Perchance to dream

He had always believed there had to be a place somewhere for all the thoughts that had been thought and then thrown out, the ideas scrutinised and swept away; he had imagined a sort of cave where the dreams dreamed and ditched shook off the dust and breathed themselves to life again, or an immense plain where grand passions lived and forsaken endured without end, where everybody's lives were bound like ribbons soaring and cascading at the end of meaning's kite. For him, the past was painted at one end of the sky and the future at the other, and in the present were the endless succession of dreams he lived in and would live out, every one of them, for as long as it took, and then for ever.

A manifesto of faith

I have read nothing more gracious and true than this for a long time; it is nothing less than a proclamation of how to remain faithful to self and to God in a world with enough curiosity to ask questions but not enough fortitude to answer them:

"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God; who hath saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began."

- 2 Timothy 1:7-9

On Roth and Kundera

Philip Roth writes the most amazing sentences; he threads together sparkling strings of words that throw off lights and colours at once bizarre and wonderful, comical and tragic, laden with meaning but flashing with the odd gleam of the absurd. His fiction is unashamedly fictional, his narratives never missing a turn for the comic, the tangent of the tale never missing a beat and never missing a trick. Milan Kundera’s works, in contrast, are more allegorical than absurdist: his novels describe worlds where gravity is literally defied, where weight and lightness are inverted, and humanity is shaken to pieces by the laughter of angels and devils. While it is the fertility of Roth’s imagination that imbues his plots with a delirious comic energy, it is the poverty of Kundera’s world that leads him to create meaning, through his own fiction, out of a past that was harrowing and a future that is forbidding.

The dark overtones Kundera paints, tied to the shadowy history of his country, give his tales of joking angels and children’s islands an unshakeable sense of realism that is too painful to be absurdist, too ironic to be comic, and yet too empty to be ironic, too laughable to be really funny. Yet the laughter in Kundera’s novels has nothing of the halting, awkward Pinteresque quality, like a bad joke that falls flat. On the contrary, it is a laughter as otherworldly as it is tragic, “real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide…bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad…and we laugh our laughter to the infinity of laughter…O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly.” This is the sound that is heard in “the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all words with its jangle.”

Insistent and exigent in Kundera’s novels is an element of self-awareness that subverts all comedy, “the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch”, the metaphysical recognition of one’s own misery that gives litost its torment. Kundera’s characters refer to themselves as Sisyphus, and the boulders they roll up the hill are the burdens they bear for each other; in his novels there is nothing of the scorn that Camus argued would surmount any fate, that would allow us to “imagine Sisyphus happy”. His characters do not laugh with joy. It is the madness of their laughter that gives their laughter its madness.

The time of our lives

Some things I've begun to realise: that living life at a walking pace, living from day to day wholly in the present, without a foot in the past or a hand reaching for the future, is infinitely better than chasing sunlight around the globe and inhabiting the darkness at the brink of a horizon. This is not only the best way to live, it is what life is, the only thing; nothing else is real. We have to live in the sunlight that comes upon us with the inevitability of life itself; we have to live with it, and nothing immaterial can stand up to its dazzling, effulgent glare: the figments of imagination, the ghosts of the past, all exorcised in a single incandescent affirmation that the world is all that is the case, and anything that is not radiant with the immediacy of life we ought to hurl into the fire. The pipe dreams, the hopes held out, the promises unrelinquished, the implications and the inferences and the infelicities are all like ashes in one's mouth, and the sounds of our laughter and wailing should echo and roll away from the single point that is the now: life lived on the knife-edge of time.

When I say

When I say I miss you, it will not be
for the whisper of petals too thin and tremulous
to stay silent about beauty. It will not be
for the trees that hold their arms out
for love, and try to bridge their distance
to the sky. It will not be
for the recurrence of wind and water
or the moaning of the birds
saying they have seen it all.

When I say I miss you,
it is for the silence of the stones and the shadows.
It is for the sediment of age,
the gathering of rain on windowpanes
and the absence of dust on the things
you smiled at.
It is for the howls and the sounds of struggle
that echo across the gap
from pen to page.

It is for the moments when you vanish
from the gaps within the crowd,
for the old habit of thinking you will
reappear, when you are already
receding with distance and in time:
for the last wave,
the last smile, before you
drop from sight.