Friday, January 11, 2013



slow it is
a slow business
to grow a few words
to say love
 ---Anselm Hollo (via Pierre, 'Nomadics')

~~~

There may be a way to (finally) end this blog. Hurrah! (I hear you say). So, so, expect a shutdown soon dear readers.

"So I’ve grown older. Was I the only one who wasn’t serious? Is it our times that are not serious?"

There's something unsettling about selling one's home; one has to reconcile oneself with the fact that nothing is permanent, that the good days are well and truly over, and that a home without people is just a house, an empty shell. Gosh, there's a ghostly presence at 110-A.

What has also emerged in these transactions is just how useless you are. A friend was saying....

Just the other day I was sitting at a restaurant when I saw, across the room, a middle-aged man talking with his wife and kids. I realized it was my old school friend, someone I hadn't seen for fifteen years. There was something about him, his face, the way he carried himself, his glasses, his clothes, that made him look, well, if not quite old then mature. Yes, that's the word. Someone who has lived seriously in a serious world; lived responsibly, making decisions, fulfilling obligations, seeing things from different angles, making compromises, not giving any great thought to things you can't understand, cutting out the channels for useless and idle speculation, letting time flow over you, allowing yourself to be immersed in the weight of the world.

And so, your point is?

Well, b, it's that all of those things have escaped me. Yes, I've grown old and my hair has in places turned grey, just like everyone else who is my age. But if anyone talked to me they'd soon see that I'm really just the same person I was fifteen years ago. It's like nothing has happened in all those years, or as if I've been sleepwalking through life (work, marriages, home...)

Men of retirement and speculation , who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity,  and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common  among men of the world.
---Adam Smith, TMS.
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Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Yellow Birds on a Pale Afternoon


You have to wonder: after all of these years of so-called civilisation, of religion and art and fire-side, bedside stories...after all these years of trying to blunt the edges: the universities, the life of learning, trade, sociability, coffee houses, conversation...you have to wonder...after all these attempts at softening the human heart, deepening its sympathies through poetry, love songs, the cultivation of friendship..the vast cathedrals of the imagination, the rituals of self-restraint..Law, family, science, reason...despite all that, still the shadow of the beast crosses our hearts...

But our course was certain, if unknown. It was going to be dark before we knew it...

It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. It was a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic...

..whose heart rests separately in Rome, unadorned in a small glass case, undecayed and whole but for its absent beat.

~~~

Nothing, today, sounds stranger to you than the words 'freedom fighters'.

What are we fighting for? To kill the mullah? To set him up? Or so that I can drive my SUV without having to worry about my kids' tuition fees? Or is all that a sham, hiding the uglier reality: I don't like your face, your tribe, your skin. Your women are decadent; they are not decadent enough. We believe in the 'I'. We're all god-damned individuals here, bud. I feel it, instinctively, like a black simplicity: you're one of my kind. Slide over here. Not enough freedom or too much freedom; which was it again, I forget? This ancient pact, this old feuding blood, iron in the soul. A reverence for life-at least for mine. You, you're a stuffed toy, a cartoon, a complete and utter fake. Even if you didn't speak with a forked tongue there'd be no match for my silent wonder.

~~~to understand the world, one's place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning...

There had to be a Fall; everything that happens is really but a fall, a subtraction, and unwinding. The unbroken low flame of our lives, subsisting in the ordinary routines around newspapers and bus timings, train timetables.

'one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever'...

the long unrecorded moments that made up my life, one after another, like a movie I never realized had been playing all along...

Come on b, cut the corners, get to the wet stone, which death do you talk about...

...remained looking out the window at the car as if it were one of God's unknowable mysteries.




Masters Of War by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark
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Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Exit, voice...


Should I Stay Or Go by Clash on Grooveshark

"His versatile, even exotic, early life endowed him with wide experience, a sense of history, a knowledge of other social sciences apart from economics, and fluency and extensive reading in six languages..."

Compare this to the one-dimensional robots churned out by the factory nowadays. Startling!

~~~

Much of my life has been spent moving from one place to another (what others might call, less charitably, trying to escape reality). There's a certain childishness involved in that, of course, though I'd ideally like to think it stems from something more profound, like my Jewish restlessness.

Voice, always voice. But after a while no-one likes to hear an old dog bark...by a remarkable co-incidence, as I was writing this a senior faculty member walked into my room and said: "the faculty-wide internet discussion forums have now become open again..you can write what you want. I just came in to tell you personally. We're expecting you to turn the screw now and then on the admin., even if it is just one of your humorous piss-takes."

Well, that's a red flag to a bull: for a little while I'll side with the admin. Someone who is always unpredictable ceases to be unpredictable (a bit of bastardized Bloch for you there). Mix it up a bit. Talking of which: interesting discussion about the benefits of having more than one wife...Er...

Of course, it's hugely expensive. You couldn't lend me ten pounds could you, Roxana, fff, dear C? 

~~~

After a while, exit always appears immensely alluring. Not that it will have any effect on anyone.  

 

 
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