Green Thoughts

Intelligence has narrowed down the horizons of life, dried up its well-springs so that it is only a receptacle of a formal, highly stylised and abstract type of thinking. The feats of such a mind are dazzling from a certain angle, no doubt, but one suspects that this isn't the whole story...

To be the wind, not a statement about it.

For the bourgeois the most important thing is to be useful to the state and society. He has never felt homesickness for something unknown.How to reconcile the quest for truth with the quest for meaning?

Does the mathematical and the abstract come up against a limit and is another name for that barrier life?

'Living thought' : a thought that doesn't fix itself on any one identity with its subject. A concept is an idol . Reverie shatters the glass, frozen meanings opening them up to wonder and freedom. To make a de-cision is to end the past and the notion of permanence; it is a beginning, our true creativity. Unity is not given , or not merely given, but an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality, a direction.
(Taken/borrowed from Bachelard)

T.S.Eliot: For the metaphysical poets thought itself is an experience that modifies our sensibilities. For us, thought is something wholly external , something we can use, that serves a purpose in furthering life and then is readily discarded: in short, a commodity.

The eel, siren
of cold seas, who leaves
the Baltic for our seasour estuaries, rivers, rising
deep beneath the downstream flood
from branch to branch, from twig to smaller twig,

ever more inward,
bent on the heart of the rock,
infiltrating muddy
rills until one day
light glancing of the chestnuts
fires her flash
in stagnant pools,
in the ravines cascading down
the escarpments of Romagna.

eel, torch, whiplash,
arrow of love on Earth,
whom only our gullies
or dessicated Pyrean brooks lead back
to Edens of generation;

green spirit seeking life
where only drought and desolation sting;
spark that says everything
when everything seems charcoal,
buried stump.

---Montale.

This, which flickers at night
in the skullcap of my thought,
mother-of-pearl snail's trace,
or mica of crushed glass,
isn't light from church or factory
to nourish
red cleric or black .
All I can leave you is
this rainbow in evidence
of a faith that was contested,
a hope that burned more slowly
than hardwood on the hearth.
Keep its powder in your compact
until, when every light is out,
the sardana become infernal,
and a shadwoy Lucifer sweeps down on a prow
on the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine
flowling his pitch-black wings half-
severed from effort to tell you : it's time
It's no inheritance, no talisman
to survive the monsoon's raging
on the spider's thread of memory,
but a history lasts only as ashes
and persistence is pure extinction.
The sign was right: he who saw it
can't fail to find you again.
Everyone makes out his own: pride
wasn't flight, humility wasn't craven.
The thin glimmer striking down here
wasn't that of a match.

Montale, Little Testament

I tried to think a lonelier Thing
Than any I had seen-
Some Polar Expiation-An Omen in the Bone
Of Death's tremendous nearness.

-----Emily Dickinson