Black Sun

It is easy to look at Weimar, with its seductive decadence and alluring freedoms, and feed our guilty anxiety that these very freedoms must inevitably lead to reaction-one accompanied by a search for a mythical moral purity.

When he was a boy, Freud's father told him how a Viennese Gentile had knocked his hat off and ordered him off the pavement. "What did you do?" asked Freud. "I stepped into the gutter and picked it up" he replied.

"I think today of burning glass; these clear green trees standing in the deep grass, covered with white flowers, from some happier time...

"There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown."

Notes from Geoff Dyer:

Roots, attachments. The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.The things passed on from one generation to another, lovingly, with care; human chains, the rituals and gestures that bind, more than words can say, a common inheritance, even for those without title. The loops of time seemingly endless, but the shape of hands remarkably the same, revealing hidden affinities of the soul.

What is the right angle to see you-or see oneself, if you like distinctions? Into them. A certain approach, a certain distancing. You must remember or do you forget yourself? Not obtuse but the clear radiant lines that last forever. Acute. If you say so. He stood at a slight angle to the universe...and became invisible. She, quite plane; he, looking down on her, like a "vertical man". At first she seemed quite yielding, the full spectrum of humanity, her undefinable mystery brought to an abrupt focus by his shadow. The narrowness of his outlook redeemed by the unfolding of the horizontal line, which is to say time. Locked together they were, joined at the hip, twins refracted. Everything hinges on a simple point. The circle becomes square, the point a line.

In the small room the books have been re-arranged, thrown next together randomly by the swami. Not as if the previous order was any more satisfying. Chance determinations. They've been lugged here, heaped unceremoniously on top of one another, the rituals of orthodoxy quite foreign to you as a matter of right. Books ready to be carted off. You imagine this room at night, words in the dark. The white shelves tired, sagging and sighing under the weight. There's less and less space to move about in here-especially when little R drifts by, poking her nose around. (Most of the day she's pretty content chasing dogs and walking in and out of small ditches and holes. This repetitiveness in human nature, for what purpose?)

"The vortex was the expression of Turner's deep pessimism for he thought of humanity as doomed to a senseless round, which ultimately sucked man to his fate..."

In late paintings like Te Rerioa there is no telling where the dream begins and ends, each level of signification-the dream and the woman dreaming-is contained in the space of the picture. There is no time-or sound-in this or any of the Tahitian paintings. The horseman in the background is so still he might as well be a figure in a canvas hanging on the walls as a scene glimpsed beyond them."
---Geoff Dyer.

Northern light: sharp, piercing, changing, always full of longing and absences. Lawrence: the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed...

Is there something too essentializing in this: the eternal east, the eternal feminine? The lack of distinctions: between humanity and nature, dream and reality, inside and outside; between the first days of mankind and the last days. A profound oneness of mind and body, or a dreamy childishness?

First thing you think of: how ancient England is. Those pragmatic heads, devoid of any spiritual concerns; the language plain and square; those faces, repeated every two or three generations, as if nature only had a limited repertoire of possibilities. The names: solid, matter-of-fact; the places, dark and unredeemed, just as they've always been. Eternal summer, comes around again, unimaginably so. Warmth on the back, profound and reassuring, beer sloshing in thick glasses, hands that would know...

Well, not quite the first. At the airport you see a beautiful woman, dark haired, an intelligent and compassionate face (Mr. Heinz was right in this respect, after all). And they're the strangest of places, airports: people crossing each other's paths, barely noticing one another...just the most furtive of glances, a tentative finger to the lips ("what if"..) and then everyone moves on, back.

On the way home, the clouds radiant, the light full and peaceful, so that everything seemed to be swimming in its brilliance; past St. Mary's and the leafy park, the gravestones old and weather-worn, slumbering in the green shade. People walking in this high light seem somewhat unreal, as if this day and this day alone defined them, or as if a dense fog had suddenly lifted and one could now, for the first time, clearly see where one was going. The late flaring of the sun, the golden light relating and revealing each face to another. Past another church in the east, with the words 'Alive and Kicking' written in huge letters on the front. What next, 'Rapping with MC God'?

Down Euston road, a beautiful woman striding past you, her hips swaying like an Egyptian. And your first thought (well, not quite your first one!)...you only see individuals here. Yes, that much abused word. But better to burn with one's own 'lights', than with those of another's vision. The coming community will need a deeper sense of the individual, one that underpins a far more profound sense of the 'we' than hitherto produced by the state or religion with their army of clones and clowns.

"Being able to read means being able to change yourself more effectively, ..it means being being able to see yourself differently and to empathise with others more fully. That is why literacy and democracy go together."
---Rowan Williams.

You persist with JCO, despite your instincts and reservations. Quite simply because it's written with such directness and honesty (and craft, of course...candidness without dexterity is boring). The odd line here and there strikes you:

"Without meaning, the world is things, and these things multiplied to an infinity."

or, Pascal: "The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play is; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever. "

You don't believe that, not for a second. The ancient sway of the world; things and people return; we take delight in beholding familiar faces, seen in a new light, one that is as deep as the images produced by memory, that are remembered by heart.


‎"Common names are a kind of time capsule, a record of the powers of observation and literary inventiveness of ordinary people. They log resemblances, uses, sounds, mythic associations, smells, seasonal appearances, kids' games, superstitions, habitats. They're witty, concise, evocative, sometimes even satirical....Here are wild organisms' hues, habits, habitats, histories, and humans' histories and curiosity, too. It's not stretching meanings to say that the vernacular lexicon is part of the ecosystem, a living and growing web which links us with all other species."
---R. Mabey.

The devil was a word forgotten between humans, was someone who had been out of sorts with himself, on the wrong path from the start. He stammered when he spoke your name, was stunned into an awareness of distinctions, duality, of all that he wasn't and all that he couldn't be. He tramped on the streets, never knowing why; looked at the display of books in the windows but saw only the pale glimmer of faces, the frailty of the human mind. A line, a faint grey line of beauty.

He tried to recall...what? Nothing in particular. A time when he'd been happy, perhaps. Or something that had been said. He achieved a kind of pure inwardness, and the world became a desert, the high sun burning his face, making his eyes narrow, his face sting. An hour, an age seemed to pass. He'd lost all sense of time. He let it go, and felt himself fall even further.

"...I realized that there is a fatality in human natures..."

"I've learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions, and destinies tend to repeat each other."

"Clumsiness and disorder reveal too much of the secrets closest to our hearts; we also betray them through too careful a disguise."

"For being consists of being able to do everything at the same time...the great and simple images in whose presence his heart was first opened."

The first man, in the last light; remembering the first light, he became the last man. The light everywhere around you, and yet your love of bare interiors, no sign of your presence.

At the time of Judgement it is said that the unbelievers will ask for another day, another hour, to make amends, to change what has come to pass, as if we could live in all times. "If I had another day I'd be true to myself, and then return". But this will be denied them. Is it so very different for the believers? If you had another hour in the presence of loved ones, would you leave? What is destiny but a return to our origins? Everything will be the same, and everything will be different. Like a broken circle.

People who are very talkative are so full of themselves, so in love with themselves; the same is true for people who are very quiet. What is it that allows the self to be broken, to not think in terms of of, but in ways for?

you gave me a mirror,
so that when I looked at myself
I would think of you.
(after Rumi).

I don't have much else to say, and what difference would it make anyway. Words are not the thing. There were words spoken at the right time, in the right manner, and there were words that were lost, misplaced. In our haste we see everything in its contingent nature, not letting anything rest, take root, come to fruition.

At the right angle to each other there is no more room for words. But this second silence is a kinder space, one in which we see our thinner faces, as if we were looking back, with time on our hands, our names still a mystery to one another, the hours, the days, still wide and pale.

There was truth in the first moment; and truth in the last. In both, I found your silence.

No heart is as whole as a broken heart.

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
---Robert Frost.

In the last moment there is a revelation of what we are. Already, to say 'we' is to move beyond the circle and to be at one with it. To look out for you. I saw a face, and all of humanity was there; you saw a crow...But the existence of the image at the end implies it was always there. Wouldn't you agree, Roxana? The last moment is also a beginning...

The circle of our lives: to some appears full, to others empty. Some see this as life, others as death.The whole of truth contained in a full stop. There are no distinctions, and there is no knowing how things will turn out. In love, what is 'inner' and what is 'outer'?

Friend, we are meant
For each other...
Let's cohabit,
Mindful of all we share
---Guillevic.

(link to Guillevic courtesy of P. Joris, at nomadics)

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.
-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing, we turn to our friends.
-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constrained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.
-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness and fixations.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people, and between people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a commitment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occasionally felt that way. No, the first formulation was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God reveals His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in reality nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is restored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:

metamorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary...only equals laugh."Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.

Think about those last lines again...from a white male...are they true? Apart from laughing at oneself, is laughter fundamentally about inequality, about laughing at those who cannot answer back or is it about those who laugh at the seriousness of the men in pointed hats? Should we, then, talk about "appropriate" laughter, for surely we all recognize-at least on reflection, if not immediately- that sometimes laughter is in bad taste?

Folly: St. Paul? The world's seriousness...asceticism, like worldliness, is far too serious a matter. Is there, then, a 'proper' love of the world?

What sense is there in a 'sense of humour'?

Our heart has its home in journeying,
but one does not know where its wish will lead it in the end.
---Mir Dard.


a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy..and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! ...Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
---Shakespeare (forgive me, dougal!)

The drawn out look, the withered flesh, the face, finally, fully formed, as if God were judging it for signs, or some revelation of inner trust. The defeated look, where once there was a sparkle and glimmer. How we live is what we are. There's no escaping it. This is life, and this is love.

Not the restless energy (Durer, say) or the quiet, sober, personal piety and devotion of an earlier age. What we see here is similar to his 'Dead Christ', a world without salvation, time unredeemed. From now on western man-which is to say modern men and women-must live on without consolation, must overcome his core tiredness, come to terms with finitude, his own brokenness.

Resignation, fatigue, weariness etched on his face. The world is too much with us. Asceticism is not a solution. But at the end, as at the beginning, there is an opening.

I am not the sound of the blossom's melody,
I am the sound of my own breaking.
---Ghalib.

the falling of the old wall means the wall will be renewed.

(With thanks to Debbie for sharing this. More of her photos can be seen here)

Their music is immense
Each note hundreds of years long
Each complete tune a moon-age

So they sing to each other unending songs
As unmoving they move their immovable masses

Their closed eyes ecstatic.

---Ted Hughes.

The sea, like our lives, dark and light; it will rain and it will not rain. You carried with you keys, for different rooms and different houses. Moving from one room to another silently, reimagining some sort of habitation, warmth, loss, lies, the stories that will be fabricated, binding generations. I will leave a coin under the cupboard, in the dark and the dust, so that something of mine grows old. What moves the heart, except this unending song that falls, like rain, and not like rain?

Walk out into the sun's dying shadows, cast on blank walls and blank faces with perfect, symmetric equality-the sign of our forgetfulness; shield your eyes from the low-angled flickering light, bright like a knife. These, the last days, were like the first in their mystery, and this house of mine, vast and incomprehensible as the sea, this house like a creaking raft in the sea, an empty shell. The vanity of our lives. To think of belonging, and possessing, of the even flow of time, when in reality only a tent of scattered stars. We drift, we drift, without anchor, points of light, full of heavy songs, songs of longing for the moon.

Why is it that when young children first learn to walk, they also want to walk in circles, to topple the adults! My head is spinning from little R, who simply won' t sit down in one place...

At the Chinese restaurant, appropriately named Yum!, She insisted that I walk her over the small half-drum wooden bridge again and again. What is it, R, it's only a bridge!

"But no, it helps us get from Here to There! How can we live without them?!"

"Oh, most of us get on by quite satisfactorily, I'll have you know."

"Oh, please, not another one of your lectures! Come, give me your hand..."

And so we crossed the bridge together, again and again until R looked tired, and I thought that that was a kind of victory over her, and that we could at last return to the world of polite conversation, rituals, staring out of windows, noticing our own pale, half-formed reflections on the cold windowpanes. But she just stood there, perplexed, not quite ready to talk to other children, and strangely quiet, startled into awareness, thoughtful, the way she becomes just before she starts to sleep and dream.

"What is it now, little one? Are you bored with the bridge now?"

"Ha! What a silly thing to say," she said, laughing back at me."No, it's just that for a second I forgot which place was 'here', and which was 'there'. "

And so it is, that children are always looking for open ways, paths that never narrow but sweep you into new vistas; this remarkable ability to bridge distances, to forget distinctions, to think that as long as you are holding someone's hand you can find a place that grown-ups only see in their dreams.

~~~

"The taiko-bashi, symbolizing one's departure from the world of reality. In the Edo period, a bridge was usually situated ...to mark the dividing point between this world and higan (the other world). People crossing the bridge became conscious of entering an extraordinary fictional place."
---Tadao Ando.

I often think to myself how unremarkable my life is, how extraordinarily dull and plain it is, and yet I still don't have the energy or the desire to move beyond this crab-like existence. The neutral, unheroic rolling on of time. Indifference of the soul, Fenelon would no doubt say (not that I've read him; just have lots of black notebooks full of hastily scribbled down words, words that seem to indicate some sort of wisdom, easily available without the struggle..the wonderful facade that quotations afford oneself!).

And of course, some people are quite content in that surrounding warmth, the daily rituals, meagre ploddings-groceries, banks, bills-,trivial conversations, a life without metaphors, the easy after-dinner smiles maintaining the surface illusion, the quietness and stillness of mid-mornings flatly refusing any existential questions-what mattered in life was to be part of existence, not possessing it- nor dreaming of any greatness or any deeper meaning, not railing against the lack of it...this is it, this shallowness that came surprisingly easy to you... And all the time one senses the slow drifting away from oneself, the silver disintegrating behind mirrors, the darkening of one's hands, the narrowing of the light, the forgetting of names.

~~~

Today, you woke early as usual but it was so dark you couldn't see the hands of the clock, just the empty white face, bald and absent-minded. Outside, the storm still raging, a cool freshness blown in from God knows where, the wind whistling through eastern windows, down empty hallways; the oblong flowerbeds filled with greyish water and debris, like a shallow grave; a small tree uprooted, the moist earth still glowing, clinging to the roots. A maulvi with an unbelievably pure white beard races toward you on a motorbike, his arms locked into position, his head steadfast, his gaze resolute, and the determined look of a man who sees the end of days...

~~~

Listening to Rachmaninoff's Vespers (Shaw Festival Singers). The pre-reflective naivete that the Russians so love. A knock on the door. Rashid, the secretary (a man with the roundest face you've ever seen). As he speaks to you you rather cruelly divert your attention elsewhere, trying to remember what he says so that you can write this blog! How fucked up is that! I am not kind, but I am true. What use is that, when it was kindness above all that was needed in the age we were living in. You needed an image to keep you going, to reveal something to you, but it didn't come. It was simple, not that complicated after all, but you'd have to painstakingly put it together in your imagination on your own, in the darkness.

"Do you have a minute?" he asks, sheepishly.

"Yeah, sure, what's on your mind?"

"Have you read Dr. Faustus?"

"Goethe, you mean?"

"No, Christopher Marlowe, written in 17__"

"Why do you ask?"

"He proceeds to try and explain something to me, but I don't get it. What's he saying, for Christ's sake? Concentrate. There's probably something to it. That makes you seem a bit mad, like someone looking for signs in tea leaves or something.

"In it there's a line where the devil says 'all these treasures, these women, are for you. You're a Ph.D. (what, did they really have Ph.D's back whenever it was written?), if God's dominion is the whole universe then surely you, with your education are a "little god"'.

"No, haven't read it. But what else do you like?", I ask, hoping he'll clear off soon.

"Oh, mathematics and literature"

This, I think to myself, is going to be a very long conversation and I can't feign interest any more. Keep the Rachmaninoff on and he might leave.

"Anything in particular?"

"A Passage to India and the essays of Lawrence. 'What is sex?' for example."

I can't say that I've read them to be honest and I wonder to myself if Lawrence did in fact write such an essay. Sounds plausible enough, but best to steer away from such discussions. Don't want to end up in a discussion of erotica so early in the morning-at least not with him!

citation: James Salter.

Stealing words, reclaiming others, as if the word was the thing itself or that it could conjure it up. Years have passed by, or so he understood from her eyes. The more he spoke the less he became himself, less sure of what it all meant. He struggled to remember his first words to her, thinking that they might hold the key to some unsolved mystery, just as a cave painting is said to be the prototype of all art.

What was it, he thought to himself. She looked quite primitive herself, and that despite her fierce intellect, or maybe it was because of it. Her jaw slightly protruding, her eyes bright like an ancient fire, murder on her hands, the plain, shining brow...she had a face one could never forget, or settle for.

Of course she was arrogant to the hilt, her lips provincial, full, but slightly cruel, fashioned from years of self-protecting habits, adulation, and other-worldly disdain. There was no equal, and nothing suggested commensurability with anyone else. She took delight in acknowledging this, that each person mistakenly thought he was the centre of her world.

He tried to concentrate, become serious once again, but he couldn't hold his thoughts together. It was like his thoughts were circling in a whirlpool, picking all sorts of random objects, unable to relate one to another in any kind of system. And sometimes he failed to recognize himself in this courtly game, failed to see himself slipping away from the image he held of himself. His breathing betrayed him as he folded and unfolded his hands.

Distinctions! She had said something about distinctions. As if to say: 'you were you, and I was I, and don't you forget it'. Remembering would be a disastrous sign of giving in, so he drew up a list, like a keen child, or a fisherman who marvels when the nets are down and the counting must start...when did it begin, how will it end, this calculus of pain and pleasure?

But she only looked on in a detached manner, looked deeply and darkly into the dark rain, her lips sweetened, the measure of her mind something like the abstractness of the stars, brilliant and telling, her starred heart triumphant, her forehead radiant, her half-moon eyebrows raised in mock indignation, like someone who can afford an excess of emotion, and she whispered quietly and coldly to him,

the years radiating
toward the so-called first days,
toward the so-called last days,
inadequate boundaries
of the heart you hold to.

"I love to see leaves blowing through the headlights. I don't know why. I mean they're just dead leaves , no good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light."

"He crossed the dark hall to the living room where Tony was watching a show. The tube was the only light, shifting and submarine, and with the noise of the rain outside the room seemed like some cavern in the sea."

--John Cheever.

A moral quality to the light: free, independent, clear. Each particular object and person seen as they really are, as a revelation to themselves. The disbandment of hierarchies, the flatlands of the spirit welcomed. The light that holds the moments of a life together, like a memory, and seems true. Remembered off by heart: a face, a city, full of shadows, full of longing. In the clear light of the day we see the pure distances between us, those that were bridged during the darkness of the night and the mind's sleep.

We see eachother at last, with relentless precision, without colour, as a god might see us in fact, each breath, and each detail noted, yet still desirous of a fall...it is as if we had begun with a clean slate, a fresh start, not knowing what to do with the burden of the past. This light, what is it that grows so darkly within?

In Turner, there is a line, a line in which all opposites are reconciled.

..A sense of immersion in nature (Monet), a loss of identity, which heightens one's sense of being.

from K. Clark's Civilisation.

What is this loss, where one finds oneself, finds alone a sense of self to keep from the mirrors? Like colour, a pure sensation but also an order of the soul. Is the daily accumulation of it prefigured in our sleeping? Our absencing of ourselves, from ourselves? Taking leave. As if reality was too much for one, and not enough at the same time. In your dreams you can be anybody; and in your sleep you can be nobody.

This line, this line was once marked by shamans in caves; the porous border which allowed the spirit to escape, which allowed others to arrive. Art, as a way out, and not just a symbol of it to the mind.

And yet something in you recoils at this thought, anything approaching an ocenaic feeling; something pulls you back to the familiar world of dead routines, commitments, attachments: not Tillich's 'all truth is on the boundaries' or general Kashmiri laziness, but Ubo's simple and instinctive pragmatism: better to be late in this world than early in the next. And you don't have a mystical bone in you anyway! Reconciliation? Nah, too Jewish for that!

But the broken circles of our lives, like chains of light, glinting in the summer rain.

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint.
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.
---Mir Dard.

-----

Does comedy in a novel take something away from it? A book that is genuinely funny: Spike, of course! Had you in splits. But Lorrie Moore, for instance. Jesus! Is this a woman thing? No, Cheever, for all his stylistic brilliance, is beginning to grate on your nerves with the slapstick.

Of course, the extremist isn't one thing. You can't even imagine what goes through his mind, which is precisely why you have to draw up this caricature.

The fundamentalist, like the economist, is a reductionist, paring down the whole complex of multiple and often conflicting desires and values down to the simplest of motivations, the elemental springs of action. He is also like the economist in that he has infinite wants and limited resources or, to put it another way, one want that he imagines can be satisfied infinitely.

The fundamentalist is unable to love in the proper way. The object of his love becomes an object, separate from life, something to be preserved in its pristine state against the corroding effects of time. And because he cannot bear the thought of losing his attachment to the object of his love, or losing himself -and these amount to the same thing- he must, like a doomed lover, hold onto the object, not lose control. He -and it is always a he-must destroy all that threatens this relation, or destroy himself.

Conservatism, fundamentalism, extremism, fanaticism. Is there a continuity between them, an inevitable transition from one to the other? Obviously not: many people remain deeply conservative, drawn to some sort of tradition, finding solace in continuities, order, hierarchies, and resistances to the flux in their lives engendered by capitalism, immigration, social 'atomisation'. And yet they still remain fairly 'decent people' (Rawls?). More to the point: who doesn't become conservative as time passes?

Of course, these terms are loaded: other people's beliefs are often viewed as being extreme (Hey, you're a Muslim, aren't you? Aren't your lot against women/jews/the west?). Not everyone can be C of E, and why would a religious person think that following the fundamentals of his or her faith is anything but normal? It's a great put down to say that other people are full of hatred, bitterness-and one way of avoiding looking at one's own excesses.

But this isn't about just religion, is it? The Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps. What is that, but excessive violence (is there a normal amount of violence?). And can't you be excessively in love (with cinnamon rolls, say?). Is there a 'proper' love of the world, or endless lust? Madness, desire, and the need to contain it, circumscribe it: lawlines, cosmos, and civilisation, fighting the chaos in the human heart, the unmoored imagination. At the social level: bourgeois society must be protected from the marginal man, the steppenwolf, the lumpenproletariat.

But when did it begin?

Aren't we transgressive creatures by nature? Our nature to escape ourselves?The Fall, a mark of freedom, not sin? And who but a god decides what is excessive? (That seems too extreme: as if to say: the judgements of human societies and rationality count for nothing).

But on second thoughts, isn't it the deities themselves that are excessive and isn't the plural itself excessive? Excessive in their loving, in their need for devotion (the 'jealous God'), in their punitiveness? And does that inspire an excessive confidence in the believers or is it the other way round: is our excessive confidence in ourselves projected on to our ideal version of ourselves? In which case, maybe we're not really confident of ourselves...

Old Jewish proverb: if a man is right 70% of the time that's very good; 85%? That's excellent. 100% , then? Then shoot him!

'Religious' people invariably think they know it all. This isn't a particularly modern aversion to 'knowing'..after all, there are many traditions that focus on our unknowingness and a sense of humility, on seeing through a glass darkly.

Religious beliefs legitimate and contain our excesses.

1. Transference. It's wrong to say that we create gods in our own image, but who could deny that certain styles of religious thought-or 'imagery', in the broadest sense of the term-appeal to us in certain way because of our temperament? The idea of perfection haunts us.

2. Without the divine we feel uncontained. If God is dead, everything is permitted. We find ourselves too complex for ourselves and therefore need single-minded devotion to something:the Party, the family, tribe, or deity. The 'emperor of one idea' (Wallace Stevens). Compare this to the diabolic.

In the Garden there was the Law and there was knowledge. Or was it: there was knowledge and there was life, and you can't have both? What is the one thing necessary? Or is it that we imagine ourselves complex, and find it deeply satisfying to 'come home', as it were, to some simple reductionist view of ourselves when all along that's what we really were: simple, mundane creatures, lacking, for the most part, imagination or creativity?

If excess is the problem, how are the excesses of religion a solution?

1. Stifle excessive doubt. To ward off 'despair, confusion, emptiness'. Through repetitiveness and a relentless insistence on one's position, one can at least convince oneself that there's some meaning to it.

2. No man is an island. The extremist wants to become 'visible', be someone (even as he becomes another statistic in the catalogue of nihilistic violence); he wants to be noticed, for people to sit up and take notice of him-or at least his views/religion. Not to be messed with. Some sort of recognition (is this different in degree or kind from the person who suffers a loss of identity?). A man of influence: people will sit up and listen. And the 'event' has to be extreme to startle people from their lazy dreams of contentment.

[Of course, as others have commented: is there a sexual element in all this?Don't fuck with me. Purity and danger].

3. Life is full of too much injustice (personal and political). Extremism is an extreme way of coming to terms with the frustration that follows from the recognition that the world isn't the way you want it to be: the final solution. The extremist can't wait, or can't see a way out. Bring it on. This is his moment.

Excess as a sign of our poverty.

All this is highly speculative by Adam Phillips. Psychologically plausible, you'd like to think, but where's the sociological flesh and bones?

Nick Cave Nobody's Baby Now by Saklas

He never shows himself by light.
His form is blurred.
---William Bronk.

The wintered mind, the withered gaze; hands, shaped by regret- or something else, you can't tell any more-remain unclenched; the heart that withholds much...a name, without title, belonging to nobody. A darkened face, the lights dimmed, the low-blue flame sheltered; rooms kept bare like an empty lean grave, the bed unmade, books cold as stone, stillness held, shadowed soul, the locked mirrors of your eyes, the stopped clocks spilling time into silence, unanswered questions, bleak skills, these: silver inheriting the black, words unspoken, windows left open to the night...all this so that when raven alights, she will feel at home, feed on my flesh, and die without knowing it.

Life is not a walk across an open field.
---Russian proverb.

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
---John Berger.

A strange co-incidence. I wrote some words in my 'Leonardo' notebook, and then opened Roxana's blog to see that she had written something on the same topic (roughly) as well! Bizarre! The great difference being, of course, that I just wrote whatever nonsense came to my mind whilst I was silently walking across the lawn early this morning, as if the words were part of an unfinished dream.

Crow, shining darkly. Black glistens as much as white, if you let it. The earth had heated up so that by 7 o'clock in the morning the heat and light was everywhere; it surrounded you, piled up like stacks of unread books, bounced off chipped floor tiles, streamed past opaque windows, gleamed off polished cars like a film, and all the time your mind slowed down, narrowed to a single thought. The warmth had opened up everything, unexpectedly, like the sudden expansive swerve of a road. Opened up and exposed to a harshness-a kind of penitence-that revealed each thing for what it was, as if it existed in that moment only, without weight or shadow. He thought he'd fall; he couldn't take much more of himself.

If you could walk through a field without any thoughts time would be abolished; if you could walk through a field noticing every disturbance, every event and season, if you could register every rare green, startled knotted brown, know its proportions, even then you would know nothing of your life, or of hers.

In Lahore one used to see animals all the time: horse-draw carts, stray dogs, donkeys pulling impossibly large loads of wood or hay behind them if they weren't tethered to a wooden pole, as if waiting for something or someone, with an infinite patience and the saddest eyes imaginable, and on the odd occasion there'd even be the dancing bear. Most of the time, this was all very cruel and needless. Goes without saying (as with much else). But now...

Now, with the expansion of the city, the relentless extension of roads, and the creation of a uniquely ugly urban sprawl, the animals have receded to the background-both physically and in the mind's eye. What remains? Only the caged animals, and memories of power, freedom, danger (Pets, after all, grow to be human...and how you detest the next logical step: the digitalisation or virtualisation of animals with those silly Japanese electronic pets).

Animals, not even beasts any more; the irrational, formerly contrasted with our supposed rationality; not even the dark side of our humanity, but utterly tamed and humanzied...nature as a socialized product, made a raw material for consumption-our food, leisure or entertainment. The natural and the mythical have been destroyed, canceled. And one can't but help wonder if something of our own origin is lost in the process...

What remains? Crow, dark crow, looking down ominously, feeding off what we've killed, surviving amongst the debris (and he is in this sense,therefore, our closest cousin).But even when all is exhausted, seemingly lost, when all has been said and done, maybe a spark remains, since now and then the human being calls to another human being in the dark, and gives her the names of the animals.

(the ideas were borrowed from john berger's wonderful, elegiac essay, Why Look at Animals).

Set the clock, so that you can go on time. The small departures, the small hours. Fastidious, when it comes down to it, to the details of how not to live.

We see everything by memory.
---David Hockney

To think, to see, is to forget. Borges, perhaps. You think. You forget. You.

What time there was, was given, clunking into place like a lock. The key?

The only things in life that are important are those you remember. That was the key...pure recall.
---James Salter.

Fragments accumulate, turn, are noted, marked down. The variable key, held loosely. Your hands growing dark with time. Lord, forgive me.

The dusk sunlight, bright on white walls, its brilliance late, but finely attuned to its task of making things fade from sight. We stand there stunned, our distance from one another perfectly measured, as if in Hell, and I've forgotten what I wanted to say. But the mind is still, in the quiet reverie of lost time and things. Find the shade, for now. In time, I'm told, everything can be fixed, brought back to its former shape.

For the long-time sufferers on this blog, something different, a bit more personal ("oh no", I hear you say, "we couldn't take the impersonal crap and now he offloads us with this!").

Phone call in mid-afternoon, just after the suicide hour. The Colonel's got his army of men ready, can I make it through the searing heat back to my old home, 110-A.

The house itself is falling to pieces; the walls are crumbling in many places and the paint rubs off in your hand like chalk powder. Most of the lights are broken or missing, loose wires dangling down like the spilled guts of a rabbit. The grass is scorched brown, rustles like the hairs of a brush. Only the thistle-like flowers show any sense of life in their sparkiness. Oranges, reds, crimsons. How to survive in the wilderness. Other, smaller flowers seemed to have 'frozen' in the heat, petrified, and are now an eerie cobalt-blue fist of stone. A few sparrows hop and dance, as if this was a graveyard.

Up, high above, eleven crows look down ominously, the very picture of death. The window frames have mostly rusted away and some of the windows have been smashed. Ants, with an inner sense of the final days, move in in their thousands. In the driveway petals, pink and white, have fallen to the ground and lie around in neat heaps, mixing with the fresh green leaves that have also fallen. Looks like that type of crap potpourri stuff that women are very fond of. Two leaflets for 'Supreme Pizza, Home Delivery' have made their way inside as well. By the main gate a crippled dog walks past us gingerly (Don't know why, but nearly all the dogs in Canal View are cripples).

The main gate creaks like a ship and the windowpanes in the doors inside seem to have misted up at the edges. In the lounge a cockroach lies on its back, its legs already eaten away..the husk of a being. Oh well, if you're going to get screwed, lie back and think of England.

The electrician is keen and pleasant. But the carpenter,..now there's a different breed for you. One quick look and he walks out, perspiring profusely. Dark skinned, thick-skinned.He sits on the lawn, as if he's overwhelmed by the scale of the task in front of him. He looks tired, beaten down by a hard life, what life's had in store for him...like a fisherman who's seen too many people die...either that, or he's just got a case of righteous contempt-and who could blame him-for someone with a house this size. Talal phones in-between: K.Clark's Civilisation has been downloaded. Well, that's a relief.

I visit each room, now hollow, dilapidated-but once full of life and chatter- and try to recall something noteworthy. My last memory in my own room: good friends gathered before I left for my Ph.D. How many years ago was that now? A house without mirrors isn't really a house. The Dougal, her room overflowing with books, now bare, as if the Taleban had raided. The back lawn, still in decent shape, but the lemon tree sadly missing.

This house barely survives, but survive it does. Like so much else here on the black sun, it has silently forgotten about redemption, and itself has been forgotten in the passing of many moons and suns.

The swami would say: if one door is closed then a thousand are opened for you. It's a terrible thing, that. Believing in something that's been handed down in your family for God knows how long, with charming innocence, and then finding, all of a sudden, you don't really believe in it. Not a question of faith; just that experience, life, gets in the way, alters the path.

For some, you guess, it's true. Maybe one in a thousand. If the moon doesn't shine on you, is it still the moon?

'Light from without would slowly reveal the light within...the white as a denser substance-some ghostly reminder of another place in which Rothko once said he could breathe and stretch his arms.'

Was thinking to myself (who else is there?), why does the word 'dark' crop up so much in your writing? I guess you need Camus's southern light, Nietzsche in Turin and all that. What is it, for Christ's sake, the moral quality of light, the traveling acres of sunlight. The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.I imagine a certain girl, who's probably a vampire in all truth, who craves my darkness in her, who couldn't give a fuck about the light.

"The morning light is gold, and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined."

~~~

Yesterday, out of the blue (F)ariel popped up-after seven or eight years...I forget. How fitting, since she got me started on this blasted thing in the first place, and now a special guest appearance on the 1,000th. Last time I saw her she was a bright-eyed girl, looking to write short stories, or something like that.

Your mind drifts: short stories and fragments: is that all that is open to us in these late days?

Horses

"Here's another story.It tells how the Sun falls in love.
But before that, we hear how his light sees everything first:
in this case, brightening the bed where A__ lies.

She makes him fall in love...
He turns up in disguise, then discloses himself to her-you know?And so
overwhelmed by his radiance, ..she gives in. As you would.
But there's another girl, who also loves the Sun.

The other girl-the jealous one-
is changed into a tiny flower,..
turns her face forever, following the Sun."

The queen, not happy with that, demands another story...

At the pool, she's eaten up by desire and tries
to kiss him, but he's still too young to understand.
She retreats, watching him slip off his clothes and dive in.
Besides herself, she plunges after him, pulling
him under, taking him by force, and praying
to the gods that their bodies will never be parted
And so it was, like two trees grafted,
they were made one."

But the mythological is too superficial, has too much lightness. The Queen wanted to hear something real-just for once, even if they weren't his own words.

'The green leaf opens
and the leaf falls,

each breath is a flame
that gives in to fire

and grief is the price
we pay for love,

and the death of love
the fee of all desire.'

The light, whether we know it or not, never unifies in these late days; instead, it breaks and mourns, and wrecks whatever has a chance. The summer light rides the high tree tops like a horse, a dream that won't settle, but knows nothing of the dark time of the roots. And this southern light, which wasn't meant for me, became my fate. I think I'll die under it.

This place would be nowhere if you were here. Hard, hard though it is for you, you know gently: there's no return of lost time. If there was, we would be dark for one another.

Clear of myself, at last, I saw you, but you, like me, were riddled with light. We, who were made one by the gods, were parted, like two trees, or like the fish and the sea.

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

PJ

If england were to die, what of it? Neither the walls of Lahore, nor the deserts of Arabia; neither Greek nor Jew. There is no place for the way I feel. But I thought I saw you, raven of my heart, feeding off my dead thoughts, so that I wouldn't remember anything, except for you.

This stored pattern of connections that never included you, though your presence haunted them all, and was maybe even prefigured in the slip of tongue, the faltering voice. There's no betrayal like the human voice. The shadowy underside of the mirror, the darkening hour in the glass. If this was england, then let england break.

My heart, on the move again, to a place I know or once knew. You can tell it's going to move before it moves.What gives? It waited, it waited blackly, it waited all this time for her, not a second longer than her arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia.

---quotes from Paula Fox, Richard Ford, and Denis Johnson.

(Apologies to those who left a comment on the previous post. For some odd reason they've disappeared. Quite fitting, I guess. Nothing lasts here.)

Like everything else I do, haphazardly, between the acts, half-heartedly.
Repetitively. A certain chef speaking at a dinner table would always talk about a colleague as Chef so-and-so, thereby drawing attention to himself.

Your hand reaches out languidly for something to write with. Your arm dangling like a dead man's. The crows are awake and seemingly goading me in the half-dark. No pen or pencil to be found, only the jumbled up wires of an i-pod. Try to remember the colours: a red pen seen somewhere, a blue one...Sleep-walk through various rooms, deeper and deeper. Come back, write in the dark so as to not wake anyone.

In a dream, the last one, though repeated because by a superhuman effort I thwart it so that it ends before the subconscious mechanism has played out its part, I hear music blaring away from the radio downstairs. On the stairs I try to call out your name. May God protect us. But my words are stifled, my dry rasping voice of no use. I wake. My mouth is parched, and lips chapped. Too many walnuts the day before or some more general failure? In and out of sleep until I wake, startled, bemused.

My eyes are blurred as they try to focus, pick out some familiar object. The mind struggling to give shape to anything. You remember some basic dimension: 1X1X1.2. Is it morning yet? The call to prayer must have washed over me.

Put the pen down. Crow is silent. Crow is dead. Your hand reaches down and disappears, as if into some dense fog, misplacing the pen again. You look up at the window, the light appreciably better now, less thick, bettering. There's a kind of solace to be had in the fact that the stars are burnt out, have passed through you.

The first thing you see clearly is the wall clock, hanging lifelessly, slightly askew. Of fist importance, you think to yourself: determine the time. Is it four or five? Please God, let it be five. And if God wills it, then it will be so. Oriental hat, and all that.

Put your head down again like a schoolkid in the late afternoon, moments before the day is done ("heads on desk"). The warmth of one's own body, something quite simple. You were young. There R lies, in her red shalwar kameez, gloriously care-free, out like a drunk. During the day she struggles to say "how are you?" Is there anything else?

You walk across the lawn, past the empty library, stunned, dazed by too much sun. You're conscious of the small steps your feet are taking, as if on their own, shuffling steps like those of a Chinaman. The piece of paper you hold, like a mouse's tail, with forefinger and thumb, falls to the ground. Clutch at it, as if it mattered, as if the writing of the day's beginning would steer how the rest of time would unfold. Random words thrown against the chaos. What else could there be from the one with the falsely designated title, 'black sun'?