Life Insurance.

Duns Scotus is now a dunce !

What you once thought was the cheez now seems idiotic, childish. Elmer Gantry! You hear so many people make such grandiose claims and you don't know whether to laugh and cry. I started the lecture by saying we're only trying to give shape to our ignorance: Rumsfeld: we don't know what we don't know.

Rationality binds us to one truth, or to one level. Freedom of thought, real freedom, would mean we could talk about rationalities. Even better, we would not talk with so much certainty, would understand when to talk, and when to be silent. To say I don't know is to liberate oneself, is to be able to dance lightly again. Bloggers, of course, will not understand this.

God is not a concept.
---Ibn Arabi.

The wonder, the utter strangeness of the world, reduced to a formula, an equation. The universe behind your eyes, unknowable. Science, too: all that causality! Like the bourgeoisie, enamoured by boxes, labels, insurances against the uncertainties of life, or the philosopher who makes a technique out of knowing. But how strange that a child can talk and smile and love without knowing!

God is not a mathematician.

I do not know you.
I have never known you.
I will never know you.
Perhaps because I have never known myself.

The dark before the dark, the silence before the first note. Black, black to the core, which is really the light beyond the light. The night is also a sun. Perhaps we will cross paths and then, like a stranger, I will tip my hat to you, and I will steal a glance. But don't bank on it. There are no assurances.

But I have spent too long, relied
too much on understanding, not
to be ashamed to call a helper in
because it fails, or shut my mind
to what the mind receives...

I plead the permanence
of ignorance, that we acknowledge it.
It goes where we goes, gets there first, and waits
to be the find we make wherever we think
to have gone: the day's adventure, the same surprise...

Belief, which visas us our entry there ,
comforts our incoherence, offers to teach
some simple terms, the easy speech of the land..

We hear this language spoken and understand,
but it remains the special speech of the place,
resisting translation , unable to say what we mean.

Reality is what we are ignorant of.

Let me not have a life to look at, the way we look
at a life we build to look at, in the world belief
gives us to understand, a snowman life:
hurry to pack it solid, buttons on
and a proper hat, finished before dark,
before the rain to wash it away. We dress
our lives as we might dress a doll self,
getting and giving...

--William Bronk.