With so much information flying about out there it's hard to know where the gaze might rest, or what memory might cling on to.There is an accumulation of books, none of which you can remember beyond the barest outline, the shelves of your heart and mind crowded, jostling for space with a real life.
The dark days, the ice-rain slanting down at an angle, and still they held on, with their texts and vellum, books whose first letter contained a whole story, a word and an image, a picture book. The determination to preserve this thinnest of reminders of other times: the past, civilisation, warmer climes, a life of concentration and stillness.
The dark days, the ice-rain slanting down at an angle, and still they held on, with their texts and vellum, books whose first letter contained a whole story, a word and an image, a picture book. The determination to preserve this thinnest of reminders of other times: the past, civilisation, warmer climes, a life of concentration and stillness.
There were the lonely fortified
monasteries , like little arks floating and keeping the adventure of
consciousness afloat. The brave souls, the monks and bishops who carried
the soul and spirit of man, unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the
howling flood of the Dark Ages.
Images of stars, and Arabic commentaries on 'the divine Aristotle', the Sanskrit of the heart, words with their meaning all but snuffed out, a kind of low blue flame to be protected in glass. To name the world, imagine a reader a thousand years from now who will eke out another interpretation just by the sheer dazzling fact that she lived in another time, remote and alien from theirs. To carry the word with you is a religious act and is driven by the fear of loss, but also by hope and charity.
~~~
'I bear witness...'. A well-known Muslim line. But it is a witness to our own lives that we want, need. To bear: a burden, to suffer, the weight of responsibility that only man takes up...Or doesn't. Again, this striving for 'lightness', forgetfulness, for the disengaged moment, discontinuous from all that has happened. The gap, shored up by ruins and fragments, but the dizzying vertigo, the radically, shocking new, the desire for a clean break, the man of the forest, he too is with the monk on his journey.
~~~
'The tension between the everyday and the Sabbath-his awareness of himself as he is, and his longing for what what eh wants to become.'
'The world will be the world again.'
'The shabby origins of our love, can lead to this act and this death.'
'Those who are keepers of images are people selected to hold precious objects safe...They have taken a vow to do so because of the singular nature of the image itself. The image is a representation of a secret self, the being one longs to be, the Sabbath-self, the infant.
'More than ever, now: to believe there is something that is simply not the norm.'
---Fanny Howe (via anton, sort of)
~~~
'The inner walls were adorned with paintings executed by a Byzantine artist on the orders of the KaĘżba’s pagan masters; they portrayed scenes from the life of Abraham and certain idolatrous customs. There was also a representation of the Holy Virgin and Child. Protecting this icon of the Holy Virgin with both hands, the Prophet ordered that all the others be effaced.'
---Titus Burckhardt
Images of stars, and Arabic commentaries on 'the divine Aristotle', the Sanskrit of the heart, words with their meaning all but snuffed out, a kind of low blue flame to be protected in glass. To name the world, imagine a reader a thousand years from now who will eke out another interpretation just by the sheer dazzling fact that she lived in another time, remote and alien from theirs. To carry the word with you is a religious act and is driven by the fear of loss, but also by hope and charity.
~~~
'I bear witness...'. A well-known Muslim line. But it is a witness to our own lives that we want, need. To bear: a burden, to suffer, the weight of responsibility that only man takes up...Or doesn't. Again, this striving for 'lightness', forgetfulness, for the disengaged moment, discontinuous from all that has happened. The gap, shored up by ruins and fragments, but the dizzying vertigo, the radically, shocking new, the desire for a clean break, the man of the forest, he too is with the monk on his journey.
~~~
'The tension between the everyday and the Sabbath-his awareness of himself as he is, and his longing for what what eh wants to become.'
'The world will be the world again.'
'The shabby origins of our love, can lead to this act and this death.'
'Those who are keepers of images are people selected to hold precious objects safe...They have taken a vow to do so because of the singular nature of the image itself. The image is a representation of a secret self, the being one longs to be, the Sabbath-self, the infant.
'More than ever, now: to believe there is something that is simply not the norm.'
---Fanny Howe (via anton, sort of)
~~~
'The inner walls were adorned with paintings executed by a Byzantine artist on the orders of the KaĘżba’s pagan masters; they portrayed scenes from the life of Abraham and certain idolatrous customs. There was also a representation of the Holy Virgin and Child. Protecting this icon of the Holy Virgin with both hands, the Prophet ordered that all the others be effaced.'
---Titus Burckhardt
2 comments:
a beautiful post, b.
thank you, fff!
b.
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