For mani, gnostic mani.Are we but tired sparks in a gnostic world? Bright flashes that have cooled, worn out by time, lack-lustre, a darkening mirror?
A line from Solaris, when Kelvin is told there's no going back to the cosmos. Like when you reach the turning point and the days become visibly, palpably shorter, darker, heavier. Or when someone walks away, revealing only their back and you wonder if you'll see their face again...
To say or think 'order of the soul', or order of being makes one flinch. Now we only have an empty word for 'good', in which one can pour what one wants. Order is oppressive, burdensome, and must be broken up, resisted...verticality opposed by a flattening spirit.
But there is something else: an order of light. A unity of vision that lovingly embraces the fragments, knowing that nothing was in vain, that the past is still with you. Love: a flame, the wood, the smoke?
Clarification..to clarify. To see rightly, with love and justice. To be at the right distance. Lost and found, the heart fading, soaring. Muslim readers will know that the "eye did not rove". Prayer is for, and simulataneously is, a "good thing of this world".
"An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of 'faith'. Consider what it is like to increase one's understanding of a great work of art."
---Iris M.
To which one can only add, if there can be an addition, that that is not a negation of the self, but a deepening of it and the person. A greater level of connectivity with the world. Unity is not a number.And there are false unities.
We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.
Not "detachment" or "alienation", not "suffering," but Iris's: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
2 comments:
for some reason i'm really tired this evening, and i sort of float through the words of your post, content. thank you. but don't despair, no doubt tomorrow i'll be back to my argumentative, stubborn self and pick up the threads (reins?)
ps porridge, really? what's that, anyway, and why does it sound like fridge?
hey,mani, no pressure. seriously. only write when you want to. i'm easy. reins, i guess...yes, that sounds better. :-)
what's that?!!!
OMG
it's a cereal that has the texture of cement/glue..er..at least the way i make it! oats. quaker's is the best ( i think). also a staple food of horses and donkeys.
sleep well.
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