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!