"Girls keep diaries. Men keep journals. There’s a difference." (Farooq)
My first notebook was a gift from my mother. The first entry dates from January 18th, 1998 / Ramadan 19th, 1418. Sunday. My little world was centr’d in Islamabad, and was both very wide and very limited. I wrote for a few days, then dropped it for a year, returned every now and again, but constancy awaited the move back to Canada. Today, I gather my burnish’d battleshield and worn armour, essaying forth in an attempt to clean my desk.
Stacks of papers and books, university application forms from last year and visa application forms from this year, chem notes and working translations of Babaji’s novels. Among these, my three previous notebooks; when combined with the current, I’ve filled about 700 pages. But: what I aim at stems from how SB had a point with history repeating--that searching for the end of July over the past few years yields startling patterns, from the external scheme (visiting PaulR, having toe operations, muscle shirts and raspberries) to the internal vista of hollow truths and straight-up monologue. In entries of 2000 I can see the seeds of these patterns, but it was over the next year they established themselves, and ever since gain in depth and complexity. Not that these patterns are absolute, that would be too depressing, but that they seem to arc over.
Last week: Lara touristed some church in Aachen and came across what was obviously a quotation of the Qur’an, an Arabic inscription somewhere up top and translation beneath in German…the Fatihah, in the middle of a very Catholic structure with saints and relics and everything.
Me: "what?"
She: "that’s what I was asking?"
If anyone has any background on this, they should let me know, because I am intrigued and wish to investigate.
Usman has been with us for a year. An entire year. These days: gaining loquacity, his high-pitched "BHAAII" makes leaving him one of the hardest things about the 24th. Forecasted melodrama. And: I jok’d about how I mourn’d the morn in my suit of black, but by now the words gain ferocity, barbs.
Lightning storms on the horizon. The moon full and low behind silhouett’ed branches.
Bigotry. Where does it come from? People aren’t born with ingrain’d venom...JohnM recently asked me to do up a refutation of the warp’d people at www.falangist.org--at first I agreed, but later retracted that because they are evil haters, and I have better things to do than waste precious time on such putrescence. People like Bernard Lew*s at least have an intellectual veneer ("glimmer-gleam of brass") on their Islamophobic racism, but these are seriously sick citizens, contributing in their own small wae to the cultures of murder and rape. The other night I was reading Shelley, and he too is sunk in this (read "Hellas", if you misagree)...but then, all of his society was. As ours. I take absolute offence at his extremism (social anarchy in the name of "Love", religious atheism in the name of "Rationalism", and so on--a brighter bunch of idols I haven’t seen), but his verse itself is invigorating, somehow--vivid, colourful. And so this segues into the question of how closely a person’s beliefs, actions, are tied to their personality--that whether it’s at all possible to dissect others or whether they must be taken as fix’ed wholes--whether the first option leads to self-delusion, and if so, how to burst this bubble. With Shelley, it’s easy enough to appreciate his phraseology without the background, more so because he’s dead and gone, but for me, personally--that some of those I tie myself to have portions to them I shy awae at (or am ironically amused, as the case may be)...and whether it is even morally "right" to approach the question in the first place.
