relativity

My namesake and friend, died two years ago. He was my age, or thereabouts (I think). There's something terrible about writing in this way, something disrespectful perhaps. You found an old e-mail, looking for 'The Singing Detective'. The first time I met him, near Russell Sq. station he asked, like a shabby detective, "what's your story then?". So fucking pretentious, I thought, not understanding northerners' disdain for etiquette and falseness. The ability to see and speak clearly, is in the blood...

Search and search out, the last words, the first words. The tricks of the mind, deceiving the unraveling. At a corner of a place here you found long grass, growing to your knee, brown and green, unkempt, disorderly, the wonderful stray entering of the past into the present. For millions of years there has been such grass, such shadows.

We are mountain people, and vagrants. Penniless and without a history, or title. Have no sense of the past; it's something I inherited from my father, my Jew.

Relativity, the speed of light, where all things and people are present before my eyes.

The centuries
to be in the presence
of all our kind,
and know them.
—--Ken Irby.

Greater and greater subjectivity, relativity, so that you come to know each particular thing. What remains? That which needs no words, no affirmation, no fine theory; like love or the slanting light on Cadaxton hill, nettles, grass-green and brown-a path made easy by those before you; the cool shade in the library of un-read books, its 1930 stone walls of irregular blocks, roughly cut. And who could imagine this library at night, conspiring with the moon to cover in blue the open field? Or the summer of ripe fruits, your hands black and blue, when the light was so bright that it broke the heat into two, and you could see spilled water displacing the dust, absorbed in an instant by earth.

"If it gets much hotter we'll be able to see mirages, like in a desert," said the Welshman, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. We already are mirages. To take shelter from the sun, walk close to the buildings; the streets you could walk like a blind man, even now. Who could imagine, then, the way moments in our lives survive, are drawn forth, or fade?

"great to hear from you too so swiftly, very unlike a paki. blighty? talk soon, warmest regards to miguel and surab and the rest of the gang."
---Naeem Khalid.

here

what happens to soap in the end? it never suddenly disappears, no matter how much you subtract from it; always remains what it was in the beginning: a slippery character.

the soap, pared down to its final form, shaped by human hands into its elongated form of longing; the water that fish like so much, cascading down like a rainbow; the mirror a place for recollection and gatherings, where one is two; the spotted, tarnished mirrors of our lives, dimly aware of our thinner faces, as if in a dream. the heart, like a mirror, can be polished, the sufis say. the coldness around our warm bodies; the coldness of our northern-starred hearts, the spangled stars free, beyond the frontiers, the spaces of distinction; the words you never said. here, then, for the stars in your eyes.

'Here
is the world
of all things'

of absences, too. into the moon, then. who lives in the moon but a clown? the logic of the world was against you, friend. your heart skipped a beat, your mind failed to read the plot and you missed your train. better to be late in this world, Ubo said. re-trace your steps, finally. how did you get here again?

words clipped, speech faltering. say what needs to be said, for Christ's sake. speak, a word in your dark- timbre way, the word full of shadows, the word that randomly falls my way, or that precedes the directionless morning light, true or false, spoken in your sleep, in haste,in the heat of the moment, in jest.

i give you my word. don't build anything around it, and don't use a dictionary or a square mirror to plumb it. it falls, it falls, just like a fish, the water,a dream, a heart, a rainbow, the moon, your hands, your steps.

here.

the ancient sway of the world

Poetry and institutionalized religion are in a sense the flowing and the static forms of the same substance...
---Howard Nemerov.

There is no man that doth not discover in himself a peculiar form of his, a swaying form which restleth against..the institution, and against the tempest of passions, which are contrary to him.
---Montaigne.

~~~

You look at the disprin slowly dissolving, the particles falling apart, swirling around in a small vortex, which always makes you think of lost worlds. Gradually your hand becomes unclenched, your tongue less tongue-tied; something in you loosens, your face finds its true form; you move your tongue without thinking (to be conscious of one's body is a terrible state to be in). You speak no words, except in your mind, and as you do so you imagine your face like a boyish version of Ubo. That thought brings peace to your mind, helping your wooden thoughts creak a bit more...

~~~

An ultra sound. This is cold. And this is gel, said the matter-of-fact doctor. I think she spent a bit too long rubbing it over my face-the old fox! Oh well, lucky her! It was utterly fascinating watching the screen, a bit like a weather map, searching out some intense electrical charges, for some signs of activity. The screen blinked and gave a frozen picture of randomized arrows and disjointed lines. And in a flash red and blue dots, lines, fragments show up, enclosed beautifully in a yellow square against the humdrum blankness and greyness of what looks like a night sky to an untrained mind.

Some technical language, which you don't understand-not that you're much better with non-technical stuff...

~~~

Despite the growth of fanaticism, the narrowing down of the mind, you're still drawn to religion (or at least parts of it). And why not? Religion and life are full of colour; thought, on the other hand, is often far too grey. The world, despite all the materialism and fake piety will always leave open other possibilities to us, will always sway away from the one-sided rigidities and loosen us into the many directions of trust, unknowingness and gratitude.

jco

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.
---Howard Nemerov.

JCO led you to Rachmaninoff's Vespers (Shaw) and now to this, with her blue-sounding notes, and quiet melancholy. A state of mind that flourishes in the main by the united states of temperament, feeling, and insight.

'And what's new in the snow?
footmarks diverging

And what's new within?
Like the fine-hair thread of a galvanometer,
like a river's minute source,
someone is thinly laughing,
And therefore exists.'
---Holub.

~~~

and what's new with you except the snow within? the faint needle of memory pointing with its blue shadow to the life before the weight of the mind. The clear and silver point that separates the realms, the first letter on the blank script, lovingly inscribed with care and devotion. But why do you hold the pen with a red piece of cloth?

the one thing necessary...

The deep, the fundamental and permanent needs of mankind. Beauty, meaning, truth? But we get on by, most of the time. Listen, first things first (Auden). Could kill for a cinnamon roll. Actually, Emmanuel made some last night but pesky old Fudge, the most sleepy-headed dog in the world, the Kashmiri of the animal kingdom, forced me to share my slice with her. Ho hum. Second things second, then. Muslims don't like dogs, especially black eyed ones...

~~~

I spend an inordinate amount of time watching children's programmes. You think to yourself: there must be millions and millions of hours of tapes, re-runs, youtube clips, digitally stored bites of data, 'out there'. There's something truly horrific about day-time television. You imagine yourself slumped in front of a television on an unending Tuesday afternoon, watching all of these wasted moments flash before your eyes, the volume turned down. Suddenly you feel sorry for God.

~~~

There's something about the brilliant, dazzling light of Argentina-or from what you see on the screen, anyway. That's all you have: a literary reference to 'Cuban blue', a song for Argentina and Wales, a scrap of a poem for darkest Peru, a newspaper clipping on Colombia kept in Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics. But that light, it makes you think of the life you haven't lived. To dream much, and to long for a place that is at once both utterly strange and deeply familiar at the same time.

Thirty years have passed since the war, the skirmish off dark waters that was orchestrated, you could sense, for the one summer day in which the flags and beer could be brought out. The warm glow of beauty, meaning, truth. Brought back from the messy shores, where only mythical beasts really live and where the place-names are unpronounceable. The high skies, the dragon-clouds, a moment when our lips were dry and 60-over one-day matches marked the pace of life; Sri Lanka still an exotic country in those days. Never look back...

But here he was, the man who shot the Argy down. Return to the straits, locate the time of day under southern skies (Drummer Hodge) when it happened. Find the man you killed, because after that was when you died. The high-drama of forgetting. Good soldiers kill and forget (or are forgotten).

"What do you want?" asks the sexy BBC presenter (you imagine that driving around with her under the lush light would have been enough but no...)

"I want closure".

Of course, the dog was lying. He wanted to relive it, the moment of truth, meaning, and beauty. This was it, the one thing necessary to our lives, so how could you let that go, how could time move on? He took delight, the ex-army man, the ex-man, in being shown the clock from the blown up vehicle, shattered to a stop at the exact moment when the Argy was hit. This was the medal, the treasure I've been looking for all my life, you imagined him thinking to himself.

He breaks down, tears streaming from his eyes. I've come for the names. I'm growing old and I want to go home. I kill for nothing. I'm growing old and I don't know here home is...

~~~

The one book, you say? I think it would be, A, a photo album of my family; this would be the one necessary book, the one necessary object on my desert island.

(Just realized, by a staggering coincidence the book you mention also happens to be by an Argentinian!)

originality

The problem with fucking originality is that it leads to reproduction.
---b.

"Perfectly unborrowed", as Coleridge said of Wordsworth's poetry. Originality is inseparable from a powerful sense of the individual, and the boundaries of this individuality are strongly protected.

In traditional societies, conformity to certain respected patterns and conventions was the norm. The pot, the carving, the exquisite weaving needed no signature. By contrast, the modern artefact bears the stamp of personality. The work is the signature.

---Ian McEwan.

via Bob, ('The Overgrown Path')...

'In recent years, political writers have made note of a phenomenon they call "epistemic closure". The term refers to the ease with which people become caught in an information loop that offers a fully satisfying explanation of the way things are and presents no challenges to that perspective. The great practical advantage of free speech and a robust media, it has been said, lies in the way they enable a continual testing of propositions and ideas. But the Internet and social networking, which some tout as mainly a force for good, also allows people to confine themselves to a Möbius strip of the like-minded. Evangelicals and gay activists, Tea Partiers and jihadists, anarchists and Marines - any group can exist within an information membrane of its own devising, unchallenged by outside sources. The consequences for civility and public discourse are becoming all too clear.'

~~~

This notion, that one's 'got it', often stunts any possibility of growth or originality. It's easy to slide from being sure of yourself to being sure that others are wrong (both feed off one another); it's easy to accept that the answer has already been worked out for you well in advance and all you have to do is nod your head, repeat the words, and step into your pre-assigned role.

It could be argued that the various forms of fundamentalism we witness are modern-day reactions to the preponderance of doubt and uncertainty, to the fragmentation of narratives and our inability to turn to Nature, Reason, or God for some coherent picture and our place in it. What is historical here, and what deep, psychological impulse? Conformity, order, the end of the story, there in the beginning all along; the allure of belonging, the 'charm of tyranny' (Buruma).

To talk of individualism today is, the detractors would say, to align oneself with the forces of capitalism. There's a lot of truth to that. But the alternative is surely not to go back to the hierarchies and distinctions of tribe, religion, 'community', the closed, certain world of blood and soil.

The most difficult thing to conceive of: I-We.

lightness

The heaviness, opaqueness, of oneness (not that 'two' is the solution). Knowledge of the world means there is no more 'world', only strings holding us up, or together. To be as insubstantial as the moon. Dear, dear Cyrano! The fineness of a well-timed exit, the unexpected guest appearance, the [words said secretly]...

'Va' tu, leggera e piana,
dritt' a la donna mia'

~~~

You sit in the car, motionless, engulfed in the warm air that had been circulating there since early morning, when the last stars took leave, and the sky gradually and imperceptibly lightened. The comfort a hermit achieves, I guess. A bundle of perceptions, held ever-so briefly together by a faint memory, like a bouquet of flowers. A miniature dragonfly eases itself on to my knuckle. Well, ten million years of evolution and what have you got to say for yourself? Nothing? Thought as much. The randomness of the deviation of atoms brings us together, or moves us apart.

An ancient and delicate form, you think to yourself. Not as crafty as the seahorse, but similar in its manner of avoiding all questions, of breaking the line. The crusty, curvy seahorse, much smaller than anticipated. Two steps forwards and then-whoosh!-a dash to the side. What kind of movement is that? The slashed questions of our lives.

To think; to not think; to not think one is not thinking; to avoid infinite regresses. To sleep, and to sleep well is to remember nothing. When I wake, my bones ache. What kind of remembrance is that?

a comma nature

A common nature. Something wonderful about that phrase. Very old-world. Your mind a blank, a complete and utter blank after all those hours staring at the walls. And even worse: an awareness that it is blank. For a terrible few seconds, there it was, grasping at something, anything, to fill the void. But like a man in a desert, it had no sense of the past or the future, just the awful immediacy of the present (and who said I couldn't do existential?!). The human mind, all at sea, without images, memory, pettiness, 'doors'. As useless and as pure as medieval Latin.

The King's English:
'We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains'
(I hesitate to comment on the Queen's)

A recent article in the NYRB by Tim Parks asks whether we should feel guilty about not finishing a book? As someone who's started but been unable or unwilling to complete at least fifteen books you will not be surprised that my answer is yes-and no. Reminded you a bit of Dyer's fabulous essay, 'Mir's syndrome'. Perhaps a childish reluctance to admit that the story doesn't always hang together; that we need a sense of 'wholeness' (even if dimly perceived) for things to make sense (Iris M: 'we intuit unity').

, ; :

Primitive marks. Of what? The things that cannot be said, require other marks. A pause, perhaps? Or maybe they indicate what hasn't yet been said, what's still to come...

They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.

---Gertrude Stein.

and what is the colour of black

Black is the colour of my true love's words, that cover me in stillness; black is the colour of of her wish for me to die; and black are the fires that burn for me. Black-winged raven of my soul, feeding on my lack of being, the sunken bones of our past...And black is the colour of my true love's heart

~~~

Great singing here. You can still hear strains of some folk origin, some long-lost highland ballad; and then there's urban funk, mixed up with the African-which is to say the timelessly human-chant for the lost one.

␢

...and the light came streaming in at around 11, through the long eastern windows, filling up the room with warmth and old times, patterning out the brightness in bars of shadows on the floor. there are at least two, possibly three, flies in the room. their brief lives of no account. we've been without electricity all morning. don't really care. the thought occurs to you: do we really need that much? as humans, i mean. it's a kind of liberating moment, a sharp moment of recognition, of freedom from the earth's minerals, ores, heartlands, rhythms, songs of necessity, like the ancient dream an astronaut carries with him into all that vastness...

you think of shire horses, englands of the mind, and thick slices of mature cheese. little r asleep, surrounded by all her friends, a closed book, 'the moon man', which she hasn't taken to yet. she is aware of his sadness, though.

the house is empty and quiet. in each room all you can hear is the patient and faithful near deathly-silence of clocks ticking. the only logic in the world. time in each room closed off, framed by glass and wood.

you turn to read, one leg up on the sofa, sprawled leisurely with your self-contained thoughts. De Lillo. a word, a line, begins to grate. my better self says i shouldn't care. it's this: "And he had a coke with a straw bending out of the can". it strikes you as totally superfluous (even though it's the reason for your stray thoughts to alight on something). it's troubling. who speaks like that? maybe a poet or a novelist, or God maybe..yes, God describing a situation..."I was about to strike that man down but he seemed so peaceful, "and he had..."

you have to let it go. don't be snared in the net. there's no sense to it. let the words fall away, like coins in the fairground slot machine. some count, others just fall down into the side-darkness. the relentless logic of the world and chance and fate and all the things you've never understood. only this time you've got to let it go, you've got to kind of will it into play. (I'm trying to help you out here, kid).

"but," she replies (as most women do)..."are you really?...Isn't this about you?" Her, with her high ideals, light from her eyes streaming into our world at 11..."why do you always follow the negative way, the path that no-one cares about or knows?it's like, you know, you're describing plants in darkest Peru by saying they're nameless, wonderless, no more open to our perceptions than shadowed stars.

..and you're not really a reader, let alone an attentive reader anyway. classics. holey moley! not even read more than handful of books, your straight-laced training in dismal subjects put an end to that. not that you set any great store by that. but it's remarkable just what a fake you are. anton, roxana, the dougal, darling C..throw their arms up in delight, like Puritans finally vindicated on hearing the confession of a degenerate. they say, somberly, 'we told you so'.

~~~
so, there you are, standing with your clean metal tray, trying for all your life to jam it back into the empty slot of the stacked up rack. you would have thought that after 5,000 years of civilisation the Chinese would have managed to figure out how to make a straight one, but this one just happens,as luck would have it, to be warped. i can sense some of the students behind me sniggering; others just become increasingly frustrated at my antics. For Christ's sake, fit already!

lunch had been as uneventful as always. this was, i guess,a fitting end to it, a final gloss on or reminder of the futility of putting up an appearance of restraint and cleverness. you sat though lunch, praying that no-one would talk to you. keep your head down and shovel the food in. you eat, but do not taste the food. a mark of how institutionalised you've become. old t, in his immaculate tweeds, harping on about the greatness of persia or some 18th century sub-continental sufi. my stomach churns. next to him, the slightly grotesque figure of the philosopher, dirt poor and a day away from stinking. there he is, rolling off quotes from Ghalib, wheeling out faintly ridiculous stories, when you'd expect him to elaborate on the logic or wittgenstein or whatever bunk it is he teaches.

i think i see thought everyone here, or maybe it's just my ability to see like a human being has been tarnished, whittled away. maybe that's why everyone sees through me. if we had better knives, i might slit my wrists...

blue moon

'The Angel Esmeralda' is, of course, the perfect title but 'human moments', less snazzy, would have served. 5 stories down, 4 to go. One didn't 'work'. But, Jeez, the others are so good. Beautiful. Yes, that's the right word. Perhaps the novels are too thin on character (as many people have suggested) but I'm tempted to get 'Underworld' as soon as possible just to find out. Maybe for short sketches, for brief glimpses, the whole narrative of someone's life doesn't need to be set out or even known. Just start in the middle. There's a freshness in not working back.

For the first time in years I don't even want to put any quotes down. Well, didn't with Falconer either. Geoff Dyer was right (you think): Cheever's got his moments. The journals are more sustained,a literary work in its own right.

'Life and Fate' awaits me (the book, I mean). A few more weeks. Gotta get back somehow. London, sweet ugly wart-like plague-ridden rat-infested messed up sour sarcastic and sombre, city of bridges and collapse, of defeated churches and dark stone, there, of all places, in a small corner of your heart, is my home...

~~~

"The American is primitive in his artistic taste, both in what he enjoys as art and in his own artistic works. “Jazz” music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. The American’s intoxication in “jazz” music does not reach its full completion until the music is accompanied by singing that is just as coarse and obnoxious as the music itself. Meanwhile, the noise of the instruments and the voices mounts, and it rings in the ears to an unbearable degree… The agitation of the multitude[2] increases, and the voices of approval mount, and their palms ring out in vehement, continuous applause that all but deafens the ears"
---Qutb.

Oh, Qutb, you should have tried Soul. Oh well, back to the plain old belly-dancing then. God knows what you'd make of rap though!

the case against coffee (or was it women...i can't decide)

So, there you are, armed with years of useless education, hours of fruitless speculation and theoretical junk, your head stuffed with the trash of ages, standing in line with your metal tray, wondering what to go for: halva puri (if Islam didn't prohibit betting you'd bet your bottom dollar that neither the Romanian nor the American has the foggiest...google images, my dear, lest no-one say I am unfaithful to my readers) and chai, or a croissant, butter, and black coffee. The starkness of our choices in the early hours of the day...

On the way there you notice a girl wearing white socks and slippers. Always find that odd.Apparently, there's a place in darkest China that produces sixty per cent of all the world's socks (who said the black sun wasn't full of useful information!).

Imagine the conversation there: "hello Xu, good day today?"

"Yeah, not bad. And yourself, Deng?"

"Can't complain. Just sent another 100, 000 purple socks to Alabama. Same shit, different day."

(I've used google translator, btw).

Khair...back to rational choice theory. So, there you are, standing there like a fool (there's no fool like an old-or a hungry-fool). It's not about costs. It's not about weakness of will or the lack of cognitive ability (though some here might well suspect that after what's been written above)...it's really this: they simply cannot be compared. They represent fundamentally different, irreducible 'values'.

hp is offered once a week (so has novelty value); on the other hand, the croissant option is light and means you can work (er..or blog) after brekkie, unlike the hp which sits in your stomach all day and is a sure recipe for hours of grogginess. Then again, hp is desi and avoids all existential questions. The croissant...well, none of that French rubbish here [he says, putting on his xenophobic hat, made in pakiland, using child labour].

Why should we think of rationality as always getting us to a solution, an 'answer'? Wouldn't a more capacious idea of rationality allow us to say, I don't know, "I don't know"?

~~~

Yesterday, you sauntered off ('bunked' as we used to say, in the good ol' days when we didn't even have the choice of coffee and tea) to the old bookshop. the ex-army man has somehow swindled the authorities into leasing him this lovely little place for a pittance. I'm determined to skittle him out of there. I think a few anonymous calls will do the trick. "Hey, we know you're selling pornographic material..." or-and this is more likely to meet with some success-"Hey, you, we know that you ain't a true muslim so stop pretending". Maybe a few bomb threats? All in the Great Cause. No more Dan Brown and the fake mysticism of Cohelo; no more 1970's cookbooks or cheap photocopies of Bertrand Russell's 'Happiness'; No more freakin' freakonomics and piles and piles of Cosmopolitan ( the devil's favourite glossy magazine). No more piles and piles of soppy romance with their depictions of silly blond(e) women falling into someone's arms against a pink and blue soft background and no more chick lit. No, from now on, only Real Literature for Real Men.

Oh, yeah, did manage to pick up Peter Brook's The Empty Space and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son for a measly Rs. 150! Un-bloody-believable! That army guy really knows his stuff.

~~~

And just in case you're wondering: they were out of puris and so the decision was made for me. Phew! What a relief...

the grounds...

(For Roxana)

"People who don’t pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification."

Now and then I'm forced to put on my religious hat (which doesn't quite fit any more). Of course, your lack of seriousness toward religion, the idea that you can put a hat on whenever you want, may be part of the problem (or maybe it's the solution...a solution?). After all, you're not Knulp. Khair...

Got to say that I instinctively flinch on hearing the word 'existentialism'. What on earth is that? One of your colleagues here insists that one must look to the grounds of one's beliefs-whatever they are. Because it's only there that a proper argument can take place, as if to say: all rests or falls on the grounds of our beliefs, on the reasons we have to act.

Well, that does sound like an extreme approach to me. No? Firstly, why should anyone want to argue for or against faith in the first place? This question seems, to me at least, to be prior. If we can see another person as a human being (and it's sometimes a big 'if', sometimes not) then the scope for argument, debate, proofs, and evidence all seems diminished. Why shouldn't we consider conversation, discussion, and listening to be better ways of thinking. Thinking of, with, or for someone...

I guess this relates to the question: 'why moral theory?' (B.Williams, A. Baier). Is there always a need to go back to first principles? I suspect not. And what counts as a 'reason'? I think a more expansive notion of reason (something like 'reasonableness') would preclude such a rigorous, self-critical mode of analysis; reason, in this sense, would be to let some things go, to know when to let them..

For me, people who struggle with faith or, more generally, for a justification of/in their lives, are the most boring. On the other hand, there is something utterly fascinating about a calm, naive (Berlin on Verdi)sense of goodness.

"Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality" (Hannah A).

There are no metaphors for the moon; the moon itself is a metaphor. What is the source of the river if not this look of the moon? So, put your pen down, close the books, take your shoes off, undo your hair...

]
] right here
]
] (now again)
]
]for
]

---Sappho.

The moon, wet with dew, a face I recognize from times gone by. Were we not one, you & I, under the life of the moon? So, save the last dance for the shadows, the long spell you cast...

Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed--
You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak,
And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress: I but a shadow--
you a radiance fair!
Know you what such a moment holds for me?
...If ever I were eloquent. . .
---Rostand.

human moments. In the Life of...

De Lillo. Reminds you of Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son. As if in the last minute something is retrieved, as if despite everything falling around one there are still things worth hanging on to, still delight to be had in finding and reaffirming the most delicate of truths...

The truths of philosophy and religion, on the other hand, seem slow, pedantic, and cumbersome. Literature's endearing charm of speaking a language that we understand, of skipping around the essential, of keeping with the beat. A modern understanding of religion will require a modern form of expression if it's to be anything; it will have to mirror our thought-patterns, become urban. Not the Human Condition but, rather, the human condition. Low-key, at an angle to the universe...

~~~

Back at the flat, the gauze netting is broken and this plays on your mind. Your hands are quite without any skill, and you haven't got the temperament to tinker.The yolk of a hard boiled egg rests on a plate, and has done so now for six days. You wonder if it will naturally decay. Still, the brilliance of it's once crumbly yellow surface remains, and there are no tell-tale signs of discolouration.You expect a pale green to emerge soon, like a kind of gangrene.

Inside, all that remains is a slight, small (and rather sad) bar of soap, strangely shriveled up like a dried, cracked apricot, full of character, curved upwards like an outstretched human hand,a dim memory of orange flame.

You bought a magnifying glass for little r. You thought she might want to look at things close-up; in your imagination it was insects, the bark of a tree, grass, a ladybird; in reality, she wanted to see a human face close-up. To a child's eye, maybe a human face is an unexplored, unknowable world...

For once I don't want to mark the book with my lead pencil, don't want to take the words out of the stream in which they've been placed since that will break up the stream of reflections and memory as well. Instead, concentrate on the pencil...

~ # 2 7000 Goldfish Electrograph...this grey pencil, greatly shortened, trustworthy but, having said that, there's something coarse about the grain of the lead, something not quite pure, as if it was quarried from an inferior place; you imagine a better arranged lead in keys, padlocks..here it seems some atoms are slightly displaced so there's always a lack of clarity.

The don...there are moments, not years, when we see ourselves as good. There are days when we recognize something deep in ourselves. And none of that can come about without first seeing it in someone else, without first being pointed there by someone else. The web of relations before we were, the tracks that loved ones leave for us...no, little r was onto something there...

"At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history, and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty"
---Marilynne Robinson.

death is the only reality

Met someone yesterday who was all doom and gloom (yeah, and I thought I was the black sun!). An old(ish) man who has suddenly become bankrupt and been forced to live in a one-bedroom apartment after all his life having lead a 'respectable' bourgeois life. This isn't how things were meant to turn out, for Christ's sake. He was explaining to me how the country was heading for ruin, how so many people he knew were suffering, how some had passed away. Then he said: "death is the only reality". I was going to quip: what about taxes, but that would have ruined the sombre atmosphere that he had so assiduously tried to cultivate.

On reflection, I think he meant something like, 'death is a reality, we had better face it'. But in his drab, bleary-eyed way, maybe those words were a true reflection of someone who is at rock bottom and can't see a way out..

I asked little r, "is death the only reality?". She smiled and thought about it for a while. Then, as someone walked by with a plate of food, a plate that was held chest high for some odd reason, she said: "this is reality" and pointed to it. Very profound, little one. Are you Plato? she nodded her head in vigorous agreement...

Back at 110-A. Relieved to see the garden had been dug up and was a lovely muddy brown, suggesting there's always hope. On the way back, you see fires lit as leaves are burnt. Can't but help think of Rome. And to the other side, there's a strong smell of manure from the fields...

Traffic was a nightmare, but as you were at the top of the flyover, keeping your mind pure, you looked down at the traffic coming your way, on the spine of the bridge, and all you saw was a sea of dazzling white lights and Jesus, it was beautiful...Like some primal, deep-sea animal, pulsating with life, the outward form remaining constant but the inner shapes transitory.

Saw a man on a motorbike, solitary in his contemplation of life; he smoked a cigarette as if it was his last, looking on with a fixed stare into the horizon, as he moved his arm mechanically up and down like a toy solider to drag another puff. Another woman on a motorbike, with arms like a wrestler, held up two small children, one of them blissfully asleep, whilst her husband drove the bike with infinite care. Now, there's resolve and grit determination for you. Made you think, what's the point of literature or philosophy. Did buy the the DeLillo, though. Angels or something.

Held a mirror at an angle so that the light reflected on the car seats formed a lovely blurred pattern that now and then came into sharper focus. Look, i said to little r, an angel. She tried her best to grab it but I told her that free spirits cannot be captured like that. Then she looked at me and said "spider". So I let her put her hands over the light, since spiders can, apparently, be caught.

north by north-west...

some fragments for you, because I can't pick up the line, never could I suppose. the line that dances from this particular place, with this particular intonation. the jazz of the heart when you were all funk(ed). what little you understood wasn't in a book, so drop it. your reading was poor. you wait for translations, commentaries, the 'for dummies' series or the film version.

[your heart,]
points North.
this is the coastline of discovery, old
first tries recur here.

the ratchet in the will
the redwood in the heart.

not lost, the explorers of that
tiny space of intense reflection

and the signs of exploration
go on-where...

what was your face
before you were born?

a man is made
of scattered images, a route...

to talk to those now gone,
to you especially

who hardly spoke at all while you were here
a golden silence toward the ocean

toward the coming sunset
to answer the heart?

the grain falling through the glycerine
the mustard seed falling through

the Westward-facing heart
beat

germinates, the greenery
the crack left agap

to die out through
shows back, a flash of winter

intense green, after the first rains
out of the dun.

that isn't home.
it's what the heart is given

to make home out of.

---Ken Irby.

Track home, your deviations wilder and wider off. the image more faint with time. like an important word you mark with a lead pencil. you suppose there's some meaning down there. a late run once the sun is down; it's the only time you favour the narrowing of the mind. north of north-west, and I'm out of here. don't look for me.

the black and the gold

“Right you are, Knulp. Everything is beautiful when you look at it in a good moment.”

“Yes. But there’s more to it. The most beautiful things, I think, give us something else besides pleasure; they also leave us with a feeling of sadness and fear.”

“Why?”

“...If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I’d be glad, but all the same I’d look at it with a colder eye. I’d say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn’t have to be today. But when I know that something is perishable and can’t last forever, I look at it with a feeling not just of joy but of compassion as well.”

“I suppose so.”

“To me there’s nothing more beautiful than fireworks in the night. There are blue and green fireballs, they rise up in the darkness, and at the height of their beauty they double back and they’re gone. When you watch them, you’re happy but at the same time afraid, because in a moment it will all be over. The happiness and fear go together, and it’s much more beautiful than if it lasted longer. Don’t you feel the same way?”

---Knulp.

~~~

By sheer coincidence (?) this picture is related to the last post. As if to say: if we could see the end, how things pan out, would our first moves be any different? But, also, something else: if truth and beauty are distant then they're also reflected here. And if that is so, is it not the very fleetingness of them that makes them all the more meaningful, all the more precious? "Reflections", tender glances in the mirror, the chaste heart, the lowered gaze from times before (Milosz)..all that carries through, is not lost.

...

We awake from our dreams and turn away from any fixed conclusions. Enter the zone of indeterminacy, step into Heraclitus's stream. What binds any one human being to another: ritual or gold, a thread of blue? Life and fate, breaking against one another. How do we start. A passion for small things, the memories we can hold in our hands. After all this time it seems so little, and yet everything seems to rest on just this. There's this line in Hesse where he says: grit your teeth, and it will pass. But you ain't no Buddhist...

What is intelligence but a knowing heart? What is the aim of intelligence otherwise? Perhaps, also, the ability to live with not knowing?

Goodness is not an abstract concept.
---Carol Shields.

It seems strange to say that a good life is an ethical life. For starters, 'ethical' sounds too pompous, too self-conscious to our ears. Secondly, any conceivable good life contains lots of things (professional commitments, say) and, more generally, some space for our own self-interest. It seems unrealistic as well as unreasonable to assume that one can or should be subsumed under the other. Thirdly, we can't talk of a coherent 'good life' any more, or we find it increasingly difficult to do so. Individual acts of the will, good deeds, maybe, but a 'good life'? That seems far too momentous an aim for our limited resources. Concentration, attentiveness, resistance..knowing when to close your hand, when to open it...are these available to us without certain habits, rituals, the conversation and insights of friends, loved ones? No man is an island, and a life without "bridges" is a harsh, fragmentary one.

It is not that we struggle to come to any great truth; it's that we're not even sure of what that might look like. Our imagination needs to be fed with pictures, just as certain pictures need to be removed.

To generalize is to avoid facing what cannot be faced. There's a beautiful vulnerability in that. It can also mean, though, that our taste for individual things becomes less discerning, less informed when what we want is to see and feel the stars. As the curtain falls we would like to think that what truth there is will mark us in a distinctive way; a wound is an opening. Some would like to add, it is 'our time with God'; for others still, time is the shadow.