The givenness of things

And the moment comes to settle on our lives.

I didn't mean by that that there's a moment when we have to settle for the life we have; it was more: a moment of blessed sleep comes to gently settle, like snow or dew. 

And in the morning I couldn't but help be amazed by the very fact we can think, speak. It sounds naff when I say it like that, but the fact that we can even reason about reason seems to me to be utterly mysterious. It points to a 'givenness' of being that is beyond reason.

Ratzinger's line held me spellbound, not knowing quite why:

Creativity is obedience to the origin.

This requires, first and foremost, a remembrance of the origin. But obedience? How can that be? I think the medievals would say, we are bound and free. And creativity is a response to that memory of what we truly are. I think Muslims would say that that entails finding our true name with God (Christians might say, our true image).

A Jewish thought:

Thou has covered me in my mother's womb.

"This Hebrew news holds me and lets me go free, whereas the Greek aspiration to return the soul to its divine source fetters me for aeons in a body cursed and to be abandoned."

--Gillian Rose. 

Here there is a deep sense of trust, an acceptance of mystery..part of which is the mystery of time. 

The old world

k

The last notes of a crumbling world. The faded photographs, drained of colour. But once, a long time ago, I have heard it said: life and religion were full of colour...

Is this the last generation? The last time a child will look at a white butterfly caught in a staggering flight and ask: why? Is this the last generation to ask what the heart has lost? 

Buddhism

I hesitate to say anything on this since I know next to nothing about Buddhism. But I am interested in understanding why eastern religions have appealed to so many people in the modern west. That is not a question about the Truth of Buddhism but, rather, why this particular 'shape' of the truth should find such a wide reception at this juncture in time.

I vaguely recall Nietzsche writing disparagingly of Buddhism..the sense of an exhausted will in the late days. And there was this by Spengler:

 It was the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent to and "contemporary" with Stoicism and Socialism. [...] Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and the Western "Socialist" of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies.

It is strange when Islam is clearly more aligned to the Judaic-Christian heritage. Or is it precisely because it's so close to that heritage that it must be kept at arms length? Could it be that the interest in Sufism fits into this pattern? Any system of thought or way of living that asks serious political questions is obviously a dangerous thing. Does that, at least in part, explain the hostility and indifference? 

And why is there such a focus on 'mindfulness' right now? Does it have anything to do with current concerns that our attention has become a commodity and is being put under extraordinary pressures? Or is it just another way for capitalism to tap into the non-economic realms of life in order to extract surplus? After all, mindfulness is only useful as long as it enhances productivity/creativity.
  

In my coat I sit 

At the window sill 

Wintering with snow 

That did not melt 

It fell long ago 

At night, by stealth 

I was where I am 

When the snow began.

--S. Menashe.

Time is moving on forward with such rapidity that there's isn't even time to pause and look back, and see who I am.

The world as phantom and as matrix

A shadow on the wall

boughs stirred by the noonday wind

that’s enough earth

and for the eye

enough celestial participation.

How much further do you want to go? Refuse

the bossy insistence

of new impressions—

lie there still,

behold your own fields,

your estate,

dwelling especially

on the poppies,

unforgettable

because they transported the summer—

where did it go?

---G. Benn

~~

The summer is over, the storms grow, and your coffee doesn't taste right. Retreat, as far as you can go, to the very heart of the poppy seed, perhaps? We speak a darkness between us.

This image was brought to you...

The world, as sponsored by...

In 1956, two years before Arendt's Human Condition, Gunther Anders wrote a prescient essay describing the beginnings of a "phantom world". This is before the 'society of the spectacle' as well. In the article he talks about the mass production of "hermits" for whom the world will be brought to their private living rooms. This "phantom" world, always half-absent, the stage of representations, images, background banter and music..always brought to you with the express intent of rooting us to the spot, of making us consumers of images and therefore our own producers of a mass, isolated self.

The political ramifications of the loss of the public world, of the ability to act in the world, would be spelled out by Arendt. The loss of speech that comes about when we're beholden to the manufactured image has, of course, political consequences: thoughtlessness and speechlessness. 

~~~

Robinsons

Memory and loss are held by stone.

A boy standing calmly in the perfect still island
Just a dark name.
No age given, or blue plaques,
no announcement of the statistical chances of living.

No recollection of the diseases
gnawing at your body, tearing at your flesh.

Sometimes a boy, sometimes an angel.
and sometimes just a stone washed ashore.
But forever a golden child standing in the soft sand.

Robinson.

All the shells are broken,
small peieces of multi-coloured glass
well on their way to becoming glittering sand, or stars.
Listen!
O, this is the sea, this is the sea.

Drift, drift.
ggggdrift

One wave in a thousand brings something.
One of these stray heartbeats was yours?

and once I knew you with all my heart.
O, this is the sea.

~~~

The pages in the books are blank, 

The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,   

Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here. 

All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson   

Calling. It never rings when he is here. 

---Weldon Kees.