It is all here now in the café Buenos Aires.

The young fresh faced lad being supervised by his tutor and setting the older man’s heart on wings. The two students at another table in T-shirts facing each other in earnest conversation over their open and green-pen highlighted copies of the Bible. The couple in their thirties with anxious faces unable to find words for each other so that the silence stretches towards a minute, between his devouring eyes and her reluctant sideways glance. The two older women with their dark, sad eyes and thinning hair, who only whisper to each other. The barking voice of the thin, young dark-haired woman, as if she has to shout to prove the continuing existence of her friend sitting opposite who happens to be hidden from view, and the curiosity that her almond eyes, which have beauty in their form, are made unattractive by the thinness of her mouth. And sat about and alone, the solitary staring figures with their laptops open on tables, or mobile telephones pressed to their ears.

All these “tolerably well-defined objects” – I am here quoting a famous phrase of Darwin (The Origin of Species. Ch V1. Difficulties on Theory) – as if I, I am and I am not here at this given time, and in a position to speak for them.

To sum up, I believe that species come to be tolerably well-defined objects, and do not at any one period present an inextricable chaos of varying and intermediate links…

Except for the above forensically observed environmental classification – the eroticised, the ecologised, the biblicised, the monologised, the sentimentalised, as well as of course the lonely technologised – the opposite appears to be the case in a constantly shifting scene of metamorphosis between different human orders, a process in a field from which I am also unable ethically speaking to stand apart, at one and the same moment informed decision-maker considering what words to write down, threat-exposed organism primed for fight, flight or freeze, and beneficiary of the social conventions and contracts at work in this building which houses the café Buenos Aires.

In a word – it is all here now -  politicised.

In walkingtalkingwriting politics out in the world my friend habitually takes bigger risks than I, and skirts the fringes of despair and his own destruction (see last published post!) because, while we are politicised, we are not partisan. And the satire invoked here by us – remember; It is a joke and it is serious! – has ‘word slayer’ power in all directions, including our own.

So for the well-being of all human orders (and since it is less than four weeks to Christmas… and like everyone else we need to get ourselves out into the shopping streets), we paint the letters of this conjoined phrase in capitals on to the cloth of our green and red (“walk” / “don’t walk”) flag –

TRAGIC LOSS & COMIC HOPE

Is this a joke or is this serious?

You are right to challenge me; Am I (are we) affirming meaning in the experience of either tragic loss or comic hope. Because you are right, there is a lot of talk around (as 'millenial rhetoric' there always has been), and there is an apparant ethical duty to make up our minds. Either doomladen mass extinction. Or one last hurrah for science.

Climactic despair, I can't decide.

Last night I went to the ENO to see Simon Mcburney's production of A Dog's Heart. It is a Russian satire based on the 1924 novella by Mikhail Bulgakov, the title would translate better as 'Heart of a Cur-bitch', and the story tells of how a stray dog metamorphoses into a man after having the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man transplanted into him. The dead man's name is 'Pig-Iron', which was close enough to 'Steel' (=Stalin) for the soviet commissars to confiscate the manuscript so that it was only published in the 1960's, and Bulgakov lived out a life of internal literary exile in Russia therafter. Stalin retained a soft spot for him however, it is recorded that Bulgakov's epic The White Guard was one of his constant bed-side favourites, and the Great Leader is said to have telephoned him to offer… encouragement.

A Dog's Heart was an opera with the music having been composed by Alexander Raskatov. Yes, I hadn't heard of him before either, and the musical component was disturbing, one of the solo voices singing through a megaphone, others (according to the programme notes) asked to provide rauco (hoarse) or scollato (shaky) effects, and so on so that I could not describe of having experienced a single dominant form, balance, or measure in the music. The composition seemed to encompass many without allegiance to any.

Satire: a story of tragic loss…. and comic hope because in the end the dog, finally returned to doggy form by a further surgical operation, survives. And tomorrow. Tomorrow, who knows, albeit worse for wear from the surgeon's knife, the dog may, with wagging tale hanging on to its precarious perch in the Moscow household in which the evening's entertainment has been told, continue to lick the soft hand which offers it fresh sausage to eat.

I am back from the 4 day men’s group (Big! Can you imagine – 34 – both young and old) in a house in sparkling wild country near Buxton (Derbyshire), and warm messages from several missing you.

Was I caught out? Checking in, I did indeed ‘out’ myself with the very first words I said. I have retired, I began. A moment of relief to get that over with, and two back-flips later (you know the way my mercurial mind works), but I quickly tripped over the doorway of the next questions, What to leave behind, and what to put aside and keep. Fitful sleep was the only answer. But by the next day I had collected dried leaves to bury and rot, and decided the coloured jewels to return to my back pocket. What jewels? Well, the power of metaphor for one, and my singing voice for another, so that, for example, when I checked out I did it in song. The song, a simple one and newly composed by me for the moment, was called The Art of Ending.

So the work was the practice of crossing thresholds, and also asking for help, which I did in Flaschenpost (‘message in a bottle’) style, and I can report was amazingly and improbably found. And tiny glimpses of a possible future, so that later it occurred to me The Art of Ending is also a possible new name for the charity I look after which has been inactive for the last two years (UK Reg’d no. 1120811, primary charitable purpose ‘EDUCATION AND INFORMATION ON PALLIATIVE CARE AND END-OF-LIFE CARE IN THE UK’). I purchased artend.co.uk / artend.org site names today.

I also began a personal letter today:

Dear ****

We agreed on a ‘buddy’ basis to continue with our conversation, which began towards the end of last weekend, when I also invited you to meet with me here, where I can also offer, if you like, to introduce you to my blogging co-writer (ak), with whom this particular stretch of the dialogic writing ocean is shared.

Introductions over, I can move on to the main area of our conversation two days ago; about aloneness, or perhaps better said, about aloneness and friendship. You and I were talking about this in the context of what it is like to be perceived to be absent, or ‘not there’ at an arranged meeting. To be accurate about this, of course you are there in physical person, but not otherwise according to the observation of certain people attending. Caught out, our reaction to your apparent absence is an irritation, even a disgust (yes, I own to that feeling too), which it is almost impossible for any of us to put into words, and, when words are tried, they are translated into various kinds of negative viewpoint and critical utterance.

And you say that you have heard all these before!

There is an assumption about meeting, like the laughing Rumi says, “Out there beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field, where we meet”. At which point I leap. What assumption, I ask. And there you are at that moment, clear in the aloneness, like a sparkle upon the seawater, like a glint from within a slanting light.

It is something that I have experienced before, but now is not the time to tell you the stories, and aloneness is a subject, which both ak and I have, as best we can over the years, directly and indirectly written about quite often here (after all, we receive almost no outside visitors to our stretch of the dialogic writing ocean!). Aloneness, and, I find, often in the same breath intertwined with brokenness in the seelische ('spiritual') sense; during these see-through moments when our personal spirit is in some way broken off, and the aloneness stands clear of any supporting form.

And a friendship based upon this capacity for seeing, and being seen in this way. You will notice from our blog ‘strap heading’ that we describe ourselves as “two city vagabonds on pilgrimage”… Well, you are welcome to join us any time you like as we go along, as well as (or alternatively of course) continuing our ‘buddy’ basis conversations in private, as you prefer.

(Etc…)

My letter ends with some personal remarks, which I do not wish to make public.

It is a delicious phrase you will admit (taken from a poem I was reading by Elaine Feinstein called – Old Poets – which I found in her 2007 collection Talking to the Dead).

Celeritas! And perhaps a similar sort of experience to yours in the thrilling fresh air of Dartmoor, on a bicycle up and down hill, because last Tuesday evening I was still in London -

Heading for the Poetry International 2010, Imagining Peace event at the Southbank Centre, Thank you for cumin, said Simon Armitage in Pennine-speak as he began his introduction of the six overseas poets assembled to give readings that evening, which included a late replacement, I confess his name now lost to me, a fine Columbian poet complete in not-to-be-removed overcoat, thick scarf, and pony tail, who read in lyrical Spanish, pausing from time to time to glance up over his shoulder to look at the text of each poem being translated on a large overhead screen behind him, and laughing nervously to himself as if considering whether perhaps we were able to read his mind

- and also flagging. Or was it flinching? These days whenever I am in the city there is a persistent thought that starts at the back of the mind and remorselessly grows, Am I being observed. Even disreputable me, darting from shadow to shadow, up to no good I admit, but as skillfully anonymous as I can be, and surely, as I think it, of no interest to anyone else as I dawdle zig-zag-wise along these anonymous streets, galleries and shopping arcades, but still underneath the CCTV cameras, and the recurring thought, What if they have me under surveillance. And the guilty feeling like flinching arises, akin to cheating at school, What if She can see me cribbing (… for more on ‘flinching’ and ‘cribbing’, see below *).

 Pinhead.

 And none of the poets, and nothing that evening, matched the maximal internal economy of Anne Carson. Striking odd how it worked, soberly dressed as she was in dark gray wool with her gig like academic spectacles and fluted voice, while she read from her most recent published work, textual references relating to obscure classical sources, long lexicographical translations, and verbatim records of personal letters and reported speech, all formatted in a notebook list of entries.

Afterwards the same illicit ‘flinching’  or ‘cribbing’  feeling arises as I join the lengthy queue to obtain a signature from her for my old copy of If Not, Winter (Fragments of Sappho, translated Anne Carson. 2002). Hello, I say and she gives me a dainty smile and asks my name in the same fluted Canadian voice, and close up, as she writes my name and then signs hers on the book’s front piece page, I observe that behind the glasses her eyes glitter like fires of coal.

  –

 * from the PANOPTICON WRITINGS  (1787) of Jeremy Bentham [ref: a.]

 Letter XXI:  (“Knives, however sharp, are very useful things, and, for most purposes, the sharper the more useful.”)

 Flinching would then be as impracticable in a monastery, as cribbing in a school. Old scores might thus be rubbed out with as much regularity as could be desired; nor would the pride of Toboso have been so long a-disenchanting, could her Knight have put his coward Squire into an inspection-house.

Neither do I mean to give any instructions to the Turks for applying the inspection principle to their seraglios: no, not though I were to go through Constantinople again twenty times, notwithstanding the great saving it would make in the article of eunuchs, of whom one trusty one in the inspection lodge would be as good as half a hundred. The price of that kind of cattle could not fail of falling at least ten per cent., and the insurance upon marital honour at least as much, upon the bare hint given of such an establishment in any of the Constantinople papers. But the mobbing I got at Shoomlo, only for taking a peep at the town from a thing they call a minaret (like our monument) in pursuance of invitation, has cancelled any claims they might have had upon me for the dinner they gave me at the divan, had it been better than it was.

If the idea of some of these applications should have brought a smile upon your countenance, it won't hurt you, my dear ****; nor should it hurt the principle. Your candour will prevent you from condemning a great and new invented instrument of government, because some of the purposes to which it is possible to apply it may appear useless, or trifling, or mischievous, or ridiculous. Its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to. If any perverse applications should ever be made of it, they will lie in this case as in others, at the doors of those who make them. Knives, however sharp, are very useful things, and, for most purposes, the sharper the more useful. I have no fear, therefore…

–

[Ref. 'a'] Complete online text