Big-bellied gods

The more character you have, the more influences you can take in.

--Cy Twombly.

This is true, you intuitively feel, as much for individuals as it is for societies, civilisations. With a certain degree of confidence one can afford to allow room for stray reflections, meaningless diversions, easy-going generalizations. And, more positively, you can look in other directions, as well as look back. You sometimes even believe: if you see beauty, you'll see it everywhere.

Let's go the field.

Which field?

The same that has rabbits.

Don't kill the dogs nor the rabbits,

for the dream of the rabbit reminds me of the dream of my lover.

And don't kill the deer,

for the grace of the deer reminds me of the grace of my lover

And don't kill the pigeons,

for the flight of the pigeons reminds me of the flight of my lover.

I'm not sure why, but lately you seemed to be more and more attracted to paganism-or at least to what you imagine a type of sensibility that goes hand in hand with it. The rigorous, abstract, semi-puritanical ways, the fake asceticism, grey wisdom, and 'inner-worldliness' that sometimes gets translated into a preference for a form of socialism, a chaste heart, bookishness, or aloofness seems ever more remote.

Even to use the word 'gods'! May God forgive me! But not the northern gods; something more Mediterranean. Light, the chain of being, that connects all to one. There is no soul searching for a soul; there is only a finding, a seeing clearly, the setting of a trap for the white hare. And all this is peace, a form of play, all of this happens now and has happened before.

This focused concentration on 'the one' seems misplaced. What is it that Suger, Abbot of Denis, said again? Something like: jalal and jamal.