Thoughts for the New Year

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"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of a terror that we are still just unable to endure..."

--Ranier Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies

"Who could tell what wonders waited then, when emotions were full and strong and sufficient, no longer greedy and grasping, when the senses could take in colour and essence and respond to all the delicate vibrations which now their clumsy dullness missed, when deprivation itself should be an intense means of experiencing both the deprived self and the thing of which it was deprived, when..."

--Charles Williams, from Shadows of Ecstasy

"But someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you this many a year:  that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough.  Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried."

--C.S. Lewis, from The Great Divorce

On What I Know and Who I Am (Becoming)

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In Night Operation, Barfield offers advice for those suffering from "library-terror," that feeling that there is endless recorded knowledge in the world but nowhere to begin to understand it. Barfield's remedy is "to keep following always one particular thread of inquiry"—presumably with an inkling that eventually anything will lead to everything or at least to everything you need to know. Almost as long as I can remember, I have followed a thread. I have been in pursuit of something, something I knew not what and I have come to believe that this pursuit is coeternal with my being. The experience of receiving what I needed to receive when I needed to receive it, most commonly through reading but also through hearing or even mishearing, from thinking, being told or through what seemed an unbidden insight, is an experience that I cannot deny. It is not correct to conclude from this that my mind did not grow through direct experience. Alert receptivity (when we manage to achieve it) is the definition of direct experience, whether of art, nature, intellect, love or heartbreak.

One could argue, however, that I cannot step outside of my life to evaluate how it, how I would be now had I learned one thing when, in fact, I learned another. It is possible to conclude that, of course, everything seems as it should be because that is how it is. I know and love my life as it is. Had it been different, I would have loved that life, too. To that, I answer that my life is an unfolding, and just as it is possible to discipline ourselves to see becoming, to see not a leaf but leaf-ing, not natura naturata but natura naturans, I can learn to see—even to quite literally see—the thread of my life as the thread of my Self. For his part, Barfield looked forward to a time when ""a man is no longer regarded as a lunatic who divines that the things which happen to a person, and the order in which they happen, may be as much a part of him as his physical organism."

I am not an object acted upon, am not distinct from what happens to me, what occurs "in" my life. I am what I seek. I am what I learn—the serendipities and the disappointments. I am what I am coming to know and this is much larger than the appearance of myself as phenomenon. In What Coleridge Thought, Barfield explains that Coleridge, often accused of plagiarism, did not generally "borrow" the ideas of others but "adopted" them. The difference is that, in borrowing, one merely apes the insights of another. In adopting, the ideas come alive in one's self. One mind rises up to meet another in Mind. It is possible to adopt only what had been on the tip of one's own tongue to begin with. From this understanding, it is a short step to realize Coleridge's imperative that we should recognize our own creative activity as the creative activity of the Universe. Just as it is possible, as Steiner did, to think of a butterfly as "a flower liberated from its stalk," it is possible to experience Life, the same Life that animates everything else, transmuting itself, displaying itself, reveling in itself through me—through each and all of us all the time.

Many, many blessings for the New Year!

"The Poetic Narrative of Our Time" by David Whyte

Excerpt:  "It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. This is poetry's province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life."

From Night Operation

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Owen Barfield's novella, Night Operation, can be described as his "Allegory of the Cave." Through its characters, he explores what it means to see, to think and to create as well as the difficulty, when we are true to ourselves, of distinguishing between the three activities:


"There are two kinds of seeing.  There is just seeing—and there is being shown."

___

Words were uttered by the Gods at the start. Very well—but they have since been spoken by men, and most of them spoken very much amiss; and the things have followed them. Men call themselves 'creative' and fill a Library with books and pictures, and the world with things they have made. But in the end, for good or ill, they can only do what the gods are doing in them. It might have been otherwise if they had ever been fully born. As, who knows, perhaps they nearly were.

___

We shall do whatever we find to do, whether it's big or little, not because we think it's likely to succeed but because we are bound to. I don't mean compelled. I mean bound by the shape of what we've seen and by the fact that we've seen it. We shall know the direction in which our faces are turned, because there is only one way in which a face that has looked on that could be turned. And that's all we need to know. Prospects and hope are bunk. The only reality is resolution.

We also find the three protagonists experimenting with exact sensorial imagination as it is described in this passage:

Nevertheless, as Peet pointed out, amid all variety that same particular blossom with its own particular shape could be seen recurring over and over again. He made them concentrate on one of these to begin with, until they could recognize it when they saw it in another place. 'We haven't got a name for it,' he said, 'but that doesn't matter. Perhaps it is all the better. The point is we must become able to say to ourselves, 'This is this flower and not another.' After which they went on and did the same with a few more.

"Nature Fulfilled by Grace"

One of the readings from yesterday's Charles Williams' New Christian Year was this two-line gem from Coventry Patmore:

"I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."  Not because they are so unlike your mortal experiences, but because they are so like.

--from The Rod, the Root, and the Flower.

This led me to explore the full-text of The Rod, the Root and the Flower where, so far, I have been delighted to discover that there are more gems where that came from.  The first passage is from the introduction:

A systematic Philosopher, should he condescend to read 

the following notes, will probably 
say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed 
the stars for the first time, " How untidy the 
sky is ! " But who does not know that all philosophies 

have had to pay, for the blessing of 
system, by the curse of barrenness? Sensible 
people will feel shocked at my "paradoxes," 
which, however, are not mine, and are, as Coleridge says, 

the only mode in which realities 
of a certain order can be approximately expressed.

_____

Lovers put out the candles and draw the 
curtains, when they wish to see the god and the 
goddess; and, in the higher Communion, the 

night of thought is the light of perception. 

_____

Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural, 
but is supernaturally natural. 

_____

Direct teaching cannot go much beyond pointing out 

the conditions of perception, and the direction 

in which it is to be looked for. 

_____

Goethe said that " God is manifested in ultimates";

that is, in facts of human nature of which 
we not only see no explanation, but also see 

that no explanation is possible. 

_____

The most pregnant passages of Scripture, 

of the wise ancients, and of great poets are those 
which seem to you to have no meaning, or an absurd one. 

_____

"Detachment" consists, not in casting aside 
all natural loves and goods, but in the possession 
of a love and a good so great that all others, 
though they may and do acquire increase through 
the presence of the greater love and good, which 
explains and justifies them, seem nothing in comparison. 

 

More from Robert Kelly

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Theology of Mind

When I say mind, I mean desire. When I say desire, I mean you. When I say you, I mean your skin. When I say your skin, I mean the way in. When I say the way in, I mean the way into the dark. When I say the dark, I mean the place where there is listening. When I say listening, I mean listening to the word. When I say a word, I mean a bone. And when I say bone, I mean the ocean, but when I say ocean I mean a book. And when I say book, I mean the law. When I say law, I mean tethers and fetters. When I say fetters, I mean a knife. When I say knife, I mean wisdom. When I say wisdom, I mean your body. And when I say your body, I mean your mind.


--Robert Kelly

"Hedgehog" by Paul Muldoon