Black Sun

And in my heart it feels like the end of the world. I want to and do not want to go to a different land. You know me? I was born old; wrinkled and mournful for lost time. 

At night, when all is quiet, and your heart is still, you walk in a strange light. Like a dream of some form of life that I can't name. The birds stare at me even though not awake at this hour. The moon is clear and broken. And I danced in circles one day, all those years ago...

Walk close to the flowers in this dark hour. What distance the stars travel! Everything I have wears thin and it's a beautiful-sad feeling to think how short lived all we hold is against them. I know the sun is out there, so far and high- and yet its heat is here on my hand, now. It is moving closer, I can feel the black sun in my bones. No-one sees my face at this moment. Daylight will come and the shadows will fall on my raven heart. And then I will draw a line to your heartful mind.  

The Red & the Green

For the Red Indian seems to me much older than Greeks or Hindus or any European or even Egyptian. The Red Indian is a civilised and religious man..is religious perhaps in the oldest sense, and deepest sense of the word. 

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms, and shut up fast in her own 'productive' machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

--D.H.L.

Flying Lizard

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains..

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead..

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed..

Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star.
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future.

--W.S. Merwin

[This reminded you of Calasso's 'American Woodsman'-the Man of the future, because he has no past, no time to see anything grow, has no patience for the slow circles that he think have bound us for so long. What is human, truly human, is the ability to break out, escape, from all that is 'given' and perhaps this amounts to the same thing: destroying what is given. ].

Which is another way of saying: we can possess time. And to possess is to control, order, manipulate and, ultimately, quantify and sell: time is money.

If Le Goff is correct then in some sense the beginnings of capitalism start with credit (must go back to Graeber). Religious condemnations of usury were not, you suspect, simply a result of such trades being considered exploitative, asymmetrical in nature ('asymmetric warfare') but followed from the presumption that human beings owned time and could trade it, could know what the future would bring in terms of gifts, productivity gains and that these 'returns' could be priced today. Contracts and other such binding arrangements are at the heart of it about managing risk, taming chance.

But here we are, with the looming environmental crisis on our backs, a shadow that is about to make a special guest appearance and we haven't got a clue. That's partly because we can't imagine an alternative future to our own glitzy present and partly because political thinking is in thrall to 'the now'. And because it's harder to think about anyone but ourselves today, it becomes harder to think about anyone in the future. The narcissism-whether fundamental to human nature or not-is now the only game in town. Show or be shown up. 

In the end of the day we were only really addicted to ourselves and everyone's got their price (those two are not unrelated). We congratulate ourselves on our supposed clear-eyed intelligence that is streets ahead of the other animals but, really, is that true?

In the Islamic tradition the devil warns God, implores Him not to send down human beings to earth because they will only cause mayhem and havoc. 

That, as it turns out, isn't the whole truth because it hasn't only been mayhem, but there was something there in that statement, right in the beginning, that makes you wonder.

'The best things in life are often free.
But you can give them..
Money, that's what I want'
--Flying Lizard.

'I wonder if the ground has anything to say.
You have made me drunk, drowned out
the world's slow truth with rapid lies..
wherever you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.'
--Carol Ann Duffy.

'We'll have Manhattan,
the Bronx and Staten
Island too.' 

Fire, 'the Fire,' our only future? A scorched earth policy. 

When all is said and done, I think the forgotten wisdom of the Red Man will haunt America. 

Ghost Dance (the Penultimate Speech to the White Man)

There is no time now to stitch together the song of what is lost.

|| |

It is true that Malcolm only became a problem when he stopped talking about "the white man" but something needs to be said. Of course, that is not to say that "the east" isn't a sham, the "mystical" east of the swamis, sufis and fakirs. You'll still take the secular and progressive Quaid over the religious and backward-looking Gandhi any day. If truth be told, though, neither matter today.

|

'...The white master will not understand the ancient words...
because Columbus the free has the right to find India in any sea...
and the right to name our ghosts...
but he doesn't believe people are equal...

Take the gold of the earth and the sun, and leave the land of our names
and go back, stranger, to your kin..and look for India.

So do not bury God in books that promised you a land in our land
as you claim...

You will lack an hour of meditation in anything that might ripen in you.

[He said]: " I am the master of time, I have come to inherit your earth."

[but] Time had enough time for us to be born in her, and return from and to her.

Don't write the decrees of the new god, the iron god, upon us, and don't ask the dead for a peace treaty...
we had longevity here, before England's rifles, before French wine...
and time is a river, when we stare into the river time wells up within us...
Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?

I will not sign my name to the peace treaty between the murdered and the killer, I won't sign my name to the purchase of a single hand's breadth of thorn around the cornfields...

I wrap myself with my name
to fall into the river.
And nothing remains for us in the new time.
Here our souls glitter, star by star, in the space of song.

There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build..
there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct
there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead
who come by dawn to drink their tea with you

so leave

some vacant seats for your host..they will read you
the terms of peace..with the dead.'

Darwish.

||||||||||||

It is hard not to see this in the context of Palestine: I will not sign my name!

But there is something more general here, something that needs to be said (not just in reference to the destruction of the Earth...50% of wildlife destroyed over the last forty years). 

What will the historians write of all the defeats, of the nameless ones who don't make it to their books? Shikast: already we have slipped off your page, out of your memory, the last word on your lips our freedom. To imagine that here, too, were human lives, broken hearts, is not admissible in an age of minerals, and the iron cross. What music will you play for us now in your chambers if not a death march or something out of tune?

  

the end of days

About 100 years ago the Great War was just beginning.Perhaps nobody could see it coming or, more importantly, what it would entail. I suppose that's what war is: the eruption of anarchy into the ordinary, daily routines and fabric of life. And despite all the planning no-one can tell how things will pan out (maybe that was part of the "thrill" of it after all...a step into the unknown, a step back before the lawlines were drawn). 

On November 12th, 1921, Plenty Coups participated in a dedication to the Unknown Soldier...

The end of the West, the end of the novel, the end of history, of communism, the end of Europe as we know it, the end of faith, the sense that things are in terminal decline, that a way of life will never be recovered. At best some one will read about it in some dusty, neglected volume. Time is lost, never to be regained. Time is a falling away...When did it begin? For Hans Jonas it was the Renaissance (or around then). Before, 'life' was everywhere but from that moment on-but of course, it's never a moment-, with no fixed nature, no cosmos, no patterns or models to follow, or unchanging transcendental realm everything was flux, a mere swerve of atoms and subject to decline and, ultimately, death: entropy. This is it, this is as good as it gets. (Kristeva and Holbein's Christ. Fro now on the great winding down begins, only to be staved off by constant revolution, re-invention)

The end of the future-which suggests there's a history of the future. What happens when there's no north, north of the future, no "ifs", and no possibility of imagining how things could continue.

After that nothing happened. 

The end of days suggests not just loss but something more radical: the inability to say what counts as a loss any more. When a way of life disappears or collapses then concepts, words and ordinary activities that are bound up in that conceptual universe cease to make sense. Nothing happens. The very idea of happening changes its texture; the very structure of temporality is disturbed.

The end is unimaginable. It is now a distinct possibility but no-one knows what how to picture it, how one could negotiate a life in the end of days. What was impossible became possible, said Hannah.

A "storm" was on its way. The enigmatic dream of Plenty Coups. How would they survive? How would they survive as Crow? 

Is the only way of living with the end a kind of nostalgia or can one imagine the contours of the future by projecting the past into it? There was no question of the Crow living on as Crow with the same old ways and rituals since they would not be, from now on, be a material possibility.The question becomes, then: how to live in a new way as a Crow?  

Pretty Shield: "I am trying to live a life I do not understand."

Plenty Coups, 1921...

The First Terrorist

The interesting thing is that terror/terrorism is first associated with the state: State Terror, and not the isolated acts of individuals, assassins, and anarchists. In terms of violence, is there anything compared to the Trenches, The Gulags, and the Camps? Or the use of force by the state in occupied Kashmir or East Pakistan?

One must not think like an accountant, though.

Since your own country has been the victim of terrorist attacks by 'non-state actors' (even though, to muddy the waters a bit, they're probably backed/supported by some states) you obviously don't have any sympathy for them. We're talking crazy horses here. The forging of a military-maulvi nexus is one of the most insidious things that General Z accomplished. Interestingly, tacit support for the Hamas crazies has waned since people have seen with their own eyes what blowing up civilians is like. The pathetic testosterone-fuled support for Hezbollah will also probably fizzle out over time...

~~~

Never did get the chance to read Hell-Fire Nation. Much more interested these days in The Stammering Century. Having just finished Yellow Birds couldn't but help wonder what this pathological tendency towards extreme violence is all about (of course, there's something ancient about it-Dudley Young). Is there, as Norman Mailer claims, a causal relation between the decline of white masculinity and the need to 'kick ass' in Iraq, Afghanistan? Not so much about restoring 'America's moral authority' but something more primitive altogether: restoring one's physical authority. And, of course, the notion that violence is in some sense an expression of vigour, good health, a necessary rite of spring that cleanses (with blood) the impurities, the effeminacy of  civilized life.

The hero becomes the lawless star permitted in an uncertain community, a figure not only permitted but needed to justify the system, to exemplify heroic reward for energy placed at the disposal of manhood and survival. 

----Mottram.

~~~

From Jonathan Raban's fascinating 'Indian Territory'...

The mythic connection with the Red Man...

...the oldest, darkest and most enduring folk memory: the fear of sudden attack by the Indians. 

October 12th, 2001, Peggy N., The Wall St. Journal:

"I think he's in Afghanistan..welcome back Duke."

[We ain't talking no Duke Ellington here!]

Who had killed Wayne: peaceniks, intellectuals, leftists, feminists...

Time: Todd Beaner was the kind of guy you wanted on the free-throw line in a tied game.

'The Spirit of America,' The Searchers (an awful film, btw). Karl rove enlisted the help of Hollywood.

Cynthia A. Parker:

Degeneracy in women reflected a breakdown in male authority and morality...M..saw the raids as divine retribution for a more general crisis of American manhood.

Restoring 'America to its original roots and destiny'

Quasi-frontier society. The swagger of Walker. Dead and Alive.

Indians as the proto-terrorists of America's paranoid imagination.

~~~

This myth of the frontier society, the "rugged individualism" and the lone cowboy who survives against all the odds, the genu-ine American hero, when things were simple, black and white, could easily sort people out into the fundamental categories: us and them.  The staging of the "wild west". Incidentally, E.S.Curtis, also comes in for some criticism for trying to capture a sort of 'quintessential,' stoical, Indian look and present it as a timeless reality.

~~~

On a side-note: some rather hostile comments to an article in the Boston Review which talks about how Muslims revere Jesus and how he was, for some, the Sufi's sufi. This comes as a terrible shock to some: the very notion that Islamic orthodoxy-and not just Sufism-could maintain that belief in all the prophets is mandatory. Of course it goes without saying that  there are serious divergences in the precise nature and significance attributed to the words 'belief' and 'prophet' but, having said that, the scope for pluralism is, in my opinion, undeniable. 

Dream-vision

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here.
---J. Berger.


W.S. Merwin: I don’t think it was an urge to improve the world. It was an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed. I think I felt that as a very small child. Though how much of it I owe to my father or his family, I can’t say.


The world around me did not seem to me to be satisfactory. There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement—and I did have a very strong sense of growing plants and trees and so forth, and still do. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jer- sey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there. I’ve talked and tried to write about that, but I feel that I haven’t even begun to say it. But that hunger, that tropism, is something that I don’t believe we can live without, even if we aren’t aware of what we’re missing and by now many of us aren’t aware of it. We’re missing it just the same. We’re deprived of something essential.
(courtesy of anton)
~~~~

Talking to a distant relative last night:

her: Is your heart settled here now?

me: No! (I can't be bothered to be polite). How can it ever be settled?

her: So, it's a matter of compulsion then?

me: Isn't it always when it comes to such things?

She then talks about how she's lost a lot of her friends. They had to go, it was their time, we all have to go sometime. We all have to go back to the Creator. And then she laughed.

You know, I'd just been reading about this, about how everything moves in circles, how everything in nature must "return" to its source, and it had seemed quite profound-though something nagged away at me even then.

I guess if someone had actually lived those words, those thoughts, it would be fine; but it just seems so fake, such a cliche in these parts..one hears it all the time from 'the religious': this world is temporary, the Real is somewhere else.

And then she said: we are suffering and God is showing us a glimpse of hell now.

Well, I said, wouldn't it be better if He showed us a glimpse of Heaven now instead?

Anyway, there's something not right about that type of equanimity.

Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world.
---Iris Murdoch.

the first terrorist?

The Feathered Sun

One of the four books I keep in a thick piece of cloth and take out now and again, just to look at the images: The Feathered Sun (Schuon); The Meaning of Icons (Lossky and Ouspensky); Calligraphy (Martin Lings); and Moorish Spain (Titus Burckhardt).

The lack of idle chatter. Concentration. Commitment. Community. Stoicism. The love of "old times", of the elders.

Of course the westerns loved to play up the so-called "rugged individualism" of the settlers. And who knows, maybe there's a grain of truth to that. But surely a lonely individualism based on destruction and hatred can't be compared to an individualism that flourishes in, is nurtured by, a settled pattern of life, a life that thinks of earth as "divine" because it was prior to the creation of Man. (This notion of animals being "communities like us" finds resonance in some Islamic traditions).

But no matter what, the westerns couldn't but help, even if subconsciously, bear witness to the courage of the Red Man and the often duplicitous nature of the settlers. This isn't a political point (politics doesn't really interest you). The sheer irony, though, of calling the attack on OBL operation Geronimo. As every kid growing up in my time would know -and probably from before as well-to shout Geronimo! whilst doing some daring act, or making a charge for it was, even when we were only dimly aware of it, a sign of being able to put our weaker selves to one side in order to become more than ourselves.

One Feather:

"What can never be taken from a man is his upbringing; it can neither be taken away nor sold. Everyone must discipline his character and shape his personality. If one lets oneself go, one falls and must bear the responsibility for it. "

stray reflections

for roxana:

a new category that is not a category.

Kierkegaard, Genius and Apostle:

The former is an individual genius who expresses or articulates a truth that is greater than himself, his spiritual substance; the Apostle is a function of the Truth, someone who bears witness to an impersonal, transcendental Truth and is chosen by grace. The relation to the self-to our eyes-is contingent. A circle, rather than a diamond.

Appearance and Reality.
...


For what may I hope? (J.Lear):

Radical hope is radical because it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. When the cultural world around us collapses, when all that made sense now seems irrelevant, how do we survive, how do we carry on? How do we take forward what we are, what we know, into those unchartered waters? We need to dig deep to find courage , but the very framework that elucidates what is meant by 'courage' has itself been dismantled...

Steadfastness. Latching on to a path, a way, even though unusual in all respects. How can one even imagine such a possibility? Doesn't hope depend on some determinate end, some picture of how things will turn out? This is the problem faced by the Red Man with the destruction of his way of life.

Courage. We are finite -and recognize ourselves as such- but still we reach out to the world in yearning, longing, admiration and desire for that which we take to be valuable, beautiful, and good. This is the world we inhabit.

Socrates. Every soul perceives that the good is some thing but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things.

We reach out for sustenance, to a source of goodness that is beyond us. It was there before we came.

Commitment. The ability to face up to reality . This, only a true individual can do. What resources can one draw on, what experiences when experience itself is empty? How do we go on? But at the same time, new limits to the possibility of experience are opening up.

And yet the Crow remains assured, his dream-vision vouchsafes the possibility that though human beings may be overwhelmed by cultural destruction, the fundamental goodness of the world is secure. Fidelity to his dream would ensure that his people would come through what was the destruction of a telos , the radical discontinuity that announced itself with the coming of the white man. To stray is to lose all...

Only thus could he out-stare the nothingness, face the destruction ahead of him and walk towards it, courageously.

Manifest Destiny

Over the last few weeks I've been following the American election campaign with some dismay and what I've seen depresses me no end. I thought it was only Walker who was monumentally thick but...

Obama "pals around" with terrorists, he's a Muslim goddammit ! , a "redistributor"(I don't think Rawls would go down too well!), a socialist* for Christ's sake! Why, he ain't even a "real" American. I'm not even sure if he "loves" Israel like me! That's the level of the 'debate' in the world's most advanced democracy! And no, what catches the eye of commentators and bloggers alike: let's talk about Palin's $150,000 spending spree, not her right-wing fanaticism. "Who is Obama?" and other insidious nonsense.

* For most normal people, of course, socialism is not a bad word, nor is liberal. I must admit, I love seeing the libertarians squirm, fearful that their 'rugged individualism' and 'the American way of life' is under threat once again from the commies, big govt. and a whole host of other ghouls and demons...Hell-Fire Nation

~~~~~

Manifest Destiny: to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated and self-government entrusted to us.

In the light of the most current attempts at the sacred mission of spreading democracy and freedom to the rest of the world, liberating those pesky towel-heads from their convoluted ways-and socking one to 'Old Europe' at the same time-such age-old religious zeal is not that surprising.

But how did it begin?

America was bought. From the Russians (Alaska for five million dollars) and the 'Louisiana Purchase'. But what was there before? Nothing. Just wilderness , emptiness, wild spaces for miles on end. But in another sense, here was the promised land, the land of milk and honey, a place where one could begin again, a place of redemption of salvation. Praise the Lord!

But how did it all begin?

The land of the free! This is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why, I've never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his country-men....

What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe..they came her largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America , and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been. ..Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. it is never freedom until you find something you positively want to be.

America soon killed the belief in the spirit. but not the practice. The practice continued with a sarcastic vehemence. America, with a perfect inner contempt for the spirit and the consciousness of man, practices the same spirituality and universal love and KNOWING all the time, incessantly, like a drug habit. And inwardly gives not a fig for it. Only for the sensation. The pretty-pretty sensation of love, loving all the world . And the nice fluttering aeroplane sensation of knowing , knowing, knowing. Then the prettiest of all sensations, the sensation of UNDERSTANDING. Oh, what a lot they understand, the darlings!
---D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays

Is there something inherently restless in the American character and does this derive from the frontier experience? The attitude to the land, as something that is only worth talking about in terms of its commercial value, may itself be one enduring characteristic of the wild west experience. Inalienable property rights-and not property-are the foundation of democracy, and perhaps the rugged individualism is also linked to this formative stage as well.

The Promised Land.
America as the New Jerusalem, the city on the hill, taking on the mantle of civilisation; America as the emblem of universal history, a universal nation: Empire. California was the shangri-la, and people were told that one could live to the ripe old age of 200 there. Myth and history are deeply intertwined. From 1841-48 about 15,000 people move west, mainly middle income farmers and their families but with the gold rush this soon changes: a quarter of a million from 1849-61. and the composition changes as well; this is the birth of individualism, the 'pioneering spirit', that is the dynamo of the land of opportunity. The Romantic individual, the outsider, and the outlaw, are all myths that owe something to the frontiersman. But the self-made man, independent of state and society, seething with his contempt for those on welfare and hand-outs is also, perhaps, an indirect legacy of a life forged under those harsh realities.

Turner, 1893, Chicago exposition.
The frontier permanently marks the American psyche. Could American economic and political life if there wasn't an area to be expanded into, conquered? If so, the closing of the frontier is a crisis. The tension of garden/wilderness would be meaningless without it, the forward drive, the ever pushing forward into the future too. Utopia, like American happiness , is always just across the border...

Frontier Life.
Wanted, dead or alive. That Bush has to repeat what he's heard from t.v. films is ironic; it comes on the back of a president who actually acted out the wild west : Reagan. We're gonna smoke 'em out, track 'em down. This isn't even genuine cowboy talk, not even a nostalgia for the passing away of a golden era, but a phony attempt to tap into something deep in the collective memory-except that the memory is largely that of the electronic media.

Our words give us away. No matter how hard American cowboy films tried to cover up the atrocities against the 'savage Red Man', the truth would always out. White man speak with forked tongue , the Red Man would say in his slow, deliberate way. And every school child knows that the shout of Geronimo ! is synonymous with courage. But all that changes. 1869 and the transcontinental railroad ensure that land is too valuable to be left to the unproductive savages.

Settler mentality.
Settlers always see emptiness where there are people. People are always irritating 'dots and dreams' in their schemes. The Black Man was 3/5 ths of a person under the constitution and the Red Man? Nothing. Pure and simple. The frontier must be kept open, otherwise it would collapse under its own weight, and political interests, 'factions', would take over. Only a vast and expanding net could ensure the vitality of the political system.

Reality: savage+ rum =0.

The American Dream

Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never remember it nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors-the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit...and is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being...

When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone...At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted , they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and that loved this beautiful land.

The dead are not powerless. Dead-I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.
---Chief Seattle.

~~~~

We did not think of the great open plains , the beautfil rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery...When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us that the "Wild West" began.

----Chief Standing Bear.

~~~~

Brother, continue to listen. You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great spirit agreeable to his mind..you say that you are right, and we are lost. How do we know this to be true? We understand that your religion is written in a book. If it was intended for us as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given to us-and not only to us, but to our forefathers-the knowledge of that book? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people?

Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?

We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favours we receive; to love each other, and be united. We never quarrel about religion, because it is a matter which concerns each man and the Great Spirit.

Brother, you have now heard our talk and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand , and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey, and return you safely to your friends.

---Red Jacket.

~~~~

A few points. Compare this to "America owns the skies" and the sheer emphasis on exclusive property rights and legal wrangling, the resounding use of the word "my"...

As Hugh Brody points out in his fascinating book, it is actually the agriculturalists and settlers who are the restless ones, not the "nomads". It is they who see nature and its inhabitants as "mere extension", something abstract, something to be dominated, subdued..a resource (compare this to the Islamic perspective: "they are communities like you").

And don't get me started on missionaries-muslim or christian. Always the same bad faith, the same mean-spiritedness and self-righteousness.

The American dream was built on the nightmare of the destruction of the Red Man and the enslaving and segregation of black people. Guns and religion, gold and silver...we've heard it all before.

The Red and the Grey

A report today: native red squirrels face extinction at the hands of grey ones, introduced from America in 1876. No-one can quite work out why they cannot live together but scientists say that it may have something to do with the grey ones being more competitive....
The greys are sweeping the south; only in a few places do the reds survive and that too in special reservations...


Wisdom is grey. On the other hand, life and religion are full of colour.

----Wittgenstein


For the Red Indian seems to me much older than Greeks or Hindus or any European or even Egyptian. The Red Indian as a civilised and religious man, civilised beyond taboo and totem, is religious perhaps in the oldest sense, and deepest of the word. That is to say, he is a remnant of the most deeply religious race still living....Never shall I forget the utter absorption of the dance, so quiet, so steadily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent, with the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth's centre, the very reverse of the upflow of the Dionysiac or Christian ecstasy.

There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were still alive but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock...For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, earth-life, sun-life...This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion ...

Again, something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitter dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses..this old, bronze-resonant man, with his eyes as if glazed in old memory, and his voice issuing in endless plangent monotony from the wide, unfurled mouth...

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms, and shut up fast in her own 'productive' machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

--D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays.



'The North American Indian, says Frithjof Schuon, had no intention of 'fixing' himself on this earth, where things crystallise or petrify in time if they do not evaporate: this explains his aversion to houses, especially stone ones, and also the absence of writing which, from his perspective, would "fix" and "kill" the sacred flow of the spirit ..The red man's sanctuary is everywhere,; and this is also why the earth should remain intact, virgin , and sacred as when it left the Divine Hands'.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.


'First, in the Sioux country , the Army crushed the Sun Dance with armed force. Then the missionaries influenced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to impose regulations not only against the Sun Dance but against all "pagan" ceremonies which, they believed, impeded the progress of the Indians towards Christian civilisation. The Interior Department framed a criminal code forbidding Indian religious practices.'

---Indians of the Americas, John Collier.'...


The white man descended on them. It was a horde in which rapacity and the sterile superstitions of 'progress' had already destroyed the spiritual heritage which had been its won birthright...and there was only a sadness deeper than imagination can hold-sadness of men completely conscious, watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning foe'

---J. Collier , cited in Gai Eaton's King of the Castle.


At the frontier, the death of an Indian...(from Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden)

On the outskirts of a small town an Indian, Jimmy, is attacked by three crazed white youths and his body dumped at the riverside...

"In the spring when the snow melted and the rivers flooded, Jimmy would no doubt be swept away to the river , on currents that carried the logs and rocks and earth of the interior to the Great Slave Lake and beyond towards the arctic ocean...Think of those four minds. The one moving in a country that was his , of which he knew every corner, that he could explain and explore and use and delight in. The other three looking at a "wilderness", with a tough indifference or resolve, somewhere and somehow, to get get some hold of some part of this place and transform it from nothing into something, from mere land into money, from frontier into a ranch or an oil well or something, just something. Think of one mind filled with knowledge of place and the others empty of such knowledge, filled instead with determination and craziness and anger of youth, reinforced by restlessness and nomadism and technologies from elsewhere....this meeting of minds, this murder, could have taken place-has taken place-on all frontiers between settlers and hunter-gatherers.This time, in 1998, in this place, it was Jimmy Field, Dunne-za. He was man who travelled time in dreams and moved on his lands with awe-inspiring skills...the pain of his death contained all deaths, in all places and all times. The bodies of hunter-gatherers continue to be swept under the ice, frozen , dead, towards the oceans."

Danke

Another day, another bomb. It's getting closer.

Given such mindlessness (perhaps 'thoughtlessness' would be better- if it didn't imply casualness) to continue working in the ivory tower, continue living in the 'green zone' seems slightly unreal. Perhaps one should give thanks that one's loved ones and friends were not injured. But this, too, seems out of place. Our first thoughts...how easily we utter these words when so much depends on putting first things first...Should one say that any real thinking depends on another, on not being "full of oneself"?

All one can say, rather pessimistically, is that America, Israel, Pakistan and the terrorists have not learnt that you cannot bomb people out of existence.

Watching the old Sherlock Holmes last night. Holmes, ageless, invincible, unchanging ran the credits. As the song says, our survival, documented in the Bible.



So today I realise one should only give thanks for what one's heart has the capacity for...

Today I received the packages, brown paper ones (my favourite..string would have been perfect) and others lovingly wrapped in golden paper. (How superficial is that, I hear you say! But there are many things to love in the world! )

These come to me from my supply lines from another world, a distant star that I once knew. I do not doubt this other place exists-it overflows with being. This other place is memory, desire. Familiar, unknown. Distant, far. In love what use distinctions?

The books are fab. I'm speechless. Solar generosity said the miserable bastard. Bronk, Sebald, Solnit, Strauss, Ponge. Whether I read them or not they are there, like an assurance, something to block out what some people mistakenly call the real world.

And the music too: Cohen [what's got into you dougal old bean, you were such a happy child:) ]
Richter, Adagios (no Gould, though). As with all gifts, one realises one's own radical insufficiency to accept them with an open hand. One is left wanting (in the right sense of the word).

But perhaps more delightful than anything (is the drawing of distinctions a sign of being ungrateful..nothing could be further from our thoughts!) were the photos of the swami blazing away in her red outfit, C's promise of a coffee at Euston (bagels too, I hope), the Dougal scrawling my name. And now my heart becomes sad; what else is a gift (or art) but a reminder of our separation? You are there, and I am still here...

I look to the Red Man to understand religion. For even when the heart contracts to a point there is still a space that is given to us, that allows us-if only we knew-how to breathe again, and for this we are thankful...

The great sea
Has sent me adrift
It moves me
As the weed in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me
Have carried me away
And move me inwardly with joy.

Tawakkul

And unto everyone who is conscious of God, He always grants a way out of unhappiness, and provides for him in a manner beyond all expectation; and for everyone who places his trust in God He alone is enough. Verily, God always attains to His purpose: and indeed, unto everything has God appointed its term and measure.
Q:65:2-3

It is highly inappropriate to cite verses like this, out of context, and without any formal education or training. But the words strike me as expressing such a truly remarkable quality, a dazzling human quality -that of trust-that I felt compelled to do so.

Last night I had a terrible dream. I was praying in an open field but I couldn't understand the language of the leader of the prayers. And the old man had a strangely elongated face (something like an old Russian icon I'm familiar with). Everyone wore tall, rounded black hats and some prayed with gnarled hands outstretched to the heavens. And the frightening thought occurred to me: what a terrible thing it must be to lose one's faith and what a gift it is that one has any....

(the dream ended on a positive note as I followed a white horse until I came to a small green gate in a wall....)


From 'Radical Hope':

After the destruction of the Crow's way of life it was difficult to comprehend anything. Did anything make sense any more? The very frame of reference had shifted. One is reminded of the ethics of the horizon, the limit, when Agamben talks about the camps. What sense can there be when one is beyond the bounds of reason-bounds that have been set by the way of life?

She laments, ' I'm living a life I don't understand'.

Plenty Coups sees in a dream the ending of the traditional way of life. But he sees something else as well: The tribe relied on what it took to be the young men's capacity to receive the world's imaginative message; it relied on the old men to say what these messages meant.

What did Plenty coups see? He saw the dissolution of the old world; he saw that he and his people were living on the edge, that a radical discontinuity in their narrative, their lives, was about to take place. In short: he had imagined the unimaginable. But to imagine is not to know. [It goes without saying that the dream is not merely a subjective experience, as the moderns would have it].

Plenty Coups is told that his people will survive, but they will only do so if they learn to listen, learn to be open; this, in effect, means a radical openness to the new, to the possibility of possibilities. By doing so they would know which month of winter they are in. This entails a suspension of the traditional ethical life, what they have always considered as the good. It is, as Kierkegaard says, the teleological suspension of the ethical in order to lead into a higher life or, as in their case, to preserve the holy.

And here is the key passage, the words that Lear infers Plenty to have spoken or thought about when understanding his dream-vision.

God-Ah-badt-dadt-deah -is good. My commitment to the genuine transcendence of God is manifest in my commitment to the goodness of the world transcending our necessarily limited attempt to understand it. My commitment to God's transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my limited understanding of what that good is.

A commitment to good that transcends our own understanding, our own subjectivity. Such a thing is difficult in normal circumstances; in the face of tragedy and despair it requires superhuman resources and I can only imagine that such trust is , in itself, given to us (as Citizen might say, a matter of grace).

~~~~~~

"..because when these birds feel that the time has come for them to die, they sing more loudly and sweetly than they have sung in all their lives before, for joy that they are going away into the presence of the god whose servants they are. It is quite wrong for human beings to make out that the swans sing their last song as an expression of grief at their approaching end; people who say this are misled by their own fear of death, and fail to reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or distressed in any other way; not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, whose songs are supposed to be a lament. In my opinion neither they nor the swans sing because they are sad. I believe that the swans, belonging as they do to Apollo, have prophetic powers and sing because they know the good things that await them in the unseen world; and they are happier on that day than they have been ever before."

I heard Lesley Chamberlain read these words on the Radio the other day and there was something wonderfully reassuring about the incantation-like quality of her voice. Of course, the notion that there can be any serenity-even if for but a brief moment- strikes our modern sensibilities as outrageous, if not impossible. And yet, and yet, might it not be that in the swan's song there is a hint of sadness, since it touches on the passing away of the life she has known? No, it is not "fear", but a lament for the erasing of her identity, her isolated self-will. Wasn't that the very quintessence of her being: to long much, to desire much? Didn't deepness reside in the yearning, in the hope?

The swan does not sing because she now knows that there is 'the good'. This she has always known, even darkly. It has always been there, it's reflection had always been here.

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual relaity which is beyond them. For the spirtual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.

--Iris Murdoch.

But she sings at the approach of the good, as a lover does at the drawing near of the beloved. She wants to die in that circle. But why lament then? I want to live I want to die. How, in a state of bewilderment, can memory still exist? How is it possible to exist like this, fading, soaring ?

But then she thinks: it has always been so! Have I not always been this dying white star, alone in this infinite dark ocean, this black sun? There were reflections. They were nothing, they were everything. I am still me, you are still you. But I look at me, think of you.

Californian Days

We live in an age when it isn't easy to distinguish between your natural inclinations and the times.

-----David Remnick, editor of the The New Yorker.

.

Walking down Beaumaris Drive in the middle of the morning, a time when the world is just about to stir, find its groove. I look askance and see an old woman, perhaps in her eighties, diligently attending to the plants in her small square garden. She is immaculately dressed- pale blue cardigan, make-up, a large gold broach- and there is a tremendous look of seriousness on her face, as if knowing how to approach each flower in the right way was not just a matter of the application of a vast accumulation of knowledge and experience that she could draw on at will, but a trying out of all that she instinctively knew. And why make that distinction anyway? To be gritty, obstinant, tender, just in the right measure...the garden was a world in itself and she was no different. To be so thoroughly engrossed in the give and take of the world or the rhythms of the earth was to move beyond self-consciousness.

.

That worldy wisdom, self-absorption, the deep knowledge of and reverence for the details of a life-no matter how narrow a life it is- holds the nomad spellbound. Equally, the stranger, the misfit, and the rootless looks on at this lack of alienation, this roundedness, with a fascinated horror and is simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the vision of domesticity, shallowness, and stillness. The perfect intensity that can be derived from a command of skills and the deep continuity-resources that only civilisation can make available- dazzles the monolithic mind with its sheer horizontality.

.

There's a finality about the sunshine today. It signals the last of the summer days, the late flowering of possibilities , a final flourish before the onset of the dark and fatalistic winter. It seems as if one is witnessing the world in colour one last time before we slip into a perpetual greyness. The light suggests a perfect ripeness or sweetness but to reach such perfection must also mean that everything can change in an instant.

.

There's a slight chill in the air-not the type that reaches the bones, but one that leaves its impression nevertheless. By 10 0'clock things have evened out and listening to some Gary Jules I wonder if the mellowness is coming from the music, the faded yellow light or if its just the way I'm feeling right now. It's nearly impossible to listen to classical music any more- everything has to be about timeliness now, has to be related to that small patch of time and space that we've experienced. There must have been a thousand days like this before.

.

The sunlight does not so much as illuminate the world as hold it together in a delicately poised totality. Chains of frail light. The last moment contains all others, encapsulates all that was said and unsaid over the long-break. It also mysteriously evokes distant places and times, both familiar and imaginary: a lazy November morning in Lahore, tramping through leafy Richmond suburbs, and wide open Californian streets.

.

Practicality, taken to its limit, reverts to the poetical; Roth can convey a world in all its of particularity and utterly believable depictions are carried on the back of a solid prosaic world of fact, knowledge and experience. So much of the artist's work is in making nothing happen, in creating a space where intelligence can burst though the mundane and sparkle all the more for standing out from all that is intimately familiar. And then there is the type of wisdom that only comes from a cerain level of detachment, the inner dialogue of a lonely self:

.

As she was speaking,she took hold of his arm and now, as she became silent, her grip tightened as though only her hand could continue the burden of her thoughts.

.

Now it was like the laboured conversation among guests at a late hour after there is nothing more to say, nothing but ashes in the fireplace, dishes in the sink, a chill in the room, a return to ordinary estrangement.

.

There isn't any place for the way I feel

-----from Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

Remembrance of Things Past

Strange dream last night. Lots of black crows waiting aimlessly under some dark trees. Large, dark fruit-blackberries-had fallen to the ground but the floor was covered with blood and I knew immediately they were flesh, not fruit, and that this was a scene of death. Of course, this was just a remembrance of the haunting image from "strange fruit". Of course.

Mulling aimlessly around for a book to read at Borders. Zizek, who does my head in, or Agamben. Then, by chance, I come across a book, Radical Hope.

But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. "Besides", he added sorrowfully, " you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away."

What is it for history to exhaust itself, for there to be no more meaning or structure against which one's life would make any sense? The Reservations are like Frinton-on-the-sea: huge waiting grounds..waiting for death to overcome you..like a black bird....

Does history itself, happenings, come to an end or is this only a subjective feeling of the Crows: as if to say, this seems like an end for us, what else could there be? We must put questions of psychology to one side. What if the Crow Chief's statement is true, what if this is a question of ontology and what if he is not just nostalgic for a vanished past but a witness to the end of experience, to the death of a way of life? The last spokesman of a disappearing world can only give testimony to the last moments.

A necessary diversion: Cavell on Kierkegaard 'Authority and Revelation':

The concept of authority [and Revelation] has been entirely forgotten in our confused age. We are not even sure what it means to be obedient any more. How can we once again get a clarity about certain dogmatic concepts and an ability to use them.

Luther's problem was to combat a foreign institution motivated politically or economically, but Kierkegaard's problem is that the mind itself has become political and economic...Luther's problem was to combat false definitions of religious categories, but Kierkegaard has to provide definition for them from the very beginning...the problem is that no one remembers what a promise is, nor has the authority to accept one.

The question being addressed here is: have words lost their force, have we lost the very ability to understand certain concepts...whether anything any longer could conceivably count for us as a revelation?

There is a dialectical shift in our understanding of concepts depending on the contexts in which they are embedded. We can talk of a qualitative shift when we move from "immanent" to "transcendent" contexts. [This mirrors Eckhart when he says that we cannot attribute Being to God and man in the same way].

Kierkegaard describes what the life of a man will look like which calls for the description, which can only be understood in terms of-which ( he sometimes puts it) is lived in Christian categories. A man's life; not a striking experience here and there, or a pervasive mood or a particular feeling or set of feelings. As if to say: in that life, and for that life, the Christian categories have their full, mutually implicating meaning, and apart from it they may have any or none.

"This night thy soul shall be required of thee"; know what they mean not just in some sense, but know what they mean in a sense we may wish to call heightened. We may know or understand them even if we cannot explain them..that we use such words on specific occasions is itself an indication that they are understood.

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life"---Wittgenstein.

When a form of life can no longer be imagined, its language can no longer be understood...to understand an utterance religiously you have to be able to share its perspective. (In these ways, speaking religiously is like telling a dream). There seems to be no reason not to believe that, as a given person may never occupy this stage [of life] , so a given age , and all future ages, may as a whole not occupy it-that the form will be lost from men's lives altogether.

"Most men live in relation to their own self as if they were constantly out, never at home.."out" in a foreign land..spiritually and religiously understood, perdition consists in journeying into a foreign land, in being "out". " ---Kierkegaard.

One may want to say: A human being can be a complete enigma to himself ....because he does not know why he lives as he does., what the point of his activity is; he understands his words but is foreign to his life.

Some are alienated not just from society but from the lives common to their times; which is perhaps the same as seeing their time as alienated from its past, to say that forms are broken, that time itself has come to a stop...nothing happened.

In such circumstances it is easy to fall back into silence or the absurd. Is there anything left to say and even if there was, who would understand us?

The thing we must look for,in each case, is the man who, contrary to appearance, and in spite of all, speaks....

[hans Jonas: after auschwitz;]