Saturday 9 March 2013

Bus note 44

        Red light says stop.
Look through the window of the bus
and then through the window of a car.
        She reads her prayers
        (with picture of al-Ka'bah)
        from her smartphone.
There is no God
but God. Still but
        for the regular low
        combustion shake.
I've been watching for too long.

10 comments:

  1. what we feel can not be explained sometimes but an image can...

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  2. Thank you, Sandra.

    Too many words can sometimes bury those images.

    I've always been struck by how Islam with its prohibition on representation has such a rich visual culture, making such effective use of the look of words.

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  3. There is no God
    but God. Still but
    for the regular low
    combustion shake.
    I've been watching far too long.

    This has resonance in context of the series, perhaps.

    The varieties of religious experience and the search for understanding, compassion, peace -- along with the problem of distance inevitably created by the voyeuristic position of the watcher, with his furtive gaze -- one takes these to be themes of the whole work. The handling of, or grappling with, these themes takes on the aspect of an unfolding drama. The honesty and modesty that have attended the project from the first are very much in this reader's mind now.

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  4. Thank you, TC.

    Looking and thinking about looking are a conscious part of it. The spiritual matters have come without being called for, the bus being very much a church (to refute a character earlier in the series).

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  5. If your bus is a church it can only be because you make it one. Either that or the cultural abyss is even deeper than one had already suspected.

    Twice on the bus here this week, no spiritual indications whatsoever. Stare, be stared at, look away. A great deal of coughing. Accompanied by an equal amount of anxious breath-holding. The several stages of impoverishment declaring themselves. To not have a car is to descend into the maelstrom.

    The bus for many is simply an alternative to being on the streets. A bit more expensive, but warmer. One class of riders occupies seats until forcibly ejected.

    One would walk if one were able.

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  6. I hear what you're saying, Tom.

    They can be places of very real menace too. A recent seemingly random stabbing on the number 9 close to where I change buses each morning has been such a manifestation.

    That hunger for the grace events: you have to be careful that those gestures and faces are not written over but read.

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  7. religions have many strange views on representation...catholic and evangelic also disagree on this ...but in some way I think it is a way to forbid the commercial use of images..(?)

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  8. In this country they've begun to uncover the wall paintings whitewashed during the reformation.

    One of my favourite examples can be found in Holy Trinity Church, Coventry: a Last Judgement.


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  9. Here's the link again:

    http://www.holytrinitycoventry.org.uk/Images/Content/1759/440322.jpg

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  10. that is good.....those paintings blow the imagination....!!

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