In real time

It seems as if this will never pass.

All that rose to the surface was more surface. What he had instead of a being, I thought, is blandness.
--Roth.

What if your personality has developed as far as it can go and from now on cycles around a still, dead point, like a vulture? Plenty Coups: After that nothing happened.

There are fields, in each in their own wild time. You are nowhere. “Often I am permitted to return to the meadow”

Lahore, 4 p.m. the suicide hour, on any day in June in any year. The centuries roll on, but the core feeling, the central dream, remains undisturbed. Nothing moves, all the clocks have been stilled. The mirrors serve no function, return to a quieter life of solitude. No-one appears before them. The human face has disappeared. Outside, if that's the right word, there is the structural rigidity of nothingness. And within? There is a deep shade, in which thought lies, quietly observing how a small gust of wind picks up the dirt and swirls it around at ankle level, makes it look like a small animal. The mind becomes elemental. In the corner a human waits for the fierceness of the day to come to an end, for night to fall.

Think back, think back now, to your old life.

In your own life-that's right, distance yourself as much as possible- in your own life that was never your own life your hands were largely idle, without grace. Heart and hand out of tune. The body at an angle to the light. The 'life of the mind' is not life; it is abstract rather than time-ridden, textured by place or interwoven with the lives of others.

I thought I heard her say something. She knew a word found in nobody's heart. Which was useful for a time like this.

Everyone's left. It's like the day on a world cup final, the day after human beings have left for space. It was always strange down here, they'd say. They'd forgotten,

'That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth. If you live without one or the other you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will only be half-made.'
--Kingsnorth.

06/06/20.

The field in the early morning hours is quiet. The moon is still above it, connected to the dew. there are some cold shadows on its surface. In a few hours, to use the old mode of expression, it is bathed in light, flat, bare. Later still, the shade returns and this time it is soothing, pleasant to walk though. It weaves the whole field together. Then, when the sun is at its lowest, only a few brief patches of the field remain illuminated. The light clings on with such melancholic sorrow, hanging about the long grass, or at the feet of a small tree. Before, humans would have photographed such events but now they simply let them wordlessly register in their hearts and fade.

05/06/20

In the last days everything had been repeatable, everyone had been interchangeable. Gold, silver, hand, heart.

But before, someone had understood this and had actually said,

'Instead of a world where things were unique but linked by an unimaginable density of connection and cross-reference, we had created one in which things were unconnected but endlessly repeatable and where everything could be exchanged in the market.'

04/06/20

An open book was found in the field. The curvature of the land followed the curvature of the river that ran adjacent to it. The moon, the flow of the river, the words..

Before, the humans had dreamt much, and in opium-infused dreams would travel like those people once called shamans and they would enter other people's lives and be allowed to do so. 

03/06/20

Once there was a category of people called 'the poets' who cold see far away things, but also things that were nearby with great intensity. Some said they had the 'ear of a wild Arab in the silent desert, the eye of a North Indian tracing the footsteps upon leaves in a  deep forest..they could know a face the way a blind man does, through only his system of touch.'

02/06/20

The desert returns to city. A man stood still, as if trapped in a mirror. Looked out into the empty world and saw the footsteps of a woman upon the dry leaves in the field. He'd never seen her in real time but her face still seemed mysteriously familiar, her voice as unsure as his.

Romania

The glory of the day carried things easily when the sun shone; but when the sun passed, things seemed abandoned, they became dissociated, and you had to find a way to take them up yourself.

--Bellow.

Are you messing with my mind?

Why, is that what you want?

The light entered the east window and briefly illuminated the whole room. Late afternoon and a crow up above. I thought of your name. Time settled, tea was poured, introductions were made. 

I set great store by words spoken. 

Why? Mine or yours?

Describe yourself in a few words, then.

I am the Tigris without a fish; a fish without the Tigris.

A bit melodramatic, even by your standards, don't you think?

How else can one answer a (drama) queen?

So, you finally recognize me as the queen?

No, a.

Was I ever really alive?

Why do you ask me, ghost? Has anyone ever told you, you ask too many questions.

I don't have time for your foolishness!

Then for what?

A barbarian at heart! 

Everyone needs their barbarians, Cav.

You know there's no end to this?

That's what I was hoping.

Can you be serious for a moment?

Yes, for a moment.

Why do you take everything literally?

But how else, then?

My mind can't take this any more!

And the rest of you?

You know, you're not funny any more. And there's not much left to say anyway. I wish you well, I do, but there are no bridges across these islands of the heart.  

{The characters in this story bear no resemblance to any person living or dead. Well, okay, maybe to someone who is dead} 

What is this world but the six yards before me-and the nothing beyond. This patch of land at my feet, dry as ice. Beyond the perimeter wall the sound of a lone rickshaw, out there in the sea with its single soft white light. The light so dim now that it's almost grey. The traffic lights flickering senselessly, saying to itself, "no one obeys". 

Inside, inside the calls of crows in the windowless branches and the sound of the leaves being swept by the other ghosts, as if they were making grand preparations for the arrival of a special guest.    

In his own world

I
In his own world.

And not too bad off. Just the way it is. 

for a long time 
and chance had been toying with them

Winter notes: He was in his own world. Always was, from childhood, which he never really left. For others, every beginning was also an ending. 

I suppose you think this is about you. 

He wants to and does not want to sleep. Zeus! The cells in the body stay startled, dazed-awake, through the early hours, and the floating grey half-light, as if covered by a shroud, or lost in gentle summer shadows, ready for some recollection to march into their territory. 

He was all flesh and blood for a few minutes, singing, shining, silver-back in the dark; and then he was all mind. 

Drift, drift, sail away from here. There are socks on the floor, frozen into shape. The mirror is still and lonely. On the table a large and bright golden bowl with packets of medicine in it.

In the morning he saw the moon, a large and pale ball, aloof, fragile, ephemeral, more beautiful than the green and blue world below it. The moon was a door, the memory of a fire, a houri. 

A child somewhere (and therefore everywhere) asks: "Who broke it?". Does he ever grow out of that sense of brokenness?

"I'm quite happy in the world I'm in," he said. "There is no need to disturb me".

She texts him and says, "You are angry. Are you an angry person?"

He says, calmly, trying to deflect all attention from himself, "Look at my words."

The Queen in London

The Queen arrived in London, slightly tired, mysteriously so. There were rumours but she ignored them. For a change, she thought to herself, I will walk through the streets of my country, even though London is hardly recognizable any more. So many subjects from distant lands. A city with too many bridges and not enough lovers, she thought. I will walk alone with my thoughts, without regalia and ceremony, without the burden of history, simply I, I this unequalled self.

So she let down her hair, put on her green and red dress and applied her kajol. Preparations for a meeting?, wondered the paparazzi. 

She walks by unnoticed and the earth tilts slightly. The May light sways with her but the crowds only throng to the window to watch the live telecast inside. And snow is falling in Kyoto, falling deeply. Soon it will be evening. Introductions will be made and she thinks of her first formal words to him.

It displeased her to see that London is not as she remembered it, not what she had read about. There was no fog at all! And many of her male subjects had taken to wearing grotesque, thick beards. Their language was coarse and so lacking in dignity, any sense of poetry. As she adjusted her skirts she thought: The women were hardly dressed at all! "There is no religion to be found on the streets of London," she would later say to him. He would reply, in order to embarrass her no doubt, "Faith is under the left nipple".

Between a Church and a coffee shop she found a small gate to an enchanted world, a small and quiet square garden that no-one seemed to know about and that was certainly on no map to be found in her kingdom. 

She sat down on a bench and read the names on the wall. They formed a tapestry of all the lives that were not lived. Was her name there, too? Then she sat solemnly with a closed book on her lap and waited and waited, but he didn't arrive. She looked at the sad, golden fish in the dark pond:

I am a fish without the Tigris.
I am the Tigris without a fish.  

  
  

'You'll enjoy it when you get there'

The words she dreaded more than anything were, "You're so different from all I had imagined." In fact, words were just wounds and better put to the side. There was nothing to say, nothing left to say. Distance, she thought, was indeed the soul of beauty. Yes, far better to sit at the window and let the clouds gather silently up above and then write at the small table, gathering in your thoughts, making something out of nothing, remaining half-unknown to him and yourself, because that was the best way to see, don't you see..keep the wine in a dark place, see your own face dimly reflected in the shimmering, distant past, some lines formed then still with you, see yourself as a stranger would see you. "I know what distances are," she whispered. 

The great summer sun on your shoulder now remembered after all these years. In winter, fires fragment and the ashes are so soft, indistinguishable. What shape there was to your life was to be found in the gestures of your hands. She observed the ink stains on her fragile fingers. "Yes," she said to herself, "it is just like this". 

In mid-morning, while the world lost its focus, it was best to keep the windows slightly open so the warm air would enter the house and the childlike patterns formed by the lace on the floor would ebb and flow into existence at irregular intervals. With each mirror recalling another time, it was as if, she thought ponderously, that her life was larger than it really was. There were no formal arrangements, but neither were there any signs of visible decay. "The next person in this house," she said to herself, "will wonder what kind of human being used to live here, what kind of life she could possibly have lived."  

Take up your pen again in the last light, and think and write naked, knowing your false self would always fall away in such moments. He's looking over your shoulder. You imagine him looking. Outside, the darkness gathering, the windows turning cold, the wooden furniture coming to its own stillness. Find that one sentence that takes you back. And, when you get back to that place of silence, return and drift back to that old room, alone, as if time didn't matter any more, you'll understand, vaguely, obliquely, brokenly that you'll enjoy it when you get there.   

Fragments of a life

I dreamt my own death and the light was calm, serene, easy and simple and gentle. I'd always imagined it just so, the perfect light of late summer, just before Fall and the evening chill.

"God forbid," she said in horrified innocence. And then added: "You ate too much".

He couldn't argue with that, but as usual she'd cut down a train of thought that might have led somewhere. Not that it made much of a difference now. How could grief and a kind of acceptability go together, he wondered.

Bumped into old _ just now. Hadn't seen him for a while but he's still as confident as ever, breezing through life, even though he'd been asked to leave the organization for a series of misdemeanors and moral failings. No-one quite knew how he did it, how he came thought it all unscathed, with that winning $100,000 dollar smile and a new dutiful trophy by his side.

By this time she had no idea what he was talking about and turned her face to look vacantly out to the window, to some other, distant life. The evening came down on them silently in the unlit rooms. For the evening meal, he would remember, the plates weren't set perfectly.

~~

'To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good.'

--Macintyre. 

Even if there is some perfectly conceived form, and even if one has some kind of access to it, it remains true that in any real life there is jumble, confusion, lapses, the wayward movement of time, the past sometimes swept in unexpectedly, the present rushing from your fingertips. Which is to say: Even in the perfect order there is if not disorder then time, open-ness, flux. Life is not an idea or a system, no matter what, no matter that we sometimes act as if it would be a good thing if it was. 

Life, as a broken circle, is a strange kind of equilibrium, a strange constellation of opposing forces, dispositions and inclinations.  

Encyclopedia of the Dead

Do you think, D, that life was somehow a dream..or maybe it was just our lives? It's as if we just floated through life or maybe it was the other way around: everything in the world passed before our eyes in a fleeting moment. I can't get a hold on things. I don't even reach out any more, not sure of the point. Everything can be contained in one room, or maybe even in a suitcase. 

D: There's some anthropological theory, isn't there, about how we could understand a person's life by just looking at a complete record of their transactions?

But isn't that in part the problem? That it's always been ideas, as if they were just another one of those transactions? What about what we gave and took from life?

D: Life?! Dear child, what are you talking about. We died a long time ago, don't you know?

The Ghosts of Motley Hall? Gosh, we're in a charming mood this morning!

D: Dunno about you, kid, but I am. Do you know any tunes?

I know the first four notes of 'Once in Royal David's City' and can play them on that cracked piano. 

D: Then play them in the centre, those keys still work.

~

Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

~

You really wanted to like Danilo Kis but three stories in you're still undecided. Certainly some lovely passages but what holds you back is the feeling that there's a fierce intelligence at work there, that an idea can take over and swamp the story telling. No, maybe it's not that. Perhaps there's the uncomfortable thought that lurking just below the surface of the stories is politics (not quite a political agenda but..). That all sounds a bit harsh, I know, but...

~

That night I dreamt I was back in an old part of the town, in the old country. You stopped at what you thought was the public library, but it really resembled a city train station with kiosks, stone walls and lots of people in grey hats and long coats walking past it. there you are, in the shade, the sweltering heat, windows flung open..and you always walk up the wrong flight of stairs. In the offices above the station/library was the loud-mouthed girl from your class, from the school on the hill, all grown up and it was truly amazing to see her. "Where have you been?"

I couldn't tell, after all these years. We return as strangers to our own homes.



~
Was there only ever one room after all? The red one of bewilderment, the white one in which all directions were possible? The dark one, with no lights, except from the passing cars. Your face pressed against the cold window, the tune from Dizzy's 'All these things you are' behind your back, as you wait for the return.

~
[Do you ever see your own face in a dream? Is it the true one? You dreamt of someone's fantastic legs the other day. Really must stop watching Paige].

A London Bedouin

The background story interests you more than the poetry, to be honest. The poetry is lush, lyrical, wild and nervy. I suppose you have to be of a certain temperament, have to be able to 'fly' with it, because if you pause to think about it, you can end up asking yourself: "what are you on about?" 

So, yes, there is something hugely fascinating about someone who decides to pack their bags and call it quits. There is a sense of expectation, the clearly perceived life panning out: years of continued engagement with higher things stretching into the distant future, the commitments, the carving out of a life that rises above the mundane; immortality, of sorts, perhaps second-rate but still, a bronze evening that endures in the memory. The possibility of being a cultural icon, the staged readings, associations and 'movements' and the like-minded travelers along the way.. all that provides a warm glow against the lonely evening chill. 

The rush hour. You take a step to the side, darting out of view, finding..you're not sure yet, but not the chartered mind, the hour of fame then oblivion. Why not die first? Become invisible, obscure, avoid speaking straight or straight up. You come to realize what needs to be said is very little. The rest can be written on scraps of paper kept in deep outer pockets or pointed to. (Shades of Wittgenstein?). In the inner pockets, a Bible. Faith under the left nipple.

Harrower. Walser. Keep walking. Go to the sea. At the edge of the world you can sit still and reflect-an oriental skill. Become so small that nothing is left but broken sentences. Maybe something will emerge from the ruins. Nothing can from the false wholeness. 

The fragmentary life that was full of disappearances; never still, restful, always half-lit rooms of the heart, street, bed. Always half-dark. You're one of those persons. 

There's something extreme in your voice, of that you're sure. These dark clouds in your life, brought on by a thousand-year old bronze cat from the East and its dead eye. The graven image that prevents a second life, a weird inheritance, like mixed-blood unsettling the lines, making me a bedouin in my own home. 

I rush to the desert, which has always been with me somehow, like a hole in my pocket. My story can't be written or read, an unpublished manuscript thrown on the flames, the ashes fluttering and spilling onto November's frozen mud. The oases, the mirages, never far, slip down to them in mid-afternoon, beyond the gaze of men in pointed hats, forgotten, adrift, drift now in the distances of the Venice-blue streets, with drifting yellow-sentences down Soho for a shilling, knowing like no-one in this arab hour. 

The time has come. Make arrangements, head for the sea, back to where you know. Get on the wrong train, go in the wrong direction; the carriage is, for a brief rickety moment, suffused with light, envelops you . You stagger and stand still like no-one else, pass through tunnels and then into the open light, right into and through the heart of a shadow-less space, only to realize you are lost again.  

all roads lead to Rome

There is no time for books, she thought to herself, but left a few open just in case it came to her, the word, the name she couldn't recall, that couldn't be found in anybody's heart. She had a love..for obsolete words, shadow words, things that had fallen or that were lost. Take a pencil, make a faint scratch, or leave the blank page as it is. A broken line from Sappho...

[

...]

Fall

[[..

[

for..

]

Lie back, and think of England.

She floated in and out of sleep, dreaming she was a fish at the bottom of the deep sea: Trop d'ocean, trop de ciel; her spine, a delicate and ancient bridge. Bridges know the meaning of distances, she reflected.

"I attach great importance to words, to the word that is spoken," she said, perhaps because they were always disappearing or always lost. 

She looked up at the shelf, from the sea bed: you can never really own a book, she thought. Held, briefly, yes, but then closed; then on the other side of her eyes. I'l s'agit de pencher le coeur...her hand, too, was a kind of bridge. She wandered about inside herself, inside her heart.

"Tell me another story," she demanded, "one that never ends, that keeps you here, even though you're not here."

But there is no story. 

"Then tell it to me".

But I don't remember it, not at all. 

She rose and put the books back in their place, covered herself and put kajol on to mark the death of the word. Silently she repeated to herself:

Ammel: the first light of morning, that covers everything, that makes the ice glitter and sparkle and the landscape new.

the last words

The last man to speak has nothing to say, bewildered amidst the maelstrom of free-floating images, surprised by the strangers by his side. 

At times, in those last few months,
he would think of a word.

and he had to remember the tree, or the species of a frog..

the graves he swept and raked; the wedding songs.

while years of silence gathered...

the name of a bird in his mother tongue.

__ _ __ ___--- __

J. Burnside.

What is the word for loss, again? What ancient pathway comes to an abrupt end when memory fades? Where is fancy bred?

At times, towards the end, he would imagine the meals he had eaten, shared with those close to him; recall the young ones who had moved to the city in search of something he couldn't fathom; and sit patiently in the depthless afternoon shadows trying to stitch together the brief moments of his life. What pattern has my life taken, what final form does may face display? 

There were points of gold in the morning stream; they coagulated and formed a black sun, taking on a life of their own; then in a flash the circle broke and disassembled, the shining points sinking back down like heavy stones.

With no fire in his mind he clasped his hands together in an act that was neither spontaneous nor deliberate; the rituals he carried in his body, though dimming with time, would make him recognizable as his father's son, always his father's son. It was a blessing that his father would not see him like this, with his last, stammering words, that only he would have understood.

~~

In our saner moments we conclude, not unreasonably, that by destroying other beings (human and non-human), by decimating our natural and social habitats, we will end up destroying ourselves-since everything is connected, related to something else (whether we know it or not). It is only a matter of time-and this thought still haunts us, even in our so-called post-religious milieu: karma: what goes around, comes around.

What kind of deep knowledge, understanding, will lead us to that realisation, though? Science may tell us the "facts" and economics through its narrow prism inform us of the "costs" and benefits" but neither the analytical nor the pragmatic mind has led to much hope of a change in direction. The possibility of a catastrophe is now not insignificantly small (see Weitzman). The whole thing is shrouded in uncertainty (what one IPCC report called a "cascade of uncertainty"). 

Some changes will occur-that much is for sure. But have we reached a 'tipping point' beyond which mitigation will be of little use? The system may be subject to threshold levels or non-linear dynamics-in which case we may not really have that good idea of what comes beyond that point. If the permafrost melts, releasing methane into
the atmosphere, then what? 

Perhaps our love of continuity ("the mind intuits unity") prevents us from thinking of radical altered states of being (the most radical being, of course, the condition of not-being). But it is hubristic to think we can carry on like this forever, accumulating debts, living on borrowed time.

Think of an animal that has lived on this planet for 5 million years, and that now faces extinction.

'Everything perishes, except the Face of your Lord', all Muslims are told. These words may bring peace to those who can share that detached perspective. For others it might lead to despair or indifference, or a dive into hedonism. For others still, it might suggest that the world, a dream though it is, a fleck of ancient gold, a ring in a desert, is still a more beautiful and serious place for all that since it still harbours the possibility of life, the chance of love-as well as their termination.

'The song of joy and sorrow is always with us'
---Mir Dard.

seahorse

Time, he thought, is not what it used to be. The measure of his words was certain, and his voice resonated with an old-world reassurance that seemed to have almost completely disappeared from the modern world. The gaze, not so well known, was out of fashion, as loose and baggy as could be imagined, not alert at all. It was like when you watched the old classic between Brazil vs England, the movements deliberate and slowed down, full of deep shadows, the passes accurate enough but pensive,from another era. 

The continued existence-should one say endurance-in what most human beings have lost all interest in, the lack of any relation to contemporary ways of living drew him to think of the sheer superficiality of so many of our gestures. A failure, of sorts, nothing grand enough to lead to a final answer, just the mild insights that came from reading other people's matching words. 

Time, he thought, would ultimately winnow out the secondary, until we got to the fundamental gestures, the position of the hands dark and mysterious, but true for all that, or radiant and fleeting like those far down in the interior caves of southern France, the core of what it was all about. It was too late to try and make sense of it all. What little he now understood could be scribbled in a small black notebook, no larger than his coat's inner pocket. 

The other side

The wandering mind. Pure thought is no thought. I count on this, not a perfect Cartesian understanding, but an imperfect one, that is Jewish. From memory. The mind wandering, the wandered mind. Alarmed by the time. Gypsy intuitions. Leave one room. To let. 

'The light in each room of the house is different
but the light of the whole house
Hangs suspended in eternal afternoon.'

Roaming. All roads lead back.

Sure?

Increasingly, you find yourself lost. Marginal notes, as insubstantial as straw in the wind..a kind of freedom is being lost. The frontier, the wilderness has been drawn inwards (Hopper). What's the key, the name that registers in the heart, that takes me straight out of here, north, by north-west? 

"Where you goin'?

Nowhere in particular.

"Then hop on in"

The wheels turn, dust rises like a small animal. Your mind begins to wander, your heart hasn't kept apace.

{Photograph: Stephen Shore; lines by K. Irby and Bellow}

revolutionary road

Blue Valentine Closing Credits from Josh Noble on Vimeo.

The intensity of the shallowness was all he had to go by; the false smiles, the blinking out into the light at this late stage of the day a kind of familiar bewilderment. The intangible sense that something irrevocable had occurred, that some great ship had passed him by in the distance and he had made no note of it, been unable to recognize it. 

He looked down at his fingertips, unstained by a decent day's work, his  father would have said. His hands were blotched, without form, the one great constant in all the flux, in a strange way bearing witness to the lack of brilliance, the ordinary, unremarkable striving that didn't mark anyone out; if there was any precision or rigour then it was the kind of abstract type that would always keep him one step removed from reality. 

The flood of memories held back, just one allowed to surface...the deeply satisfying smell of smoke that clung to his father's coat, from another, older and more reassured world. "Our personal lives will always seem small in the vastness of time" and now that he recalled these words they seemed true and his life remarkably even smaller than he'd imagined it would be.

At parties there was nothing to say any more, just this profound desire to get through-somehow-and make for the darkness and the quiet. Everything that could be said had been; and what had not, had not.

The world without foundations, the turtle's feet sliding. That's the way it goes, he thought to himself..you see all those lives slipping by, like so many multi-coloured headlights over the bridge, without any sense of a destiny. Keep on moving unless you stop and wonder why you were moving in the first place.

How does it unravel, this silver thread? What images are inherited by your face? He had no answers and wasn't even sure if these were the questions.  

In another world, another time, who would we be? He couldn't even imagine pulling himself together in this place. Eyeing the fatal flaw in his own character, he thought he could name it. He wondered how it would pan out, enfold him in its final mystery; he secretly longed-if he was honest with himself he would tell himself this-for its dark compulsions to break him open and reveal that final image, anything but endure more of the average greyness with which he surrounded himself, and in which he had lost so many years of his life.