a new day, a new age.

Bob points me to this very interesting passage that starts with:

'In virtually all cases, a man in his late twenties, no matter how bright and precocious, has not yet manifested his full wisdom, simply because he cannot have had sufficient life experience to mature his spirit.'

The big news last year was the publication of a biography of P.Fitzgerald who only started writing in her late fifties (of course the reasons for starting late may be different for men and women). At the fag end of the year there was also mention of Willa Cather, who only started writing at the age of forty (yesterday you picked up two of her books, one for the title alone...My Antonia).

~~~

A scathing attack on TED here 

'But perhaps this is what the Hybrid Age is all about: marketing masquerading as theory, charlatans masquerading as philosophers, a New Age cult masquerading as a university, business masquerading as redemption, slogans masquerading as truths.'

~~~

There was a time when 1999 seemed in the distant future; now it seems to be in the distant past. Each of us is a still point through which time blows, and time will find us out. Absent from ourselves. At Trafalgar Square...Imran has brought three very pretty girls with him, deep brown eyes, lush hair, dressed all pretty in pink and purple scarves and woolly hats.

All this talk of the future seems empty; the past, on the other hand, is a different country, rich and with a varied texture. And the feeling, too, that the past is given its poignancy and intensity because it is a distant reflection of the 'absolute past', that silence from which the first note tears itself away. 

The first day of the year is always a stepping back into that silence.  

The early morning discussion with the secretaries: so many years have flown by. What is left of anyone? A name, a picture on the wall (if they're lucky). Where is Jinnah now? And Sir Syed?When you're gone from here, Khalid, all they'll say is: "Yes, there was someone here, we think, by the name of KM."

Jesus, it's going to be one of those years!

~~~

Good news: it appears that Danilo Kis (Lea's recommendation) has made it. Abdul, bless his soul, has brought it back with him after a three day flight from London. At his brother's wedding last night we stuffed our faces with steaming hot pilau, tender mutton, moist chicken tikka, plum chutney, fresh curd, followed by the most perfect carrot and milk sweet dish. The wedding halls ("banquet halls") are out there in the outskirts, huge white buildings with glaring neon pink and parrot-green lights, large empty driveways. Something like you imagine Vegas to have once been like. And of course, the analogy is not lost on you: marriage: the biggest gamble of all. 

    

the poet against the world

The poet stands to lose everything.

The poet against the world, against theory, law and history; not against history, but one step ahead of it. She is not for or against "people", but is for this particular person. 

In the world we know, or think we know,the meaning of words like 'friendship' and 'absence' somehow gets lost in translation, which is another way of saying when the distance between two people grows there is only silence. But when we dream, there is another silence, full of understanding...

Every generalization is an image that the poet will break, only to create another, more transient one, like a shape-shifting fire or the moon's light passing over high tree tops. 

'And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling,..' 
--DFW

I can't read writing like this, can't stand the idea of being swept away by words. The false note of lyricism grates on your nerves and in the final analysis it comes across as the writing of a precocious, self-obsessed kid. 

Something is drawing you to give up on reading altogether. There's nothing worse than the fake intelligence of writer and reader.  

'“Forgiven” is not the right word. I think its lyricism has been accepted and understood in the context of the book.'
---James Salter

The poet is against the world but he is for the world as well, at least for a different world that exists not just in the hopes of a generation or in an individual's imagination. He is 'for' the world that has always existed, the acts of kindness, generosity, the restraint and the enlarged vision, the wider sympathies that prevent the world from collapsing into pure nothingness. 

War, you feel, is not just the disruption of 'experience'; it is the very antithesis of it. Which is why it must be refashioned years later into a story, a poem, a film. Collective cultural memory, institutions of all shapes and sizes, and individual testaments will do their best to reconstitute and refashion a narrative, tie the threads together, make sense of the great trenches in our minds, eke out some sense, fathom some line of causality, of sin or loss or frailty or heroism against the familiar backdrop of the human condition.

This frenzied lust for blood must form no part of our nature, must say nothing about Man (and in particular, about man).

Lest we forget. Lest we forget what?

the inessential

Two films, both entertaining , but both lacking something.  McCabe and The Long Goodbye. As with the fiction, which you don't think you can read any more unless it really gets down to the bone, there's a limit to your enthusiasm for films. Larry's Party, for example. Enough writerly material to keep you going but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself: so what? 

You want a book or a film to illuminate some part of your life, bring half-understood things out of the shadows or make you see something in a new light. What you don't want to see is acting, or writing, or "ideas" or any attempt to seem profound. This is, of course, very much an age thing since with time it is harder to tolerate bullshit. Eventually, reality will catch up with you, no matter how many evasions. 

Is there a way in modern life to reach truth or goodness without suffering?

If you cannot see beauty or truth in one's life do you inevitably have to fall back on the mind, the imagination? An imagined beauty? Is art, then, just a high-brow mirror image of popular culture's familiar escape routes? 

McCabe: the west as it really was: muddy, cold, a shambles, full of stupidity, pettiness, made up of village bumpkins, whores, gamblers, goofs, tricksters, dealers and hustlers; a veritable Russian drama without the aristocrats.

Talking of Russia...Ivan's XTC sounded like a great story but the acting is so hammy, so awful that you're tempted to give up on it. If you don't want to see acting you equally don't want to see the lack of any acting! And yet, there was something that drew you in. 

Which leaves you with Bergman's Smiles and Frances Ha.

Much is being made of the renaissance of television with series like Breaking Bad, the Wire, the Sopranos, Sherlock, the Killing...all of which are very popular amongst a certain class here. With life and work catching up on you it's simply impossible to indulge in such luxuries. Are you becoming a Benthamite? Do you want to calculate the precise scale of pleasures from a book, the opportunity costs? No, it's not that, but at a certain age you have to work out-but not too tightly- what's essential and what's secondary. At this stage in your life you don't want to just read about goodness.

The Swimmer

Time is an unbroken line, an infinitely outward extending line. We race with one another, headlong into it, aware that the past can never be retrieved, or never consciously brought back from the depths. All time does is flow, taking us with it. Time as the relentless subtractor. In other words. Time is death, the Fall, quick or slow, never to be redeemed.

But what if, opposed to this modern view, time were circular, always bringing us back? What if time is a condition of life itself, an unending series of possibilities opening up before us? Each birth is a rose against the thorn of time. Insofar as we are modern we have lost the sense (or value) of the timeless and the older, cyclical views of time themselves appear dated. Time marches on (at war with who?), and all we have is this sense that it is taking us away from who we really are-not leading us to a clearer or more complete image of ourselves. Time is a broken mirror. 

Watched The Swimmer again yesterday with some friends (in one of the auditoriums). For Cheever everything is about the moral quality of the light. In the film we see Neddy himself becoming darker with time. In the end he doesn't even have the strength to haul himself out of the pool; he treads heavily, his face bowed down, broken, defeated by the realization that the life he thought he had was all a pretence, a show, a false coin. At the beginning he is all smiles, the symbol of youth, vigour, freshness (he even finds a dark cloud beautiful) but by the end he is almost like a wounded beast, struggling for all his worth for some comfort, solace, some way back "home"... 

There is a way out, I know-a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word-but I am unable at the moment to find it.

Home is the invisible axis, the still point of the heart from which all time is measured. The warmth fades from his body, slips from his hands. The green translucent waters of childhood are now replaced by the fallen brown leaves of autumn. Somehow the idea comes to him that all the swimming pools, the moments of his life, are connected as if really just parts of one river-and that connection goes by the name of his wife, Lucinda. Along the way he his friends will line the banks of this great river; he is noble, different, grand. The depth of life is found in the fact that there are no second chances, that history doesn't always lead us forwards. 

This is it. You had your chance at the good life and you blew it. The light is pure and very elegiac. I see it now, as if it was before my very face. The eighties, the nineties..there are no words for time gone, no matter how much you struggle; the imperfections absolved by summer light or simply forgotten, make their way back, press up against your cheek.

You stand in a line in your forest green blazer, your dark grey flannel trousers, counting the money with one hand in your pocket. You sit slouched on a plastic table, your head heavy with sleep, waiting...eight, ten hours for a flight out of here...when will this journey end? 

There is no-one serious left. The world is full of politics, shallow schemers, reality shows. Late at night the dark winds seem to be lost and there are so many re-runs on television that one has lost the sense of what's "live" and what's recorded. The wide net, all this casting out of words into those empty lives. Where are those subterranean waters that will take me back to the centre? Where is that summer's day when I shot a gun and hit the target and Andrew O'Brien said, exasperated, "beginner's luck!"?

Why do we think luck will stick with us, drag us with it to safe waters? For what is given us in the beginning can be lost, and only a late ace can turn the hand.  

the suburbs

There is a small brick station, lost, blind behind the leafy trees. If you walk hurriedly by it on a blustery Monday morning you might mistake it for a post office or a 1930's municipal building in a state of disuse or disrepair. There are so many stations like that, half in the countryside, linked to the city like an open wound. One day you will get on the central in the dark and stop at every station, walk up the stairs into the light and look at all those small worlds I'm not a part of.

The spiritual history of the suburbs: ice-cram vans prowling on empty summer roads, lemonade and ice clinking in tall glasses, cricket on the radio,  the dull aftermath after Wimbledon, the early arrival of a brief September light enough to chill us in the shade, remind us that all this cannot last. The grass growing thicker by the hour, the last war veterans sunning themselves, their facial expressions having been fixed many years ago, cats and dogs deep in their dreamworld, a young girl just breaking out of hers.

At night a drunk utters his first coherent words of the day, a silver-backed fox slinks through the broken wooden fences out into the sloping gardens and fields, the perfume of the flowers brushing against her, past the constant roaring drum of the motorway traffic. The last song is playing at the straggling party down the street, the plates heaped up next to the remains of the barbecued meat and fish, the bones, the toothpicks, the stained paper tissues that had looked so pure when tightly packed together, the clocks that have croaked, the exhausted, childish giggling, the bodies loosened, hands autonomous of the mind-and it is still not clear at this hour who will sleep with who.

"S", who has worked hard to get here, looks out of his bedroom window in partial disgust at what he sees below him. He looks out at them as would his ancestors, ancient Russian Jews, with great pity and remorse. "Is this a life?" He feels the warmth of the presence of his wife and children sleeping cozily behind his back in a parallel world.

In winter the suburb is Japanese. It is quiet and formal...The last true rituals are played out, the big metaphysical questions worked out in the tawdry details of wrong turnings,  chances that have slipped by. How did I end up like this, my hands so unsure? The summer of my childhood, it seems like a minute ago, less...these patterns, these arrangements, stitched together..what do they all mean? Here we are, a name on a map nobody wants to read. The old gods, Pan-Shiva, weigh down on us like the spirit of the dark forest. You wait, each day, for the threshold, for some great turning point in your life, an event that will draw a line under your past. Jesus-Christ.

In the late afternoon the tinkling sound on the rail tracks like the jangling of keys, the train that passes us by, floats, curves way out from the ghost station, our abandoned little frontier outpost, this temple to some forgotten god. No-one gets off, no-one gets on. We have no idea of the journeys other people make, their easy-going accommodation with the world and with risk.

My life, folded like a Japanese flower, simple and ornate,already a thing of the past.

(Lines from John Burnside. Film: The Swimmer)

~~~

The short story is a gem but the film, well, now, that's another story. As with John Huston's The Dead the film version outdoes the short story in darkness, strangeness. It's the perfect summer day, but already there is a dark cloud up above, heading this way... 

 There was this line that goes: the Red Man's values were expressed in the way he lived; and they were made up of relationships with other people and with his home, his land.

 Great store is set-and rightly so-in the freewheeling individual, the man or woman who resists all definition. But there can be no 'I' without a 'we' or even a 'Thou'. As time rolls on we begin to understand that not all determinations are constricting, that freedom lies in another direction, one less hostile to what faces you. It is wrong, you think, to say there is no 'east', no 'west'. But there will always be a way out, moments when the silver hand of the compass points north, and you orient yourself, even while standing in the very same spot, to another way of thinking, another set of themes.

Is there a word, a line, that will take me back to myself?

Yesterday, as the last light of the day began to flare, you stood in the open talking to a friend and the light all around you delineated every object with a rare precision. Only we remain unknown to ourselves. This great, clear light could have been the light from any northern country and for a moment the world seemed awash, cleansed with its brilliance, our very lives halted the way one halts when seeing a stray photograph amongst all the familiar ones. A crow looks down on us and is amazed by the strangeness of the fact that there are so many blank, wild spaces in the lives of human beings, that after all these centuries of life on earth men and women would be so affected by the changing quality of light.

Our faces, half in shadow, all the losses remembered. A trace of music can still fascinate, hold us. Nothing will change, the human condition an unbreakable thread. But none of us will be around to see it all. There is no set of sets, no comprehensive view, no stepping out into radiant sunlit meadows, only one person gliding into the exact same role as the one who has departed, taking up the fallen robe.

Each man and woman is the light they know or recognize. Though it stoops and bends down to us from afar, like the fragrance of the flowers from the deserts of Uzbekistan or the outer reaches of a dark universe, it is we who make something out of it by tilting our heads to it, if at all, giving our assent or denials.

This slanting winter light, frozen light stream, from a half-dead mongrel sun, bristling with the expectant new year in its webbed refractions; this we hope will open us up to some perfect mystery, will clarify, still, moderate and reveal.

With age we move away from abstractions and hard-worn truths to something softer, gentler, less precise. There seems to be less time now to work things out, less space to shelter, and you think twice about reliving some old memory. The wind strikes up a note of discord, as events and unfinished business stack up against you. Nothing happens as you drift. And all this will be called a life by some, this slow accumulation and running down.

Pessoa wrote that he had lived a lot but not really lived.

There must be some form-perhaps it is described in some ancient text-of the life well lived? A way in which character takes shape and the scales fall.

The mud in the fields has hardened overnight, with nothing between it and the stars. There are small muddy puddles that resemble those in a village and the roads, too, seem to have become more earthy. You walk across the broken fields, without too many assumptions. Of all the hearts I have tried, I have found this winter one to be the most agreeable.

Warmth slips from my fingers, and on the road my eyes look out impassively at the passing world, just as my father's steely eyes would, almost without blinking, all those years ago. Across bridges, keeping up with the setting sun, or down country lanes to Cardiff, this is how we traversed the silence. 

Time has done its best and time has caught up with us. Streaks of rust on my silver buttons, the mind that cannot hold the line lingers in a daze. Your hands full of blemishes, barely imaginable a quarter of a century ago. You look without favour on younger people. What spring was sprung for this arrival? Uncalled for, and your own voice falters. A small semblance of order aimed at, like the terrace of your mind, some deep unknown strata of childhood memory caught in the fall of light. This light that falls on saints and traffic policeman alike, on the prostitutes in-between the acts, on the collectors of rubbish that sparkles like misplaced gold, and on their terrible hands, misshapen by fate.  

the universal

The universal grey clouds up above. You stop at the traffic lights where the road swerves erratically back to the gated community and the cloistered dullness of the small lives. Beyond, the open 'ring road' which branches off on to the motorway and pure wilderness. This great accumulation of traffic lights, this cathedral of lights-the red of religion, the green of a boiled sweet, the turquoise of a south pacific sea-is like a pilgrim's penultimate resting place. They are he last great universal signs we have. Somewhere, right now, in Buenos Aries, a woman is staring vacantly at the traffic lights, waiting for the change, the sudden change in gear that will move her out of this impasse...

Listening to the music in the car, with one eye on the back seat passengers, insulated against the cold by this little domestic scene in a capsule, you wonder to yourself: why does the music seem to reflect every turn, every emotion in the petty dramas of your life? And how could this be? 

Education: you bump into a fantastically clever (and humble) colleague at breakfast time. He's your age and already with four young kids. "Where do they go to school?" you ask. All go to religious schools, it transpires. Maybe the'll catch up later. You don't care, of course, but it does say something, you think, when the brightest people of your generation think that a "true" education is a religious one. I'm not even against that in principle (somewhere deep down I harbour a longing for a different type of knowledge). It's just that the level of education is likely to be so poor that it will just be a form of brainwashing. 

On Friday we went with little r to her Christmas school party. A bonfire, Santa's grotto, and so on. Also, a very fetching woman wearing bright red shoes, leather trousers, and lace gloves up to her elbows, leaving her upper arms exposed. Yes, well..er..ahem.

An old friend had asked me to sponsor his walk (or participate myself) to raise funds for the "Islamic education" of kids. Now, I'm not averse to the idea of sponsored walks, but: for an "Islamic education"? Firstly: why not for something useful like access to clean water? Secondly, why an "Islamic" education and not education in general? Thirdly, what is Islamic about an "Islamic education" anyway?  

~~~

I'm not sure if I can read the whole of Carol Shields's LP. A bit gimmicky, staged. That there should be a whole chapter on Larry's penis is a bit off-putting.She just doesn't get a handle on it. In any case, as with Updike, you feel there's a difference between a writer and a novelist. Both work within conventions, of course, but the former will always keep the voice true, real, so that it speaks with a grainy realism. The latter, on the hand, is too self-conscious, too aware of "plot", frameworks, "style", all the things they've learnt from other books or school. The former wants to breathe life into her creation and doesn't care too much about consequences or "the universal". The novelist is enamoured by his own cleverness, and has one eye on sales or posterity. 

~~~

Perhaps a fingernail from your hand
lives on in my hand...
One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others,
know how to keep it.

---Jules Supervielle. 

a life in common

Little r asked me what I was reading. 

Oh, just some notes

"Is it a story?"

Not really, it's an experiment by some scientist.

"Tell me the story!"

Once upon a time...there was a man who wanted to find out what made human beings sad or happy. So, he asked a baby monkey: you can either go to this fake "mummy" and get milk (but not a hug) or you can go to another fake "mummy" and get a hug (but not milk).

"Why can't the monkey go to the daddy"

Well, let's forget that. So, what do you think the baby monkey did?

"I think he went for the milk and then when he was tired he went for a hug."

~~~

Driving around the streets of Lahore on Saturday morning, the fog dense and dirty, grimy and grainy, your '70's Addidas blue and gold jacket only slightly crumpled, tossed on the back seat. The road has darkened overnight with rain but the day hasn't cleared and the light is still murky, as if blown in from the sea. It is overcast and soulless, the grey buildings are so dull that this could be a run-down part of London, or Rumania. Then, all of a sudden, while listening to some Bach, it suddenly struck you that your life is right here, right now, in these confined streets. There seemed to be some great revelatory quality to this singular thought (which will seem banal on reflection and/or to other people, no doubt). This very moment you are alive in the world and that is all that counts. 

But then a second thought: you only feel this way because the light, the cement, the colour of the road, even, the time of day, all of that reminds you of so many other Saturdays in a previous life: walking to the station to get the Saturday Guardian, a packet of minstrels in your deep pocket, the wind on your face, the bark of the trees gloriously given additional weight by the overnight rain, the freedom from time taken up in your stride, the Roding hemming us in to this little world, an old man shrugging his shoulders, a woman walking her dogs;there is a timelessness in these gestures, a timelessness to this loss.  

Roxana once wrote: there is no redemption of time. But it seems to me that time is always repeating itself, so that if you wait long enough the same characters and faces will reappear, the same November light that you saw in childhood will come around again, as will the same magic of the first snow of the season, the first green of spring. The only difference being that we will be older, greyer, slightly less coherent and maybe less wiser, but our eyes will recognize this familiar moment of life and death.

~~~

Looking for a black woolen hat you stumbled across a very curious looking sign that pointed down to a mysterious basement shop. 'The gift shop' or something like that. You're sure that if you look for it again it will have disappeared and that you will never find it again. You walked down the steep stairs with their plush carpets, and the dim, hazy orange light gave a rich glow to everything you saw. In this large room, which was a lot warmer than you expected, you found an old piano, lots of dark-wood chairs and tables and on the walls were, amazingly, lots of old plates, the kind of central European or Swiss memorabilia that only a very peculiar person would bother to collect. On one shelf there were small wooden puppets of clowns and angels and next to that large Bavarian tankards with their ornate designs. For a moment I forgot I was in Lahore or in 2013. This could have been anywhere: Berlin in 1970, say.  

The shopkeeper (I say shopkeeper but I wonder if he really wasn't a djinn, a Lahori version of Mr. Benn) seemed totally nonplussed and sat meditatively in his wicker chair, eagerly waiting to switch the light off as soon as I tumbled out of the shop.  

tangential

'I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding which is Jewish.'
---Bellow.

Second spaces, second chances, not for the first time.

The human condition: the time of the body (birth, growth, decline and death) and the time that is aware of this (consciousness). The time that is lived and that which is thought: the circle and the tangent... 

There's a wonderful line in J Berger...about how the gold of pollen is older than the iron of the mountains; how it's always been there, and will be even when things are on the level. 

There is no magic, perfect 'circle', only its reflection. We stand at its centre and imagine the circumference. Life, a constellation of events with their own inner working, their own pattern and not a continuous stream. There is duration and deepening, the background work, simple moments when everything is gathered and brought into focus (by what hand?). 

Our lives, brief though they are, have moved away from their centre and discovered other, more provincial or limited ones. Gone off on a tangent...to lose oneself in a steady stream of aimlessness. 

Tangential: hardly getting to the truth of it, vaguely or erratically related to the centre. 

Tangential evidence. The witness who stays in the dark corner, waiting for her turn to speak. 

'The tangent would be merely a line without the circle.'

~~~

Books of the year (2013)

1. Nescio, Amsterdam Stories
2. Walser, Institute Benjamenta
3. Gopnik, Winter
4. Cheever, The Journals
5. Barnes, Levels of Life

the fiction of democracy

There's this line in Iris M about how liberal political regimes work on an 'as if' basis'. i.e. we treat men and women and all sorts of groups as if they were equal. There is no room here, you suspect, for discussions of our "true nature" or essence. Does a politics based on such fundamentals eventually end up as a form of fascism and destruction of politics itself?

Of course, there is a lot of machismo associated with politics and there's always the old boys' club phenomenon at various levels. But in another sense democratic politics-since it is about persuasion-is more feminine, and less about "vigorous natures". A good democracy is also about conversation and imagination (how to imagine the lives of the poor, the excluded) and so here, once again, fiction comes to play a role (more specifically by highlighting the ordinary, flawed lives of individuals).

Pierre ("nomadics") points us to an interesting book, In the House, Un-American by Benjamin Hollander. And David Runciaman's book on democracy looks absolutely fascinating. The intro is here.

Really interesting stuff. One tends to think of the central problem of modern political regimes in terms of their inability to deal with time, change, since the old systems had some sort of "foundation" which was supposed to be rooted in the cosmos, religion, fundamental nature or timeless truths. Democracies, on the other hand, deal in contingencies, current needs and lack a long-term perspective. Worse, to the extent that they merely represent economic life they cater to people's desires and choices-and these are often fickle, with only a tangential relation to our "true" self. And not just because we're deluded or lack information, self-understanding..more, because we live in time and can never see ourselves from a distance,a s it were. 

Democratic life is vague, uncertain, partial, fragmentary, with a multiplicity of understandings of what constitutes 'the good life'. How can there be politics-a binding-if there is no common good? How can a system be stable if it is so open? (This is something that has always troubled fundamentalists who see democracy/the west always in some kind of crisis, teetering on the verge of collapse).

But what if it is just the opposite? What if the autocratic regimes cannot get a handle on time because they are so rigid, inflexible?

~~~

If one makes the claim that to be rational one should understand the limits of rationality is one undermining one's faith in rationality itself? 

Isaiah Berlin had written many years ago: two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason. 

If you sit in the middle somewhere aren't you opening the door to irrationality (after all, you still believe, don't you?)? Not so sure, since what you do not deny is the fundamental capacity for reasonableness: to take a step back from one's views and examine them in the light of experience. Public reason, discussion, different voices, accommodation. All that gets lost in the anti-politics underlying fundamentalism and fascism alike. 

Democracies are hypocritical and never live up to their ideals. But has ever has? Theocracies?

What kind of individual does a democracy produce, require? 

I don't know, but there is a line in Carol Shields's Larry's Party which goes something like...is it possible for men to think about goodness in a sustained way given their testosterone (i.e their inclination to cruelty violence)? And what type of goodness is envisaged? It seems to be one that emphasizes independence, autonomy, and the lack of fragility-and maybe that has fed into our ideas of individualism and political virtue (vir:) .

Where economics and politics might change, however, is in the very scope of these notions. From now on a more integrated view of pluralism could be underwritten by a more pluralistic and inter-subjective notion of ourselves: I-We. 

"Vigorous natures" may or may not turn to gentleness.  Which is to miss the point, entirely.

if I had a million dollars

'If I had a million dollars 
we wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner
But we would eat Kraft dinner
of course we would, we'd just eat more

And if I had a million dollars,
I'd buy your love.'

I'd eat Rye bread for breakfast and lounge around thinking of my Caucasian rug. If I had a million dollars I still wouldn't be rich.

Today I walked in the fog with an immense sense of freedom, with nothing to do or prove and with nothing to say. It was like I was dead or something.

I am gradually building my house-the rustic French breakfast place that opens up onto the garden, the bookshelves, the leather chairs, the warmly lit rooms in which there is sparkling conversation, great ease with one's friends-in my mind. By the end I will have a good picture of it all, even if I'll never be able to inhabit it.

~~~

A young woman came in to clean the house. Well, with her tight black clothes and girlish physique it was only her coarse, worldly voice that gave any indication that she was in fact a lot older than she appeared. She didn't notice me sitting at the table, eating my porridge and immediately made for the heater on the other side of the room, giggling to herself as she did. She placed her right hand on the wall and then extended her left foot to the fire, warming herself up in a gesture that was at once elegant, graceful and economical. Is this how the old Degas felt?

~~~

I lie down on the couch and see the apartment in a brilliant, dark mirror on the wall. All the lights are off and the fog has hemmed us in, paralyzed us. It moves in from the north-west, is dense, dark and slow, making its way inwards, pushing against the high windows almost with a muffled thud. In the mirror you see another place, one you long to walk into as if on your first day on earth. You drift in and out of sleep, your thoughts and words strangely disengaged from your body. You sweat it out. Knots or bulbs that had been strung together in a tangled bundle now loosen up, unfurl, curl up on themselves like melting butter leaving a wonderful clear and fresh space as your senses rock themselves out of their slumber. Your eyes regain something of their former alertness, flutter erratically and dart to take in as much of the world as they can, as if gasping for some reality to latch onto. You remember the green before the Fall and consciousness takes those first tentative steps of freedom, emerging from the dense fog...

The pen pusher (the poet) and the drug pusher both seek out the perfect line. Blue speed, white ecstasy: chemicals soaring, caroming through your body, the dose/dope of love. Berkeley, '68: halls of light, exalted silence, wide experiments in loss. Colombian crack, Pakistani hashish, universal Man stoops below a trembling sun with his trembling yellow-stained hands: deal me another! 

Vapours clearing out a centuries-old mind, the mists of time purchased with a few dollars scrunched up in his fist. Veins exposed, ridges and blue shadows on the pale moonskin of his wrist. AR_IV_AC, lovely white goddess, harbinger of the sweet cold sweat of forgetfulness, hold out your hand to me this hour. 

Truman Capote

Just before the evening fog descended, you headed for the large iron gate to pick up your books. Already you could see some people tightly wrapped in their beige mufflers as others walked briskly by, hands firmly rooted in pockets. Your mind is all clogged up and your nose barely functioning. Bunged up, well and true! 

For a relatively small amount you pick up: Greenblatt's The Swerve; a thin book by John Berger, a nice hardbound copy of Carol Shields's Larry's Party and a lovely produced copy of R. Hass's essays, What Light Can Do.

You decide to write a short story, one line by little r, followed by your own one-liner. I would, obviously, write the whole thing down. One day kid, I said to her, we'll outshine Truman Capote. 

'Little r said "eh, eh, e," trying desperately to talk to her little baby brother. 

Then I said, "You know what, you're a great communicator; you're always trying to connect."

She then said: "Give me an example?"

I can't think of one.

Suddenly little r said: "if a horse says "neigh" then I will say "neigh".

Yes! That's right.

It always surprises you just how good Carol Shields is. The only other book you've read stumbled a bit since the plot wasn't that tight, but no matter, there's a kind of rare wisdom to parts of the writing. Small scale and low-key for sure, and there is quite a lot of rambling (first 100 pages of LP) but there's a kind of intelligence that isn't showy or particularly dazzling. 

~~~

the strength of the old soul: image-making, name-giving. the work of the century finding its way into his life: his gestures, his failings, his partial-sightedness.

grey zero

'I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid.'

Miles above the grey clouds are swirling around with a ferocity barely imaginable. Down here below all that is translated into a dense and rich fog that settles and will not clear, even by mid-morning, such that a gentle grey blanket covers us, making us invisible and unknown to one another.

Your bones are cold but three cups of hot lemon and honey keep you going. Today you imagine inhabiting some long sentences, washing over you, rather than focusing on words that get stuck in your throat.

One wonders how this country might have developed had it not swerved towards the Arabs and had it not been drawn to the frontier, the tribal belt. What softness and gentleness is lost when all we think of is war and survival?

Books to look out for next year: a biography of Walser and a translation of the love sonnets of Louise Labe (NYRB).

Your throat has packed in, your strength collapsed; your Ray Bans sit idly, upturned on the desk next to a small and delicate bottle of "dollar" black ink and a strip of paracetamol, punctured and holed-out. The winter mark sheet and a USB (on which there is an image of a gentle reader) rest on Hazlitt. Mekas's Walden, Glenn Gould's Idea of North, bottled water "with added zinc".  There is a kind of world down here, tainted but intact. Blue matches strike to light the world red for a second. 

Miles above the grey clouds are swirling around...

writing, home

'I sit there, wondering about this, never sure if our barbarism denotes vigour or decay.'
---A.B.

Strong natures, slave mentalities and all that. One is surprised that after all the violence and the bloodshed of the last century anyone would want to talk in that way. The surprising thing remains that for a society that prides itself on 'historical consciousness' how so much is easily and wilfully forgotten. If there is one lesson-and perhaps there isn't-then it's this: human goodness has to be learnt, nurtured and cannot simply be assumed to flow automatically from our "nature".

To paraphrase Kenneth Clark: gentleness comes to the north via the south, the east.

There are lines here that you savour for the flow, but when you write them down you start to question the meaning. One can be lulled into switching off by the intonation of words...

'It was only gradually that I came to appreciate how tolerant he was, and gentle, and lacking in any respect for the form of things.'

Does a 'lack of respect for...' induce kindness, tolerance or does it inevitably lead to a type of dogmatic and harsh and 'ungiving' attitude to others?

As always with A.B. you feel he is wise-within given limits, and perhaps wisdom resides in the very 'knowingness' of one's capacities to understand and express certain things.

'In those days Peter could tap a flow of mad verbal inventiveness that nothing could stem...there is no suggestion that he is going to mend his ways in any permanent fashion. He goes on much as ever down the path to self-destruction, knowing that redemption is not for him-and it is this that redeems him.'

Again, on initially reading this it came across as much gentler, humane than it does when torn out of context like this. Only part of us, one feels, applauds such single-mindedness; the other part recognizes it for what it often is: bloody mindedness.

'In him morality is discovered far from its official haunts, the message of a character like Peter's being that a life of complete self-indulgence, if led with the whole heart, may also bring wisdom.'

Again, rather like a fool, I was drawn to these sentiments, somehow thinking that even if they didn't make complete sense to me they could plausibly pass as a way of life for someone else. And there's always, I suspect, a more than grudging admiration for a person who knows their own mind and what they want in life, as there is for someone who doggedly pursues a particular path knowing full well that even if they do not achieve what they set out to do they would nevertheless have accomplished something as great by following their own lights.

~~~

You are in no mood for dipping today; nor for finishing Rabbit which, to be honest, is pretty mediocre. The time for epigrams, aphorisms and grand statements may have come to an end. 

pastime

an activity that someone does regularly for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby:

"his favourite pastime was shooting and golf"

synonyms: 

hobby, leisure activity/pursuit, sport, game, recreation, amusement, avocation, diversion, divertissement, distraction, relaxation, pleasure , entertainment, fun, sideline, enthusiasm, interest, passion, fad, craze, mania, obsession. 

~~~

I like to dip into Lydia Davis now and then. A small, brief, encounter. Google images has a picture for every taste. "We have a wide selection of images, Sir, for the discerning voyeur." Google, you must remember, is part of the entertainment industry. 

~~~

When the world ends there will only be leisure. Will play lose its interest if everything is superficial? 

~~~

Today you saw an old man-though your definition of "old" is rapidly changing-walking sprightly despite his age and rickety body. He is a cleaner of some sorts and has a fixed smile, immaculately well-set hair (as if plastered on). And there are specks of grey on his thick, old-style moustache, that gives him a dignity that is unmatched in the whole university. Must one suffer to have dignity, today? The entirety of this man's life-story is contained in that moustache. The rapidly changing colour of it the crux of his life: from deep and strong brown to a lighter, mousy colour, straw and sand, then the onset of inevitable grey. This one single gesture seems to frame the rest of his face.

~~~

Saturday morning is full of cartoons. They are thought up by grown-ups for grown-ups and therefore lack all charm, all innocence and all humour. Mostly it is people being zapped or turning into machines.

~~~

Peter Brown and the Romans. 

Free sex on the back of slavery. 

The jolly free-for-all, which we like to imagine as forming a timeless human bond between us and the ancients, was based upon the existence of a vast and cruel “zone of free access” provided by the enslaved bodies of boys and girls. Slavery, “an inherently degrading institution,” was “absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life.”'

Freedom (from the body, from society)...the isolated will vs an embodied sense of the self, connected with other bodies and, ultimately, to the cosmos. There is the darkness associated with the structure of dominance that was 'the world' , but there was another type that would replace it: that of the self battling against an ever darkening world. 

The chain of being: freedom or unfreedom? Do chains, dependencies, bind or connect

the fox

The fox was sadder than I thought. Her heart was gentler than I had taken account of. The fox was sadder than my thought. Her heart I had taken.

The blue fox could not be trapped. The blue fox was a trap herself! "Kill me!" she said. And something in him died as he pulled the trigger. 

He climbed to the top of the mountain to see her better. But he ended up seeing only himself. A fine blue thread, she wove into his heart.

"This lush, luxuriant tail of yours, it must be worth something?" 

"Only if you keep me alive," she cunningly replied.

He sat there, looking through the ice, through the snow, his life carried forward in the snowstorm. For a moment she opened the door, walked daintily into the swirling snow. "This white room of yours is a bit bare, isn't it?" she teased. But he imagined a chair and a table for her and poured her some green tea. The first hint of spring in her heart appeared again. 

She seemed far away. She seemed close by. He saw time falling to the ground and conversed with her in a dream.

'the night is so dark
the way so short
yet you do not wake against my heart' 

He knew she must go. For a while he traced her footsteps in the snow. He was sadder than the fox had thought. His heart she had taken.

the golden state

Unremarkably, he put the glass of plain water on the table. The refraction of light at this hour of the day moved his heart an inch. The clarity of light depending on the weight of the world. He saw a fetching woman wearing all black with a set of golden badges or oblong medals on her breast, shining with honour. He thought to himself: "I must get this for my wife".

She said: undress my gold. The words as ancient as time, as human history itself, a reflection of some haunting, archaic desire brought to the surface.

The swirling dust is an irritant at this time of the year, filling out the waiting rooms in clinics with children whooping and sniveling. But it also lets us see the light, filtering down in streams through the boughs of the trees, or like columns made up of golden chains of morse code...

With gold there is no "or like", no space for metaphors or tryouts. She said, look my way...
]
]
]
burn
]
]
]

A fragment of a sentence, a line unblurred, I turned my head ever so slightly to pick them up. There is no seeing clearly, no chance of seeing without gentleness. If the eye only sees similars, then what of the human heart? What field of vision lies open, what golden state must be reached before the eye is dazzled, the heart stilled?

Gold, the absolute of time, the standard of consistency, universality, the moment when nothing is left to see or undress. Gold, the thing that makes all exchanges possible, that allows things to flow. The fleetingness of our lives and loves arrested, locked in the certain gaze, of trust; the voice free, our words measured soundly, leaving winter behind, finding south, Byzantium, Constantinople, the nameless.

'Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.'

There is something remarkable about the attempt to put things together..our deepest instincts, you think, are to unify, draw patterns, gather and resist the flow...

You stand by the small bus stand on a blustery and clear day, wondering nothing much in particular, trying to make yourself invisible. Behind you the huge, dark and imposing Gothic hospital with its labyrinth corridors and army of professionals. Out here you feel healthy, pure; inside there is a sickly kind of warmth, a diffused light and tepid hospital food. There is the recognition of pain, suffering, something that must be dealt with and that cannot be escaped. Outside, there is much dreaming...

Two nurses stand close by and discuss their plans for the evening. And who can blame them. But the strangeness of it all. To carry the idea of revelry in your heart as one eye looks at death. There is no room for poetry here and you're overwhelmed by the ability of people to only deal in facts, the bare bones, the stark realities...life reduced down to a series of tables, charts and probabilities. It dawns on you that it takes a special kind of strength not to day dream, not to leave the room in which you are standing. Everyone looks ridiculous without their own clothes. An old man, ninety plus, has so few memories, so few words that he can only repeat the same phrases to us in an empty ritual. The war is now the defining moment of his life-though it didn't seem so before.

On the small bus back already your mind is turning to dinner and you feel guilty. The sheer inescapability of decline grips you by the throat. That our fate is shared or universal provides no solace. Each person fades, dies, in their own special way. If someone were to see my face from outside-for the whole journey-what would they see? Behind the glass they would see dim watery reflections of clouds and trees pass over my face, highlighting and then obscuring my eyes; they would see my tangled hair, my thick peasant hands propping up my chin, my Buddhist-ears listening to the silence, the deep lines on my face that with more concentration would have been saint-like; they will see a clown on his day off, a one-legged acrobat mumbling to himself as if he were talking to God. A dropout, an outsider, unkempt, his laces permanently undone, his jeans torn, his t-shirt stained, the loosest collection of clothes one could imagine.

An unread book in one hand, a pencil in the other. There are no notes to make since to do so is a kind of betrayal. Stay tuned, pick up on the mechanical warmth, your heart staying bewildered. 

achievement

I don't know quite why, but I felt a strange kind of sadness reading the final few pages of Cheever's journals. I think it was his deeply conflicted being, his profound loneliness, his longing for a different kind of light, a moral beauty of light and, I suppose, there's the lack of resolution. Towards the end it seems that nothing is solved-maybe that's precisely what life is, an unsolvable mystery?

At the end one doesn't want to sit in any kind of judgement but, instead, just say: here was a human soul, here was a life. What else does the presentation of a whole life attempt to achieve but this coarse, incantatory statement: here I am, warts and all.

As a whole, does it make sense? You sometimes hope that something of that medieval idea is alive and well in the modern period but if truth be told you know that that kind of narrative is reserved for the very few, the rare exceptions, in this day and age. And still, you are gripped by the possibility and are unwilling to relinquish standing in that strand of light for the undefined shadows.

I am no longer dealing with the common disadvantages of need...I am dealing with time, with alcohol, with death.

Who wants to look back on their own life, who can? Especially in mid-stream? The past seems like a far off continent today, as the morning light cracks open, peels away. You look and see that everyone is asleep: little r like a drunk, H, statuesque, and the little one who, when awake, looks at me with those quizzical eyes, the eyes of an old man, of someone who is asking the fundamental questions: what am I doing here, do you love me? These questions never leave us and never fail to startle us.

You look, and look. There is something of the deep warmth and order of civilisation in this sleep, this last hour before everyone wakes. You will eat porridge (barley and Quaker oats), grilled cottage cheese with Worcestershire sauce and grilled tomatoes, exercise, collect your books and notes and yet there will always be this sense of something missing, the idea that no matter what achievements there are life is radically incomplete. You have to learn to walk around like that; it marks your steps, curves your back, hunches your shoulders, folds another line into your hands, narrows your eyes, makes your heart sing a song you don't know the words to.

"But I deserved better". There is, of course, no such law.

What law is there, then? What latitude is given to me on this faint, sunless morning, to understand the stumbling of my life? What do you expect at this time of your life? There can be no prolonged engagement with truth when you have skimmed the surfaces so lightly, sought out the corners in shadows. You want to be a mystic for $3.50.

~~~

In a discussion a colleague asked me to imagine a perfect contract, imagine, as a thought experiment, that we could foresee every contingency. If we start from that then we can make sense of reality as a lack, a falling away from that ideal.

But what if there are some things we simply cannot know?  Why should we imagine we can have God's perspective, can see final causes, the last hour, every detail? Is this finite, limited outlook, this 'brokenness', precisely what makes us human?

Among all the debris, the scathing comments, the cock-ups, there are moments of great tenderness:

So I say that what I love is the world that lies spread out before him [my son].

You think or want to think that words and gestures like that are enough to redeem a man's life, overcome all the pettiness, the bitterness,  that surrounds you, that has infected you. But it doesn't always work like that: a beautiful door doesn't always open to a beautiful room. And the light varies; there is darkness in the morning and an old music strikes up. A set of circumstances, a memory, a character, a sense of permanence that was not tarnished and that stood aloof from the times we live in, something that could touch the universal, the true, and shine.

The nature of this sorrow is bewildering. I seek some familiarity that eludes me; I want to go home and have no home.