Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Reflections on Driving, Running out of Petrol

How fast are women
in the city of your exile?

How fast
are you
in deciphering
the road signs
the gestures, the looks
languages and alphabets?

learning so much, knowing so much
in order to change gears
to keep mum.

Friday, November 14, 2008

In Praise of Oxford


(dedicated to those who like the blasé pose)
For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasing for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.

Here in Oxford, the one really decisive factor is not just that I'm a foreigner about whom no one knows or cares, about whom the only fact of any biographical significance is that I won't be staying for ever, it's that there's no one here who knew me as a young man or child. That's what really troubles me, leaving the world behind and having no previous existence in this world, there being no witness here to my continuity, to the fact that I haven't always swum in this water.
In Oxford the light remains the same from half past five, when the shops close and teaches and students return home and when the cessation of all visible activity first obliges you to notice it, until gone nine o'clock when the sun sets - as suddenly, apart from a lingering distant, ghostly glow, as if turned off by a switch - the signal for those who have determined on going out that night to rush impatiently into the streets. The same unchanging light, that accentuation of static quality or stability of the place, makes you feel as if you yourself were at standstill and even less a part of the world and the passing of time than one normally feels here.
There's as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can't accept that certain things won't repeat themselves. That's why I sometimes I envy Will, the old porter at the Taylorian, who must be twenty years older than me and yet, now that he's let go of his will for good, he lives in a constant state of joy and anxiety travelling back and forth in time throughout his life, both enjoying great new surprises and repeating things he knew before.
(That's enough Oxford nostalgia, Ed.)

Monday, November 10, 2008

The Second Coming

For D. (you rock baby!)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Friday, November 07, 2008

Musical Chairs

The scene is the following. B is driving the car up a winding road in Istanbul, S is telling me about X, joking. I have not done all my summer travelling yet. I still do not know many characters in the farce. A is about to be engaged.
Cut to 5 months later. It is now me driving the car up winding roads in Istanbul. S is in London. I now know many more characters in the farce. Some of them twice over. I wait for W’s call. X writes me an email to tell me he is in town. A’s engagement is off, but she’s just been to a party at the British Consulate where she mistook an Armenian priest for an Iranian businessman.
These things happen. Such is life.