Black Sun: April 2015

Thursday, April 30, 2015

old style thinking

Downtime, but until the world spins this way here's some old style, mesmerizing, old-time songlines:

original

~~

Lift off:

Rorruwuy from The Mulka Project on Vimeo.

The problem with economic theory is that its founding assumptions or axioms, its methodology, is rooted in developments in intellectual history stretching back to the last quarter of the 19th century, and only modified in the 1930s (Lionel Robbins)-that too in the wrong direction.

The core ideas were narrow and unrealistic then (in the sense that they may not have reflected or thrown much light on the underlying social realities) but they come across as plainly anachronistic now.

For example, scarcity may have made sense in the old days-though that too is highly doubtful since the subsistence ethic results in scarcity being thought of as an event, not as a principle on which to order or explain our decisions/behaviour. But how can we today, in the face of so much affluence, still maintain that there's scarcity (unless we hold that there's a scarcity of meaning or spirituality).

To square the circle-and this always happens when you cling on to a way of thinking that doesn't take into account reality or that merely joins itself with the dominating power-we are forced into all sorts of intellectual somersaults. We must posit something like:

Life is the pursuit of happiness; or we have infinite desires and limited capacities to attain them (finite creatures, etc., etc.; and so we are always thrown back to the fundamental need to maximize or optimize (which in plain language is doing the best with the least)-and who could argue with that?

But the desire (note: not need)to always maximize is not just a mechanical approach to behaviour (where is the freedom in a science of human beings?); it is at the root of some of our most central problems.

Part of the problem arises when we try and equate preferences (desire-satisfaction) with goodness. There is no necessary logical or ethical relation between the two. Utility in economics, for example, is not a substantive notion. But part of the problem lies in they type of beings we are assumed to be: restless, always striving for more (and the associated idea here is that goodness cannot ever be attained but can always be improved upon..axiomatically more is preferred to less). There is no possibility, therefore of some situation being 'good enough' and no idea of determinate concept of human needs or human nature. Instead, what we have is the ridiculous idea that we are nothing but 'constantly moving happiness machines'.

In the end of the day all we have is a formal notion of freedom (Augustine would say an empty freedom). Even that is saying too much given the manipulation of our desires by the desire-merchants.

~~

The relation of thought to life cannot be grasped at its extremities. Neither "pure" abstract thought nor the blind will of faith will get you there. Which begs the question: get you where?

Life was simple and beautiful once; it still is beautiful in many ways, but denser, more opaque; and there's always the chance that it will suddenly change its face, so that poor Jack becomes a Joker. Really is a walk in the half-dark, your footsteps trying to trace some familiar path, your hands still pre-shaped to hold on to what is real.

Stillness: eke out what time you can; make nothing happen or allow it to. That, today, seems like a mighty skill. There is nothing to chase. A wiser man would know what to let go off, what to hold on to-and, crucially, when.

If the world will always be the world you can always tilt your head at a certain number of degrees, find your unique angle, as others have before you; or sleep or dream a little. Seems preferable to all this striving. Walser, again: the art of being small; step away from the mirror, and necessary illusions.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Genre

There is a deep need in the novelist, contrary to the conventions of their chosen form, to not present a complete picture of a life or an event, not dutifully serve up fleshed-out characters, not explain everything...

--Amit Chadhuri

Started Amit's latest book with some trepidation-since I don't usually read desi writers (couldn't read Bilal's book either, even though he's a dear friend). The whole notion of a genre makes you want to throw up. Chick-lit, post-colonial stuff, gay and lesbian, sci-fi (which is never, as Le Guin notes, real literature).

Part of the problem with this book was also, it has to be said, that it was too close to home (London in mid 80s, Warren Street...well, that was me, give or take one or two streets. The Indian restuarants...in my case it was Anwar's, a grotty takeaway that served kebab rolls for one pound fifty-and there was no arguing with that, no matter how rubbery the naans were, no matter that there was a question over the genuineness of the declaration that the meat was halal. And there was old Anwar, behind the counter or in the back room doing some calculations. The Indian man who used to serve me, gaunt, his hair plastered back with oil (not gel), the droopy eyes, the thin moustache..would always warn me in advance if the food was fresh or not with a simple nod (so that Anwar wouldn't know).

As it turned out, you went to Anwar's house (in Wembley) to see his daughter as a potential marriage prospect. All a bit of a haze now. But when the food was wheeled in (on the iconic trolley that is a part of this whole humiliating ritual) you couldn't help wonder if the food had come from the restaurant!

~~

What gets you about desi writers is that they'll prostitute themselves in order to be liked by white people; jump on to any bandwagon as long as there's money or recognition in the offing. So, it's either fundamentalism, women's rights, oppression, minority rights or some other bullshit because that makes a few middle- Englanders happy that there's, you know, liberlaism still alive and kicking back there in the jungle.

This might all sound like sour grapes. Why should you, after all, begrudge anyone their little spot in the limelight when all is said and done. But there is malice towards none.

Back to Amit. James Wood...can't go wrong there. But fifteen pages in and already something's grating on my nerves (yes, the gentleness and geniality is something you can warm to..but).

It's lines like this:

"The other side of that road [Euston road] was so still and dark (notwithstanding the sabre-like hissing of passing cars) that it might have been the sea out there for all he knew."

Now, that just doesn't ring true. The cars on Euston road do not "hiss". But that's not it. It's this: for all he knew. Seriously?! I mean, what the fuck!

Then there's the endorsement by your guru, Sen, and you have to wonder: Calcutta, Bengal? So much for 'public reason'. You just don't buy it..the whole 'industry' is full of back scratchers.

Then there's that aunty, Hilary Mantel with her tuppeny's worth of showmanship. She may be a great writer-though I take dougal's word for it that she's shite- but her whole appearance suggests to me a kind of frumpishness that turns you off (how superficial is that!). The whole "history-genre"..historical fiction..making people from the past look "sexy".

[A few pages of Breece as an antidote].

But, no, give it time. Let's see.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

When in France...

'But the regional education office hinted in a statement that wearing the skirt could have been part of a concerted “provocation.”

“When it comes to concerted protest actions by students, which follow other more visible incidents linked for instance to wearing the veil, the secular framework for education must be firmly reminded and guaranteed,” it said.'

---The Guardian.

A comment:

'So get yer kit off, fifteen-year-old schoolgirls! Marianne demands that you show some flesh in the name of laïcité! Never mind if you don't want to, just raise your skirts and think of Robespierre!'

The French, so, how you say, super-cool, hyper-chic, non?

~~

“Old soul?” said Ananda. “Yes, born into the world again and again and again. Most Indians and Pakistanis are ‘old souls.’ They’ve been born so many times that they’re tired, they’ve returned to reality so often they take it for granted. If you ask Shah, ‘I gave you ten pounds yesterday for some cigarettes—what happened to the change?,’ he’ll look astonished, and say, Arrey Nandy, I gave it back to you in the afternoon, because he thinks he did. He’s been around for a very, very long time. Small inaccuracies escape him, and minor discrepancies don’t matter. Similarly, if you ask an Indian on the street, ‘Bhai, which way to Camden Town?’ he’ll give you directions even if he’s never heard of Camden Town. Old soul. Tired from having come back repeatedly. No longer mindful of detail, just living out, yet again, the duties and obligations.”

---from James Wood (on Amit Chaudhuri), The New Yorker.

Monday, April 27, 2015

news from a strange star

Estefania: ‘I had my liposuction when I was 15, then breast implants at 18. I can’t even remember when I started to want to change my body; I have always had that desire. When I was very little I remember saying to my mum that one day I will have breast implants. It’s about time to have another liposuction. I would also like to have my bum done, and probably a face job.’

the last words

The last man to speak has nothing to say, bewildered amidst the maelstrom of free-floating images, surprised by the strangers by his side.

At times, in those last few months,
he would think of a word.

and he had to remember the tree, or the species of a frog..

the graves he swept and raked; the wedding songs.

while years of silence gathered...

the name of a bird in his mother tongue.

__ _ __ ___--- __

J. Burnside.

What is the word for loss, again? What ancient pathway comes to an abrupt end when memory fades? Where is fancy bred?

At times, towards the end, he would imagine the meals he had eaten, shared with those close to him; recall the young ones who had moved to the city in search of something he couldn't fathom; and sit patiently in the depthless afternoon shadows trying to stitch together the brief moments of his life. What pattern has my life taken, what final form does may face display?

There were points of gold in the morning stream; they coagulated and formed a black sun, taking on a life of their own; then in a flash the circle broke and disassembled, the shining points sinking back down like heavy stones.

With no fire in his mind he clasped his hands together in an act that was neither spontaneous nor deliberate; the rituals he carried in his body, though dimming with time, would make him recognizable as his father's son, always his father's son. It was a blessing that his father would not see him like this, with his last, stammering words, that only he would have understood.

~~

In our saner moments we conclude, not unreasonably, that by destroying other beings (human and non-human), by decimating our natural and social habitats, we will end up destroying ourselves-since everything is connected, related to something else (whether we know it or not). It is only a matter of time-and this thought still haunts us, even in our so-called post-religious milieu: karma: what goes around, comes around.

What kind of deep knowledge, understanding, will lead us to that realisation, though? Science may tell us the "facts" and economics through its narrow prism inform us of the "costs" and benefits" but neither the analytical nor the pragmatic mind has led to much hope of a change in direction. The possibility of a catastrophe is now not insignificantly small (see Weitzman). The whole thing is shrouded in uncertainty (what one IPCC report called a "cascade of uncertainty").

Some changes will occur-that much is for sure. But have we reached a 'tipping point' beyond which mitigation will be of little use? The system may be subject to threshold levels or non-linear dynamics-in which case we may not really have that good idea of what comes beyond that point. If the permafrost melts, releasing methane into
the atmosphere, then what?

Perhaps our love of continuity ("the mind intuits unity") prevents us from thinking of radical altered states of being (the most radical being, of course, the condition of not-being). But it is hubristic to think we can carry on like this forever, accumulating debts, living on borrowed time.

Think of an animal that has lived on this planet for 5 million years, and that now faces extinction.

'Everything perishes, except the Face of your Lord', all Muslims are told. These words may bring peace to those who can share that detached perspective. For others it might lead to despair or indifference, or a dive into hedonism. For others still, it might suggest that the world, a dream though it is, a fleck of ancient gold, a ring in a desert, is still a more beautiful and serious place for all that since it still harbours the possibility of life, the chance of love-as well as their termination.

'The song of joy and sorrow is always with us'
---Mir Dard.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

the long now

The cultural revolution they [the market and moral individualists] helped to inspire was a revolution against history, memory, and shared identity: tailor-made for the history-less new elites of money and celebrity.

--David Marquand.

The human need for identity, for some enduring structure or framework of background understanding against which we can trace the outlines of our own fleeting lives is never admitted to or, if so, then grudgingly seen in a negative light: autonomy demands the deliverance of the unencumbered self. 'Free from'..drum roll...the state, religion, the family, community, gender roles, professional identity. Make of that what you will.

One of the manifestations of narcissism is the abandonment of any concern with previous or future generations.

Of course, Marquand is not saying that it is only a cultural shift; no picture would be complete without taking into account technology and market economies that speed up our lives, making things and ways of being obsolete and therefore something to be readily discarded (as well as economic theory which is ahistorical). Add to that heady mixture the role of art and artists in producing "the shock of the new", and the trends in economic thought as it moved away from the central idea of needs and a determinate view of human nature (or the common good) and you get some idea of how difficult it will be to establish any form of resistance, let alone bring about a reversal of the dominance of the market in our lives.

And, of course, the dominant ideas of private property, the role of contract, only further the notion that what counts is "my space" and my little domain of choice and private/privative good.

And so we veer, unstably, from one extreme to the other: the self is either the centre of the world or it is nothing, a shadowy dream amidst a world that, too, is something that is destined to pass. And if that is true, then why bother? The utmost freedom or the indifference of someone who realizes they are trapped in a system, a matrix not of their making. Are we really at heart just modern-day gnostics?

~

Haven't read Oakley's book, or any of Wootton's work-but she is mentioned in Marquand and does seem like an utterly fascinating character. In particular, am keen to take a look at her Lament for Economics-a critique, I believe, of neo-classical economics.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Moments of Being

~~The real world has its limits~~

By chance (we whisper to ourselves, not believing). A photograph, kept safe, in a dark cupboard, among wires and cables and other things that carry messages. For all the passages of time there is a sentence, underlining each one, like a secret, a crow's folded wing. Because I grew up in the west these shadows are carried over...

Sit in the corner, looking out of high windows on a Saturday afternoon, looking at both sides of the world. Waiting for it to grow dark, and the old house leaning in the light, like a shipwreck, keeps a hold on us no matter what. Before that..what is the time before the beginning? In death we think of life, or was it..

Cut it out!

Death lines every moment of ordinary time.

Tell it slant.

That's the problem with distances, with always being too late on the stage. By then it's gone. We stumble across..a photograph, say, what? I must have known another language at one point in time. Was everything already there in the picture, on that bright afternoon? Was the face knowable right from the beginning? "See, I told you, I told you you'd fall," a voice says from deep within the kitchen. The paint on the white door is peeling but it is flung open for security, so an eye can be kept on us, and the shadows and voices are thick like a blanket, heavy with the sense of foreignness.

Here has to be laughter, you idiot.

How did it turn out then, what little mystery do we take with us? What place is this that you know so well and have forgotten? The heart, older now, sighs when it thinks of all the time that has been crossed out or lost, or of how an image grows darkly, without any more moments of being.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The University of Nowhere

'The real world has its limits; the imaginary one is infinite.'
--Rousseau.

The techies, accountants, engineers and other dullards get very excited when it comes to technology and its "application" to universities. On-line learning, massive on-line learning. Sandel has a thousand students in his philosophy class. That's awesome! Massive. Give it up for MC Sandel. Stanford can educate 165,000 kids at the switch of a button (er..except they're too busy fornicating or tripping to take advantage of this bright new world).

Of course, they are just the minor players in the game, the foot soldiers, as it were. As with so many other things nowadays: follow the money! (I'd mistakenly written follow, then money..which is also correct!)

Is it teachers, educationists, parents or students themselves who are pushing for these changes? Perhaps they are. But it's much more likely that it's "educational companies" (what are those, for Pete's sake!), Silicon Valley, corporations interested in 'Big Data', data mining. The wonderful online world of data surveillance and corporate greed! All sing together now, and with meaning: Je suis...

The brilliant Monty Python sketch from the Life of Brian: a mob gathers and says in unison: "we're all individuals". From the back a lone voice can be heard: "I'm not!". Classic.

Individualization as a way of control: 'subjectivization'. Choice, choice is what it's about, goddam you.

Why nowhere? Because attachments to a place, to an identity, to tradition eventually slow down the system, prevent the flow of goods/ideas/knowledge/capital. There's no place like home.

You have to let go of things and acquire others if you wanna grow (with a twist this sounds a bit like that charlatan, Deepak Chopra). It's called the 'natural propensity to truck and barter'. And what's natural has to be right, right?

Universities aren't the last bastion of resistance against capitalism. They've already been co-opted. The knowledge economy, the research grants, the "research" interests, the predominance of economic thinking in various disciplines, the managerial techniques of the administration, the go-getting, cost-benefit attitude of the students and parents. Universities now sell themselves like brands: think Harvard, LSE, NYU. Also, a journey to the deserts and the mystical east will show you that there's big money involved here. Even Saudi is getting in on the act. The global university, ..we aim to be a 'world-class' university, promote 'excellence', 'innovation' ...this is all a cut & paste job from some third-rate business journal from the 1970s.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

days of our lives

Piers are universally the saddest places on earth, preserving the old ways: music no-one listens to any more, childish entertainments, a particular type of laughter...all worn-out forms in a shape-shifting world.

Let us be grateful for what we had.

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast hollow, supported by no-one

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one,

It's face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased

The horse foams in the dust

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off the ground

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty on the way home...

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

---M, 1923

~

Bridges connect one place to another, so don't build a home on one. The world is a bridge, a floating bridge. Piers, on the other hand, are sad because they are beyond any question of being useful; at best they are places of mild entertainment and forgetfulness. A pier is not a space at all...

There are other 'spaces', like the threshold space, the dihliz; the places in-between, full of wonder, in which there is the possibility of movement, and insofar as a window is neither inward nor outward it, too, is such a space. Can any place take on these qualities? If I sit on the landing steps, for example, a bench in a park under some leafy shade? I am neither still nor am I on the go; neither wholly in the park like the others but nor am I totally alone with myself. Who knows who b is?

To walk out into the sea; to walk back into the sea, the ancient sway of the world holding it together. We have lived indoors for too long.

Can you at this moment recall the particular feeling at the time, now that's it's so entangled with memory, now that childhood is well and truly over? Think of S. Name it, keep your finger on it if you can. The transience of our lives needs re-telling. The words said in order..In the beginning...our desire for the perfect sentence, form open so that we return to it again, the same, yet different.

The same. The same
Then once, in a flash,
fresh ground...
black, grey, green and blue.

--Lowell.

Are we so different, then, from the cave dwellers who needed images to remind themselves of absences, loss, who imagined distances and the traversing of distances in the darkness? And who still could dream of finding a way back to who they were.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Buddha and the wheel of fortune

“His entire staff meditates. I know many others now on Wall Street that we teach, actually. It makes them much more productive, because they’re centered, they’re not distracted.”

Manifesting True Success.

Brendel’s fear is that meditation might make executives too mellow and compassionate; he described one client who asked for assurance that she could embrace Buddhist meditation and still fire people.

‘Does this make me Stronger, Better and More Efficient?’

A technique once meant to help monks grasp the unreality of the self became the inspiration for a new sort of self-help tool, and from there it was just a short leap to mindfulness becoming a business tool.

---from M. Goldberg, The New Yorker.

~

You couldn't make this up if you tried. Well, you could, actually. Real life snatches of conversation, clippings of newspaper articles, the gimmicky 'vision statements' that universities churn out (cut & paste from some third-rate business journal, one should say) etc. make for great comic material- and part of the beauty of it is that so many people take it so seriously!

The Buddha mind thinks.
No.
The Buddha mind says:
Never mind.

There are short sentences in Hoban's Turtle Diaries that also strike you as being Buddhist-like:

'The fountain in the square
isn't there.'

There's a kind of innocence running throughout the book that makes it charming and also, perhaps to some people at least, dated (if we pride ourselves on being historical beings then we have to put a date on everything-and that includes a sell-by date).

~

'This is what happens when you don’t understand or even acknowledge history. You end up in a situation where, when slavery is the elephant in the room in your relationship with African Americans, you think it’s OK to say that you killed one of them because he was trying to escape.

Britain is in a similar place with colonialism. We have streets named after slave owners. We profited from a vile crime and feel no shame. We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don’t understand.'

--Frankie Boyle, comedian.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

turtle diaries

It is estimated that you have three or four hours in a life to make sense of it.

'This too, my brief light, maybe it had flashed across the darkness long long ago.'

Very rarely , you think to yourself, can you say: 'I let my mind be where it was.' Can we accept: 'everything was what it was.'

He looked in the mirror at an angle, stopped in his tracks by the thought that at any moment it can stop; he would write of his day, or off his day. Already the presence of 'of' creates the necessary distance, even though the tone isn't quite right.

'Winter grey skies, winter early evenings, make London small. Not to be grasped by the mind, not to be held in the eye.' This is not a world, this is not a way to live. Perhaps. But the small place, the low light, the small flame was a kind of refuge after all, and if not lived 'to the full' then at least without questioning or recrimination, like a second childhood that comes to one with age. An accommodation to the distinct likelihood that there would be no revelatory moment, no finding, no perfect sense or clear pattern, just the few days strung together and held, yes, held against the blank spaces.

'It never seemed really dark until I came into the house.'

~~

Little r found a 'Y' stick on the ground yesterday. I told her that the aboriginals use it to detect if there's water in the desert. We moved along trying ourselves until she came to a discarded bottle of water with a mouthful of water still in it. Eureka!

She has the habit of keeping the things she likes safe in a cupboard, scampering towards that special place to store the little treasures she finds: a subbuteo player from the 80s, a feather, a coffee bean that I stole from the department machine, a rainbow-coloured elastic band, an old photograph of my aunt-who she couldn't remember meeting.

How we collect things, gather them to ourselves, hoping that time will not be time for a while whilst in our heart of hearts we know that it must all pass, like the grey clouds of London that you love. Under the grey clouds everyone is lost, which is why there are so many bridges!

What will you write of today? I read the first page of black beauty to little r. The horses's mother says to beauty: don't bite, even in play. Which, remarkably, is something that I always say to her. When I told her this she stormed off with her nose in the air, all uppity. Then she raised her hand-the brat-and said: "do you want me to get the belt?!". I nearly keeled over laughing but since that isn't my way, the keeling was expressed in a slight tilting of the head and the narrowing of my eyes. There are moments that make up a diary/a life-whether it is worth noting them or not is always questionable.

The green ocean of time, Bellow's Venetian green bottles...There is some freedom out there, you're sure of it, some mode of recovery, but it rests in being small, hidden, unbothered by the modern world or any other generalization.

Friday, April 17, 2015

meantime

so he drank his gin and accepted a dish

of sausage soup, free on Thursdays

with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance

of sorrow and pleasure.

---G. Benn

A short story, life: starts somewhere and stumbles across others in mid-flight, as it were, as it were. An old-world sensibility that has seen so much and that must, therefore, leave out so much in the descriptions: light-compulsions. To find one's voice again, the narrow words that are used in everyday speech.

At Vicky's late-night party you are too tired to speak and, instead, reserve your attention for the strawberry pie. At the hospital earlier: AK, after a heart-attack looks to be in good spirits but he looks at me, somewhat embarrassed at being in this position: "the body is a machine after all; it can fail and fold". A colleague tells me he was suffering from depression. Can that cause a heart attack, I ask.

We all think we can cheat it, laugh it off, give it the dodge, but it takes us by the scruff of the neck...Khayyam, you wise fool...

Old A after his third attack is as sprightly and as irritating as ever. He phones me excitedly to tell me that he's introducing Australian-type steaks at his restaurant. I'm not very reassured by the word "type" but secretly wonder if I'll have to pay for a meal if I go there.

There is no money left at the end of the month. There are two simple options: work harder and earn some more; or cut down on what is already a decidedly stark and austere lifestyle. Neither option seems feasible or particularly likely. As always you will probably let time do its work and lead you down some hole.

At mid-life-I wish you'd stop saying that, I hear the D say- you'd expected some sort of magnanimity to take root, some wide-eyed wisdom that had found settlement with the ways of the world, or at least a grim acceptance of the likelihood that its mechanisms cannot be altered. It's all very old hat and you imagined-foolhardily-that you'd have carved out some space for yourself by now. Instead, your words continue to falter and your mind doesn't stick to anything (strawberry pies excepted). Grace and daily life. The "daily special" the menu reads (Ikiru).

The Colonel tells me the secret to good health lies in a drink of warm water every night, fresh yoghurt in the morning and the ability not to hurt anyone's feelings. A strange juxtaposition but you don't knock it.

Mrs S. phones for the hundredth time, trying to convince me to buy life insurance from her. For the last fifteen years she has tried to persuade me. Once I locked myself in my office, knowing she was outside, and kept as still as a mouse for half an hour until she left, deflated and defeated. On the way to the hospital she's at it again..."Son, do you remember me.." she says breathlessly, making sure I can't reply. I force the words out of my throat in a last ditch attempt to come across as assertive" going to hospital. Friend. Heart-attack. Speak to you later". Comes across as slightly retarded, like the speech of a fake Red Indian. I should palm her off on to AK.

In the meantime there are books to be completed, escapes to be hatched. You won't be here, and you won't be yourself.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

The time of the book

The perception was that the essential quality of writing was its separation of mental material from mortal grey matter. Word and idea were disembodied and stabilized in order to travel through time, not to be infinitely multiplied in the present...

[t]he general and implacable human determination to fill endless space with dubious mental material when life is short and there are so many other things to be done.

---Tim Parks.

~

This picture which, no doubt, will also soon disappear reminded you of the old Foyles, teeming with books stacked up haphazardly, sometimes in large piles on the floor so that you had to be careful where you tread. The religion section in particular was always very chaotic and a lot of the titles were obscure-or at least they seemed to be. I suppose it was the time before religion was 'sexy'. I don't think there were any computers around and you doubt if there was a huge marketing and promotion machine behind the book. Each book just sat there quietly, a small dream, not "recommended"-except by word of mouth, the old fashioned way still surviving somehow.

It was exhausting looking for anything in those days. Now, of course, everyone knows what they want and thanks to the reviews and the prizes and the internet you'll never find something you weren't looking for.

You sometimes wonder about the time of the book. Not about whether the book is now outdated given the emergence of other ways to distract oneself, other information technologies-must the book be reduced to those categories?-given, indeed, people's shorter attention spans. But the time that is in a book, the time we lose in a book, time lost to life. How does time get condensed, how does it deepen and gravitate around a sentence, a startling turn of phrase? How are we opened up to other times, other perceptions (are these one and the same thing?) What kind of duration is there in a book and why does the experience of reading one, with all its artificiality, seem more real than your own life (and that is said by someone who is not, unlike anton, the dougal, a great reader)?

Or there was these wonderful lines from Illich:

'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 Professor Marzhan, two new translations of Winnie the Pooh into African languages stand, right after the title of a new journal, Symposion, dedicated to "con-bibiality." 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. My experience is biblionomic; I have become a biblionome.

Even in the liveliest and most intimate conversations, I am reminded of books next to the faces of people. I know where a certain book stands, I remember its size and type face exactly. I know I got an idea I'm discussing in a paragraph on a right-hand page, somewhere in the lower third. As with a colleague whose mustache I remember before I can hit on his name, so with the color of a book's binding before I can bring up its title.

Again and again, a page will serve to orient me. I continually turn to a page, and am turned on by a page. All this make me a bibliotrope.'

---Ivan Illich.

Black Sun