Re-vision

His gaze, contemplating the stars, remains alert, available, and released from all certitude.---Seamus Heaney on Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

Do we see ourselves or others in the right way? We cannot see the whole in the fragment, understand a book from a single page, or the word stripped from its context. What do we actually know? Very little, I suspect. It is as if coming across one blog-post in a whole series one could divine something of the personality of the writer-when it is something in the making. Perhaps God could see us in this way, as if all that is superficial/accidental is whittled away to some fundamental, essential gesture or act. But I don't think so.

Notes from Iris M.

We do not live just for one day. Freedom is the attempt to see clearly, to cancel out other versions, ignore certain views of things, to know what and when to forget, what and when to remember. What M is attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly.

And this, our endless task, follows from our necessary fallibility. This is not a question of facts, or concepts, but of understanding, and of incarnating them into one's approach to life. Re-vision. What is required is a change of key, a change of heart, the supreme dexterity that enables one to find a different tune, to keep things open: wonder, precisely.

What seemed to be softness can turn out to be hardness. And what seemed strong can turn out to be weak. You just don't know. The historical individual is, and makes, a series of mistakes, corrections, cancellations, reconsiderations, reassessments, rejections and affirmations.

Love is knowledge of the individual, an inevitable infinite task because of our fallen nature, our finitude. A deepening, a complicating, a widening of our view. A breaking of the self. An ideal end-point, a limit that is never attained, something that can only be infinitely learned, approached softly, quietly.

We grow by looking. [Medusa?]. We apprehend more than we clearly understand.

~~~~~

The more I think about Bellow's Seize the Day the more I think of its religious undertones. Reading backwards always means we read another book. The main protagonist changes his name, tries to find his real name, which is the freedom of the individual, not of the generations, the species.

And the father refuses to carry the son's burdens. He will have to suffer on his own to come to the truth: I am not going to pick up a cross. I'll see you dead, Wilks, by Christ...

On the chaos of a life with no order of the soul, a life that isn't strung together in any theme but only progresses in fits and starts: Everything was like the faces of a playing card, upside down, either way.

Wilks must learn: Bringing people into the here-and-now.The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us..Only the present is real.

And what is real, what is imaginary?Dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects. The worst kind of people always want to look at you in a clear mirror or a camera. But extreme beauty (and ugliness..Medusa) cannot be perceived directly. What is the right way to look?

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own which he figured out by private thinking..you had to translate and translate, explain and explain, and it was the punishment of hell not to understand or be understood and yet the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone..There sons and fathers are themselves, and a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel's mouth. There truth for everybody may be found...