Conversation in Moscow

In a dream from a day or two ago you saw a beautiful white building, floating, solid but also intensely real, its shape well defined even though its interior was empty. A survivor, a whale, a palace. White stone dreamlike against the plain white landscape, the northern place from deep memory with fading soft colours dying from its surface, a trace of Venice, which is south, east, or Westminster, home of conversations...

In a dream you thought you knew many people. A fire, crackling with great strength, chairs arranged, time passing without being noted, the hours of our lives a brief smile, the light flashing from silver, roxana and anton with their hair down. Your own home, where you don't speak, but tend the fires, see to the lights and keys.

The lights change, you try to detect the notes of sadness in the air. The winter soil beneath your feet grows cold, is knotted into a pattern. At eleven o'clock there is so much light that it seems as if every inch of the world is covered by it. The old sun on your back, the shadow of the trees falling on your face...

Go through the exercises-of the body, not the spirit. Drink too much black coffee which, at my age, is asking for trouble. What type of question is that? You feel a knot grow in your heart or is this just the evil eye on you, some twist of fate, a design cast on you like a loosely flung shawl? We talk of Spain, the south, about how a taxi driver will stop the car or steer it to the side, letting it drift, to look at a beautiful woman. This conversation we're having now, over Spanish omelettes in the English tea house, this is it, here and now. Yes, you think. But this is not it. Already I've forgotten what was said. There are other conversations locked away somewhere, stuck in your throat, that you imagine lasting forever, that maybe you will strike up when you are more yourself.

In Moscow there is no God. In Lahore, too. Gagrain, floating in outer space: "I find no God here". As if. As if he'd be waiting for you with a cigar and flowers. A word, a sentence, a word that would take us back, aback, through the years. Relearn the alphabet, the spell, the silences between the words, too. Become one of the dark ones amongst the dark multitudes...

The existentialist hero

I am everything; you are nothing. There is no common measure between us. Nothing is 'given'...I can only create a world in my image or destroy. How will this end?

'He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that NullAchtzehn is no longer a man.'

---Primo Levi.

Is there something Protestant about the hero, battling against himself as much as the world, this fallen world that cannot be redeemed by "works" but only by grace? The damned and the saved, the absurdity of it all.

He must push on, against all odds, not so much because the goal is difficult but, rather, because this relentless striving is the goal. To be constantly on the move, deeply sceptical of the world and its "distractions". By sheer irony, it is the existentialist's disdain for material goods, his quest for new experiences, that keeps the capitalist machine going. (To be satisfied, content, to live within one's limits, to find happiness in the people around you...all that, the "bovine acceptance of things" (Sartre) spells the death knell of the system). 

I am everything; you are nothing. There is no common measure between us. Nothing is 'given'...I can only create a world in my image or destroy.

Is this not Man's version of God?

Free from authority, from institutions, 'supports', from doctrine and ritual. From now on, strike out. Make something of your life. 

The ideal here is a consumer in a shop, surveying everything and taking what satisfies his tastes, sovereign in his decisions, unchallenged when it comes to the quality of those tastes since they are blind desires and no-one can sit in judgement. There must be no interval for reflection, everything must flow onwards...Desire, yours truly.

The existential hero must find pure space (Calasso's American Woodsman comes to mind but all sorts of 'settlers'), flee from cyclical time-partly because it is too confining, but partly (surely) because the last sequence is decline and death. It as if to say: we can only see ourselves truly from a distance, detached, cut free from any obligations, relationships. Other people remind us of our own mortality. 

~~~

Why is there so much anger, aggressiveness, and violence? Is it because we fail to get recognition through love and friendship and that we must, therefore, attempt to compel others to recognize us? A self-hatred spilling out on to a hatred for other people?

Norman Mailer provocative comments on the attacks after 9/11: America must reassert (or find again) its (moral) authority. Kick Ass! 

Is the exercise of power ever really an exhibition of freedom or is it really just a symptom of the will to dominate?

Recognition (or the clearing of the clearing)

“There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe."
---Saul Leiter.

Return to your pure white room, board it up, darken the windows, block out all sound, discard any memories,...and think!

What would it mean to think of other people, or think for them (as in: look out for them)?; think with other people in real time, not in an abstract way?

Everything must be doubted, the real world around you, for instance. Red is only secondary, the mind and the eye are only passive receivers of "information". Clear the ground, drum roll if you please..make way, make way for the arrival of the spectacular 'I'.

Once you start down that road then does it necessary follow that it's 'I' against the world, me against you? The beginning of the modern west, M. Sahlins says, holds this notion of conflict to be central, fundamental. 

Right from the very start there is war, us against them, a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Under such circumstances the social-which is artificial, not being part of our "nature",-is the only way to reign us in. The social, the state or the moral are all on the side of civilization against our instincts, our true despicable selves and they can only function by repressing the individual. Against this is the economics hypothesis: the pursuit of self-interest actually leads to everyone being better off and produces a kind of order or equilibrium. But both, you note, start off with the simple idea that the individual is the locus of all truth and that "the common good" is really only the convergence of private goods or interests.

Clear the ground. There are no "Palestinians" here, or if they are here then they're not really a people. There is only a wilderness here, full of savages (like the Red Man). Hell is other people. It is only our weakness that requires us to interact with others, to even think about them in our schemes. Strategic thinking requires little else than thinking of everyone else as a means to your ends.

Another person must be submit or be defeated or collaborate. 

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex. He said unless you’ve had anal sex with a girl she hasn’t really submitted to you."

de Sade. Master/Slave.

Sen and the Prisoners' Dilemma (to continue the Nash theme)...what get's us into this mess is, one might argue, the narrow definition of identity that us built into the game. If I'm always looking to be sharp, and you are too, then we can both end up in a worse situation. What is required here is something like commitment or thinking that runs along the lines: "what is good for us?".  Note: no retreat into a clearing but a recognition, an acknowledgment of the other person's goals and objectives.  The highest wisdom remains:

Amo: volo ut sis

This line from Todorov blew me away because it gets, maybe, to the heart of it:

"If the account of the origin of the species has been systematically preferred over that of the origin of the individual ..., it is without doubt in part due to to the fact that the authors of these accounts are men, not women..."

So, to take up a line of thought from Macintyre: what would mean to think of ourselves as dependent animals? Is it not possible to think of the parent/child or the mother/child relation as a loving, caring one, not tainted by "interests" or hatreds or rivalries (if that's what the view of human beings is, post-Freud, then it's a pretty crap one). In this sense 'the east' remains largely naive and, therefore, blissfully immune from such corrupting tosh (which is not the same thing as saying misogyny and abuse do not exist but only to say that self-conceptions are less mean-spirited).

~~~

But in this clearing process the 'I', too, must disappear-for what is an individual without God or other people or the world? It is not "I think, therefore..." but "it thinks,.." or "there is thinking, therefore..."

And if the slave is truly a slave then what power does the Master have? Power only resides in making someone a slave, surely?

The strange disappearance of the individual. If there is only flux, sovereign becoming, an instinctive life, or the world of facts, then what of the 'I'? This 'I' which was so dependent on the outer world, resembling only a shadow of it, was understood only vaguely, outwardly, or publicly in its behaviour and patterns.  But if that solid world has vanished in a puff of smoke and if reason, society and history are merely fictions, then is the individual only a shimmering reality as well?

Denise: we seek a witness...

There is no clear space, as if the 'I' could exist before the world, which in its turn is then supposedly constituted. Each of us is already born into a world and learns to be human. Is that really possible without other people? 

Integral intelligence

What catches your attention here is the floor, the light illuminating it like a swaying cornfield. The truth, then, is not in the artist's face or posture; but nor is it the painting on the canvas itself. What do we look for and where? Another way of being reflective: thought and imagination are endless, but they must touch the world, brighten it.

You take a step back. What do you see in the mirror? A man, an unimpressive man in the shadows who will be unknown, who wants to be unknown. What kind of narrative is that, what kind of story remains inward, hidden?

The floorboards-for whatever reason-suggest a way of life.

Eventually, whatever we say, whatever we write may or may not cease to exist; but we shall not be around to see this vanishing act. All will float effortlessly away from us, or we from it all. When will the light return to our faces, to our representations?

~~~

Again one comes across what appears to a self-evident truth to our ears: look at the work, not the woman (or man). To think of the personal or the biographical is to miss the point and, worse, to engage in all sorts of useless speculation. The truth is impersonal and great works can be produced by awful people.

I've always remained uneasy about that. If one takes an extreme case-the Nazis-then it's fairly uncontroversial to say that whatever intelligence some individuals may have had, it didn't count for much. Someone can be spectacularly clever in one area (mathematics, say) but still be a terrible person who lacks any real understanding of life (which is a different meaning of the word intelligence). Nash was, it appears, a brilliant mind, but at the same time would-it is alleged-throw his wife to the floor and put his foot on her to show everyone that she was his slave.

Frithjof Schuon, integral intelligence:

"To the question of knowing whether it is better to have intelligence or a good character, we reply: a good character. Why? Because, when this question is asked, one is never thinking of integral intelligence, which essentially implies self-knowledge; conversely, a good character always implies an element of intelligence,
obviously on condition that the virtue be real and not compromised by an underlying pride, as is the case in the “zeal of bitterness.” Good character is open to the truth exactly as intelligence faithful to its substance opens onto virtue; we could also say that moral perfection coincides with faith, and thus could not be a social perfectionism devoid of spiritual content."

To continue with this morbid theme: didn't Celan stab his wife? Norman Mailer, too?

And then what is one to make of these lines, apparently uttered by Freud:

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex. He said unless you’ve had anal sex with a girl she hasn’t really submitted to you."

(cited in Julian Barnes, LRB).

~~~

What would it be like to be an ordinary human being? What would it be like to start our philosophy with the proposition that we are social beings? Other people would not, then, be mere obstacles to my self-fulfillment or people that need to be made into 'subjects' by one form of domination or the other.

The most difficult word in the English language: good.

~~~

Women in fiction were either bimbos or bitches.' She recalls a talk she once attended by George Steiner. 'I stood up and asked about women writers and he said there weren't any from the 20th century. He could think of a couple from the 19th but that was that. It's all so dispiriting. I went to another talk by Martin Amis and pretty much the same thing occurred.
---Carol Shields.

gangsta

the little one

This photograph is on the cover of Walser's The Walk.

John Berger has a fascinating small essay on the picture (excerpts to follow). Line for line, Berger's writing remains, for me at least, an indication of what it is to write with a singular vision, paring what one hears and sees and speaks down to the fundamental, the essential, the way an old man might encapsulate the meaning of a sentence in the sweep of his hand or some other gesture.

Yesterday little r asked me: "What is the Hajj?"

Me: It is when you go to God's House.

Her: "Will He serve lemonade and cake?"

~~~

Cheever has shifted gear, toned down, old age reducing everything to a well-worn truth. There is hardly a mention of his wife, a dull acceptance that some colossal mistake has been made but cannot be repaired or rectified. There is-it appears-some coming through the alcohol-dependence. The great longing for beauty, tenderness remains; if a person's character is known by her grasp of the quality of the light then the light becomes an irresolute grey in these final pages.

For some reason you remembered Aurelius's meditations and how they could still be read two thousand years after being written. That's saying something. With JC there's always the lurking suspicion that much of what is noted is partial, of its time, easily dated and one is drawn to ask: what is universal? Love, the loss of love, the longing for it..is there any other story?

There are words, sentences, and if you're out of sorts they can seem like cages. But then, in the middle of them, between the bars, between your breaths, he says something remarkable, such as: all his homosexual feelings were in reality probably just a search for his brother's love. A single line, and then it's gone.

There is a winding down, the failing body. Gardening always seems like a way of putting off death. The silly flirtations, the surface illuminations. Does an excess of unhappiness lead to depth or superficiality? It can go either way. There is more reading now-of course, this may not be true...these journals represent 1/20th of the whole. That fact makes you wonder to yourself: assuming that this was a judicious selection, what would it mean to have read the whole man, start to finish? You imagine the tedium God must go through seeing our small lives.

There is no whole man, no whole woman, perhaps. This loose sprawl of words is what you see, what you get.

~~~

The small man, making it into the next century. Their clothes don't fit, the suits are dark, thick, class-ridden. To live out of sync with the times, then as well as now.

Confinement. The body stuck, at the wrong angle to the world: straight or queer (to tie the loose threads together).

The solid world of the peasants would disappear, the slow, assured and worked out rhythms of change that reproduce the same gestures, the same smiles, generation after generation. From now on, what resources could one draw upon, what inner strength could be found?

The voice falters, the synapses of the brain pick out the same words, a man's gait is weighed down by grief. The circle closes, there are many shades of green in anyone's life. To name every movement of green, every perfection glimpsed or deeply known.

"You can't change the past," little r told me in her hilarious American accent.

Where on earth did you learn that?

"Lion King I".

I give up!

   

once in a distant city...

I saw the world from a distance; that was what the world was. There was another, I keep with me, speak of with quiet reverence or it speaks with me.

there is a small circle of people, a small and bright disc lying in the dust. i bend to pick it up and my hand grows old.

In the old country, in the old times, near the black sliding gate, large enough to allow five horses to pass through it. In the shed sacks of coal, on the walls shards of broken glass to keep intruders out. In the dust you found an old twopence coin from 1837. Inside you found an old red penny stamp from George..you forget now. And there were other such findings, things people had left behind or misplaced. Like a stack of old 78s, which you played and were amazed to hear a distant voice from the past rise to the surface above the scratchy sounds. Some living person had once sung this, and another had listened to it or maybe even danced to it with sparkling eyes and love in their heart, only to fall, and fall.

You found many things in the house and perhaps someone after you has found a few of our old things: letters in an undecipherable script, blue aerograms, beautiful curving letters and dots, themselves great travelers from Persia and the sanskrit of the heart; fading yellow photographs, our journeys to Penarth pier, the edge of the world, to view the fading sun. The dougal pretending to read a math book; the swami pretending to play the piano. You can play the first few keys of 'once in royal David's city', the notes of pure Wales entering your soul...

What is all this navel gazing when the face remains hidden?

My hands are becoming hairy. Moles and freckles and blemishes appear from nowhere. There are no new lines on the reverse side. I stand in the calm mid-morning light, waiting.

the things we love, the unseen things,

take flesh, of course, in what can

be seen and said, though never

absolutely, one to one…

…there’s always a little too much

or a little too little, the seams remain on the surface,

fingers jut, buttons, umbrellas, fingernails…

uncollected letters in azure airmail envelopes,

the sense of shortfall or excess remains…

…but just wait 

Andrea

There's no telling how much green
is buried under this green
nor how much rain under this rain
many are the infinities
that here converge
that from here wander off...

There's no-retelling.....This is the relict
of that........................rrainy relict
the green in which the extreme of green
.....................................is weaving
Perhaps there's-no-telling for a 
deaf movement of light distilling
itself in ephemeral sound, and knowing
.........Perhaps allowing blooming, extending
.........combining
.........member to member, rejoining

---A. Zanzotto.

-----  ---  ___

Was it only a word that fell, a name from your heart, for your heart? Who knows how much your geyness was drawn to my almost-green eyes? To leave behind, turn one's back, as the world rushed by. Is your silence another type of question?

~~  ---  ____

When we were children we nearly drowned; and when we grew up it was no different. This is where I am, with my low-key words for my high-November thoughts. Winter surrounds us, feathers us in. Ice has a  tendency to repeat itself.  The frost on your starred heart. There was another time, quietly breathing within time. There was another green beneath the green. I dreamt it once, rare, overlaying a distant fire. It was the flag of my country, which is something I have lost too, though the more I forget her, the more she grows in me, inwardly.

A cautious optimism

A new book by Deaton (not read yet) suggests that things are, on the whole, getting better. Of course, that is too general to mean much. After all, it ignores distributional issues and it also glosses over the idea that 'goodness' may comprise a number of distinct features (or 'variables'). So, whilst there may be progress for some, along some dimensions, say, it is not clear why that should translate into 'overall betterness' unless one explicitly discusses how we weigh up or aggregate.

But on nutrition and life expectancy it does seem that there have been significant gains in some regions. Also, when it comes to political systems it seems there have been real gains with the growth of democracy and the decline of totalitarian and/or communist regimes. As for freedoms, it would also be fairly uncontroversial to say that when it comes to gender and religion there is more freedom. And if one takes a longer view it is hard to ignore the role of the welfare state and social democracy in promoting a more humane society. In terms of accessibility to education, again, one has to be cautiously optimistic (the old idea of education being reserved for the elites, the leisurely class) hardly appeals to anyone.

I suppose the question looks quite different if one thinks only about what's been happening over the last thirty years (growing inequalities, the invasion of the market into more and more realms of society). Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land and David Marquand's Decline of the Public are indispensable guides in this regard.

Also, I'm less optimistic than others when it comes to the net.

Here's Jackie Ashley with a great (but disturbing) article:

"But the bigger and better answer is to fight back in the real world against our exploitative and deeply sexist sexual culture. The internet, as all women commentators know, is rancid with idiot sexism and braying misogyny...

Remember, not long ago, when this was a cornucopia of democratic wonders, a new way of bringing the best information and entertainment to the billions. It was going to usher in a new enlightenment, break open the old structures of universities and tycoon-driven media empires. It was going to democratise entertainment and give political activists all the information they had struggled to get before.

And now? It's all about predatory paedophiles and a rising panic over the sexualisation of children. Has there ever been as fast a shrivelling? What does it say about western humanity in the 21st century?"

The whole article can be accessed here.

THE LONG ROAD - Nusrat fateh ali Khan & Eddie... by sweetsongs58

minority report

If you write, speak, or act from a dominant position it always appears-to yourself at least-that you are coming at it from a neutral position; the very fact of you being in that position allows you a certain leeway. If, on the other hand, you're a minority (in your own eyes or those of others) then it's: me against the world. It's hard to imagine a minority report free from bitterness and recriminations.

~~~

Private journals. It startles you-though it shouldn't-that there's no mention of politics or the 'real world' until two thirds into the book, the 1960s, page 243 to be precise:

'Men and women of Jewish descent are blackballed at the country club. Next to armaments, the nation's largest-selling product is whiskey and drugs. Wall street capitalists are real, militaristic and avaricious. You can see them on the station platform any morning, the overt and cheerful sponsors of tyranny all over the world.'

Before it was all country clubs, gin, repressed homosexuality, his wife's coldness and more gin. Well, at least that was the backdrop against which there are some great insights.

What will be remembered? How to reach the universal or timeless within the small arc of time allotted you, your 'rootedness' in a small, provincial corner of the world?

The exciting thing about a journal is that it is so unexciting. What one is allowed, or what one allows oneself, is the space to breathe and not react to passing external events. Or at least to partially insulate oneself from their impact.

What emerges in a journal is a life.

The passage of time, growth, new avenues explored, but also the recurrence of certain themes, like a red thread weaved through it all. The writer, hunched over the blank page,a kind of secular monk.

What also surprises you is just how little reference there is to other writers, to other books. Updike and Roth get brief mentions but that's about all. What did Cheever read, what did he like? Whatever it is, we learn nothing of that here.

'The computer is invincible, unseen and antic; at times cretinous. It is a  blow to our best sense of reality.'

Swimming in September...

'The pool is real enough and is the crux, the truth of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of the year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm in the sun...'

The plain recording of simple, marginal things, the light at a particular time of the day, the slow growth of darkness in our lives. A minority report comprising short sentences, devoid of any lyricism, ornamentation, embellishments. Nothing new under the sun. You just return to the same place again and again, hoping to find the same faces. Nothing flash, and no great revelation-your life has been too circumscribed and circumspect, too small for that.

'Swimming is the apex of the day'.

You know that for some of your friends the days spent at school were the best days of their lives-or at least they came to be represented that way. Looking back, everything else was a falling away from that pristine time. To laugh heartily and unknowingly is a precise way of avoiding second thoughts, of letting the sun drift over your naked back....

As you grow older nothing strikes you as deep. The superficiality of money and property and success. For some it was the distant gleam of a religious understanding. But for the most it was a kind of stumbling, a loping from from one job or place to another with a kind of hopelessness that goes by the name of freedom nowadays.

You wonder what it would be like to belong to a community of scholars or some other similar group:

'a community of accomplished men, who are passionately concerned with their deepest intuitions about love and death.'

Swim. Float. Avoid contact. Drift.

Have your B-complex to keep your spirits up; ginkgo balboa, herbal tea, green and black, chocolate, some homemade labneh. This is as close to blessedness as you'll get..a 'local maximum', a life lived in a low, inaudible key, without frame or weight. These minor reports you write to yourself lack all poetry.

November. Fires fragment and the smoke from the burning leaves stings your eyes. 

the shape of the coming winter

Something about the arrangement catches your eye and disturbs you. The accumulation of deodorants,  the cheap green and white hairdryer, the roll of cotton wool, nail clippers, the vial of hair darkener, toothpastes, cleansers, brushes of various sizes, balms, aftershaves in brilliant yellow and green bottles, down to the last ounces, body-washes, the ocean-blue soaps, growing transparent at the borders, yes, there's no mistaking it: all this is a sign of death.

You look in the mirror in the early hours and think of yourself as an old man, looking back. Will you then have so many things around you or will you have managed to whittle it all down to the essential, discarding the superfluous? Will your life be simpler then, truer?

For fifteen minutes in the day there is a semblance of order in your life. The plates are laid out in a regular fashion, the food is hot and delicious, and there is a simple salad that comes to stand for all that is good in the day: radishes finely sliced, cucumbers cool and fresh, onions in lemon juice and a few plump tomatoes. Here it is, an unpretentious, rustic bit of lunchtime perfection.

You are the last person to sleep. Outside there is a vague and unearthly glow produced by a streetlight and it makes the lawns appear artificially green, the artificiality spreading everywhere, like a soccer field after the game is over. You turn off all the lights and each room becomes dark again. You draw down the blinds. Little r sleeps blissfully, like a cheeky and exhausted chimney sweep, her hair tousled, her hands grubby. The baby with his yellow cap pulled firmly back resembles a miniature,  innocent  Pope. H sleeps propped up on three pillows, her hair seeming more dark and lustrous than usual, flowing down on the pillows, accentuating her features. The slow breathing joining the millions of others around the world. She has a few buttons remaining open...

The impassive stars, witness to this impermanence, this kindling and rekindling of the flames, of love itself and the death of love. The finding of form, its loss in our dreams, the ancient chaos in the human heart, the displacement of fine sentiments, feelings, left cold like a china plate on the table overnight, with the howling dark outside gently pressing against the windowpane. This stilled moment when the the clock's telling of time reverberates within.

Out of nowhere, in the deep silence, a host of dark bird twitterings, as brief as the glittering of silver leaves in a high tree in full summer, or the sudden and sure swerve of a million shoal of fish.

g

"Is that Tennessee roughcut?

 No, it's Pakistani black"

 “This tapestry moves

as the morning lights up.

And they who are in it move

and love its moving

from sleep to Idea

born on the breathing

of a distant harmonium, To See

is their desire

as they wander estranged”

The trail led to a great-grandfather, 102 years old, living in complete squalor with a wife who was willing a death that was slow to come. To talk, Dorn had to put his mouth right to the old man's ear. He could hear, but he wasn't responding. Then he broke into a lovely, long line chant. It became important, Dorn says, to register this, beyond the immediate circumstances of the contrived meeting. 'We think death is some rather large event. We don't have the sense that death is simply another occurrence, like any occurrence that might happen on this string we call our lives... And death is not any great thing. It's either there or it's not.' The poet justifies his decision to stay and watch, even when he doesn't know what he thinks about the scene he is working to remember. That will be decided later, when he sits down to write. 'I have to be there with the Indians. I don't have a country any more than they do.'

---Iain Sinclair. 

What the desert teaches you is two great things: Endurance and Abstinence.

When a man is down on the floor he usually speaks the truth. 

You walk absentmindedly against the stream of Friday worshipers, ambling away from the mosque. You hear the good-natured banter amongst the faithful, their easy-going relation to the world and one another, their bodies free from any sign of anxiety, their faces calm against a weak sun that beats a shiny yellow film of light on the cool marble. You walk against the tide, knowing that this kind of fellowship is strangely beyond your reach.

For a moment you stop and observe the thick green leaves, unusually luxuriant for this time of the year and you are absorbed in something, transported to summer time in London, Watford or Woodford, by the stillness, the thick and dense light filtering through the trees. This rapture of the green moment holds you, and is like a jewel amidst the dross of the world.  This may be all you are afforded. It passes. You are changed slightly. And you walk on in the light which is now less mysterious.

~~~

A friend tells you that he's gone too far in his infidelities with some woman: it must stop; it mustn't stop. In a car, a second-rate hotel room. "The problem is," he confesses, is that I'm neither a pure saint, nor a pure sinner. Instead, I'm torn between what I want to do and what I should do. "

Can you picture the solution, the endgame when things sort themselves out? I ask.

"Part of me thinks: if I had enough money I'd buy an apartment and keep her as my mistress...it could be, though, that all this is merely a compensation for my failure in life."

Endurance and Abstinence.

In the moment in which we fall, we tend to speak the truth, or at least think we do. 

"I am fallen. I should accept that others are too. But there is something in me that is too rigid, too narrow, that makes it impossible for me to accept another's faults. Is this it? Is this the way it ends up?"

~~~

'And the sad men, the lonely men, those who are unhappily married, drop to their knees in garages, bathrooms, and motels asking God to help them understand the need for love.'

'I must sleep with someone, and I am so hungry for love that I count on touching my younger son at breakfast as a kind of link, a means of staying alive.'

'Sleep is my kingdom, my native land, ...Do we see our age in the poverty of our dreams? The threadbare dreams of middle age.

---John Cheever.

~~~

You steal ten pages in the morning. The sleeplessness still deep in your eyes, your bones, your walk. You hold a book with you wherever you go, the way a cripple holds a cane. Not to read it under a tree but for the simple feel of it in the palm of your hand. 

In a dream she asks you for Venus and Furs. For two consecutive mornings you see a Chinese-looking girl, round face with lots of blush, and a Russian fur hat, black leotards. You have no lurid thoughts: at six o'clock in the morning it is still possible to sleep and be yourself.

Steam enters the pages of the book, opening them up, making them go wavy. Another five minutes and the front page will turn up and then eventually curve horribly. Will the steam affect the text itself, transforming a 'g' into an 's'...'K' morphs into 'R', forgets its sharpness, makes peace with the time it has, the shade it has.

'When the car gave up the ghost outside Lahore
It would have been around a hundred and twenty
In the shade, had there been any shade.'



  

Two-nation theory

Pankaj Mishra's very interesting article here

'There is much about this shadow-boxing that makes one wonder if Bhagwati, moving like many intellectual elites between the bubble of universities and think tanks and the private hothouse of professional rivalry, has lost touch with how the other half—or the 99 percent—lives.'

This isn't about Bhagwati per se. It's really about two visions and, stemming from that, two ways in which we look at inequality. 

the bigger picture is that worldwide we're seeing the growth of inequalities (see the 2012 UNCTAD report for the latest figures). Given that this has been an era of globalization and free markets it is not surprising that some think there is a clear line of causality between market reforms and inequality. 

But the really interesting question-one raised by Mishra-is whether what we're seeing is really less about the emergence of genuine markets and more about the capture of the state by big business. And not just in India. Monbiot's recent article in the Guardian spells it out

At a more personal level you're beginning to wonder how people survive here. Tomatoes have hit 140 Rs/kilo (just last year they were 40Rs). Forty per cent of Pakistani children are malnourished (a slightly higher figure for India, I think). Education and housing are barely affordable. The lives of the poor, as Banerjee and Dufflo state, are characterized by severely limited options (up to 70% of income goes towards nutrition). The poor have few assets, little access to credit on reasonable terms and are engaged in numerous, low-skilled (and often temporary) jobs. Weak markets (insurance, say), ineffective governments (low spending in the public sector, corrupt officials), monopolies and mafias, the prevalence of feudal mindsets and practices (structures of domination), tribal mentalities, and a growing religious conservatism and fanaticism are a heady mix, a recipe for disaster, actually.

The little you know of India makes you think that it is an incredibly superficial place. The "mystical East"? Do me a favour, bro'. Filth and squalor and unbelievable poverty and injustice. 

The real two-nation theory is this: the haves and the have-nots.    

notes from the underground

As a child you thought of trolls as being quite frightening. When you grew up you realized that they still are!

Of course, there was the initial excitement of encountering your first genuine troll. For a while you felt a bit out of sorts. But then you remembered the first few pages on Pepys and how, despite losing his balance, he managed to keep a small area of calm and impartiality in his mind from being disturbed by the events he was surrounded by. And by writing about it one could distance oneself from one's momentary and instinctive feelings.

Then a kind of sadness to it all and you reserve judgement-at least for the while. It is genuinely disappointing to see people with half-decent minds acting so silly, so childishly. You think to yourself: there are some people out there who need some kind of help. Of course, there is a more extreme form of trolls, those who heckle and harass women (why do you suspect that most trolls are men? Because of their aggressiveness, their cowardice?).

But what is it about trolls? Is it ultimately their loneliness and social ineptitude, their lack of grace and etiquette that makes you think they're interesting-at least for a short period of time?

Does the internet and anonymity bring out some of the pent up hatred and frustrations of people?  These very same people would not dare utter such comments in a face-to-face conversation (which makes you think that they are either bullies or the childhood victims of bullies).

How does one deal with a troll? Ignore them, reply to them, try and understand them? Quite frankly, I see enough crazies to realize that there is often an insurmountable barrier between normal, reasonable people and those who write notes from the underground. It is incredibly draining trying to put yourself in their shoes (did Smith write on this?). What kind of powers of imagination and sympathy does one need, and can there be a limit to one's abilities to comprehend difference? How, for example, does one talk to (and not talk at) a racist, an anti-semite, a misogynist, a fundamentalist or a troll? In a similar vein, can we understand madness or those afflicted with some sort of pathology?

You begin to wonder about your troll. West Midlands. Could just be some fucked-up desi (most likely). Or a bitter middle-aged man whose life is disintegrating all around him. You think how hatred and bitterness can reduce a grown person to a child-like or primitive state. You could refer him to your psychologist friend, of course, but you fear he might attack her. Then you think: trolls aren't that interesting after all. Goodness and kindness...yes, now that is something that is endlessly fascinating. 

notes to myself

Diaries, notes and sketches of the inner life, not out of any great inclination to spiritual matters it must be said but, rather, as a result of any noteworthy 'outward' events being so very rare.

A low key, provincial life, lived at least three degrees from any significant semblance of reality or authenticity. A duplicitous life, perhaps, but with malice towards none. An unwittingly casual approach to matters of prime importance, a kind of childish indifference to the politics of the times, the fervent disputations that so animate and inflate the egos of one' s contemporaries.

There is much speculation in the half lit corridors over who beds who, and in the main this conversation is conducted in such high spirits that little thought is spared for any of the would-be aggrieved parties, the unknowing spouses of the guilty persons.

The puritan, adjusting his head gear ever so slightly, complains bitterly of the lack of moral fibre he finds amongst his compatriots. It is the cool indifference of the gossipers as much as the hot and illegitimate passions of the merry makers that stokes his indignation, so much so that his face is contorted into a ghastly form, almost unrecognizable even to himself.

He sees himself and the others from a distance, like a foreign or italicized word in the margin of a text written by some other hand. The iron-like rules that govern his heart and speech prevent the growth of a space for doubt or humour or sympathy or a myriad of other human emotions. He must stand in high judgement, seeing the moment and mistaking it for a sequence, mistaking equally himself for God.

~~~~~

At the book fair you reluctantly put Everything Flows back on the table. You will never read it...not that you will read more than ten pages of the books you did acquire.

Pepys. The unequalled self. A book on the boxer, Muhammad Ali. A biography of Leonard Woolf. A selection of Betjeman, two children's books. In addition you have persuaded bt to purchase Amiel's journal if he can find it in the desert bookshops of the gulf.

The first journals...to record the inner movement of the soul; now everything must be noted with a relentless tedium, an inescapable logic. One is not thinking any more, merely composing for the next entry.

What purpose can such an exercise serve if not to puff the ego up even more? A retreat...a recognition of the losses, a writing out of oneself to distance oneself from oneself?

~~~

Geoff Dyer, who usually writes with some verve, has a disappointing piece on (war) reporting and fiction. Why this endless fascination with the traumas, guilt and 'experiences' of the men who inflict such violence on other people? Had the same uneasy feeling reading Yellow Birds (which was a good-ish book, even though Dyer thinks it was tripe). I suppose one might call this the Camus-effect: other people on the scene are merely bit parts in the mechanism which reveals the inner depths of the existential hero or, more accurately, the flawed existential hero.

~~~

Some interesting notes being struck up about how the economics curriculum needs to be revamped in the wake of the financial crisis. Note to self: must get my book out.

california dreaming

This is as kitsch as it gets.

It is estimated that one in twenty Americans have one of these in their homes. Go figure!

The Guardian, on the painter of light (Hey! Wasn't that JMWT?)

'For while Kinkade's work is at best humdrum and technically adequate, its popularity tells us something about his public, about a desperate yearning for nostalgia that pervades parts of American life, a return to the safe glow of some imagined past.

"It's not the world we live in," Kinkade said of his painting, "it's the world we wished we live in. People wish they could find that stream, that cabin in the woods."'

~~~

I was drawn to this by something anon said...what's all this about the Jewishness? I suppose we all live with our illusions-both at the individual and at the collective level- and maybe even though some may be necessary or harmless others are, no doubt, a real source of trouble and strife. 

The notion that there was some sort of "golden past" in Muslim history, a time when "we" were progressive, scientific, and pluralistic, spellbinds a lot of fairly educated muslims-particularly when they look around and see just how backward and rigid their societies have become.

The American west, the frontier, the rugged individualism and sheer gritty determination of the outlaw, the holy rebel, the gunslinging Puritan, and the defender of the 'city on the hill' (the new Jerusalem) fosters another kind of delusional outlook. 

Equally: how the settlers found a "wilderness" in Palestine (how very convenient!).  

And Little England with its sickly-sweet nostalgia for rolling hills, village churches, cultural homogeneity (read: hierarchy), and its idealization of a kind of bumbling fool or amateur with his non-intellectual, non-abstract, common good sense and decency. Alternatively: the pragmatic reformer, the world-builder, the no-nonsense Utilitarian. Extend this a bit further and trashy sentimentalism over the Empire isn't far behind.  

~~~

The seduction of the American dream, social mobility-where anyone can make it if they put their hang-ups to one side. Roll up your sleeves and stop larking around, make something of your life. Success is only around the corner...the Promised Land, over the rainbow. California is also the home of the porn industry, isn't it?

Of course, to talk about the degree to which the ideal corresponds to reality is to miss the point. The ideal serves some other purpose here. What is sad, amusing and tragic at the same time is how those with such high ideals and good intentions suddenly find their lives coming off the wheels as irreality takes a grip on them. 

I suppose there's a special glee associated with seeing preachers and mullahs falling flat on their faces and in our cynical age it is easy to dismiss any type idealism by associating it with a fundamentalist mindset. 

~~~

Anyway, let's see if 12 years a slave can break free from the Hollywood makeovers. Still waiting for the truly great film on the destruction of the 'Red Man'. The Guardian runs a piece: 'Top 10 westerns. Haven't got the heart to actually look at it.

~~~

"We believe that the walls of the home are the new frontier for branding. Thom always says that there are forty walls in the average home. Our job is to fill them."

"He speaks for about thirty minutes, and afterwards they come up to him and talk. It's very emotional, some of them are crying and saying, 'Here's how you've affected me.'"

I think I'm going to puke. 

randomness

a is either a mystic or I am going crazy. And why can't it be both, you ask? The randomness of thoughts coming together and drifting apart. Sometimes a word also loses its meaning with time.

Since I'm reading K.Irby and J. Cheever simultaneously they sometimes get mixed up with one another.

'as a hand of sunlight into the room
drawing figures on the wall.'

Words which are indecipherable. It may be because it's winter; or maybe you were never destined to understand much. Look at the blank wall or the sleeve or the fair narrow wrist, but never the writing.

You run (up to 8 K now) and find yourself vanishing into the breeze, running through it. A dark November evening, running in a channel, hemmed in by memories of childhood's special, dark November days. And yet, you realize how far they have receded now.

'Traveling acres of sunlight. I remember...'

'you taste for the first time the strangeness of those voyages, battlefields, and hotel rooms in which you will, as a grown man, find yourself frightened and alone.'

'he seems to have the identical smile, as if this expression-this transparency-were a quality of light and existed independently of one's features.'

Books randomly placed on top of one another on a shelf: The Vertigo Years, Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Czeslaw Milosz, Speamann, Walser, Julian Barnes, Rebecca Solnit, John Broome, William Bronk, askew on the top in light grey.

Today is bright and the light rests gently on the top of the leaves, reminding you of a deep forest you walked through once. And you are divided within yourself: this beauty and tranquility has always existed and will so forever; if I did not see it it would collapse like a pack of cards.

The I has left the stage,
straight out of there,
I find myself
saying.

The past, your past, drawn down to a whisper. What was given to you at birth seems to have disappeared; all strikes up now as a false note, except, perhaps, your Jewishness...

As I rummage through my clothes in my closet I realize I'm talking to myself. Is this any different?

As you grow older you think every fall, every sin, is somehow unique to you; when you are young each mistake is as old as sin, as old and eternal as human history.

"Why is there so much sun when it is winter?" asks little r, almost talking to herself, and deep down I feel proud she has sort of inherited this hatred for the southern light. But in winter the quickness of its demise is a sight to behold, the flagging, exhausted last hours, the piercing shadows cutting it down to size, the squares and rectangles of light, burning with a brilliant orange hue on old brick walls.

confidence (trickster)

I see myself smoking a pipe, grey haired and dignified, full of wisdom, wise thoughts, musing on how the world is going to pieces. I fear that one drag, and I'll die of cancer. 

The winter grey descends, fine particles of dust produced by burning leaves ten, twenty miles away. We have the afterthoughts, the debris without the crackling fires. 

You turn the lights off and set up two lamps, burning with low flames. The old medieval one, cloth and iron, produces more warmth than light, its narrow focus of light spilling reluctantly on to polished wood. The orange cone of light, the thin film of gentleness resting on the table surface until I unplug it and the wood fades to ordinary wood again. In the 6 o'clock morning drive, down the empty road, your hair tousled, your breath still heavy but calm, you see the red traffic light ahead, like a distinct note against the silence of the world. 

I listen to some Biber and my heart is full of strength or confidence. There are no doubts, just the road and the simple movement of my hands and feet. You drive with both hands close to each other, at about '8.35', W-SW. In a more relaxed fashion you sometimes keep both south, as if you were steering a ship (or how you imagine you'd steer a ship). But in a moment I remember how everything can go pear shaped in a split second. Slow the car down, take the back routes, the grey unused roads that live a second life.

"Have you seen your face?" she asks.

"No, not truly."

He says, "I'm falling to pieces, going through hell. I know I can't marry her but I've developed feelings."

I listen to his scrambled message as hoards of restless school kids push and shove their way past me. There's a fountain with gurgling water and lights reflected up to the white ceiling as the clouds darken over. A few drops of rain...maybe twenty or twenty five. In a desert you are grateful for what you get. There is a kind of tremendous peace in this school with its open structure and it is an absolute inverse mirror of my friend's quavering, trembling voice. "My life is a mess and I don't know who can fix it."  

There is no certainty in my voice and the best I can do is joke my way through the conversation. It is little comfort, a small ray of light-either to him or me.

There are no lines of poetry, no mountain-like experience that will show the way. His clothes are well-worn, slightly frayed at the edges, his eyes darting wildly like a trapped animal...

On my way home I shift gears mechanically: the sure world of Japaneses technology, of the stars above my head, of the white street lights just coming on. What if I forget how to drive? 

1870s

'I love having an alternate life to retreat into and to lose myself in. I love being away from the world so long — so far out from shore. Eleven years. '
---Donna Tartt.

'In a culture of speed-dating, quick fixes, fast food, bullet trains, pop-up everything, and unreadably long jeremiads about the increasing incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the single-minded commitment required to read a long, absorbing book serves as a rebuke to a culture that favours those who can simultaneously email/tweet/instant message/hold up their end of a phone call/Skype while live blogging the whole shebang'

---Stuart Jeffries.

'We wanted to start to tell a story that would take a long time to tell. We were creating a sophisticated, multi-layered story with complex characters who would reveal themselves over time and relationships that would take space to play out.'

---Kevin Spacey.


He then spoils it by saying 'the industry' should give people what they want.  Organized religion and the music industry failed (or will fail) because they didn't give people what they wanted and so they, 'the people', ended up taking it for free or rejecting what was being offered. 

Always give people what they want. '8/10 cats prefer...' And if people want porn in their soaps, then?

The longer form, the slow movement: the last convulsions against the fragmentation, discontinuity, or the beginning of something radically new?   

~~~

'Boccaccio wrote the book between 1348 and 1352, when the values of the Middle Ages (valor, faith, transcendence) were yielding to those of the Renaissance (enjoyment, business, the real)'

In Boccaccio the world is:

'like the tiny natures mortes, corners of landscapes, and background-figures of some of our fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters. Action, pure action, without intended meaning or ethics, gains depth, lucidity and mystery from those details that no amount of serious moral intention could give it.'

~~~

Each person is a centre.