Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Jan Zwicky, from Introduction to Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada (edited by Harold Coward and Andrew J. Weaver).
Climate change is only one of several human-induced environmental---what?....crises? difficulties? challenges? Any noun I might choose has political spin, defines allegiances, presupposes a point of view. Robert Bringhurst puts the point succinctly:
Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.
---(1995, p. 200)
It is hubris to imagine our species can destroy everything, or even everything that matters to it, just as it is hubris to imagine we are what evolution is "for," or that human interests are distinct from and ontologically superior to all others.
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"---A question that has no answer, but one that is rooted in a fact that has absorbed and moved great thinkers from Lao Tzu to Heidegger. Which is not to say that you have to be a philosophical genius to experience astonishment that things exist: it's a common experience among the naturalists and poets of my acquaintance. [...] Our astonishment is the mark of our mortality. Is-ness is, always; but what is, this, is here only now. The love we feel for concrete particulars---a stand of birch, a stretch of river, no less than other human beings---is as biologically basic as our sexual mode of reproduction. We must love what dies and we must love because we die. Plato, like other religious thinkers in other traditions, sought to ease the pain attendant on this inheritance by encouraging us to fix our erotic gaze on eternity, on the non-particularized being that informs everything that is. But me, I'm with Herakleitos: "The things of which there is seeing, hearing, and perception, these do I prefer" (Diels, 1934, Fr. 55). I would be the last to deny the power of universal, atemporal being; it's just that because I'm human---that is, because I love and die---it's only half the story. "Nameless:" says the Tao Te Ching, "the origin of heaven and earth./ Naming: the mother of ten thousand things" (1993, chap. 1). Those ten thousand things are the other half of the story. They are the manifestations through which the mystery flows, without which it would be invisible, of which we are one. We hope because, quite apart from the philosophers, we have good reason to believe that beauty will be here: there will be trees and grass and rivers and, unless we are staggeringly stupid, a few humans around to appreciate them. We grieve because we also have reason to believe that this beauty---at least some among these copses, these grasslands, these shorelines---will not survive. That is what this book is about: the grounds for that hope, and that grief.
Climate change is only one of several human-induced environmental---what?....crises? difficulties? challenges? Any noun I might choose has political spin, defines allegiances, presupposes a point of view. Robert Bringhurst puts the point succinctly:
Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.
---(1995, p. 200)
It is hubris to imagine our species can destroy everything, or even everything that matters to it, just as it is hubris to imagine we are what evolution is "for," or that human interests are distinct from and ontologically superior to all others.
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"---A question that has no answer, but one that is rooted in a fact that has absorbed and moved great thinkers from Lao Tzu to Heidegger. Which is not to say that you have to be a philosophical genius to experience astonishment that things exist: it's a common experience among the naturalists and poets of my acquaintance. [...] Our astonishment is the mark of our mortality. Is-ness is, always; but what is, this, is here only now. The love we feel for concrete particulars---a stand of birch, a stretch of river, no less than other human beings---is as biologically basic as our sexual mode of reproduction. We must love what dies and we must love because we die. Plato, like other religious thinkers in other traditions, sought to ease the pain attendant on this inheritance by encouraging us to fix our erotic gaze on eternity, on the non-particularized being that informs everything that is. But me, I'm with Herakleitos: "The things of which there is seeing, hearing, and perception, these do I prefer" (Diels, 1934, Fr. 55). I would be the last to deny the power of universal, atemporal being; it's just that because I'm human---that is, because I love and die---it's only half the story. "Nameless:" says the Tao Te Ching, "the origin of heaven and earth./ Naming: the mother of ten thousand things" (1993, chap. 1). Those ten thousand things are the other half of the story. They are the manifestations through which the mystery flows, without which it would be invisible, of which we are one. We hope because, quite apart from the philosophers, we have good reason to believe that beauty will be here: there will be trees and grass and rivers and, unless we are staggeringly stupid, a few humans around to appreciate them. We grieve because we also have reason to believe that this beauty---at least some among these copses, these grasslands, these shorelines---will not survive. That is what this book is about: the grounds for that hope, and that grief.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
How The Late Autumn Night Novel Begins:
The ferryboat smells of oil and something rattles all the time like an obsession. The spotlight's turned on. We're pulling in to the jetty. I'm the only one who wants off here. "Need the gangway?" No. I take a long tottering stride right into the night and stand on the jetty, on the island. I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept out of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand are misshapen wings. I turn round and see the boat gliding away with its shining windows, then grope my way towards the familiar house which has been empty for so long. There's no one in any of the houses round about.... It's good to fall asleep here. I lie on my back and don't know if I'm asleep or awake. Some books I've read pass by like old sailing ships on their way to the Bermuda triangle to vanish without a trace.... I hear a hollow sound, an absentminded drumming. An object the wind keeps knocking against something the earth holds still. If the night is not just an absence of light, if the night really is something, then it's that sound. Stethoscope noises from a slow heart, it beats, goes silent for a time, comes back. As if the creature were moving in a zigzag across the Frontier. Or someone knocking in a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but was left behind here, knocking, wanting back. Too late. Couldn't get down there, couldn't get up there, couldn't get aboard.... The other world is this world too. Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.
- Tomas Tranströmer
The ferryboat smells of oil and something rattles all the time like an obsession. The spotlight's turned on. We're pulling in to the jetty. I'm the only one who wants off here. "Need the gangway?" No. I take a long tottering stride right into the night and stand on the jetty, on the island. I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept out of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand are misshapen wings. I turn round and see the boat gliding away with its shining windows, then grope my way towards the familiar house which has been empty for so long. There's no one in any of the houses round about.... It's good to fall asleep here. I lie on my back and don't know if I'm asleep or awake. Some books I've read pass by like old sailing ships on their way to the Bermuda triangle to vanish without a trace.... I hear a hollow sound, an absentminded drumming. An object the wind keeps knocking against something the earth holds still. If the night is not just an absence of light, if the night really is something, then it's that sound. Stethoscope noises from a slow heart, it beats, goes silent for a time, comes back. As if the creature were moving in a zigzag across the Frontier. Or someone knocking in a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but was left behind here, knocking, wanting back. Too late. Couldn't get down there, couldn't get up there, couldn't get aboard.... The other world is this world too. Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.
- Tomas Tranströmer
Thursday, August 18, 2011
A Story About The Body:
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity---like music---withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl---she must have swept them from the corners of her studio---was full of dead bees.
- Robert Hass, from Human Wishes.
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity---like music---withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl---she must have swept them from the corners of her studio---was full of dead bees.
- Robert Hass, from Human Wishes.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
L68:
A live metaphor is a linguistic short-circuit. Non-metaphorical ways of speaking conduct meaning, in insulated carriers, to certain ends and purposes. Metaphors shave off the insulation and meaning arcs across the gap.
A dead metaphor is one in which this arcing between gestalts no longer occurs. Its energy has been diverted into and contained by the culture’s linguistic grid.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
A live metaphor is a linguistic short-circuit. Non-metaphorical ways of speaking conduct meaning, in insulated carriers, to certain ends and purposes. Metaphors shave off the insulation and meaning arcs across the gap.
A dead metaphor is one in which this arcing between gestalts no longer occurs. Its energy has been diverted into and contained by the culture’s linguistic grid.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.
- William Blake, from "[A Vision of the Last Judgment]," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
- William Blake, from "[A Vision of the Last Judgment]," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
Monday, August 1, 2011
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