Black Sun

A picture of the beautiful Elis, who sings like a dream.

Faithful old T has helped me..er..locate one of her cds ('Romantica' from the 5-cd box set). Must ask Miguel to get me translations of the lyrics.

~~~

Standing over little r in the morning, my arms folded, as she sleeps blissfully, in her freestyle, carefree way. The early morning light is like a blue haze since we have a blue shade to keep the sun out. Thought to myself, when she's 80 or 90 she'll have no idea that I watched over her like this and I would have been long gone. (How many of our acts go unnoticed, even though they're surely real with or without a witness to them?). Doesn't matter. Some things are right in and of themselves. And perhaps we see the faces of our loved ones in dreams too...

Old Grenville, what a sad little character he was. Even his name was hardly believable. What did he teach again? Was it literature or language. They were probably the same thing in those days anyway. Strange that I should remember this after all these years...

I look at the grey-blue floor tiles.Something you might expect to find in a cheap hotel.You see a single hair,the presence of a human, curving asymptotically to the crack between the tiles;an upturned cockroach, apparently content in its small death; and a squashed mosquito, flat as a pancake, its body horribly twisted around the centre. All this laid out on the Cartesian grid, or like pieces in a grotesque game of chess.

The rain pelted down. Crashing down on us as we ran from one building, across the rugby field, to the smaller set of buildings where our class had already started. Some of the wiser ones had already decided against it and stayed put. There was always sense in staying still against the flow of the world.But the test had begun and we were already ten minutes late. Somehow we were hoping that the heaviness of the rains would clear us of any obligations, wipe out the next 45 minutes of our lives...

We made a dash for it. Half way, caught in no-man's land, and already the rain had plastered our shirts to our bodies. There's always a stage when things get so bad that you say, fuck it, just carry on...

We make it and stand in our own puddles for a minute, laughing, catching our breath. Inside, the revered silence, what people will later call 'the life of the mind', even though they don't what they're talking about.

There he is, old Gren. Light-brown suede jacket. Sometimes he'd wear an outlandish red jumper. You'd imagine he'd go for a yellow bow-tie as well. Must be gay. But wasn't man enough for it. He has that ridiculous stoop, one side of his shoulder closer to earth than the other, as if he's in this permanent state of apology. Thousands of years of subservience in his blood. Suppressed, like most other people in Wales, there was nothing mythical about him...

Write an essay on...Blow on your hands to get them unfrozen. No words come to your head. How great it would be to write something just now, something not connected to the past, to other writers, to the future; something that could be read and then thrown in the waste paper basket in the corner, the dunce's corner. Duns Scotus and all that. Except, except Grenville, the whole classroom was one such corner. Surprised you couldn't see it...

What do you remember now? Not the words but the rain, the running across a muddy field. You seemed to have spent an inordinate part of your life running. Running back home before it got too dark, or running past the cripple's house...at the corner of the street there lived a man, a very old man, who would occasionally come out in his wheelchair, his trouser legs all floppy and folded neatly back to his thighs; and he wore that army jacket, highly decorated, but he scared the life out of you. Run, and hope to God you never see him.

Down from his house was the old train bridge; covered in so much black soot and grime that it looked like a block of crap and was almost invisible. There were probably loads of such useless old things, places of dark refuge, strewn around the country-particularly up north, since everything up there was dilapidated and shit. And the scale of the arch was not something human beings could relate to either.

Only this? Those shivers at first-light, this succession
of moments, thread after thin thread-hours, years
drawn into the curve of life...

I don't want to hear from you,
don't want to see your eyes.
There's more to life than this.

---Robin Robertson.

Back to that first moment, your smile trembling through the rain. First light. Just warm enough for us to touch one another, before you moved off on a tangent. Back to that open door, where we once lived off one another. Your thin and gentle face, that quizzical look, like that of a dog that's lost her master. The sun made us equals.

And now? When you add up the years, you will notice I have nothing-all the smiles were from you, all the tears from me. My face has darkened for no reason that I can gather and my eyes seem unnaturally sad.The hand of the executioner is so fair!You promised to send word, said it would be a bond between us,like a fetter in a world that contains the space of mirrors.I wait here darkly for the sun to return, so that our paths might cross once again.

This is from one of the best albums of the year (pity about the lyrics at the end).Like Buffalo 66, the soundtrack is better than the film. What other great film soundtracks are out there?Suggestions? (And no dougal, you can't suggest any of your beloved musicals or Barbara-bloody-Streisand).Donnie Darko's got to be on any list. Then there's Requiem for a Dying Planet, with the beautiful musical synthesis of Reijseger and Mola Sylla in what is an otherwise ordinary Werner Herzog film. What is it about the combination of music and film that makes it even more intriguing than, say, image and word? Think: your favourite art books, from Civilisation, The Shock of the New,and Farewell to An Idea,to Martin Lings on Calligraphy and Ouspensky and Lossky on Icons...they all miss out on some intangible but fundamental ingredient, something vital, living, experienced in time, something that is of time.

Other great combos: cinnamon rolls and fresh black coffee; orange flavoured dark chocolate; fish and chips;peas and tomato ketchup, fried egg and chips (seriously, if you haven't tried that what on earth have you been doing with your life?!)Monica Bellucci and film...

Fusion: how I hate that word.Fusion food, fusion music.Lot of it kicked off, I guess, when you heard some Nusrat Fateh-not his original stuff though. But then again, there probably is no such thing as 'pure' music, a music that doesn't borrow, steal, mingle with various cultures and sub-cultures, or pick up something from the past (how can you fail to hear, despite all its contemporary sadness,echoes of the Beatles on Grizzly Bear's album?). And of course, part of the fundamentalist opposition to culture is precisely that it is so fluid and open to different influences and impulses. Khair, there's surely a difference between coming together and being thrown together?

A good example of where fusion-if that's the right word-works is here. Bob on 'the overgrown path' has a lot more interesting things to say on fusion.

~~~

Kaboom was imply awful, the most cliched film you've seen in a while.Wise Blood: not as good as you thought first time round. Which leaves John Harvey's choices of Fat City, Cutter's Way, and The Last Picture Show.

I love my love with an X
and the black cat bone
she buries in a kiss is sweeter now
than honey from the book of Genesis.

Rain in the yards; a cuckoo in the
meadows; I look in my bed tonight (and find
my brothers and sisters gone
and the curdled glaze
of everafter on my father's skin
is cold as ice

I love my love with an X
and here she comes now, now,
stealing across the fields and creeping around
to feed
my mouth
a sweet spot in the dark

she thinks is safe
until I drink her in.

---John Burnside.

I sent this to some friends and one replied with the wonderful poem by Louis Macneice (Autumn Journal):

Surbiton, and a woman gets in, painted

With dyed hair but a ladder in her stocking and eyes

Patient beneath the calculated lashes,

Inured for ever to surprise;

And the train’s rhythm becomes the ad nauseam

repetition

Of every tired aubade and maudlin madrigal,

The’he faded airs of sexual attraction

Wandering like dead leaves along a warehouse wall:

‘I loved my love with a platform ticket,

A jazz song,

A handbag, a pair of stockings of Paris Sand–

I loved her long.

I loved her between the lines and against the clock,

Not until death

But till life did us part I loved her with paper money

And with whisky on the breath.

I loved her with peacock’s eyes and the wares of

Carthage,

With glass and gloves and gold and a powder puff

With blasphemy, camaraderie, and bravado

And lots of other stuff.

I loved my love with the wings of angels

Dipped in henna, unearthly red,

With my office hours, with flowers and sirens,

With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.’

And so to London and down the ever-moving

Stairs...

~~~

Finally finished JCO's memoir. Parts of it made you cringe..."the widow this" and "the widow that". But on the whole, the writerly quality of it means there's sufficient space between the raw emotions of grief and the text. (Gosh, that does sound overly complicated! Makes me sound like a European intellectual!).And, the other way, it isn't an abstract discussion of 'Grief', 'Loss'. You know, you always read on the blurbs: 'A profound meditation on...' and think to yourself, that must mean it's good. You fear it will turn out to be mush, relentless wallowing in self-pity.

A strange book for me to read, I know. (What, do we only read what's the appropriate genre now?). And there's probably a whole industry nurtured, perverse though it may sound, on grief, loss, despair, 'survival' (the Americans are big on that), a phenomenon related, perhaps, to the exponential increase in personal confessions, the mania for revealing all and shocking people with the sordid details of one's not-so-interesting life. Lay your cards on the table, brokenness as the only way to the truth of it. That always surprises you because you think silence and withdrawal could be the only response. But then there's this weird and incredible line in Arendt (from somewhere): 'Any grief can be borne if it can be put in a story'.

There's also something terribly voyeuristic in reading about other people's despair, as if to say, I'm fine, I'm untouched by it all. Sit in your room, sip your coffee: other people are hell and other people's lives are hell.'If this is Man' and all that.

But no, I think JCO avoids all that...

Art thou not aware that they roam confusedly through all the valleys [of words and thoughts]
Q:26:243

A friend of a friend told me of this book; in the book was a footnote that mentioned the review of another book and in this other book there was a passing reference to ----'s book and it is from there that I re-tell this story....

Your goal is the Fire: it is your [only] refuge*
Q:57:15

[*="friend"]

al-Ma'arri's 'Epistle of Forgiveness' (which, incidentally, mirrors Dante but predates it by about three centuries) tells the story of one of the great poets, sitting at the very outer rim of Heaven, the outer regions where not many people venture, gazing intensely towards that fiery place far down below. From this vantage point he can survey the whole of Hell and his vision is taken up by its spectacle. But more than that. To his surprise he realises that he can converse with its inhabitants and so, why not avail such an opportunity!

The great Syrian poet decides to strike up a conversation with the famed Imru' al-Qays, the very same poet whose verses were hung on the Ka'ba. He inquires about his work and in particular of his justly praised epic, about the lack of an "and" in some versions, the inclusion of it others. What is one to make of this?

The response is swift and brief:

May God blot out the scholars of Baghdad!..If one reads the text in such a way what is left of the distinction between poetry and prose?

The Syrian is impressed. Despite the dense walls of smoke, the pungent smell of burning, he receives clear answers to the various textual, grammatical, lexical, and metrical questions he puts to the classical authors. Each statement is concise and uttered with the utmost serenity.

[Lest it be objected that time should not be wasted on such frivolous matters let me remind you, dear reader, that there time is not of the essence]

Having understood much Ibn al-Qarih-for that is the name of the illustrious poet whose journeys so delight us-travels around various places in Heaven. Here he comes across a city that is not bathed in light but pocked with caves and eerie trees. And this is where those creatures who lived before Adam are to be found. He converses with one such creature, a spirit who has taken on the form of a very old man. The old man reminds al-Qariah that no one really knows anything in comparison to the poetry of the spirits.

[Man!] What does he know of poetry. You are completely bedazzled by one ode and even commit it to memory when I can dictate thousands upon thousands of words in this same meter, more than can be written on all the leaves of the world, each more beautiful than yours. This is mere child's play for us! In fact, just one poem would rival all of yours. These words are the work of one of our poets who died an unbeliever and is now burning in the circles of Hell.

He's enticed by the prospect of having access to this vast treasure trove of poems but, then again, why transcribe so many words? Are these to be compared to the treasures of Heaven? Anyway, this is a dilemma only at the theoretical level for the spirit is reticent. Even more, the great poets and mythical literary figures he questions don't seem to remember any of their own poems-even though he can quote vast tracts of their beautiful verses to them.

By this time our Syrian friend is a little bemused. It appears that the inhabitants of Heaven are suffering from sort of literary and linguistic amnesia.

One poet explains to al-Qarih: my eternal beatitude has allowed me to forget all these poems and I no longer remember a single line of them.

Ibn al-Qarih pleads with him and offers to recite them in the most melodious voice in an attempt to jog the great poet's memory. The old man, as if remembering at least something of his former fame-if not his poetry- concedes:

Recite them for me, and may God's mercy be bestowed on you plentifully.

Further on, and to his great delight, he comes across al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, the first and greatest grammarian of classical Arabic. He looks up and sees Khalil riding a beatific chariot and 'as he ponders the verses in his memory it occurs to him that one could truly dance to the music of their elaborate rhythm.

At that instant, God the Almighty, in the kindness of His wisdom, allowed a walnut tree to emerge from the ground. The tree immediately let its nuts ripen, and threw so many of them to the ground that God alone would be capable of counting them. The walnuts broke open, and from out of each nut there stepped four maidens, who inspired wonder in all those near and far alike, who saw them. They danced to the verses of al-Khalil...

And yet the strangest of things happens here as well: al-Khalil, despite all the promptings, cannot recall that these are indeed his verses. After crossing the bridge, he tells al-Qarih, he has no recollection of such things. Al-Qarih is greatly saddened by this. How is it possible that he who once possessed the greatest memory of all Arabs, he who had dedicated his life to the very rules of time, could produce such a blank look? He begins to grow more and more despondent with every great figure he meetst. Was this, then, the future of mankind, of civilisation?

At last, Al-Qarih comes across Adam and recites to him two of his verses or ones that are commonly attributed to him. But Adam can only reply:

What is said in these lines is true and whoever composed them was surely a wise man. But as for myself, this is the first time I have heard these words.

Al-Qarih walks respectfully towards him and suggests that perhaps Primal Man has a faulty memory for a scholar has argued that you are in fact named 'Man' on account of your forgetfulness.

Adam reproaches him. "But how could such a thing be possible!" And then, with impeccable logic he explains to al-Qarih that he spoke Arabic only when he was in heaven; on earth he spoke Aramaic. Furthermore, the Arabic verse says: 'From the earth were we created, and to the earth we must return'. Only someone who was on earth could have thought up of such words, adding: the tongue of the poem is an index of time...it was most likely composed by some fellow in his spare time.

Our wily protagonist isn't completely satisfied by this explanation. Is it not possible that it was translated into Arabic? At which point Adam swears by God that the verse is not his and after that what else can be said: there can be no further dispute!

Al-Qarih wanders from place to place, ever more forlorn, ever more disappointed. The poets of Paradise, like Primal Man, forget and are not even aware of their forgetfulness. They are, it seems, happily reconciled to their forgetful nature. (The sinners, on the other hand, can do nothing but remember). Only the poet, only al-Qarih is allowed to remember! Is memory, then, the mark of the redemption we cannot achieve? Is al-Qarih mysteriously and mistakenly admitted to Paradise although he doesn't belong there, as if someone has forgotten to check his name against a list? The unsaved is, perhaps, a witness to a beatitude that the other poets cannot recall or have no need of recalling.

And only he, the fragile figure of a resolutely unredeemed humanity, could therefore glimpse a relation to language that would do justice to the empty essence of the speaking being who forgets; a relation in which recollection and oblivion remain as indistinguishable as the continuity and discontinuity of the time to which they are bound, and in which the memory of speech is at last liberated from everything that has been stored in it.

'The site and generator of universal values'

I've mixed up the notes, so here's a mixture of Dyer on Gedney and Berger on Degas.

'People living out their lives in obscurity' (darkness, anonymity).

'Those who lack things are defined most conspicuously by what they own'

'Human truth in what seemed like an artificial situation..the truth of what is found, the commonplace, is often startling, surprising.'

'He loved the contrasted movements, concentration and relaxation, and the way in which each woman is absorbed in what she is doing'

'A momentary gesture's capacity to contain the timelessness of myth.'

'He saw his life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.'

Auden: 'The man or woman in any walk of life who manages to acquire and preserve a face of his own.'

~~~

What happens when a word becomes obsolete, archaic? The slow slippage to obscurity, the pile of half-remembered things and phrases heaped up like unwanted clothes. And whole languages, too, crack and split, break-up and fall by the wayside, inhabiting or taking shelter in a few lone survivors. And these 'last people' then become like the ancients, unique in their ability to name the world with a sense of awe and wonder.

Gestures, too, I guess. What seemed to inhere in the blood, all that was lovingly or unconsciously passed down from one generation to the other, that was a product of a particular place and time, a particular kind of work and language, is that too destined to now fade from memory and be repeated artificially, if at all? Sraffa!

Landlady: "What do you do?"

I'm a preacher.

Landlady: "Which Church?"

The Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus.

Landlady [without batting an eyelid]: "Protestant?"

Yes.

Landlady: "Good, don't like no church with n'ggahs and foreigners."

You've got to laugh at the wackiness of religious "folks"-whether they're from American or closer to home. But what you liked about this film is not so much the craziness and funniness of the crackpots-though that is one of its appealing features- as the wide open spaces of the roads, the emptiness of the streets, the fading yellow light in the museum and the ordinary speech of unpretentious people; even the staircases and run-down rooms reminded you of a poem by Lowell. What was it again?

Not sure if I'll read the book, though. Let's see.

~~~

There was this line from Christopher Hill's engaging 'The World Turned Upside Down' which really was quite suggestive: the 'second turning inwards' (Hannah)...the 'religion of the heart'..was this connected to, in some way, the 'inwardness' of philosophical thought? Not: 'how can I live' but, rather, 'how can I know'?

Of course, the horrors of organized religion. But maybe there's something else: the lack of rituals, places of refuge, symbols, 'bridges' (Simone), the slow, patient understanding that relies on other people's endeavours, insights, scholarship; the tempering of one's views by contact with traditions and communal understandings, with worldly, practical matters...does the absence of all that lead to another kind of fanaticism? Not the world turned upside down but, instead, inside-out?

Each man is a prophet, a saint, is in direct contact with revelation, the end of times; he stands alone, aloof, heartbroken, against the world of sin. The existentialist hero. What is true, what is "real", is the spark within. And yet one has to know despair, suffering,one has to feel that God is infinitely removed from the affairs of men. The soul veers erratically from being nothing to being everything. The world itself is full of wide open spaces, empty streets...

(With thanks to bob...another one of his excellent recommendations).

Sketches...as if everything could be said in a condensed form, a light brush-stroke. No, not everything, but a brief view of some segment of reality, filtered through one's own memories, the way in which a few lines of a caricature can also instantly capture some vital characteristic of a person.

It's hard to talk of death; it's hard not to talk of death. There are signs of it everywhere. Friends and colleagues with stomach ulcers, cancer, heart attacks or, as one relative recently put it, 'shocks', since he was not willing to face the reality of what had hit him-and who can blame him? The more general high blood pressure, anxiety attacks, high cholesterol of others. There it is, working its way into us, cell by grey cell. You can't stop it. The slow march, the drummer and the fool indistinguishable. The awful thought that you might not be able to take care of loved ones (not that you've done a very good job so far!).

You sit on a green wooden bench with a friend at midnight, sipping hot milky tea-desi style-and all around you see the students, young, thoughtless, swarming like bees around one another, immersed in their own world where looks are everything and frivolous chatter is a sign of being at ease with oneself. Thin, bronzed arms, lustrous black hair and baggy jeans. The thin, excited faces that they themselves will barely remember ten years from now. The casualness of it all is something you notice (notice, not judge) from the corner of your eye. None of all that matters. One shuffles up to you: "Can I steal a light?"

Later, you return home and try and put all such thoughts to bed. Wise Blood. But it can't hold your attention.

…[t]hat not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.’

—-Joan Didion

Interesting discussion with __ today. Think he was steering it to how he broke up with his thirty-ish radical feminist, radical atheist (girl)friend. What space is there left for re-vision, for doubt when someone is a radical? I mean, the problem always has to be with the world, and not with yourself. The radical's sense of certainty, his remarkable self-assurance. Plus, they just seem to have far too much energy!

~~~
Bumped into a colleague the other day. Grown quite fond of him, actually, despite his horrid political/religious views. But whenever we meet we have the exact same discussion and the words 'industrial-military complex' always crop up. Dude, there isn't much left of an industry here! But I continue with the act. Can't be bothered to argue with anyone any more and I doubt I could say anything useful anyway, even if I wanted to. Academics gave up talking like ordinary human beings a long time ago.

~~~

Was just thinking: how good Mark Vernon's piece on friendship is and how odd it is that he comes across as so unfriendly in his comments on his blog. Part of that, I suspect, is that anyone writing about religion/evolution..etc., etc. is entering a highly charged discussion with crazies on both sides. But still, there's something a bit suspect, methinks, about someone who calls himself an 'English writer'. Wtf!

~~~

Found some old copies of the NYRB (going back to the mid-'80's). Sure the dougal has stolen them or something. And flicking through the 'Christmas Review' whilst I sip my piping hot tea, Rachmaninoff's beautiful Vespers on in the background -sorry Bob, if you're reading this I guess you'd be horrified by the idea that there can be something like 'background' music-you'd excuse me for thinking I was, for one exalted moment, back home.

~~~

___ had recommended Jesus's Son. Turned out to be really good. I liked it anyway.

We can't imagine the shape of our fate, that's for sure.

It doesn't matter what his problem is until he's fully understood it himself.

I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn't tolerate any other place.

He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years.

Through the neighbourhoods and past the platform, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes,a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.

But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar.

He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

It's got lots of lines like that. You think it's going to be all desolation and broken-ness but it isn't, strangely, and it's lit up by these warm moments of kindness and humanity.

~~~

Films ..er..downloaded and still to watch:

Fat City
The Last Picture Show,
Cutler's Way
(all recommended by John Harvey on his fascinating page, mellotone)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes,
Kaboom,
Wise Blood,
Badlands,
The Shock of the New,
The new Woody Allen film (though I really hate him)

Roxana recommended a film about someone walking into a painting but couldn't find it (sorry!). Infinite Journey, if anyone's interested.

I don't know why this seems the perfect version. To an untrained ear the Tashi and others sound just a touch too shrill. Or maybe there's something in the pacing that's different or maybe it's the video. Doesn't matter.

In any case, it reminds me of that haunting line from J. Lear's beautiful book, 'Radical Hope,' where Plenty Coups says: And then nothing happened.

~~~
Architecture and happiness, from Mark Vernon's interesting blog (his piece on friendship is excellent)...

A home, a house, a shell, a cave: this primal need for rest, for protection against the wildness beyond; our first sense of inwardness; the freedom of not appearing, of not being seen or known except by loved ones. The conservatism of the family...is it any different from the conservatism of the house? But each house also has its cellars and strange corners, its creaking stairs, its rooms with high windows, its view of all that extends beyond the house: trees, stars... The house is our first world, the ark, a bunker (Beckett's 'Endgame', when there's no more time), but also a reminder that nakedness is a terrible affliction. The house is inextricably linked with our memories and a sense of timelessness. The house: the place to which we return again and again, hoping to find a part of ourselves long forgotten.

Only the saints can truly be 'homeless'.

[Anyone who talks about tradition nowadays is asking for it. But if you're a old and grumpy-and Scruton comes across as that, a sort of thinking man's Prince Charles-then you probably deserve it. Anyone who uses the word 'monstrosity' is a fake]. Still, his idea of 'settlement' is surely on the mark: happiness is not a fleeting sensation but something that endures.

"A house, wherever it may be, is an enduring thing, and it bears perpetual witness to the slow pace of civilisations, of cultures bent on preserving, maintaining, and repeating...

It was as if the houses were a response to the external world and like the cloister, the fortified castle, the walled town, the walled garden acted as a protection against the difficulties of material life."
---from Braudel.

This song came via jacky b ("A Dark Glass"). Ta!

I find a kind of hope here, in this
homelessness, in this place
where no-one knows me-
where I'll be gone, like some
over-wintering bird,
before they even notice.

Healed by distance
and landscape opening
under broken sun, I like this
mirror-less, flawless world
with no people in it.
[You, and you, and you]

Unmissed, I can see myself again.
[and] the grey is beginning to green.

---R. Robertson.

'Love's Work' by G. Rose is hard going, something of a strain to be honest, as if the 'ideas' or the mind was getting in the way. Why do you expect something beautiful or meaningful? As if that could transform death.

What's real? Anna Calvi and PJ, of course. Not sure about Lana del Rey yet. A voice always reminds you of someone else's voice. Obtuse, I know. Hard to know what the right angle is though. But today I caught a glimpse of a young woman's tawny hair and blue denim shirt and could have sworn it was...

Only someone who sees himself or herself truly can see 'the other', 'the object' as not really the 'other', not a 'repertoire of images' or an 'object'. Then, and perhaps only then, can you see a unique face and original gestures, traces of which are caught in other people's features and character, repeated from time out of mind, from time to time.