Stray Reflections

Fragments of a fragment....
Not wanting to place these fragments in their respective places it is, perhaps, better to just assemble them here, haphazardly, without any logic; instead of trying to harmonise the others they will just remain here, displaced, discarded; that way the past will never be completed and be always open to additions, further cancelations and deletions....

The whole world is made of fire,
the whole world is fire.
----Heraclitus.

Why so downcast, my soul
why do you sigh within me
--------Psalms.

We live and dream of other lives; our life itself is part of the life and dreams of others and just as a dream only occurs within a life, so a life only occurs within that other, dream-life which is the realm of possibility.And all are contained within the orbit of that greater circle, the iris of eternity, that single moment that is the Life of God, the "blinking of an eye"....

Shamanism is a stray descendant of Sufism.
-------Ted Hughes.

Augustine.
Our desire for the world makes it , in some sense, "the world"; fleeting, because we die even if it endures. To lose oneself in the dispersion of the world, "worldliness", is a way of losing the sense of fear that the good will pass away.

Iris M.
Anything that consoles is false. We live in an age that is sceptical of happy endings (the Romantic legacy).

Anselm.
We can 'conceive' of something beyond which nothing can be conceived. Which is to say that we can know our limits and therefore have some "idea" of infinity. To affirm transcendence requires a degree of immanence.

American Artists' congress, 1936.
The individual is identified with the private ( that is, privation of other beings and the world), with the passive rather than active, with the fantastic rather than the intelligent. such an art cannot really be called free , because it is so exclusive and private...An individual art in a society where human beings do not feel themselves to be most human when they are inert, dreaming, passive, tormented or uncontrolled, would be very different from modern art.

Outside William Morris' house.
The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light and finally they disappear into the hidden depths....and then the sun is reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together again in a loving embrace...and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself, endlessly, eternally. Perhaps it is the ceaseless movement of the stream that allows such an image to form in my mind; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change it is doubtful whether there would be a reflection at all. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time because of the permanent presence of the sun?

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream return to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without its illumination the stream is nothing but a memory, a thing that exists only in the mind as a possibility, empty and alone.

Courtesy: the perfect matching of inward intentions with outward gestures.
The Gita: holiness within, selfless action without.
For the moderns courtesy will appear as something wholly artifical, superfluous and trivial. The mechanical repitition of the set phrase, the cliche, spoken at just the right time and the right place, lacks "authenticity", "individuality".
However, for an aritstocratic soul it is precisely this sense of balance and proportion that is the highest virtue since it is at one with nature; from the perspective of the 'outward eye' there is only a mindless formulaic act; but the medievals would have understood "the deed" to be a sober, outward act and a state of inner freedom, "drunkenness".

Isaiah Berlin on Naivete:

The naive , in contradistinction to the sentimentalist, is not conscious of the rupture between "thought" and "action", feeling and expression. There is a pre-lapsarian harmony and unity. This will appear to be superficial, shallow, too peaceful. the sentimentalist, on the other hand, is always searching for that lost unity..he is always outisde nature, alientated from himself and from society...2 not joy or peace but conflict with nature or society, unsatiable craving, the notorious neuroses of the modern age, with its troubled spirits, its martyrs, fanatics, and rebels...."

He comes to delight in his inability to find "home".