.

Isinglass


.

.

I'm away tomorrow for a couple of months and during that period do not anticipate posting here; I might retire the site altogether. It's been nearly six years and maybe that is long enough. My rule has always been that I only post when I feel like it; and lately I've been feeling like it less and less often. Not sure why, could be the pressure of other commitments, could be something else entirely. While I'm away I expect / hope to get a bit further along with a book that I'm beginning to think of as a sequel to Luca Antara; maybe, if all goes well, I might start a new site that reflects not so much a switch of interests as a development of certain preoccupations in new directions.

.

.

A feeling of harassed sympathy arose in him, a compassion that pertained as much to Augustus as to the mass of humanity, to the ruler as well as the ruled, and it was accompanied by a responsibility no less importunate, a truly unbearable one which he himself could not account for beyond knowing that it bore small resemblance to the burden which Caesar had taken upon himself, rather that it was a responsibility of quite another kind; for this seething, befuddled, unrecognized evil was beyond the reach of every governmental enterprise, beyond reach of every earthly force however great, beyond reach, perhaps, of the gods themselves, and no human outcry sufficed to overwhelm it except, it may be, that small voice of the soul, called song, which while it makes known the evil, announces also the waking of salvation, knowledge-aware, knowledge-fraught, knowledge-persuading, the provenance of every true song.

The Death of Virgil by Hermann Brock p 22-3 (Penguin, 2000)

.

.


nonlocality v quantum entanglement



.

my day job is at night

I first drove a taxi in Sydney in June 1981 . . . I think. At the time a friend in New Zealand asked me to put together a few pieces about my experiences of that kind of work for a possible book. I did write something, called A Night in the Life, which for various reasons never eventuated. I still have a photocopy of the ms somewhere but, since it was made on heat sensitive paper, last time I looked it had faded towards illegibility. No matter. I drove for about a year that time; returned for another stint of about the same length in 1988-9; and since 2005 have driven, if not continuously, then continually. Over those five years I noticed that it was very difficult to drive and write at that same time. I don't mean literally: if I was driving, I wasn't writing; and vice versa. A bit like the way you can't smoke and swim at the same time (the water puts the fire out). This is obviously not a satisfactory state of affairs, so recently I have been attempting to discipline myself in such a way that I can both write and drive - do my thousand words or whatever in the morning, drive through the afternoon and evening, get back to the desk in a fit state to continue the work next day. Today I completed the first part of what I hope will become a book. About a hundred pages have been compiled, laboriously sometimes, sometimes not, over the summer that has just ended. All the while I have been driving two or three or four shifts a week, trying to make the rent and the bills and so forth. I'm pretty pleased about those pages, although I do notice that, now I have drafted the first of the three parts of the book, and the euphoria of composition has (temporarily?) departed, the critical knives are venturing forth with their unappeasable hunger to slash and to burn. But, get this - just the other day I discerned another pattern to this crazy quilt. I realised that on the days I write fluently, the shift does not go well; and on the days the writing is hard, I tend to make more money driving. It is as if there are two antithetical states of mind, one contemplative, even vague, a serotonin daze in which I gather words or phrases or whatever into coherent sentences almost without thinking; the other a hustler's state, disenchanted and analytical, probably adrenaline-fuelled, in which it is possible (never easy) to gather more fares from city streets and therefore more dollars. My writing mind does not drive well for money; my driving mind banishes that negative capability so prized by we who write. What to do about this? The next few years are more or less spoken for, the exigencies of living on a fixed income, ameliorated by a couple of nights driving to find the wodge I need for food, drink and entertainment, stretch before me like the M5 on a quiet Tuesday after nine. While through my head, on permanent loop, a wistful verse from a popular song ricochets: Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet / Work all day, still can't pay the price of gasoline and meat / Alas, their lives are incomplete . . . and then, in the nick of time, just when all seems lost, the chorus kicks in: Don't it make you want to rock and roll / All night long . . . Yes. It does. That must be the key.

.

pic & song credit : mohammed's radio

.

.

patience is (not) a virtue

The crescent moon hangs pale on the pale blue sky over the steeple. Again. How many more times, he thought, and how many more times will I have this lugubrious thought? He had begun to suspect that he had already thrown each of the 64 hexagrams making up the I Ching on at least one occasion: as if the oracle might be exhausted. But how can you exhaust the inexhaustible? The number of different possible chess games is 10 to the power of 120; look eight moves ahead and you confront as many games as there are stars in the galaxy. And that's just our galaxy. Just chess. No, he could not have reached the end of the I Ching, it must have been something else that was ending . . . but what? Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly / for what was already mine . . . Warren Zevon crooned. Accidentally Like a Martyr. First heard that song in 1975 or 6, knew nothing then of what it was talking about: The hurt gets worse / and the heart gets harder. It was #5, Hsü / Waiting (Nourishment), in the Richard Wilhelm translation Englished by Cary F Baynes. The orotund complexities of the Germanic syllabic roll made him tired. It could not sound less Chinese. Or could it? All beings have need of nourishment from above. But the gift of food comes in its own time, and for this one must wait. This hexagram shows the clouds in the heavens, giving rain to refresh all that grows and to provide mankind with food and drink. He drank the cheap red wine, he ate the cubes of lamb that had been lightly grilled on a skewer then tossed in a wok with chilli and sesame oil, garlic, red onion, tomato, mushroom; delicious. Afterwards, dark chocolate and small sweet black grapes with tough skins and many seeds. Funny how even a poor wine can taste good while you're eating but goes sour on the palate as soon as you have finished. As if its virtue departed with your appetite. Oh well, cap the bottle, put it back in the kitchen, drink any more tonight, you'll feel awful tomorrow; which is not to say you won't feel awful anyway. The moon has set now, Orion lies supine like a narrow canoe jagged on the spire. Don't know what's wrong with me. What's wrong with the world? Perhaps it is wanting more than the I Ching can give, which is a dangerous thing to want, especially when you've just thrown Patience: Clouds rise up to heaven: / The image of WAITING. / Thus the superior man eats and drinks, / is joyous and of good cheer. What's that supposed to mean, a Christmas carol? Well let's say you're Scrooge tonight. Or, screwed. Then wallow in your melancholy, bathe in its blue glow, take that tunnel that leads from the manhole in the wardrobe down, down without end into the dank underparts of the City. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. / My people humble people who expect / Nothing. / la la . . .

.