Black Sun: May 2016

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Dust

I was a child of the world a century ago. There were olive trees and sunshine..and now...

The grey dust settles this evening, the dust, all the way
down
down
down.

I am a child of the world no more.

~

There is a sickness in the world that in former times would have been named evil..the evil of men. But what difference does a word make now?

In the Philippines and the shanty towns of Brazil there are unspeakable crimes. In the land of the pure only the shambolic word "pure" survives. The man in the dust is no other than the child in the dust.

"If you leave the daily chores for a single day," someone said to me last night, "see how much dust accumulates." There is so much dust that things take on a different shape over time, become unrecognizable. Is time passing so quickly because there is nothing left to say. It is as if humanity has run its course. Ghosts and ancient forms are waiting in the shadows..

~

...

child after child in the
chalk
embrace of chemical death. We saw again

the elegant economy with which God
sculpts
the infant face. Not one..

Not one dis-
figured by what brought them here,
by death
throe and the bland assimilations

of the evening news, by lunatic cal-
culation
or malevolence, which launched the gas,

by money,which made it,
and made as well
the sumptuous ground rhythm

that supplants the children on the screen,
lures Emma
full front now and wants her to want

with the whole heart of childhood what
money
will buy. The patron's deft

technologies. Our sponsored
view. The cutting-room distillations that can take

our breath away. The man
in the dust
and the child in its unearthly

beauty, still in his arms, they're

,they fell as they ran.

--Linda Gregerson.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Losing my religion

The need to press on and ignore F.R.'s view that Islam is a pagan religion (there is a whole history to this, the idea that Islam is nothing more than a corruption of the true faith, a set of borrowings). This hostility is not altogether surprising when you think of Islam's traditional aversion to the idea that any one people or religion has an exclusive claim to the truth: no eternally fixed "chosen people" and no salvation through Christ alone.

If one has been brought up to believe that you have a monopoly on the truth (and in practice Muslims are as guilty of this as anyone else) then the orthodox Islamic view that every people, community or "civilization" had its prophet can jar and be profoundly psychologically disturbing.

Let's leave the last word to Putnam:

"The most unfortunate aspects of the Star of Redemption are, in fact, its polemical remarks about religions other than these two [Christianity and Judaism]...I find this aspect of the Star depressing..."

But no, let's press on or the day will never start...

_______________

It is a sad fact to contemplate the losing of one's religion (if one still takes religion seriously, that is). Over the years a number of good friends have-understandably-felt themselves increasingly ill at ease with their faith (or, more accurately, with the way it is expressed all around them in its political, cultural and social guise). Understandably, I say, because when one sees all the pettiness, hatred, ignorance and violence associated with religion in its current manifestation any sensitive soul and any reflective person would recoil, in good faith, at the horror that is unfolding before him or her.

And yet, if we move beyond current events and probe a bit deeper there is another source of unease and I think it's this: much of the modern world has grown from roots that have little to do with Islam (this is a view that is in stark contrast to the Allama's lectures). The political and economic systems, for instance, do not seem to bear much resemblance to the religious world-view. And, the disjunction between an unbridled capitalism and disdain for the environment and a religious sensibility (in general) over the last century stands as an even more glaring example of the specific incompatibility between Islam and modernity.

I mention all of this in relation to F.R. because I want to ask: are the Muslims the new Jews? The point of this question is not to neglect the continued existence of anti-semitism or to draw any firm historical parallels, and even less is it to harp on about victim-hood. Instead, can we ask this question in the light of the Rohingya and the long history of Islamophobia, in light of what is seen as the pressing problem of "assimilation" and integration, the radical 'othering' of Muslims, the strangers in our midst whose values are "not like ours".

__________________

"If there were five seconds of love, understanding, and truth, what would the rest of the day be like?"

"The Middle Ages are the East's revenge on antiquity for Alexander's conquests."

"For what is the use of the most perfect organization of Jews if there are now Jews left to be "organized"?"

"I make excerpts, collate, I experience commas, make tracings..."

"An entire train of thought was concluded with a gesture."

~~~~

In the light of experience.
In light of.
In. Light. Of.

Our love of, the necessity of, life lived in darkness. Our life is just as much structured by the light of what we do not and cannot experience.

~~~~~

"I too am now anxious for a furlough (bath, carpet, sofa, chair, Beethoven variations, old manuscripts, which again interest me."

"I detest sets and love the single book."

~~~~
F.R., growing up with the usual antisemitism, the pressures (however subtle or gross they may have been) to conform to "Germany" or "Christianity" turns to what? What resources does he draw upon?

There is something utterly fascinating about Rosenzweig. His Understanding the Sick and the Healthy has some lovely writing. But his face is too harsh. I don't know why I set such great store by the looks of a person.

At Herr Lukas's place for dinner over the weekend. He recalled to me, with some glee (perhaps pride would be a better word) that he had told the students in his class that Abraham didn't actually exist. Learn to be critical (by which he really means: stop believing). It seems as if there are some people hell-bent on making sure the kids lose their religion, just as there are other forces at work trying to convince them to adopt the harshest, sternest and most unforgiving version of it.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Sifting...

Sifting through my old books and notes I finally find my old copy of Rosenzweig's biography (how many times do you find things when you're not looking for them!). As usual, only dipped into and lightly marked in a place or two. In short, like the books on anarchism under which it had been resting all this time -C. Ward..what a juxtaposition!- it had largely been unread. The temptation, as always, to start from the beginning or to draw parallels (in this case: individualism?)

Opened the book at random (I suppose the way an illiterate person would, looking for a message, a primitive belief in the magic of words still embedded in his heart):

"He who lives on possibilities is a coward; there's always one you can run to for shelter. A decent person lives not on the ninety-seven and a half possibilities but on the one reality he has experienced. Since he has experienced it, some provision will be made for his being sustained by it."

--Franz Rosenzweig.

It occurs to you that you will never read this book.

It gives you great pleasure to read this diary entry:

September 6, 1906

Missed the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 127

[As chance would have it, I was listening to the late quartets when I found the book].

There is nothing mysterious about the line itself but I revel in the fact that a fragment of thought from over a hundred years could be preserved like this. Not some great moment for sure, but one that is in some sense as ordinary and insignificant as a person having a sip of coffee at a bar and for that very reason wonderfully strange and familiar since it reminds you of how our own lives are little but a series of such instants, perhaps not amounting to a lot more.

The levels of 'removal' are intriguing: Beethoven actually conceptualizing the music, perhaps drumming his fingers on a solid wood table as he does so and then, later, committing it to a score: breath-ink-space. The years that intervene before F.R. listens to what was then a live performance (think of how much history is made and unmade in that period, grandfathers, loved ones, vagabonds and generals slipping in and out of existence, appearing and then vanishing against the relatively more stable bourgeois world). The time that elapses-perhaps a few days, perhaps a few hours-before he jots down what he remembers of the experience. A calm afterthought. Then more time passes before the notes/diaries are published. I find the book, lose it, find it again, stumble across these words that catch my eye. Another eight hours pass before I then write down these words, here, and so that simple sentence has a whole history to it, implicating many different people in its construction and extension across space and time.

[In your own book of life what will the angels write?]

~

You write like this, even more removed from the text and the life of the text, because you do not read properly. And yet, you always wish to read like this, away from reality.

~

A friend, the most Jewish of your friends, to whom I sent this quote replied: "One reality is that it is always possible to be honest with yourself...".

I read that, oddly, as suggesting that the future is open and that it contains the possibility of being sincere and yet, I wonder, was he alluding to the here and now? I read it against F.R. but maybe..

Possibilities as a source of delusion, fantasy, yes, but also worth noting that a shelter can be a refuge, a concrete sign of hope. An escape from reality, from what one has experienced or can experience, is a deep individual impulse. In the image of God, men and women say: "Not this, not that". If one must find oneself where one is, keep pace with your foot, then one also longs (note the disappearance of the "must" since we are in the realm of freedom)..one also longs for a disappearance, other lands (the shadow of the Garden is always with us, even as we know: But famished field and blackened tree/Bear flowers in Eden never known).

~

C, I bring your comment here, out into the open, where there's more space/light.

"Do I need to read this?"

I love the urgency in that question. Only someone who takes reading as seriously as yourself could use the word "need" (I imagine the dougal or anton expressing similar sentiments, though there would be no question of their asking me).

What do we need to read? Gosh, that's a tough one. To what end, one might ask? Is F.R. vital? I'm not sure, I've only read around him (via H. Putnam's wonderful little book on Jewish thought). If I did have to name a writer it would be Alfred Hayes. Devastatingly good. However, I have no way of saying why that's the case. Unlike Cheever's work, I don't think it was the tone that struck me. Cheever is sad; Alfred Hayes seems to have passed to the other side of sadness and is broken (putting it like that does make it sound like a typically male hang-up).

I suppose someone with a more serious inclination toward religion than either of us might devote more time to F.R. Like an illiterate peasant who believes in the magic of words I'm tempted to say that fate arranges things so that I only dip into his works, finding, then losing, then finding his book over cycles of time.

Only read as much as you can live. Not sure who said that (Goethe?) but it's always sounded like a sound thought. I don't know, perhaps religion offers a channel to live a unified, self-contained life (or at least it used to). Steadfastness (from the previous post) and being sustained by an experience. Part of me is drawn to that deeply civilizing impulse but, putting my other Jewish hat on, there is always the idea that the fragmentary, partial and exiled life is more in line with your scattered thoughts, wayward sensibilities and personal history:

Wandering tribes have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.
--Bellow.

~~

The one thing not mentioned, the thing that may attract a certain kind of reader, is that F.R. suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease for a number of years (I forget this biographical detail as if it is somehow incidental but the tremendous sense of fortitude that he displayed throughout makes you very sympathetic to him-despite his awful views about Islam).

His response to being made aware of the disease appears to have been: life is entering another stage. That sounds truly remarkable.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Wandering Infidel

Samed: steadfastness.

As I turn to write of my woes,
the paper is infinitely still,
the pen is but a flame.
--after Amir Khusrau.

No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
--Dowden.

Turn, turn, Qalb. Do not ask why my heart sighs.

Thy firmness makes my circle just
And makes me end where I begun.
--Donne.

Stone, tree wind.
Stone, tree, wind
Star.
Stone, tree, wind.
Stone, tree, wind
Heart.

Summon me and I will tell you of loss and the history of loss that is my land and no-man's land. No good will come of it.

Where are you from, she asked. And I said, originally?

No, stay, no,..
I see it now, briefly, the swiftly passing world. Time on my hands, my face darkened, I look like everyone else. A thousand years ago she held my inner wrist and said, "you have a strong heart." I nearly fainted. A wandering infidel, I say to myself, or was I the only believer?

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Some further notes on the notes on

Llosa has lots of very interesting things to say in this short book. Trying to put to one side his views on religion and Islam in particular since I don't think he's saying much here that is either new or particularly insightful. But it does strike you that if he'd have thought more carefully he might have been drawn to some unpalatable conclusions.

One of the main thrusts of his argument in the book/essay is the idea that culture is, at least in part, about prohibitions, barriers (this echoes, of course, Rieff). So, for instance, culture had, in previous times, acted as a bulwark against the corrosive forces of the markets. And any culture sets up shared norms of evaluative judgement (what Fuller once called a 'shared symbolic order'). This amounts to saying that culture embodies ideas, values and spiritual realities in particular forms. To say 'forms' is already to suggest limitations (at least from one perspective, the dominant one in late modernity).

Instead, we live in an age of spectacles where an image grabs our attention for a brief moment and then releases us back into our mundane life. No image must be allowed to inhere or relate to the true Image of Man. The ephemeral nature of the image is, in fact, what allows for its commercial success and is also foundational to how one thinks about the type of power it exerts over us: the aura of the dazzling, hypnotic image depends on its ability to fragment our consciousness, its ability to isolate. There is no time for anything to gestate; instead, what is required (required by the system, I should add) is a temporary suspension of disbelief, a passive acceptance of what is fed to you. As Freud might say: Mother!

Whence the disappearance of eroticism (not sure I completely agree with that (see the picture in the previous post)) but in terms of trends Llosa is surely correct. The erotic has been transformed into the pornographic since the erotic depends on a fine balance between transgression and limitation. Or, to put it in the negative: without limits the erotic becomes trashy, devoid of any imaginative effort (the shameless spectacle that doesn't linger in the memory)

To an older generation the striptease was, you suspect, something of an art form. That's pushing it a bit, but you can see what Llosa means. Culture always mediates the biological. Without that mediation it can descend into the purely mechanical or a horror show.

So, here's the point Llosa misses out on: the veil (or the burqa) may be freely chosen (of course, the word 'free' is subject to the usual need for qualifications since a woman may not be directly co-erced into wearing one). If it is a free choice then doesn't it express a point of view that isn't simply reactionary but that is, instead, critical of the very tendencies that he thinks are leading to the dissolution of culture? The idea that a woman's body and sex is private and that not everything is for show or consumption..surely that militates against the spectacular society?

The second flaw of the book-and this, unlike the previous one is more substantial-is that he really doesn't follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion or join up the dots. It's all very well saying that culture can curtail the corroding influences of the market (its short-termism, its emphasis on greed, its inability to distinguish price from value). What Llosa never adequately discusses is the way in which those very same market forces have helped generate the modern-day culture that he thinks is replacing genuine culture. To think along those lines would get him into all sorts of tangles.

At times he displays a dim recognition of the pickle he's in since it is the very freedom of market democracies, the freedom of the Enlightenment, that is in large part responsible for what we're seeing now. If the dominant strain of thinking has been to emphasize freedom (over solidarity and equality) and if the particular notion of freedom that takes root is that of being 'free from' (an abstract or 'formal' notion of freedom) then is it any wonder there is so little resistance to the desire-machine that is capitalism?

Having said all of that, the book has lots of profound insights.

When considerable sections of a society feel that nothing is of consequence..then the ground is clear for the wolves and hyenas.

Seurat (from the previous post) was 24 years old when he painted that!

The whole of Seurat's life was a slow, stubborn, timeless and fanatic preparation to reach the formal perfection he achieved in his two masterworks.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Notes on 'Notes on the Death of Culture' (or: the End of Eroticism)

One sign of decay is the proliferation of, as it were, 'secondary markets': notes on 'notes to..'.
Derivatives, in other words. You can't but help think that the history of capitalism involves greater and greater levels of abstraction, a movement away from the real (economy) to the frivolous, stylish, fashionable. At the root of it-putting my religious hat on-has to be credit/interest/usury. What is, ultimately, being purchased here is time (Le Goff: Your Money of Your Life).

[The fact that one can talk of a religious sensibility that one can 'put on', like a hat, and then discard at a later stage is also, perhaps, symptomatic of the times we live in].

Not incidental to that trend is the hyperinflation of the word (or, more accurately: babble): "light literature" and criticism, analysis and the deconstruction of "texts" accompanied by a pseudo-intellectuality and "passion" for cleverness, playfulness and obtuseness. But if it's all a game then why bother in the first place?

'Shallowness' doesn't quite cover it because implicit in the idea of shallowness is the counter-vailing notion of 'depth'. When there is only the surface, when there are no second spaces (as it were, as it is), then a kind of nausea can follow, but one is more likely to witness or experience a stupefied indifference. The metropolis and the blase attitude. Yeah, like, whatever.

Everyone today wants to be a clown, an actor. Not a "stone," but an actor. Just watch TED and you'll see academics craving for attention. "Visibility" is what they call it nowadays. Or "cyber presence". But politicians and other charlatans, too. You sometimes wonder if you were the only one who was serious. The seriousness with which people devote time and energy to accumulating possessions has always ended up in frivolity and boredom (luxury as the beginning of capitalism as well as its ultimate symbol).

"Everything is a puppet show that can use very cheap tricks to win the favour of a public greedy for entertainment."

The playful banality of the dominant culture, in which the supreme value now is to amuse oneself and amuse others, over and above any form of knowledge or ideals..to forget serious, deep, disquieting and difficult things and to indulge in light, pleasant, superficial, happy and sanely stupid pursuits."

~~~

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Light, light, light...

Eight or nine consecutive days of temperatures 45 C +. Today, grey skies.

9.25 a.m.

~
Nothing happens, until it does. No one goes, but they do. My mirror sings so heartbrokenly after sunset, its silver dreams frame miles and miles of distances. The impassive chair hasn't moved an inch the whole night. In this heat everyone wants a ride on my back so I step on an ant just in case. The light has unlocked a gate and my mind wanders freely. An excess of light breaks up any continuity: you think of a strip of shade under a step in the hundred acres of light; a single leaf that falls to the ground in front of you. A meal, an hour of sleep and forgetfulness. Wake up and start again (not so different from your life so far, you think). In a dream a single line of poetry from a book that has the colour and texture of the green bark of a young tree.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The sea around us

A narwhal turns up in a Dutch estuary. A bizarre beaked whale, the likes of which have never been seen before, is found on an Australian beach. A bowhead whale in Cornwall, 1,000 "miles and an ocean away from its designated domain" (Philip Hoare). Are these signs of warming, more acidic, seas? (Not to mention the bleaching of the coral reef).

pH levels are down from 8.1 (1800) to 8.0 now (doesn't sound much but this is a log scale so that translates into roughly 30% more acidic). If current rates continue ("business-as-usual") we could see mean pH levels of 7.8 by the end of the century (which represents a 150% increase on 1800 levels). The thing to note here is not that the sea hasn't been more acidic in the history of the earth; it's the rate of change that is important.

E. Kolbert's book, The Sixth Extinction, was chosen by the Guardian as one of the 100 most important non-fiction books and I am beginning to see why. The journalist's eye for detail and the ability to weave them into a story makes for compelling reading.

What strikes you is nature's amazing systems. Of course, we like to think of nature as wild, chaotic, random, unanalysable (a good part of the Romantic and counter-Enlightenment tendencies draw on such roots). But if you think of the coral relief as a key player in the exchange of nutrients as well as a stage in which those exchanges take place then you begin to think of it in social terms (i.e the market). So, there's a whole ecosystem that makes us think about balance and equilibrium, but also dynamics and evolution: structure and freedom.

And then if you think of the trees, plants, the flora and fauna in a forest. Of the 130 million km of non-ice land about 70 m has been modified/altered by humans (think of agriculture, deforestation, mining, urban development, etc.) Of the remaining 60 m about 36 m is forest (1/4 of all forest land is in Canada and there are only 20 species of trees there). The remaining 24 m is desert and mountain area. Now, get this: in a small area of Peru (less than the size of Manhattan) there are over 1,500 species of trees! As you move south from the ice-regions biodiversity (not just of trees) increases. Why?

A number of theories. This part of the book was absolutely fascinating and made we want to pull out Deakin's Wildwood which has been languishing on my bookshelf for some time now.

Couldn't but help marvel at the empirical approach to knowledge/reality as well as the commitment of the scientists to trying to make sense of it all (in sharp contrast to the dull and ideological economists whose intelligence is really second-rate at the end of the day).

And what gets you is that if the forests make up an ecosystem as do the seas, then so, surely, does the atmosphere? And how do they all hang together like that? And within that greater order is the human order. Except that now the balance has shifted so far that humans have disrupted-perhaps irrevocably-the very sustainability of those other systems.

At the heart of it is surely something before Descartes and the mechanical idea of nature as mere matter-in-motion; perhaps it all started with out shifting attitudes to (and therefore practices on) the land? Once we started to think of ourselves as exclusively land based creatures and the land as a resource, something to be tamed, trapped, cultivated, exploited, managed and controlled was it only a matter of time before we ended up with this crazed desire for possession? (It is difficult not to see this as an expression of war-a war against the land and war against women who must also be tamed, possessed and controlled). The fertility of the land? Sow your oats?

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The Queen in London

The Queen arrived in London, slightly tired, mysteriously so. There were rumours but she ignored them. For a change, she thought to herself, I will walk through the streets of my country, even though London is hardly recognizable any more. So many subjects from distant lands. A city with too many bridges and not enough lovers, she thought. I will walk alone with my thoughts, without regalia and ceremony, without the burden of history, simply I, I this unequalled self.

So she let down her hair, put on her green and red dress and applied her kajol. Preparations for a meeting?, wondered the paparazzi.

She walks by unnoticed and the earth tilts slightly. The May light sways with her but the crowds only throng to the window to watch the live telecast inside. And snow is falling in Kyoto, falling deeply. Soon it will be evening. Introductions will be made and she thinks of her first formal words to him.

It displeased her to see that London is not as she remembered it, not what she had read about. There was no fog at all! And many of her male subjects had taken to wearing grotesque, thick beards. Their language was coarse and so lacking in dignity, any sense of poetry. As she adjusted her skirts she thought: The women were hardly dressed at all! "There is no religion to be found on the streets of London," she would later say to him. He would reply, in order to embarrass her no doubt, "Faith is under the left nipple".

Between a Church and a coffee shop she found a small gate to an enchanted world, a small and quiet square garden that no-one seemed to know about and that was certainly on no map to be found in her kingdom.

She sat down on a bench and read the names on the wall. They formed a tapestry of all the lives that were not lived. Was her name there, too? Then she sat solemnly with a closed book on her lap and waited and waited, but he didn't arrive. She looked at the sad, golden fish in the dark pond:

I am a fish without the Tigris.
I am the Tigris without a fish.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

I, not I

"Not my pride, not my spleen nor any other appetites oppose it, but I do-I, I."

---Thomas More.

"Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the woof and warp of the universe, that sets riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of this order but we remain, quintessentially, unknown."

--D.H.L.

~

You think of Gissing, standing on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court road, over a century ago now, hungry and bewildered, with sixpence in his hands. You have stood there many a time as well, deciding whether to go down to Leicester Square or back up to Russell Square. From a top floor flat a woman looking down on you would be greatly amused to see this bundle of confused stillness amidst the unceasing to and fro of strangers.. And in a hundred years from now, what of that glance?

A small part of you, perhaps 1/5th, derives a perverse kind of pleasure from the consideration of the fact that books and people and buildings are forgotten, nay, more, that they are destined to fade into memory, that all of history collapses like a pack of cards and what we now decipher of it is nothing more than a few faces turned away, a search for the ace, a grinning joker..

But for the greater part you are held stunned by the thought of all the people-great and small-who traverse a given place and who are are ghosts in the sunlight. I, not I, I...

'The phenomenon called "I'
is a blue illumination
of the hypothesized, organic current lamp
(a compound of all transparent ghosts).'

Last Acts, Disappearing Acts, What has Happened, Hold on Dreamer, Dark Mirror, Snow in April...have you not been talking about your own soul all along? Where have you been all this time? A question to myself.

I have lived many lives, which is to say I have lived none.

The great mystery: there are people from different eras, ages and historical worlds who walk by each other quite oblivious of the fact that the other exists. One's star is rising, the other's is falling. I know some old people who can remember a few stories their grandfathers told them, so that words and turns of phrases from the mid 19th century dimly live on somehow. My inheritance: a stray and unique gesture of the hand, a Jewish nose..

You are under no illusion: the grandness of the "I" is today without anchor, is but so much dust without the illumination of faith. But, equally, with faith in the world today as it is that anchor sinks it, not into some timeless truths but into a shadow-world of pettiness and hatred, a hallucinatory world.

Another I, that has failed to, and continues to fails to, take definite form of shape, that briefly glitters under grey skies, knows of no resistance or acquiescence, blue and green, am I, not I?

Friday, May 13, 2016

Last Acts

Game over:

The last game at Upton Park.
An older form of football, now obsolete.
Game over in Syria. Another nation in tatters.
The Vaquita Marina, headed for extinction (60 left).

The final class, the last hour, time ticking down. You observe the students, some take one final glance over their shoulders as they leave the examination room. What next? A brief profile of someone and then they move on. Only we age, remember something of our own strange relationship with fleeting time. How many years ago was it now?

For the students a walk through the open door into a wide, unknown space. In years to come some will want to come back and see you, like an old familiar wall that reminds them of something they once knew. But for most you will just be a name, perhaps mentioned in passing at a pizza restaurant when one of them asks, "I wonder what happened to old ___?"

I think of my old teachers, since only one or two are still alive. It never occurred to you that they had an inner life, a family, heartache, that they were as confused as you but in a different way.

There is no more time for reflection. Get the job done, put on your hat, clear the cheques and head out, north by northwest. Think of the old tree, and you sitting in the shade at 6 o'clock wondering to yourself, is this a moment in the future or the past, is life but a dream?

Black Sun