twice removed

Dougal, just had a fantastic breakfast-near perfection. Two things missing though: grilled tomatoes and fresh orange juice

~~~~~

Walking in the early morning, lost in the fog. I can barely see ten feet ahead of me. What difference does a number make? I can barely see...

The sun-at least I think it's the sun-seems strange: small and meaningless; the winter sun is so sad, a pale shadow of its former self. Tired of giving, it withdraws into an irreconcilable point. The greyness of the skies has invaded its being. I walk on. I stop at the kerb and stand on it, peering over the edge like the captain of a ship, searching for land, any land...Through the open fields. Like Marcovaldo I lose all sense of perspective-what is distant, what is near at hand? I think to myself, to others I too must appear ghost-like. Only the 'craa' of the crows jolts me back into existence. Black. Invisible. Twice removed. The voice is all we have to go by.


There's nothing like the betrayal of the voice.

--Richard Ford.

~~~~~~

Meet an old student. Like a bolt from the blue. She's half mad. Now a film director who sees Marx and Socrates in her dreams. The day is wasted. Why do I count the hours?

~~~~~

Over breakfast F tries to convince us that the motivation for all our actions is our own satisfaction (or, if you want to be fancy, utility). I can't be bothered. Second thoughts: Better to concentrate on the scrambled eggs and coffee!

~~~~~

Notes on the 'Notes':

To think, to really think, is to take a step out of the dense fog that is one's own ego and see other people. One is forced to..or at least one imagines it so. The personal is extended to the impersonal. And then further: the other is not just 'the other'. We stand before the boundary between subject and object, me and you, with awe. The edge is the place to be. Achtung. We shudder before the law. The Law is a line. But already this is too abstract. The soul tremors before all that is different, caught between an infinite respect and the desire to transgress. Is love the only way the 'I' escapes its own boundaries? Volo ut sis.

Perhaps not. Aren't all of our actions a direct or an indirect expression of longing for release? Play. Lost and found.

Justice, truth, what are these but the ability to transcend one's own perspective. But 'transcend' does not mean abolish. Part of us wants to reduce all of our moral ideas to some principle of unity (happiness, utility). Part of us longs for the monotony of the desert, the open blue skies with its harsh and piercing light. But the other knows the value of darkness, of ashes, and returns to the unsystematic dialectic of subject and object, personal and impersonal. There are plural sources of value, spheres of justice. And what we seek is not justice as an idea but the incarnation of that idea in our very acts.

There are points of clarity, illumination,a round which we circle. Cling on to them. but sometimes they grow darker, denser, like a knot. Coherences and correspondences, a pattern to our life, not isolated moral thinking that is occasionally applied to life. We want a set of interweaving principles as well. Structure and light (the Red Tower). We want to see the stars and feel them.


Two worlds collided.

I was there.

You were standing.

And they can never tear us apart.

Individualism as a heightened awareness of separate worlds. But we are never so removed that we cannot imagine the lives of others. Through sympathy we can transcend the determinism of the world and the scientists. The pupil of necessity, the Iris of love.

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
----Iris. M.


Attentiveness: to know what is distant, to know what is far; to know the ground beneath our feet.


Spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality.

There are hierarchies. Yes. There is what some (Mill?) would call a 'true' happiness. But the real mystery is at the level of Maya. The ordinary is so much stranger than we think.

Good modes of attention and good objects of attention.

What is 'inner' here, what is 'outer'?

Attentiveness to the void, but also to the details that fill the world, that are the world.

One could walk in an open field for ever. An absence of ritual starves the imagination.

If not utility, then what?

Duty? But duty without moral experience, a dense background of moral fabric, may seem arbitrary. We can only move in a world that we can see.

'But you can't explain duty, can you? And what if this heteronomous principle conflicts with one's interests?'

'Yes, there is a limit to explanation. There are boundaries to everything. Sometimes there are no roads.' Insofar as we are modern we rebel at the idea that anything is 'given'. 'Conflict?' 'Surely the light comes to us from elsewhere ?'

'But duty is only a matter for the will, not for vision'

The absolute as a moral goal is already part of knowledge.

We are involved in the mystery of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. What is true is 'beyond' but its reflection is also here.

Places and time are an expression of that second space.

Spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality.