Black Sun

I feel at ease and sad; there's a radiance in my sighs,
My sighs are all of you.
---Pushkin.

We die from a lack of imagination.
---Isak D. 

Thankfully, I've seen through academia and its monstrous pretension: commitment to the Truth. What utter poppycock! Like the religious fanatic who would see his own house burn for the sake of religion or the patriot who is with his country, right or wrong. The pagans and polytheists had no such zeal...the world is not with us enough, said the poet.

So, today, let us remember the bridges and all the things that bind us and that we've cared for. And if we must forget, let us float in our imagination gently over the earth. The one thing necessary: to be true to our words, which is to say: there isn't one thing... only things like home and childhood, sighs and rain and love and chains, the things we can't untie.

 

In the train of my thoughts, I am aware of the parentheses, the italics, the paragraphs, the need for a footnote here, an idea out of the bibliography there. In the plans I have for this next semester, some periods are blocked out, others underlined. On my memory's note pad with the agenda for lunch with...stand, right after the title of a new journal...When I tell you my thoughts, it's as if I were reading them off from inside me. To an alarming degree, the structure of the page is the outline of my thoughts, plans and memories...Even in the liveliest and most intimate conversations, I am reminded of books next to the faces of people.
---Ivan Illich.

The end of the year, a time to reflect on all you didn't do and didn't read and the people you didn't meet this year (and who said I couldn't do pessimism?).

As good as it gets, the best years of our life having slipped away? How presumptuous! No-one knows-he says, swapping his clown's hat for his Muslim one (or is it the other way around..I forget)-how things will turn out.

I think a part of you looks for rituals to offer you some sort of assurance in this shape-shifter's world; rituals like the same breakfast every Sunday, the same bookshop, or place on the Westbound central line train. You hope to see the same people at the shops/station-even though you never talk to them and have no inclination to do so. Just holding on to the most fleeting memory of continuity. Surround yourself with books..that always works since they, at least, never change and despite the curs-ed new technology will still be around for a while yet.

All these lists of 'best of...' are quite silly (though entertaining).

I have before me The Observer's 'Christmas Books' (1994). I think the Dougal stole this from the office. Somewhere, lost amidst the piles of scrap paper, misplaced documents, tattered files, and other miscellaneous rubbish, there lies a copy of another newspaper in which Berlin and other greats recommend their favourite books. At the time that seemed like an iconic selection..Braudel's Mediterranean and all. I guess that by now the rats have chewed their way through the reviews. The way of the world, I guess. Perhaps it's their insatiable hunger for ink or animal striving for warmth that has led to a kind of permanence-since that copy now remains 'iconic', not quite lost, but something to be searched for.

And of course, whilst everything has all but slipped away nothing is quite lost. Everything is up for grabs. Game on. I am here. And as long as I say 'I', albeit somewhat gingerly, the world still exists.

The world, according to little r, is made up of connecting lines; no single line is more important than the other; and it would be hard to say if the lines radiate outwards or point inwards. For the Sufis such distinctions do not count; what is of prime importance, however, is to remember the colours.

~~~

"Who thrives in a state of anarchy? The warlord, the impostor, the speculator, the jester if he is lucky enough to find a protector..but not the citizen."

One wonders if Dahrendorf will be proved right after all: the growth of right-wing parties/sentiments in Europe, for example; the way people view Singapore/ Dubai/Qatar as the future; and the growth of fundamentalism as a response to the loss of security, "family values", and the open-endedness of globalization?

 for ffff...

'How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.'
---Adam Smith.

Now, it seems like there's a fairly old perspective that maintains we can reduce all motivations for human behaviour down to one, all-encompassing principle and that this principle is self-interest (or what Smith calls 'self-love' in TMS). So, two critiques follow: one, related to the narrowing down of the scope of our understanding of humanity; and, secondly, critiques of self-interest as the sole or dominating idea of modern culture.

A word of caution: modern economic theory doesn't actually have much to say on what our interests are or ought to be. In fact, as long as they are neatly ordered then the theory (axiomatic utility theory) is okay. It is only that economists typically add the assumption that agents have self-interested preferences. That was Edgeworth's 'first principle'.

Second word of caution: Even here it seems many of the political economists-Edgeworth himself, for example- never maintained, a la Gary Becker, that self-interest could explain all human behaviour. Exchange, trade and war. So, how and why anything is produced in the economy is not, according to them, something that could so easily be explained by individual self-interest (this is not surprising given the predominance of class perspectives in the old political economy tradition). Also, it was widely understood that we need institutions, trust, honesty (non-market factors) for market transactions to be sustained.

Why, historically speaking, did self-interest come to take up the position it did in our social imaginary? Hirschman suggests that self-interest was thought to offer a more orderly way of organizing society (as compared to one based on passions or a collective view of the common good. Understandably, perhaps, after the wars of religion the very notion of diversity and conflict had to be taken as a starting point for political theory). So, to borrow a line from Foucault, not very difficult to understand how the interest of the state could translate into the reason of the state. The passions were far too disorderly and unreliable; perhaps too extreme as well. Cold calculation has its advantages. For one, it allows one to see beyond the current moment and in a culture which has given up on the idea of 'cosmos' or teleology this may be crucial...

But what of sympathy, commitment, duty, kindness, compassion and empathy? could these all said to be mere veiled forms of self-interest? Does the self-interest theory become tautological and, relatedly, does it even count as a theory if there are no competing causal factors? Can it be refuted by evidence or is it an axiom? Does self-interest (as expressed in market transactions) lead to a reduction in these other values (are they "crowded out"?)

Just to take up one of these questions...

There is now growing evidence from the behavioural economists that individuals are actually not self-interested. This evidence comes in the form of games-such as the Ultimatum Game or the Public Goods Game. What is typically seen is that individuals do express a desire to co-operate or help another person even if it is not in their interest do so. So, for example, in the Ultimatum Game individuals do share some of the 'pie' with others even though, strictly speaking, in a one-off game (one which isn't repeated) it would make "sense" for them to take all of it for themselves if given the option.

Economists are increasingly aware of 'other motivations' or what S. Bowles calls "strong reciprocity". In the standard economics paradigm you only help someone if you expect them to help you in the future or if you gain some status benefits from doing so. Either way, it's in your self-interest to do so. And if it's not, then you won't help them and shouldn't. Simple. But under "strong reciprocity" you will still help someone even if you're never going to see that person in the future. In that sense it is "irrational" (if we couple rationality with self-interest). You might just be repaying kindness with kindness or you might be committed to helping someone in need even if it means you have to sacrifice your own interests. In short, the self-interest theory says something about what it is to be human and how we relate to other people.

Where does Smith fit into this? Well, he was obviously a pluralist and was quite vociferous about the damage done to our thinking by reducing sympathy to self-love.

"What's in it for me?"  

There's a terrible cynicism attached to the standard economic view of motivation. If it's in your interest to cheat/default, then you should. One can't but help feel that part of the problem is the starting definition of 'the individual': closed in on himself, autonomous,  always seeking to "maximize, invariably in conflict with other people and nature. I think Augustine would have called it a lonely kind of freedom...

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

One must not think like an accountant, though.

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

~~~

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

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

----Mottram.

~~~

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

The mythic connection with the Red Man...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia A. Parker:

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

Restoring 'America to its original roots and destiny'

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

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

~~~

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

~~~

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

The last days, the light murky, the old sun and its ancient light so very fragile. And of course, taking a step aside, you realize that it's only us who have distanced ourselves; the sun burns on, brilliantly constant, absolute almost, as near to a perfect circle that could actually exist...

Much of the spiky grass is frozen in its dream and there's fine drizzle of steel mist. Reading Yellow Birds by the gas fire since there's nothing else to do. You stand up to read by the window since there's been no electricity since morning and so the day can never get started.

What powers the heart have and what the mind. Of course, it is hard to have any sympathy..the politics keeps on getting in the way. But, gradually, that begins to wear off and it's always the same: universal sadness.

There are some nice lines in it; it sounds real-and that's all that counts...more or less. When he comes home, and that isn't real either. It's like we're all ghosts, all dead already.

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.

I like the plainspoken words, the unselfconscious short sentences (unlike Salter) that give it the right pace. Not some outreaching hand, groping for lyricism. I think a diary would have worked even better...cut out a lot of the artifice. But, no, not always...

People have always done this, I thought. They looked for a curved road around the plain truth of it: an undetermined future, no destiny, no veined hand reaching into our lives, just what happened and our watching it.  

~~~

Already your mind turns to Dear Life. Read one short story ('Runaway') and, yes, there's something here. Meanwhile, must lumber on with Great Jones, and perhaps even finish off Cheever's Journals. No pressure.

~~~

In the biting cold, close to 'Mian Mir' bridge, the books were literally thrown all over the wooden, rickety stalls, under the open skies. A sudden cold front had moved in one hour earlier, bringing with it clumps of dense fog. No-one around. A few hijabis. The religious looking for a kind of confirmation. A brash woman with lipstick all over her face, screeches: I'm allergic to books. A few kids warming their hands next to an open coal fire. The books, one of the most random you've come across. Lots of books on retirement; The Jews of Boston; some of the most obscure books one could imagine: Bok, capital tax, gardening, four copies of Bourdieu, books on gays, morality for Jewish Girls...and most of the hardbound books had a 1970's feel to them: brown covers, yellowing pages, probably never destined to see daylight again, just lumped from one cardboard box to the next like some great international traveler:  today Lahore, tomorrow Singapore...

Out of the blue you picked up Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. 1957 and all that. But also, quite remarkably, the book was from Leyton library!So close to home. How on earth did it make it here, to this godforsaken corner of the universe? I felt like I was meeting an old friend. More incredibly, the last date of issue was 2010. This was a book that had been issued five times and so was no dud. And the question therefore arises: how did it get from there to here in two years? One imagine there's a less dramatic descent...you start off on the South Bank in the second-hand market; after a few months someone picks you up and discards you...500-odd pages after all! It makes its way down to the local second-hand store and then it's on the international circuit, makes it to the D-list of books that are hoarded together under the category of 'weight'.

But how did it all begin? Some odd soul must have stolen the book, furtively looked around and slipped it into his bag when no-one was looking, loping out of the library with a cool urgency...maybe he even brushed past me or sat next to me on the bus.

So, here it is, and I now feel I'm under an oath to get it back home. More importantly, to gather myself, my things, take heart, and get myself back home...

'The wonder is that this disintegration of self leads not into a void but into an ecstatic fullness'
---G. O'Brien, on Kenji.

Maybe there's something real in music, life, that isn't there in words, fiction. Something about life in dull streets and forgotten towns, miles away from any place that is any place. The average person who when asked: "what's your story?" has only a few lines to speak, after a false start or two. The soul, held together by what? The need to escape, a lack of courage and imagination.

Off the beaten track, the roads not on any maps. Off-centre, ec-centric.You pass someone by on the streets, and it could be anyone. There's a kind of poetry there. A place that offers you one crack at something else, where older people stare out of cold windows in winter, full of regret. Under the fading sun the desert ain't no different from the city.

Some simple idea. Or like a small, single idea somewhere in his mind. Like murder. There were people who in mid-afternoon were filling out forms, even though the game was up, and others vacantly surfing the web, trying to find some deal or way out, determined to make something of their lives. It was those people he hated the most. A cheap 8-dollar dream like a whorehouse in bright morning sunlight. 

The shops on the main street were being boarded up, like a storm was approaching, and signs were going up, written in large block red letters: 'everything must go'. The Zen essence of capitalism. All that shit floating from the south seas making its way here, poisoning our kids.  Things were better when we didn't know no better. But we do. That was the sucker punch. We didn't see it coming; thought we'd cleared the ground of the fucking reds, only for their ghosts to haunt us in the dark rain.

Life insurance. I can't afford it.

I thought the distance between I & the world would be overcome in the closeness between man & woman. But there is only "man" and "woman" and "world". And what of "I"? What of it? A blue illumination that flickers, dangerously short of breath. If there is one word in the English language that must be preserved, remembered, underlined, then it is &.

Mid-morning, with nothing to do and no-one to speak to (for they are still asleep) I find myself./ Free.

A sounds like I when spoken.
---Thalia Field.

I am not I, when I am you & I am not I, when I am not you.

Orr, Sappho, the clear, unbroken line amongst the fragments...

[I
[I] am not
you & I
not when [..
not [you]
 

I don't have access to youtube so I'm posting this link instead here

(You have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch it or just find it on youtube if that's easier).

Not quite as good as his ' Century of the Self' but good stuff nevertheless. Also, guest appearances by Nash and Hayek. Revealing.

So, here's the dark story...

At some time point in time we were seduced by the idea that what we are, at some fundamental level, is no more than self-serving creatures. Altruism, sympathy, commitment, friendship and even love were really just veiled forms of self-interest. We are nothing but calculating machines, weighing up pleasures and the costs of attaining them..a lonely robot with a lonely kind of freedom (negative liberty: freedom from...).

This was held to be normal, nay, rational, even. You'd be a fool not to cheat, for example, if you could get away with it, if the benefits outweighed the costs, that is. There are variations on this theme, some stressing the "selfish gene", others how a system of interaction between self-interested individuals brings about order, stability, tangible freedoms, and ultimately progress. None of the old hierarchies and "prejudices". Wheel in science; wheel out ethics, which was only really a cloak that we can now discard in our more mature understanding of life.   

When did it begin? That's not the question.Obviously not with Nash (see Albert Hirschman). The real question, I guess, is why such a view would resonate with so many people and for so long that it is now firmly entrenched as one of the dominating ideas of our times. Why should it come to be seen as perfectly normal to think, for example, that if it's in a country's interest to commit acts of violence then that's okay?  Or that we can only trust someone if we can monitor them or, alternatively, if the law is a strong enough deterrent? Trust is something else...what the late Annette Baier called 'accepted vulnerability' (and what the Muslims would call 'tawakuul' or the Red Man might call 'radical hope').

~~~

After the tragedy at Newtown what can one say? Not a lot, obviously. There is evil in the world.

But Monbiot does point out something worth saying (though the timing is awful and insensitive)...why isn't Obama's "heart broken" when American drones -one has to assume unintentionally-kill so many innocent Pakistani children? What is it about human beings that we can only comprehend the suffering of "our own"?

Yesterday you watched CNN and cracked up. Some army dudes had come back from Afghanistan and Iraq -"where they were fighting for freedom"-and on their day off (how sweet!) had decided to visit Newtown and pay their condolences. One of them said, without even the barest hints of irony, it's quite upsetting coming back and seeing the same kind of thing you saw in Afghanistan. You have to laugh (or cry).  One day people are going to put two and two together. Why is America so addicted to violence?

Then there was this line from someone reported in the papers. The man was going to one of the local Churches to pray for the dead. He is reported to have said: I don't belong to this church, why, I'm not even Catholic..I'm a Muslim.

Ah, the soul of crow returns, southern black, the centre of things. As in a medieval story, or Romance, once you cross the bridge the world behind you collapses. Why, then, should I talk of this blue illumination, "I"? It is the bridge that lives for the world, and the world that lives for the bridge, depending how you look at it. A bit of Eastern wisdom for you. Sweet crow, why is your shadow on my heart?

'...
madly in love
with fragments of the bright words innocently spoken
by the people with beautiful cheeks,
who burn the red flowers of Oriental poppies...

Ah must I make up for myself
what I am in love with?
...'

---Kenji.

You, a thousand year old shadow of myself. From the north, where time is dark, a cold breeze over the pond brings glints of sunlight to the surface, ruffles a young girl's hair, brings tears to the corners of an old man's eyes. What some seek in religion you find in a particular face. It has nearly disappeared, like the past. Small, as Blake said; like a fleck of dust in an old man's eye, or a loose strand of hair, or the flickering of a single light on a dark pond. As long as the world exists, everything is a bridge to something else.

The seasons pass, and sadness makes you less lucid. There is an image of you somewhere, your thinner face, more full of wonder. It makes you blush to think about it. Rock, star, light, atom. No, that's not the one. There is an image of you somewhere. It makes you blush to think about it. Elemental, naked.

The old problems, from time out of mind; they don't change much, whether it's Carthage or Westchester or Upper East Side. The mystification, the utter senselessness of it all, wrapped up in or around by moments of precise comprehension. The tension, the conflictual drives that tear at a human being, and that set one person against another. The human condition: mystifying to the core, every detail shrouded in dumbfoundedness...a fork in the flow of events, that means life could go one way or, drastically, quite another. Nothing is given or known with assuredness.  This could be late antiquity; this could be 1950's Americana.

 Life isn't made any simpler by a life of abundance. Religion only adds to the complexities of the times. There must be a way out, or a way into a richer, more meaningful life. The predicament, the fundamentals of humanity is that men and women are always at a loss or always feel that there must be a truer life somewhere else, even if it's just around the corner; the promise of some imagined wholeness dimly recalled; there must be some pure glass in which we could see our faces, our lives, other people untainted by the darkness of our fears...

'When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger...'

'In the morning the air is cold and dark and as clear as glass.'

'The specious cheerfulness of the lost, their fetid compassion, their devotion to deep chords of laughter, to kindly faces in lighted rooms...'

'..and you recognize at once in the grayness of her face and the elegance of her voice that she has come to you from the abyss.'

'It is not that the light goes; a dimness falls from the sky over everything, obscuring the light.  The cold air makes the dog seem to bark into a barrel. Bright stars, house lights, rubbish fires.'

And here's a line which struck me as very ancient, very old-world in its turn of phrase and underlying sentiment...

'But I also see that we perform our passions in the large scene of what we have done and left undone in the past and that now and then the curve of feeling-hostility- seems to intersect the structure of my disposition...Reason cannot enjoin the carcass to be cheerful and lusty-and when my powers of desire are maimed, so are my powers of wisdom-but I can persist at least in my hopefulness-in my knowledge tat simple cure...will set the mind free.' 

A Superb Writer ™ 2½ # 999, written in light gold on a deep burgundy coloured lead pencil; also, a green and black striped one: 3M Scotch™ Professionals, which reminds you a bit of the indestructible yellow and black striped one from the old country.

Listening to music or looking at a painting is, perhaps, some kind of uninterrupted experience, where you passively await a moment to unfold, for an "experience" where disparate feelings are brought into focus, lucidity, even though one spoils it by seeking it. Perhaps your lack of training or skill means that memory plays less of a role here; when you read, on the other hand, there are always half-familiar thoughts, deep reminders of some vaguely comprehended truth.

A perfectly quiet and untroubled morning. Grilled croissant with cheese and steaming hot tea. The lights down, the grey light from outside filtering through the drawn shades; a kid two seats from you is asleep on the chair. Next to you, two hijabis sit down and natter away for a while. The dullness of the religious knows no end. Then a slightly older kid walks in, a florid pink shirt with wide 1970's collars, a purple corduroy  jacket and pointed boots; a well-trimmed stubble, droopy moustache and an impenetrable oval face...gel-backed hair..all gave the impression of a low-level criminal. Register the details, for what they're worth, which isn't much.

Outside it is unseasonably warm. God has given up on winter.

~~~

It's mainly Cheever's writerly style that convinces you to continue with his journals. The odd insight here and there, interspersed with the mind-numbing tedium of his anxieties and mania for noting down exactly how much he's drunk during the day. There's something suspicious about a person getting drunk on martinis. You can't wait till "the fifties" end and we put all that hypocrisy and fakeness to one side as we enter-hopefully-a more honest, less bogus and less guilt-ridden sixties.

~~~

Meanwhile, DeLillo's Great Jones has stalled. What at the beginning came across as fresh, "funky", has petered out into a lot of irritating prancing about and "stageiness". Seventy, eighty pages in and for the life of me I can't go on. A familiar story, of course. Forty pages into Yellow Birds. Lots of dust. And, of course, Exley's Fan's Notes stands as a kind of emblem for all failed attempts: three starts, and counting.

~~~

'the shelves of glass and china; the warmth of ownership and life, has gone off all these things; these are all ghostly things now.'

Little r asked me: "what is that?!"

Well, it's something called a typewriter. Not something that you really see nowadays but in the old days this is how some people used to write stuff. Before the computer, that is.

" Who is he?"

He's a writer called John Cheever.

"Is he the same Johnny from Barney or a different one?"

No, he's a different one.

"Why is he sad?"

Now, that's a tough question, little one...

Why is anyone sad? It's not clear at all. Perhaps there's a quotient of sadness and it gets parceled out the way other things do, by some Great Utilitarian Planner. Not the kind of overpowering sadness that has the redeeming quality of revealing something, an initiator of some sort of understanding of previously unknown things, a turning point in a life...but the dull and dim picture of a quiet life that is devoid of any great mystery or any sense of adventure. Who knows why the light suddenly falls away, why a face ten years ago beamed with the freshness of an inner brilliance and now, all of a sudden, is more sullen, less flexible, and in a way not a face at all but a grey mask...

'The parks on Sunday night. The light withdrawing from the sky and life on the walks darkening and intensifying.'

The despair of Sunday, with its unmatched stillness and aloofness. The world, which had been a veil over you, is removed. No-one can take too much reality. There is no line any more between the seasons, marking out subtle changes. Winter, you feel, is an illusion. You wait for the cold to break from the skies but it's all calm in heaven, nothing stirs. The dry spell is on us, the dust patiently accumulating on the windowsills, your hands as dry as paper. Elsewhere there is the ferocious melting of ice, continents sinking in dark waters, but here, in the heartlands, miles from sea, mountain, there are only fixed horizons and the slow death of the heart...

'I think I learned to listen to the rain in the lapses of a quarrel...It meant infinity. It fell on the quick and the dead and on the unborn. What a profound pleasure I took on hearing it fall.  How clearly I saw the complexity of the ground where it fell..

Shit London. Of course. But there's also an exhibition of pre-historic artefacts on at the British Museum and some work by M. Mori which looks interesting. Also, no doubt, there will be a retrospective of Oscar Niemeyer's work. The city, not unlike the university, attempts this amazing delicate balancing act, drawing on the past and pushing open the future. The weight of the world dissipated in a few fragmentary images, sideways glances, mumbled words.

On the central line you could put together all the snatches of conversation you overhear into a book... "I love you"..."It's totally fucked"...."And he said, yeah..."

On the northern line, you suspect, there would be more gruff, austere tales to tell. The district, you hazard to guess, would have the greatest variety, ranging from Punjabi to Bengali as you head west; then Somali comes to predominate. At Tower Hill there's Italian and Japanese from the tourists, and this holds until Victoria. Beyond that we're talking Arab country; only when you press on, south and west, do you hear some English words again, and this time its a degree or two posher than when you started..." And he said, of course..."..."We're totally fucked"..."I love you".

Words are said over and again. The 'when' and the 'where' change all the time. And who says what to who and under what circumstances, means it's never quite the same. The stuttering, the dream on its own, means nothing. It only makes sense within the larger scheme of things, the whole story of which only a small part passes you by. The dream within the dream is sometimes more acute, intense, than anything else...

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
---Wittgenstein.

I was just saying to little r the other day: you really ought to visit America; Americans love people who talk a lot. 

She's in a "but why?" phase where everything is a question (is this a girl thing?). "But why do Americans say 'tumatoes' and not too-ma-toes..tell them..."

In America you've got the grid, the chessboard...East 35th Street...6th avenue. If you know the co-ordinates, that's where we'll meet; 'X' marks the spot. No names (or not many, anyway); no funny historical figures whose greatness no-one can really remember anyway.

Too many words? Have you ever wondered whether each person just saying a word, in their own way (borrowing the rules and inflection from generations from time out of mind), somehow adds something to the world?

Today, the obituaries: Dave Brubeck (92), Oscar Niemeyer. (104) and J. Harvey (who you can read about on Bob's excellent blog here.







 

It is rare to come across someone who is both charming and fastidious. Perhaps that's the wrong word. But if 'charm' connects you to the world and other people then does a certain kind of austerity or "purity" isolate?

 Prompted by Bob's comments about whether marking books-even if in pencil-isn't really a kind of barbarism I feel compelled to reply (Gosh, you can see how far this blog/life has slipped if these are your compulsions nowadays!).

At eleven, with everyone else finally asleep I sat down with a bowl of Honey Bunches and cold milk (If you haven't, you haven't). Reading A.B.'s delightful uncommon reader. Also curled up in bed with me: Alice Munro (no, not like that, silly). Earlier in the day I'd picked up two of her collections (though not Dear Life). On the way back, after my Turkey sandwich on brown-for which I had to pay an extra 30 Rs just for it to be put on a plate..would have been better off eating it in the car like a loser or someone stalking his wife-and get caught in a terrible traffic jam. The electricity has gone and so it's a free-for-all. Which is saying a lot for a place that is chaotic on a daily, routine basis. And there at the traffic lights I notice there's no traffic warden; only a small boy wearing a red cape and a Santa Claus beard. I look closely and notice it's actually someone with breasts. Not that that matters. Just saying.

But yes, to my utter surprise, on page 67 who does AB start talking about? Yes, Alice Munro! Well, anyway, there's a wonderful sense of generosity in the book, the names of other writers slipped in with a nod of approval. Perhaps that's what the whole book is about: how reading creates other spaces, extends a hand to other people, grants other views a good hearing...and that means it has to go hand in hand with democracy (without the "D", thank you).

A faint pencil mark on a book. Now, there's a mark of civilisation for you. Not the heavily underlined passages, of course. There really is something quite paranoid about people who do that. But a gentle system of markers-dashes, underscores in the margin, square brackets, a rare cross and even rarer asterisk. There's always the temptation not to mark but, no, marking means pausing, catching one's breath, reflecting for a moment, sighing, connecting a thought to something else, remembering..all the distances that are required for an experience to be an experience..the groundwork for our thinking; more: the hand and eye, grey lead and black ink, the faint lines on a white wall like the first tentative strokes in the first cave paintings. Not to mark your own presence, but to gasp at the insight that is made available to you. !

And you always love to go over a book the swami has read and see what she has marked or noted. It's like a window into them.

There is no such thing as a work of art that is whole, that doesn't invite the individual to get into its angles. The eye, the hand selects, filters, relates, conflates. Memory of a book is not the book, but it is something of it. Your trusty lead pencil, a way of fishing out choice and tender phrases; to break up a pattern is to connect it with your own. A text is just a text without the human scale of things, just abstract notes, scribbles, a 'negative' which has to be held, and held up to the light. No book is sacred. To think otherwise would mean betraying your ideas of austerity, purity. When all is said and done you close the book and return to life. Get some sleep. And wake, thinking of French scrambled eggs, baked beans, sausages and hash browns. Which is why this post has to come to an abrupt end, dear reader!

Last week you wrote, perhaps unfairly, that you couldn't imagine a place worse than China. Well, what about East Europe? All you know about it is they've probably got bad plumbing and endless, freezing winters. Lots of anti-semitism and skinny women. Also, totally fucked up by the Commies.

'You can't see someone being shot'
---Herta Muller.

Maybe something's lost in translation but that does sound shite, doesn't it? You sometimes wonder if they write about anything else but Nazism/Communism/Interrogations/ Bad Plumbing...I brushed my teeth. A daily act of "resistance". Put kettle on stove (bit of a Yorkshire accent slipping in here). Stove not working. Stove not work. (Is there a hidden linguistic affinity between Yorkshiremen and Native Americans?).

Russia...now, there's a place to avoid! And the so-called 'Far East'. Jesus, is there anything more mind-numbingly boring than Singapore? One might as well go to Terminal 5. Everyone wants to be a business manager. They still read the Reader's Digest out there for Christ's sake! But it so well order...

Cambodia, Vietnam (if they're not one country, that is)? Nah, there's no avoiding eating slugs or the landmines. Can they even speak English?

An American kid to his mother outside the Leaning Tower of Of Pisa: "Is that another Chrch? I ain't going to no more Goddam chrches."

Or Pakistan, land of mystery and the original commando-survival package tour all rolled into one. All wel-come. Unless you are Jewish or a woman or practitioner of black magic. At customs you may be asked to deposit any narcotics or pornography you are carrying with you. Please pick up your receipt. We are hospitable nation but please follow cultural norms. Do not shake hands, smile in public or talk to animals in zoo.

This is land of Sufis. Don't come here with your polluting thoughts and Jimmy Savile perversions. We have history stretching 5,000 years, 10,000, ..even before human beings came down on earth. Look at this tree stump. Been in our family for 83 years.  Very good for artificial legs. 

India! Have I told you about what an utter waste of time that place is? People eating on the streets next to pigswill. And I don't just mention that coz I is Muslim. You have to pay 10 Rs just to be allowed to piss on a tree. That's capitalism for you.

Holland? Oh, my. Never seen such ugly looking prostitutes in my life. And that's a tourist attraction?! Nearly as bad as Tracey Emin and so-called modern art.Is there anything more nauseous in the whole world (except for one of those insipid women's reading groups and all that prattle about "love" and "loss"...and how you couldn't stop crying...)

'You don't put accountants in charge of music. When that happens, you just have shit-ass music that sells but doesn't have soul. Music is not just a fucking graph.'
--Cy. Lauper.

'And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you're beautiful,...'

---Ziggy.

Hope. Change. We can do it. Unless you're Palestinian. Get thee back to the ghetto. Pathetic.

~~~

A certain social fabric somehow exists.
---Bagehot.

Through all these years of mass murder, expulsions, evil, greediness, hunger, pettiness, hatred, human beings have somehow pulled through. Something humane and decent has survived. We still talk of us, still dream of the stars, and feel at ease with the late sun on our backs, imagining the world is okay, that it makes some kind of sense, the way it is, just right now.

What endures, what remains? Not the music, or even the old buildings (since one can overlook them, forget them). Character, a 'chance predominance'...your race, your face. It's hard to say for some, but the Palestinians are a people.  There, said it! Wasn't so hard after all. After all these years, you looked and you found Faith under the left nipple. It was there all the time. It was that simple, that obvious, like the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus that no-one talks to.

Was talking with R (no, not you, R) and he said: there's a student who gets right down to the core, the essence of what's being said and puts to one side all the trappings, the paraphernalia, the side-shows, the trailers and enticements. The icy truth under a cold heaven. And yet, and yet, how we wanted the warmth of ambiguity, the human unknowingness that resists explanation. Maybe if two bodies met, they'd be okay with all the darkness between them. 

Admit it, why don't you: you're attracted to crackpots.

Well, yes, at a theoretical level, I guess. Heaven knows why. But yeah, the small communities in California, say, that have gone out there in their radical solitude to escape the world of things, like the Syrian eccentrics in Peter Brown's Late Antiquity. Ec-centric, off-centre, out of the loop in an innocent kind of loopy way. The Bohemian world-weary hippies, drop-outs who think freedom shouldn't be tied to a flag. Someone who wants to fall and doesn't give a damn or who's got some one-time solution to the world's problems, has dreamt up some utopia  in a sweaty night vision and is willing to sell it for 64 cents. Transcendental meditation, Zen stillness, a Buddhist mantra penned by the man himself when he was in Oregon, the "inner you" meeting the "outer you" and other crazy shit that makes LSD look like liquorice.

"Every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" now thought he had a political message.
---George Orwell.

But also the Christian revivalist types, thumping on wooden desks, crying out to the wilderness about the redemption of all ye sinners, the number of devils hidden in a woman's licentious lips and lustful gaze, or how you will burn in hell until you're dry like a bone and all that type of stuff. It just has, I dunno, great comic potential. Anyway, I love those stories about hell-fire.

Closer to home, the fundos and crazies here are less entertaining (because more dangerous). But the all-American crazy,with Durer's eyes and the wild, erratic sentences, that kind just cracks me up.

Admit it, a kind of crazy type of woman is attracted to you. Someone who is really "deep" or is looking for that depth. Oh yes, the thing to be avoided at all costs is superficiality.  The other day someone wrote to me on facebook something like: "I've totally fallen for you..blah, blah..."

"What, in three days of knowing each other?"

"Yes"

" Well, all I can say is that you've got very poor taste"
(which is like the classic line from Groucho).

"I get the feeling that you're a very private man. Am I right? What's your sign?"

There's something deeply suspicious about people who think everything is "mysterious", not quite what it seems. Everything has to be a sign for something else, a world of perfect substitutability, a medievalist's fabulous scheme. "62," Freud said.

"I can tell a man's personality by a single word. Say one word."

"Xylophone"

Then you've got your sort of regular delusionals, the conspiracy-theorists or the people who believe they can see real world events in their dreams before they actually happen. If it ain't the joos it be dem dere negores. World domination by the losers cooked up by the dregs of the system. You wonder if that ain't but the effect of 19th century peasants coming to the city.

Someone once said somewhere: if you want to know something about a book, turn to page 99.

You always read on the blurbs: 'the first lines gripped me' or the first sentence was magical and drew me in.  Our fascination with origins, the opening shots, the line between the boring old world and the exciting first page, the second lives and fresh starts. The romance of crossing over. There it is: the intangible sense of newness: the novel.

Recently, it was the first line from The Big Music that was supposed to have this magical quality of hooking us to an image (and it is an image we want, after all, and not the beauty of the words); then it was the catchy opening from Canada. There must be something, after all, that generates and sustains interest and when you think about it wasn't it there all along in those first notes? One reason you never seem to able to finish Exley- despite numerous attempts-is that the first pages just seem mediocre and a far cry from the classic it's supposed to be. Of course, the real reason is the quality of the paper and the poor print. One reason you can never start M.D. Foot's Debts of Honour is that the quality is too good.

And then what about the last pages? Is there a book that ends so well that you forget how average the rest of it was? Is there something like what Kahneman calls a "peak effect"? The best last pages have to be from Stoner, though if pressed you wouldn't be able to say why. But when you want to slow things down, give up marking passages or phrases with your pencil, and simply let things sink, then you're in the zone. Leo the African and Khayyam were polar opposites; on with a good first third, the other with a good last third.

Maybe short stories cut through the beginnings and endings problem.

Are endings always good, do you always eagerly seek them and if so why?

'Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary-to end.'
---from The New Yorker.

Real life isn't like that. Get back to the mundane routines. Your life isn't like that.

The end to that Auster book was terrible, comical even. But Falconer! Now you're talking.

There is nothing, by the way, on page 99 of Great Jones Street so that theory is out the window.

~~~



  

Jamie Woon - Shoulda

You have to laugh, don't you. Apart from floating millions of tonnes of shit (read: commodities) around the world-which I guess is just part of the modern world for you- what gets on your wick is the capitalists pretending to be Commies. Or, in other words: them having their cake and eating it too.

I can't think of a single place I'd rather not go to. Maybe 'sock city' which produces 60% of the world's socks would be okay-ish for a day visit. But, nah. Maybe India, which just represents a slightly better version of the stuff here. Personally, all those miniatures make me feel like throwing up and I'd rather see a dancing bear than the Taj Mahal. What about the "mystical east". Yeah, right, if you can find your way through all that garbage, the slums, the cheap materialism, the jingoistic nationalism, and the stench from refuse and dead bodies that is. The "spiritual east" is a corner shop in Bombay. Some guy who hasn't cut his nails for 20 years ain't it, bro'. For heaven's sake, haven't they heard of personal hygiene? [The best line ever: Churchill on hearing that Gandhi was back in town: Oh no! Not that bloody fakir again!]Not so "spiritual" when it comes to atrocities in Kashmir, Gujarat, or the Punjab methinks. But let's not go there. Where's Sunny Leone when you need her? Wheel in Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra or some other fucking charlatan.

Is it me, or does the Dalai Lama smile too much? Reminds you of Peter Sellers in Being There. The saffron robes. Yes, of course. But I could just nab one from Qatar airways next time without all the hassle of the spiritual practices. Have I ever told you, Roxana, how much "religious" people piss me off? They're nearly as bad as the anti-religious.

Of course, the Paks. are just as bad. Not much of the "peace of Islam" when it comes to the rape and massacres in East Pakistan or the support of all sorts of crazies in Kashmir, Afghanistan, etc. But, no, let's talk about Sufism or 'the glories of the past', anything for Christ's sake but reality!

Why do you say, Monsieur, that for all appearances you are an atheist. Why don't you just come out and say: "I am an atheist".

French intellectual: Ah! Tres bien. It is because, 'ow you say, I do not say "I". I-to the extent that I exist- must posit another's existence before I can say "I" with any confidence...but, who is this I that posits or de-posits? and ere we face the paradox of the fissure in inter-subjective relations brought about by a mechanical play of the forces of globalization which may or may not be conducive to the "heightening" of attentiveness, so to speak, as the case may be.

Was it not this 'nomadic thought' that drove Descartes to an internal wilderness, to the edge of madness that was Reason approaching its limits, the dynamic instability of the subject encountering the 'face' of the unkown object that is not an object.

French intellectual: Non!

Would you like to elaborate on this profound statement that is neither "yes" or "no" but a sort of "yes" and "no" juxtaposed to modernity's ambivalence towards the questioning self?

French intellectual: I do not say "yes" and I do not say "no"; I do not say "yes" or "no"; and I do not say "yes, but no" nor do I say "no, but yes"; I do not say "yes & no". I do not say anything because to say anything I would say "I" and I do not say "I". As I said earlier: I-to the extent that I exist-must posit the other.

Let us move on. Do you have cornflakes with cold or hot milk?

French intellectual: you raise a fascinating point, for what is meant by the word "milk"? I asked-to the extent that I exist, of course-my wife, who very much exists, for some hot milk. In a beautiful act that affirmed her existential maturity and post-colonial, post-modern, post-punk, post-God and post-natal depression vital "discourse" with modernity she said: "we are out of milk"

Is that when you divorced your fifth wife?

Voila! Mais oui.

~~~

Coming soon: the German intellectual, ya. At one with nature and eternal life and other such nonsense. Nonsense on stilts, as old Jeremy once said.

Where I was from was a long time ago.

I don't know if it still exists; I suspect and half wish it doesn't.

Above 'hot spot' you picked up D. Johnson's Tree/Smoke book, some Capote and Joan Didion's Where I was From; the latter only out of nostalgia...

Under the bridge, the Thames unusually choppy, the early morning gulls very noisy. Those lovely folding wooden tables are being opened up and set out in lines. Books are hurriedly stacked on them in no apparent order-and it's this people really come for, the chance find, the sudden gleam in the eye when someone finds what they've been looking for for aeons or if they chance across a book they'd read in childhood and forgotten until that very moment. And all that parceling out of chance and randomness under the bridge a result of casual, early-morning settlements and unselfconscious arrangements by the booksellers. They keep lots of coins in solid green boxes, set themselves down for the day, light up a cigarette or warm their hands by rubbing them together.

There are few people around to witness this spectacle. Sunday light is invariably brilliant, true, spotless, almost eternal in its possibilities. Under the bridge sounds are muffled by the shadows and all the words are thick, squarish.

Always good to be there before anyone else; other people are hell. To your delight you read the opening pages of JD's book. One for later, perhaps. Except no matter how many times you return you never find it again. Perhaps that's the way with bridges, or maybe it's just London: nothing gets repeated. There's a chance, an opening, then it's irrevocably gone, sinking back into the shadows. Who would have thought an aimless Sunday morning walk would have afforded so many opportunities for useless speculations on the role of chance in our lives!

The books. do you..er..actually read them or do you just talk about them the way a starving man imagines a fabulous meal in a French restaurant? The books are now just signs, to what, God only knows; the words glint back into the sun, as unreal as California.

~~~

Today you see a person with a long rectangular beard, jet black, not totally out of control. There are probably one in ten million people with such beards in England, an old 18th century Russian patriarch's beard. Fiercely stupid but still not the fanatical beard that sprays out in all directions. The well-trimmed types are usually conservatives or semi-educated; beards without a mustache are, of course, the missionaries (tablighis) or the Saudi-influenced. Now and then you see the wispy, straggling beards of the cunning foxes. Then there are the Iranian-influenced types and even the Ahmadis once had their own distinctive style.
  

'The dark moon's non-existent seas'; the traces of blue shadow behind your radiant face, your sad eyes. The acrid smell of burning leaves, stinging the eyes, bringing forth a moment of awareness. November fires, unforgiving, lest we forget.

Foundation stone: that which separates the waters from civilisation, chaos from order. The seasonality, the regularity of the floods is a containment but has now broken free from time. Our law-lines, the boundaries we erect to assure ourselves of who we are. What would we do without our borders, our barbarians, the specific rituals of pacification, the pattern we throw over randomness like a nomadic kilm?

You must re-invent yourself, side-step the ongoing stream, change your clothes, look positive for once, for Christ's sake. You must lose yourself to find yourself. Get rid of that drowsy Oriental look on your face, she said. All those simple years spent near mountains, the generations of idleness, all that has mysteriously been passed down to you...

The days narrow, there is less light in the sky now. Earth grows slow, conserves its energy, keeps the dream of spring carefully tucked in its folds, like a child hides a toy, or like the way a priest keeps the sense of the goodness of the world close to his thoughts even in bad times. There are no more anchors in the world, said the poet. Things are going to slide. Time is out of joint and my bags aren't packed yet. No time to go back for three books. But you have kept a large brown dry leaf in a book and a chestnut in your coat pocket for safekeeping. Your picture books-Russian Icons and Kufic Calligraphy-have been lovingly stored, numbers have been committed to memory and your heart is at rest.

The mid-afternoon sun is weak, its pale peach light strangely linking one building to another, and for awhile it is as if each person's destiny is mysteriously related to the others under this light. Friends smoke and drink tea. We have fewer words now. There is a deep silence. Ash on our fingertips, the greyness spreading on our faces.How we got here nobody knows. No profound awareness, no deep insights for us who live day to day. Some look out blankly into the horizon. No answers there. Don't look at me, kid, I'm as clueless as you. We, the last remnants of the bourgeoisie, hold onto our possessions as if they were the world.

It is weird-and this may strike some of you as odd-but there is no talk of religion amongst us. If we do talk, it is of death or women or money and the lack of it. Like everyone else, I guess. Unless you're a woman, of course, in which case you don't talk about death. 

By now the light is fading from the windows, which grow darker by the minute. The crows near the mosque avoid the slanting light. We get up to go, nothing is resolved, nothing is made clearer. We imagine, perhaps not unwisely, that it was intrinsic values that were at the root of the matter.    

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
and neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my love and I.
---Elizabethan song.

The Dougal finally found my copy of 'Commons'. But first, perhaps, I should go back to Annette's lovely, lovely Tanner lectures on Trust.

Trust, an acceptance of our vulnerability, our dependency on others.

Rest in peace.  

~~~

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise

---Auden.

There are moments when you find the ability to slow things down in life, when the moment ceases to be a "moment", and you are distanced from it; it flows, calmly.

Of course, for most of the time your Jewishness dominates. I found a corner of the world that had my name on it; but now the wind blows through my house, as if it were the end of days.

I walked off the plane, without any baggage, straight through immigration at Heathrow. There wasn't a single person there, no lines, no people, nothing. Just a sleepy-headed official. Breezed through the corridors, sat on the train so lost in a reverie that the two hour journey flashed by; at Woodford everything was as you left it; down the hill, time running off your back..the Church, the old brick school, each passing by you as if in a dream. The Cross, brilliant white, like fine porcelain. You walk, unhurried, your steps light with a rare sense of direction. Around the corner, your heart in your mouth, your timing perfect; the great tree bronzing itself in the open sky, the first few chestnuts flung to the ground, like a try-out; the creaky black gate. Each sensation registering separately, and yet all were linked.

The swami, gingerly opening the door, with no idea of my return. The mid-morning ordinariness of the world exploding into reality. You walked into a dream, more real than the world.

"Would you like some tea?"

"I wouldn't say no"

There is a certain bookstore in Lahore, close to 'Jalal Sons' and not too far off from 'Punjab Tikka House'. Not a very remarkable shop by any standards. But it does have the one remarkable feature: one will always find a book that one desires (I'm tempted to say that Providence plays its hand here and that it's actually 'needs', not desires).

Walking into that shabby little shop, which always changes its name...'old book world' to 'old book city' and now just 'old books', you imagine that you're a kind of Mr. Benn. Sadly, they've reduced the number of books they sell by about 75%, filling the shelves with cheap plastic Chinese toys, kid's magazines, piles of discarded Cosmopolitan, and other useless stuff. The shopkeeper looks up at me from his seat and asks me: "What are you looking for?" The tone of his voice makes you think there's something fateful in his question. "I don't know...nothing in particular."

Of course by now my heart has sunk just a little bit. One of the best and worst features of capitalism (or more generally, of the world) is that it keeps on relentlessly changing. Really is quite disorienting. Well, at least you have the books the Dougal has sent to fall back on...some DeLillo, A. Baier's Commons of the Mind, and New Finnish Grammar. As you move further down into the shop, the lighting becoming poorer as you do so, the books become progressively older and stranger. If there was any order in the stacking it has now gone. Genre, dates, themes, authors, all those categories that we are so dependent upon to make sense of our world are thrown out of the door. Paperback gives way to hardback. You're rocked back in time slightly. You hear a faint alarm going off in the distance; at least you think it's the distance. Twice you take out your phone from your pocket to check someone isn't calling.

By now it's becoming increasingly difficult to read some of the titles, the gold lettering having been worn down by time and dust. Some books just have plain white covers and could be just about anything. It might be Fanny Hill; it might be Aquinas. Mystery is there, you don't have to reach out for it.  One part of your mind is aware that you have to leave soon, that your friends a street away are waiting for you. A few religious books now seem to be appearing. Red and gold. The technical stuff, the useful and worldly textbooks having long disappeared. We're now in different territory. Open country. Picture books and religion. Two minutes 'till class starts. So I'll end. I guess you can make out what I bought.

~~~

You think you'll open a book at a random page and find the line you're looking for. The first one that leaps out at you is:

"I realized that what I was doing was all unnecessary work."
---Morimoto Roshi.

Modern man lives only on the earth and imagines no other world, except this one amplified in colour and intensity. We have become like angels, our only respite a day off. Each song is known by its first note, and each book has been made into a film. Go up to space, 100,000 feet, on hundred and twenty, lose count, the measure of night and day, only to realize how small you are. Or sink to the bottom of the vast Atlantic to note how a dark, blind fish hasn't changed its form or pathways for five million years. There are no more secrets and no more milestones; we'd blacken our faces for second spaces if we knew what we were talking about...

In a dream you see Ubo, in his 1970's navy blue three piece suit, his legs folded like an aristocrat, his 'tash thick and blooming...there he is, explaining something or the other to everyone at some grand annual family dinner. No one understands. Only when he tells it as a series of jokes is there any comprehension and by then everyone has realized it doesn't matter. You wake up, as always, with a glow of semi-understanding. Half your life is spent in this state: thinking you almost know what it's about...

If we knew what we were sick of we wouldn't be so unwell. God is 'dead' (please note the inverted commas, God) and Man isn't feeling too well either. Here it is, life thickening all around you, the dust settling on the high branches and the roots alike, in a great sweep of democratic vigour.

This lack of routine has aged you. The shadow work going on until one day you'll be caught unaware. Little r isn't a baby any more. "And how did you come to that conclusion?" I ask. "A fish living at the bottom of the sea doesn't know if he's old or young."

"Because I can draw a circle," she says.

Except the circle she draws is broken, open, the ends never actually meeting. There is something quite perfect about it.

'One day we'll say 'The sun ruled then'
Don't you remember how it shone on the twigs,
on the old as well as the wide-eyed young?
It knew how to make all things vivid
the second it alighted on them.
It would run like the racehorse.
How can we forget the time we had on earth?
 ....
We'd pick daffodils, collect pebbles, shells-
when we couldn't catch the smoke.
Now smoke is all we hold in our hands.

---Jules Supervielle.