How Can I Begin

How can I begin?
So many skin
of silence upon me
Not that they blunt me,
but I have become
accustomed to
walking like a pregnant woman
carrying something
alive yet remote.
My thoughts,
though less articulate
than image,
still have in them
something like a skeleton,
a durable beginning
waiting for
unpredicted flesh
and deliverence.
I would ask
you: learn as I learn
patience with mine
and your own silence.

~Pat Lowther

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Each one of us is a centre of life, a unique event inthe universe, and whatever our external relations to people and things may be, the absolute fact remains that we have to live our inner life alone even as we have to die our own death; no one can live our own inner life for us; and no one can go through our own death. In the infinite struggle of man to know this world and the universe around him, and also to know the mind that allows him to think, he comes before the simple fact that life is above thought… [Juan Mascaró - Introduction to The Upanishads: Penguin 1965]

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“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee [Attitus Finch, Chapter 11.]

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“Look…Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. So don’t sweat it. For focus simply move a few inches back or forward. And once more…look.” ~ Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion)

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…we are kin to stars

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Ahab’s Wife’ by Sena Jeter Naslund. I’ve been entranced by the language in the book and I can’t seem to put the thing down. Here’s a passage from p558 of my copy, and you’ll see what I mean about the language. The whole book is line one giant poem. I bought it on a whim, because I am a fan of Melville’s Moby Dick and I wanted to see what this woman had done with a character that is mentioned in maybe two lines of Moby. I am not disappointed.

     There is a great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.
     Where is my place before this whirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty -that gilt frame - burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It’s no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in thier turning, marches them always outward in thier fiery parade.
     That I can see thier glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive - and surely they are alive in some other way. Perhaps it is only being that we share. But something is shared between me on the rooftop and them flung wideand myriad up there. What was the golden motto emroidered on the hem of my baby’s silk dress? We are kin to stars.
I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black v’s between my fanning fingers. To think I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. it is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Thier light is on my hands.
     Thier light is in my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright - I lower my hands - why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call thier names, but htey are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.
     Little scrap, little morsel, the stars sing to me, we are the same.

I’m sad I’m almost done!

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“…[the Utopians] chief subject of dispute is the nature of human happiness - on what factor or factors does it depend? Here they seem rather too much inclined to take a hedonistic view, for according to them human happiness consists largely or wholly in pleasure. Surprisingly enough, they defend this self-indulgent doctrine by arguments drawn from religion - a thing normally associated with a more serious view of life, if not with gloomy asceticism. You see, in all their discussions of happiness they invoke certain religious principles to supplement the operations of reason, which they think otherwise ill-equipped to identify true happiness.

The first principle is that every soul is immortal, and was created by a kind God, Who meant it to be happy. The second is that we shall be rewarded or punished in the next world for our good or bad behaviour in this one. Although these are religious principles, the Utopians find rational grounds for accepting them. For suppose you don’t accept them? In that case, they say, any fool can tell you what you ought to do. You should go all out for your own pleasure, irrespective of right and wrong. You’d merely have to make sure that minor pleasures didn’t interfere with major ones and avoid the type of pleasure that has painful after-affects. For what’s the sense of struggling to be virtuous, denying yourself the pleasant things in life, and deliberately making yourself uncomfortable if there’s nothing you hope to gain by it? And what can you hope to gain by it, if you receive no compensation after death for a thoroughly unpleasant, that is, thoroughly miserable life?

…according to the normal view, happiness is the summum bonum towards which we’re naturally impelled by virtue - which in their definition means following one’s natural impulses, as God meant us to do. But this includes obeying the instinct to be reasonable in our likes and dislikes. And reason also teaches us, first to love and reverence Almighty God, to Whom we owe our existence and our potentiality for happiness, and secondly to get through life as comfortably and cheerfully as we can, and to help all other members of our species to do so too.

The fact is, even the sternest ascetic tends to be slightly inconsistent in his condemnation of pleasure. He may sentence you to a life of hard labour, inadequate sleep, and general discomfort, but he’ll also tell you to do your best to ease the pains and privations of others. He’ll regard all such attempts to improve the human situation as laudable acts of humanity - for obviously nothing could be more humane, or more natural for a human being, than to relieve other people’s sufferings, put and end to their miseries, and restore their joie de vivre, that is, their capacity for pleasure. So why shouldn’t it be equally natural to do the same thing for oneself?

Either it’s a bad thing to enjoy life, in other words, to experience pleasure - in which case you shouldn’t help anyone to do it, but should try to save the whole human race from such a frightful fate - or else, if its good for other people, and you’re not only allowed, but positively obliged to make it possible for them, why shouldn’t charity begin at home? After all, you’ve a duty to yourself as well as to your neighbour, and, if Nature says you must be kind to others, she can’t turn around the next moment and say you must be cruel to yourself. The Utopians therefore regard the enjoyment of life - that is, pleasure - as the natural object of all human efforts, the natural, as they define it, is synonymous with virtuous. However, Nature also wants us to help one another to enjoy life, for the very good reason that no human being has a monopoly of her affections. She’s equally anxious for the welfare of every member of the species. So of course she tells us to make quite sure that we don’t pursue our own interests at the expense of other people’s…”

from Utopia (book II) - Thomas More

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“The future…something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” ~C.S. Lewis [The Screwtape Letters]

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I know where my towel is, do you?

“The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

~The Hichthiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately…or accurately claim to remember what happened truthfully… Besides, there are some things that can’t be the truth even if they did happen.

Ken Kesey – Sometimes a Great Notion

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But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of control and the curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at…

6:43:16 BDST –in the sky right now here is the same unfolding, just about to break through, his face deepening with its light, everything about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside has ever proclaimed… slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining grace, swearing this is how it does happen –yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud…”

– Beyond the Zero [Gravity’s Rainbow] Thomas Pynchon

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