"Not my pride, not my spleen nor any other appetites oppose it, but I do-I, I."
---Thomas More.
"Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the woof and warp of the universe, that sets riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of this order but we remain, quintessentially, unknown."
--D.H.L.
~
You think of Gissing, standing on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court road, over a century ago now, hungry and bewildered, with sixpence in his hands. You have stood there many a time as well, deciding whether to go down to Leicester Square or back up to Russell Square. From a top floor flat a woman looking down on you would be greatly amused to see this bundle of confused stillness amidst the unceasing to and fro of strangers.. And in a hundred years from now, what of that glance?
A small part of you, perhaps 1/5th, derives a perverse kind of pleasure from the consideration of the fact that books and people and buildings are forgotten, nay, more, that they are destined to fade into memory, that all of history collapses like a pack of cards and what we now decipher of it is nothing more than a few faces turned away, a search for the ace, a grinning joker..
But for the greater part you are held stunned by the thought of all the people-great and small-who traverse a given place and who are are ghosts in the sunlight. I, not I, I...
'The phenomenon called "I'
is a blue illumination
of the hypothesized, organic current lamp
(a compound of all transparent ghosts).'
Last Acts, Disappearing Acts, What has Happened, Hold on Dreamer, Dark Mirror, Snow in April...have you not been talking about your own soul all along? Where have you been all this time? A question to myself.
I have lived many lives, which is to say I have lived none.
The great mystery: there are people from different eras, ages and historical worlds who walk by each other quite oblivious of the fact that the other exists. One's star is rising, the other's is falling. I know some old people who can remember a few stories their grandfathers told them, so that words and turns of phrases from the mid 19th century dimly live on somehow. My inheritance: a stray and unique gesture of the hand, a Jewish nose..
You are under no illusion: the grandness of the "I" is today without anchor, is but so much dust without the illumination of faith. But, equally, with faith in the world today as it is that anchor sinks it, not into some timeless truths but into a shadow-world of pettiness and hatred, a hallucinatory world.
Another I, that has failed to, and continues to fails to, take definite form of shape, that briefly glitters under grey skies, knows of no resistance or acquiescence, blue and green, am I, not I?
---Thomas More.
"Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the woof and warp of the universe, that sets riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of this order but we remain, quintessentially, unknown."
--D.H.L.
~
You think of Gissing, standing on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court road, over a century ago now, hungry and bewildered, with sixpence in his hands. You have stood there many a time as well, deciding whether to go down to Leicester Square or back up to Russell Square. From a top floor flat a woman looking down on you would be greatly amused to see this bundle of confused stillness amidst the unceasing to and fro of strangers.. And in a hundred years from now, what of that glance?
A small part of you, perhaps 1/5th, derives a perverse kind of pleasure from the consideration of the fact that books and people and buildings are forgotten, nay, more, that they are destined to fade into memory, that all of history collapses like a pack of cards and what we now decipher of it is nothing more than a few faces turned away, a search for the ace, a grinning joker..
But for the greater part you are held stunned by the thought of all the people-great and small-who traverse a given place and who are are ghosts in the sunlight. I, not I, I...
'The phenomenon called "I'
is a blue illumination
of the hypothesized, organic current lamp
(a compound of all transparent ghosts).'
Last Acts, Disappearing Acts, What has Happened, Hold on Dreamer, Dark Mirror, Snow in April...have you not been talking about your own soul all along? Where have you been all this time? A question to myself.
I have lived many lives, which is to say I have lived none.
The great mystery: there are people from different eras, ages and historical worlds who walk by each other quite oblivious of the fact that the other exists. One's star is rising, the other's is falling. I know some old people who can remember a few stories their grandfathers told them, so that words and turns of phrases from the mid 19th century dimly live on somehow. My inheritance: a stray and unique gesture of the hand, a Jewish nose..
You are under no illusion: the grandness of the "I" is today without anchor, is but so much dust without the illumination of faith. But, equally, with faith in the world today as it is that anchor sinks it, not into some timeless truths but into a shadow-world of pettiness and hatred, a hallucinatory world.
Another I, that has failed to, and continues to fails to, take definite form of shape, that briefly glitters under grey skies, knows of no resistance or acquiescence, blue and green, am I, not I?
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