By some miracle of autonomy

David Malouf on Patrick White:

"Only the greatest masters can stand aside and allow themselves to be admonished by one of their creations, whose vision, by some miracle of autonomy, is larger than their own."

To lead and not to rule

I recently came across a couple of books by Clive James - one, an anthology of his favourite poems from various poets with his notes on each poem. Which is almost like a teacher in a book, showing you how to read poems, what to see. Second, his Poetry Notebook. It is a collection of essays, notes, thoughts on poets and poetry. 

One is fortunate to come across certain books, essays, blogposts where people reveal what they respect, look up to. And more so, when it is a poet who talks about poetry he looks up to. Be it Borges in his 'This Craft of Verse', or in this case, Clive James. Anyone, who has read and written a lot, and hence often done that journey inwards to the source of wholeness, wisdom, being and nothing. It kind of makes the day when one comes across notes from these inward journeys!

The way they see things. They inadvertently show us how to see, what to see, they guide our gaze, they show us the path to tread to reach that source which sits inside all of us, and for that, all humble thanks.

*

Here, following from his list of five favorite poetry books. The books as well as various referred poems. A good list to begin a poem-reading journey.

W.B. Yeats, The Tower

It is available at Project Gutenberg here. 

"This has his masterpieces like 'Sailing to Byzantium', 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', 'Leda and the Swan', 'Among School Children', and one of the greatest poems written in twentieth century - 'All Soul's Night'." It can be read here. 

"Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight / Till meditation master all its parts, / Nothing can stay my glance / Until that glance run in the world’s despite/ To where the damned have howled away their hearts, / And where the blessed dance;"

He also talks about 'every separate collection of Yeats' poems from Responsibilities (1918) onward os tremendous, but The Tower is his favourite'. 

Robert Frost, Collected Poems

"The trick with the Collected Poems is to avoid the longer poems until the shorter ones have taken over your mind. The longer poems have good things in them, but the self-contained showpiece poems give you his essence, and his essence is one you should learn to recognize before watching him distribute over the framework of an extended edifice."

Collected poems can be accessed here on Archive.org. And selected poems is available at Project Gutenberg here. 

Looking for it, also led me to this small collection of American poetry from 1920s, here, a Miscellany.

And here is 'The Silken Tent' as Clive James mentions it in his note:

The Silken Tent

She is as in a field of silken tent

At midday when the sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease,

And its supporting central cedar pole,

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To every thing on earth the compass round,

And only by one's going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

W. H. Auden, Look, Stranger!

This collection is also known as 'On This Island' in certain countries. He mentions Poem No. IX and Poem No. XXX

One can read Auden poems here at Babelmatrix, and here at Voetica.

All collected poems of Auden here. But perhaps what Clive James iterates in this essay is the beauty of poet's small collections as the poet plans it rather than the overall collected poems.

Poem No. IX is also known as 'Through the looking glass'

And Poem XXX is famously known as 'To a writer on his birthday'. Can be read here. From the poem, the last two stanza:

"So in this hour of crisis and dismay

What better than your strict and adult pen

Can warn us from the colours and the consolations,

The showy arid works, reveal

The squalid shadow of academy and garden,

Make action urgent and its nature clear?

Who give us nearer insight to resist

The expanding fear, the savaging disaster?

This then my birthday wish for you, as now

From the narrow window of my fourth floor room

I smoke into the night, and watch reflections

Stretch in the harbour. In the houses

The little pianos are closed, and a clock strikes.

And all sway forward on the dangerous flood

Of history that never sleeps or dies,

And, held one moment, burns the hand."

Richard Wilbur, Poems 1943-1956

"It contains elements from three of his separate books, The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony and Things of the World. "

"Anthony Hecht's wonderful poem about Japan, would never, I am sure, have been the meticulous miracle that it is if Wilbur hadn't set the standard for a filigree stanza."

He mentions "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarria". Can be read here.

He also mentions another poem, Grace. I found it here on this blog.

Then there is Ceremony.

But ceremony never did conceal,

Save to the silly eye, which all allows,

How much we are the woods we wander in.

Richard Wilbur's collected poems can be found here, but what perhaps Clive James here refers too are earlier poems.

From elsewhere, on Richard Wilbur: 'In his words “It is fatal for a writer to have one hero only; submitting to a single model, admiring but one syntax and lexicon, means that you will say what you do not mean, and that you will never find the right words for what you do mean. A commanding imagination, as many have said before me, steals not from one writer, but selectively from all of writers, taking whatever will help in the articulation of its own sense of things.”'

 “I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy…that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good,” 

Looking up, here's another poem, A Black Birch in Winter, found here on another blog.

"Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,

New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,

And this is all their wisdom and their art—

To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart."

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

"There might not, at first blush, seem to be much joy in him: but he gets the whole truth of life's transience into unforgettably beautiful poetry, and it is hard to think of a greater source of joy than that."

The Whitsun Weddings can be read here.

And Collected poems, including, The Whitsun Weddings, High Windows and Aubade can be read here.

Perhaps, worth mentioning a couple of his other poems - Church Going, and The Trees

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

-- 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

(Pretty much a long time project, to get to know these poems and poets!)

**

One can read the whole essay by Clive James here.

And this is Clive James' website for a few more of his writings online. 

Looking up, came across another Clive James archives website, here.

Container

Somewhere perhaps in Ursula K Le Guin, this thought appeared or got a nudge. And over years, here and there it has been collecting its like. This idea, that the first time a human being figured out a jar, time perhaps began for consciousness. Something to hold in. Something to hold in something for beyond the present, for a time yet to come. That raised the present locked gaze or sort of released it from its hold of now. It let it linger on future. And as Tao Te Ching puts, things come to being with their opposites, it simultaneously opened up the countries of the past. Future and Past seemed to float in on the horizon which always contained the now, was driven by will, perhaps unconcsious, physical and chemical responses to the stimulus nature provides, and learnings registering on the physical being, lodging deep down in the subconscious, eventually finding their narrow narrow path to the DNA.

So came up consciousness. Time woven in consciousness, and consciousness in time. One an infinite. Other too, an infinite, but seems to be carried by a 'self'.

From a child of nature, where nature provides for every 'now', human being started planning, saving, providing for future. In its wake, rose society, and as the concept woke up the gaze further, the extent of holding it began, it continues still, not finding its order or proper structure, proper organisation, the way nature seems to magnificently organise everything, the human conscious still grapples with this holding.

The physical holding gave way to numbers, the abstract holding, to words, language, books, epics, poems, the abstract holding to a future self or to future progeny, the passing on of what it has learnt, lived, perhaps earned wisdom through experience. There, perhaps it follows nature's cue, that of noting everything down, all good practices, all experience of the complicated response-stimului-response-stimuli shaped and shaping network in its long strand of DNA noted in every living cell.

But as mentioned earlier, this shape of self, of consciousness is not understood well. And if you don't understand the dimensions of the container well, it is difficult to organise it efficiently.

Perhaps here, one looks, reflects, learns from all the masters that have gone before. From the sages, to the artists, who have delved deep into this wonder of consciousness, life, time, existence.

A few things that come up:

- Practice. State of Being.  Like physical self, the invisble self needs a workout, a daily practice. A daily lifting up. One has to think it should be simple. 

    In Vedas, it is called 'abhyasi' the aspirant, the practising person - one focuses on breath, posture and concenteration. Just bring them to order any time and you kind of order yourself. 

    The other is to keep beginning, that a person is a growing changing thing, have loose binds, ready to be detached binds with your ideas of yourself. Be simple, open, come as a blank page to a moment. And keep beginning, 0 to 1. The first step. Just focus on the first step. 

    The third is this state. Since it is a state of being, it cannot be contained in a container, one often feels the need to bottle it up, but one has to pull oneself together, again and again, and yet again to feel that way. Even after generations of thinking into this, this seems to be the basic thing. That 'practice'. It is like the physical self, one needs to do one's own exercises or move one's own body to stay fit. So goes for the invisible self. 

These few simple things - breathing, posture, concenteration, begin again and again, first step, keep moving forward calmly, and things pass. And one perhaps knows how to restore some order to a self (even though we do not understand its shape). 

Perhaps the shape of container is irrelevant. Perhaps it is formless that way. Perhaps one orders it by simply ordering the present will.

- There are ways of doing it. Meditation of different kinds. The other is simple acts with presence. And yet other is reading uplifting things slowly. There is magic in these activities of concenteration.

- That it is all here, available in this now. One just needs to know that whatever force runs through the universe, runs through its every atom, every cell, through every self. Deep inside, the forever fountain sits. Keep finding your way to it. Sometimes deep writing helps. Sometimes reading helps. Sometimes reading and then contemplating through writing helps. It is all like a big sphere, our lives and its specific materials on the surface, but deep inside each one can access the eternal fountain. Our own personal journeys given our own personal relativities.

- Keep moving. Keep moving forward. It is the human thing that it all seems to be like a moving shuffling board, like a treadmill. Rest too long and everything changes. So you too change up. Figure out something else with full presence. Not a dwelling, a bridge mindset.

-Learn from the lotus. This one from symbols and general wisdom. Our lives materials are different, varied, a lot of chance - as to where we are born, how we grow up, what circumstances find us. And we could have been anyone. As in, what we happen to be, so much of it is not us, but chance. By being like the lotus and its leaf in the random material of this world, the humane, or the being inside all of us is perhaps made of the same material. By being like the lotus, one lets the externalities slide off, glide off gently without getting too much bothered, entangled or attached to them. 

*

All seem so simple, but guess the need for practice. Like perhaps a workout plan on paper versus actually going to the gym and lifting those weights. 

Here's to keep practising :)

The human experience on earth

 

"The first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago. Until then—that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth —we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting-and gathering bands."

 

Link to share - poems

Came across this interesting webpage - BabelMatrix. Here, a lot of poets, poems, in English as well as in translation, primarily European.
Seems like a wonderful place to hang out.

Here's the English poets collection: link

Personal well-being and stoics

About Socrates, stoicism and our everyday lives: "He argued, paradoxically, that 'it is self-discipline, above all things, that causes pleasure.' Self-control is healthier and actually leads to more enjoyment than self-indulgence, particularly with regard to the most common sources of pleasure in daily life."


**

'Virtues follow each other, and those who have one, have all'

Daily practice and decision guides or good weights on decisions. Sometimes, help simply answer 'how to be':

Traditional cardinal virtues:

• Wisdom (sophia) or prudence (phronesis), which opposes the vice or folly or thoughtlessness (aphrosune)
• Includes excellent deliberation, good calculation, quick-witedness, good sense, a healthy sense of purpose and resourcefulness.
• Justice, lawfulness, or integrity (dikaiosune, sometimes 'righteousness'), which opposes wrongdoing or injustice (adikia)
• Includes piety to the gods, good-heartedness or benevolence, public service and fair dealing.
• Courage or fortitude (andreia, literarlly 'manliness'), which opposes cowardice (deilia)
• Includes endurance, confidence, great-heartedness, brave-heartedness, and love of work
• Moderation or temperance (sophrosune, sometimes 'discretion'), which opposes intemperance or excess (akolasia)
• Includes organization, ordeliness, modesty, and self-control.

**

The above from Donald Robertson's book.

A few of the books he refers to:

• Seneca, Dialogues and Essays. Selected Letters
• Cicero, On the Good Life, On Moral Ends
• Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Sayings
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
• Epictetus, The Discourse & Handbook
• Lucan, The Civil War
• Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes
• Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers.
• The Way of Hermes
• The Pythagorean Sourcebook
• Plato: Complete Works
• Generally, books by the Loeb Classical Library

**

'Never cease to think of the cosmos as one animal, possessed of a single substance and a single mind.'

Tao Te Ching No. 10

Techniques


Can you keep your soul in its body,

hold fast to the one,

and so learn to be whole?

Can you center your energy,

be soft, tender,

and so learn to be a baby?

Can you jeep the deep water still and clear,

so it reflects without blurring?

Can you lobe people and run things,

and do so by not doing?

Opening, closing the Gate of Heaven,

can you be like a bird with her nestlings?

Piercing bright through the cosmos,

can you know by not knowing?

To give birth, to nourish,

to bear and not to own,

to act and not lay claim,

to lead and not to rule:

this is mysterious power.

-- translated by UKLG

A booklist from Gerald Murnane

From his 'Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs'.

Books I would like to read yet again during the years left to me:

• Various collections of short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Several collections of short fiction by Italo Calvino, together with The Castle of Crossed Destinies by the same author
• Independent People and World Light, by Halldor Laxness
• Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

Two supplementary lists, one for Australian literature:

• The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by Henry Handel Richardson
• the Langton novels, by Martin Boyd

second for Hungarian literature:

• Puztak Nepe and Konok Kikelet, both by Gyula Ilyes

Elsewhere, "Among the first works of prose fiction that moved me deeply were Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy."

Tao Te Ching, no. 25

Imagining Mystery

There is something

that contains everything.

Before heaven and earth

it is.

Oh, it is still, unbodied,

all on its own, unchanging.

all-pervading,

ever-moving.

So it can act as the mother

of all things.

Not knowing its real name,

we only call it the Way.

If it must be named,

let its name be Great.

Greatness means going on,

going on means going far,

and going far means turning back.

So they say: "The Way is great,

heaven is great,

earth is great,

humankind is great;

four greatnesses in the world,

and humanity is one of them."

People follow earth,

earth follows heaven,

heaven follows the Way,

the Way follows what is.

-- translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

From Jose Saramago's notebook

As he says, his spiritual family:

• Camoes, because all Portugese roads lead to him
• Father Antonio Vieira, because the Portugese language was never more beautiful than when this Jesuit was writing it.
• Cervantes, because without the author of Quixote the Iberian peninsula would be a house without a roof
• Montaigne, because he did not need Freud to know who he was
• Voltaire, because he lost all illusions about humanity and managed to survive his disgust
• Raul Brandao, because you don't have to be a great genius to write a great book, like his Humus
• Fernando Pessoa, because the door you take to find him is also the door you take to find Portugal
• Kafka, because he demonstrated that man is a beetle
• Eca de Queiroz, because he taught the Portugese irony
• Jorge Luis Borges, because he invented virtual literature
• and Gogol, because he contemplated humanity and found it to be sad.

Wonders of life - Cells & energy

"Sunlight is the most abundant energy source on this planet. However, the ability to convert sunlight into biological energy in the form of adenosine-5′-triphosphate (ATP) is thought to be limited to chloroplasts in photosynthetic organisms."

 *

"In strictly chemical terms, cellular respiration reverses the reaction at the core of photosynthesis. Sugar and oxygen react with each other to make water and carbon dioxide, releasing a lot of energy, which is captured for later use." - Paul Nurse

(At one end, we have chloroplast to pack energy into glucose through photosynthesis. And the other, mitochondria, to unpack energy from glucose through cellular respiration)

On further looking up:

Mitochondria (singular = mitochondrion) are often called the “powerhouses” or “energy factories” of a cell because they are responsible for making adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell’s main energy-carrying molecule. The formation of ATP from the breakdown of glucose is known as cellular respiration. Mitochondria are oval-shaped, double-membrane organelles that have their own ribosomes and DNA.

Like mitochondria, chloroplasts also have their own DNA and ribosomes. Chloroplasts function in photosynthesis and can be found in eukaryotic cells such as plants and algae. Carbon dioxide (CO2), water, and light energy are used to make glucose and oxygen in photosynthesis. Like mitochondria, chloroplasts have outer and inner membranes.

Scientists have long noticed that bacteria, mitochondria, and chloroplasts are similar in size. We also know that mitochondria and chloroplasts have DNA and ribosomes, just as bacteria do. Scientists believe that host cells and bacteria formed a mutually beneficial endosymbiotic relationship when the host cells ingested aerobic bacteria and cyanobacteria but did not destroy them. Through evolution, these ingested bacteria became more specialized in their functions, with the aerobic bacteria becoming mitochondria and the photosynthetic bacteria becoming chloroplasts.

**

ATP

"Adenosine Triphosphate, or ATP is life's universal energy source. Each molecule of ATP stores energy, acting like a minuscule battery. When a chemical reaction within a cell needs energy the cell breaks ATP's high-energy bond, turning ATP into adenosine diphosphate (ADP), a process that releases energy that the cell can use to trigger a chemical reaction or a physical process, such as each of the steps taken by a molecular motor.

Most of the food you eat eventually ends up being processed in your cells' mitochondria, which use the chemical energy it contains to make a prodigious quantity of ATP.  

The key energy-capturing step in cellular repiration is based on the movement of protons, which are single atoms of hydrogen that have been stripped of an electron to give them an electric charge. These protons are pushed out from the centre of the mitochondrion, into the gap between the two membranes that enclose the mitochondrion. This results in the build-up of many more charged protons outside the inner mitochondrial membrane than inside. Although based on chemistry, this is essentially a physical process.

If there is anything remotely like a 'vital spark' that sustains life, it is perhaps this tiny flow of electric charge across a membrane." - Paul Nurse

(Glucose is like charged battery recycled through the biosphere - what keeps it all going)

**

"A cell's autonomy lies in its anatomy. And that autonomy, in turn, enables an essential feature of living systems: the capacity to maintain the fixity of an internal milieu -- a phenomenon terms "homeostasis". Loosely meaning, "related to stillness". Claude Bernard - the constancy of the interior environment is the condition of free and independent life. In this shifting physiology's focus from action to the maintenance of fixity (perhaps a dynamic balance (?)) changed our conception of how an organism's body works. A major point of physiological "activity", paradoxically, was to enable stasis.

Bernard and Cannon studied homeostasis in organisms and organs, but it is increasingly recognized as a fundamental feature of cells -- and, indeed, of life. To understand celuular homeostasis, we begin, again, with the membrane that separates the cell from its external milieu, so that its internal reactions can be sequestered and self-contained. The membrane has also evolved pumps to move unwanted substances out of the cell -- again, to maintain a constancy in the cell's internal space. The protoplasm contains chemical buffers so that the acidity or the alkalinity of the cell does not change, even when the chemical environment outside the cell changes.  A cell needs energy, and the mitochondria deliver. The proteasome disposes of unwanted, or misfolded, proteins. Specialized storage organelles in some cells ensure that a supply of nutrients can act as a backup repository should there be a shortage externally. Toxic by-products of metabolism are shepherded to the peroxisome to be destroyed."

-- Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Song of the Cell)

** 

Further from The Song of the Cell:

"In the nucleus - the nucleus is the command center. We might imagine the nucleus as the center of the center of life. The nucleus houses the organism's genome made of long stretches of DNA. The DNA double helix is elaborately folded and packaged around moleules called histones, and tightened and wound further into structures called chromosomes. We still know little about the inner organization of a nucleus. When a cell divides, every chromosome is copied, and the two copies separate in space."

 

And the most amazing program! All of a person's code is in every cell, just switched on at the particular module it is supposed to be operating, but the point is, each cell carries the whole instruction manual bookmarked for its own particular set of code. (Oh the tangents this launches! Each being contains the entire fabric of creation folded inside, just highlighted at that particular consciousness or point of light it randomly or determinedly happens to be. Oh! As if the entire movie script of all universe and existence is with each being. Individual parts highlighted for quick reference :) )

"The process of switching genes on and off is vital, giving the cell its identity. The set of on/off genes instructs a neuron to be a neuron, and a white cell to be a white cell. During the development of an organism, genes -- or rather proteins encoded by genes -- tell cells about their relative positions and command their future fates. Genes are turned on and off by external stimuli such as hormones, which also signal changes in a cell's behaviours."

 

A new attention to the world

The heron made the subtlest movement, enough for its maginficence to be revealed, and the prince saw it as a radiant thing in a dying world.

...

Then the heron strteched out its wings and flew over the blood-red river. As it flew it changed all things and restored a new attention to the world.

From The Last Gift of the Master Artists, Ben Okri

From David Malouf

Henry James' conclusion is that what really matters is that the writer should be one of those 'on whom nothing is lost': that is, an observer, a listener, a close attendant on the world's smallest affairs, a scavenger, a snapper-up of otherwise unconsidered trifles; and that everything he sees, and hears and overhears, should be laid down in his memory, taken into the spider-web of the consciousness and kept there to await the moment when, transformed by imagination, it finds its use.

*

All this is what the young Shakespeare found himself happily working with -- and I say 'found himself' because he must simply have set himself to work at first with what he was given: an eclectic mix of traditional and folk material, of slapstick, Senecan horror, Italian or Spanish romance, for an audience that was prepared to be transported wherever the play might take them; with an ear for language that was elevating and ricj, but a taste as well for the scurrilous tha was almost the equal of Shakespeare's own. With no qualms, or so it appears, about the purely commercial nature of what he was engaged in, the young Shakespeare simply set himself to do a good job as his talent, his interest, his experience allowed him to do.

Like his great Spanish contemporary, Lope de Vega, he made a distinction between his poems, which do aim to be literature, and the plays, which do not...The plays were something else. Not Works, but work. If he worked on them to the top of his bent it was because he was by temperament the complete professional and could do no less. But what they belonged to was not literature but the lively and engaging world of entertainment: in a continuum with such other forms of popular diversion as bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and in its darker aspects, the spectacle provided by exhibitionary torments and executions, the state's own theatre of cruelty and last words. Anything he hit upon and drew out of himself, in the way of originality and daring, must have emerged in the heat of the work itself, as his talent and interest, both of which as it happens were prodigious, discovered possibilities in the material before him that till he conceived of them, 'in the quick forge and working-house of thought', had no existence.

Language itself teaches him what he has to say. He gives a Flastaff or a Hamelt, or a Rosalind or Mercuito, their head, and puts at their disposal, as langugae-creatures, his fund of words and allusions, his fantasy, his humour, his capacity to break through to those revelations of insight and feeling that we call 'Shakespearian'. And none of it is fixed. The language-world of Romeo and Juliet -- and of Romeo or Capulet or Mercutio or the Nurse within in -- is not the language-world of As You Like It, or of Henry IV Part I or Hamlet. 

From 'The Writing Life' by David Malouf

Chaos, and life

Reading Tagore, this thought a while ago that so much of what used to be household work a century ago is different, mechanised. It was perhaps drawing water, water related mostly, cooking fires, food cleaning, no refrigeration, most food processing - grinding grains, cleaning grains at home, sweeping, almost no plastics, not much packaging, sewing, mending, washing clothes by hand, domestic animals - milk, butter, raw and rough, most household work. No good or bad. Just different things perhaps come to people's mind when they are this century apart, when they say 'household work'. So much of human household work has changed over last few decades, so much processed out, industrialised or mechanised. A lot more convenience. But earlier perhaps there was a closer connection with living and work one does to help that living. Now there are steps in between and when the chain gets very long of means to end, one wonders more about purpose, meaning, questions, despairs. Always, pros and cons of anything in this world. Personal efforts and personal bests whichever time/space life drops you in.

**

Later - as one thinks about this chain of means and ends, our conscious selves (the capacity of mind, now, our RAM if you may, the weight of Now on things, and the distance of time for sense, our inner fabric of balance), and then again, the modern world, and its long chains of means and ends. And I then read this about chaos theory:

"Chaos theory concerns deterministic systems with sensitivity to inital conditions a small change in the input might result in a large, unpredicatable change to the output. It's sometime called the butterfly effect: a butterfly flapping its wings might cause changes in air pressure and weather systems resulting in tornadoes elsewhere. Within a dynamical system. we observe periodic orbits - sets of points which, if one is used as an input, the system will visit each one of the others in a loop and return to the first. Chaotic systems contain periodic orbits of every period, filling the whole space of possible inputs."

When a small change to input can make an unpredictable, vast change to output, how does one consider human agency or the exercise of will? When one cannot see through the means chain to the end, or cannot understand the interplay of shifting weights along the means chain, what end is one working towards? Aren't we veering closer to chaos then? Then the end that happens is disassciated from the end that one works for, and this disasscoiation, brings despair, a sapping away of joy, delight, ownership, self-reliance, all the things that make life a gift rather than an automaton or chaotic system's pony.

Perhaps as water, life still figures it all out and makes its own path. Very soon it tires of the effects of long-chain chaos-like input-output, the darkness of mind it brings, the confusion, the tapping and trapping of free thought. One looks for simple joys, self-discipline, things where one sees the cause and effect working and not be disillusioned by a random set of potential outcomes which seem to encompass the world, but make the self a little plaything of chance. Little steps. One makes the choice to go 0 to 1. To begin something. Something small. And then lose oneself in that momentum, so either one doesn't encounter the question of long chain and will, restored to a pre-word state, or one wills the self, since rest of the world and its acts seem beyond reason.

Come to think of it, we are objective maximisers, all nature is, chosing lightening paths of efficiency. Chaos hides the objectives or makes the paths obscure. A moment, two, a day, two, a month, two, a year, a few, but then life, like water, takes over and calls chaos's bs for what it is, and lays out its board again. (At least in a lifetime. For nature, perhaps that period may be longer, and hence the decline and fall of parochial civilisations takes its time. Eventually all making way for a true cosmopolitanism, the way nature is, learning from the best everywhere, practising the best to the extent possible, continuously linear programming for objective maximisation, the best win-win solutions it can find. It tries. But then when things get too lopsided, it is water at the end of the day, got to make its way forward).

Meaning is relative, personal

Meaning is relative, personal.

Each of us, however close we may be to another, still lives in our own head, sees the world through our own private filter of perceptions, backgrounds, contexts, moods, colours. We communicate, we work towards objectivity by cleaning it of all transitory, passing colours. Yet, the glance we cast is our very own. And on the same scene, what another sees is completely personal to them.

Just a sort of good sense note when one feels the need to justify, defend, explain, and at times and often times this intense desire to share. It is what it is. It passes. It is all well.

Perhaps this is what Krishna meant about attachment. To not to be attached to private meanings, weights. One needs the same to live, but beyond that, the emotional baggage is deadweight.

A practice to begin where you are. Recalibrate. Look around. Where do you find yourself? What is doing well as that person means? How do you take care of yourself, of people and things around you? How do you become peaceful so that you can radiate the same out in the world? To being fully vital, here, engaged, and yet fully content. Fully here engaged, and yet yet not attached at all. Complete anywhere, anytime, and ready to be nothing, nothing at all.

**

Here, a few things from Swami Vivekanada. From his way of looking at existence, reflecting the ancient passed down wisdom of Vedas:

Each soul is a circle. The centre is where the body is, and the activity is manifested there. You are omnipresent, though you have the consciousness of being concentrated in only one point. That point has taken up particles of matter, and formed them into a machine to express itself. That through which it expresses itself is called the body. You are everywhere. When one body or machine fails you, the centre moves on and takes up other particles of matter, finer or grosser, and works through them. Here is man, and what is God? God is a circle, with circumference nowhere, and centre everywhere. Every point in that circle is living. conscious, active, and equally working. With our limited souls, only one point is conscious, and that point moves forward and backward.

Soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere (limitless) but whose centre is in some body. Death is but a change of centre. God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, and whose centre is everywhere. When we can get out of the limited centre of body, we shall realize God, our true Self.

Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest the divinity within, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy,—by one or more or all these,—and be free. This is all of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.

Jnanam (knowledge) is "creedlessness;" but that does not mean that it despises creeds. It only means that a stage above and beyond creeds has been gained. The jnani (true philosopher) strives to destroy nothing, but to help all. All rivers roll their waters into the sea and become one, so all creeds should lead to Jnanam and become one. Jnanam teaches that the world should be renounced. but not on that account abandoned. To live in the world and be not of it, is the true test of renunciation.

Caspar David Friedrich

Woman at a Window

And a few more:

Solitary Tree

Landscape with the Rosenberg in the Bohemian Mountains

Moonrise on an Empty Shore

Rocky Reef on the Seashore

Language, reading, time.

"Of course it is the writer's daily self that lives the life and has the original experiences. But it some other agency in him, what I've called the writing-self, that records them, and working in its own way, according to its own needs and in its own language, colours them feeling, gives them resonance and meaning, so that when they come up in the writing -- as the writing calls them up -- they may be as new and surprising to the writer as they will be to the eventual reader. They have been reshaped, given a different emphasis, Transformed.

The truth is that it is the writing that shapes and leads the writer, not the other way round. The writing self grows out of the writing and grows with it -- that is what we ought to mean by a writer's 'development' -- and a good deal of all this has to do with the creative action of language itself, though by language I mean something very different from the words a writer may have at his disposal for talk.

The gap between the language of writing and the language of talk: In talk, language is at the service of what needs to be said. In writing, language is an active agent in what gets said. That is why writers are so wary of talk. They know that if you allow what wants to get written, what needs to get written, to be expressed in the serviceable language of talk, the writing will not happen. Talk will have already moved in and done the job, blocked out forever what the writing, in its own more hesitant way, was about to reveal."

-- David Malouf

*

"Entering a story -- a fairytale or folk-tale or fable: being taken out of ourselves into the skin of another; having adventures there that are both our own and not our own -- is an experience of a aprticular kind. Release from the constrictions, whatever they may be, of our own life and body into a dimension where reality is not limited to dailiness and the laws of nature, and all sorts of occassions, richer and more fantastic, more exciting, more harrowing, can be imagined forth -- imagined -- and made real. There is a regenerative and healing quality here that makes such experiences something more than entertainment or simply a way of passing the time; though the passing of time is also essential to it.

Time in a story passes more quickly than in real life -- 'the next day' we say, all in a breath, or 'some yeas later'. But it may also pass more slowly, or stop altogether, giving the narrator, and the listener, the luxury of looking around and absorbing things that in real life are gone too quickly to be taken in, or to consider and ask questions that real life leaves no space for. Such games offer a momentary respite from calendar and body time into the free time of 'ever after'. As if by losing ourselves in the story, we had, at least for its duration, stopped the body's clock from ticking on inevitably to death, and escaped its laws and limitations."

-- David Malouf 

*

Say, how time is held in this painting. Allows us to dilate time to stare, at time in passing in the stages of life, at transient time which perhaps last only for a moment in the twilight sky, here, all together. 

The Stages of Life by Caspar David Friedrich

*

Perhaps, when spirit put itself in a form to perhaps explore, play, understand, go around a 'let's say' scenario, perhaps then, as it took form, time was created. It finds itself swimming in time, tries to get its bearing. And then, as it plays with time, perhaps its thoughts turn to how to adorn time. Its companion, its playmate.

A thought on literature

One of the things that perhaps differentiates literary authors from other fiction writers, is perhaps this, that they lay out a frame for you, and rather than all the time moving within the frame like other mortal fiction writers, great authors sort of break the frame, immediately falsify the truth they've established, and take you out of the frame. And like the paradox of reality, of absences and presences, that creation and breaking, somehow meets the whole of the reader, and not just the narrative & reason following mind, but the deeper mind that somehow knows in its core that everything is, and everything is not.

Here's Tolstoy after he just sets up a detailed scene in Sevastopol, about 'a beautiful city and a dirty bivouac' which, 'is not only not beautiful but seems repulsive disorder; it even seems to you that every one is thoroughly frightened, and is fussing about without knowing what he is doing. But looking more closely',  a few words later:

Look at this little soldier from the provinces, for example, who is leading a troika of brown horses to water, and is purring something to himself so composedly that he evidently will not go astray in this motley crowd, which does not exist for him; but he is fulfilling his duty, whatever that may be, -- watering the horses or carrying arms, -- with just as much composure, self-confidence, and equanimity as though it were taking place in Tula or Saransk. You will read the same expression on the face of this officer who passes by in immaculate white gloves, and in the face of the sailor who is smoking as he sits on the barricade, and in the faces of the working soldiers, waiting with their litters on the steps of the former club, and in the face of yonder girl, who, fearing to wet her pink gown, skips across the street on the little stones.

Somehow, this, this taking you with the story, and then safely bringing you back home is perhaps done only by a few generous souls. Most fiction writers perhaps as normal mortals on a narrative, leave you out there after the story with a random frame, which you have to eventually balance out with some sentiment or emotion of your own, either a desire or some sympathy, it seems to ask something of you. But the generous souls, their pleasure is sharing. They take you out there, and bring you back to yourself, enriched for the experience.

I feel this in Bridge on Drina. In Independent People. In Moby Dick. In Butchers Crossing. And the pleasure of reading these works is much deeper than the random horizontal business of human range of emotions. These somehow transcend them, by creating, and then dissolving, without taking anything away, just leaving you tranquil, firmly grounded, somehow stronger, where you are with perhaps some deeper seeing, a deeper tranquil peaceful wisdom rather than any ask of its own for you.

*

Perhaps they let you feel the humanity running through each being, irrespective of the material of any particular life. They begin with particulars, yet, very soon, they are talking to something beyond your private reality, they are talking to the deep Self inside any being. By thus engaging a whole being, peace & strength, sort of the waters of the source fountain flow out to the particular being reading it.

*

Or maybe it is this journey which sort of explains and completes life. A transcendence from the frame, a sort of journey through creation and dissolution, which, in one human life, in a transient, changing life, (as day cannot explain night, but day and night together make something whole which either cannot fathom by themselves), something in that way, taking a life through a creation and dissolution perhaps addresses something deep inside, this wonder that we have about living, which only living cannot answer as day cannot account for all time. Something on those lines, such art, transcends the day of life, and meets the whole of being and non-being.

*

I think of Yeats and the long-legged fly:

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,

Quiet the dog, tether the pony

To a distant post;

Our master Caesar is in the tent

Where the maps are spread,

His eyes fixed upon nothing,

A hand under his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

That nobody looks; her feet

Practise a tinker shuffle

Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding reclines

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

A booklist from Naipaul's essay

Some books mentioned in Naipaul's Reading and Writing:

The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal

Julius Caesar

Oliver Twist

Nicholas Nickleby

David Copperfield

The Heroes by Charles Kingsley

The Mill on the Floss

Joseph Conrad

O. Henry

Maupassant

Jesting Pilate by Aldoux Huxley

Hindoo Holiday by J. R. Ackerley

Decline and Fall

Tartuffe

Cyrano de Bergerac

Lazarillo de Tormes

Kipling

Maugham

Forster

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

The novel

"For sixty or seventy years in the nineteenth century the novel in Europe, developing very fast in the hands of a relay of masters, became an extraordinary tool. It did what no other literary form -- essay, poem, drama, history -- could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn't been shown before; and it altered vision."

-- V. S. Naipaul  

From Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

"Somewhere in his writings, Robert Musil reminds us of how wrong we are to think of the individual self as the one unstable item within a firm world. The opposite is the case. The unstable world drifts like an island at the heart of each of us."

- Gerald Murnane

John Everett Millais

 Further exploring Google Arts and Culture, came across the following:

The Blind Girl

 

"Millais began painting the landscape for The Blind Girl on a visit to Winchelsea in Sussex in 1854. It was not completed until two years later when the artist moved to Perth, Scotland when he added the two figures into the painting. Mathilda Proudfoot was the model for the blind girl, replacing Effie Ruskin who Millais first used as the model, and Isabella Nicol as her sister.

In sharp contrast to Millais’ detailed observation of the painting’s picturesque backdrop and his use of exceptional colour, the girl’s blindness becomes more profound. From underneath her head shawl, the note is just visible “pity the blind”. Unable to see the scenic landscape that surrounds her, the girl instead relies on her other senses; she reaches out to feel the grass beneath her and with her head slightly lifted the warm sun illuminates her face.

The painting is seen to be addressing pressing social issues in 19th century England, vagrancy and disability, especially among children and young people. Instead of criminalising the two girls, Millais portrays them as victims and arouses our sense of compassion for the two sisters. A number of contemporaries described The Blind Girl as a contemporary treatment of a religious subject, likening the two figures to Mary and child."

*

About John Everett Millais: John Everett Millais (born June 8, 1829, Southampton, Hampshire, England—died August 13, 1896, London) was an English painter and illustrator, and a founding member of the artistic movement known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Having emerged as a bone-fide child prodigy, Millais would embark on a career that saw him enjoy domestic and international fame in his own lifetime.

*

There are many beautiful paintings that I would like to add to the scrapbook. A few at this moment:

Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind

My first sermon

 

My second sermon

**

Chill October

Further, from Letters from a young poet

Unless you come here you forget how amazingly beautiful the world is and what a large heart she has and how full of a deep fulfillment she is. In the evening when I sit quietly on the boat, the waters silent, the riverbank growing hazy, the sun's rays slowly losing their light on the margins of the sky, my whole body and mind feel such a touch -- strangely generous, large and incommunicable -- of silent nature with her downcast eyes! What peace, what affection, what greatness, what limitless tender melancholy! From these inhabited fields of crops to that desolate world of the stars, the sky fills to the brim from end to end with such a stunned heartfelt feeling, and I sit alone, immersed in this limitless mindscape -- only the maulabi stands next to me and jabbers on and on, making me disconsolate.

 

*

The other day I read a sloka from Kalidasa in a paper that I was quite surprised to read - meaning 'Why is even the soul of a happy man rendered restless upon seeing a beautiful thing or hearing a sweet sound? It must be that he remembers, unbeknownest to himself, some friend from another life.' It's pretty apparent that Kalidasa's mind would sometimes be weighed down quite without reason. In the Meghdut too, the poet has said -- 'seeing clouds, even the happy person turns absentminded.' Beauty awakens in man the most deep and mysterious and limitless of desires, that attracts the mind and takes it from one birth to the next...

*

I was walking as if I was the one and only last-remaining pulse of a dying world. And all of you were on another shore, on the banks of life -- where there's the British Government and the nineteenth century and tea and cheroots. If I could lift somebody out of there on a small boat and bring him here to this uninhabited moonlight, we would stand on this high bank and look out at the endless water and stand, and the fathomless night would shimmer and hum all around us! So many other have over the years stood here like me, alone, and felt this way, and so many poets have tried to express this, but oh, it is ineffable -- what is it, what is it for, what impulse is it, what does one call this lost peace, what does it mean -- when will that tune emerge, splitting open the heart precisely through the middle, which will exactly express this musicality!

 

*

You must be quite surprised to hear that I'm reading so much of Elements of Politics and Problems of the Future after coming here. Actually, the thing is, I can never quite find a poem or a novel that is appropriate for this place. Whatever I open has the same English names, English society, the roads and drawing rooms of London, and all sorts of meaningless complications. I never come across anything that is quite easy, beautiful, free or generous, brightly tender, and rounded like a teardrop. Just complications upon complications, analysis upon analysis -- just attempts at crumpling, wringing and scrunching up human nature to spin it around forcefully in order to prise out newer and newer theories or ethics. If I try to read that stuff, it shall completely muddy what I have here -- the calm current of this small summer-worn river, the flow of the indifferent breeze, the undivided expanse of the sky, the continuous peace of both shores and the silence all around. I almost never have anything to read that is appropriate for here, except for the shorter verses of the Vaishnava poets...quite simple and beautiful and peaceful -- full of a lot of sky, light, silence and tenderness!... In other places, people crowd around, they interrupt your flow of thought if they are in front of you, as if their very existence seem to nudge you; they are all, each and every one, a positive human being; but here they come and go and talk and work in front of you -- yet they do not push against your mind.

*

The universe has many paradoxes, one among which is that where there's an extensive landscape, endless sky, dense clouds, a deep feeling, in other words in a place where the eternal is manifest, there its appropriate companion can be only one person -- too many people make it too petty and messy. Infinity and one person are both evenly balanced in relation to one another -- both deserve to sit on their individual thrones face-to-face. ...If a person wants to spread out his entire soul, he needs too much space that there's no room for...

*

-- Rabindranath Tagore, Letters from a Young Poet

From "Letters from a Young Poet"

Some notes from Rabindranath Tagore's Letters from a Young Poet.

"Time refused to pass. Every moment seemed to have to be physically pushed forward....Began to read Anna Karenina, but it was so dreadful that I couldn't -- what is the point of reading these sorts of sickly books, I don't understand. I want writing that is quite simple, beautiful, sweet and generous -- a strange mess of a situation full of convoluted turns doesn't suit me for very long. Thankfully it began to rain heavily after a while. It felt good to shut everything on all sides and sit down by the glass window to watch the clouds and the rain. At one place the sight of a monsoon river was quite amazing. It had become swollen and enlarged, frothing, twisting, muddied, racing, banging its head against the stones upon which it flung itself, hitting and falling over them, leaping over and whirling around them, behaving most terribly. I've never seen such madness anywhere else. By the time we got to Sohagpur in the evening and had our dinner, the rain had stopped; when the train started I noticed the sun setting brilliantly among the clouds. I was thinking often of all of you, that for you time was passing unnoticed while you ate, played, studied and conversed -- time was flowing over you and you hadn't even noticed its presence -- and I was swimming through time, the entire expanse of time was hitting my face, my heart, my whole body..."

*

"Our boat is moored to the front of a sandbank on the other side of Shilaidaha. It's a vast sandbank -- utterly desolate -- its limits cannot be seen -- just sometimes, in some places, the river's lines are visible -- while again, sometimes you could mistake the sand for the river -- no villages, no people, no trees, no grass -- for variety occasionally cracked wet earth, and in some places dry white sand -- if you turn your face towards the east you can see endless blue above and endless white below, empty sky and empty earth; a wretched, dry, hard emptiness underneath and a spirit-like, generous emptiness above. Such desolation isn't to be seen anywhere else. If you suddenly turn your face towards the west, you see the lap of a still, small river, tall banks on the other side, trees and bushes, huts, all looking like an amazing dream in the light of setting sun. Exactly as if on the one side you have creation and on the other annihilation. The reason for mentioning the light of the evening sun is that we normally go out for a stroll in the evening, and therefore it is that picture that remains etched on the mind. When is living in Calcutta one forgets how astonishingly beautiful this world is. It is only when you live here that you comprehend that this sun that sets every day among these peaceful trees by the side of this little river, and the hundred thousand stars that silently rise every night above this endless, ashen, lonely, silent sandbank -- what a surprisingly noble event this is. The sun, as it rises slowly in the east at dawn, opens a page in some tremendous book, and the evening gradually turns another enormous page in the sky from the west -- what an amazing script that too is -- and this barely flowing river and this sandbank spread across the edge of the world -- what sort of large, silent, deserted school is this!"

*

"Is man an iron machine that he shall always run on schedule? Man's mind is a thing that functions in so many diverse ways -- it moves in so many directions -- and it has so many claims, that it must lean in one direction or the other. That is its life's aim, its sign of humanity, its protest against inertia. A person who does not have this hesitation, this weakness, is terribly narrow and hard and lifeless. Our life force is that we call propensity [prabrtii], which we are always criticizing in harsh language -- through our many joys and sorrows, good deeds and sins, this is what allows us to blossom towards the cosmic. If we completely disbelieve our inclination, we would make the same mistake as the river if it were to wonder at every step, 'Why, where is the ocean, there is only desert, forest and sandbank to be seen, perhaps the power that pushes me onward is taking me in the wrong direction.' We too are flowing every day through many apprehensions, we cannot see our end, but He who has given us, in this limitless life, the tremendous force called our propensity, He alone knows how to use that force to direct us. We always make the enormous mistake of thinking that we shall perhaps be abandoned in this place to which our propensity has brought us; we cannot know then that we shall be drawn out of that situation. The power that brings the river to the desert is the same power that takes it to the sea. What pushes us into our mistakes is the very thing that pulls us out again. This is how we move on. The person who doesn't have this propensity of his, or the plenitude of this life force, whose mind does not manifest its mystery and variety, that person may be happy, or good, and people may call that narrowness mental strength, but he has an inadequate stipend for this limitless life."

( A blossom is not really linear, logical. It is quite magical)

*

"On the shore, many different sorts of people come and go in the most slow and sedate manner; why they come, why they go, why one sits hunched with his arms wrapped around his knees pulled up to his chest, why they stae surprised at nothing in particular -- one cannot be sure what any of this means. Only a few ducks display an air of being busy in the midst of this -- they make a lot of noise, frequently, excitedly dunking their heads in the water and immediately raising them again with a vigorous shake. Exactly as if they were sticking out their necks each time to investigate the deep mysteries under the water, then forcefully shaking their heads to say, 'No, nothing, nothing at all!' The days over here keep lying there, sunning themselves in this way for twelve hours, and in the remaining twelve hours they wrap themselves up in the deepest darkness and go silently to sleep."

*

"A shadow has fallen over the entire never-ending field -- a tender melancholy -- not exactly tears -- like a deep trembling under the long eyelashes of an unblinking eye. One could imagine that mother earth lives with her own children and clamour and household work in the midst of society -- but where there's a little space, a little silence, a little bit of open sky, that's where her vast heart's hidden sadness and melancholy can appear; there, one can hear her deepest sigh. It is doubtful whether you'll find the sort of unobstructed clear sky and flat land spread out over such distances as we have in India anywhere in Europe. That is perhaps why our race has been able to discover the limitless melancholy of this vast world. That is why our Purbi and Tori ragas seem to express the inner lament of the entire vast world, not someone's domestic story. One part of this world is efficient, affectionate, limited -- that part hasn't found the time to influence us a great deal. But that part of the world which is unpeopled, empty and endless, that part has made us melancholy."

*

A poet's prose is some of the best prose in the world. :) Rilke, Tagore, Keats, Brodsky, Borges - letters, notes.

*

Ursula K. Le Guin on Water

From her blog.

Studying peace means in the first place unlearning the vocabulary of war, and that’s very difficult indeed. Isn’t it right to fight against injustice? Isn’t that what Selma and Standing Rock are — brave battles for justice?

I think not. Brave yes; battles no. Refusing to engage an aggressor on his terms, standing ground, holding firm, is not aggression — though the aggressive opponent will always declare that it is. Refusing to meet violence with violence is a powerful, positive act.

But that is paradoxical. It’s hard to see how not doing something can be more positive than doing something. When all the words we have to use are negative — inaction, nonviolence, refusal, resistance, evasion — it’s hard to see and keep in mind that the outcome of these so-called negatives is positive, while the outcome of the apparently positive act of making war is negative.

We confuse self-defense, the reaction to aggression, with aggression itself. Self-defense is a necessary and morally defensible reaction.

But defending a cause without fighting, without attacking, without aggression, is not a reaction. It is an action. It is an expression of power. It takes control.

The choice to act, rather than react, breaks the paralysis of fear and the vicious circle of aggression, frees us go forward, onward.

**

Lao Tzu says: the way of water.

The weakest, most yielding thing in the world, as he calls it, water chooses the lowest path, not the high road. It gives way to anything harder than itself, offers no resistance, flows around obstacles, accepts whatever comes to it, lets itself be used and divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to go always in the direction it must go. The tides of the oceans obey the moon while the great currents of the open sea keep on their ways beneath. Water deeply at rest is yet always in motion; the stillest lake is constantly, invisibly transformed into vapor, rising in the air. A river can be dammed and diverted, yet its water is incompressible: it will not go where there is not room for it. A river can be so drained for human uses that it never reaches the sea, yet in all those bypaths and usages its water remains itself and pursues its course, flowing down and on, above ground or underground, breathing itself out into the air in evaporation, rising in mist, fog, cloud, returning to earth as rain, refilling the sea. Water doesn’t have only one way. It has infinite ways, it takes whatever way it can, it is utterly opportunistic, and all life on earth depends on this passive, yielding, uncertain, adaptable, changeable element.

The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?

I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.

The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.

The way of the water admits them all.

The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going — carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant by choice and uses force only when compelled, always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.

The cup of water that gives itself to thirst is a model for me of the compassion that gives itself freely. Water is generous, tolerant, does not hold itself apart, lets itself be used by any need. Water goes, as Lao Tzu says, to the lowest places, vile places, accepts contamination, accepts foulness, and yet comes through again always as itself, pure, cleansed, and cleansing.

Running water and the sea are models for me of patience: their easy, steady obedience to necessity, to the pull of the moon in the sea-tides and the pull of the earth always downward; the immense power of that obedience.

 

Patrick White/ The Tree of Man

On White: "His position as man of letters was controversial...provoked by his belief that it is the eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation."

*

"But he knew also there was nothing to be done. He knew that where his cart had stopped, he would stop. There was nothing to be done. He would make the best oh this cell in which he had been locked. How much of will, how much of fate, entered into this it was difficult to say. Or perhaps fate is will. Anyway, Stan Parker was pretty stubborn."

*

"Many days passed in this way, the man clearing his land. The muscular horse, shaking his untouched forelock, tautened the chain traces and made logs move. The man hewed and burned. Sometimes, possessed by his daemon of purpose, the ribs seemed to flow beneath his skin. Sometimes his ordinarily moist and thoughtful mouth grew rigid, fixed in the white scales of thirst. But he burned and hewed. At night he lay on the heap of sacks and leaves, on the now soft and tranquil earth, and abandones the bones of his body. The logs of sleep lay dead heavy.

There in the scarred bush, that had not yet accepted its changed face, the man soon began to build a house, or shack. He brought the salbs he had shaped for logs. Slowly. He piled his matchsticks. So the days were piled too. Seasons were closing and opening on the clearing in which the man was at work. If days fanned the fury in him, months soothed, so that time, as it passed, was both shaping and dissolving, in one."

*

"Well, she could sit a lifetime if necessary, she said, once the crying was done.

The girl sat with her eyes on the road. She was not concerned, as, at odd moments, her husband was afraid she might be. Because in her complete ignorance of life, as it is lived, and the complete poverty of the life she had lived, she was not sure but that she might have to submit thus, interminably bolt upright in a cart. Life was perhaps a distance of stones and sun and wind, sand-coloured and monotonous. Dressed too much, as she was, for her wedding, and in an unfamiliar, undistinguished place, she could have believed anything."

*