1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), 36.
Archive for March, 2008
Only a sheep’s fodder bush and a screw pine
And a dark sea going by at a piaffer
And a little palæocrystic light keeping watch
Through the phengites of this panopticon
On mankind in the last stages of pellagra.Now the light, the paxwax of infinity,
Becomes rigid as a bar of iron.
No phosphene or photopsia any longer
Can supplement or supplant it, and in vain
A voice still cries ‘Ephphatha’ which means nothing
In the poor pasilaly of all other sound
Which is no more than a rattle of broken bones
On the invisible pamphract of God.
from The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Volume I (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985), 393.
I have implied that the original faith which Luther tried to restore goes back to the basic trust of early infancy. In doing so I have not, I believe, diminished the wonder of what Luther calls God’s disguise. If I assume that it is the smiling face and the guiding voice of infantile parent images which religion projects onto the benevolent sky, I have no apologies to render to an age which thinks of painting the moon red. Peace comes from the inner space.
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,1958), 265-66.
“Not to weep, not to laugh, but to understand.” Spinoza.
Ecotone: the boundary between two ecosystems.
“A society does not stamp personalities from a die, but no one can go beyond its possibilites for freedom and growth.” Sidney Finkelstein, How Music Expresses Ideas.
“Society has no fringe … no one is ever outside it even in the depths of dungeons.” Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary.
Theresa [of Avila]’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel, and fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), vii-viii. Emphasis added.
These, of course, are the final words of The Return of the King, spoken by Samwise Gamgee. For those who feared that the bout of ‘nosocomial tedium’ might have been fatal, I am fine, merely quite busy.
I believe, however, that I can now find the time to return to regular writing here.
