In Place

There's something almost holy, sacred even, in a person who has lived with and understood the fixed patterns of life and the land; who in the regular movements of the seasons can see the turning points, the transitions from nostalgia to hope and back again. Here one is not talking of individual poetic souls who are in touch with the mysterious -almost as if by chance -but of the sturdy recorders of history and folk tales with their rock-like memory. It is not their closeness to the elemental, raw sensations, that is unique but their heightened intuitive awareness of the intermingling of nature's and their own destiny. The stories of the people merge into the stories of the land.

Kavanagh:
the parish is not a perimeter, a limitation, a bound, but a 'space through which the world can be seen'. Parochialism is unversal...all great civilisations are based on parochialism..to know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge , a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the juncture of four small fields-these are as much as aman can fully experience.

This, of course, only 'works' for us as a kind of metaphor since there is no going back to nature or to cosmos for the latecomers that we are. The unchanging habitat is an expression of and a product of the genetic material of the species that creates it: the spider's web is without teleology. Only language and myth re-connects it with the human world..."spin a web". But our heart isn't in it. The gradations of being , the subtle threads that bind us in feeling and consciousness with nature no longer exist, or if they do cannot be found. We see only "pure extension", magnitude. There is only the "idea" of nature, which is to say: discontinuity, radical and absolute, and nothing else.

At a certain age the clothes fit. There's an equilibrium between biological and social worlds. It is as if one has grown to one's limits, being has filled us out and there is a certain peace about this, like two overlapping circles finally becoming synchronized. But from here it appears that there can only be a decline, a falling away. This perfection cannot be consciously designed by a political system or even by religion since it depends , crucially, on the awareness of our fittedness with all that has passed in the universe, a sense of not being estranged from oneself or from the times we live in. And that type of self-assuredness is fragile, temporary, and not something that can be aimed for or re-constructed once it has passed; it is pure gift.

To speak a word of love.
But there is none.
To hold a fire to the sun.
But the gods never come.

Cans't get out of myself,
No matter how hard I tries.
Always singing to myself,
My self, my 'I', never dies.

If

"If a wound hath befallen you , a wound like it hath already befallen others"
-------[ Q: 3,140].

God may reduce you,
on Judgement Day,
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
----W.H.Auden

The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.
It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen.
-----Angelus Silesius

Paragon of animals, quintessence of dust.

Winter is a thousand directions: past , future, regret and a promise; a homecoming of the heart and the death of the world. Summer is nothing but an endless horizontal.

Depaysement: nocturnl rambles, exile and disorientation; dropping out of bourgeois society,..arriving somwhere for the first time and feeling the wonder and excitement of a world that is not yours and that never will. Not reaching out to possess that otherness , but just an awareness of it: as if one were seeing the world on its very first morning.

Never read more than you can practice.

Kamikaze diaries: Of the 4,000 one quarter were unviersity graduates, studying Latin, Chinese and western philosophy. The ultimate test, the right of passage that they set themselves, was the ability to comprehend Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One wonders if they remembered any of it during those final moments....

Contra Jogulatores Obloquentes

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof beams
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise.

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.

-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing , we turn to our friends.

-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.

-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people and people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a committment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occassionally felt that way. No, the first formualtion was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God revelas His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in relaity nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is resored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:
metmorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.

Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.

The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary..only equals laugh."
Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.