The Tree of Life

Every tree can vary from year to year.

A Comice pear may take many weeks to ripen in store, but it is at its peak for only a day. Perfection in the Grieve is almost as transient.

But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times.

The fact that two branches grow in different directions and ways does not mean they do not share a same mechanism of need, a same set of deeper rules [words to ponder if you're still hooked to Shia/Sunni distinctions].

Ordinary experience is made up of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse.

All the richness of our personal experience derives from our synthetic and 'confused' consciousness [Thomas Browne here: "we live in distinguished, diverse and divided worlds"..there is always a 'wild', ec-centric element].

A way of knowing and experiencing and enjoying outside the major modes of science [and the academy].

[Only the scientist, the idol worshiper or the philosopher tries to escape the 'green chaos' of now and fix reality in immutable categories. Rosenzweig: Wonder!]

Possessing or wanting to gain too much knowledge can produce ignorance.

--words by John Fowles, The Tree.

A few small notes for Celia

I imagine Transtromer looking down at the world from a height. Not a great height (he still sees the human) but from a height nevertheless (like some minor 'god'). There he is, looking quietly out at the world from his top floor apartment, insulated from the passing of time, Schubert playing in the background, the notes emerging mysteriously...

Ted Hughes in the Bestiary is something of a different order, a different species; a lost Shaman, immersing himself in the very first elements of the world, mingling with the animal-soul to name it.

Robert Walser. Seelig's Walks with. 

Love the informal, personal tone of the writing here. A bit like the way a private journal is not supposed to see the light of the day and cuts you off from the hurly-burly of the world. At one point Walser says,

one cannot always walk in the light. 

And there is this pervading sense of the importance of letting nature run its course running throughout the book. Perhaps this explains Walser's 'greyness', his 'neutrality', his desire to be as small as a Chinaman, as soft as ash. I don't know why, but Walser always reminds me of Argon from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. He himself is one of the 

quiet, inconspicuous characters that keeps humanity together. 

that he talks about.

is it not lovely that in our existence so much remains strange and unknown..

He praises Keller's Green Henry quite a lot but not much otherwise. I'm sure anton has read it. Roxana too, perhaps.

“Indeed,” Walser writes about ash, “if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that you have stepped on anything.

By chance-was it chance?- I stumbled across the book at readings a few days ago but put it back on the shelf in favour of James C. Scott's Against the Grain. 

By chance-was it that? -I watched an hour of Into Great Silence. A slow but strangely compelling film. 

~~~

Thought for the day. How strange we are, and how strange we are to ourselves. What is this estrangement we carry with us and glimpse in the early morning light?

The sheer variety is breathtaking. There was a Hitler and there was a Bach (why contrast evil with beauty and not the good?). In each human language there were hundreds of ways of describing and thinking about 'looking'. And then there were myriad languages, more spoken than read, each giving its own inflection to different ways in which to look: gaze, glance, stare...

And what of the ways of not looking? Who sees my face today and is it lovingly?

{M wanted to see D lovingly, not accurately}

And K?

I look for you; look out for you, look with you...

~~~

The sheer abundance of life, whittled to the bone.  

~~~

A line from Augustine, cited in Oliver O'Donovan's Common Objects of Love, that struck you as being immensely beautiful: 

My weight is my love, by which I am drawn in whichever direction I go

~~~

The annual book fair was immensely disappointing. Too many books and pamphlets on Islam. A slight glimmer of hope in that a copy of Braudel was found but I don't have the time for such luxuries. In any case, it would have to wait in queue behind Pocock's Machiavellian Moment (still not finished) and Ronald Blythe's delightful Akenfield.

~~~

Well, how have you been C? What a pleasant surprise to hear from you!! Where have you been all this time?