Black Sun

Beads of water collect on the back of my hand; some reach out and join with others, before rolling off to the side; others, the more individualistic ones, dart off, unexpectedly, as if with a mind of their own. Deep veins, a bundle of raw nerves, the calmness of a posture. How poor your hands are at gathering, collecting...

There's a starkness to the opening page of 'A Death in the Family' that made you return to it three times before moving on to the second page. Bleakness, a desire to stick close to the facts, shorn of too much artifice, embellishment. How few times you've spoken with a clear voice...

Find a space, a time to yourself. Your mind, the mind, stilled; not by love, but perhaps by the image of it. If I had no more words, or maybe just one, I'd say your name            ,

  (etching, courtesy of Roxana) Things draw to a close; that's okay, you're not the first one. It's not okay...

You think you can draw a circle around your life and the lives of others, protecting them from vulnerability, change, illness, but it simply doesn't work like that. You haven't got the strength of character to live with the flux, displacement-or maybe that's just the cards you were dealt.

All those books, words, stored up against life/death. The escape, home a refuge, a raft in the stream of things so that you don't have to talk to anyone, engage with...what an awful word: engage! Time passes, you've nearly lost your bearings, places and memories accumulate in you, the blue shadow behind your mind's eye, time out of mind. This great desire to shed skin, walk away. A strain in modernity: the desire for lightness, superficiality, laughter, emptiness, not too much "meaning" or the 'wisdom of the east' type of nonsense; to divest oneself of names, traditions, definitions..to speak with an authentic voice, elemental gestures, without quotations, clichés, stock phrases; to be close to nature again, putting images and mirrors to one side, striking the right note...art transformed into life. 

There's something mysterious and beautiful about the flowers and plants that grown in the Underground, a dazzling darkness that seems ageless...

Life, full of ambiguities, uncertainties, stray reflections, random chances. It's been like that from the first day..it's only that you walk into the mystery right now.

The day starts of grey and sombre, the cloud cover thick and universal, the rain steady but light. But by late afternoon the sun flares, and time starts to be found again in this new, lyrical brightness. Between the tunnels there's an open stretch, light flooding down upon it, the lilacs gently swaying in the summer breeze, the sudden play of light and shade.

You walk past all the people distractedly going home, but you also see three members of some amateur music group (two lean and long haired men and a woman with strong, determined features in contrast to her soft eyes). You only hear one of the men near the Royal London Hospital say "Yeah" but it's said with such self-assuredness, such knowingness, that you could be forgiven for believing this man has proclaimed some great truth with the utmost naturalness and simplicity. Strange to think that as the day ends for some, so it begins for others.

Near the library, which you only saunter to to kill some time, there's the potent smell of fish. The Bengalis, with strong arms and tired hands pull the green and white tarpaulins down. How ancient this gesture! Sixty years ago you would have seen exactly the same co-ordination of mind, eye, and hand; would have seen the exact same thoughts of home flash across faces, the same looking out into empty space, the recognition of a hard day's work done...On the opposite side of the street, the pencil thin arms of a cross, gleaming amidst the lost light. Near the restaurant, the old brick houses, high windows, the clouds radiant, swimming across the sky..the East is dilapidated, run down, for sure, but for a moment this is like a scene from a Vermeer.

Today, Michael Foot's Debts of Honour comes in the post. Beautifully produced and a bargain at 64p.

'Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. The sober blank verse is widely spaced and...easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page.The whole book is as delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.'

This was in the news again (NYRB). In general terms the incidence violence may be decreasing but who cares about generalities?

Is there something about photographers and nostalgia, something about holding on to what cannot be held...time, itself, which is never really itself after all? Is it not the same with all of us? Or does this feeling become more intense at particular junctures in history-ones of rapid displacement or change?

Your hands grow dark with time, your smooth skin giving way to hair, blotches of sun shaped freckles. On the move again, never looking or finding, but stumbling. On your desk, right now, are sprawled many things, none of them very appealing-or if so, then only for a moment, not really a reverie one could get lost in. And still, you ask: my soul, why do you sigh within?

There's some great music and film making in this documentary.

70,000 (out of 240,000 applicants) were selected as volunteers for the Olympics. Individualism and the end of civil society in 'the west'? Nah, don't think so! After the Madrid bombs it is estimated that up to 20% of the population came out on the streets on one day, singing: "a people united will never be divided". 

So, here's the dope: countries in which the nation-state has had a poor run and/or those in which markets are weak are only apparently more individualistic. If truth be told-to take up an old point made by Gellner-those societies are prone to be more chaotic and more likely to be governed by autocrats (the old, "princely" form of power).

~~~

Lovely tributes to Freddie Mercury and to John Lennon last night.

On the corner of Denmark Street: speckled stone smashed, revealing root. The memory of the young woman at Foyles still fresh; her pink dress, too modern a cut for a bookshop, her vibrant stride and wavy hair, a pink blur. You turn your head down to word, text, gaze finding the words:

There are not always melons
There are always stories.

Well, yes, indeed. 

At St. Giles a solitary pink carnation wilting in the summer light, light that is still young. Happy hour is over and the wine glasses have been emptied to the dregs. The long grass, the late shadows, the mystical emptiness of the Church, the strugglers speaking in tongues; a fat black man that you saw many moons ago, who used to sit next to you at Borders, still half crazy, speaking to himself in a wispy voice,with a newspaper folded under his arms; you imagine the folds of his skin, the stench from trying to stay alive on the edge of things, keeping afloat.

Buddhas have replaced  garden gnomes in England.  You have to be out of it. The Taleban and smashed stones, crumbling Buddhas, the nihilism of the heart. If they had their way everything and everyone would be destroyed, so there would only be God. 

Little r has six stars on her hand, one for each word she knows. Words with three letters. "Not big ones," she says. So, no 'love'? "Yes, just small ones, but not God...words like 'God'". Little r, you're such an actress, and just a  little bit pretentious! "Have you seen your blog lately!" 

The grey of pavement, dark and dry. You think you'll gain some insight this close to stone, on Kingsway. The rituals you surround yourself with; don't look back and keep your heart empty. 

Hammershoi and Five Easy Pieces, the prelude. That bit where he comes home knowing it isn't home any more, but is the closest thing there'll ever be to home. He sees a shape, walks into the silence, the black and white photos holding up something to his face. A home, a house, the great protector against the fierceness of the hours, of the mind losing track. Stone house, built next to tree, each lives in its own world and time, each a boundary to the other.

~~~

anton wrote a beautiful line, which I've just remembered:

the price of being in the world is not being yourself.

Which is complete, in itself, like 40 pieces of silver in the world, or a coin resting on a shelf, but still only half true, for the price of being in the world is also being yourself. At the time of death, there is no time for metaphors.   

Who would listen to a music band that called itself by that name? Definite Hate. As opposed to, what? Vague Love? The connection between music and violence. The first time you saw it-or is this just a faulty memory-was when the President of Panama was being hounded. More recently, it appears that terrorist suspects are sometimes subjected to hours of heavy metal played extremely loudly. But is there something older, something that stretches back to our time as warring bands? Music as a way of stirring the senses, of helping us find some ancient pattern of unity, fraternity, brotherhood? The most laughable thing in these Olympics has been the sight of grown men and women crying when listening to their respective national anthems. Pathetic and funny at the same time.Is there something about music that can lead to the individual finding pleasure in some sort of collective dream? And the Proms-dear Celia will hate me for this-what is all that about?  

"These people haven't heard heavy metal. They can't take it."


Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles of Greek organizations. These hypermasculine s

Another horrific case of "honour killing" draws to a close. Easy (and wrong) to generalize from a few specific cases-not least because it means glossing over individual tragedies. The mind at a depressing blank when you consider how much human stupidity and viciousness there is. Not much good saying Bach, Rembrandt...Sometimes a moderate kind of utilitarianism, whereby the ordinary lives of  large numbers of people are made better, seems attractive. In an age which is obsessed by "inwardness", "states of mind" and "spirituality" you wonder if a dose of pragmatism isn't in order: Good states of mind require things to work (Keynes). You wonder if it isn't time, if it isn't always time, to pack one's library.

You don't quite trust anyone who isn't, at some time or another, sceptical of books/academia/ religion. Not the virulent kind of fanaticism of a Dawkins, mind ; but a gentler type of questioning, which is really bewilderment. Ho hum.

~~~

The colours of the heart. What would you know!