Diary of an unborn writer #12

I enjoy a daily commute of three hours. Really enjoy. Time to sleep and read. I'm redeveloping a passion for erudition, worming my way through all kinds of serious books.

The commuter trail is hilarious. Train stops and there's an orderly swarm of faces tap tapping down steps so they don't miss the onward transport to the office. It's so polite and so frenetic. Elbow barges by way of refused glances. An attempt at personality sees you shunned.

In the office too I'm perfecting the steady stare of pretending you haven't noticed the other person as they pass right by you in the corridor. Sometimes you see them looking and you look but too late so they look away and by that stage neither of you is going to admit to looking at the other by looking back again.

Though I naively hope for this. I walk towards them staring across their trajectory. That way if they glance they catch my eye. But there's a problem. By prolonging the gaze, my eyes settle into an accidentally intense glare so if they look it'll seem as if I'm staring them out, they look a little freaked and look not just ahead but away. The pain of missed spontaneity is not worth confronting as this oft-repeated ritual clearly displays.

~

Martin Buber was a clever Jew from early 20th century Vienna ; one of those firecracker conflations in time and place where every thought seems to spark a revolution and proving - with 1776 Philapdelphia, several Parisian decades and 18th century Scotland - that intelligence is a collective fragrance aside from the gigantic personalities to which it is attributed.

Buber had Freud, Wittgensstein and my favourite Karl Polanyi alongside him. In 1919, radicalism flew along Red Veins, while these men, great men, sang finer tunes and ideas yet to be fully absorbed.

Buber was an existentialist but not the navel-gazing, wistful type that make his cousins so attractive to me. Like Heidegger he spoke of an authenticity but felt this was found most effectively by connecting with others. Disitinguishing between 'I-you' relations and 'I - thou' relations, the commuters painful walk is a dearth of thous amongst too many grey eyes.

I-you's are conceived as if to an object, an acknowledgement, the corridor avoidance, the shop counter lady seeing fit not to return the warm morning greeting (I even said it in Dutch...). It's the connection that populayes 99.8% of human connection.

To 'I-Thou' relations, Buber gave a designation almost holy: the tender inexplicable when all shutters blow apart and we find in the other all the meaning and serenity of human existence.

By reaching into the other, the divine in you can emerge.

Imagine the fate of civilisation, leave alone that of its discontents, if Buber had had a few more morning strolls with Freud along the Graben.

~

Looking at a photograph of Martin Buber you see the relaxed gaze of a man that cannot help but Thous all round. The Immortal in man stood nakedly before him, whether blankly gazing back or avoiding down corridors - the Buber boddhisattva enduring everyone to be free.

I take his eyes and fix them with an inward glance, the better to see my depths in the other. Two fade to one, as if it could be any different.

~

Love kept it slyly for a time but now repentent seeps it back trace by trace into gaping mouths and stifled hearts drip by drip we're coming back

~

The eyes and corridors and Buber ruminations melt to nothing in the face of the horror in Palestine. There's no fact to this I can add to make it more real just look on in disgust as politicians play parlour games with situations they well concocted long before.

Can't remove this from our own plight. Please don't place it over there but see the I-I that made this so - Ishmael and Isaac - one brother not recognising the other. And you pretend it doesn't matter to ignore the other as they pass you by again.

You play out this horror every day.

Only the Palestinians cry.