Light Extracts

"When I open my wallet

to show my papers

pay money

or check the time of a train

I look at your face.

The flower’s pollen

is older than the mountains

Aravis is young

as mountains go

The flower’s ovules

will be seeding still

when Aravis then aged

is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart’s

wallet, the force

of what lives us

outliving the mountain.

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos."

Page 5

"In reality we are always between two times: that of the body and that of consciousness. Hence the distinction made in all other culture between body and soul. The soul is first and above all, the locus of another time."

Page 10

"Sometimes, I’d like to write a book

A book about time

About how it doesn’t exist,

How the past and the future

Are one continuous present.

I think that all the people – those living,

those who have lived

And those who are still to live – are alive now.

I should like to take that subject to pieces,

Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.

Wrote Yevgeny Vinokurov.”

Page 21

"Paintings are static. The uniqueness of the experience of looking at a painting repeatedly – over a period of days or years – is that, in the midst of flux, the image remains changeless. Of course the significance of the image may change, as a result of either historical or personal events, but what is depicted is unchanging: the same milk flowing from the same unbroken, the smile and the face which have not altered.

One might be tempted to stay that paintings preserve a moment. Yet on reflection this is obviously untrue. For the moment of a painting, unlike a moment photographed, never existed as such. And so a painting cannot be said to preserve it.

In early Renaissance art, in paintings from non-European cultures, in certain modern works, the image implies a passage of time. Looking at it, the spectator sees Before, During, and After. The Chinese sage takes a walk from one tree to another, the carriage runs over the child, the nude descends the staircase. Yet the ensuing images are still static whilst referring to the dynamic world beyond their edges, and this poses the problem of what is the meaning of that strange contrast between static and dynamic. Strange because it is both so flagrant and so taken for granted.”

Pages 25-26

“Yet why is the still imagery of painting so compelling? What prevents painting being patently inadequate – just because it is static?

To say that paintings prophesy the experience of their being looked at does not really answer the question. Such prophecies assume a continuing interest in the static image. Why, at least until recently, was such an assumption justified? The conventional answer is that, because painting is static, it has the power to establish a visually “palpable” harmony. Only something which is still can be simultaneously composed and therefore so complete.

A musical composition, since it uses time, is obliged to have a beginning and an end. A painting only has a beginning and an end insofar as it is a physical object: within its imagery there is neither beginning nor end. This is what makes possible pictorial composition, harmony, form.

The terms of the explanation seem to me to be both too restrictive and too aesthetic. There has to be a virtue in that flagrant contrast: the contrast between the unchanging painted form and the dynamic living model.

Could it not be that the stillness of the painted image speaks of timelessness? The fact that painting are prophecies of themselves being looked at has nothing to do with the perspective of modern avant-gardism, whereby the future is always vindicating the misunderstood prophet. What the past, the present, and the future share is a substratum, a ground of timelessness.”

Pages 27-28

“This small corner of the landscape – which I had never particularly noticed before – caught my eye and pleased me. Pleased me like a particular face one may see passing in the street, unknown, even unremarkable, but for some reason pleasing because of what it suggests of a life being lived.”

“The three pear trees looked different. The articulation of every branch had become apparent, I could see how each leaf moved. (All afternoon the north and south winds were contesting one another in gentle, brief breezes, scarcely longer than a breath.) The ground under the pear trees had changed.

Until I met you, I would have been unable to name the transformation that was taking place. Today, at my late age, I name it – the fusion of love.

Everything was shifting. The three pear trees, their hillock, the other side of the valley, the harvested fields, the forests. The mountains were higher, every tree and field nearer. Everything visible approached me. Rather, everything approached the place where I had been, for I was no longer in that place. I was everywhere, as much in the forest across the valley as in the dead pear tree, as much on the face of the mountain as in the field where I was ranking hay.”

Page 29

“ONCE THROUGH A LENS

Suppose a character, in one of the stories you and I write, tried to conceive of his origin, and tried to foresee beyond what he knows of his destiny at any given point of the story. His enquiries, his speculations, would lead him to hypotheses (infinity chance, indeterminacy, free will, curved space and time…) very similar to those at which thinkers arrive when speculating about the universe.

This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous.

The notion that life, as lived, is a story being told is a recurring one. Rationalism rejected this notion by proposing that the laws of nature were ineluctably mechanical. Most recent scientific research tends to suggest that the natural working of the processes of the universe resemble those of a brain rather than a machine. To think of such a “brain” as a narrator – although many scientists would protest that the thought was to anthropomorphic – has again become feasible. The metaphysics of storytelling has ceased to be a merely literary concern.

What separates us from the characters about whom we write is not knowledge, either objective or subjective, but their experience of time in the story we are telling. This separation allows us, the storytellers, the power of knowing the whole. Yet, equally this separation renders us powerless: we cannot control our characters, after the narration has begun. We are obliged to follow them, and this following is through and across the time, which they are living and which we oversee.

The time, and therefore the story, belongs to them. Yet the meaning of the story, what makes it worthy of being told, is what we can see and what inspires us because we are beyond its time.

Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through as lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless.

If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.”

Pages 30-31

“Despite clocks and the regular turning of the earth, time is experienced as passing at different rates. This impression is generally dismissed as subjective, because time, according to the nineteenth-century view, is objective, incontestable, and indifferent; to its indifference there are no limits.

Yet perhaps our experience should not be dismissed so quickly. Supposing one accepts the clocks; time does not slow down or accelerate. But time appears to pass at different rates because our experience of its passing involves not a single but two dynamic processes which are opposed to each other: as accumulation and dissipation.

The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the accumulation of experience. This is why the moment is lived as longer. The dissipation of the time-flow is checked. The lived durée is not a question of length but of depth or density. Proust understood this.

Yet it is not only a cultural truth. A natural equivalent to the periodic increase of the density of lived time can be found in those days of alternating sun and rain, in the spring or early summer, when plants grow, almost visibly, several millimetres or centimetres a day. Those hours of spectacular growth and accumulation are incommensurate with the winter hours when the seed lies inert in the earth.

The content of time, that which time carries, seems to entail another dimension. Whether one calls this dimension the fourth, the fifth, or even (in relation to time) the third, is unimportant, and only depends upon the space/time model one is using. What matters is that this dimension is intractable to the regular, uniform flow of time. There may be a sense of which time does not sweep all before it. To assert that it did was a specifically nineteenth-century article of faith.”

Pages 35-36

“To measure modern astronomic distances, one uses as a unit that distance which light will travel in one year. The magnitude of these distances, the degree of separation which they imply, seem almost boundless; the magnitude and the degree escape everything except pure calculation and even this calculation has the quality of an explosion. Yet, hidden within the conceptual system that allows man to measure and conceive of such boundlessness is the cyclic and local unit of the year, a unit which can be recognized because of its permanency, its repetition, and its local consistency. The calculation returns from the astronomic to the local, like a prodigal son.

This weakness of the mind, this homesickness which cannot or will not altogether abandon the here-and-now, can be interpreted in two ways. It can be seen as the revealing weakness which proves how lost and impotent man is in the universe; or it can be seen as the vestige, preserved by the structure of the human mind, of the original truth.”

“God abandons life, to inhabit the eternal domain of death. No longer present within the cycles of time, no longer the hub of these cycles, he becomes an absent, waiting presence. All the calculations underline how long he has already waited or will wait. The proofs of his existence cease to be the morning, the returning season, the newborn; instead they become the “eternity” of heaven and hell and the finality of the last judgment. Man now becomes condemned to time, which is no longer a condition of life and therefore something sacred, but the inhuman principle which spares nothing. Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment.

Henceforth only somebody reprieved from a death sentence can imagine time as a gift. And Pascal’s famous wager – God may not exist, we may be lost, but supposing he does exist . . . – is a stratagem for imposing this death sentence and then hoping for a reprieve.”

Pages 37-38

“Today, in the West, as the culture of capitalism abandons its claim to be a culture and becomes nothing more than an Instant-Practice, the force of time is pictured as the supreme and unopposed annihilator. The planet Earth and the universe are running down. Disorder increases with every time unit that passes. The final state of maximum entropy, where there will be no activity at all, is termed heat-death.

Pages 38-39

“The force of sexuality is forever unfinished, is never completed. Or, rather, it finishes only to re-begin, as if for the first time.

Differently, the ideal of love is to contain all. “Here I understand”, wrote Camus, “what they call glory: the right to love without limits” This limitlessness is not passive, for the totality which love continually reclaims is precisely the totality which time appears to fragment and hide. Love is a reconstitution in the heart of that holding which is Being.”

Page 41

“The visible bring the world to us. But at the same time it reminds us ceaselessly that is it a world in which we risk to be lost. The visible with its space also takes the world away from us. Nothing is more two-faced.

The visible implies an eye. It is the stuff of the relation between seen and seer. Yet the seer, when human, is conscious of what his eye cannot and will never see because of time and distance. The visible both includes him (because the sees) and excludes him (because he is not omnipresent). The visible consists for him of the seen which, even when it is threatening, confirms his existence, and of the unseen which defies the existence. The desire to have seen – the ocean, the desert, the aurora borealis – has a deep ontological basis.

To this human ambiguity of the visible one then has to see what we saw. We face disappearance. And a struggle ensues to prevent what has disappeared, what has become invisible, falling into the negotiation of the unseen, defying our existence. Thus, the visible produces faith in the reality of the invisible and provokes the development of an inner eye which retains and assembles and arranges, as if in an interior, as if what has been seen may be forever partly protected against the ambush of space, which is absence.

Both life itself and the visible owe their existence to light.”

Page 50

“The first thing God created was light. After every subsequent act of creation, the light allowed him to see that what he had created was good. At the end of the sixth day he saw everything that he had mad and, behold, it was very good.”

Page 51

“The walls of the house are thick, for the winters are cold. On the window embrasure, close to the windowpanes, hangs a shaving mirror. As I look up now, I see reflected in the mirror a spring of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near that the petals look like the pores of a skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the far side of the lilac, the side fully lit by the last light of the sun. Every evening my love for you is placed like that mirror.”

“’Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere.’ – Novalis. The transition from a nomadic life to a settled one is said to mark the beginning of what was later called civilization. Soon all those who survived outside the city began to be considered uncivilized. But that is another story – to be told in the hills near the wolves.

Page 54

“The term home (Old Norse Heimr, High German heim, Greek komi, meaning ‘village’) has, since a long time, been taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear to those who wield power. The notion of home became the keystone for a cod of domestic morality, safeguarding the property (which included the women) of the family. Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied a first article of faith for patriotism, persuading men to die in wars which often served no other interest except that of a minority of their ruling class. Both usages have hidden the original meaning. Originally home meant the centre of the world – not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, “at the heart of the real.” In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelter less, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation. Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The wards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. The crossing of the two lines, the reassurance their intersection promises, was probably already there, in embryo, in the thinking and beliefs of nomadic people, but they carried the vertical line with them, as they might carry a tent pole. Perhaps at the end of this century of unprecedented transportation, vestiges of the reassurance still remain in the unarticulated feelings of many millions of displaced people. Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and at its most extreme abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd. Emigration, when it is not enforced at gunpoint, may of course be prompted by hope as well as desperation. For example, to the peasant son the father’s traditional authority may seem more oppressively absurd than any chaos. The poverty of the village may appear more absurd than the crimes of the metropolis. To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen. All this can be true. But to emigrate into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.”

Village

“I tell you

All houses

Are holes in an arse of stone

We eat off coffin lids

Between evening star

And milk in a bucket

Is nothing

The churn is emptied

Twice a day

Cast us

Steaming

On the fields.”

Page 55-58

Earth

The purple scalp of the earth

Combed in autumn

And times of famine

The metal bones of the earth extracted by hand

The church above the earth

Arms of our clock crucified.

All is taken.

Page 58

Metropolis

The edge of moonlight

Sharp

Like the level

Of water in a canal

And the locks of reason

At dawn

When the level of the dark

Is bought down

To that of the light

Accept the dark

Massed black

Zone of blindness

Accept it eyes

But here the dark

Has been stolen in a sack

Weighted down with a pebble

And drowned

There is no longer any dark.

Page 59

“The ‘substitute’ home has little to do with a building. The roof over the head, the four walls, have become, as it were, secular: independent from whatever is kept in the heart and is sacred. Such secularization is the direct consequence of economic and social conditions: tenancy, poverty, overcrowding, city planning, property speculation. But ultimately it is the consequence of a lack of choice. Without a history of choice no dwelling can be a home. With the traditional dwelling which was a home, the choice may have been ancestral, even beyond living memory, but every act of maintenance or improvement acknowledged and repeated the first choice, which was not one of taste but of insight, in having chosen a place where the two life lines crossed. The choices open to women and men today – even the past, but what has been lost irretrievably is the choice of saying: this is the center of the world. Nevertheless, by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Build of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter. The habits imply words, jokes, opinions, gestures, actions, even the way one wears a hat. Physical objects and particular bar, a street corner – supply the scene, the site of the habit, yet it is not they but the habit which protects. The mortar which holds the improvised ‘home’ together – even toes are arranged – photos, trophies, souvenirs- but the roof and four walls which safeguard the lives within, these invisible, intangible, and biographical. To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice or set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived. At its most brutal, home is no more than one’s name – whilst to most people one is nameless.”

Page 63-64

“The sky is blue black

Starlings unfold their wings

Quit their pediments

To write a letter

Returned.

The setting sun

Fills teeth with gold.

Like a shred of meat

I’m lodged in this town.”

“The experience of newly arrived immigrants is different from that of a long established, ‘indigenous’ proletariat or sub-proletariat. Yet the displacement, the homelessness, the abandonment lived by a migrant is the extreme form of a more general and widespread experience. The term ‘alienation’ confesses all. (It would even be possible to talk of the ‘homelessness’ of the bourgeois with his town house, his country house, this three cars, his several televisions, his tennis court, his wine cellar – it would be just possible, yet nothing about his class now interests me, for there is nothing left to discover there for the future.) After the migrant leaves home, he never finds another place where the two life lines cross. The vertical line exists no more; there is no longer any local continuity between him and the dead, the dead now simply disappear, and the gods have become inaccessible. The vertical line has been twisted into the individual biographical circle which leads nowhere but only encloses. As the horizontal lines, because there are no longer any fixed points as bearings, they are elided into a plain of pure distance, across which everything is swept.”

Pages 65-66

“The other expectation is historical. Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration. It is equally impossible to return to that historical state in which every village was the centre of the world. The one hope of recreating a centre now is to make it the entire earth. Only worldwide solidarity can transcend modern homelessness. Fraternity is too easy a term; forgetting Cain and Abel, it somehow promises that all problems can be soluble. In reality many are insoluble – hence the never-ending need for solidarity. Today, as soon as very early childhood is over, the house can never again be home, as it was in other epochs. This century, for all its wealth and with all its communication systems, is the century of banishment. Eventually perhaps the promise, of which Marx was the great prophet, will be fulfilled, and then the substitute for the shelter of a home will not just be our personal names, but our collective conscious presence in history, and we will live again at the heart of the real. Despite everything, I can imagine it.”

Page 67

“Human happiness is rare. There are no happy periods, only happy moments. But happiness is precisely a generalized pleasure. And the state of happiness can be defined by an equation whereby, at that moment, the gift of one’s wellbeing equals the gift of the existent. Without a surplus of pleasure over and above functional gratification, such wellbeing could not exist. Aesthetic experience is the purest expression of this equation.”

Page 70

“For an animal its natural environment and habitat are a given; for man – despite the faith of the empiricists – reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held – I am tempted to say salvaged. One is taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second distant, far away. This opposition is false. Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events – which is what one means by reality – is an imaginative construction. Reality always lies beyond – and this is as true for materialists as for idealists. For Plato, for Marx. Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés.”

Page 72

“All modern artists have thought of their innovations as offering a closer approach to reality, as a way of making reality more evident. It is here, and only here, that the modern artist and revolutionary have sometimes found themselves side by side, both inspired by the idea of pulling down the screen of clichés, clichés which have increasingly become unprecedentedly trivial and egotistical. Yet many such artists have reduced what they found beyond the screen, to suit their own talent and social position as artists. When this has happened they have justified themselves with one of the dozen variants of the theory of art for art’s sake. They say: Reality is art. They hope to extract an artistic profit from reality. Of no one is this less true than Van Gogh.”

“One knows from his letters how intensely he was aware of the screen. His whole life story is one of an endless yearning for reality. Colors, the Mediterranean climate, the sun, were for him vehicles going towards this reality; they were never objects of longing in themselves. This yearning was intensified by the crisis he suffered when he felt that he was failing to salvage any reality at all. Whether these crises are today diagnosed as being schizophrenic or epileptic, changes nothing; their content, as distinct from their pathology, was a vision of reality consuming itself like a phoenix. One also knows from his letters that nothing appended more sacred to him than work. He saw the physical reality of labor as being, simultaneously, a necessity, an injustice, and the essence of humanity throughout history. The artist’s creative act was for him only one among many such acts. He believed that reality could best be approached through work, precisely because reality itself was a form of production. His paintings speak of this more clearly than do words.”

Page 73

“And his compulsion? It was to bring the two acts of production – that of the canvas and that of the reality depicted – every closer and closer. This compulsion derived not from an idea about art – this is why it never occurred to him to profit from reality - but from an overwhelming feeling of empathy. “I admire the bull, the eagle, and man with such an intense adoration, that it will certainly prevent me from ever becoming an ambitious person.”

Page 75

Caravaggio

“He does not depict the underworld for others: his vision is one that he shares with it.

“Caravaggio is listed as a forerunner of the light and shade later used by Rembrandt and others.”

“His chiaroscuro allowed him to banish daylight. Shadows, he felt, offered shelter as can four walls and a roof. Whatever and wherever he painted he really painted interiors. Sometimes – for the Flight into Egypt or one of his beloved John the Baptists – he was obliged to include a landscape in the background. But these landscapes are like rugs or drapes hung up on a line across an inner courtyard. He only felt at home – no, that he felt nowhere – he only felt relatively at ease inside.”

Page 80

“Those who live precariously and are habitually crowded together develop a phobia about open spaces which transforms their frustrating lack of space and privacy into something reassuring. He shared those fears.”

“The calling of St. Mathew depicts five men sitting round their usual table, telling stories, gossiping, boasting of what one day they will do, counting money. The room is dimly lit. Suddenly the door is flung open. The two figures who enter are still part of the violent noise and light of the invasion. (Berenson wrote that Christ, who is one of the figures, comes in like a police inspector to make an arrest.) Two of Matthew’s colleagues refuse to look up, the other two younger ones stare at the strangers with a mixture of curiously and condescension. Why is he proposing something so mad? Who’s protecting him, the thin one who does all the talking? And Matthew, the tax- collector with a shifty conscience which has made him more unreasonable than most of his colleagues, points at himself and asks: it is really I who must go? Is it really I who must follow you? How many thousands of decisions to leave have resembled Christ’s hand here! The hand is held out towards the one who has to decide, yet it is ungraspable because so fluid. It orders the way, yet offers no direct support. Matthew will get up and follow the stranger from the room, down the narrow streets, out of the district. He will write his gospel, he will travel to Ethiopia and the south Caspian and Persia. Probably he will be murdered. And behind the drama of this moment of decision in the room at the top of the stairs, there is a window giving onto the outside world. Traditionally in painting, windows were treated either as sources of light or as frames of framing nature or framing an exemplary event outside. Not so this window. No light enters by it. The window is opaque. We see nothing Mercifully we see nothing because what is outside is bound to be threatening. It is a window through which only the worst news can come.”

Page 82

“Before the railways were built, what took the place of stations in people’s dreams? Perhaps cliffs or wells or a black smith’s forge? Like a tram or a bus this question is a way of approaching the railway station. Of all nineteenth-century buildings, the mainline railway station was the one in which the ancient sense of destiny was most fully re-inserted. Stock exchanges, banks, hotels, theatres, courts were built as pretences, or, to put it another way, they were already dreams. The railway station – whatever the extravagances of its ‘decorative’ architecture – remained stark. And it remained so because it was a site of arrival and departure, where there was nothing to muffle the significance of those two events. Coming and going. Meeting and parting. Dreams welcomed the railway station so readily since it was already – in other forms – a familiar. The Greek word for ‘porter’ is metaphor. And this is a reminder of how deeply the act of transporting, of despatch and delivery, is intrinsic to the imagination. Seaports are more moderate than mainline railway stations for, although the distances involved are usually longer, the sea has not been laid down, like the rail tracks, for the sole and unique purpose of transporting. Airports are too polite; reality is always at one remove in an airport. In a railway station the impersonal and the intimate coexist. Destinies are played out. The trains run regularly, according to printed timetables. The lines are inexorable. But for each passenger or for each person who comes to meet or see off a traveller, the train in question has its own portent. The portents can be read close-up, in faces, in details of luggage, in the welcomes and partings as people embrace on the platform. On that late spring afternoon, few people had come. I was the only one to climb the railings and there, clinging on with one arm, to wait for the train to draw in. In the coaches which passed me, I saw people crowding round the doors, impatient to jump down. Among the first were some Spaniards, relatives of migrant workers already installed in the city. Their small children, deposited on the platform, looked less bemused than their parents, as if for the children one city was much the same as another, equally familiar and equally unknowable. From a rear coach a man with two Alstation dogs clambered down. The locomotive, now uncoupled, was driven off, leaving the train stranded. At that moment I saw you at the end of the platform. You were wearing trousers. On the long platform beside the stranded train, in the vast white diffused late-afternoon light of the rift valley, you looked very small. With your appearance everything changed. Everything from the passage under the railway tracks to the sun setting, from the Arabic numerals on the board which announced the times of the trains, to the gulls perched on a roof, from the invisible stars to the taste of coffee on my palate, The world of circumstance and contingency, into which long before, I had been born, became like a room. I was home.”

Page 92-93

“During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most direct protests against social injustice were in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason, and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means clear, the outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constant ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution – the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life – cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is far more trusting than poetry; poetry speaks to the immediate wound.”

“Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and to incite a caring.”

Page 95