A Better Environment

I have been asked to translate a work from French called Testament of the Ego, a focused, poetic meditation on how the ego would divorce one from the freeflow play of life, communication with what the author calls the Holy Spirit, which resides within us (actually, he writes - the Holy Spirit is also us). It is a short work, as so many of the best works are; short enough to contain something essential, not long enough to lose it. It is a gentle appeal to how our reason, the reason of the ego, can reason us out of the more tender and profound moments of life. The "testament" is written as the author seeks to finally release this ego. I find myself drawn back to the book, though it makes me a little bit afraid, just like Western Buddhism makes me afraid - the book seems somhow Buddhist - in that I think the Western approach to these worldviews take them too literally. And yet. The author does not, as there is a humour that pervades the book, even when it is most serious. I don't know how I will find the time to translate it, but as I said, I feel drawn to return to read it whenever I have time. And tonight, as I was doing the housework, I heard a phrase on a podcast that reminded me of the book, Rebecca Solnit's idea that "people in this century ... seem to love certainty more than hope".

The idea that we love certainty more than hope reminded me of the Testament plea: that we once and for all leave the empty reasoning of the ego for a life that unfolds - in unexpected ways - only in the present (I do the book a disservice by shorthanding in this way).
Not having heard of Solnit before the podcast, so not knowing of the larger context of her writing, I did admire how she spoke in this instance of libelous clichés that emerge from the media, and how they keep some people from witnessing the manifestations of hope and possibly fruitful change that can emerge even out of disaster.

... all the clichés [of] ... how we revert to our savage, social-Darwinist nature, were aired [in New Orleans during Katrina]. And ... all the major news outlets ... were the unindicted co-conspirators ... They start publishing all this garbage about how there’s mass killings in the Superdome. And that was just believed so much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends a gigantic tractor-trailer refrigerated truck to get what turns out to be six bodies, not the 200 that are supposed to be there.

There’s all these stories that people are shooting at helicopters, so you can’t have helicopter rescues [but who would shoot at helicopters during a time of need - she asks in the unedited interview]. And so they mount a campaign, not to treat suffering human beings and bring them resources, but to reconquer the city. ... And it’s like, that is not a humanitarian effort. M16s are not how you help that grandmother dying on the roof. And some of those grandmothers died.  And so people were not a victim of a hurricane, they were a victim of vicious stories ... And what’s interesting is that a lot of people believe those stories. And we often treat stories like they’re very trivial, like they’re story hour for kids or — but people live and die by stories.

Stories. The stories that kill us could be stories of our own making, according to the author of Testament. So, like that author, Solnit is making an appeal to another kind of narrative for life, choosing to talk about:

... the unpredictability of our lives and that ground for hope ... — that we don’t know what forces are at work, what — who and what is going to appear, what thing we may not have even noticed or may have discounted that will become a tremendous force in our lives. 

People in this culture love certainty so much, and they seem to love certainty more than hope, which is why they often seize on these really bitter, despondent narratives that are — they know exactly what’s going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win, and that there are these openings.

One example of an opening, of the "seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment" is the climate movement, which she explains now has energy generation options. I was actually planning on writing about nature in this post, before I heard this interview, which brought associations with Testament. Yet the environment is very much related here; even Solnit describes it at the beginning of the interview as a refuge that both feeds and encourages. I definitely feel that when I go out for a run, and this is why I need to run so far, to see more of the plants and animals that feed and encourage. Today, as I slip-slid on a minor muddy forest trail, I suddenly heard a tap-tappp-tap, looked up, and saw the red breast of a woodpecker, on a bare tree. Whatever my thoughts may have been at that moment, about the uncertain day ahead of me, I was able to pause, and to witness, beautiful other forms, doing other things, finding food where I saw only barrenness.

This nature, this nature that seems ever more infringed upon. That I feel for, every time I see more cement being laid over it.
In Hong Kong recently, a general's son, now retired, asked whether the mainlanders would respect the preserved areas (there is a stretch of coast, for example, that is a UNESCO-protected geopark: in about a kilometre, you can see eight totally different kinds of volcanic rock formations). He noted that those freshly-departed from village life are always in a hurry to literally pave it over. I could not help but think of how it is the same in Europe. I remember in my Angers (France) college, the farm boys who partied their families farms away. But, Testament would say, these are the reasonings of an ego that wants to live, so continues to provide intricate reasonings, involving us. But, Solnit would say, look for the openings.
Solnit may be relatable for one more reason: her pursuit of humour and depersonalised questioning. She notes [in the unedited interview] how in one interview, a host took a reductionist approach to her work, and focused an attack against her on a personal level. Her response to this was that her host had asked her a "closed question" (according to which there is only one right answer), and that she should have responded with a "Rabbinical" question - a question to a question, which would put the focus back on the interlocutor. She notes she was successful at this once, where again her work was reduced (being called her whining about suffering from the injustices of humanity), so she turned to the audience and asked, have you ever felt the injustices of humanity?, which, she says, thanks partly to her American accent delivered to a British audience, got her a laugh.
Testament was written on a deathbed. But I hope that its sentiment, one shared by others like Solnit, will bring some of us and the space around us to life.

Book of Experience

One of the gems from the second-to-last edition of On the Shoulders of Giants (which will now migrate to a weekly post here) was the discovery of a blog called Conciatore written by Paul Engle about 17th century glass maker Antonio Neri, who was, as per the blog title, a "specialist in alchemy who formulated glass from raw materials".
The most recent post, a very interesting guest post by Maria Grazzi, is about how Neri was plagiarised by a Jesuit scientist - but the part I want to respond to are her describing the "'scientific' mindset" as the study of the "book of Nature" and knowledge being acquired "with the practice of many experiences" (emphasis added).
Pierre Hadot in The Veil of Isis reads the book of Nature as follows: "Bernard Silvester reserves the word integumentum to designate myths intended, as in Plato's Timaeus, to explain a natural phenomenon (they reveal a true meaning hidden beneath a fabulous story), as opposed to allegoria, which is proper to the explication of biblical texts (it reveals a new meaning in a veridical historical narration). We find this distinction again in Dante. It corresponds to an opposition between the two books written by God, the Bible and Nature, both of which can be deciphered only if one uses an allegorical exegesis, which, in the case of the Bible, refers to sacred texts and, in the case of Nature, to myths. This Nature, we must recall, was conceived in the Middle Ages as a power subordinate to God but enjoying a certain autonomy."
Hadot later notes the resurgence of viewing Nature as a language or code, signature, hieroglyph and book in the seventeenth and also eighteenth centuries (the latter in Kant, Hamann, Goethe).
There are precedents of viewing nature as a book, like in the Pythagorean view of nature as being written in the language of mathematics. One might also observe that Homer's description of Achilles' shield fabricates the world as a reduced symbolic model.
While I understand combining the study of the book of nature with knowledge of such gained through experience to describe 'science', I wonder how many scientists actually fit this simplified model.
On Engle's blog itself, we read in From Beads to Belief Reprise that not only did Neri read Psalms by way of keeping time for his extraction of colours and dying but that he made glass beads that were not only material but of spiritual value: "they served as sequential placeholders in prayer, as objects made by man in the fashion of natural stones or gems, which were physically held and invested with hopes and dreams".
Similarly, and to choose an example of a later scientist whose narrative also addresses allegoria and integumentum,  J. C. Maxwell wrote, "We may use our knowledge of such truths for purposes of deduction, but we have no data for speculating as to their origin." This complies with Engle's observation of Neri in Beads: "At first blush, it might seem that religion would be at odds with alchemy and glassmaking. In reality, practical elements of Neri's religious life integrate seamlessly with his work at the furnace and in the laboratory."

In another context, Maxwell wrote: "I would be very sorry if an interpretation founded as a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis, even if by doing so it got rid of the old statement of the commentators which has long ceased to be intelligible. The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretation, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten."
That the distinction between the 'two books' may be seamless can be seen by Maxwell explaining, "and I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of. But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonise his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society."
To this very day, there are bishops ready to cite science for change or scientisimists who are ready to say that scientists cannot possibly have faith if they are to be successful.
What Maxwell writes might also be considered as advice against the trend of scientistic social interpration. I was thinking about that when I read Engle's post on Turquoise where Neri stresses the importance of experience when making the "sky blue" of turquoise: this privileging of science applies only to this very particular work in the laboratory. It does not apply to a life figured out through experience only.  Ἰωάννης τῆς Κλίμακος writes about such an approach to spiritual progress, saying this is a long (possibly uncertain) path, as opposed to learning via υπακοή - which I would describe as the leap of love, where one is devoted to the person, place, instruction not so much for what it is, but as a form of anchor to a type of flightiness that might otherwise get the better of one. (Maybe this is not an accurate description.)
Viewed as a book or books, the natural life of man contains so many rich stories. To return to Engle's blog, we learn of the 'evil spirits' of cobalt (kobald - this is particularly amusing if you are learning German here), which were the toxic fumes released in its making; the insects used in crimson dyes and for medicinal purposes from the Mediterranean and later from Mexico; the "as it is" in perspective painting and in science; trade agreements blocking access to raw materials - know-how unto itself may not always be enough, though the blog, being about alchemy, frequently stresses the rarity or non-existence of published know-how. But today, Conciatore, the blog about a book in part about the book of Nature, is to become a book. We say well done, and wonderful guest contribution by Grazzi.

Book: Midwest Modern. Brush: Ewansim tape at deviantART.

心

I dream in dragons, which I took to in my heart or was it mind - this 心 that can also stand for nervous and spirit. But these were not any dragons, but literary ones and not from stories but where the dragon is symbol for the embellishment of the written word: carved and engraved like so many jade creatures of the heavens (in the East, the dragon is auspicious).
This is a faraway preamble to 文心雕龍, the fifth century Chinese book on literature, translated in English as The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, which is not quite the same as the alternative: The Heart of Literature and the Carving of the same. For the book also argues for a kind of writing which is not entirely produced by the logical mind. For example, a writer is to let inspiration flow according to the Way-wherein things issue forth from nothingness. This may bring associations of ex-nihilo wherein man is the microcosm enacting an aspect of creation, in an example of what Robert Neville calls "parallel sensitivities". And in the adaptation of nothing, to return to the Tao Te Ching, we might think of sensitivities in a different way, the sensitive perception of sympathies, which is not necessarily a rational recognition    but a natural one. The author of 文心雕龍, Liu Xie, argues in this way that the writer is to be true to his or her personality.
The recognition of similarity, or parallelism, is to emerge from within if it is to be natural. We could say that in this way, the writer is to feel and think for his or herself, seeing connections where others might not. The parallelism could be described as figures of speech as much as of thought-and as the former are released from their literal confines, they require imagination to be formed, so we may now argue about where the imagination resides, is it found in the mind? What is inspiration? I put it in 心. It has to be, at least in Taoism, somewhere outside of the rational mind: the Way is had only when it is not grasped.
After Liu Xie writes of parallelism (ch. 35), he addresses polysemy and multivalence (ch. 40), which he describes as the "hidden beauties" of a text, "comprehended indirectly through secret overtones, which unobtrusively reveal hidden brilliance ...  such that common readers will have unlimited responses, and connoisseurs will never grow tired of it." The well-written text resonates.

Yet for such hidden correspondences and parallels to emerge, it happens that the dragon is also carved by a rational hand. The character 文 itself first meant "natural beauty", then the Confucian understanding of "culture", and finally "literature". This etymology is indicative of the traditional set of opposites thought to form literature: literature itself is opposed to raw material; sentiment to the decorative; reality in a work to its embellishment; tradition to what is new (etc. - it is noted that while the writer is invited to novelty s/he is warned that newness without reliance on tradition is but trend). In fact, parallelism itself reflects cosmic order as all natural things have their own parallels. Written examples emerged first spontaneously, later occurring more logically, with comparison and contrast its best type.
By way of summary, one might wish to speak of what is at the heart of literature here. "Parallel sensitivities" between natural and written beauty.
In this way, 文心雕龍 supports at once an ordered universe or may be compared to Lucretius' Nature, depending on who is writing and when. In this way, too, it is possible for some to assemble books to review under the header reading is not always good for us - with the tagline: "Somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: ... reading ... will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. But is that true?" - while others work for low pay, after prior and diametrical work experience, due to their passion for books as particularly promising for those who wish to call themselves literate. It is why, according to said review, one reviewed book's author can dismiss Middlemarch as "a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade" [may be quoted out of context] while others might see it as the literary paean to science, wherein the life is taken to microscope for some moments. What does the data say? That the modern-day Theresa may be unseen except for her reflecting light in the faces that surround her: that is the modern spiritual trial, to keep some kind of inspiration to persist despite all the pessimism and uncertainty.
In any case, if one is to craft words as dragons, that fertile beast, according to 文心雕龍, there is to be balance to all oppositions. Heart and mind. 心.
(I first blogged about 心 here.)

Brush. Magazine.

Sources

I was driven through landscapes today that I could never have imagined. We joked that if we were to relate what we saw, no one would believe us. There was an entire village of intricately-tiled homes, some with ceramic statuary of eagles whose eager and open wings seemed to defy their static form that cemented them between series of otherwise pillared balcony balustrades. Other ornaments - where they indeed were found on this architecture, from the roofs or at strange distances from the entrance - included bucking horses and lions (not the open-mouthed fortuitous Chinese sort). The thing about these houses, though, was that every one of them had their blinds drawn shut: uninhabited. Entire villages of ornamented, freshly painted, but empty homes.
And from the meandering roads, always meandering and never straight, we drove into the desert. Several times we passed people walking from and to who knows where and why as any destination was clearly more than an hours' walk away from where we passed them at noon. In the middle of those sandy lands was a wooden sign inscribed in an antiquated script that read: SOURCE. It was posted near to the road, and pointed past the road in a direction that led to no path nor to any apparent destination. That is perhaps the best summary of these hills and a perfect definition of life as it may seem to the person sometimes.

Along those roads that I longed to walk away from, craving the smell of the earth and the peace and quiet of the journey à pied, were over three score goshawks adopting various poses: one, perched upon a lone wooden post; another, at the top of a tree; a third, burrowing in the black, black earth, etc. Which reminds me of the blackspot road sign we passed - we may as well have entered a black hole, everything familiar was left behind and we drove into more fog and the birds got bigger, the smaller ones probably knowing better than to fall prey to those difficult terrains.
The mind and the soul may be starved for the larger landscape and when finally allowed to gaze at pastures that extend to the horizon, it may suddenly etch those impressions not so much to hoard them as to replenish the empty rooms, so empty that any portrait might also be useful in the time to come.
If as adults we do not know that whatever obstructs, contorts, denies, too, shall pass, perhaps we have not done our growing and if we do know such things, it is wise to store up on whatever leads the imagination back to its sources.

This long journey made today, to the desert and back in a roundabout way, was medicine for all of the petty indeterminacy of the two-faced, which, we may remember, is the symbol for the dual tragic-comedic masks of Μελπομένη and Θάλεια - the Muses of sad song and joyous flourishing, who are the sisters to the Muses of epic poetry, history, lyrical poetry, erotic poetry, hymns, and astronomy. There was something said about how theatre (whose two-faced symbol may also have birthed Janus, the god of this month and who is usually depicted above doorways) derived from what was originally temple worship. There is something that may be said about how to consider sources (such as retreating from pettiness to the perspective of history) shields one from the fracturing of vision, where things divide and multiply, seemingly without end in a rather uninspiring and oppressive way.

Sir Arthur Helps writes about how the temptation to create drama out of life stems from an ill-informed tendency towards entertainment. I shall cite it almost in full because I know I myself will want to come back to these words from time to time: "people will backbite one another to any extent rather than not be amused. Nay, so strong is this desire for something to go on that may break the monotony of life, that people, not otherwise ill-natured, are pleased with the misfortune of their neighbours, solely because it gives something to think of, something to talk about. They imagine how the principal actors and sufferers concerned in the misfortune will  bear it; what they will do; how they will look: and so the dull bystander forms a sort of drama for himself. ... 
"These poor people have nothing to think about; nature shows them comparatively little, for art and science have not taught them to look behind the scenes, or even at the scenes; literature they know nothing of; they cannot have gossip about the men of the past (which is the most innocent kind of gossip), in other words, read and  discuss history; they have no delicate handiwork to amuse them ; in short, talk they must, and talk they will, about their neighbours, whose goings-on are a perpetual puppet-show to them."
It may be the Janus of January that brings the two-faced into prominence: one may prefer indeed to think of it hung upon the door as a sign. If one has grown at all, one shall not take things at their surface value. The journey to the desert may remind one of those larger expanses, beyond the houses of nature in cement, beyond the petty collectivity that man sometimes imposes on the land,  out of tune.

Brush.

Philosophical Stargazing

In Epictetus' Discourses, the pride of the "young man come out of the schools" is that he face circumstance with courage and treat his emotions and passions with caution. Instead, however, "we turn what should be courage into rashness, desperation, recklessness, effrontery; and what should be caution becomes timid, base, and full of fears and perturbations." In a controversial take on education, he writes, "we are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the wise alone are free." In other words, the benefit of schooling is not lavished on the wealthiest Oxbridge Ivy League student so much as it is on the student who seeks wisdom. For true freedom is not in "fear, or sorrow, or perturbation" but delivery from such, "by the same means is delivered likewise from slavery." Are our maters still liberales?
Victorian classicist Ernest Myers writes in his preface to Pindar that Greek poetry offers the reader more than just literary interest: it teaches morals. He argues that the human mind should be most interesting to the human mind, which should thus desire, "knowledge of the most vigorous and sensitive and in some ways also the most fruitful action of human minds that the world has known hitherto". He makes this claim parallel with acknowledging the rise of interest in physical science, rivaling for a place in education.
To look at an ancient work we describe today as addressing physical science like the Timaeus, there, too, we are confronted with notions of good and evil, the world having been created by a good divine craftsman according to a paradigm. Thence too this idea of mimesis (the "model's Copy" 49a). There was a notion that the stars represented, through mimesis, the proportions constituting heavenly order. Thus young Anachronism muses in The Caxtons of the night sky: "Things seem to approximate to God in proportion to their vitality and movement." And just like that, one may imagine the poetic title of the lost work by Eudoxus on astronomy, called Mirror. Per aspera ad astra. What can this mean without the above context, if not antiquated frippery.
Aristotle observed long before us that, "Since men doing or experiencing something are the objects of representation, these must necessarily be either good men or inferior—thus only are characters normally distinguished, since ethical differences depend upon vice and virtue—that is to say either better than ourselves or worse or much what we are." (Poet. 1448a) To defer or to fragment discussion of the moral aspect that constellates his actions as in the modern novel may bind, not free, him. Still, Aristotle argues that the young man is unfit for Moral Science (Nic. Eth. 1095a) guiding his actions according to feelings, not principle. Experience of life and conduct are needed - if but for man to begin to read the connection between ideas and actions. By removing morals from the revolutions of the stars, human movement may run less like a Rolex and more like a brute.

There is a beautiful description of the folly impulse of youth in one of Bacchylides' odes (XVI) and the ensuing entreaty that grievous action be deferred for as long as possible, for the scales of fate will be tipped as it is, in due time: ὅ τι μὲν ἐκ θεῶν μοῖρα παγκρατὴς ἄμμι κατένευσε καὶ Δίκας ῥέπει τάλαντον πεπρωμέναν αἶσαν ἐκπλήσομεν, ὅταν ἔλθῃ· oὺ δὲ βαρεῖαν κάτεχε μῆτιν; "Whatever the resistless doom given by the gods has decreed for us, and the scale of justice inclines to ordain, that appointed fate we will fulfill when it comes." But the daring transgressor provokes further through a dare - and the youths are saved from themselves through the mercy of their parents, (and a beautiful scene with "dolphins, dwellers of the sea" and maidens with fillets and gold adorning their hair "delighting their hearts by dancing with lissom feet"): "Nothing that the gods may ordain is past belief to men of a sound mind."
Δίκας ῥέπει τάλαντον is such a beautiful phrase. I know it is said Bacchylides is no Pindar, but I am far from understanding such things at this time. Those three words put together are so potent: δίκη meaning custom, order, judgment, therefrom justice (it is the goddess Δίκη who traditionally holds the scales); ῥέπω, incline, always shifting, prevail, happen in a certain way; τᾰλαντον, balance, (of) weight, (of) money, and the root of the Biblical "talent." Indeed, as per the ῥέπω we may think of those scales as always shifting.
In the context of that line, it is implied - as Epictetus writes - that there is circumstance that can be controlled by man; some that he cannot, but need not fear, just forbear. "Do you rather contemplate death, change, torture, exile; and all these with courage, and reliance upon Him who hath called you to them, and judged you worthy a post in which you may show what reason can do when it encounters the inevitable." Emphasis added.
Bacchylides' ode shows it is the impulse (in this case, of the lustful youth whose gesture of the hand betrayed his thought) that may beset the ecosystem of self. Elsewhere, I was reading, "Do you see the terrible host of enemies and their savage legions, not clad in steel, but content with their natural ferocity, which is as good as any suit of armour?" In the starred paradigm, it was understood that behind the stars stood principles. The text of the world was not taken literally. At least not by those seeking freedom, through those "redeeming ethics on which all sects of philosophy agreed, but which, unhappily, requires a philosopher to comprehend," thought Pisistratus in The Caxtons.

Magazine. I am aware I could have composed a better image
but the sentiment remains.

Back to Nature

Yesterday at around 8am the skies were blue but for the rice paper of cumulus floating in various corners of sky, also over the moon that was still visible but had chosen that strange veil the auspice of today's weather, oppressed with mist and heavy rain. It is the sign of the fog of humanity when it is heavy with disaster; what happens when we are tested to the core of our beings. It is unpleasant, until afterwards, sometimes only much later if one fails the test, when one may agree with the Latin maxim, res severe, verisum gaudium: the severe task is the real joy. Or, one might prefer the way Kurt Hahn put it, "Your disability is your opportunity."
But of course he was the one who was proud that there was nothing new about his schools and their operation, quoting Prince Max as saying, "In education, as in medicine, you must harvest the wisdom of a thousand years."
The wisdom of a thousand years if we look back to Plato's Republic as Hadot does in Qu'est ce que la philosophie antique?, considers the philosopher powerless to impact the corruption of the city chooses to practice philosophy alone or with the like-minded. Even Marcus Aurelius expresses his own feelings of powerlessness before the lack of comprehension and inertia of his subjects.
Yet, according to Aristotle, the practical life need not be exclusively focused on "practical" actions - as we do today. It need not be directed towards others, either. Rather, "practical" may also be conceived as the activities of the soul (viz., θεωρέω) and thoughts that give rise one to another (Pol.).
The word θεωρέω is derived from look, behold, and is often used in philosophy to denote contemplate, consider - though I find it sometimes translated as science, probably shorthand for speculation to be proved. It is a view, θέα, declined from θεά, conveying with it memories of goddesses.
Through reasoning - observing, contemplating, speculating - we hope to be lifted up from the fog of existence, true to the promise of Athena, goddess of clouds and wind, the first female a male wished to bear in his own stomach. Though the goddess of war, she is also the goddess of wisdom, which she resorts to first before bearing arms, averse to needless combat. Wisdom, too, is promised by philosophy that brings order to understanding. For example, we are taught by Aristotle (Met.)  to look at each animal with the conviction that it came from a perfect seed, and recognize appropriately, therefore, its place in the bigger picture of things (also Ep. 66).

There is stable pleasure that may relieve us from suffering (Rep.). Philosophy is a defense against chance (Ep. 16): "If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich." According to nature is Ruskin' pseudonym, whether he took it from Epicurus or the Stoics. He examined morals and nature and retreated to Switzerland when he felt misunderstood. "There is no unhappiness for those whose habit has brought them back to nature." (On Prov.)
Aristotle also teaches that there are two sciences, one of the perishable and changing, and that "other" science of that which is eternal (Met.). Arithmetic (D.L. 8.1.48; Met. 987b) compels the soul to reason about the abstract (Rep. 7); maths, unchanging, are contrasted with the everyday world, imperfectly approximate. Mathematics is privileged as a means to knowing, though it is through dialogue and desire that man can make the speech-experiments that may lead him to the essential, unutterable, but desired. In this respect, we may consider the full range of the meaning of the word κόσμος, meaning universe, order and rhetorical ornamentation.
While the body weighs a person down, philosophy brings freedom, urging man to look at nature, directing it from the earthly towards the divine: "This is its freedom, this is its escape ... Do you ban me from an investigation of nature, drag me away from the whole and confine me to a part? ... Shall I not inquire who is the artisan of this cosmos?" (Ep. 65.16-20). "These bodies, which you imagine have been strewn about for no other purpose than for ornament, are one and all at work ... Tell me, would you not be captivated by the sight of such a mighty structure even if it did not cover you, guard you ... and permeate you with its spirit?" (Ben.) To reach the author, we are to examine our conscience (Ep. 71.16).
If man has but a "slippery hold" on knowledge (Ben.), he can move towards it. This knowledge of human limits reminds me of Epictetus writing, "I wish to do this only if destiny permits". Lévi-Strauss, too, in our time, echoed this thought, thinking it "naive" to call man master of his destiny. I wonder how much fog is created by the unnecessary strain of thinking one must control everything instead of learning how to be spontaneous, i.e., not forcing circumstance but learning to put it to use. "I do not know whether I shall make progress;" writes Seneca in Ep., "but I should prefer to lack success than to lack faith."
If the going gets tough, there is always the humble contemplation of the stars that requires no practical results but brings happiness, freedom, morals, character.

Brush.

Sapphire, Tempted

The sky was so flawlessly blue without blemish of cloud that to peer at it was to feel momentarily the vertigo of staring at ocean expanse ending only where it dips into horizon's edge. It is that kind of clarity, everything in a word.
To look at that sky is not to need so many words as scribbled boats or birds, but to divert the eyes away from that pure blue, the desert of the soul thirsts for the wisdom of many novels, constructions and passages of sentences.
How was it, I was asked today, that Moses' tablets were so quickly broken; after travelling the impossible, through water itself, the tablets had to be thrown at the golden idol so promptly constructed. Those sapphire tablets, meant as reminders of the sky.
It is a story of fallibility, the alacrity of the atrophying convictions, even when evidence for said convictions has been supplied in an abundance of blue. It is a story of misplacing values when externals and appearance do not meet expectations or feeble wishes.
The squire in The Caxtons recommends for such situations a pouch of saffron - his symbol of the faith and purpose behind actions; the doing, not the wondering. "Life is a drama, not a monologue. Drama is derived from a Greek verb, signifying to do. Every actor in the drama has something to do, which helps on the progress of the whole: that is the object for which the author created him."
Respected but critiqued in the book is the conscience that curbs action. Respected, indeed, for it plays beneath the surface of externals and appearance, being, "what the world would never know, despite all the vigilance of its praise and blame." And one is never to care three straws for praise or blame - leather and prunella, praise and blame are not in the externals but here - a fist is brought to the chest, in the heart.

It is possible for there to be a situation where one is doing the Right Thing, even Matthew Arnold's Needful Thing, and yet appear to be the person who is in the wrong. This can cause confusion - if one possesses not the saffron. But how hard it can be to be sure of purpose. Arnold himself wrote, "But most of us, alas! are what we must be, not what we ought to be - not even what we know we ought to be." To do right then let go with a smile.
But that "ought" is indicated by a sharp fork in the road. So many forks, as if one were being skewed for the barbie, to be Australian about being grilled. I think of the smokeless sky - it is very simple, "Do your part and let the play go on," says the squire, my fictitious friend. Except the mind may labour over the details, may question the choice of words behind the actions a thousand times, may doubt efficacy, may doubt the whole endeavour, even though it may be the only endeavour one was given. The parched question of why there is no bounty is answered by the timeless prayer for a good harvest.
These are the crags in the Chinese watercolour, all those tiny steps disappearing intermittently among the trees, journeying up to the tiny temple on the immense but spindly mountain. That is perhaps a picture of the νοῦς, the eye of the heart. Such a heart cannot be held by an external landscape paved over with human wish and ambition. Where it is the agglomeration of a thousand melted gold earrings. Such a heart craves the opening of the sea, of the sky, the sapphire sky.
"The narrow stream reflects the gnarled tree, and the pausing herd, and the village spire, and the romance of the landscape; but the sea reflects only the vast outline of the headland, and the lights of the eternal heaven." To be broad is to be badly and only partly reflected in the narrow. It is to suffer the intervals between recognition that may gape with age. Levavi Oculos!, the psalm reminds us.

To see the sky is to be answered by it. But like the damned, or perhaps the desert in the soul, one may seek more answers for one's discontent, even from those unqualified to speak. People do not always have the answers, struggling with their own deserts, possibly tempted to make a golden calf of their worries and impatience. One wouldn't always be friends with oneself, but one must; others may be kept at bay, and their wish, remain with us longer - is met by the squire with a calm response, "Books for me and men for you." The squire will not change his habits even for friendship, "especially when in labour."
The simplicity of it all may seem absurd. The necessary thing is the natural thing that one turns to, that one is and already was. One's labour. To learn when to let go to find oneself again, shimmering or shivering in une fête slave now playing on WQXR, such is the fête of truly the letting go, in the comfort of one's home, working as one wishes, not attempting to talk words. It is the Difficult Thing to be one's best when neglected by A Situation, but look at that sky, so blue and clear that the mind in observing it returns refreshed. Not to carry that blue with one like a favoured postcard from a friend is to neglect it, to under-appreciate it as one is being under-appreciated.
"Do your part and let the play go on." Forty days is not that long. Not even forty to the power of whatever it takes. The sky is a reminder to the mind; if only the soul could take it in, those who were cast away from the nets in life rejoice in the xylophone of shells in the waves and collect endurance instead of money or trophies from foreign lands.
Perhaps that is the final count, to know one's place is to know that one can never truly belong, and that such a state is truly a gift. Such is the sapphire sky, here but so far beyond.

Brush. Book in background.

Seed Shell

There are days one awakes to lucidity, but this is often the result of the evils of fortune, as they are classically defined, forcing one into one's best self. Or worst self, but it would be nice not to have to see behaviour that best belongs to presuming youth.
Like so many helicopter seeds, which because of the wind can spin round at the same several-meter-high heights, dizzying, unexpected. Michelangelo thinks of a machine with blades like basswood seeds. It is a memory, it may have been a dream. Inspiration abounds in this world the eyes may be temporarily blinded to; the arrangement takes a new form, the composition of a life may change, and the stagehand removes the old props and brings in new ones. I live on that precipice with this motto engraved in that rock that is my work ethic: docendo discimus,  教學相長. The seed with wings is no accident in this paragraph, it is the cultivation of leornian, the cultivation of contemplation and reading, with its roots at the sole of the foot, finding and following the track.
Once upon a time, I was far away in a mountain, in a white edifice barely gripping the escarpment. "Why is it," I asked, "that I seem to be forgetting so much of what I knew?" So that it may be returned to you in a new order, was the answer. It is possible to have the answers one is looking for but not know how to find them. Think, self tells self, pretend you are writing an autobiography. What's your forté? Indeed, one may have shirked earlier from those who sing their own laurels, but today it is a survival tactic, rap braggadocio: the civic poet gone, one must sing one's self as did Whitman, performing one's own epideictic oratory of praise, if as internal monologue, when under attack. Yes, one used to know about autobiography, the knowledge returns - in part. The rest is silence. A blank page.
The needs of the present may change the direction of the foot, or its intensity. One may not be sure. One may feel like a bad impression of Švejk: either incompetent or deliberately obfuscatory. Maybe this is a good thing. There are realities where the invisible barbed wire people fear on the internet, mining their information to close them in, exists in the physical quotidian where intrigue whispered in the dark just for the sake of it. This is not an environment conducive to one who is straight forward. Unless one stops looking in that direction of danger. Danger is not like basstree seeds that are beneficial to watch, inspiring one with awe at such tiny things in life, tinier than one's own already tiny, seed-speck, rice writ life.

One remembers again that words exist as medicine for the mind. Harsh words and dull reason never settle anything, says the Chinese proverb. Indeed, for all the ruminating one does, it may be incredible that one's thinking is already geared to self-destruction without so much as a hearing. How, one might ask, might one exit the labyrinth?
I learned from Davenport that the inverse of the labyrinth is the honeycomb. Reality is plastic and awaits the proper interpreter. Disaster, as Tom Matrullo's post on Minos implies, is the punishment dealt by poets to their nation's aggressors. Labyrinth-honeycomb, both sides of the coin of the epideictic; perhaps reality is somewhere in between.
The conch of the labyrinth is formidable to listen to, but Ariadne's love sings through it like the sea - such a different noise than the hot, upwards flight from it of Icarus. The seed shell: in the husk is the sea. It is not the man, but the sea inside the man, bringing the right measure of inspiration to those who nurture hope. The many pericarp wings that sailed over the city yesterday were like banners of the unbelievable but possible. The promise of the good soldier. Only plotters of intrigue need be fully sure of themselves. Socrates wasn't. The teacher isn't.
And the dialogue of the teacher is always an opening out, Gadamer's hermeneutics of something spontaneous and shared. Some steal words and record all the wrong ones. Some gather the best and send them floating above the rooftops to find new and many homes. Surely this model leads from life back to life. Fortune is what falls away like a hull. Character, with its sole of the foot, sets out for maturity. And I just remembered what was in the dark recess of my memory that I want to learn and practice now, if it is not too late. A line from Emerson's "Gifts": "It is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies." It is the 道 of not playing corrector. Some play the clown: the serious often play the corrector. That is where seriousness can get the better of one.
The composition of a life may change; the stagehand removes old props. Seeds fly far above the trees they came from. Only after winter, when Persephone returns from the hell into which she was tricked, do seed vessels cede new life and beginnings. Dangers abound, we can but try to give back to the life that gave us, to erase our ecological footprint of debt by delusion as best we are able.

Pastel brush. Arrow brush.
This seed blew into my window 
as I watched how many hovered
so many storeys high.

Original Mind: Tree with Roots

There is a fishing technique, a kind of jigging, that uses a special wooden stick to disturb the water and lazy perch that testily venture out to see what is going on. Bait is thrown and in confusion at the commotion, the fish bites. This is just like in those increasingly common situations, which should proceed unnoticed, that become provocations of one's better sense. One is best forewarned not to take the bait.
A friend was telling me how cobblers are now above even their trade and are reluctant to practice their craft of restoration. She had taken to the cobbler's three pairs of sandals, already prepared to charm the cantankerous soul who works there into doing his job. Despite her smile and clever tactic of using the sandals in best shape as bait, the cobbler proceeded to criticise them, huffing and hawing at how much work needed to be done. When he saw pair number three, he said, now these, these should go straight to the rubbish dump! She explained to him that of course they needed work, that was why she had brought them to him, the expert. But to no avail. She said smilingly, as she was thinking of the perch, I don't know how you expect to take that attitude and remain for much longer in this line of work. Disturbance met a task meant to go swimmingly.
She wore her smile all the way onto the bus, where everyone was scowling except her. A man complimented her for her bright demeanour, saying the only other person he'd seen smiling that morning was his neighbour, who, on questioning, said he was smiling out of hardship. When she told him why she was smiling, he said, that, too, is hardly funny.
There is a passage in Mencius, or Mengzi (6A10), where he compares desiring a fish to desiring a bear's paw. He would choose the paw. He desires life, but there are things more than life he desires; he hates death, but there are things worse than death that he hates. It is up to man to retain his heart of hearts (本心) , one's conscience. 本 means fundamental, origin, source: it is the character for tree, with roots on it. Charles Muller translates it as "original mind."
Part of the passage reads, "there are some things that people will not do to save their lives and some things that people will not do to avoid death. This means that there are things more important to them than life, and more hateful to them than death. It is not only the worthy who have this capacity. All people have it, but the worthy are able to be consistent in it ... a man will accept a huge sum of money without any consideration of propriety. What can the money add to his person? I can beautify my house, gain the favors of wives and concubines, or gain the attention of greedy acquaintances ...Was it also not possible to decline this? This is called 'losing one's original mind.'"
We can be conditioned out of our natural state but can help each other return. Thence the helping stick of humour, which may remind us of our dust in our bones, and help us detach from appearance, including the way we appear to ourselves, sometimes deracinated from where we'd like to be.

Brush. Yellow walls now fully painted and yellows muted to match. Friend mentioned above came to help with the 12-hour cleaning, saying, "It's not so bad, we're almost done!"

Salubrious Respect

There is something to be said for early rising in spring; that first silence of the day, before man-made clatter and the automated chirp that is the siren and horn. There is also something to be said for waterside walks at sunset, observing poppies at the golden hour, watching the message of pink as the sun slips from view, which is not to say that it does not return.
To possess a storage of such observation is to be rich. Even better when accompanied by passages from Cicero, to be mulled over like a good wine, never to just be swallowed. Thence the word respect, to look back on, consider, observe. But even for people who do not read or take up permanent abode in nature when deep with age like Chomei - who writes from his hut of solitude, "of the beauties of the ever-changing scenery of the hills one never becomes weary. And to one who thinks deeply and has a good store of knowledge such pleasure is indeed inexhaustible" - the need to retreat, to observe nature, is apparent. A tear-drop-eyed woman yesterday felt she had to apologise for our having happened upon her alone, on a waterfront trail. "Better to walk alone in nature than not to go at all," she said, not knowing that my friend and I both do the same.
I would posit that it is those people who walk alone - and as the woman said, though company affords its special joy, it is not a prerequisite - are people who can be trusted. But here we return to the apology: why would anyone need to speak in defense of their solo retreats into the womb of the very nature whence we came, also alone? That wicked part of society that ties people to each other like weak slaves. The kind of society that whispers at adults doing things by themselves: the kind that mechanizes marriage, bearing theirs like a police badge, writing up outsiders who include those who are happily married but grant each other free time to pursue their own interests, and simply time to themselves.

Such is the chorus quick to bad-mouth their significant other: saccharine martyrs (martyrs are never syrupy: their love burns within, flames necessarily licking up the pathetic: to consider them is awesome) who would throw others into the jail they constructed from the mistake that is their approach to life. They do not see that the institution of being with another person, a co-helmsman for life, is a special gift, that it is hard, but that if one wants that privilege, there is a burden to be borne. They steal the high social rank they give themselves, always reneging on paying for the favour. And in the mean time, they spread half-false stories of those people getting on with their lives, walking alone in nature if they want to - free as birds.
There is something to be said for enjoying birdsong in the morning, tuning into it, then tuning out, then capturing the calls again - the noisy swifts! No money or status could possibly pay for such pleasure and privilege. There is indeed a price tag on everything in life, but some things are worth far more than what they cost.
We have all been granted freedom to understand life as we will. While many intelligent people use their minds in an attempt to pepper other people's stews, there is no over the counter remedy for human life. The freedom of individual decision invalidates the prescription of the universal. While the universal, as an ideal, remains unaffected by 'man's meddling, it is exactly the specifics of each individual's mangling that makes a return to the ideal - if it is desired - dependent on particulars. Universals only apply to healthy respect.

Brush.

Phoenix

To attend through the night the dawn reminds me of opening the window blinds during a long distance flight and being flooded by unexpected sunlight; waking up in the desert after hours and hours of bus riding, eyes transfixed on the desert brush making hieroglyphs on the land, prying eyes open against sleep to see the young blue sky alongside those yawning yellow hills. These are the usual circumstances of my vigil.
This morning I watched the sun emerge, at its earliest the light swelled in but five minutes, the pinks then taking their time to leave the sky: now, with the sky's tribute to primary colours, the subtle hues of dawn are hard to imagine.
Sometimes, the city-dweller may feel such longing to be reunited with the earth that only at dawn can that peace be felt, the letters of the sky read, that deeply personal letter communicated to the soul. That picture postcard of all one wishes to bury in the darkness enveloping the emerging eye of light, the rays to be identified with, leading one into the new day of hope.
So much has been weighing on me that I found meaning in the journey I took to reach this new day not through sleep but awake.
Dark straws of unprincipled behaviour had piled up in an overwhelming disbelief that people are not embarrassed by their lack of attempt towards character. The most banal illustration is of the shop assistant who claimed a faulty good had been repaired. Despite the visibly shoddy job, the salesperson pretended the item looked like new. That sums up the unfortunate string of experiences: the behaviour of people feeling they can't rely on the accountability of their workplaces, fearing someone else will fill their shoes. But I am old enough now to know not to trust such coincidence: straws lack the depth of the bigger picture. A haystack, after all, is but a detail of the landscape, even though there are times when everyone seems to focus on the haystack, as if there were nothing else to life.
I gave myself back the bigger picture this morning: the eye of dawn as an image I tried to memorise. I do not want to live in the fear or disappointment that misinform action. Such thoughts I wished to cut up this morning for a kindling to give rise to the flame of the rising sun; the smoke oracle in dark clouds, the message I read to myself about life being so much greater than our limitations.

Out of the dawn, the phoenix. And I do not know if by phoenix I mean the colour, as the word may have signified in Linear B, or the bird itself. For the colour of the phoenix is of course the colour of fire, and also the three principle colours of Heptaktis, the Chaldean god of seven rays. Interestingly, it is variations of these three colours: magenta, cyan, and yellow, that create the broadest palette for painters - if falling short of the whole gamut. The crossroads of these colours is the night from which the phoenix emerges.
Beyond optics is the register of colours on the emotions; who would claim that the first waves sent from the horizon do not evoke a communication that surpasses the vessels of words? In the last two days, two beautiful posts have referenced the holy vessel of imagination - specifically, how this relates to the task of the non-careerist crowd-pleaser, writing towards the higher tasks of literature. Only the small-minded make inferior mountains from the straws that menace camels.
The phoenix of culture is to rise above where mythos got cancelled out by the logos of Enlightenment, and return to the beautiful as a way of knowing, to cite Gadamer, for the darkness of circumstance to be lightened up by the pathos of character and the pathos of the emotional appeal that may be made by the one still building character. To bring wider range to the communication that breaks down when there is little trust.
Once upon a time, I worked with those termed as 'challenged' in a non-profit abode that was the labour of love of two women who knew that those in need cannot provide fully for the even needier. I still remember the range of personalities and behaviours. But I remember most the small-framed woman in the cot, who would stare at the cupboard. Every day, I tried to get her to turn her head to look out the window. One day as I stood over her, she slowly moved her head, turtle's pace, to the greenery outside, and her oddly-shaped mouth turned up at the edges.
I do not know if she understood or even registered the vegetation I hoped she would observe. But that subtle and painfully slow gesture remains in my mind, along with images of travelling into the light, one of my, perhaps awkwardly grandiose, wishes. That we turn each other's heads to look outside. That our choices not be informed by pettiness, that we not be afraid to share, make mistakes, or start again. That if we break down and lose faith and words and the ability to move, we will at least register the meaning of colour at dawn.

Brush.

The World Turns Clown

"When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's blood instead of vermillion, it is something else than comic, I think," Ruskin said when he addressed an Exchange that had invited him to speak about architecture, to advise them the design of their building. The world turning clown has to do with false values espoused as real ones.
"Your harbour piers, your warehouses, your exchange - all these are built to your great goddess of 'Getting-on.'" But this 'getting-on' does not occur for the spending of riches and contributing to the commonwealth, but to mere accumulatiom. What is more, the activity of the Exchange requires no heroism or conquest. Ruskin writes of the "wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it". While he can but preach, he advises the stock exchange men to change, for, "Change must come, but it is ours to determine whether change of growth, or change of death." He ironically describes what the exchange statue could represent and look like - a stark contrast to his interpretation of statues of Athena: her snake-trimmed aegis and Gorgon shield turning men to stone out of the superficial spheres of knowledge (the hardening of the man from the child) from which springs disdain; where Athena herself reveals perfect strength and peace, crowned as she is with olive spray.
Behind Ruskin's criticism of his age is essentially an argument on education and the reluctant admission that education is to differ for different classes. There will always be an upper and a lower class (is this not conspicuous today, with the disappearing middle class). Part of the problem of class is that the poor criticise the idle rich, and the rich criticse the idle poor: no class criticises their own idle.
"None of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we think we ought, but because we have chanced to fall in to the way of it and cannot help ourselves." I would venture to say that a lot of sixties and seventies children might admit that this is the realisation they come to in their later years. How many went off to fish in the Atlantic, or spent summers or youth as labourers only to realise that was not their work. This is in part because of education; Ruskin write that if one comes to appreciate Dante or Beethoven, he will not return to costermongering of his own will. He implies that the affinities are to remain different, as they already are.
The biggest problems, and in my understanding of Ruskin, the biggest trends against education, are those of money and mechanical production. "Manufacture not only is unable to produce [art], but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist." And lust for money? It is stupidity, "stupidity is always the basis of the Judas bargain." Judas couldn't "make the worth out of Him, or the meaning of Him." Judas was unable to understand the consequence of his betrayal.

The world turns clown if it values money above all else. It will spend its rivers and human lives and not understand the consequence of its betrayal. Much has been written about money and art, though when Ruskin writes about this, he brings war into the equation. Albeit the war of defense of home, not the war for money (wherein Austria borrows from England to bomb them in India, and the Austrian peasant is robbed, the Polish peasant assassinated and banished, and the English live on the produce of theft of the prize of assassination).
Coppola wrote about money and art, arguing that it should not have to cost money: he makes his on his wine and reminds readers of earlier patrons and commissions. But I would bring time into the equation, like Ruskin does war.
Our relationship to time is compromised. I've written before about a lecture Bob Thurman gave on education; how it requires the discipline of silent reading as one of its cornerstones. I don't think anything of quality can develop without long periods of time. Like the old Chinese saying 千里送鹅毛: Sending a feather across a thousand li (the gift is light, but the sentiment is heavy). A goose father feather has no monetary value - but it is sent at great distance, so must be worth the trouble. This one feather must be invested with far more premeditation than a simple smiley.
And ditto with education. The century or so of more accessible education (I'm thinking of the G.I. Bill and worker's colleges) is drawing to a close. But the Victorian thinkers were not as naive as we are today: Pharr's incipit states that not all boys are for ancient Greek. Not everyone sees the value of the work of the mind. So education in many places becomes more akin to the entertaining circus than a place of quiet learning. Bells and whistles. I am thinking also of the changes that seem to be afoot, the best article reviewed succinctly and I think wisely by Mary Beard.
In contrast to the clown is the statue of Athena: knowledge protected by the Gorgon shield. In contrast to the lectures that promise everything, Ruskin's opening lines: "My friends - I have not come among you tonight to endeavour to give you an entertaining lecture; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you a few plain questions." In contrast to the "fuming heap of the city of play because it only makes money for the sake of it" the English countryside lauded by the departed actor, Peter Cushing - Cushing, who learned his lines as he walked through the woods, who knew the different bird calls, who implored us to protect our nature - and be conscious of the consequence of our betrayal if we do otherwise. Education teaches us our vermillion to spare our hearts.

Brush.

Block

This weekend, waves of birds moved in to the city, bringing their song with them, and the grass seemed to turn green over night, which was impressive. I had one of those moments of clarity, when certain ideas fall in place. Except that sometimes ideas are far harder to crystalise materially: they seem to be clearer in the mind, beyond the reach of words or even symbols.
But the ideas had to do with symbols; I was thinking of the woods of simplicity in the characters 朴 which mean simple, unadorned  - even sincere. Those characters denote certain Taoist principles related to the ideal of being an "uncarved block," sort of akin to Rousseau's tabula rasa, but implied is the latent creativity that comes with living things.
I wondered about similar words or concepts in ancient Greek, and found the word απελέκητο - uncarved, unhewn. Before shapes are impressed by force. Again, the promise: in the Odyssey, Calypso gives Odysseus an axe, the name for which is the inverse to "unsmoothed stone" - (α)σκεπαρνον: with this adze, he carves the boat that will take him away, "escaping the great bonds of woe" and the hermetic island.
With adzes, as we go places, we too, like our vessels, are chiseled at by time, our environment, the company we keep - something. The question is how 'natural' these influences are: one may think of the jardin à la française compared with a wild garden.
It is rather curious to plonk down the uncarved block in a conversation about culture. There is a Greek expression that compares the illiterate person to an uncarved block of wood. Accordingly, the educated person receives a form - which reminds me of the formation of the finishing school. This is not the Taoist ideal, though in the Tao Te Ching there is no explicit rejection of culture: culture - civilization? - is fine so long as it is serving man's higher purpose, a form of simplicity and sincerity.

These thoughts brought me to Gadamer's Truth and Method, which is a book that I cannot believe I have not read by now. In the preface he explains that understanding is a subjective relation to the history of the 'effect' of an object; man is to question effects, question the difference among contexts. The universal is applied to specific historical conditions - I'll add: bringing a carved form to what in essence is formless. The Tao is to go with the flow and not pursue tradition, culture, etc, with a mind bent to it, so deformed by it, but rather to seek the universal: the carving will follow.
This was the thinking behind my new pen name, which I decided on yesterday and wrote about here: it means 'unfinished, unpolished' - which certainly better represents the stabs in the dark I make on this blog than the pseudonym I borrowed from Ruskin, which nonetheless continues to inform my new one, in its aspiration toward the 'natural.'
Also, I am barely literate, so 'unfinished' works for me. I read this weekend that Western Civ ended in the 1970's: I agree and want to make up for that small but important increment of lost time by teaching myself Latin and Greek. But to be truly literate, one ought also know at least Sanskrit and Chinese. Words in early languages contain postcards from the past, mediated through etymological ideograms, so helpful to the critical apparatus and imagination.
It occurred to me this weekend just how much of a blockhead I am - but when I write that, I wish to soften the words by saying that in tandem with that realisation, I understood that it may be time to start cultivating the hope that comes with formlessness. The hope that through seeking one's own simple nature, one may in turn intuit nature.
Instead of dreading one's unpolished state, to put it to use: to hold it as the map of one's origin and final destination. There is no simple way to end this post, but to simply end it. These are, after all, "rough ideas."

  

Element.