snugly in your saffron blankets. some pull the blankets up to their chin whilst others let the blankets fall half way to their hip. Here we are, like Buddha staring into the void. This could be anywhere. We could be anyone. This is Vegas, wired up, one's senses dazed, stunned. So, here we are; we could be sitting on Brighton pier, our mouths agape in the expectation of the first lights, or our hearts saddened by the last show, the dim understanding of all that's gone wrong in our lives. So, here we are, in the dead hours, all bleary-eyed, shot through, the mind reduced to a blank functionality. Stare, and stare into the darkness. We could be anyone or no-one, a man in a Hopper painting, looking out in the small ours of Saturday night. So, here we are, 100,000 years ago, peering into our tribe's fires, fascinated and hooked to the disintegrating flames, the cooling embers' last glow. We sit in a broken circle, without names or words for one another or the world; just the spectacular display of lights, the departure and arrival of strangers like ourselves. We try to find peace. We try to forget. The wheel of desire has become unhinged.

~~~

When an Arab woman says "Khalid" it's sexy as hell; such a difference from the solid, mind-numbing and boring, no-frills English pronunciation. Almost becomes something exotic. Eastern promise, as opposed to the gravely, pragmatic, gritty, way of saying it.

~~~

You sit in the airport, closely observing everyone's face; you want to judge every one of them or stand up and preach some to them in a high-pitched tone of moral righteousness: for Christ's sake, there's gotta be more to life than Costa coffee and the scramble for duty-free goods! This is where we are. The Americans are way behind on the scene. Why, their fakeness sounds positively old fashioned in comparison, almost old world. There are no classics in the 'bookstore' (I use the word loosely). Most of it management guru stuff and silly romances for the Bedouins.

~~~

On t.v. you hear an Egyptian peasant/labourer say: "We want our freedom, we have a 50 year-old civilisation". All of a sudden the other protesters stop their shouting and turn to him, flustered: "you mean a 7,000 year-old civilisation, right?". Cut to the next scene. The Egyptian peasant/labourer: "We want our freedom, we have a 7,000 year-old civilisation." Priceless.

Can one be a Muslim without the 'birth of Christ in one's soul' (as Rumi expressed it, all those many years ago)? This is not interesting because (or only because) of its political ramifications; it remains quite unknown to outsiders that Muslims are taught that they cannot be Muslims unless they believe in all of the prophets, as matter of orthodox doctrine. It goes without saying that Christianity requires a deeper, more heightened awareness of 'belief' in regards to Christ, and that the notion of prophethood is also quite different. For most people 'belief' means respect, veneration and piety towards the other prophets. But is that all? Isn't the maulana suggesting that the distinctions aren't, or shouldn't be, so sharp?

~~~

There is no redemption of time. Of all the things I find most difficult to accept, it is this.

loose ends

Trying to read Kenneth Irby. Can't say that I'm making much headway or really picking up what he's saying; wavelength, frequency, is key. What capacity of mind, what state of mind, would allow you to do so? Or has the heart been so constrained, drawn down to minimal receptivity by the harshness of..what? The lawlessness of the heart, the homelessness of the mind.Your understanding cluttered like a backyard. Beyond, the open country, the lack of distinctions, the land populated by the dead and their dead words.Where are those other entrances that 'the times of understanding make'? Where do we go from here, said the bishop to the Queen, said the prostitute to the bishop.

Must a poet reflect outward, take up a piece of trash in his life, and see it sparkle? But, still, you like the 'datedness' of them, the idea that a moment is marked, recorded, slips by the attention's gaze; something insignificant, one's whole life made up of what's made up...

Of course, there's precision, exactness; but there's also fuzziness, jumbled up stuff that defies expectations, closures, definition. Poetry is not a system, nor is it philosophy. 'Ends' are provisionally given; are also stepping stones to new beginnings.

There are only two types of people in the world: those who wear hats and those who don't; no, that's not quite right: those who are Kashmiri and those who aren't; or was it muslim, and non-muslim? You forget. There are only two types of people: those who forget...there are only two types of people in the world: those who believe there are only two types, and those who do not.

The faint pencil marks, return to them, to see what caught your imagination in the evening of the mind. See if it still holds.Look back, the direction of your soul. Being lost. Is that not also a way? Fish out some choice words, turn of phrase, moment of mind alighting on some object, flowering of imagination, for no rhyme or reason. The primitive, foundational aspect of memory, that cannot be traced back any further, that resists explanation. We see everything with memory (Hockney). Trust, trust in the world...

'In the moonlight
the explorers have lost
all sense of self.'

'and the moon
covers into blue the empty beer cans on the porch'

'I have not seen you anywhere...
I have only wanted to see you everywhere'

'and in the flames
of the fireplace
all loves, all persons,
ever touched..

flare, buckle, and flare back'

Look back, again. Will it make a difference? The longer you stare, the more acute your bewilderment. Pick up the loose ends again.

'eyes turned back, inside,
blind, stumble

on, into the love
I cannot come to

any other way.'

north-west frontier

'But I think it was in fact peculiarly western to feel no tie of particularity to any one past or history, to experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one's eye, without ant need to make such tedious judgments as "mine" and "not mine."...

At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety—to contract, and of grace to decay into rigor, and peace into tedium.'
---Marilynne Robinson.

A bit torn on this one. Though there was something utterly fascinating about the Utopian projects (or at least the Utopian longing) of 'the west' (Joel Sternfeld's wonderful book on this) part of you thinks the whole mythology of the frontier is poppycok, balderdash. The American woodsman (Calasso) ends up destroying the very notion of 'place' or habitat that is required for the individual to flourish. Surely it's the same 'rugged individualism' of the archetypal capitalist: crude, self-centred, ruthless; man, always defined by what he's up against, never in terms of his or her openness to others. An adversarial and confrontational form of intelligence. Tightly define what is your property, your space. And since your sympathies have always been with the 'Red Man' you simply can't bring yourself to this point of view.

On the other hand, this idea of freedom from place, names, hierarchies, church, society and the state is simply exhilarating, breathtaking: "neither Greek nor Jew" or, as the Muslims would say, "neither of the East nor the West".

~~~

I've traveled south for that southern breeze on your skin, and then west, from the east; as far west as one could get without facing the sea and stars, without forgetting where I was from; now, tell me, which direction do I go, to meet you?

Homesick for the Earth

French week at the uni. Had to endure, suffer the torments of listening to a Frenchman talk about some old crusty French poet. Not the poetry itself, mind you, just the poet! For Pete's sake. Well, at least it wasn't Vogon. And all in search of a crepe, which wasn't half bad but, as you can guess from the photo above, nothing like the original ones that I wolfed down in Paris...me down with crepeititas. Travel broadens the mind-and one's girth.

A human trapped in a whale's body, or so I've been told. Looks more like I'm on drugs with that puffed up face. But at least a rare appearance of Ubo, with his old military mustache, Turkish-style, methinks. The dougal, meanwhile, was busy taking photos of empty chairs and other artistic things like that.

Jules:
...

the american dream

You realize, to your horror, that you haven't read any European literature. You think it'll be about the wiry tentacles of the political reaching into our being, the politicization of the soul, or some deep and no-doubt profound existential angst, or some philosophical ideas about the end of religion, the end of God, the end of language...

For the life of me, I can't bring myself to it.

Started the Don, and it reads like a hypnotic dream, a series of images...the flow, get into the flow of things: memory, trash, spirtuality, all brushing up against one another. The old themes, the universal themes, played out in the contemporary settings of ordinary human lives; meaning, the sense of belonging, unbelonging, of time slipping out of your hands; the grand theme of loss (of love, of chances, of the possibility for redemption), of failure -"Listen you son of a bitch, life isn't always a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl. Life is rejection and pain and loss"- is never erased, but only finds new forms. And you've got to go with that, imagine what is possible, even if you haven't been part of the story.

" All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction."

"..can almost hear the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs, liturgical and grave."

~~~

The neurologist: What do you think what's wrong for you?

Wanted to say: listen dude, I didn't just pay your man sitting outside on the front desk 1,500 to hear my version of the story.

"Can you count to fifty?"

Wanted to say, do we really need to?What's wrong with one to twenty. doctors are far too serious in my opinion, a bit like academics.

~~~

At the bank the guard, all boots and laces, carries a short-arm machine gun in his hand. He's kept it well-polished, a man who loves his guns with care and near-fanatical devotion. He holds it down and I notice this huge silver ring on his index finger; it's like he's wearing a gleaming, diamond encrusted book; it's probably a set of Qur'anic verses.