Black Sun

I am absolute for you.

And we, spectators always, everywhere
Looking at , never out of, everything.
It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.
---Rilke.

Anything can happen
Those overlooked regarded.
Ground gives. The Heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
---Seamus Heaney, District and Circle

The experience of the world teaches us to appreciate rather than depreciate.
---Leopardi
We give up the fixed ideal of perfection and the attempt to judge our lives by it. What people call the formation of personality or realism, seriousness, adulthood, is really nothing but a series of accommodations. May God preserve us from an un-idealistic realism and an unrealistic idealism...

When someone says something that distills the whole story down to a simple but elegant phrase, when they can say that it "all boils down to" in a poetic way then we say: he has caught the whole river in a small cup.
---Swami.

But "cup" wasn't the right word. What was it now. Tinker. Tonker? Something like that. I saw it in a film once.

We searched the rivers of our mind for that one word and the search was like giving the world back. It was if that one word would unlock memory and allow in a flood of associations. What was it now? Why is it that everyday words and things can illuminate so many patches of our lives as we stand motionless, at a slight angle to the universe?

Hopper: 'People in the Sun': On a boat, a raft, in the open, a desert but no less the city. We are surrounded by people as we are by our own loneliness. What is that word that will allow your past to flow to my present, that keeps the imagination alive like a dimly burning blue flame?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil

I remain here, at the bottom of this well, or at least I think it's the bottom.
No point moving. What is up, what is down?

Some friends have passed by, I hear their voices. Quiet, subdued, as if caught in a soliloquy. For a brief moment the sun flares and light slips down here, only to be halted in its tracks. I imagine green fields and cottages warmed by gentle winter fires. Up above the skies constantly change, in colour and in weight. So much so that I have come to think that the only reality is down here. And didn't the wise man teach : what is, is ? I have become the space I occupy.

Who is to say which life is more real; that one or this , down here. Do I only remember that other, wider life or is this the dream? Aristotle had taught that if one can think the frog then something of his soul passes into the intellect. Perhaps, as in some shamanistic trance, I passed into his body as well.

Life here is nothing but a waiting. What to write? The words have dried up. The patient waiting of a stone, for that light from above; the gathering up of one's thoughts to snatch at the moment when it happens as if all life down here was but a mere shadow play, its time a mere reflection of that unfolded instant. Without that focus would we even have any sense of the passing of time?

But it has been a long time, hasn't it? Here in this vertical column that is a ray from the black sun. The sheer vastness of time collapses into the meaningless. Has a day passed or a year? Is it day or night, summer or winter? Bewildered, we must always remember to look up.

Lying in me, as though it were a white
Stone in the depths of a well, is one
Memory that I cannot, will not, fight:
It is happiness, and it is pain.

Anyone looking straight into my eyes
Could not help seeing it, and could not fail
To become thoughtful, more sad and quiet
Than if he were listening to some tragic tale.

I know the gods changed people into things
Leaving their consciousness alive and free.
To keep alive the wonder of suffering,
You have been metamorphosed into me.
----Anna Akhmatova

Son, give me your number now. He said what's your number?
I don't answer
He said what's your number man?
I don't answer
He said what's your number now?He said what's your number now?
I said hey 54-46, that's my number
...54-46, that's my number.

---Toots and the Maytals

Hard time here and everywhere you go
Times is harder than ever been before
And the people are driftin' from door to door
Can't find no heaven, I don't care where they go
Hear me tell you people, just before I go
These hard times will kill you just dry long so

Well, you hear me singin' my lonesome song
These hard times can last us so very long
If I ever get off this killin' floor
I'll never get down this low no more
No-no, no-no,
I'll never get down this low no more

---Skip James

They says if you was white, should be all right
If you was brown, stick around
But as you's black, m-mm brother, git back git back git back.

---Big Bill Broonzy

I'm reminded of what Muhmmad Ali once said about popular 'white music': it's full of crooners, people singing about how they love their 'baby' , the candyfloss dreams where everyone lives happily ever after and so on. The black man, on the other hand, sings of pain and loss and utter dejection. This is a stereotype, of course. But there's more than a grain of truth to it methinks. So, there you are.

If everyone had an ocean
across the U.S.A.

Modern notions of happiness have become axiomatic for us and our contemporaries-a fundamental right and demand that prevents us from achieving any sort of stillness or peace of mind. In other not too distant times, suffering and pain had been taken to be part and parcel, no, rather, an essential part of what goes up to make a human life. How to reconcile one's life with suffering, the absurd and unpredictable irruption of tragedy with out projects for stability and meaning. The elimination of unhappiness is hardly something that one could conceive of, let alone wish for. To abolish it would have seemed like a fanciful dream since life itself consisted of the constant interplay of good and evil, pain and pleasure.

And if one could ever eliminate unhappiness from the human condition, if that state of perfection was ever something that could be achieved, there's a profound suspicion that it would, in turn, degenerate into a most terrible boredom that would trigger off even greater waves of violence.

By the 18 th century 'happiness' becomes a right, not a privilege. And from the perspective of society or the government it becomes a duty. The very legitimacy of the latter is premised on its ability to deliver 'the goods', to make the greatest number happy. From then on, the state is a therapeutic concern, caring and nurturing its flock: the Motherland.

This expectation of happiness becomes the main legitimating factor of social integration. Our shared endeavours and goals have no other object than to maximize the sum of happiness. At the same time, it must be remarked, this represents, in some sense, the birth of the totalitarian state, a state whose main function it is to reduce the uncertainty of modern life , to reduce the impact of Nature's capriciousness: security : life and a way of life must be preserved.

In that sense the State is a new 'god', a provider of insurance in this world. If the perfect, happy state is achievable (conceivable) then why shouldn't the state be allowed to plan a trajectory to it? If that means the narrowing down of individual choices then is that such a bad thing? When it comes to the elimination of risk, the conflict between security /identity and freedom, we know on which side the heavy hand of the state comes down...sovereignty, as Hobbes points out, is not incompatible with terror...

In the first stage of capitalism-the solid stage- happiness stood there like a treasure at the end of the rainbow, something that might be distant but whose benefits were tangible nevertheless. The path to ultimate happiness was a road with a teleos, a finishing line.

But now progress is no longer subordinated, as in the optimism of the 18th century to superior and external finalities, human emancipation and well-being. It has instead become a movement without a cause , escaping all control, proceeding on is own with no destination or purpose....a perpetuum mobile.

Globalisation: the future is not something we can control (See Ulrich Beck's Risk Society) and is more unpredictable. Unknown unknowns said that wonderful natural philosopher, Rumsfeld. Science itself initiates processes whose results we cannot, simply cannot, fathom from our current position. The bourgeois' penchant for control is not unrelated to his fear of the unknown (Levinas).

Technology develops needs. It is naive to think that technology is merely a response to needs. There is no question, nowadays, of 'true' or fundamental needs, something that might be consonant with out nature since there is no thing as human nature; intrinsic worth is devoured by market exchange; everything is evaluated and measured by a universal marker , whether that be utility or happiness. (see Illich)

The consumer market is constantly at war with tradition.

Continuity, fixed habits, are broken up by the shifting tissue of desires, the unceasing interplay of desire with imagination, a busy, breathless movement that cannot stop to catch its own breath, gaze that cannot focus on any one thing. Our attention span must be forever agitated, disrupted, our gaze fragmented.

Stable needs set by customary expectations, norms, a work-force rooted to its fixed ways of doing things was now the enemy of progress (see Hobsbawm:'Land' in The Age of Revolution ); now it is the traditional consumer with his notion that a good says something meaningful about his personality, as if the latter were something that is given pre-established once and for all. For capitalism to be truly dynamic it must dismantle the very idea of status goods as well as the notion of a individual/consumer having a fixed identity.

'Having' was previously a servant of , and was justified by, 'being' (meaning, virtue, the good life). In some sense it appears that there's been a reversal: we live to eat, we do not eat to live. But even here, 'having' was still associated with possession, ownership, and therefore an element of stability and being. Both shared the idea of commitment and both suggested dependency (one on goods, the other on people) . Having could still be plausibly linked with use value. But the last and final movement in this process is to unhinged desire, to a sort of virtual reality...

Surfing. A minimum contact with reality, with the world. The surface is the only reality.

Emerson: In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. Avoid the deeps.

Modern consumerism is about gathering (and hoping for) sensations, not goods.

Furita: no stable career path. Experiences-even f fragmentary, partial, are everything. Fast food, always on the move, travel light..all this helps us forget our initial aim of happiness: amnesia is the meaning of happiness now.

Utopia: The urge to transgress, to overstep the limits, to transcend them, is universal. The world would not be the world if it did not induce in us some desire from escape from it. But projects of transcendence are particular , historically constituted conglomerations of ideas and practices: utopias. In the solid stage of capitalism the two defining features of them are: finality and territoriality. the sedentary imagination is haunted by topos, a place. Thomas More: an island, an imaginary space. In normal society identity itself was a fixed abode. The Utopian imagination was architectural and urbanite, a map, a well-ordered society, where everyone and every thing was in the right place, at the right time.

Finality: A perfect society and not just a better one, where at last man would have full control over his destiny and not be subject to the whims of nature or the gods. This Utopian reality was just undiscovered, a place waiting to be found, and not unknowable , in principle. Here there would be certainty and stability, freedom and necessity. In sunshine ever fair (Pindar). Law and rules would be willingly accepted (Kant), will and desire would be reconciled, as would body and spirit. Imagination itself would be transfixed, at once both predictable and planned.

The new capitalism, the fluid stage of modernity, dispenses with this type of Utopian project. The nomadic imagination is much more 'nomadic' and like scholarship and science's pursuit of knowledge, it knows no boundaries: infinity, rather than the cosmos, is the presiding idea. And this goes hand-in-hand with the decline of the nation state with her frontiers and meta-narratives. A disengaged imagination and the end of 'territory' as the dominant form of power are two sides of the same coin.

Imagination is privatised. From community, to society ( a self-enclosed totality) to a virtualisation. The growth of abstraction.

Happiness is not in the intellect or the fancy-but in the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; by the green land; by the bright hearthstone! This is the magic glass, man.

The slaves unrespited of low pursuits
Living amid the same perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end.
---Wordsworth, Prelude.

There is always a danger of criticising aspects of another tradition, people, or civilisation because it is usually accompanied with a hardness of heart and/or self-righteousness. The decadence of critiquing what one takes to be 'decadent' is all too-often forgotten: he who plays the angel ends up playing the beast.

But having said that, I have to say that I find there to be something shallow, mean-spirited even, in much of contemporary culture. I think it is partly down to the inability to think religiously, but also -and this may just be a consequence of that- due to the sheer self-centredness and narrowness of outlook that arises from a materialistic vision to life (I do not say worldly, because that can, quite properly, be a profoundly humanising element in our lives). The nihilism entailed in a materialistic monism is quite staggering.

Men are free when they are obeying some deep , inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled purpose, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. ..Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like , there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes..America has so far meant the breaking away from all dominion.
---D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays.

The amount of times we 'third worlders' have to listen to Bush et al talk about freedom and how everyone else is jealous of them almost makes me laugh. It is repeated incessantly , like some sort of mantra, and one wonders after Iraq if anyone really thinks much of American freedom...

Sometimes I think Americans are unaware of the extent to which others think of their lives are hugely impoverished, trivial, and childish. Please, don't give me Dylan! He can't sing for a toffee ! I much prefer Toots, 54-46.


Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms?


Merlau-Ponty on freedom: Should we look at freedom exclusively as an act of the will. The 'true decision' of a warrior is not a choice but a spontaneous action...[a higher fatalism: Allama]. Freedom as the removal of constraints [negative liberty] only makes sense in a field of possibilities given to us.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
---Arnold, Dover Beach

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again
----Larkin, MCMXIV

A generation that had still gone to school in a public carriage found itself under the open sky in a landscape where nothing but the clouds remained unchanged...the men returned from the front struck dumb , not richer but poorer in communicable experience.
----W.Benjamin

They expected a grander experience, and they witnessed the disintegration of experience. Today experience can only refer to a past. Otherwise it is synonymous with horror.
---Roberto Calasso.

I read somewhere of someone meeting a person on a blind date and not asking, even after three hours, what that person did. At first I thought this was odd but then I realised that this is an entirely modern phenomenon: the art of conversation is dead, firstly because people are closed in on themselves ('Me, Myself , and I': the intoxication of our selves) and, secondly, because the span of shared experiences is much narrower...whether we even have something that could justifiably be called an 'experience' is questionable. The eyes become opaque and our lips move mechanically. Are we , the great language animal, running out of 'being', out of things to say?

The Mongol has hit on to something: the communte to central London is only bearable if we occupy our minds-anything (sudoku or some trashy magazine are best) to escape ourselves. The only people who talk on the tube are Albanians who laugh voraciously amongst themselves or American tourists blabbering on about 'Friends' and The Da Vinci Code. The underworld is the land of the zombies...but is it so different above?

Yesterday in Foyles, a teenage kid asks the assistant:
"Have you got any satanic Bibles?"
Try downstairs in the cult section, this is religion and philosophy.
"The big one, not the small one"
Yes, maybe in the basement, under 'cult'.
"Where is that, second floor?"

From Agamben's 'Infancy and History':
With war there is the destruction of common experience ..but the destruction does not just accompany the tectonic shifts in history, the disasters and the catastrophes but resides in the very heart of a humdrum life. What, in an average day, can be translated, recounted, as an experience? Is it the fact that we all lead very similar lives that precludes communication or is it that we go through the routines of the day mechanically, unreflectively? If the former, then the problem is one of identity and homogeneity. A common world, on the other hand, unites and separates us, offering up the possibility of different perspectives.

Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, or unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them have become an experience. ..the everyday oppressiveness, the banality of the ordinary, the deep ennui that covers us like a thick blanket, the numbness of our gaze...

Experience has its correlation not in knowledge but in authority-that is to say, the power of words and narration. But who can accept authority that is based on experience? To do so would be to give credence to the past when what we desire, precisely, is its elimination. It would also to place a value on the wisdom of old age and to maintain that not all those people in generations gone by were complete and utter naive fools. The cult of youth makes this next to nigh impossible. And nothing disturbs the modern conscience more than this possibility: we latecomers must be deemed to have extricated ourselves from years of delusion, only we have the right to call ourselves 'enlightened'. All other experience is considered-has to be considered-invalid, suspect.

Hence the disappearance of the maxim and the proverb, the disdain for cliches and the mania for originality and creativity. But in reality, all this has been replaced by the slogan, the jingle and the sound byte. Our subservience to experts and mandarins, Boston Brahmins and swamis or gurus of all persuasion, lifestyle managers and spin doctors, makes a mockery of the Enlightenment's claims of autonomy. The problem now is perceived as not how to start the story but, rather, how to bring it to a close. How to tell a story that ends all stories.

We moderns are voyeurs, observing the experience of others, unable to plunge into the unknown. We want security more than anything. At best we can theorize about experience. A reflective, self-conscious age (Kierkegaard), one that only seeks mirrors, that dares not go beyond the limits of reason. Hedonism is as predictable and boring as a mechanical life and both, ultimately, spring from the same root.

Take any example. Museums or art galleries. Almost always we do not allow the work to speak to us, to move us. Instead, the onus is on appearing intelligent, in 'deconstructing' the work, in unravelling its mystery before the mind's eye. In this regard, American simplicity can be like a breath of fresh air:

Outside the Leaning Tower of Pisa:
"Is that a Chuch , coz if it iz I'm tellin' ya I ain't gonna go in. Damn it, I'm sick to death of all these Chuches, ain't there nothin' else to see in this God-damned country?"

The modern tourist's ideology can be summarised in a few words: 'Been there, done that'. Everest, K2. Tick. It was there, it had to be done. That is all. Even the travel brochures market their holidays as an 'escape'-and is this anything but an escape from a mind-numbing and mundane day-to-day reality? If one thinks of the armies of tourists with their cameras and camcorders then this initial impression is confirmed. For what is important here is not the experience itself but that it is captured, kept safe so that one can view it again and again in the comfort of one's home. The most extreme example of such a mindset are the photographs of Abu Ghraib...

Must we sacrifice experience to 'pure knowledge'? As in Tiech's story, Das Lebeusuberfluis, must we throw away the ladder that connects us to the world? Knowledge, and knowledge now! We repeat the sins of the Fall. There's an element of fanaticism in this rejection of the world's slow wisdom. The virtual world is upon us...

What are we to make of the high rates of drug addiction and excessive drinking? A desire to escape experience, perhaps? We want to forget and to forget completely. 'Wasted' , as they say. When humankind is deprived of effective experience and becomes subject to the imposition of a form of experience as controlled and manipulated as a laboratory maze for rats then rejection of experience is a legitimate defence.

The Gambler:

You don’t know how hard it’s been,

to find you a gift.

Nothing fits.

Why bring gold to the seam, water to the sea?

Every idea of mine seemed like hauling spice to the East.

No good, to give you my heart, soul,

you own both already.

So I got you a mirror.

Look at you.

Think of me.

---Rumi, courtesy of 'Copenhagen'

Harmonize with your destiny or it will crush you.
-----

I want to live.
I want to die.
Does this fading, soaring please You so?

Where am I?
Who am I?
Is it winter now?

These voices within the voices.
The fires fragment.
Your Hand, again?
---b.

In the dark before the winter dawn
What’s to say?
Hard to invent oneself
Let alone anyone else


Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and love’s transcendent
dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.

One of C's gifts. (A.A.)

If your heart is not deceived by the mirage,
be not proud of the quickness of your mind
for the freedom from illusuion is a sign of your imperfect thirst.
---After Urfi.

I sometimes wonder if we wish for something hard enough it might come true. Is the act of desiring that future hour, which is but a moment, enough? Is it the very act of hoping that makes life holy? To gather oneself for that instant. To be sustained by that meagre reflection, weak as this fading winter sun. Give thanks when the heart is contracted? But: the heart's endless desire to break is stronger...and what else is the heart but a patchwork of filigree and shadow?

We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...

That we are not very securely at home
in the interpreted world.
---Rilke.

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing.

He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling. He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening. He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its primitive infinity.

------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.

Natur hat weder Kern
Noch Schale
Alles ist sie mit einem Male.

Half our story is a search for a wider world, untrodden paths to the open..but half is to find our place in it, for the cosmos and order and wholeness. It sometimes seems that all we have are other people's thoughts, the fragments of others' words..idols of the mind. But we look for those gateways, those portals that will take us away from the world or the inner world of ideas and second-hand emotions, learned responses, the soul's cliches. A passageway that is also a labyrinth where we are lost and found. A transitional place, neither outside or inside, that leads outwards but that is also connected to the familiar world of memory and human warmth: 'home'..the dihliz...

But if access to that transcendence has been blocked then we withdraw into ourselves, seeking out hidden paths, an 'Orphic descent' into our deepest past: a sub-way. But there is an air of desperation and anxiety in such a move. The air is still, heavy with resignation, and space itself is cramped and we willingly accept our slipping away out of sight...By doing so we may avoid the nausea of every-day reality, its horror and absurdity, its shallowness and theatricality. To bear witness to our suffering in an age of crass materialism and easily-worn emotions, an age in which reason sleeps and brings forth nightmares, primordial monsters from the depths...To escape the predicament of theoretical man-'Am I in pain?' is answered by 'What is pain?'.

The artists, whenever the truth is uncovered, will always cling with rapt gaze to what still means covering even after such uncovering. The philosopher wants to dispel all wonder , or hold it like an idol. He is oblivious of the mystery that inheres in every breath of life, every brain cell.

There is a sorcery in art, a magnetic pull to the unknown; by focusing on the particular totality is avoided. This human being-not the human being-is the gateway to infinity.We must learn to stop at appearance and its folded, concentrated reality. The moderns are obsessed with uncovering, revealing and purifying. The Secret is his greatest enemy.

Rothko's art is an attack on the sedative, commercial world , the world of entertainment and forgetfulness, of synthetic brightness and superficial cheerfulness . (Schama). Modern man's idol is a false infinity.

There is, perhaps, a Jewish sensibility to his work..and the interior glimmer all make looking at them an inexhaustible process. Feeling himself unable to go forward , he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown. What else is this but an aniconism that preserves the secret of God's creation from the Medusa-like gaze of the world? Art, like love and thought, can never exist solely in the realm of necessity. They are bound and free. But his is a hard-won freedom and only the adventurer, the sea-gypsy embarks on the journey for the unknown space, the terra incognita, that 'second space' that lies behind space.

The picture 'expands and quickens' in the eye. It remains unfinished, a symbol of perpetual becoming.Is Rothko really attempting to make a painting or is he trying to compose music...a sound thought? A Russian Jew: two pre-occupations: to communicate, the ethical commandment to take on responsibility, to have comapssion for other human beings ("the highest form of understanding"); but also to shatter images, to trace that invisible axis, and listen to that silence behind the music...

...Eliade once wrote of man's ontological thirst -his quest for being. This now seems, to me, to be only half the story. For what he wants most is to step beyond the frontier, to un-do himself, unfasten his createdness, to catch a glimpse of what is beyond-being. Such a person does not search for 'existence' but has a 'fanatic thirst for essence'...to break not the sound barrier, but that of light...

And since man is made in the image of God, a God who in virtue of his indeterminacy of unlimited actuality , is supremely undetermined (Duns Scotus) would it not be fair to say that his search is, ultimately, an irreducible desire for freedom? Does not thought transcend matter all the time? In love, do we not leap out of our own narrow horizons? The mystery of life is in life itself. Is it only the mind that gives the impression of 'outer' and 'inner'?

Natur hat weder Kern...

Man only becomes aware of himself when he perceives all others, and then as a condition of his existence.

The Descrtesian cogito is shattered into tiny grey pieces by :
We are, therefore I can think.

(Wisdom is grey but religion and life are full of colour).

Two things: something is given and it is given to us.

Is Rothko after a silence that refuses to become a name..an absence, the spark before the world, the speech before the word, the light before the light, the space before the space (Jabes?)? A space that is neither the beginning nor the end; neither outside or inside..a space that is a point..death is the point of all points.

Rothko on large pictures: precisely because I want to be very intimate and human [insaan: ins: intimacy] To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a steroptic view or with a reducing glass. However you paint a large picture , you are in it. A lived experience, a sound thought: we need to think the stars and feel them...

But again, we must ask ourselves if such a thing is possible in these times, in an age devoid of religion and metaphysical understanding.How is this autonomous individual related to Nature and to the universal, to the cosmos, except in terms of radical discontinuity (Descartes , again. Also, "reducing glasses"..see Rorty). Man, who is closed in on himself, sees only himself or the reflections of his own mind in everything. He who sees Ratio sees only himself...

Robert Hughes poses this question in another way: Do the paintings carry the weight of meaning that he intends, is there a final epiphany ..the sceptic answers : No! [having seen them again in the Tate yesterday, I tend to agree with him].

But Rothko's is at least a high order of doubt. Can we ever possess and experience..should we? What can be revealed to us in these days but the absence of God? We, who search for ever new destinations, might we not be draw to what is actually always the same?

But the desire for that open space is in the blood, the pressing need to elicit meanings unmediated by discursive language , to find, be lost in, a space divested of rigid boundaries [Does his work not make them fluid?] What use words here, what thought? A knowledge of human feelings is to understand, not to 'know' ; still less is it a knowledge of how that knowledge was acquired. Knowledge through suffering...

Men, with their minds, produced a vision of the world,a concept. Perhaps there is too much thinking,a hypertrophy of the mind. When what we desire is a light from outside to reveal the light within. [Fides et Ratio: faith illuminates the paths of reason]

Was Rothko searching for a black square, a Ka'ba? A sign that would be and not be (Zeus wants to and does not want to be named)...a housing of the spirit, an enclosing of the presence moving through it. Movement in stillness. Does something end with the inexplicable or only begin...a sacred enclosure.

Blanchot: Light illuminates, that is to say that light hides itself, that is its sly characteristic. Light illuminates; that which is illuminated presents itself in an immediate presence which reveals itself without revealing that which manifests it. Light effaces its traces; invisible it renders visible.

Art, then, that is like a house that has breathing spaces (Terminus) , a broken circle that is both presence and absence.

Rothko is influenced by Fra Angelico and the search for that purest essence...no space of perspectival perceptions ..the single features are consumed by the cool flowing light...conjures up a space that knows no limits and yet flows tangibly before our eyes. Insight over sight, or maybe both. Or is he influenced by Monet: to be immersed in a vision, an 'oceanic feeling'; to dissolve oneself and feel oneself slipping away to unknown lands. And who can then say where one ends and one begins, whether I am one or two?

But for the moderns is this anything but a show-a spectacular show, no doubt- in the theatre of the mind? Is the world of things and humans left behind, made more opaque by the glowing radiance of the interior realm? Or is beauty a ladder where one cannot look back or down? Rothko admires the impenetrable, blank walls of Byzantine chapels: outwardly sober, inwardly drunk. They are the keepers of the treasures. To re-create 'the place' : ho topos. A place where necessity and chaos flees. Everything here is about the right proportions-but that of music, not architecture. People praying are distracted by images.

All is rhythm: the entire destiny of man is a single celestial rhythm, just as the work of art is a unique rhythm.
(Holderin)

The problem for the artist, then, is how to give shape to the absent, how to speak about silence. Is it only in silence that one surpasses oneself? Perhaps we should be cautious of thinking of Rothko's art as a stark alternative between a return to an interior space and a journey to outer space. But for someone who was so aware of his mortality is it so surprising that he should be fascinated by wells and caves, the subterranean, portals and gateways. Death is a kind of birth....

The indeterminate bars of colour, the flow of the river, the eternal flux that lies at the heart of all that appears so solid. It is a certain light : the absolute, but also a particular light. Are his pictures about the attempt to get a feeling (not an idea) of what is boundless, unlimited and the paradox that we are but creatures who are subject to birth and death: finite beings with immortal longings...is he saying that we, we who move from womb to tomb, move from one unknown to the other?

Main concerns are the mysteries of the emanation of the divine powers of the hidden God. On the one hand God is so remote from human understanding that nothing can be said about Him. On the other hand, the whole raison d'etre of any mysticism is the need to grasp, by thought and imagination, , the living dynamic presence of God in the world. [Black Sun?]
---M.Megged, The Darkened Light.

Rothko's experiences were shaped from the land of opposites: Russia. Or was it a Zorastrain sense of light and darkness and their moral relation to good and evil?

*Most of the words and ideas in the last three blogs are from Ashton's 'About Rothko', Schama's 'Power of Art' , and Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New'. *

Jonah's response to Rothko is, intriguingly:

Between the idea and the reality
Between the motion and the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception and the creation
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire and the spasm
Between the potency and the existence
Between the essence and the descent
Falls the Shadow
---T.S.Eliot

I don't usually mention politics but the ridiculous 'conference' on the Holocaust in Iran by that monkey makes me wonder just how thick a human being can be (in thickness I include a lack of ethical values). Looking forward to Jimmy Carter's book on Palestine...

For Jonah and C: Robert Hughes on Rothko:

Patience, patience
Patience in the blue!
Each atom of silence
Is the chance of a ripe fruit.

"... This obsession with the qualities of light, issuing from motionless emblems which are themselves fixed in a completely frontal pictorial structure, exactly repeats procedures of American Luminism and its 'small, still voices' of inner contemplation..the idea of a deity that was a 'great, luminous, oblong blur'. "

"He was a Russian Jew, obsessed with the moral possibility that his art could go beyond pleasure and carry the full burden of religious meanings-the patriarchal weight , in fact, of the Old Testament."

On the Rothko chapel:
"all the world has drained out of them, leaving only a void. Whether it is 'the Void' glimpsed by mystics , or simply an impressively theatrical emptiness, is not easily determined. ..In effect it is the last silence of Romanticism..art, in a convulsion of pessimistic inwardness, is meant to replace the world."


All the artists… agreed to hate the image. The art of the new man must suppress all representation of man. Malevich, an eloquent if erratic propagandist, thundered against the Venus de Milo ('not a woman but a parody') and against the 'rubbish filled pool of Academic art' with its female hams, depraved cupids and congealed legacy from Greece. His tone is that of Isaiah on the subject of idols and I think the comparison apt. For beneath the Russians' obvious devotion to human images lurks an impulse to smash them to bits. The ugly riches of late Tsardom, it is true, were an open invitation to the wreckers, but iconoclasm in Russia has a longer history.

As 'Third Rome' and guardian of an orthodoxy denied by the renegade West, Russia inherited from Byzantium her peculiar attitude towards the image. The statue of an emperor or icon of a saint proved the legitimacy of a political or religious idea. The saying 'He who delights in the Emperor's statue delights in the Emperor' applies as well to Justinian as to Tsar Nicholas II Authoritarian societies love images because they reinforce the chain of command at all levels of the hierarchy. But an abstract art of pure form and colour, if it is serious and not merely decorative, mocks the pretensions of secular power because it transcends the limits of this world and attempts to penetrate a hidden world of universal law.

Anarchic peoples, like desert nomads, hate and destroy images, and a similar image-breaking streak runs through Russian history…

Malevich was touched by mystical yearnings. In his hands the non-objective canvas became an icon of anarchy and inner freedom: this is what made it dangerous to Marxist materialism. Of his painting Black Square he said he had felt 'black nights within' and a timidity bordering on fear', but as he decided to break with reality and abandon the image: 'a blissful sensation of being drawn into a "desert" where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life.' Now this is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart – or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich's Black Square, his 'absolute symbol of modernity', is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka'aba at Mecca, the shrine in the valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God. And if this seems far-fetched, I quote the judgement of Andrei Burov, an architect who left the Constructivist Movement: 'There was a strong Muslim influence and orthodox Mohammedanism at that; by way of decoration only clocks and letters were allowed.'

excerpt from "George Costakis: The Story of an Art Collector in the Soviet Union," in What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin

Celeste says,
Rothko himself said, in conversation with Selden Rodman: 'I'm NOT an abstractionist.'Selden: 'You're an abstractionist to me.. You're a master of color harmonies and relationships on a monumenal scale. Do you deny that?'Rothko: 'I do..... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions -trajedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of peple break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate these basic emotions. .. People who weep in front of my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, {meaning Selden}, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
'The above is taken from Seldon's Conversations With Artists.(First published in 1957.)

Seldon also spoke with Rothko's great friend, the Japanes artist Kenzo Okada, who said, among other things: 'Like Cezanne, like Matisse, [Mark's] pictures [are] always changing, meaning different things to different people. This is not true of Rouault or Picasso.'Looking at Rothkos's paintings, arouses those same 'mystical yearnings'that one experiences when contemplating the geometrical art of Islam, which have no iconographic meaning but makes its appeal direct to the spirit (or whatelse?). In his Introduction to Keith Critchlow's Islamic Pattern, Seyyed Hossein Nasr says:'The doctrine of unity which is cental to the Islamic revelation combined with the nomadic spirituality which Islam made its own brought into being an aniconic art wherein the spiritual world was reflected in the sensible world not through various iconic forms but through geometry and rhythm, through arabesques and calligraphy which reflect directly the worlds above and ultimately the suprenal sun of Divine Unity.'

I won't pretend to understand the full implication of Nasr's words, but want simply to convey the idea that work like Rothko's evokes a passionate response which is beyond words and which taps into the sort of deep levels of awareness which I sense in Islamic geometrical art.

Here I am believing words again
Here I am trying to find your love again
Here I am down on my knees again
Praying for a love that we used to know
When so few understand what it means to fall in love
And so few know how hard it is to live without it
Ah, to hold something real, and not believe it
To live in her life, and never trust it
To give all you know and never feel it
To hold back each day until it dies away
Lord, I must have been blind.
---This Mortal Coil

I scour the text, searching for the words, the word, that will unlock the mystery..but is this a hopeless endeavour? Will words take us there, help us see?
Maybe we should look for the 'desert places' elsewhere...

What starts as a funferal ends up as a meditation on a funeral. Death is the point of all points. Who is truly dead and who alive ? [Martyrs, for example, are not really dead]. All around us we see people who in the midst of life are really dead (and only all around us?) They are dead to their past, to themselves and to other people.

Gabriel tries to forget the past-he is sick of it- but is he talking about Ireland or, more obliquely, of his wife's past that he is dimly aware of? Is it, then, that he, like an exile, cannot put his memories to one side, or that he cannot remember what he has forgotten?

This is a dense and compressed work and one searches for her clues in vain. A mystery can only be deepened, never 'known'. Which events, Gabriel wonders, led up to the present situation, which innocuous objects, throwaway words, could throw light on this tale, could unravel this mortal coil?

Goloshes: they keep the country out. The snow, the outside world is liberating. But for Gabriel it is the 'East' , civilized Europe with its education and light (and order, perhaps) that he holds in high esteem. The 'west', on the other hand , is a dark land, primitive and unredeemed. He wears the goloshes because that is all the rage on the continent but also, perhaps, so that he can keep the past at bay: "...and the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-filled frieze, a cold, fragrant, air from out of doors escaped from crevices and folds."

This is the story of a quite ordinary evening , with ordinary people. But ordinariness, pushed to its limits, reverts to the mysterious. Gabriel-even the name makes me inclined to think of goodness, rounded contentment-is quite at home with the ordinary, mundane conventions and norms of respectable society (of hospitality, say). [compare this with the rage implied by the name 'Furies'] . And so he is ill at ease when Lily answers his question in an abrupt and unexpected way. The plain saying of the literal truth, instead of the worn- out cliches, surprises him. And this is only a foretaste of what is to come...

The more one allows the images of the film to settle the more one finds oneself paying attention to things that are not said, to the stolen glances, and the inexplicable events -like the reading of the wyrd poem-that punctuate the linear narrative. Mind the gap! And keep an eye out for what stands apart from the grey intervening spaces of a life.

We must remember that Gabriel isn't very comfortable with words. Again and again he must remind himself of a quote and the appropriate things to say (the speech). And he is bored, later on , listening to Freddie's mother's ramblings. But still, he is committed to words, to the printed word of 'the East' and its civilized thinking though a part of him recognizes that we live in a thought-tormented age. But to go west is to venture to one's death or the impulsive country..perhaps, even, to the muffled silence of the snow...

And so, for Gabriel there is no relation between the living and the dead. In his speech he passes over this, glosses over it. although we may rightly be nostalgic for the past, the old ways, though we may fondly remember absent friends whose voices can no longer be heard, we must move on: Let the dead bury the dead. Cherish in our hearts the memory of the dead. Really? These words will come back to haunt him. again, we must ask: are these just words? The question then becomes not what we are remembering, but who....[earlier , one of the aunts remembers the voice of singer whose name escapes the others and we wonder if it is the voice or the eyes that she is remembering...]

Are dead singers, like dead lovers, preferred to present ones?

From inside the house it is the cold that is liberating. But here let us remember that Gretta, Gabriel's wife, is made to wear the goloshes and that she'd walk home in the snow if she were left. An innocent remark?

Gabriel fondly remembers the warm moments with his wife. No, everything is alright in the world and God is in his place. Even if one has to accept the mediocrity of one's life there are always the starry moments, the fire that is the stars, the sparks that illuminate the darkness and without which there would only be a black void. [But earlier on he had asked about a fire : Is the fire hot? Experience is never revealed to him in an intensely personal way]. Perhaps all we can hope for in life is sympathy, a second-hand emotion, second-best? In a thought-tormented age is that all we can desire, all that we can elicit from others?

Doubt thou the stars are fire? No. But sometimes when the light from a distant star reaches us it is already extinguished, already dead. It lives on-at least in the eyes of those who behold it. As Kingfishers catch fire so we too get a glimpse of that reflected light...We need to think of the stars and feel them....

Eventually , he learns that there is a melancholy unity between the dead and the living, that snow is general all over Ireland (and not just over the west). But he has to learn this painfully (is there any other type of learning?) and the truth , when spoken, is startling, dazzling in its simplicity.

At first the snow was something that was 'feared' but now it is desired-even though it may be unattainable. Only now, with the final revelation, does it dawn on him that what he always needed was a sense of what one aunt calls the excitement of swift and secure flight. It is as if now, and only now, does he truly remember what he has always forgotten-and it is totally unscripted. Only now does he see that "the intense and the moderate can meet ; intensity burns out and declines , and the moderated can admire and pity it, and share the fate that moves both types of mankind towards age and death..that all me feel and can lose feeling..."

Can there ever be an acceptance of the past and the dead since to do so would be to accept one's own mortality, one's own fragility? It would be to see ourselves as something that is destined to recede and fade away, like snowflakes into the darkness. [In the film, in a timeless moment, Gabriel draws together moments from the past and the future to his present situation. The death of others is imagined-both of those before us, and those who will come after us. The living and the dead are one.

Goethe: "Death: what was an impossibility all of a sudden becomes a possibility"

He asks Gretta: WHAT was he? Again, his words show how alienated he is. He died for me, she says and this shatters his illusion of self-possession. And this, too, is a kind of death. Betrayal and abandonment are no less a death. Does he , then, sacrifice his old self, "die before he dies"? Is it possible that the death of another person can lead to one's own salvation-as mention of the monks and the coffins would indicate ? [That there is a religious dimension to this story no-one can deny, unless he tell a lie: snow lying, thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones,...on the barren thorns.

As Joyce says:
Death is the highest form of presence.

-----(citations and ideas borrowed from a dead man)

Everything is flux.
----Heraclitus.

To see everything as a stream one has to be outside the stream.

The water takes on the shape of the container but remains water.
---A sufi saying.

Ten Green Bottles. Is that the Sea?

At Tesco's:

1. Pass me five red apples will ya?

2. Sorry?

1. Which part of that sentence don't you understand bud?
Let me spell it out: Five. Red. Apples. Comprende? Or shall I write it on slips of paper?

2. Five?

1. Yes. One more than 4. Even a robot could understand that. Shall I put it down mathematically? More. Than. >
No? 4 + 1

2. What is meant by '+' ?

1. Red. Even a fool knows what that is.

2. Isn't that a secondary quality?

1. Apple? they do have apples in your country , don't they?

2. Is this the name of something or the essential property of the thing?

1. Where's my gun? Or maybe I'll just buy them on-line.

2. Ah! The western solution: power, money, or technology!

Realism (R) and Idealism (I)
( from Nagel's View from Nowhere).

R: The world extends beyond what we can conceive.
I: What is, is what we can conceive. What we cannot conceive is not or is nonsense. (Strong version: something doesn't exist or make sense unless we perceive it)

This is not an empirical argument but an argument from reason..about what we 'can' conceive and not what infinite minds can or what minds actually do conceive. R holds that there is a reality that exists independently of our minds , language, and our methods of reaching it. This is what makes objectivity possible. But, R also maintains that an increase in objectivity doesn't necessarily reveal the world , or, rather, all features of the world, as they really are and a difference between what we can conceive and what what there is still remains. for a Realist Idealism embodies a lack of humility: as if to say: I am the world! It limits the universe to our own terms of self-understanding and is a form of reductionism.

Positive Inconceivable: the idea that there are a category of things to which we cannot apply our concepts is either impossible or incoherent.
Negative Inconceivable: there are, or may be, things that we may not , or can not, conceive of.

So, is there really a category of things of which we can form no conception? The idealists might say: wouldn't such a conception of such a category itself be a contradiction since to use words like 'exist' is already to be on this side of 'conception'. Perhaps one version of Realism turns this on its head and says that its position is merely that we cannot rule out such a category and if we do, then on what grounds do we do so?

The idealist claim seems to go like this: We cannot form a general concept of reality that goes beyond existence as we understand it. What would it mean to say that such a category (of things that are inconceivable) 'exists'? By imputing 'existence' or 'truth' to it does that not mean that it can, in at least some respects, be thought of..i.e it is back within the fold of what is conceivable? Can something be said to exist if the mind does not (cannot) conceive it?

The realist rejoinder might go like this: we can imagine certain people for whom reality extends beyond what they can conceive. Think of concentric circles and the blind, deaf , at the centre of them. If we, with our higher conceptions, were not to exist, the reality to which our conceptions were an adequate measure, would still exist and be true. In that sense, reality is independent of the minds of the those at a lower level. The same analogy holds with higher beings. It is perfectly possible to imagine beings who have a higher understanding of reality than we do.

So, even if we cannot communicate with such beings, or they cannot communicate with us, does it follow from that that a higher form of understanding does not exist ? Or , to put it in narrow terms: that it cannot exist? On what grounds can we say that there is no possibility of anything beyond our experience being real? [As the Allama pointed out, this itself is an a priori assumption!]

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)


The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?
---- foot-marks.....

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.

--After Rumi

Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.

But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, his mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is , ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes him -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.

Most importantly , there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.
What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?

There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...

Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)
A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).

Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).

G. Bataille:
To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

It is the unknown that compels us to love [the key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul (D.H.Lawrence) ]

God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'

The Central Line is buggered-has been for two weeks. But it's great to hear all the whingeing that goes on-a national hobby in these parts: I dunno know...pathetic..it's ridiculous,..this is a third-world country. It's one of the few times the farangi will talk to strangers. The only other people on the tube system who do that are drunks or Amrikis..especially the ones who wear those grey or blue t-shirts with 'Harvard' written on them! Just exactly how many people go to that university! Reminds me of a line from Chatwin when he met a Bedouin: Tell me Mr. Chatwin, have you been to India? Yes. "And just how big is this village, India?"

Waiting for the train and a grey and silver ghost-like one slinks in, as if there wasn't a driver. One of those low-ceiling ones. But there are no people in it and some of the carriages have 'Northern Line' written on the side whilst others have 'Central Line'. This is some sort of weird hybrid that has slipped the lines. It's hard to see what's in some of the carriages because the windows are tinted but in others the seats have been ripped open and there are bottles of chemicals stacked up in neat piles. This skeleton of a train seems to be on its last legs. It's always amazing when something like this turns up out of the blue..a bit like the Thames whale last year.

Eventually a train does pull in. I find 15 pence on the floor, look around, and pick it up. The day before I had given exactly 15 p to a beggar. I wish I had given a pound. What goes around comes around...

Tea outside the wb:
The Persian tells me how noisy Iranian audiences are at cinemas. He has no idea! Back in the land of the pure I recall how two friends sat through the whole of a film discussing the price of tomatoes and other vegetables. I had to turn round to them and tell them this wasn't a f'ecking sabzi mundi. 'Mundi': market...is that word connected with 'the world'? And then there were the two people who couldn't make head or tails of the Urdu-dubbed version of Time Cop since it was next to impossible to understand how someone could die three times. And watching Twister I told him how the crowd would howl with derision at the evil guys and clap thunderously when they were 'taken up' by the twister (one said: Allah mian has taken them up).

Dalrymple in Xanadu has a great story about how an audience of tribals in Kazakhstan are watching a James Bond film when the scene with the tarantula come sup . They hold their breath. And then when Bond kills it they take off their shoes and stamp the ground, killing another hundred imaginary ones. And then the cries go up : Allah Akbar!

It's hard to explain to the Persian the tradition of call-response at the cinemas. Someone at one end of the cinema might make a witty comment (during the film) and another person will shout something back as a response or a further question to which the first person then replies in turn. And then there are the people selling fake chocolates: Kit Kart. One of these people , a young man with a very well oiled black beard makes a sudden appearance. He's there to watch the 'dance scene' of Reema and is nowhere to be found after that scene. For once there is pin-drop silence in the hall. Even the people in the 'sofa seats' are quiet (I kid thee not, in one there is actually a red velvet sofa stuck to the wall).

I watched this film again last night and so am repeating this post-what else am I but a mechanical turk of sorts?

What would it be like to see the passing splendour of the world with the eyes of an angel, without concern for its trials and tribulations, where though the rise and fall of whole species flash before one in an instant, still one's heart doesn't sink? There are no judgements, no values, just the simple bearing witness to events, pared down to their most fundamental components (the whole story is in the fragment and the fragment is in the whole); the simple recording of an infinite series of changes in a logical fashion; to have the spectacle of all that has ever happened, all that ever will happen, laid out in front of one's eyes like some richly woven tapestry.

The sudden illumination of a beautiful face or the witnessing of the death of a star are looked upon with equanamity. The sigh of a love-torn heart is not so different from the gentle rustling of leaves in the spring. The permanence of crystalline matter is replicated in the art and politics of men. An equation governs the movement of the planets and certain proportions, 'notes', are to be found in the universe as well as in the sadness of a song. The wavering light, the uneasiness in the poet's heart. Everything is something else. Every image flows into another and a thousand generations pass to produce the all too ordinary face that stands before you. But, he who sees Ratio sees only himself....sees only the geometry of his soul.

As Lull's thinking machine knew: all sentences, all meaning, could be derived from the combination of a finite number of words. All stories are a repitition of the seven basic plots. The world itself is a metaphor. A horse is a car without wheels, a man a chance agglomeration of matter that is interchangeable with the environment...a thinking reed. The angel looks at the hordes that attack Rome and knows they follow the same patterns as other migratory animals.What we picture, what we wish for in our innermost heart , is what we become.

The angel sees without the complications of a body, without the gestures of a culture; if he has a language , it is mathematics. All thought is pure, the clear reflection of everything in the mirror of his pure soul. This is the ancient dream: to know, to see with the eye of God, sub specie aeternitatis. A smooth immanent world that is never interrrupted by miracles or anomalies. Gradually, the earth yields all of her secrets. Only one remains, though he delights us not: the strange hybrid creature that thinks but is finite, that is finitely infinite.

The mechanical turk is able to calculate all possible 'moves', all theoretical outcomes, and lives in a black and white world of perfect foresight where the only unpredictable thing is who is what colour, and that is determined by chance. Otherwise the universe is governed by necessity, ' the veil of god'. Once the rules and the properties, the characteristics, of all of the elements of the system (the players) are understood it is a mere formality for the Turk to work out all possible games and to play out his life accordingly in his spotless mind.But still something perplexes the Turk. He has heard the poet talk of a blue flower and this is an absurdity beyond his comprehension. Man must build a machine that can question itself.

"When will I be human?" asks the robot. But in the very questioning, the desire to be something that he wasn't, something that he knew in his heart of hearts would never be an option-not for him at least-in this,wasn't there a sign that he was already human, all too human in fact?To despair over the road not taken or the road that one is denied. He sat there, transfixed by the statue of the blue angel, an image that he had searched for for so long. And now,2,000 years pass and still there is no answer to his prayers, only longing and hoping. Maybe this, he thinks to himself, is what it was to be human: to wait for something out of the blue.

But what is this 'thing' that he waits to become? Not to be first among many, for there have already been many before him, but to be unique, utterly distinct , so that he can be loved in the proper way. And at last the boy finds that day, that instant from the past when he's momentarily recognised for what he really is, when he is allowed to bring the past back for a day.Humans search for the witness to their own being. Are we only sustained by the memory of love, or the desire for being loved?And when that day passes, receding into the shadowy land of what was, and when he finally understands that the moment has passed, as it invariably must, and can never be truly recovered, then what? Is the acceptance of life as finitude, transience, and fragility, the limitof humanity or is there also a reaching out to transcend the ephemeral?Aren't all utopias, all forward dreaming, and the need to repeat just that? But perhaps this submersion into the permanent is a betrayal of sorts-would we be human without the tragic?

And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that we are what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if onlywe would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.

(From the film, A.I.)