Black Sun: October 2015

Saturday, October 31, 2015

modes of silence

Don't judge a book by its cover but..

"It's beautiful how often Schubert writes about the sea, even though he never saw it."
--Alex Ross.

Driving through the old part of the town with the swami on a beautiful early winter morning. The light, old and new at once. So many years down the river..past the hostel were Ubo stayed more than 60 years ago, the old winding curves of the original roads still just discernible despite all the subsequent developments.

The qualified mind making cautious judgements on how desire is spent. How anything turns out is nobody's business. Mystery deepens each year and you wonder what remains. The high light from the east, slanting in through orthodox windows, falling gently at our feet, the human world remembered, the old gestures on the verge of disappearance, like November's fragmenting fires. The glory of this hour is that it summons others, is a witness to its own passing splendour.

We pass the old graveyard with grass and graves almost stumbling onto the main road. The swami says, " do we have time to stop for a prayer for my mother?". Then adds.." But I will never find the grave now." So it is..and we know what the weight of distances is, we know that there are so few rituals left in our hearts.

On the way back I take a diversion, find myself following ever narrower roads. Don't read too much into that! The houses here are dilapidated with crumbling verandahs, unkempt gardens, rusted iron gates, the paint peeling off the outer walls ( the inner,too, you suspect). And then, out of nowhere you find yourself facing a spectacular mansion, a brightly painted yellow house, like some reminder of a bygone age. The swami, surprised, says this was Sikandra's house..from seventy years ago.

These old Hindu houses in the heart of Lahore make your heart sink a little.

Time narrows its gaze. There is only one room left in my house.What do we possess but this brief, strange hour? My hands, darkened with time, have forgotten how to count.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Misc.

You read somewhere that the fires in Indonesia were equivalent-in carbon terms-to what Germany generates in a single year.

George Monbiot on the amazing interconnectedness of life..how the slow death of the whales leads to the death of so much sea life and how that, perhaps, makes our own lives even more precarious.

Hell hath no limits.

Today, stillness, with nothing to do. Your mind is made up. There are levels, you remember? What kind of knowing is possible without memory? You take a look around, the unoriginal paintings, the mirrors held in burnished silver frames, the lampshades at an angle to the universe, the low tables (the wood splitting from deep within) and wonder to yourself, as you always have: is this you, has it been, all the time?

You imagine it otherwise, some greatness of soul, inner strength inhering, unfazed by it all...not because you live in some backwaters, out of the main currents, but because there is an achieved simplicity, a decisive ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. Of course, to think in that way is pure hubris for what comes your way does not have your signature on it.

The somber heaviness of the early morning light which confers on everyone-if only momentarily-a type of gravity and seriousness that was previously lacking, delineates fundamental gestures through its slowness and is itself but a turning of the seasons, uncoupled from human agency.

Monday, October 26, 2015

The cult of youth

It will come as no surprise to the long-time sufferers on this blog to discover that I really am an old man. I have been old for ages, in fact. And that remains true despite my naivete, stunning impracticality and inability to consider what grown ups take seriously to be anything but comical. In other people the refusal to cower before authority would probably be taken to be a reflection of anarchist tendencies or a religious leaning; whereas for me it is, I suspect, a form of childishness. So, old as in: old-world, out of date, a relic from the past, etc., etc.

In this line of work you always stand still while everyone else gets younger. So, in effect you age at double the speed.

Makes you wonder what "value" (to use that horrible word) old people actually have. In previous times, culture was essentially conservative and backward-looking. The past was never truly past and everything was about the origin, not the periphery.

Also, because time passed more slowly and nothing really happened we were closer to the natural cycles of the earth. In fact, it would be fair to say that all of our thinking was circular. Birth-growth-death, the great cycles within which we would weave our story. At another level: poverty-labour-luxury-poverty. Perhaps there's something truly frightening about the inevitability of those closed worlds-except they weren't completely closed as long as they had a transcendental dimension (broken circles).

But if we live in linear time then time always escapes us or we always flee it. There's only a chance encounter with what is lost and there's no "redemption" of time. If the past is remembered then it as the "past," something that is staged for consumption and not something that stands as a model or that offers exemplars (I told you I was old!).

What counts is what can be counted. The experience of age, the accumulation of experiences, doesn't matter any more. But why is that? It's not just that there's a cult of youth and beauty; it's not just that the economy increasingly values productive skills and knowledge rather than craft or wisdom (the latter being reduced to some kind of woolly leftover from a bygone age). It's also that given the way technology develops, cities and places develop or are transformed, nothing stands still..nothing is allowed to stand still.

In that sense, even the idea of a linear narrative is broken since we only live in, are encouraged to only live in, the moment. There is no continuity and therefore no experience to speak of. We do not grow old but are stuck in a perpetual adolescence, clutching onto our toys in the belief that they will offer some semblance of order (memory?) against the momentariness and fragmentary nature of the modern world (religion, to state the obvious, is one such toy).

So, given this wild desire for the shock of the new, for novelty, we end up thoroughly bored, needing an ever more exotic and erotic 'fix' to keep us going. And we must keep going. The only thing that can be conjured up is a fake stability produced by fake images infinitely repeated. Repetition and ritual do not disappear from the modern world (Calasso).

{Poussin, at The Wallace Collection, one of London's little and relatively unknown gems}

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Are friends electric?

'However, when it comes to care, the process can be as important as the outcome, for many values that we hold dear – dignity, for example – are the properties of processes, not their outcomes...

Alas, once we let companies define what counts as “demand” and “need,” these two tend to get defined downwards. Would a desire for human companionship even be recognised as a need or merely written off as a quixotic, romantic quirk of the bygone era?..

And how do you even retire from an economy where financial value is produced simply by interacting with data-intensive technologies?'

-E. Morozov, The Guardian.

~

For a minute there, I thought I recognised you.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Through the windows

Thursday, October 22, 2015

An excellent sheep reflecting on its life

There's a grave danger of extending an argument or piece of analysis that holds reasonably well in one limited area of inquiry to other, wider, realms where it sounds nonsensical.

So, I've got nothing against Harvard in general. I'm sure it's a fine place but, to be honest, it does sound like a corporate machine spewing out a lot of trash and you can't but help wonder if the underlying superficiality of modern American culture is partly responsible for that (for superficiality one should read: the mechanisms of late capitalism that are generating so much stupidity and bullshit).

For confirmation of that no look further than the fact that Ben and Don are leading the race. Jeez...if you're a big supporter of democracy, of American democracy, now is a good time to do some excellent sheep reflecting.

This was from a course/programme (out of class?) at Harvard called Reflecting on Your Life (for freshman):

* Where am I headed and what is my ultimate personal dream?

* How might my college experience influence my dream?

* What do I value and will my time in college impact my values?

* What are my responsibilities, if any, to my community and to make the world a better place?

Where to begin? Where am I headed? Nowhere, I'm Kashmiri, fuck off! My "personal dream"? Well, now that you ask..Monica Bellucci...

Personal dream.

Once you get that, once you notice the recurrence of this magical word throughout, you see what this is really about: consumer satisfaction! I mean, it's as if Oprah Winfrey had invaded Harvard!

Values. Yes, what are my values? Wish I'd brought them with me. Here it's quite easy to detect the influence of corporate America (we don't want no scumbag loser values here. Personal effectiveness in nine easy steps, all for $5.50 or your money back, GUARANTEED!).

Universities around the world now specialize in this kind of jargon and management-speak. At our own all the rage is currently about making the students into "entrepreneurs," "innovators" and-I love this-"change agents".

What are my responsibility, if any...

Make the world a better place. That's so cute, Harvard, but wasn't that the question that was traditionally asked to Miss World? Can you save the planet and still make $300,000 a year? That's the question, that's the real question, folks.

It's all a game and Harvard produces "winners". You have to wonder, if a jackass like Bush can go to Yale what does that say about influence?

'But the most important problems are everywhere, at every level: at small regional colleges and large state universities, at prep schools and public high schools, at grade schools and community colleges, in Canada, Britain, Korea, Brazil. They are everywhere because neoliberalism is everywhere...

If college is seldom about thinking and learning anymore, that’s because very few people are interested in thinking and learning, students least of all...

What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. That kind of contact is becoming unusual...

Leadership, service, and creativity do not seek fundamental change (remember, fundamental change is out in neoliberalism); they seek technological or technocratic change within a static social framework, within a market framework.'

--W.D.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Killing time

Your face is the face of all the others
before you and after you and
your eyes [deceitful as a green..

A mirror has broken
between me and her,
look at me, think of you.

]now that I cannot read the letters I have to squint in mid-afternoon at the black words of your silent heart. You will not age much more over the next five years, you've already aged enough. It is a brilliant autumn morning and time is laughing, making a fool of us all. In the back of my mind a word I remember unspoken, an old word that can't be found anywhere and that no-one uses knowingly. Blank verse and the blank page, still full of ways, placed flat on the table asks: "where do I begin?" The Indian ink, mineral blue, bible-black, thinks it is better to be less than a single brushstroke, better to be full of distances than utter a word.

The moon could still be seen in the early morning sky, pale and blue, diminished and tired, but there, yes, for all that, still there. Count the coins in your hand even if they don't come to much, for no-one knows when "less" will become "more" or the other way around. Once in a blue moon the world becomes still and everything flows back..

But that ain't no way to say goodbye, he thought. The small disappearances like children playing in the shadows, heard even when not seen. If time is money, how much do I (o)we you?

She unfolded the small piece of paper in her hand- as if it was a butterfly- unloosened her hair and said: "There are no more mirrors between us".

{lines borrowed from Ingrid Jonker and Rumi!}

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Far from the madding crowd

The fanaticism of religious people never ceases to amaze you. A cow is holy and so that justifies someone being dragged from their home and beaten to death. Human life is not sacred, one has to remind oneself.

Of course, the love affair with India continues (partly because of its markets but partly because it has cultivated this image of spirituality and holy poverty-at least in the West). Swamis, gurus, pundits, spiritual healers and the whole mystical East dance into town on the back of a society that is exhausted after two world wars and the fears that it is morally and spiritually bankrupt (is this so very different from Late Antiquity?)

But there's something more than that and it's this: the Mystical East is attractive because it provides "inner" change and does away at once with all the messiness of the real world. One can go on one's monthly retreat, or continue to be an executive in a ruthlessly exploitative company and still practice "mindfulness", find personal salvation. No calls for radically altering the institutional and power structures of society since society is in some sense an illusion, the realm of maya (Thatcher (and Bentham before her): society is a fiction).

In that sense we have just another version of the Protestant "religion of the heart", Arendt's "second turning inwards". Everyone's a latter day saint, baby.

What surprises you is that no-one will ever talk about the caste system in India. It's as if it's taboo to even mention it. A vast system of exploitation and remarkably intense demarcations goes unnoticed and is barely commented upon because it doesn't sit well with the prevalent notion in the west of "inner Enlightenment".

No, let's not mention the estimated 80,000 people who have been killed in Kashmir and let's not talk about the acts of unspeakable cruelty toward the untouchables, Dalits, lower castes.

~

Symbolic acts of sharing:

How prevalent is envy in human history? And how does one escape being envied?

1. concealment (eat with your back to someone, don't show off)
2. denial
3. symbolic sharing
4. true sharing

There are cultural, symbolic and institutional forms of warding off the evil eye.

The Harvest Supper (this reminded of you Hardy and Far From the Madding Crowd):

"They sit at the same Table, converse Freely together, and spend the remaining Part of the Night in dancing, singing & without any Difference or Distinction".

This is temporary, of course, a way of establishing the inherent power relations by keeping them in ritual abeyance for a specific time period (somewhat similar to the point Eliade makes in the Myth of Eternal Return).

How else do you keep the "losers" from destroying you or at least harming you with their envy of your good fortune?

Offer them a token, perhaps?

A wooden spoon, a bridal bouquet for the bridesmaids or unmarried friends, a postcard ("wish you were here"), the Boxing Day present, a tip to a waiter...).

Or, the institutionalized forms of redistribution, the disbanding of excess (potlatch, the welfare state as away of preventing revolution).

Another institutionalized mechanism is to emphasize solidarity within one's own caste or class or club. In the eternal order everyone (especially women) know their place. There is little envy between unequals (or the sting is taken out of it) because the differences between the classes and castes are ordained, or entirely natural. The lines of demarcation are maintained by the idea of "pollution", the terrible act of crossing the boundaries (of good taste). But they're also maintained by institutionalized violence (think about how black people were segregated and considered to be not fully human by white people). What is required for the boundaries to be maintained are particular discourses and practices of power. Not too dissimilar to the idea of the settlers making a "holy journey" across the plains, through the wilderness.

Who can eat what and in whose presence then becomes a question of maintaining boundaries. I think that much is obvious. The real question is, for me: why is there this heightened sense of violation and vulnerability right now?

{Quotes from Foster: Envy}

Monday, October 19, 2015

dreamworld

You dream too much. It takes you all morning to clear your head, find the right words, think pragmatically. Much of your life has been spent dreaming and yet you couldn't tell. A dog yawning, stretching, shaking off the night's lingering presence, does a better job of it.

How many hours? If God hadn't invented windows we'd all be atheists by now.

Venice is the dream of winter; Venice is the perfume of the East deep into the forest. Turner, sitting at home, dreams of a white landscape drained of all the faint and weak colours just a moment before he paints it. Turner's anti-intellectual love of white. The blank spaces of our hearts. He speaks kindly by pluralizing...

Venice, 1819. The web of colour, refracted, reflected, filling out the space. From now on in the western mind the sensation of colour, the last note of music, is the door to perception. fine colour must reflect our sense of values..The state of ecstasy..of a fine colourist is something on the borderline between dream and reality.

A man in his last year of life works to find the perfect blue. This man from Murano, who is forbidden to leave the island, dreams of Venice for a second and finds a bridge. The steps I walk in are the only time I've got. Left my heart a long time ago.

He walks across a bridge and realizes he can't find it again, or it's there, floating above the mist, in another life that is not his.

"The perfect blue," she said, "when our heartbeats were one".

In common

We are not defined by what we have in common. There is no definition since Man is supposed to be, by definition, the being that has no definition. And "having" sounds like a throwback to the 19th century, as if we could possess something or there was something to possess. Instead, we must make do with the idea that we have in common is a radical insufficiency: our common needs, of body, soul and spirit, are things we all lack.

Even that view won't do since it veers to the unpalatable notion (unpalatable to the moderns, that is) that there is a determinate human nature-or at least one that persists over history (a sort of internal transcendence, to use Nussbaum's terminology). Instead, we are told that our common root is only our desire (a desire that often entails uprooting). Not any particular object of desire, for sure, but the very act of desiring, choosing, wanting. And, remarkably, desire is blind. We may rationally plan or strategize to work out how best to satisfy the desire but the desire itself is just there, exogenous to the whole system, merely 'given'. But desire is blind in another way: we may simply not know what we want. And what we think we want may turn out in the fullness of time not to be what we either really wanted or needed.

What we have in common, then, is this blind, abstract desire (desire itself). If this is the fundamental picture of human beings then what, possibly, could bind us, what prospect for solidarity, community, politics? Is a politics of desire self-contradictory?

Another feature of desire (or how it's been constructed by the dominant discourses) is that it is meant to be boundless, infinite. It's not that we just lack something but that we will always lack something. Worse, we will often mistake a particular 'object' (thing, person, religion) for the infinite. Insufficiency must be radical, ineradicable (at least in this life..we see though a glass darkly). In our finitude, or so the story goes, we grasp for something that is beyond us. The whole of human history, or so Dudley Young tells us, starts with the human hand reaching out.

Building on that "natural" picture of human beings it could be said that scarcity, as a modern construct of economic theory and actual market economies, is just an extension or prolongation of those inherent tendencies: non-satiation and disappointment are rooted in economics ("constrained optimization" is a technique that embodies that fundamental idea).

And all the problems are supposed to stem from that scarcity (mimetic rivalry, greed and competitiveness leading to violence).

But there's something not quite right about the whole story. Why must we start out with this isolated, self-interested egotistical creature? And even if we do start in that way, why do think that other people only limit our goals instead of sometimes helping us further them? And why are desires unending? Don't we sometimes know, instinctively feel, that enough is enough? Don't we all eventually come to live within our limits, understand that at some point or the other we have to be grateful for what is given?

Auden, you recall from somewhere, once said: Catholicism is the possession of truth; Protestantism is the search for it.

In late capitalism we are forced to believe that the search, the journey-as the fake mysticism would have it-is everything. All we are, in the final analysis, is 'constantly moving happiness machines'. Fine, but I don't buy it for a second.

The periphery becomes the centre

'What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases protofascist, figures.'
--David Shulman, NYRB.

Peter Brown, writing of the conflict between Rome and the various tribes on the frontier, mentions how the centre was drawn to the periphery and how as a result of the prolonged conflict it was influenced by the barbarians.

Back in the land of the pure, years of conflict with the tribals has, for complex reasons, led to a growth of fanaticism at the 'centre'.

What happens when wild, peripheral and extremist voices and outlooks become mainstream? When they become the only sign of vitality in a world that has lost a coherent vision of the good life?

This isn't just about the growth of the extreme right in America (the fact that Trump and Carson and hockey mom could make it so far does say something, I think, about the levels of stupidity and ignorance in the world of American politics). And, of course, we have those charming people in the BJP as well as the homegrown radicals and bigots closer to home. But what of the settler and the settler mentality, the xenophobic and deranged thinking of the self-styled righteous?

And why are so many people apparently drawn to that extremism? Is it a reaction to the predictable and rationally organized 'flatlands' of modern life, a throwback to a counter-Enlightenment view of the heroic, spontaneous and authentic individual? Or the loss of a sense of community?

"The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois"
--S. Sontag.

Is it fostered by a belief in purity, the untainted man standing up to a corrupt world, a fallen world gone to the dogs now that it has lost its faith?

I don't know what it is, but sobriety in a world of excess seems like an antiquated virtue. The New Jerusalem ain't looking too dissimilar to the old Jerusalem.

~

So, the Tories look to Saudi as a top priority in terms of contracts ("for defence and justice" the report says, without a semblance of irony). China praises Britain for its "vision" by deciding to be her "friend".

Nothing new there. But I wonder if anyone will ever stop and ask the bleedin' obvious: aren't the Gulf Arabs the ones who have been exporting all this fanaticism to every corner of the world? In what sense are they are our (?) "allies"?

Friday, October 16, 2015

Beyond the dark mountains

Was thinking about how over the last years so many religious shrines and places of worship have been attacked, destroyed or torched. Of course, the murder of so many people as a result of this savagery is the really troubling thing, but, still, I don't think the two are completely orthogonal to one another.

The destruction of the natural habitat and the attacks on holy places cannot, ultimately, be thought of in isolation from the caging and slaughter of indigenous people, the horrific violence generated by a society in awe of technology, and the unleashing of our baser impulses. To say that 'Man' is by nature fundamentally or exclusively self-interested, a "knave," that life is "nasty, short and brutish," that truth is "lyingly added" says what, precisely, about the picture we have of ourselves?

What image of Man & Woman remains?

This was from Tom, over at Tomclarkblogspot.com:

GIDEON LEVY: Unfortunately, I must say that John Kerry’s declaration is rather hypocritic[al]. The Americans could have prevented long time ago; the Americans know exactly how to prevent it. If they really wanted to put an end to the occupation, the Israeli occupation would have come to its end long time ago. This policy of only serving carrots to Israel, of flattering to Israel again and again, is now decades long and never worked, never, ever worked. And the Americans never really tried the alternative path of putting pressure on Israel in order to bring Israel back to the international law, back to legal and order, back to morality.

And now John Kerry is saying that this can be prevented and should be prevented? Where were you in the last 67 years, in the last 48 years, when Israel is so much depending on the United States like never before, and you just gave Israel a carte blanche to go wild in Gaza, in the West Bank, again and again, build settlements, go for wars, and never tried to push Israel and to put an end to all this? So, really, with all the respect to John Kerry’s good intentions, this is not the way to deal with Israel after all those years.

~

The Return has some lovely images, the hauntingly blue mournful light of the north hinting at disappearances and final loss but, as a film, it doesn't work.

~

A lovely reading of a short story by Grace Paley over at the New Yorker: My father addresses me on the facts of old age.

What can one say? With time you realize that no-one is that wise, that we only have a few stories after all, none particularly joined up. Some supreme artist, no doubt, could hold her life together, gather it up in one, hand and heart you know. The words we don't say is just the way it is.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

"Try to take seriously the alternatives to your own viewpoint."
--Fergus Kerr

"We are all human beings, we are all equal."
---Uri Rezken

Uri Rezken is the young man, the young Jewish man, stabbed by other Jewish men in what is rapidly descending into something that is very nasty.

It is important to keep one's thoughts centred on his simple but eloquent words. At the same time, it is important to recognize that hatred inevitably leads to this kind of barbarism. David Shulman has written some interesting articles on the slide into anarchy and chaos- and you have to say that that is fed, ultimately, by a colonial and fanatical mindset, by years of not considering other people to be human beings, or if human then not equal.

The opening gambit from Anscombe:

"It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy."

I find it very difficult reading and comprehending philosophy, but I am drawn-for reasons that I cannot fathom-to female thinkers: Arendt, Annette Baier, Iris M.

Why is it important-is it?-to find the source of what one loves, to draw the threads together? There is something erroneous about a mind that questions too much, that thinks it can make sense of everything. Religious people in particular, you think, suffer from this arrogance. Or, more accurately, a particular perversion of the religious attitude.

And though you've only started Macintyre's book on Edith Stein she does look like a fascinating thinker as well. Still to read Philipa Foot, too.

~

I wonder what anyone today would make of Aquinas and his apparent inter-religious dialogue with Muslims and Jews?

In an age that is given to emphasizing meaningless distinctions and at the same time proposing a false unity (based on bodily appetites or an abstract, formal notion of freedom) it is worthwhile, always worthwhile, to take a step back and think about the notion of tawheed, which was explained to me to mean: unity-in-diversity.

Bob had pointed me to this a while back:

'His major devotional interests converged in what he called "constantia" where "all notes in their perfect distinctness, are just blended in one"..Not only in religion and religious philosophy but in art, creative writing, music...'

--Merton.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

The naked eye

There was a rather strange and polemical article by Jonathan Jones in today's Guardian that caught your eye.

"All great civilisations celebrate the naked beauty of women.

(This was, believe it or not, an article that lamented the demise of Playboy).

Okay, is that true of Islamic civilisation, or Jewish? If you don't like those terms then perhaps one might say the Islamic and Jewish contribution to civilisation. That is, even if one is not religious one can surely recognize the contribution of the Semitic faiths to civilisation (art, poetry, cathedrals, churches, mosques, scholarship, music...). Have they really "celebrated" the naked beauty of women?

What about Chinese or Buddhist civilisation? Just asking.

The naked body is "part of how human beings communicate with one another".

If that's true then why is it predominantly women's bodies that have, throughout recent history, been displayed? How, exactly, is that 'communication'? to me, that doesn't sound like much of a conversation.

"Societies that praised naked beauty tend to be democratic..."

Okay, but Japan and India were never really very democratic. Greece? Perhaps. But if what we're really talking about is (women's) rights then Greece? Really? What is the relation between "praising" naked beauty and the actual conditions of women's freedom?

Also, why is there no discussion of pornification? Is this display of naked bodies in democratic countries and its huge consumption in non-democratic ones something to be celebrated? What kind of "communication" is that?

~

When I think back to the art that has held me captivated it hasn't been the naked female body. Rubens and Titian are boring. (Of course, Jones's blurring of art with playboy is deeply disturbing). Is the voluptuousness one finds in Rubens the same as a selfie by Kim Kardashian?

Rothko, of course. Stunning and serene at the same time. (Hammershoi, Auerbach, Poussin..yes!)

But if there was one single painting, I think it would have to be Rembrandt's gorgeous 'Jewish Bride'. (Note to self: must get K. Clark's 1974 lectures on him).

There is something profoundly intimate and gentle (almost fragile) in this painting: I-We. But when you actually see it in real life, what sets it apart is the dazzling gold on the sleeves, the brushwork. Dark and light.

If Jones was simply a jackass that article would be excusable. But to deny so many other ways of looking-and not looking-as central to civilisation he has simply contributed to the denial of a profound human outlook. Of course, there is a political and polemical aspect to the article as well: freedom is only a freedom from constraints, a reduction of our lives to our bodies, as if to say that pleasure could be envisaged independently of the good. A body free from guilt.

Yes, then why not Ibiza?

"The selfie era is a golden age of the civilised nude. Humanity marches forward proud and naked".

Another man, you suspect, going through a mid-life crisis!

~

To look out for:

"There are too many Muslims"

“Closer examination of history and a closer examination of what happened in Europe in the early part of the 20th century should make people think very carefully about what it is that they’re saying..

One wonders what has happened to Europe. Why is there so much amnesia? Why don’t they properly distil from their experience that they’ve been down this road before and it’s a very unhappy road if you continue to follow it.”

--Z. Al-Hussein

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

without title

'The Sufi is he whose thought keeps pace with his foot.'

I love that saying since it not only indicates the importance of a sense of proportion, of not letting one's thoughts run wild, disjointedly into a realm of fantasy, but it also suggests that thought must be lived by the whole person, 'incarnated' or anchored in our being and bodies...that out spirit is not opposed to the earth and that finding one's own pace, one's own "groove," is the same as finding out who one really is-even though 'finding' is not 'knowing'. And since we walk on, as we must, thought, in this deeper sense, cannot be fixated with an object and is in itself an approach, a living of life, an aliveness to life, a real life that is at once open, creative, attentive and full of unscripted ways...a broken circle.

Fidelity to ourselves and to other people means never really leaving home.

'We cannot find happiness in our work if we are always extending ourselves beyond ourselves and beyond the sphere of our work in order to find ourselves greater than we are...

It is, therefore, a great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves.'

--Merton (photo courtesy of anton (flowerville)

Black Sun