Black Sun

K K

I don't know why you loved this song so much but I do as well.

The music, like everything else, all seems like from such a very long time ago now. Life is a strange and mysterious dream. You would say, of course, that it's also a beautiful dream. But right now it doesn't feel like that, Ubo.

k


Today, in the late evening never have the streets seemed so empty, never the world so paper thin. It's like you can see only the polish on the table and not the table itself...

So many journeys together in the 275- and now I make it alone. You'd always ask at least five times for me to sit down so that my legs wouldn't get tired. I'm sure you remember that. Or try and pick up all the bags yourself. Well, not today, Ubo.

Why does this light remind me of so many other summers? Like the time we stayed in a caravan. There is no more time, not even hours and minutes, just these memories that go around and around.

How I have longed for you today.
How I have wished you to stay.

~~~

You said, “There is a time and place for everything.”

Already this ‘you said’ sounds false, a way of creating a distance from you when your actual voice was always close by. When your spoken words, however plain, were real in comparison to the ghostly memory-voice. Moocha phoned and the way he abruptly and half-quizzically says ‘yes’ at the end of his sentences reminds me of you.

Did you even really say that? What if my memory fades, falsifies? How many false notes before it becomes a different tune? Or is that just another way of living: through stray words, images, the things you once held or wore?

I half expected to see you cleaning the kitchen when I woke up. In the park I catch myself looking for you.

What a mystery. Today I thought, for some reason, of the moment you were born, how you must have played as a kid. And this I remember clearly because the image is deeply lodged in my memory. Do only jokes and tears remain after all? You had dressed up as a fakir and, as a lark, went about with your friend collecting money, from street to street. You went to your own house and even nearly got some money from your poor old mother. But at the last moment she recognised you and then beat you proper!

What a mystery. A bird flying through one window and out the other. Is that it, then, the time and place? But you would never have settled for such an ascetic view, never held it to be the whole truth. It is true-and I have to agree with you here- that life on earth will always have some kind of imperfection and that it will never be complete. But that’s only the half of it for there is so much wonder in life.

I think you would have liked this:


"In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen and enough to rot upon the ground."

I know you would have appropriated it and pretended they were your own words!

Nothing happens all day. Some letters are still arriving for you. I hate to think what will happen when they dry up. Well, what time would you call this now? I think you’d have been amazed yourself to see it. But even this no-time you would have passed through, worked out. Even this rotten time is part of the whole of time you would say and that it has its place. But more than anything you would have shielded me from it, negated the negation, and let time flow again for me.

It won’t last. Everything must fade. Perhaps even our memories.

Maybe that’s true. Let’s see. Right now, all I can say is that I know that nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.

k

You said that when a person's gone they're gone- and that's it. A wahabi till the very end! But you were wrong on that, old man!

You made me promise you not to get old. Well, I've tried. Now I won't see you get older, but it's okay. Guess it was your time. But we had so many good years- and for that I'm grateful. Well, on your way then. I know that since you always looked out for us even now you're trying to find a good place for us. 

I know your heart is true.
My heart is still, as time will tell.

'But your dance is ended
so sleep on and take your rest, my father, my Jew.'

No, not even Denise gets it.

I will always remember you dancing, almost hopping on one leg, arms outstretched, about to fall, free, not knowing beginning or end, with those deep sorrowful eyes. So, dance or rest in your own way, as you pass down that sorrow to me.

I don’t know why I don’t write more about dreams and sleep when they’re such an important part of my life. I sleep a lot; much of my life has been spent sleeping. I look forward to it and can sleep almost anywhere. After lunch is usually the deepest, most perfect. Or in a chair in the sun. I sleep on the floor in my office, in trains, on journeys. Even when people are talking to me I’m half asleep.

I remember lots of my dreams. From years ago. Sometimes I revisit them. I sometimes get confused and am not sure whether I’m dreaming or awake. Sometimes I’ll see words or whole sentences and then wake up to scribble them down in pencil on a scrap of paper. Dreams can be so deep that you do t remember them but when you wake up the feeling carries over well into the day, dissipating by 10 or 11. Often, the first word in your waking life is just a continuation, or a summary of, or a connection to the dream, a floating bridge to that carefree world which you love to inhabit.

Sunday morning lie in has its own unique charms. The ‘king’s sleep’ ( I.e. after breakfast) is something of an indulgence. Sleep after a hard day’s work is supposed to be superb but I wouldn’t know.

In lots of my dreams I’m in London, on the underground. Very rarely in Lahore but, recently, like Drummer Hodge, the south has seeped in. Is there something to who we see in our dreams?

To the moderns dreams mean very little (perhaps because they live in a dreamworld anyway). They tend to see them as the working out of the subconscious, a frustrated expression, perhaps, of what is repressed. But there’s nothing quite like the sense that one’s seen a true dream or that it somehow gives you insight into one’s own life. 

The heart's roots
are here under this black soil.

Every right word on your tongue 
Has a green taste.

The truth's here
Closer than the world will confess.

--R.S. Thomas.

¬¬¬

The sullying of the mind, the heart, in this late hour. Bewildered. A time for sheltering, for gathering and taking stock. But what if nothing has accumulated over all these years? We're haunted by old ways of speaking, older notions of time from our distant past and so we still talk about 'conserving' and the 'web of life'. As if we still retained some deep connection to cyclical time, the cycles of life.

The seeds of time. Where will you plant them now? Which filed will be allowed to lie fallow? The soil, turned over with love, will bring forth what new things, which green words?

It seems as if this will never pass.

All that rose to the surface was more surface. What he had instead of a being, I thought, is blandness.
--Roth.

What if your personality has developed as far as it can go and from now on cycles around a still, dead point, like a vulture? Plenty Coups: After that nothing happened.

There are fields, in each in their own wild time. You are nowhere. “Often I am permitted to return to the meadow”

Lahore, 4 p.m. the suicide hour, on any day in June in any year. The centuries roll on, but the core feeling, the central dream, remains undisturbed. Nothing moves, all the clocks have been stilled. The mirrors serve no function, return to a quieter life of solitude. No-one appears before them. The human face has disappeared. Outside, if that's the right word, there is the structural rigidity of nothingness. And within? There is a deep shade, in which thought lies, quietly observing how a small gust of wind picks up the dirt and swirls it around at ankle level, makes it look like a small animal. The mind becomes elemental. In the corner a human waits for the fierceness of the day to come to an end, for night to fall.

Think back, think back now, to your old life.

In your own life-that's right, distance yourself as much as possible- in your own life that was never your own life your hands were largely idle, without grace. Heart and hand out of tune. The body at an angle to the light. The 'life of the mind' is not life; it is abstract rather than time-ridden, textured by place or interwoven with the lives of others.

I thought I heard her say something. She knew a word found in nobody's heart. Which was useful for a time like this.

Everyone's left. It's like the day on a world cup final, the day after human beings have left for space. It was always strange down here, they'd say. They'd forgotten,

'That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth. If you live without one or the other you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will only be half-made.'
--Kingsnorth.

06/06/20.

The field in the early morning hours is quiet. The moon is still above it, connected to the dew. there are some cold shadows on its surface. In a few hours, to use the old mode of expression, it is bathed in light, flat, bare. Later still, the shade returns and this time it is soothing, pleasant to walk though. It weaves the whole field together. Then, when the sun is at its lowest, only a few brief patches of the field remain illuminated. The light clings on with such melancholic sorrow, hanging about the long grass, or at the feet of a small tree. Before, humans would have photographed such events but now they simply let them wordlessly register in their hearts and fade.

05/06/20

In the last days everything had been repeatable, everyone had been interchangeable. Gold, silver, hand, heart.

But before, someone had understood this and had actually said,

'Instead of a world where things were unique but linked by an unimaginable density of connection and cross-reference, we had created one in which things were unconnected but endlessly repeatable and where everything could be exchanged in the market.'

04/06/20

An open book was found in the field. The curvature of the land followed the curvature of the river that ran adjacent to it. The moon, the flow of the river, the words..

Before, the humans had dreamt much, and in opium-infused dreams would travel like those people once called shamans and they would enter other people's lives and be allowed to do so. 

03/06/20

Once there was a category of people called 'the poets' who cold see far away things, but also things that were nearby with great intensity. Some said they had the 'ear of a wild Arab in the silent desert, the eye of a North Indian tracing the footsteps upon leaves in a  deep forest..they could know a face the way a blind man does, through only his system of touch.'

02/06/20

The desert returns to city. A man stood still, as if trapped in a mirror. Looked out into the empty world and saw the footsteps of a woman upon the dry leaves in the field. He'd never seen her in real time but her face still seemed mysteriously familiar, her voice as unsure as his.

We stand, in wonder, and look at the time that has been lost, with empty hands. What happens when the hands fail? Those same hands that worked for so long and were also the ‘self- revealing gestures of the soul’? My own hands have darkened with time.


In your own line of work your hands are largely idle. Heart and hand out of tune. The ‘life of the mind’ is not life; it is abstract rather than time-ridden, textured by place, interwoven with the lives of others.

The dream of the unified field. Only half of it is revealed, as if out of modesty.

‘One in the Hand’:

The Abundance. Time is a gift. Accept it gratefully. At all times the world is open. Life is full of tragedy but also so much dazzling wonder, beauty & truth. The ‘song of joy and sorrow’ is with us. Walk lightly, listen carefully, remember the colours.





I’ve always lived in the 1970s.


There are many pathways in life.



The structure finds the light.

I imagine this veil
shall be lifted again and something like a face in a mirror
appear. And it will be me. Will be a room as rooms used to be to us.
And us in them.
As a family or as lovers. We shall be lifted and we shall touch
in the old way. Just a hand on another. Not meaning that
much but still a small weight. With
meaning. A feeling of a harbouring inside which reminds one of having a
mind. A feeling that one could
die for instance.
So there was
mystery, hope, fear, loneliness.
A sudden alarm from not-knowing and being startled by an in-
comprehensible terror or some other reaction
to change. There was
change. A person could be-
come. You could look into a face &
not know. There was rain & you would hardly notice.
It could rain for hours. The face would be there inside
its otherness, the way its body, which you could not imagine the in-
wardness of, moved, each one
moved,
differently, completely
differently. Why is it now you summon
streets. How they ran everywhere away. You could be in a strange
place and not know. You could be
lost. You could be as if
thrown away from the real. A trembling thing. A
journey. Lost yes – but not wrong in being. And from there you
could see a face which was a stranger. And it
would have a look which you had to wait for.

--J.Graham.

   Capitalist realism:
Emptiness filled with delusions (Empire, purity, abundance).The endless desire for more, bloated self-importance. Mechanical thinking. The only realities left: bodily and virtual ones. —Z. Herbert.

Lots of speculation about what a post-C19 world will look like. Lots of uncertainty, for sure, and probably lots of suffering (economic, mental and otherwise). The simple pleasures of social interaction, going to a restaurant with friends or family, reading in a bookshop..maybe they'll all be effected. 

Will reading, music or art be as important to us in these troubled times? How will we think of nature? Will our relation to time itself be restructured as we stop investing so much time and energy in future-oriented projects (a theme from Scheffler's great book, Death and the Afterlife).

What will you miss (or mourn) most in the bleak near-future? That was a question posed by someone on the internet.

My commitment to God's transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my limited understanding of what that good is.

The light is clearer, the birdsong and the silences more intense, but in some sense much remains the same here in London: trees, clouds, river. Are we returning to an elemental state or does this point to an awareness that the fundamental things that underlie the goodness of our lives are constant?

Much speculation on economic, political and institutional futures.Interesting and necessary but also, perhaps, a distraction. Social solidarity or a surveillance state? Ultimately, I marvel at the human spirit that imagines continuity and a 'north of the future'. But another part of me-a deeper part?- dimly recognises all the interruptions that have gone up to make my life. Isn't life itself this broken circle, a song of joy and sorrow?

So, to think too much about the future seems both impossible and something of a false consolation. The past, too. February nostalgia, a Bardo-like hankering for the simple pleasures we once enjoyed but took for granted: coffee, scrambled eggs, conversation...

For me this has been a time to reflect on what's really important in my life (that makes it sound too self-referential for in reality there is no life without others). If we are what we love, then who am I?

I zig-zag up the street, trying to avoid people. If someone gives me way I nod my head in an exaggerated fashion or, in an old eastern gesture that people in London are calling 'the Turkish,  I move my hand to my heart in gratitude. Maybe something of the old gestures will remain or maybe we'll learn to recognise smiles by the sparkling of someone's eyes.

So, in the time that remains it seems important to not think too much about the future or the past but, instead, about what Rosenzweig called 'the demands of the day'. Time is given to us and is not ours. If that was *truly* believed, I think to myself, there would be less anxiety.

Personally speaking, I'm not there. But I am grateful for all the beauty, friendship and love that have come my way ("Which of My favours will you deny?", asks God in the Qur'an). All the striving of the ego seem hollow and shallow- more so than usual. I'm haunted by what Merton once wrote: "I want to be somebody that nobody knows".

When everything appears to be in lockdown it is important to recall, as Rumi said, that freedom is the ability to thank the Almighty for his Beneficence. Now, right now, more so than ever.