Lost

'An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old.'
---The Guardian.

'Thoughtless', Arendt's word, doesn't perhaps get to the heart of it because the word is more often than not thought of as denoting a casual slip up, a regrettable minor infraction, a mildly reproachable forgetfulness. But to fall, to forget oneself, if taken literally, is a startling way of indicating our lack of 'verticality', of pointing us to the necessity of remembering ('lest we forget')for the scope of civilized behaviour.

~~~

'A darkened room, without direction'

You've often craved that, to keep yourself from the sunlight, a room that is known like the back of your hand, or a face. You drape the windows with thick quilt covers, shawls, trousers, anything to blot it out. And that room, that doesn't exist, the still centre, is then an unnameable presence: it's reflection is here, home, and now you suddenly realize how far you've wandered, the shadows marking the distance we travel. 

Of course, since Malevich is in town you have to think back to the black square and ponder the various kiblas the world takes (Ibn Arabi): the murderer turns his face one way, the poet another; the mullah finds a ray of darkness falling on his gnarled, closed hands. 

There are different types of silence, darkness...variations to the sense of being lost. 

The lost rivers of London (Iain Sinclair)..

~~~

For what can be spoken of must be spoken.


'The light in each room of the house is different
But the light of the whole house
Hangs suspended in eternal afternoon.'
---K. Irby. 

The cool, late summer evening is like a somber weight giving point to the day. The tall windows are still left open as the clouds and light splinter. A grey restoration of former times, the garage dark like a foreign land. The houses and rooms you have left over the years merge into one lost room...the ones you live in now are lightly furnished because no matter what you can't reconcile yourself to the times you live in. (All a bit melodramatic, you know!)The time between the acts held in false hands.

[A moment,light things]
then come like a great procession,
touch hours with drums and flutes:
fill all the rooms of our houses
and haunt them when you part. 

---Elizabeth Jennings

No country for old men

She goes on to writes that Johnson’s words show a “deep psychological investment in masculine self-image,” one that “has the power to subvert circumspection, logic, prudence, morality and even national self-interest in matters of national decision making, and create the illusion that there are no alternatives.”
---Adam Gopnik on Obama.

We'll show them good. America kicks ass. This is the world of real men, not girly-men.

~~~
The Lustful Turk:

Arinç went on to slam women who "despite being married with kids go on vacation with their boyfriends" and those who "never miss the chance to wrap themselves around a dancing pole".

Women should learn not to laugh in public.

~~~ 

Some more charming sentiments from Israeli extremists:

'There's no school tomorrow, there's no children left in Gaza.'

~~~

Moral authority is at risk. Moral corruption, decadence, degeneration etc., etc. is perfectly matched by political corruption, degeneration, etc., etc.

A review of the papers

Now, it's no secret that I love to watch programmes that review the papers. Of course, more often that not there's not actually anything worth reviewing in the British press (the standard of political journalism being particularly poor). I suppose it's always interesting to see what people pick out from all the stories. And it's more honest than the book reviews with their pseudo-intellectualism and middle class hypocrisy.

..One special Christmas you actually got all of the papers and still remember the great book review in which prominent artists, thinkers, and academics were asked to comment not on the book they're "currently" reading but on a book that has stood the test of time. It was in those pages that I first came across Berlin's Crooked Timber and Braudel's Mediterranean...

~~~

From the New Yorker:

Since then, the lust for “authenticity” has proved to be a lucrative contagion. Middle-class kids spend billions to project street cred; supermodels weigh as little as famine victims; designers channel the swagger of nomadic tribesmen; convicts set the standards for body art; the guerilla uniform of aviators, camouflage, and a knitted cap is a perennial favorite for celebrities incognito. Thus do the least oppressed citizens of the world express their imagined solidarity—expensively, in one respect; cheaply, in another—with the most marginal. You invert an hourglass when the sand runs out, and the fashion world inverts the social hierarchy when the trappings of privilege lose their glamour. But it’s also a conceit that we owe to the Romantics: in a civilized milieu, ferocity confers cachet. The upshot is a pair of jeans, pummelled by a bored animal—a slave laborer, you might say—with a four-digit price tag. 

~~~

A strange and quite sad story, really, about radicalization in Saturday's Guardian. Looking at those old pictures reminded you of your cousins. How is it that someone could grow up, leading such an ordinary life and then suddenly get up and go to fight in a faraway land and for a cause that is so unfamiliar? (I suppose some young men the allure of fighting for justice, or what they think is justice will always hold a certain appeal (Spain and the civil war, for example. Others would be drawn to Spain for other reasons-sun and sex? Laurie Lee?) Also, what, exactly, is the process? How to keep one's mind open and not give in to the opposites of total confusion or unfailing certainty? (Zen: the beginner's mind...)

One of the lines by the older brother, the one that stayed, struck you:

"I went to parties where there were women and alcohol. I had girlfriends. I went to the student bar. He would be learning Arabic."

And of another home-grown radical it was said: 'the only divine presence [in his teenage years] was Eric Cantona.'

Dalrymple, earlier in the week:

'Even before this latest exodus, at least two-thirds of Iraqi Christians had fled since the fall of Saddam.'

This is quite startling but entirely predictable. Back in the land of the pure Hindus, Parsis, Ahmadis, Hazaras and other Shias are on their way out.



~~~

A review: some of your friends have lost the plot (suffering from anxiety, depression or breakdowns..in one case resulting in you having to face death threats). Maybe that's par for the course, statistically inevitable. Others have struck out in the form of infidelities-or maybe just drifted into them. For some others still there has been the lure of money and consultancies, the world of property, status and positions and a terrible kind of forgetfulness. A few have become deeply conservative-but that, too, is expected in middle age. But no-one you know has become radicalized (apart from the odd student or two).

While you sip your latte and enjoy your blue Stilton sarnie you sometimes wonder if you're too lazy to get caught up in any of this, too marginal or bourgeois to settle for anything but the second-hand, the reviews on a easy-going Sunday morning?

northern gothic

The '80's, a time when dark things remained dark, and a new world was in the making (markets, fundamentalism, the lurch to the unencumbered self). Some part of your life stopped there (as it seems to do in many places). A soundtrack for the '80's-as you actually remembered it-would have included a lot of soul, some blues and some reggae. But lurking there, somewhere in the background, was the music that-like most things-you found too late. A 'late style' always returns to something you think you only dimly guessed at, but have always known when all the falseness falls away. Then there was this: killing

'There is no land in this land,
since time broke around me'

--Darwish.

Can you think of any other tracks that are quintessential 80s?

so he drank his gin and accepted a dish

of sausage soup, free on Thursdays

with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance

of sorrow and pleasure.

                                             II

He had been reading on the park bench

and stared into the gray of the last roses,

there were no titans, just shrubs

thinned out by fall.

He put down his book. It was a day like any other

and the people were like all people everywhere,

that was how it would always be, at least

this mixture of death and laughter would persist.

A scent is enough to change things,

even small flowers stand in some relation to a cedar of Lebanon,

then he walked on and saw the windows of the furriers

were full of warm things for the winter ahead.

ol' blue eyes

...this encounter, which seemed to bridge a canyon of time: on the one side, a composer who had been born in 1864, before the founding of the German Empire; and, on the other, Americans who had come of age with Frank Sinatra. 
---Alex Ross

When two worlds collide...In the mirror of the past...

That's it. London, where worlds often collide (mixed marriages, say, or a church that becomes a nightclub, a street that has changed uurecognizably except for one grubby, worn down building with high windows flung open in a last act of desperation). But more often it's just worlds glancing by, strangers in the night.

What gets passed down and what gets lost over time? The sheer randomness of it (war, chance encounters, missed trains) means some cast of mind will fade into obscurity, or someone will stutter a few half-remembered words. A tune remembered as soon as the first chords are struck, even if only just, and as faintly as a dream is remembered, but the words are forgotten. What we see and hear is nothing but a distillation of the past, filtered down through some unknown process. A bright image remains at the centre of the mirror and we imagine it to be true, vital; others withdraw as the silver inherits the black. 

The first step away from home by some dim witted ancestor all those years ago explains where you are today. Some ill-fated adventure snuffs out a long line of possibilities; the wild imagination of someone else opens others up: the hinge of history: a series of mistakes or lucky breaks. If I were another...

The old and the new bustle side by side sometimes. An old man thinks to himself: once I was young; and a young man thinks: one day I will be old like that. And so the two meet. Time is a bridge.

The truth is, of course, none of the old ways were really yours-but few of the new ones are either. Some people exist-insofar as they exist-in a grey, indeterminate zone, waiting for God, for God knows what.

In the mirror of the past all that happens seems like only a vibration, a slight disturbance, of past events and temperaments: a refraction, a continuing ray, a red thread noticeable among the elaborate patterns, the hint of some old notes, played in the same sad way.

July 23,

In a leafy, wooded corner of St. James's park, a small oasis of shade amidst the relentlessly blinding light. We sit exhausted, mouths parched (or is that an excuse for not speaking?). It is easy to imagine our arteries dry, all chalked up, our pulses and thoughts lowered to mere functioning, a tick above what's necessary. 

A stylish Japanses woman stands aloof in her floppy hat and immaculately slim jeans (flared at the bottom). Amazingly trim after two kids. The adults have a tendency to look into the distance. Other people are simply stunned by the heat and the light. 

A man opens a book at random and reads about a man in the park...

One lost in thought of what his life might mean
sat in a park and watched the children play
Did nothing, spoke to no one, but all day
Composed his life around the happy scene

[on a steep hill people lied flat stomached, bare backed, at a suitable distance from one another, as if they were in part of a Seurat composition]

So one can live, like patterns under glass,
And, like those patterns, not committing harm.

[He gets up to leave and a dark haired woman flops down in his place. He looks back, adding one more note to his philosophy]

~~~

When the light is so strong everything seems unreal, stuck in time. All these ghosts in the sunlight. One of us, at least, is dead. 

~~~

Alfred Hayes's two novellas are stunningly good, remorselessly honest. 

'And was this, we say, later, when it's over, really us? But it's impossible! How could that fool, that impossible actor, ever have been us? How could we have been that posturing clown? Who put that false laughter into our mouths? Who drew those insincere tears from our eyes? Who taught us all that artifice of suffering? We have been hiding all the time; the events, that once were so real, happened to other people, who resemble us, imitators using our name..

She, too, knew the words that came easily or fumblingly were never the true words... 

a different time

Because in Gaza time is something different.
---Darwish.

You are sometimes stopped in your tracks. Not by an image of death but of a few days before it, when a face is hidden as it recognizes the inevitable. And yet, we carry on, as if our faces were forever bright and fresh, unmarred by future grief, as if our lives, unlike everyone else's, will this time be something different.

Attentiveness and indifference. Reading, books, are neither necessary nor sufficient. What are words but stones thrown in the great stream? A key is not a door is not an open field.Attentive to what is real, of value. The ability to hold on, the understanding that tells you what to keep. Indifference: the equanimity to let go, to realize what isn't necessary after all. Freedom: from anxiety, expectations..the rarest of qualities: a heart free of bitterness (Camus).

The natural history of the heart. Occupation, the boundaries redrawn. Land that was formerly (formally?)yours now not recognized or acknowledged. Time is not linear. This feeling of destruction comes around again. Latch on to the world and its lists, maps. You are one of the unfortunate ones that belongs to the select group of people that belongs to no group. Not this, not that, the Hindus would say. The frontier within (Hopper), to be exiled in your own living room. 

Gaza, Kashmir, is not a place and never really existed. A song, a fleeting, sad gesture that my grandchild will copy without knowing why.Only the memory of it exists, in a different time. And what of it? Tell me, what shape is the human heart, again? Oblong?

(image courtesy of P. Joris, 'nomadics')

the idea of north

The idea of north is not an idea at all, only a feeling, a sense of absences and a quiet, lost waiting.

On the top deck of the 275, outside St. Barnabas's, you saw, for the first time, the thin, threadbare cross, infinitely distant from all the spending and getting back at ground level (Friedrich?)The cross, almost lost in the clouds, lean and necessary..the one thing...above the empty church.

C.S. Lewis..."engulfed in northerness"

The return home that isn't home. The late flaring of the summer sun, the endless last hours. The 'scaffolding of the soul' taken down (or brought down..a world of difference). Concentrate on the wood, the red that lives in the green....

If I were another...

The northern soul opens the door and walks into a desert. The long, narrow road, with the old sun on our backs. Across the wobbly bridge, the millennium, that has now been stabilized. But the world below swings and rocks..the memory of that moment, the first step, the last lodged plank. St. Paul's sits there, hunched, hemmed in. 

Ghosts in the Sunlight

I am almost never there, in these
old photographs: a hand
or shoulder, out of focus; a figure
in the background,
stepping from the frame.
I see myself, sometimes, in the restless
blur of a child, that flinch
in the eye, or the way
sun leaks its gold into the print;
or there, in that long white gash
across the face of the glass
on the wall behind. That
smear of light
the sign of me, leaving.

--Robin Robertson.

The light, predictable, as words, as the way your heart snags on the same emotion. You typed in 'wrecking light' and found the same music. Chances are: 5 million to one, and falling (Douglas Adams, in case). Type in 'wrecked light' and you find ghosts. 1976: the special time when time stopped. Time, the specialist in the division of roles.

Life in the high room, the windows and your thoughts at an angle to the world. From this distance everything is slightly less real. The W14 on its last round, its bright interior word in stark contrast to the surrounding dark, sunken fields, like a ship on the high seas. Up there, a few metres closer to the stars than anyone else, ahead of the weather, some glimpse of an ordered world, the distant thunder in the clouds, the mind on the outer rim of a clear intuition, the way a horse second guesses the darkness by sound, or the way the introductory moves in a game of chess foretell the endgame.

A Bank holiday in a house full of children..I see myself now as I was then. An image that is the breathing of time. The greater the distances grow, the closer one gets to something else.

Let us have winter loving
that the heart may be in peace

Responsibility

Some sense of what can now be expected was given by the Israeli reserve major general Oren Shachor, who explained: “If we kill their families, that will frighten them.”

---S. Milne, The Guardian.

It always surprises you why the Israel-Palestinian 'conflict' (perhaps occupation is a better word) always elicits such strong and passionate views from people not directly involved in it. I mean, when it comes to Darfur or gas attacks on the Kurds, East Timor or East Pakistan there is a great reluctance to even acknowledge any great injustice inflicted by the brothers, let alone beat one's chest about the suffering. The occupation of Kashmir fails, for some odd reason, to get people very excited (perhaps because 'mystical' India is beyond reproach...more likely that large potential markets don't favour much honesty).

Benjy: Hamas is 100% responsible for the deaths of civilians (Palestinian and Israeli). 

Now, in terms of causality the argument goes: IF they didn't fire the rockets Israel wouldn't have responded and there would be no deaths. That makes some sense, but is causality the same thing as responsibility? If Israel didn't pound Gaza then there would be no deaths. So, how far does mechanical causality take one? 

I think the argument about responsibility entails an idea about freedom:Israel did not have any choice, therefore it is not responsible; Hamas did have some choice and are therefore responsible. But is that true? I suppose Hamas would say that being cornered and living in conditions that have been equated with a large camp by some that they had no other choice. 

You don't buy that from either side. 100%? There are very few cases in life where something is 100%.

~~~

Mark Edmundson:

Perhaps there's always a  tension (if not contradiction) between the simultaneous need for transmission and continuity on the one hand, and the need to see things in a new, fresh light on the other. Broken circles. 

'The primary reason to study Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who at a cocktail party is never embarrassed (but can embarrass others). The ultimate reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. They may help you to cut through established opinion — doxa — about who you are and what the world is. They may give you new ways of seeing and saying things, and those ways may be truer for you than the ones that you grew up with. Genuine education is a process that gives students a second chance. They've been socialized once by their parents and teachers; now it's time for a second, maybe a better, shot. It's time — to be a little idealizing about it — for Socrates to have a turn.

For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists. She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does. Does she come to college as a fundamentalist guardian of crude faith? Then two necessary books for her are Freud's Future of an Illusion and Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ. Once she's weathered the surface insults, she may find herself in an intellectual version of paradise, where she can defend her beliefs or change them, and where what's on hand is not a chance conversation, as Socrates liked to say, but a dialogue about how to live. Is the student a scion of high-minded liberals who think that religion is the OxyContin — the redneck heroin — of Redneck Nation? Then on might come William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience or Schopenhauer's essays on faith. It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that immersion in the manic culture of the Internet and Adderall conditions students not to have. The first step for the professor now is to slow his classroom down. The common phrase for what he wants to do is telling: We "stop and think." Stop. Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They're always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising.'

So, something in-between the reverence for the status quo and the constant need for change (which is concomitant with the ethos of late capitalism). If a good education is about balance then it has to be said that a lot education isn't very good-training students for the market or inducting them into snobbish and elitist ideas of knowledge. The extreme specialization and levels of abstraction in many fields ultimately making the approach to the question of how to live far too removed from life itself to be of much relevance. Academic, as in: redundant. 

In any case, modern conditions of life militate against thoughtfulness, slowness, and second spaces, against a few, limited possibilities being known in any depth.

Fragments

A. Resnais: Muriel - Escena final from jecoero on Vimeo.

Overheard on the 'down' escalator at Tottenham Court Road, a young black woman turning at an angle to speak to her friend says, with a broad and wide smile: "It's only now that I know what she was saying".

~~~

A page turned to at random:

'It's only a quarter of an hour to Charing X from here'
--Malcolm Lowry.

~~~

A radio 4 interview with a doctor treating a man injured from the ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

"Is he a fighter?"

"No, he's a lawyer"

[roughly]:
And there you see the complexity of the situation...how the same events can be viewed as being very different depending on...

Er..how can the kidnapping and brutal murder of three kids be seen from 'another point of view'? How can the killing of an estimated 120 people be viewed as 'understandable'?

~~~

'My king is caught now in a world of trust.'
---Elizabeth Jennings.

Life studies. Where do you live...now.

At the local library, at a desk facing a window, looking out on to tall trees, dark moist and shaded grass. Beyond that the crowded back terraces of a thousand unknown lives. An old, gaunt man sits two tables down and laughs to himself. A man whose bones are almost visible and who reminds you of a piece of walking scaffolding asks for The Kite Runner by someone whose name begins with H. 

"We haven't got it"

"Can you order it for me?"

"Come back tomorrow"

"How does one become a member of this library? I ask because I don't want my wife issuing books on my library card."

A hushed silence of knowing recognition.

there is so much smallness in this small library. Only the poetry section offers a bright-lit window. One section is called 'literature'. 'Fiction' is completely separate.

~~~

Richard Holmes: biography is like music in a way: a search for the line, the theme, the arc that unites a life is like the melody that holds the notes together. Binocular vision: the factual with the dream-like, each taking from the other, crossing the page. 

Far, far more interesting than J. Meades who is all showy, fake, and who suffers from the overcompensation one typically sees in the working classes or self-educated who 'make it'.

~~~

You have nothing to say and you say it well.

~~~

Proportionality. Well, there have been 160 deaths on one side and none on the other, said a man. Well, yes, came the official response. But the threat, the threat.

~~~

Six degrees of separation. Think of a book. Imagine a book.

"I can't imagine a book"

"What does it remind you of?"

"A film"

"No, no. Some other book, title, cover, useless trivia about the author."

"Got it. Plato's Republic"

"Good. What does it remind you of?"

"Nothing, I never finished it"

"A bed, perhaps"

"Yes, two degrees"

The turning tide?

The view from my window, right now, 8.40, Thursday, 2014.

~~~

The Brazil match (fiasco) which was more than a football match and less than one at the same time. The horror-yes, that's the only word-on the faces of the supporters. Someone commented about how though they didn't even like football they were riveted to this spectacle because it was if in a few minutes someone's whole destiny could be mapped out. As the newspapers later said: 'some of the players will be scarred for life'. The idea that everything can fall apart in six minutes and that no matter what else happens in your life later on you'll always be remembered for that fatal night and your part in it.

You blanked out. I think that was the instinctive defensive reaction. As if to say: I wasn't really there and had nothing to do with it...it was like fate hurtling towards you and all you could do was close your eyes. Far better to think that than imagine you were, somehow, a part of the whole, terrible scheme, that you were part of the story.

Right said Fred: it will take a higher power to help us forget/move on. Does the manner of defeat have something to do with the evangelical spirit of Luiz and others? The belief that God is on your side and that grace will get you through, no matter what. The tide will turn, the sky will clear and you'll find your own pace again, your place in history; the old times will return, the old style regained, as familiar as an old note played on the piano that is the old west, that is late music hall legend and that is suddenly remembered. 

But the realization that there's nothing to play for now. Go through the motions and kill time or sit in the long grass or under a tree's shade and observe the tired mothers in the park...

~~~

But the need to break with 30 years of cash-backed dogma against public ownership goes well beyond rail. The privatised industries haven't only failed to deliver efficiency, value for money, accountability or secure jobs. They have also sucked wealth, rentier-style, out of sitting-duck monopolies, concentrated economic decision-making in fewer and fewer hands, deepened inequality and failed to deliver the investment essential to sustainable growth.

---S. Milne, The Guardian.

lost words

The distances are the only things that are real, he thought to himself. With time he had thought they had given some shape to his life. With time. The negative space, the background material, somehow giving the vague, indeterminate and shadowy image some kind of stability. Of all the silences in the world this is the one he knew best and thought it would be incorrect to say that he had grown to love it it was fair to conclude that he had grown so used to it that it glittered like a large, old coin, 1837, he once found in the dust of his backyard. It conferred on him a temporary but delightful sense of knowing the correct words, the way a king might speak after a crown was placed on his head. What was that word, again?

The rosebushes in the cemented front garden were like the 1970s. A locked glance amongst strangers and then it broke, as she turned on her heels. 

____

Some common sense:

'But it is absolutely negligent to talk about power and abuse without any context, in some gender-free vacuum. If we cannot talk about historical abuse and how male privilege operated to make it so risk-free, then it won't go away. Abuse is always an expression of power. Not acknowledging that power is another way of silencing its victims.'

---The Guardian.

'The media were making monsters of "misguided young men, rather pathetic figures" who were getting coverage "more than their wildest dreams", said Dearlove, adding: "It is surely better to ignore them."...It was time, he said to move away from the "distortion" of the post-9/11 mindset, make "realistic risk assessments" and think rationally about the causes of the crisis in the Middle East.'