TERMS STARTING WITH
Arcade (fictional)—in Anatole France’s Revolt
Arcade "networking" A UK {BBS} for the {Acorn} {Archimedes}. Also has links with {Demon Internet}. Telephone: +44 (181) 654 2212 (24hrs, most speeds). (1994-11-08)
Arcade ::: (networking) A UK BBS for the Acorn Archimedes. Also has links with Demon Internet.Telephone: +44 (181) 654 2212 (24hrs, most speeds). (1994-11-08)
Arcadic: Artificial art with the pretence of expressing pastoral simplicity. -- L.V.
ARC ::: Advanced RISC Computing Specification
ARC {Advanced RISC Computing Specification}
ARCANA—An inner secret or mystery; something hidden from the mass of men; one of the great secrets which the alchemists sought to discover.
Arcana (Latin) Secrets, mysteries; in ancient times almost invariably what was secret, sacred, and taught in silence and privacy in the Mysteries, whether such teachings comprised the revelation of truth, the explanation of difficult points regarding ceremonies, or the hidden wisdom.
Arcananas ::: the name of a rsi, "the pilgrim of the Light", he who travels to the illumination created by the word. [Ved.]
Arcana ::: Refers to Mysteries: those aspects of reality that go unnoticed in states of mundane consciousness. Also refers to the symbolic categories of the Tarot.
Arcane: A sort of unconscious "cloaking" effect that some mages possess, rendering them immune to scrutiny.
Arcane: A synonym for esoteric or occult.
Arcane: Capitalized, Arcane refers to a mysterious field or effect that obscures the existence and identity of a person, place, or thing.
Arcan —king of the angels of the air, ruler of
Arcan, king of the angels of the air serving on
Arcanopath: Someone who pursues magick and/ or knowledge without concerns about ethics, morality, or consequences. (See Faust.)
Arcanum: An elixir used as a stimulant for divination. (Plural: arcana. Cf. tarot.)
Arcanum: An old term almost identical with occultism, its recent equivalent. Arcana were originally used to cover the sacred objects, such as the Playthings of Dionysus in the Eleusinian rites, and a cognate is ark, as in the Ark of the Covenant. Arcesilaus: (315-241 B.C.) Greek philosopher from Pitane in Aeolis. He succeeded Crates in the chair of the Platonic Academy and became the founder of the second or so-called middle academy. In opposition to both Stoicism and Epicureanism, he advocated a scepticism that was not so extreme as that of Pyrrho although he despaired of man's attaining truth. Suspended judgment was to him the best approach. -- L.E.D.
Arcanum arcanorum: Medieval Latin term for the “secret of secrets”; the ultimate secret.
Arcanum (singular) sometimes meant in medieval and modern Europe, an elixir, philosopher’s stone, or magical agent, whether physical or spiritual.
Arca. See ARK
Arc – A set of points that lie on a circle and that are positioned within a central angle.
Arc elasticity - A measure of the average responsiveness of quantity to price over an interval of the demand curve.
Archaeologists have calculated that these circles date from about 1900 BC in the so-called Early Bronze Age. Blavatsky states that the erection of such great monolithic monuments was supervised by initiated priests, some at least coming from Egypt, belonging to the second subrace of the fifth root-race, at a time when a land connection existed between France and Great Britain, but gives no date for the British stone circles. Recent excavations, however, have disclosed that the great circle cuts right across the site of an older and rather smaller one.
Archaes: A synonym for astral light (q.v.).
Archaeus, Archeus [from Greek archaios original, ancient] Used by Paracelsus and others after him to denote the unitary cosmic or human spiritual-vital force or essence. It is one aspect of the anima mundi and therefore the source of all astral-physical phenomena, whether as energy or substance; also called Father-Ether.
Archaic: A style which is primitive and incomplete in comparison with a posterior style which is considered perfect and complete. -- L.V.
Archaism: A revival of archaic style as a result of dissatisfaction with a manner previously considered perfect. -- L.V.
Archana —an angel’s name found inscribed
Archan —an angel who exercised dominion
Archangel Angel
Archangel [from Greek arch higher, original + angelos messenger] A higher or original order of angels; cosmic powers synonymous with the highest class of dhyani-chohans. In Christian legend, they number seven; in the Koran, four. In Catholic theology, the eighth of the nine divisions in the divine hierarchy. Jewish astrology associates the archangels with the planets: Raphael with the Sun, Gabriel with the Moon, Michael with Mercury, Aniel (Anael) with Venus, Samael with Mars, Zadkiel (Sachiel) with Jupiter, and Kafziel (Cassiel) with Saturn. In medieval Europe, influenced by the Islamic system of Averroes, the planets of Michael and Raphael were reversed. The archangels parallel the Babylonian planetary spirits, the Zoroastrian amesha spentas, and the Hindu adityas.
Archangel (Kabbalah) ::: The main consciousness that the aspirant can call to and work with that is associated with a particular Sephirah and which is linked to the Briatic aspect of that Sephirah. Typically the archangel is viewed as the most powerful aspect of that Sephirah that can be worked with, while the God Name refers to the purest, most primordial manifestation of that Sephirah's energy.
Archangel of penance; prince of the pre¬
Archangel of salvation; regent of the sun;
Archangel of the Covenant —a term applied
Archangel Ruin’d —Satan is so called by
ARCHANGELS OF SEFIROTH / AREL
Archangels of the 10 Sefiroth—Mathers,
ARCHANGELS
Archangels
Archangels —the term archangel applies gen¬
Archarzel—an angel invoked in ritual magic
ArchBSD ::: (operating system) 4.4 BSD-Lite for the Acorn Archimedes. (1994-11-08)
ArchBSD "operating system" 4.4 {BSD-Lite} for the {Acorn} {Archimedes}. (1994-11-08)
Arche: (Gr. arche) The first in a series; that from which a thing either is or comes to be; origin; principle; first cause (Aristotle). -- G.R.M.
Archelaus: A disciple of Anaxagoras; belonged to the Sophistic period; proclaimed the conventionality of all ethical judgments. He distinguished between man's natural impulses and dispositions and the dictates of human moral laws. The former he held to be superior guides to conduct. -- M.F.
Archelogy: The science of first principles. -- C.A.B.
Archer—a governing spirit of Aquarius. Archer
Archer: See: Sagittarius.
Archetypal world is also used to designate the fourth cosmic plane.
Archetypal World or Universe [from Greek archetypos original pattern] Either an abstract type in the divine mind, or a subtle form which is the model for a grosser form. In the processes of cosmic manifestation, forms are built by the builders working on a particular plane from abstract models already existing on a higher plane. In order for ideation to pass from the abstract into the concrete or visible form, the creative logoi see in the ideal world the archetypal forms of all and proceed to build upon these models forms both evanescent and transcendent (SD 1:380).
Archetypal world: See: Yesod.
Archetype ::: A term that describes what are fundamental aspects of dualistic conscious experience; primordial forms that establish meaning within the Mind and from around which other forms have a tendency to agglutinate. These are powers that drive desire and intent and are the foundations upon which the need for complex experience arises. The archetype that is "love" or the archetype that is "acceptance" are examples of this concept residing at a more fundamental layer of dualistic reality but which are, nonetheless, emergent from the Non-Dual. The concept of archetypes is one of the more complicated topics to broach and is an area of active research. Most of the material on this site discusses the permutations of archetypes that emerge from the barest roots of experiential existence and how these drive the complex forms ands notions of self that we associate with our physical world, but it is difficult to reduce this concept to an adequate definition.
Archetype: (Gr. arche, first; and typos, form) The original pattern of forms of which actual things are copies. (Platonic). -- J.K.F.
Archetype: The original pattern, of which actual things are copies or reproductions. A collective, generalized representative of an idea or group of ideas or characteristics.
Archeus. See ARCHAEUS
Archeus: See Paracelsus. -- R.B.W.
Archigenitor; The "first begetter". A Greek reference to Yaldabaoth.
Archimedean spirals: r = kθ [Left diagram below]
Archimedes ::: (computer) A family of microcomputers produced by Acorn Computers, Cambridge, UK. The Archimedes, launched in June 1987, was the first RISC based operating system and graphical user interface, RISC OS on ROM, along with an interpreter for Acorn's enhanced BASIC, BASIC V.The Archimedes was designed as the successor to Acorn's sucessful BBC Microcomputer series and includes some backward compatibility and a 6502 text editor, paint and draw programs. Software emulators are also available for the IBM PC as well as add-on Intel processor cards.There have been several series of Archimedes: A300, A400, A3000, A5000, A4000 and RISC PC. . . .See also Crisis Software, Warm Silence Software. (1998-04-03)
Archimedes "computer" A family of {microcomputers} produced by {Acorn Computers}, Cambridge, UK. The Archimedes, launched in June 1987, was the first {RISC} based {personal computer} (predating {Apple Computer}'s {Power Mac} by some seven years). It uses the {Advanced RISC Machine} (ARM) processor and includes Acorn's {multitasking} {operating system} and {graphical user interface}, {RISC OS} on {ROM}, along with an interpreter for Acorn's enhanced {BASIC}, {BASIC V}. The Archimedes was designed as the successor to Acorn's sucessful {BBC Microcomputer} series and includes some backward compatibility and a {6502} {emulator}. Several utilities are included free on disk (later in ROM) such as a {text editor}, paint and draw programs. Software emulators are also available for the {IBM PC} as well as add-on {Intel} processor cards. There have been several series of Archimedes: A300, A400, A3000, A5000, A4000 and {RISC PC}. {Usenet FAQ (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/acorn/)}. {Archive site list (http://cs.vu.nl/~gerben/acorn/acorn-archives.txt)}. {HENSA archive (ftp://micros.hensa.ac.uk/)}. {Stuttgart archive (ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/acorn)}. See also {Crisis Software}, {Warm Silence Software}. (1998-04-03)
Archistratege (Arhistratig—“chief of hosts”)
Architectonic: (Kant) (Gr. architektonikos; Ger. Architektonik) The formal scheme, structural design, or method of elucidation of a system. The architectonic of Kant's system rests throughout the basic distinctions of the traditional logic. -- O.F.K.
Architect: See: Sovereign Grand Architect of the Universe.
Architects [from Greek architektones master-builders] Among groups of the creators such as the cosmocratores, demiourgoi, and dhyani-chohans, architect applies to the designers, those possessing and using the ideational faculties, and the term builder applies to the workmen or those who execute the general design. “The architects form the higher or more spiritual side, and actually form the line of the luminous arc; and the builders or constructors form, on the other hand, the shadowy arc” (Fund 507-8). The architects are the dhyani-buddhas, the principle creators, the elohim, synthesized by demiourgus; they follow the plan of the inherent divine thought.
Architect . . . the Architect who builds in trance
Architecture [from Latin architectura from Greek architekton master-builder] Signifies not building in itself, but the science or art of building in accordance with certain principles or rules which endure through the ages, because rooted in cosmic order and beauty. Architecture is reckoned as one of the five great arts, and the monuments of antiquity in whatever land show clearly that those who designed them had, besides a knowledge of materials and the technique of using them, some knowledge at least of the great cosmic laws of harmony and beauty, and their derivative, proportion.
Architecture Neutral Distribution Format "programming, operating system" (ANDF) An emerging {OSF} {standard} for software distribution. Programs are compiled into ANDF before distribution and {executables} are produced from it for the local target system. This allows software to be developed and distributed in a single version then installed on a variety of hardware. See also {UNCOL}. ["Architecture Neutral Distribution Format: A White Paper", Open Software Foundation, Nov 1990]. (1995-10-20)
Architecture Neutral Distribution Format ::: (programming, operating system) (ANDF) An emerging OSF standard for software distribution. Programs are compiled into ANDF before distribution and software to be developed and distributed in a single version then installed on a variety of hardware.See also UNCOL.[Architecture Neutral Distribution Format: A White Paper, Open Software Foundation, Nov 1990]. (1995-10-20)
Archobiosis. See ARCHEBIOSIS
Archon also was the Athenian name for the supreme authority established after the abolition of royalty in 1068 BC. After 683 BC nine were chosen by election or lot, each holding office for one year, one of whom, the Archon Basileus (ruler king), was the initiated and initiating hierophant in the Mysteries of Eleusis. In accordance with all ancient initiations the initiator, whether supreme or secondary, was held to be an imbodiment, at least temporarily, of spiritual-intellectual powers which worked for the time being through him.
Archon, Archontes (Greek) ’archon. Ruler; originally celestial beings, these primordial planetary spirits or dhyani-chohans transfer their mystic fluids or essences into their “shadows” or vehicles, thus enabling them to manifest on the various planes of the universe. In one sense, they are the fallen angels, counterparts alike of the highest celestial beings of the hierarchies and of the human personalities at the lowest rung of the ladder of emanations. Hence they are humanity’s teachers or guardian angels, made by theology into evil spirits, and contrasted with archangels, their own supreme and primordial essences. These beings are concerned with a kind of hypostatic action or a transference of consciousness, vitality, and force from a higher to lower planes through various vehicles or sheaths in which the descending ray clothes itself on the different planes of the universe that it traverses.
Archon ::: A title of nobility or rulership usually associated with certain deities or hierarchies thereof.
Archon; "Ruler". Refers to the creators and governing forces in the material world. The Demiurge and his angels.
Archons: In occultism, primordial planetary spirits. In Manicheism, the Sons of Dark, who swallowed up the bright elements of the Primal Man.
Archons (“rulers”)—angels set over nations
Archons: “the great Heleleth descends from before
Archytas of Tarentum (flourished 400-365 BC) Greek Pythagorean philosopher, general, statesman, scientist, and mathematician, contemporary of Plato. He was the first to distinguish harmonic progression from arithmetical and geometric progression, is credited with inventing the pulley, and contributed to the study of acoustics, music, and mathematics.
Arciciah—an angel of earth, cited in Schwab,
ARCnet "networking" A {network} developed by {DataPoint}. ARCnet was {proprietary} until the late 1980s and had about as large a marketshare as {Ethernet} among small businesses. It was almost as fast and was considerably cheaper at the time. (1995-01-16)
ARCnet ::: (networking) A network developed by DataPoint. ARCnet was proprietary until the late 1980s and had about as large a marketshare as Ethernet among small businesses. It was almost as fast and was considerably cheaper at the time. (1995-01-16)
ARCS {ARC}
Arc(s), Ascending and Descending Also Luminous and Shadowy Arcs. A cycle of development, such as that of a planetary chain, can be divided into two halves, the first from the first globe to the middle of the most material globe, and the other extending from this midpoint upwards to the last globe. The first half is the downward or shadowy arc; the second is the ascending or luminous arc. The descending arc represents an involution of spirit and a concurrent evolution of matter resulting in a progressive materialization of spirit and a continuous grossening or concretion of the texture of matter; the ascending arc represents an evolution of spirit and involution of matter, resulting in a progressive dematerialization, spiritualization, or refinement of matter as it increasingly manifests the qualities of spirit. Yet spirit and matter are fundamentally one essence at different stages of development.
Arctic "language, music" A {real-time} {functional language}, used for music synthesis. ["Arctic: A Functional Language for Real-Time Control", R.B. Dannenberg, Conf Record 1984 ACM Symp on LISP and Functional Prog, ACM]. (1995-01-16)
Arctic ::: (language, music) A real-time functional language, used for music synthesis.[Arctic: A Functional Language for Real-Time Control, R.B. Dannenberg, Conf Record 1984 ACM Symp on LISP and Functional Prog, ACM]. (1995-01-16)
Arctic. See POLES, NORTH AND SOUTH
arc ::: 1. Any unbroken part of the circumference of a circle or other curved line. 2. A luminous bridge formed in a gap between two electrodes. arcs.
arc 1. "file format, tool" An old {archive} format for {IBM PC}. The format is now so obscure that it is only likely to be supported by jack-of-all-trades decompression programs such as {WINZIP}. 2. "mathematics, data" An {edge} in a {tree}. "{branch}" is a generally more common synonym. (1998-12-29)
arcaded ::: a. --> Furnished with an arcade.
arcade ::: n. --> A series of arches with the columns or piers which support them, the spandrels above, and other necessary appurtenances; sometimes open, serving as an entrance or to give light; sometimes closed at the back (as in the cut) and forming a decorative feature.
A long, arched building or gallery.
An arched or covered passageway or avenue.
arcadian ::: a. --> Alt. of Arcadic
arcadia ::: n. --> A mountainous and picturesque district of Greece, in the heart of the Peloponnesus, whose people were distinguished for contentment and rural happiness.
Fig.: Any region or scene of simple pleasure and untroubled quiet.
arcadic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Arcadia; pastoral; ideally rural; as, Arcadian simplicity or scenery.
arcana ::: pl. --> of Arcanum
arcana, thus making Solomon the wisest man on
arcane ::: a. --> Hidden; secret.
arcanes ::: of things known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; esoteric. (Employed by Sri Aurobindo as a noun.)
arcanic book (1730.)] Arathron teaches alchemy,
arcanis, 1730. MS. in Bibliothfcque de 1’Arsenal, Paris.
arcanum ::: n. --> A secret; a mystery; -- generally used in the plural.
A secret remedy; an elixir.
arcboutant ::: n. --> A flying buttress.
arch ::: 1. An upwardly curved construction, for spanning an opening, consisting of a number of wedgelike stones, bricks, or the like, set with the narrower side toward the opening in such a way that forces on the arch are transmitted as vertical or oblique stresses on either side of the opening, either capable of bearing weight or merely ornamental; 2. Something bowed or curved; any bowlike part: the arch of the foot. 3. An arched roof, door; gateway; vault; fig. the heavens. arches.
arch- ::: a combining form that represents the outcome of archi- in words borrowed through Latin from Greek in the Old English period; it subsequently became a productive form added to nouns of any origin, which thus denote individuals or institutions directing or having authority over others of their class (archbishop; archdiocese; archpriest): principal. More recently, arch-1 has developed the senses "principal” (archenemy; archrival) or "prototypical” and thus exemplary or extreme (archconservative); nouns so formed are almost always pejorative. Arch-intelligence.
archaean ::: a. --> Ancient; pertaining to the earliest period in geological history. ::: n. --> The earliest period in geological period, extending up to the Lower Silurian. It includes an Azoic age, previous to the appearance of life, and an Eozoic age, including the earliest forms of
archaeography ::: n. --> A description of, or a treatise on, antiquity or antiquities.
archaeolithic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the earliest Stone age; -- applied to a prehistoric period preceding the Paleolithic age.
archaeologian ::: n. --> An archaeologist.
archaeological ::: --> Relating to archaeology, or antiquities; as, archaeological researches.
archaeologic ::: --> Alt. of Archaeological
archaeologist ::: n. --> One versed in archaeology; an antiquary.
archaeology ::: n. --> The science or study of antiquities, esp. prehistoric antiquities, such as the remains of buildings or monuments of an early epoch, inscriptions, implements, and other relics, written manuscripts, etc.
arch-aeon Autogenes. [Cf Phronesis; see Heleleth.]
archaeopteryx ::: n. --> A fossil bird, of the Jurassic period, remarkable for having a long tapering tail of many vertebrae with feathers along each side, and jaws armed with teeth, with other reptilian characteristics.
archaeostomatous ::: a. --> Applied to a gastrula when the blastopore does not entirely close up.
archaeozoic ::: a. --> Like or belonging to the earliest forms of animal life.
archaical ::: a. --> Archaic.
archaic ::: a. --> Of or characterized by antiquity or archaism; antiquated; obsolescent.
archaism ::: a. --> An ancient, antiquated, or old-fashioned, word, expression, or idiom; a word or form of speech no longer in common use.
Antiquity of style or use; obsoleteness.
archaism: Old or outdated words or syntax which are intentionally used for effect.
archaistic ::: a. --> Like, or imitative of, anything archaic; pertaining to an archaism.
archaist ::: n. --> Am antiquary.
One who uses archaisms.
archaized ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Archaize
archaize ::: v. t. --> To make appear archaic or antique.
archaizing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Archaize
archangel ::: a chief or principal angel, the highest angel in rank. Archangel, Archangel"s.
archangel; also identified as the Logos or Word,
archangel ::: ArchangelThe highest supreme angel. The word derives from two Greek words arch (meaning first) and angelos (meaning messenger).
archangel bears his standard in battle. In the
archangel cited in Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology
archangel Iblis or Eblis. Dasim is the demon of
archangel Iblis. Sut is the demon of lies. The other
archangelic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to archangels; of the nature of, or resembling, an archangel.
archangelic governors of the Briatic world;
archangel. In The Masque of Angels, a one-act
archangel listed among the apostates in Enoch I.
archangel. Nabu was the son and minister of the
archangel ::: n. --> A chief angel; one high in the celestial hierarchy.
A term applied to several different species of plants (Angelica archangelica, Lamium album, etc.).
archangel of the bene elohim; Gabriel, archangel
archangel of the hayyoth hakodesh; Raziel, arch¬
archangels (actually 9) and places them in the
archangels and prince of the 1st Heaven, sharing
archangels are Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Phanuel.
archangels. Elsewhere he is cited a prince of the
archangels in the original or earliest listings. He has
archangels in Yezidic devil-worshipping religion.
archangels in Yezidic religion invoked in prayer
archangels in Yezidic religious lore, invoked in
archangels occurs only twice: in I Thessalonians
archangels of the Briatic world. In Ozar Midrashim
archangels of the Briatic world. “It is a name,”
archangels of the world of Briah. Here he corres¬
archangels, see Appendix. [Rf. Forlong, Encyclo¬
archangels, see Appendix.
archangels.
archangels. Thoth (or Pi-Hermes) is characterized
archangels who attend the throne of God, as
archangel who is like the sun, holding the balance
archangel whose name appears inscribed on a
arch- ::: --> A prefix signifying chief, as in archbuilder, archfiend.
archa. ::: worship; adoration
archbishop ::: n. --> A chief bishop; a church dignitary of the first class (often called a metropolitan or primate) who superintends the conduct of the suffragan bishops in his province, and also exercises episcopal authority in his own diocese.
archbishopric ::: n. --> The jurisdiction or office of an archbishop; the see or province over which archbishop exercises archiepiscopal authority.
arch brick ::: --> A wedge-shaped brick used in the building of an arch.
archbutler ::: n. --> A chief butler; -- an officer of the German empire.
archchamberlain ::: n. --> A chief chamberlain; -- an officer of the old German empire, whose office was similar to that of the great chamberlain in England.
archchancellor ::: n. --> A chief chancellor; -- an officer in the old German empire, who presided over the secretaries of the court.
archchemic ::: a. --> Of supreme chemical powers.
arch-cherub whose title or other name is “All—
archdeacon ::: n. --> In England, an ecclesiastical dignitary, next in rank below a bishop, whom he assists, and by whom he is appointed, though with independent authority.
archdeaconry ::: n. --> The district, office, or residence of an archdeacon. See Benefice.
archdeaconship ::: n. --> The office of an archdeacon.
archdemons; a great minister and chancelor of the
arch-demons and prince of tempters. In De
archdiocese ::: n. --> The diocese of an archbishop.
archducal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archduke or archduchy.
archduchess ::: n. --> The consort of an archduke; also, a princess of the imperial family of Austria. See Archduke.
archduchy ::: n. --> The territory of an archduke or archduchess.
archdukedom ::: n. --> An archduchy.
archduke ::: n. --> A prince of the imperial family of Austria.
archebiosis ::: n. --> The origination of living matter from non-living. See Abiogenesis.
arched ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Arch ::: a. --> Made with an arch or curve; covered with an arch; as, an arched door.
archegonial ::: a. --> Relating to the archegonium.
archegonium ::: n. --> The pistillidium or female organ in the higher cryptogamic plants, corresponding to the pistil in flowering plants.
archegony ::: n. --> Spontaneous generation; abiogenesis.
archelogy ::: n. --> The science of, or a treatise on, first principles.
archencephala ::: n. pl. --> The division that includes man alone.
archenemy ::: n. --> A principal enemy. Specifically, Satan, the grand adversary of mankind.
archenteric ::: a. --> Relating to the archenteron; as, archenteric invagination.
archenteron ::: n. --> The primitive enteron or undifferentiated digestive sac of a gastrula or other embryo. See Illust. under Invagination.
archeological ::: a. --> Same as Archaeology, etc.
archeology ::: a. --> Alt. of Archeological
archeress ::: n. --> A female archer.
archer fish ::: --> A small fish (Toxotes jaculator), of the East Indies; -- so called from its ejecting drops of water from its mouth at its prey. The name is also applied to Chaetodon rostratus.
archer ::: n. --> A bowman, one skilled in the use of the bow and arrow.
archership ::: n. --> The art or skill of an archer.
archery ::: n. --> The use of the bow and arrows in battle, hunting, etc.; the art, practice, or skill of shooting with a bow and arrows.
Archers, or bowmen, collectively.
arches ::: --> pl. of Arch, n.
archetypal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archetype; consisting a model (real or ideal) or pattern; original.
archetypally ::: adv. --> With reference to the archetype; originally. "Parts archetypally distinct."
archetype ::: Archetype The original pattern or model of which all things of the 'same type' are representations or copies. Universal symbols, which are defined as standard prototypes, are used more often in pathworking. Archetypal symbols are subconscious images that form our dreams, the power of our deities, and which enable all forms of divination to be possible.
archetype ::: n. --> The original pattern or model of a work; or the model from which a thing is made or formed.
The standard weight or coin by which others are adjusted.
The plan or fundamental structure on which a natural group of animals or plants or their systems of organs are assumed to have been constructed; as, the vertebrate archetype.
archetypes: in Jung's theory, patterns or frameworks within the collective unconscious which serve to organise our experiences, providing the basis of many fantasies, myths and symbols.
archetypical ::: a. --> Relating to an archetype; archetypal.
archeus ::: n. --> The vital principle or force which (according to the Paracelsians) presides over the growth and continuation of living beings; the anima mundi or plastic power of the old philosophers.
archevêque [French] ::: archbishop.
arch from a mortal into Metatron. [Rf. Ginzberg
archiannelida ::: n. pl. --> A group of Annelida remarkable for having no external segments or distinct ventral nerve ganglions.
archi- ::: --> A prefix signifying chief, arch; as, architect, archiepiscopal. In Biol. and Anat. it usually means primitive, original, ancestral; as, archipterygium, the primitive fin or wing.
archiater ::: n. --> Chief physician; -- a term applied, on the continent of Europe, to the first or body physician of princes and to the first physician of some cities.
archiblastula ::: n. --> A hollow blastula, supposed to be the primitive form; a c/loblastula.
archical ::: pref. --> Chief; primary; primordial.
archidiaconal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archdeacon.
archiepiscopacy ::: n. --> That form of episcopacy in which the chief power is in the hands of archbishops.
The state or dignity of an archbishop.
archiepiscopal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archbishop; as, Canterbury is an archiepiscopal see.
archiepiscopality ::: n. --> The station or dignity of an archbishop; archiepiscopacy.
archiepiscopate ::: n. --> The office of an archbishop; an archbishopric.
archierey ::: n. --> The higher order of clergy in Russia, including metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops.
archies, each hierarchy being subdivided into 3
archies, of Orders.”
archie ::: (tool, networking) A system to automatically gather, index and serve information on the Internet. The initial implementation of archie by McGill from all anonymous FTP archives on the Internet. Later versions provide other collections of information.See also archive site, Gopher, Prospero, Wide Area Information Servers. (1995-12-28)
archie "tool, networking" A system to automatically gather, index and serve information on the {Internet}. The initial implementation of archie by {McGill University} School of Computer Science provided an indexed directory of filenames from all {anonymous FTP} archives on the Internet. Later versions provide other collections of information. See also {archive site}, {Gopher}, {Prospero}, {Wide Area Information Servers}. (1995-12-28)
archil ::: n. --> A violet dye obtained from several species of lichen (Roccella tinctoria, etc.), which grow on maritime rocks in the Canary and Cape Verd Islands, etc.
The plant from which the dye is obtained.
archilochian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the satiric Greek poet Archilochus; as, Archilochian meter.
archilute ::: n. --> A large theorbo, or double-necked lute, formerly in use, having the bass strings doubled with an octave, and the higher strings with a unison.
archimage ::: n. --> Alt. of Archimagus
archimagus ::: n. --> The high priest of the Persian Magi, or worshipers of fire.
A great magician, wizard, or enchanter.
archimandrite ::: n. --> A chief of a monastery, corresponding to abbot in the Roman Catholic church.
A superintendent of several monasteries, corresponding to superior abbot, or father provincial, in the Roman Catholic church.
archimedean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Archimedes, a celebrated Greek philosopher; constructed on the principle of Archimedes&
archimedes ::: n. --> An extinct genus of Bryzoa characteristic of the subcarboniferous rocks. Its form is that of a screw.
arching ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Arch ::: n. --> The arched part of a structure.
Hogging; -- opposed to sagging.
archipelagic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archipelago.
archipelago ::: 1. Any sea, or body of water, in which there are numerous islands. 2. A large group or chain of islands.
archipelago ::: n. --> The Grecian Archipelago, or Aegean Sea, separating Greece from Asia Minor. It is studded with a vast number of small islands.
Hence: Any sea or broad sheet of water interspersed with many islands or with a group of islands.
archipterygium ::: n. --> The primitive form of fin, like that of Ceratodus.
architective ::: a. --> Used in building; proper for building.
architect ::: n. --> A person skilled in the art of building; one who understands architecture, or makes it his occupation to form plans and designs of buildings, and to superintend the artificers employed.
A contriver, designer, or maker.
architectonic ::: a. --> Alt. of Architectonical ::: n. --> The science of architecture.
The act of arranging knowledge into a system.
architectonical ::: a. --> Pertaining to a master builder, or to architecture; evincing skill in designing or construction; constructive.
Relating to the systemizing of knowledge.
architectonic ::: metaph. Of the systematic arrangement of knowledge.
architectonics ::: n. --> The science of architecture.
architector ::: n. --> An architect.
architectress ::: n. --> A female architect.
architect ::: the deviser, maker, or creator of anything; one who builds up something, as, men are the architects of their own fortunes. Architect, architects.
architectural ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the art of building; conformed to the rules of architecture.
architecture ::: 1. The profession of designing buildings and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. 2. The character or style of building. 3. Construction or structure generally. architectures.
architecture "architecture" Design, the way components fit together. The term is used particularly of {processors}, both individual and in general. "The {ARM} has a really clean architecture". It may also be used of any complex system, e.g. "software architecture", "network architecture". (1995-05-02)
architecture ::: (architecture) Design, the way components fit together. The term is used particularly of processors, both individual and in general. The ARM has a really clean architecture. It may also be used of any complex system, e.g. software architecture, network architecture. (1995-05-02)
architecture ::: n. --> The art or science of building; especially, the art of building houses, churches, bridges, and other structures, for the purposes of civil life; -- often called civil architecture.
Construction, in a more general sense; frame or structure; workmanship.
architeuthis ::: n. --> A genus of gigantic cephalopods, allied to the squids, found esp. in the North Atlantic and about New Zealand.
architraved ::: a. --> Furnished with an architrave.
architrave ::: n. --> The lower division of an entablature, or that part which rests immediately on the column, esp. in classical architecture. See Column.
The group of moldings, or other architectural member, above and on both sides of a door or other opening, especially if square in form.
archival ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or contained in, archives or records.
archive ::: 1. (file format) A single file containing one or (usually) more separate files plus information to allow them to be extracted (separated) by a suitable program.Archives are usually created for software distribution or backup. tar is a common format for Unix archives, and arc or PKZIP for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows.2. (operating system) To transfer files to slower, cheaper media (usually magnetic tape) to free the hard disk space they occupied. This is now normally done for long-term storage but in the 1960s, when disk was much more expensive, files were often shuffled regularly between disk and tape.3. (networking) archive site. (1996-12-08)
archive 1. "file format" A single file containing one or (usually) more separate files plus information to allow them to be extracted (separated) by a suitable program. Archives are usually created for software distribution or {backup}. {tar} is a common format for {Unix} archives, and {arc} or {PKZIP} for {MS-DOS} and {Microsoft Windows}. 2. "operating system" To transfer files to slower, cheaper media (usually {magnetic tape}) to free the {hard disk} space they occupied. This is now normally done for long-term storage but in the 1960s, when disk was much more expensive, files were often shuffled regularly between disk and tape. 3. "networking" {archive site}. (1996-12-08)
archive ::: n. --> The place in which public records or historic documents are kept.
Public records or documents preserved as evidence of facts; as, the archives of a country or family.
archive site ::: (networking) (Or FTP site, FTP archive) An Internet host where program source, documents, e-mail or news messages are stored for public access There may be several archive sites for e.g. a Usenet newsgroup though one may be recognised as the main one.FTP servers were common on the Internet for many years before the World-Wide Web (WWW) was invented and are still used in preference to web servers for serving efficient than HTTP, the protocol of the WWW. Many sites therefore run both HTTP and FTP servers.[Is FTP more efficient? How much more?]Some well-known archive sites include UUNET, USA .See also archie, GNU archive site, mirror. (1998-07-02)
archive site "networking" (Or "FTP site", "FTP archive") An {Internet} {host} where program source, documents, {e-mail} or {news} messages are stored for public access via {anonymous FTP}, {Gopher}, {web} or other document distribution system. There may be several archive sites ({mirrors}) for, e.g., a {Usenet} {newsgroup} though one may be recognised as the main one. FTP servers were common on the Internet for about ten years but have been largely replaced by {web servers} since the invention of the {World-Wide Web} and its {HTTP} protocol. Some well-known archive sites included {Imperial College, UK (ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/)}, {UUNET, USA (ftp://ftp.uu.net/)}, {GNU archive site}. The {archie} service attempted to index the contents of FTP archives, foreshadowing the indexing of the web by {Google} and others. (2014-07-06)
archives, libraries, and rare cabinets; also one of
archives ::: pl. --> of Archive
archives ::: preserved historical records or documents, also the place where they are kept.
archivist ::: a person responsible for preserving, organizing, or servicing archival material.
archivist ::: n. --> A keeper of archives or records.
archivolt ::: n. --> The architectural member surrounding the curved opening of an arch, corresponding to the architrave in the case of a square opening.
More commonly, the molding or other ornaments with which the wall face of the voussoirs of an arch is charged.
archlute ::: n. --> Alt. of Archilute
archly ::: adv. --> In an arch manner; with attractive slyness or roguishness; slyly; waggishly.
archmarshal ::: n. --> The grand marshal of the old German empire, a dignity that to the Elector of Saxony.
archmason ::: fig. Master builder. Archmason, archmasons.
arch ::: n. --> Any part of a curved line.
Usually a curved member made up of separate wedge-shaped solids, with the joints between them disposed in the direction of the radii of the curve; used to support the wall or other weight above an opening. In this sense arches are segmental, round (i. e., semicircular), or pointed.
A flat arch is a member constructed of stones cut into wedges or other shapes so as to support each other without rising in a curve.
archness ::: n. --> The quality of being arch; cleverness; sly humor free from malice; waggishness.
arch of all our experience sacred and profane, there was only—to use an expression of Paul’s
archon ::: ArchonLiterally 'Ruler'. Refers to the creators and governing forces in the material world, e.g. the Demiurge (a craftsman - the grand original intelligence who acted to produce the real world) and his angels.
archon ::: n. --> One of the chief magistrates in ancient Athens, especially, by preeminence, the first of the nine chief magistrates.
archon, or angel. In Arabic legend, female angels
archons are designated: Jaldabaoth, Jao, Sabaoth,
archons engendered by the god Ildabaoth “in his
archonship ::: n. --> The office of an archon.
archons in the Ophitic (gnostic) system and ruler
archons in the Ophitic (gnostic) system.
archons; named also Ariel. As the demiourgos, he
archons, resident of the 6th Heaven. [Rf. “Gnosti¬
archons that figure in the Ophitic system. [Rf.
archontate ::: n. --> An archon&
archonts ::: p. pr. --> The group including man alone.
archprelate ::: n. --> An archbishop or other chief prelate.
archpresbyter ::: n. --> Same as Archpriest.
archpresbytery ::: n. --> The absolute dominion of presbytery.
archpriest ::: n. --> A chief priest; also, a kind of vicar, or a rural dean.
archprimate ::: n. --> The chief primate.
archs, and they occupied a place apart in one of
archs—except for Pistis Sophia, who is claimed to
archspirit, comparable to Metatron in Jewish
archs serving him; the latter superintend the read¬
archs) speaks of God “bringing down from his
archs, The Zadokite Fragments (where Mastema also figures as an alternate to Beliar), and The
arch stone ::: --> A wedge-shaped stone used in an arch; a voussoir.
arch to “observe” his daughter-in-law Tamar
archtraitor ::: n. --> A chief or transcendent traitor.
archtreasurer ::: n. --> A chief treasurer. Specifically, the great treasurer of the German empire.
archway ::: n. --> A way or passage under an arch.
archwife ::: n. --> A big, masculine wife.
archwise ::: adv. --> Arch-shaped.
archy ::: a. --> Arched; as, archy brows. ::: --> A suffix properly meaning a rule, ruling, as in monarchy, the rule of one only. Cf. -arch.
archy not mentioned by pseudo-Dionysius or any
archy of the Blessed Angels, an angel with dominion
archy of the Blessed Angels, p. 215.]
archy range from 7 to 10 or 11 in number; they
archy.”]
archy which rules the universe under the deity.”
arciform ::: a. --> Having the form of an arch; curved.
arcismatī
arcismatī. (T. 'od 'phro ba; C. yanhui di; J. enneji; K. yomhye chi 焔慧地). In Sanskrit, "radiance" or "effulgence"; the fourth of the ten BODHISATTVA grounds or stages (BHuMI) according to the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA. At this stage, the bodhisattva masters the thirty-seven wings of enlightenment (BODHIPAKsIKADHARMA), whose radiance becomes so intense that it incinerates all the obstructions and afflictions. The bodhisattva thus develops inexhaustible energy for his quest for enlightenment; this bhumi is therefore often correlated with mastery of the fourth perfection (PARAMITA), the perfection of vigor or energy (VĪRYAPARAMITA). The fourth-stage bodhisattva also shows special devotion to the fourth means of conversion (SAMGRAHAVASTU), that of the common good, or consistency between words and deeds (SAMANARTHATA).
arc-lamps ::: general term for a class of lamps in which light is produced by a voltaic arc, a luminous arc between two electrodes typically made of tungsten or carbon and barely separated.
arc length of a curve: The length of a segment of a curve. It can be thought of as the limit of the sum of the lengths of any type of curves (circular, straight or otherwise) that approximates the curve itself.
arc ::: n. --> A portion of a curved line; as, the arc of a circle or of an ellipse.
A curvature in the shape of a circular arc or an arch; as, the colored arc (the rainbow); the arc of Hadley&
arcograph ::: n. --> An instrument for drawing a circular arc without the use of a central point; a cyclograph.
arc some who become so eager after these subsidl, There
arctation ::: n. --> Constriction or contraction of some natural passage, as in constipation from inflammation.
arctic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or situated under, the northern constellation called the Bear; northern; frigid; as, the arctic pole, circle, region, ocean; an arctic expedition, night, temperature. ::: n. --> The arctic circle.
A warm waterproof overshoe.
arctisca ::: n. pl. --> A group of Arachnida. See Illust. in Appendix.
arctogeal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to arctic lands; as, the arctogeal fauna.
arctoidea ::: n. pl. --> A group of the Carnivora, that includes the bears, weasels, etc.
arcturus ::: a giant star in the constellation Boötes. It is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere and the fourth brightest star in the sky, with an apparent magnitude of 0.00; sometimes referring to the Great Bear itself.
arcturus ::: n. --> A fixed star of the first magnitude in the constellation Bootes.
arcual ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an arc.
arcuate ::: a. --> Alt. of Arcuated
arcuated ::: a. --> Bent or curved in the form of a bow.
arcuately ::: adv. --> In the form of a bow.
arcuation ::: n. --> The act of bending or curving; incurvation; the state of being bent; crookedness.
A mode of propagating trees by bending branches to the ground, and covering the small shoots with earth; layering.
arcubalister ::: n. --> A crossbowman; one who used the arcubalist.
arcubalist ::: n. --> A crossbow.
arcubus ::: n. --> See Arquebus.
TERMS ANYWHERE
abacus ::: n. --> A table or tray strewn with sand, anciently used for drawing, calculating, etc.
A calculating table or frame; an instrument for performing arithmetical calculations by balls sliding on wires, or counters in grooves, the lowest line representing units, the second line, tens, etc. It is still employed in China.
The uppermost member or division of the capital of a column, immediately under the architrave. See Column.
abaiser ::: n. --> Ivory black or animal charcoal.
abba ::: n. --> Father; religious superior; -- in the Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic churches, a title given to the bishops, and by the bishops to the patriarch.
ablactation ::: n. --> The weaning of a child from the breast, or of young beasts from their dam.
The process of grafting now called inarching, or grafting by approach.
abrahamic ::: a. --> Pertaining to Abraham, the patriarch; as, the Abrachamic covenant.
absolute ::: a. --> Loosed from any limitation or condition; uncontrolled; unrestricted; unconditional; as, absolute authority, monarchy, sovereignty, an absolute promise or command; absolute power; an absolute monarch.
Complete in itself; perfect; consummate; faultless; as, absolute perfection; absolute beauty.
Viewed apart from modifying influences or without comparison with other objects; actual; real; -- opposed to relative and
absorb ::: v. t. --> To swallow up; to engulf; to overwhelm; to cause to disappear as if by swallowing up; to use up; to include.
To suck up; to drink in; to imbibe; as a sponge or as the lacteals of the body.
To engross or engage wholly; to occupy fully; as, absorbed in study or the pursuit of wealth.
To take up by cohesive, chemical, or any molecular action, as when charcoal absorbs gases. So heat, light, and electricity
abuna ::: n. --> The Patriarch, or head of the Abyssinian Church.
abutment ::: n. --> State of abutting.
That on or against which a body abuts or presses
The solid part of a pier or wall, etc., which receives the thrust or lateral pressure of an arch, vault, or strut.
A fixed point or surface from which resistance or reaction is obtained, as the cylinder head of a steam engine, the fulcrum of a lever, etc.
In breech-loading firearms, the block behind the barrel
acetone ::: n. --> A volatile liquid consisting of three parts of carbon, six of hydrogen, and one of oxygen; pyroacetic spirit, -- obtained by the distillation of certain acetates, or by the destructive distillation of citric acid, starch, sugar, or gum, with quicklime.
::: "A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul"s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law — or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception, — the truth of Karma.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul’s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law—or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception,—the truth of Karma.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
acrimonious ::: a. --> Acrid; corrosive; as, acrimonious gall.
Caustic; bitter-tempered&
acroterium ::: n. --> One of the small pedestals, for statues or other ornaments, placed on the apex and at the basal angles of a pediment. Acroteria are also sometimes placed upon the gables in Gothic architecture.
One of the pedestals, for vases or statues, forming a part roof balustrade.
Action of the gimas in yogat K ego and desire arc diffe- rent things from the gunas, then there can be an action of the gitnas without ego and desire and therefore without attachnienf.
adar ::: n. --> The twelfth month of the Hebrew ecclesiastical year, and the sixth of the civil. It corresponded nearly with March.
adarce ::: n. --> A saltish concretion on reeds and grass in marshy grounds in Galatia. It is soft and porous, and was formerly used for cleansing the skin from freckles and tetters, and also in leprosy.
adze ::: n. --> A carpenter&
ae ::: --> Alt. of Ae
A diphthong in the Latin language; used also by the Saxon writers. It answers to the Gr. ai. The Anglo-Saxon short ae was generally replaced by a, the long / by e or ee. In derivatives from Latin words with ae, it is mostly superseded by e. For most words found with this initial combination, the reader will therefore search under the letter E.
aegean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the sea, or arm of the Mediterranean sea, east of Greece. See Archipelago.
aegicrania ::: n. pl. --> Sculptured ornaments, used in classical architecture, representing rams&
"A fabulous tribe of wild, beastlike monsters, having the upper part of a human being and the lower part of a horse. They live in the woods or mountains of Elis, Arcadia, and Thessaly. They are representative of wild life, animal desires and barbarism. (M.I.) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.*
“A fabulous tribe of wild, beastlike monsters, having the upper part of a human being and the lower part of a horse. They live in the woods or mountains of Elis, Arcadia, and Thessaly. They are representative of wild life, animal desires and barbarism. (M.I.) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works.
afterpiece ::: n. --> A piece performed after a play, usually a farce or other small entertainment.
The heel of a rudder.
age ::: n. **1. A great period or stage of the history of the Earth. 2. Hist. Any great period or portion of human history distinguished by certain characters real or mythical, as the Golden Age, the Patriarchal Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of the Reformation, the Middle Ages, the Prehistoric Age. 3. A generation or a series of generations. 4. Advanced years; old age. age"s, ages, ages". v. 5.** To grow old; to become aged.
agminal ::: a. --> Pertaining to an army marching, or to a train.
aigremore ::: n. --> Charcoal prepared for making powder.
aisle ::: a longitudinal division of an interior area, as in a church, separated from the main area by an arcade or divided by a row of pillars. aisles.
alcove ::: n. --> A recessed portion of a room, or a small room opening into a larger one; especially, a recess to contain a bed; a lateral recess in a library.
A small ornamental building with seats, or an arched seat, in a pleasure ground; a garden bower.
Any natural recess analogous to an alcove or recess in an apartment.
alcoves ::: recessed spaces, as bowers in a garden; arched recesses or niches in the wall of any structure.
alhambresque ::: a. --> Made or decorated after the fanciful style of the ornamentation in the Alhambra, which affords an unusually fine exhibition of Saracenic or Arabesque architecture.
alidade ::: n. --> The portion of a graduated instrument, as a quadrant or astrolabe, carrying the sights or telescope, and showing the degrees cut off on the arc of the instrument
::: "All conscious being is one and indivisible in itself, but in manifestation it becomes a complex rhythm, a scale of harmonies, a hierarchy of states or movements.” The Upanishads
“All conscious being is one and indivisible in itself, but in manifestation it becomes a complex rhythm, a scale of harmonies, a hierarchy of states or movements.” The Upanishads
"All depends on the meaning you attach to words used; it is a matter of nomenclature. Ordinarily, one says a man has intellect if he can think well; the nature and process and field of the thought do not matter. If you take intellect in that sense, then you can say that intellect has different strata, and Ford belongs to one stratum of intellect, Einstein to another — Ford has a practical and executive business intellect, Einstein a scientific discovering and theorising intellect. But Ford too in his own field theorises, invents, discovers. Yet would you call Ford an intellectual or a man of intellect? I would prefer to use for the general faculty of mind the word intelligence. Ford has a great and forceful practical intelligence, keen, quick, successful, dynamic. He has a brain that can deal with thoughts also, but even there his drive is towards practicality. He believes in rebirth (metempsychosis), for instance, not for any philosophic reason, but because it explains life as a school of experience in which one gathers more and more experience and develops by it. Einstein has, on the other hand, a great discovering scientific intellect, not, like Marconi, a powerful practical inventive intelligence for the application of scientific discovery. All men have, of course, an ‘intellect" of a kind; all, for instance, can discuss and debate (for which you say rightly intellect is needed); but it is only when one rises to the realm of ideas and moves freely in it that you say, ‘This man has an intellect".” Letters on Yoga
“All depends on the meaning you attach to words used; it is a matter of nomenclature. Ordinarily, one says a man has intellect if he can think well; the nature and process and field of the thought do not matter. If you take intellect in that sense, then you can say that intellect has different strata, and Ford belongs to one stratum of intellect, Einstein to another—Ford has a practical and executive business intellect, Einstein a scientific discovering and theorising intellect. But Ford too in his own field theorises, invents, discovers. Yet would you call Ford an intellectual or a man of intellect? I would prefer to use for the general faculty of mind the word intelligence. Ford has a great and forceful practical intelligence, keen, quick, successful, dynamic. He has a brain that can deal with thoughts also, but even there his drive is towards practicality. He believes in rebirth (metempsychosis), for instance, not for any philosophic reason, but because it explains life as a school of experience in which one gathers more and more experience and develops by it. Einstein has, on the other hand, a great discovering scientific intellect, not, like Marconi, a powerful practical inventive intelligence for the application of scientific discovery. All men have, of course, an ‘intellect’ of a kind; all, for instance, can discuss and debate (for which you say rightly intellect is needed); but it is only when one rises to the realm of ideas and moves freely in it that you say, ‘This man has an intellect’.” Letters on Yoga
allot ::: v. t. --> To distribute by lot.
To distribute, or parcel out in parts or portions; or to distribute to each individual concerned; to assign as a share or lot; to set apart as one&
All the lights arc put out by the Mother from herself.
altitude ::: n. --> Space extended upward; height; the perpendicular elevation of an object above its foundation, above the ground, or above a given level, or of one object above another; as, the altitude of a mountain, or of a bird above the top of a tree.
The elevation of a point, or star, or other celestial object, above the horizon, measured by the arc of a vertical circle intercepted between such point and the horizon. It is either true or apparent; true when measured from the rational or real horizon,
Amal: “‘The flaming Hierarchies’ are the inner spiritual levels in their true order.”
Amal: “They are beings and powers in our subconscious parts, who are bent on upsetting all our luminous movements and on creating utter disorder—anarchy—in our nature.”
Amal: “This is one of the perils awaiting one when one goes inward in search of one’s true self. The other perils are ‘the goblin Voice’ and ‘the enchantments of the demon Sign’. The opponent Snake’s ambush is the ultimate danger which can put an end to one’s inward search.”
amaryllideous ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to, or resembling, an order of plants differing from the lily family chiefly in having the ovary below the /etals. The narcissus and daffodil are members of this family.
amaryllis ::: n. --> A pastoral sweetheart.
A family of plants much esteemed for their beauty, including the narcissus, jonquil, daffodil, agave, and others.
A genus of the same family, including the Belladonna lily.
amelcorn ::: n. --> A variety of wheat from which starch is produced; -- called also French rice.
amphistylic ::: a. --> Having the mandibular arch articulated with the hyoid arch and the cranium, as in the cestraciont sharks; -- said of a skull.
amplitude ::: n. --> State of being ample; extent of surface or space; largeness of dimensions; size.
Largeness, in a figurative sense; breadth; abundance; fullness.
Of extent of capacity or intellectual powers.
Of extent of means or resources.
The arc of the horizon between the true east or west point and the center of the sun, or a star, at its rising or setting.
amylaceous ::: a. --> Pertaining to starch; of the nature of starch; starchy.
amyloid ::: a. --> Alt. of Amyloidal ::: n. --> A non-nitrogenous starchy food; a starchlike substance.
The substance deposited in the organs in amyloid degeneration.
amyloidal ::: a. --> Resembling or containing amyl; starchlike.
amylolytic ::: a. --> Effecting the conversion of starch into soluble dextrin and sugar; as, an amylolytic ferment.
amylose ::: n. --> One of the starch group (C6H10O5)n of the carbohydrates; as, starch, arabin, dextrin, cellulose, etc.
anasarca ::: n. --> Dropsy of the subcutaneous cellular tissue; an effusion of serum into the cellular substance, occasioning a soft, pale, inelastic swelling of the skin.
anasarcous ::: a. --> Belonging, or affected by, anasarca, or dropsy; dropsical.
anarchal ::: a. --> Lawless; anarchical.
anarch ::: a. Lawless, rebellious; n. An adherent of anarchy or a leader practicing it.
anarchic ::: a. --> Alt. of Anarchical
anarchical ::: a. --> Pertaining to anarchy; without rule or government; in political confusion; tending to produce anarchy; as, anarchic despotism; anarchical opinions.
"Anarchism is likely to be the protest of the human soul against the tyranny of a bureaucratic Socialism.” Essays Divine and Human
“Anarchism is likely to be the protest of the human soul against the tyranny of a bureaucratic Socialism.” Essays Divine and Human
anarchism ::: n. --> The doctrine or practice of anarchists.
anarchist ::: n. --> An anarch; one who advocates anarchy of aims at the overthrow of civil government.
anarchize ::: v. t. --> To reduce to anarchy.
anarch ::: n. --> The author of anarchy; one who excites revolt.
Anarchs ::: Authors or advocates of anarchy; leaders of revolt.
Anarchs of the formless depths
::: anarchs
anarch ::: “The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.” Essays Divine and Human
anarchy ::: a state of society without government or law ; lawlessness, confusion, chaos, disorder.
anarchy ::: n. --> Absence of government; the state of society where there is no law or supreme power; a state of lawlessness; political confusion.
Hence, confusion or disorder, in general.
angelica ::: n. --> An aromatic umbelliferous plant (Archangelica officinalis or Angelica archangelica) the leaf stalks of which are sometimes candied and used in confectionery, and the roots and seeds as an aromatic tonic.
The candied leaf stalks of angelica.
angwantibo ::: n. --> A small lemuroid mammal (Arctocebus Calabarensis) of Africa. It has only a rudimentary tail.
annoy ::: n. --> To disturb or irritate, especially by continued or repeated acts; to tease; to ruffle in mind; to vex; as, I was annoyed by his remarks.
To molest, incommode, or harm; as, to annoy an army by impeding its march, or by a cannonade.
A feeling of discomfort or vexation caused by what one dislikes; also, whatever causes such a feeling; as, to work annoy.
annunciation ::: n. --> The act of announcing; announcement; proclamation; as, the annunciation of peace.
The announcement of the incarnation, made by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.
The festival celebrated (March 25th) by the Church of England, of Rome, etc., in memory of the angel&
anodyne ::: a. --> Serving to assuage pain; soothing.
Any medicine which allays pain, as an opiate or narcotic; anything that soothes disturbed feelings.
anta ::: n. --> A species of pier produced by thickening a wall at its termination, treated architecturally as a pilaster, with capital and base.
antarchism ::: n. --> Opposition to government in general.
antarchistic ::: a. --> Alt. of Antarchistical
antarchistical ::: a. --> Opposed to all human government.
antarchist ::: n. --> One who opposes all government.
antarctic ::: a. --> Opposite to the northern or arctic pole; relating to the southern pole or to the region near it, and applied especially to a circle, distant from the pole 23¡ 28/. Thus we say the antarctic pole, circle, ocean, region, current, etc.
anti ::: --> A prefix meaning against, opposite or opposed to, contrary, or in place of; -- used in composition in many English words. It is often shortened to ant-; as, antacid, antarctic.
antimonarchical ::: --> Opposed to monarchial government.
antimonarchic ::: --> Alt. of Antimonarchical
antimonarchist ::: n. --> An enemy to monarchial government.
antiquary ::: a. --> Pertaining to antiquity. ::: n. --> One devoted to the study of ancient times through their relics, as inscriptions, monuments, remains of ancient habitations, statues, coins, manuscripts, etc.; one who searches for and studies the relics of antiquity.
apollo ::: n. --> A deity among the Greeks and Romans. He was the god of light and day (the "sun god"), of archery, prophecy, medicine, poetry, and music, etc., and was represented as the model of manly grace and beauty; -- called also Phebus.
approaching ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Approach ::: n. --> The act of ingrafting a sprig or shoot of one tree into another, without cutting it from the parent stock; -- called, also, inarching and grafting by approach.
Architect . . . the Architect who builds in trance
arid ::: a. --> Exhausted of moisture; parched with heat; dry; barren.
aries ::: n. --> The Ram; the first of the twelve signs in the zodiac, which the sun enters at the vernal equinox, about the 21st of March.
A constellation west of Taurus, drawn on the celestial globe in the figure of a ram.
A battering-ram.
aristarchian ::: a. --> Severely critical.
aristarch ::: n. --> A severe critic.
aristarchy ::: n. --> Severely criticism.
Severe criticism.
aristocracy ::: n. --> Government by the best citizens.
A ruling body composed of the best citizens.
A form a government, in which the supreme power is vested in the principal persons of a state, or in a privileged order; an oligarchy.
The nobles or chief persons in a state; a privileged class or patrician order; (in a popular use) those who are regarded as superior to the rest of the community, as in rank, fortune, or
ark shell ::: --> A marine bivalve shell belonging to the genus Arca and its allies.
army worm ::: --> A lepidopterous insect, which in the larval state often travels in great multitudes from field to field, destroying grass, grain, and other crops. The common army worm of the northern United States is Leucania unipuncta. The name is often applied to other related species, as the cotton worm.
The larva of a small two-winged fly (Sciara), which marches in large companies, in regular order. See Cotton worm, under Cotton.
arnica ::: n. --> A genus of plants; also, the most important species (Arnica montana), native of the mountains of Europe, used in medicine as a narcotic and stimulant.
arquated ::: a. --> Shaped like a bow; arcuate; curved.
arrowroot ::: n. --> A west Indian plant of the genus Maranta, esp. M. arundinacea, now cultivated in many hot countries. It said that the Indians used the roots to neutralize the venom in wounds made by poisoned arrows.
A nutritive starch obtained from the rootstocks of Maranta arundinacea, and used as food, esp. for children an invalids; also, a similar starch obtained from other plants, as various species of Maranta and Curcuma.
art ::: v. archaic** A second person singular present indicative of be, now only poet., not in modern usage. All other references are to art as the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Also, the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria. art"s, arts, art-parades.
ascham ::: n. --> A sort of cupboard, or case, to contain bows and other implements of archery.
asiarch ::: n. --> One of the chiefs or pontiffs of the Roman province of Asia, who had the superintendence of the public games and religious rites.
assamar ::: n. --> The peculiar bitter substance, soft or liquid, and of a yellow color, produced when meat, bread, gum, sugar, starch, and the like, are roasted till they turn brown.
assyriologist ::: n. --> One versed in Assyriology; a student of Assyrian archaeology.
astel ::: n. --> An arch, or ceiling, of boards, placed over the men&
atellan ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Atella, in ancient Italy; as, Atellan plays; farcical; ribald. ::: n. --> A farcical drama performed at Atella.
"A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.” Essays Divine and Human
“A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.” Essays Divine and Human
::: ". . . a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies, — all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, — for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” The Life Divine
“… a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies,—all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic,—for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” The Life Divine
At times he calls himself the ‘Lord of Nations." It is he who sets all wars in motion and only by thwarting his plans could the last war be won . . . This one does not want to be converted, not at all. He wants neither the physical transformation not the supramental world, for that would spell his end. The Mother"s talk of 26 March 1959.
At times he calls himself the ‘Lord of Nations.’ It is he who sets all wars in motion and only by thwarting his plans could the last war be won . . . This one does not want to be converted, not at all. He wants neither the physical transformation not the supramental world, for that would spell his end. The Mother’s talk of 26 March 1959.
auk ::: n. --> A name given to various species of arctic sea birds of the family Alcidae. The great auk, now extinct, is Alca (/ Plautus) impennis. The razor-billed auk is A. torda. See Puffin, Guillemot, and Murre.
auricula ::: n. --> A species of Primula, or primrose, called also, from the shape of its leaves, bear&
austro-hungarian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the monarchy composed of Austria and Hungary.
autarchy ::: absolute rule or power; despotism; absolute sovereignty.
autarchy ::: n. --> Self-sufficiency.
authors or advocates of anarchy; leaders of revolt.
autocephalous ::: a. --> Having its own head; independent of episcopal or patriarchal jurisdiction, as certain Greek churches.
Automatic writings and spiritualistic seances arc a very mix- ed affair. Part comes from the subconscious mind of the medium and part from that of the stUeis. Usually these seances etc. put one into rapport with a very low world of vital beings and forces.
arc ::: 1. Any unbroken part of the circumference of a circle or other curved line. 2. A luminous bridge formed in a gap between two electrodes. arcs.
arcaded ::: a. --> Furnished with an arcade.
arcade ::: n. --> A series of arches with the columns or piers which support them, the spandrels above, and other necessary appurtenances; sometimes open, serving as an entrance or to give light; sometimes closed at the back (as in the cut) and forming a decorative feature.
A long, arched building or gallery.
An arched or covered passageway or avenue.
arcadian ::: a. --> Alt. of Arcadic
arcadia ::: n. --> A mountainous and picturesque district of Greece, in the heart of the Peloponnesus, whose people were distinguished for contentment and rural happiness.
Fig.: Any region or scene of simple pleasure and untroubled quiet.
arcadic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Arcadia; pastoral; ideally rural; as, Arcadian simplicity or scenery.
arcana ::: pl. --> of Arcanum
arcane ::: a. --> Hidden; secret.
arcanes ::: of things known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; esoteric. (Employed by Sri Aurobindo as a noun.)
arcanum ::: n. --> A secret; a mystery; -- generally used in the plural.
A secret remedy; an elixir.
arcboutant ::: n. --> A flying buttress.
arch ::: 1. An upwardly curved construction, for spanning an opening, consisting of a number of wedgelike stones, bricks, or the like, set with the narrower side toward the opening in such a way that forces on the arch are transmitted as vertical or oblique stresses on either side of the opening, either capable of bearing weight or merely ornamental; 2. Something bowed or curved; any bowlike part: the arch of the foot. 3. An arched roof, door; gateway; vault; fig. the heavens. arches.
arch- ::: a combining form that represents the outcome of archi- in words borrowed through Latin from Greek in the Old English period; it subsequently became a productive form added to nouns of any origin, which thus denote individuals or institutions directing or having authority over others of their class (archbishop; archdiocese; archpriest): principal. More recently, arch-1 has developed the senses "principal” (archenemy; archrival) or "prototypical” and thus exemplary or extreme (archconservative); nouns so formed are almost always pejorative. Arch-intelligence.
archaean ::: a. --> Ancient; pertaining to the earliest period in geological history. ::: n. --> The earliest period in geological period, extending up to the Lower Silurian. It includes an Azoic age, previous to the appearance of life, and an Eozoic age, including the earliest forms of
archaeography ::: n. --> A description of, or a treatise on, antiquity or antiquities.
archaeolithic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the earliest Stone age; -- applied to a prehistoric period preceding the Paleolithic age.
archaeologian ::: n. --> An archaeologist.
archaeological ::: --> Relating to archaeology, or antiquities; as, archaeological researches.
archaeologic ::: --> Alt. of Archaeological
archaeologist ::: n. --> One versed in archaeology; an antiquary.
archaeology ::: n. --> The science or study of antiquities, esp. prehistoric antiquities, such as the remains of buildings or monuments of an early epoch, inscriptions, implements, and other relics, written manuscripts, etc.
archaeopteryx ::: n. --> A fossil bird, of the Jurassic period, remarkable for having a long tapering tail of many vertebrae with feathers along each side, and jaws armed with teeth, with other reptilian characteristics.
archaeostomatous ::: a. --> Applied to a gastrula when the blastopore does not entirely close up.
archaeozoic ::: a. --> Like or belonging to the earliest forms of animal life.
archaical ::: a. --> Archaic.
archaic ::: a. --> Of or characterized by antiquity or archaism; antiquated; obsolescent.
archaism ::: a. --> An ancient, antiquated, or old-fashioned, word, expression, or idiom; a word or form of speech no longer in common use.
Antiquity of style or use; obsoleteness.
archaistic ::: a. --> Like, or imitative of, anything archaic; pertaining to an archaism.
archaist ::: n. --> Am antiquary.
One who uses archaisms.
archaized ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Archaize
archaize ::: v. t. --> To make appear archaic or antique.
archaizing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Archaize
archangel ::: a chief or principal angel, the highest angel in rank. Archangel, Archangel"s.
archangelic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to archangels; of the nature of, or resembling, an archangel.
archangel ::: n. --> A chief angel; one high in the celestial hierarchy.
A term applied to several different species of plants (Angelica archangelica, Lamium album, etc.).
arch- ::: --> A prefix signifying chief, as in archbuilder, archfiend.
archbishop ::: n. --> A chief bishop; a church dignitary of the first class (often called a metropolitan or primate) who superintends the conduct of the suffragan bishops in his province, and also exercises episcopal authority in his own diocese.
archbishopric ::: n. --> The jurisdiction or office of an archbishop; the see or province over which archbishop exercises archiepiscopal authority.
arch brick ::: --> A wedge-shaped brick used in the building of an arch.
archbutler ::: n. --> A chief butler; -- an officer of the German empire.
archchamberlain ::: n. --> A chief chamberlain; -- an officer of the old German empire, whose office was similar to that of the great chamberlain in England.
archchancellor ::: n. --> A chief chancellor; -- an officer in the old German empire, who presided over the secretaries of the court.
archchemic ::: a. --> Of supreme chemical powers.
archdeacon ::: n. --> In England, an ecclesiastical dignitary, next in rank below a bishop, whom he assists, and by whom he is appointed, though with independent authority.
archdeaconry ::: n. --> The district, office, or residence of an archdeacon. See Benefice.
archdeaconship ::: n. --> The office of an archdeacon.
archdiocese ::: n. --> The diocese of an archbishop.
archducal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archduke or archduchy.
archduchess ::: n. --> The consort of an archduke; also, a princess of the imperial family of Austria. See Archduke.
archduchy ::: n. --> The territory of an archduke or archduchess.
archdukedom ::: n. --> An archduchy.
archduke ::: n. --> A prince of the imperial family of Austria.
archebiosis ::: n. --> The origination of living matter from non-living. See Abiogenesis.
arched ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Arch ::: a. --> Made with an arch or curve; covered with an arch; as, an arched door.
archegonial ::: a. --> Relating to the archegonium.
archegonium ::: n. --> The pistillidium or female organ in the higher cryptogamic plants, corresponding to the pistil in flowering plants.
archegony ::: n. --> Spontaneous generation; abiogenesis.
archelogy ::: n. --> The science of, or a treatise on, first principles.
archencephala ::: n. pl. --> The division that includes man alone.
archenemy ::: n. --> A principal enemy. Specifically, Satan, the grand adversary of mankind.
archenteric ::: a. --> Relating to the archenteron; as, archenteric invagination.
archenteron ::: n. --> The primitive enteron or undifferentiated digestive sac of a gastrula or other embryo. See Illust. under Invagination.
archeological ::: a. --> Same as Archaeology, etc.
archeology ::: a. --> Alt. of Archeological
archeress ::: n. --> A female archer.
archer fish ::: --> A small fish (Toxotes jaculator), of the East Indies; -- so called from its ejecting drops of water from its mouth at its prey. The name is also applied to Chaetodon rostratus.
archer ::: n. --> A bowman, one skilled in the use of the bow and arrow.
archership ::: n. --> The art or skill of an archer.
archery ::: n. --> The use of the bow and arrows in battle, hunting, etc.; the art, practice, or skill of shooting with a bow and arrows.
Archers, or bowmen, collectively.
arches ::: --> pl. of Arch, n.
archetypal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archetype; consisting a model (real or ideal) or pattern; original.
archetypally ::: adv. --> With reference to the archetype; originally. "Parts archetypally distinct."
archetype ::: n. --> The original pattern or model of a work; or the model from which a thing is made or formed.
The standard weight or coin by which others are adjusted.
The plan or fundamental structure on which a natural group of animals or plants or their systems of organs are assumed to have been constructed; as, the vertebrate archetype.
archetypical ::: a. --> Relating to an archetype; archetypal.
archeus ::: n. --> The vital principle or force which (according to the Paracelsians) presides over the growth and continuation of living beings; the anima mundi or plastic power of the old philosophers.
archiannelida ::: n. pl. --> A group of Annelida remarkable for having no external segments or distinct ventral nerve ganglions.
archi- ::: --> A prefix signifying chief, arch; as, architect, archiepiscopal. In Biol. and Anat. it usually means primitive, original, ancestral; as, archipterygium, the primitive fin or wing.
archiater ::: n. --> Chief physician; -- a term applied, on the continent of Europe, to the first or body physician of princes and to the first physician of some cities.
archiblastula ::: n. --> A hollow blastula, supposed to be the primitive form; a c/loblastula.
archical ::: pref. --> Chief; primary; primordial.
archidiaconal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archdeacon.
archiepiscopacy ::: n. --> That form of episcopacy in which the chief power is in the hands of archbishops.
The state or dignity of an archbishop.
archiepiscopal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archbishop; as, Canterbury is an archiepiscopal see.
archiepiscopality ::: n. --> The station or dignity of an archbishop; archiepiscopacy.
archiepiscopate ::: n. --> The office of an archbishop; an archbishopric.
archierey ::: n. --> The higher order of clergy in Russia, including metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops.
archil ::: n. --> A violet dye obtained from several species of lichen (Roccella tinctoria, etc.), which grow on maritime rocks in the Canary and Cape Verd Islands, etc.
The plant from which the dye is obtained.
archilochian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the satiric Greek poet Archilochus; as, Archilochian meter.
archilute ::: n. --> A large theorbo, or double-necked lute, formerly in use, having the bass strings doubled with an octave, and the higher strings with a unison.
archimage ::: n. --> Alt. of Archimagus
archimagus ::: n. --> The high priest of the Persian Magi, or worshipers of fire.
A great magician, wizard, or enchanter.
archimandrite ::: n. --> A chief of a monastery, corresponding to abbot in the Roman Catholic church.
A superintendent of several monasteries, corresponding to superior abbot, or father provincial, in the Roman Catholic church.
archimedean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Archimedes, a celebrated Greek philosopher; constructed on the principle of Archimedes&
archimedes ::: n. --> An extinct genus of Bryzoa characteristic of the subcarboniferous rocks. Its form is that of a screw.
arching ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Arch ::: n. --> The arched part of a structure.
Hogging; -- opposed to sagging.
archipelagic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an archipelago.
archipelago ::: 1. Any sea, or body of water, in which there are numerous islands. 2. A large group or chain of islands.
archipelago ::: n. --> The Grecian Archipelago, or Aegean Sea, separating Greece from Asia Minor. It is studded with a vast number of small islands.
Hence: Any sea or broad sheet of water interspersed with many islands or with a group of islands.
archipterygium ::: n. --> The primitive form of fin, like that of Ceratodus.
architective ::: a. --> Used in building; proper for building.
architect ::: n. --> A person skilled in the art of building; one who understands architecture, or makes it his occupation to form plans and designs of buildings, and to superintend the artificers employed.
A contriver, designer, or maker.
architectonic ::: a. --> Alt. of Architectonical ::: n. --> The science of architecture.
The act of arranging knowledge into a system.
architectonical ::: a. --> Pertaining to a master builder, or to architecture; evincing skill in designing or construction; constructive.
Relating to the systemizing of knowledge.
architectonic ::: metaph. Of the systematic arrangement of knowledge.
architectonics ::: n. --> The science of architecture.
architector ::: n. --> An architect.
architectress ::: n. --> A female architect.
architect ::: the deviser, maker, or creator of anything; one who builds up something, as, men are the architects of their own fortunes. Architect, architects.
architectural ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the art of building; conformed to the rules of architecture.
architecture ::: 1. The profession of designing buildings and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. 2. The character or style of building. 3. Construction or structure generally. architectures.
architecture ::: n. --> The art or science of building; especially, the art of building houses, churches, bridges, and other structures, for the purposes of civil life; -- often called civil architecture.
Construction, in a more general sense; frame or structure; workmanship.
architeuthis ::: n. --> A genus of gigantic cephalopods, allied to the squids, found esp. in the North Atlantic and about New Zealand.
architraved ::: a. --> Furnished with an architrave.
architrave ::: n. --> The lower division of an entablature, or that part which rests immediately on the column, esp. in classical architecture. See Column.
The group of moldings, or other architectural member, above and on both sides of a door or other opening, especially if square in form.
archival ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or contained in, archives or records.
archive ::: n. --> The place in which public records or historic documents are kept.
Public records or documents preserved as evidence of facts; as, the archives of a country or family.
archives ::: pl. --> of Archive
archives ::: preserved historical records or documents, also the place where they are kept.
archivist ::: a person responsible for preserving, organizing, or servicing archival material.
archivist ::: n. --> A keeper of archives or records.
archivolt ::: n. --> The architectural member surrounding the curved opening of an arch, corresponding to the architrave in the case of a square opening.
More commonly, the molding or other ornaments with which the wall face of the voussoirs of an arch is charged.
archlute ::: n. --> Alt. of Archilute
archly ::: adv. --> In an arch manner; with attractive slyness or roguishness; slyly; waggishly.
archmarshal ::: n. --> The grand marshal of the old German empire, a dignity that to the Elector of Saxony.
archmason ::: fig. Master builder. Archmason, archmasons.
arch ::: n. --> Any part of a curved line.
Usually a curved member made up of separate wedge-shaped solids, with the joints between them disposed in the direction of the radii of the curve; used to support the wall or other weight above an opening. In this sense arches are segmental, round (i. e., semicircular), or pointed.
A flat arch is a member constructed of stones cut into wedges or other shapes so as to support each other without rising in a curve.
archness ::: n. --> The quality of being arch; cleverness; sly humor free from malice; waggishness.
archon ::: n. --> One of the chief magistrates in ancient Athens, especially, by preeminence, the first of the nine chief magistrates.
archonship ::: n. --> The office of an archon.
archontate ::: n. --> An archon&
archonts ::: p. pr. --> The group including man alone.
archprelate ::: n. --> An archbishop or other chief prelate.
archpresbyter ::: n. --> Same as Archpriest.
archpresbytery ::: n. --> The absolute dominion of presbytery.
archpriest ::: n. --> A chief priest; also, a kind of vicar, or a rural dean.
archprimate ::: n. --> The chief primate.
arch stone ::: --> A wedge-shaped stone used in an arch; a voussoir.
archtraitor ::: n. --> A chief or transcendent traitor.
archtreasurer ::: n. --> A chief treasurer. Specifically, the great treasurer of the German empire.
archway ::: n. --> A way or passage under an arch.
archwife ::: n. --> A big, masculine wife.
archwise ::: adv. --> Arch-shaped.
archy ::: a. --> Arched; as, archy brows. ::: --> A suffix properly meaning a rule, ruling, as in monarchy, the rule of one only. Cf. -arch.
arciform ::: a. --> Having the form of an arch; curved.
arc-lamps ::: general term for a class of lamps in which light is produced by a voltaic arc, a luminous arc between two electrodes typically made of tungsten or carbon and barely separated.
arc ::: n. --> A portion of a curved line; as, the arc of a circle or of an ellipse.
A curvature in the shape of a circular arc or an arch; as, the colored arc (the rainbow); the arc of Hadley&
arcograph ::: n. --> An instrument for drawing a circular arc without the use of a central point; a cyclograph.
arc some who become so eager after these subsidl, There
arctation ::: n. --> Constriction or contraction of some natural passage, as in constipation from inflammation.
arctic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or situated under, the northern constellation called the Bear; northern; frigid; as, the arctic pole, circle, region, ocean; an arctic expedition, night, temperature. ::: n. --> The arctic circle.
A warm waterproof overshoe.
arctisca ::: n. pl. --> A group of Arachnida. See Illust. in Appendix.
arctogeal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to arctic lands; as, the arctogeal fauna.
arctoidea ::: n. pl. --> A group of the Carnivora, that includes the bears, weasels, etc.
arcturus ::: a giant star in the constellation Boötes. It is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere and the fourth brightest star in the sky, with an apparent magnitude of 0.00; sometimes referring to the Great Bear itself.
arcturus ::: n. --> A fixed star of the first magnitude in the constellation Bootes.
arcual ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an arc.
arcuate ::: a. --> Alt. of Arcuated
arcuated ::: a. --> Bent or curved in the form of a bow.
arcuately ::: adv. --> In the form of a bow.
arcuation ::: n. --> The act of bending or curving; incurvation; the state of being bent; crookedness.
A mode of propagating trees by bending branches to the ground, and covering the small shoots with earth; layering.
arcubalister ::: n. --> A crossbowman; one who used the arcubalist.
arcubalist ::: n. --> A crossbow.
arcubus ::: n. --> See Arquebus.
barely ::: only just; scarcely; hardly.
Besides these transcriptions or impresses the psychical vision receives thought Images and other forms created by constant activity of consciousaess in ourselves or in other human beings, and these may be according to the character of the activity, images of truth or falsehood or else mixed things, partly true, partly false, and may be too either mere shells and representa- tions or images inspired wth a temporary life and consciousness and, it may be, canjing in them in one way or another some kind of beneficent or maleficent action or some willed or unwilled effectiveness on our minds or vital being or through them e^'cn on the body. These transcriptions, impresses, thought images, life images, projections of the consciousness may also be representa- tions or creations not of the physical wxtrJd, but of vital, psychic or mental worlds beyond us, seen in our own minds or projected from other than human beings. And as there is this psychical vision of which some of the more cxremaf ana’ ordinary marrr- festaUons arc well enough known by the name of clairvoyance, so there is a psychical hearing and psychical touch, taste, smell
Brahman or of the Self docs not usually come at the beginning of a sadhana or in the first years or for many years. It comes so to a very few. Most would say that a slow development is the best one can hope for in the first years and only when the nature is ready and fully concentrated towards the Divine can the definitive experience come. To some rapid prepdhitory experiences can come at a comparatively early stage, but even they cannot escape the labour of the consciousness which will make these experiences culminate in the realisation that is enduring and complete. It is not a question of liking or disliking, it is a matter of fact and truth and experience. It is the fact that people who arc cheerful and ready to go step by step, even by slow steps if need be, do actually march faster and more surely than those who are impatient and in haste.
brave ::: possessing or exhibiting courage or courageous endurance. 2. *Archaic. Excellent; fine; admirable*.
butt ::: a person or thing that is the object of wit, ridicule, sarcasm, contempt.
But there arc visions and visions, just as there are dreams and dreams, and one has to develop discrimination and a sense of values and things and know how to understand and make use of these powers.
But they do not get into his body at once. He carries about with him an cn\ironmenlal consciousness (called by the Thco- sophists the Aura) into which they' first enter. If you can become conscious of this environmental self of you, then you can catch the thought, passion, suggestion, or force of illness and prevent it from entering into you. If things tn you arc thrown out, they often do not go altogether but take refuge in this environmental atmosphere and from there they try to gel in again or they go to a distance outside but linger on the outskirts or csen perhaps far off, waiting till they get an opportunity to attempt entrance.
canopy ::: a high overarching covering, such as the sky.
cathedral ::: 1. A large and important church of imposing architectural beauty. 2. Of, relating to, or resembling a cathedral.
chamber ::: 1. Archaic or poetic: A room in a private house, esp. a bedroom. 2. An enclosed space; compartment. chamber"s, chambers, work-chamber.
\cil of sleep — very largely indeed these two elements get mixed up together. For in fact a large part of our consciousness in sleep docs not sink into this subconscious slate ; it passes beyond the veil into other planes of being which arc connected with our own inner planes, planes of supraphj'sical existence, w'orlds of a larger life, mind or psychic which arc there behind and whose influences come to us without our knowledge. Occasionally we get a dream from these planes, something more than a dream, — a dream experience which is a record direct or symbolic of what happens to us or around us there. As the inner consciousness grows by sadhana, these dream experiences increase In number, dearness, coherence, accuracy and after some growth of experi- ence and consciousness, we can, if we observe, come to under- stand them and their significance to our loner life. Even we can by training become so coosetous as to follow our own passage, usually veiled to our arvarencss and memory, through many realms and the process of the return to the waking state. At a certain pitch of this inner wakefulness this kind of sleep, a sleep experience, can replace the ordinary subconscious slumber.
— clalraudience, clairsenticnce arc the more external manifesta- tions, — with precisely the same range each in its own kind, the same fields and manner and conditions and saricties of their phenomena.
clue ::: anything that serves to guide or direct in the solution of a problem, mystery, search, etc.; a key. clues, master-clue.
Conditions essfntitd for meditation ::: There are no essential external conditions, but solitude and seclusion at the time of meditation as as stillness of the body arc helpful, sometimes almost necessary to the beginner. Bui one should not bound b' external conditions. Once the habit of meditation is formed, it should be mads possible to do it in all circumstances, l.ving. sitting, walking, alone, in company, in silettce or in the midst of noise etc. The first imeroal condition necessary is concentration of the will against the obstacles to meditation. i.e. wandermg of the mind, forgetfulness, sfeep, phjsieal and nervous impatience and restlessness etc. The second is an increasing purity and calm of the inner consciousness (citia) out of which thought and emotion arise, i.e. a freedom frona all disturb i ng reactions, such as anger, grief, depression, anxiet>' about w-orldly happenings etc. Mental perfection and moral are always closely allied to each other.
COSMIC TRUTH. ::: The view on things of a cosmic cons- ciousness in which things arc seen in their true essence and their true relation to the Divine and to each other.
delved ::: carried an intensive and thorough research for data, information, or the like; investigated. delves.
Desire nothing but the purity, force, fight, wideness, calm, Ananda of the divine consciousness and Us insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for notfifng 6ut the divine, spiritual and supramenfal Truth, its realisation on earth and in you and in all who arc called and chosen and the condi- tions needed for its creation and its Wcfoiy over all opposing forces.
diarchy ::: government in which power is vested in two rulers or authorities.
DIFFICULTIES. ::: All who enter the spiritual path harc to face the difficulties and ordeals of the path, those which rise from their own nature and those which come in from outside.
Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic contact, and so long as it is done in the right spirit and (hey arc used for the true purpose they have their place. It is^ only if they arc misused or the approach is not right because tainted y
Divine Will is something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the ‘Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater power of the Divine, which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the law of the world as it is, but in full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty, and Ananda, for these arc the Divine Nature.
drag-net ::: a heavy or weighted net used to scour the bottom of a pond, river, etc., as when searching for something.
Dreams of the mental and higher vital planes ::: Things hap- pen with another rhjihm than here and freer forces, but some of them are formative of things and events here — not that they arc falSUtd exactly iite propfreefcs but they cceste forces for fulfilment.
drug ::: n. **1. A habit-forming medicinal or illicit substance, esp. a narcotic. adj. 2. Stupefied as if under the influence of a drug. drugged.**
durst ::: archaic. pt. of dare.
dwarf-search mind
Egocentric and unegoistic ::: The egocentric man feels and takes things as they affect him. Does this please me or displease, give me gladness or pain, flatter my pride, vanity, ambition or hurt it, satisfy my desires or thwart them, etc. The unegoistic man does not look at things like that. He looks to see what things arc in themselves and would be if he were not there, what is their meaniog, how tlicy get into the scheme of things
ENERGIES. ::: All energies put info activity — thought, speech, feeling, act — go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or Another, and the nature and Us actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward ::: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their elTccts. It Is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act ::: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed w-ill arc also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reac- tions.
enquiry ::: a search for knowledge, or truth.
errant ::: 1. Wandering in search of adventure. 2. Straying from the proper course or standards. 3. Moving in an aimless or lightly changing manner.
evanescent ::: 1. Vanishing; fading away; fleeting. 2. Tending to become imperceptible; scarcely perceptible.
explore ::: 1. To examine or investigate, esp. systematically. 2. To search into or travel in for the purpose of discovery. explores, exploring.
Faith is a necessary means for arriving at realisation, because we arc ignorant and do not yet know that which we arc seeking to realise ; faith is indeed knowledge giving the ignorance an intimation of itself previous to its own manifestation, it is the gleam sent before by the yet unrisen Sun.
FATE. ::: Tlic Indian explanation of fate is karma. We our- selves arc our own fate through our actions, but the fate created by us binds us ; for what we have sown, we must reap in this life or another. Still, we arc creating our fate tor the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present,
ferrets ::: uncovers and brings to light by searching.
Few arc those from whom the Grace withdraws, but many are those who withdraw from the Grace.
flaming Hierarchies
forced marches ::: marches that are longer than troops are accustomed to and maintained at a faster pace than usual, generally undertaken for a particular objective under emergency conditions.
forefathers ::: progenitors, patriarchs, ancestors, forerunners.
For they arc pot men devc/oping upwards /roni (he animal (o the divine and struggling against their lower natures, but beings already fulfilled and satisfied with themselves.
“For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.” The Synthesis of Yoga
foundation ::: “The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above.” Letters on Yoga
.GOLOKA. ::: Vaikuntha and Goloka arc human conceptions of states of being that arc be)ond humanity. Goloka is evidently a world of Love, Beauty and Ananda full of spiritual radiances
grope ::: 1. To feel about with the hands; feel one"s way, as if blind. 2. To search blindly or uncertainly. gropes, groped.
Gum's i:*urf 7lv Grave of lie f*crj t» a*»j)S i*-e»f I'm the djtclplv* ; hti afcrpfan»t it«elf Ji an art of frarc a-vl t‘- hr!p it there for him to tretor.
Headaches arc not due !o Ihc pressure or produecd by it, but produced by a resUtancc.
HELL AND HEAVEN. ::: They arc often imaginary states of the soul or rather of the vital which it constructs about It after its passing. What is meant by hell is a painful passage through the vital or lingering there, as for instance, in many cases of suicide where one remains surrounded by the forces of suffering and turmoil created by this unnatural and violent exit. There are, of course, also worlds of mind and vital worlds which are penetrated with Joyful or dark experiences. One may pass through these as the result of things formed in the nature which create the necessary affimties, but the Idea of reward or retri- bution is a crude and vulgar conception which is a mere popular error.
Heredity affects strongly the external being ; besides, all the effects of heredity are not accepted even there, only those .that are in consonance with what we arc to be or not preventive of it at least.
hierarchs ::: those who rule or have authority in sacred things; high priests.
hierarchy ::: a system of persons or things arranged in a graded order. hierarchies, Hierarchies.
hierophant ::: an interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge. hierophants.
history ::: “History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour; we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we espouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others, perhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim.” The Human Cycle etc.
If you arc free from the money-taint but without any ascetic withdrawal, you will have a greater power to command the money for the divine work. Equality of mind, absence of
Ignorance arc put forward as the Truth of things, that is the
II ADIT. ::: The physical is the slave of certain forces which create a habit and drive it ilirouch the mechanical power of the habit. So long ns the mind gives consent, you do not notice the slavery ; but if the mind withdraws its consent, then you feel the servitude, you feci a force pushing you in spite of the mind's will. It is very obstinate and repeats itself till the habit, the inner habit revealing itself in the outward act, is broken. If is like a machine which once set in motion repeats the same move* ment. A quiet persistent aspiration will bring you to the point where the habit breaks and you arc free.
II is there that habitual movements, mental and vital, arc stored and from there they come up into the waking mind. Driven out, of the upper consciousness, it is in this cavern of the Pam’s that they take refuge. No longer fllJowed to emerge freely in the waking state, they come up in sleep as dreams. It is when they arc cleared out ol the sub^nscient, their very seeds killed by the enlightening of these hidden layers, Chat they cease for good.
impressions left in it by our past inner and outer life, Nvoven in a fantastic way which docs not easily yield any due of meaning to the waking mind's remembrance, or arc fragmentary records, mostly distorted, of experiences which arc going on behind the
In complete silence there arc either no thoughts or thoughts come, but they are felt as something coming from outside and not disturbing the silence.
Indirect hostile attaclcs arc done through covert suggestions, half-truth, half-falsehood, attempts to represent the falsehood in the garb of the Divine Truth or to raix the lower consciousness cleverly with the higher. Their attempt is to mislead by guile rather than to conquer by force.
In mental vision the images arc invented by the mind and are partly true, partly a play of possibilities. Or a mental vision like the vital may be only a suggestion, — that is, a formation of some possibility on the menial or vital plane which presents itself to the sadhaka in the hope of being accepted and helped to rcalbe itself.
INNER CONSCIOUSNESS (Divisions) ::: There are five main divisions. At the top above the head arc layers (or as we call them planes) of which we arc not conscious and which become conscious to us only by sadhana — those above the human mind — that is the higher consciousness. Below from the crown of the head to the throat are the layers (there are many of them) of the mind, the three principal being one at the top of the head communicating with the higher consciousness, another between the eye-brows where is the thought, sight and will, a third in the throat which is the externalising mind. A second division is from the shoulders to the navel ; these are the layers of the higher vital presided over by the heart centre where is the emotional being with the psychic behind it. From the navel downwards is the rest of the vital being containing several layers. From the bottom of the spine downward are the layers of the physical consciousness proper, the material, and below the feet is the sub- conscient which has also many levels.
In ordinary sleep the consciousness in the body is that. of the subconscient physical, which is a diminished consciousness, not awake and alive like the rest of the being. The rest of the tteiag stands back and part of its consciousness goes out Into other planes and regions and has experiences which arc recorded in dreams.
In proportion as the surrender and self-consecration progress the sadhaka becomes conscious of the Divine Shakti doing the sadhana, pouring into him more and more of herself, founding in him the freedom and perfection of the Divine Nature. The more this conscious process replaces his own effort, the more rapid and true becomes his progress. But it cannot completely replace the necessity of personal effort until the surrender and consecration arc pure and complete from top to bottom.
intelligence ::: 1. A capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 2. Superior understanding. 3. An intelligent being, esp. one that is not embodied. Intelligence, Arch-Intelligence.
INTERCHANGE. ::: When one is with another for sometime talking etc., there is always some vital interchange, unless one rejects what comes from others instinctively or deliberately. If one is impressionable, there may be a strong impression or influence from the others. Then when one goes to another per- son it is possible to pass it on to the other. That is a thing which is constantly happening. But this happens without the knowledge of the transmitter. When one is conscious, one can prevent it happening.
Every letter means an interchange with the person who writes It ; for something is there behind the words, something of hfs person or of the forces he has put out or had around him while w’riting. Our thougiifs and feeJinp arc also forces and can hav« effects upon others. One has to grow conscious of the movement of these forces and then one can control one's own mental and vital formations and cease to be affected by those of others.
"In the spiritual sense, however, sacrifice has a different meaning — it does not so much indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one"s being, one"s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of ‘making sacred" and is used as an equivalent of the word yajna. When the Gita speaks of the ‘sacrifice of knowledge", it does not mean a giving up of anything, but a turning of the mind towards the Divine in the search for knowledge and an offering of oneself through it. It is in this sense, too, that one speaks of the offering or sacrifice of works. The Mother has written somewhere that the spiritual sacrifice is joyful and not painful in its nature. On the spiritual path, very commonly, if a seeker still feels the old ties and responsibilities strongly he is not asked to sever or leave them, but to let the call in him grow till all within is ready. Many, indeed, come away earlier because they feel that to cut loose is their only chance, and these have to go sometimes through a struggle. But the pain, the struggle, is not the essential character of this spiritual self-offering.” Letters on Yoga
“In the spiritual sense, however, sacrifice has a different meaning—it does not so much indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one’s being, one’s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of ‘making sacred’ and is used as an equivalent of the word yajna. When the Gita speaks of the ‘sacrifice of knowledge’, it does not mean a giving up of anything, but a turning of the mind towards the Divine in the search for knowledge and an offering of oneself through it. It is in this sense, too, that one speaks of the offering or sacrifice of works. The Mother has written somewhere that the spiritual sacrifice is joyful and not painful in its nature. On the spiritual path, very commonly, if a seeker still feels the old ties and responsibilities strongly he is not asked to sever or leave them, but to let the call in him grow till all within is ready. Many, indeed, come away earlier because they feel that to cut loose is their only chance, and these have to go sometimes through a struggle. But the pain, the struggle, is not the essential character of this spiritual self-offering.” Letters on Yoga
investigate ::: to search out and examine the particulars of in an attempt to learn the facts about something hidden, unique, or complex.
irony ::: 1. The humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean. 2. Fig. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. ironic.
It is not the medicine that cures so much ns the patient’s faith in the doctor and the medicine. Both arc a clumsy substitute for the natural faith in one’s own self-power which they have them- selves destroyed.
Jhumur: “Anarchs is a strange word here because to me it symbolises rulers, forces that dominate, and yet anarchy is a state where there is no rule. So, the rulers of chaos and disorder. But there is always this core of anarchy which is a form of absolute inconscience, the original inconscience. At a very early level all form of order is a sign of consciousness, organisation, and this is the opposite, the first expression of the Inconscience, the descent into Night which is ruled by all these forces of darkness, the forces that refuse harmony.”
Jhumur: Here you have the beginnings of the mind opening onto other planes of experience. Because mindhas no experience. This is the kingdom of the greater mind where it opens on to another phase of vision or experience or feeling. The heaven-bird is the feeling of poise that hasn’t taken off. It reminds me that in a certain place, the goal of the mental search is where ultimately the mind abdicates in light and one enters into what Shelley calls ‘thought wildernesses’. Before that concrete abdication there must be some sensation, some feeling of something other that is waiting for us, that has come from elsewhere. The mind has not quite yet abdicated but begins to pursue intuition, perception, feeling.”
Jhumur: “Sleeping Vishnu who is at the core of creation, Brahman who is seated on the lotus which comes out of the navel of Vishnu. The Architect has the whole play, the whole perception. He knows what He is building. He is the supreme consciousness in the deepest involution, the sleeping Lord at the core of things.”
king ::: 1. Applied to God. 2. The formal title of a monarch, usually accompanied by or substituted for the proper name.
Last comes the crossing of the border, ft ts not a falling asleep or a loss of consciousness, for the consciousness is there all the time ; only it shifts from the outer and physical, becomes closed to external things and recedes into the inner psychic and vital parts of the being. There it passes through many experiences and of these some can and should be felt in the waking state also ; for both movements arc necessary, the coming out of the inner being to the front as well as the going in of the conscious- ness to fcccoific ajvare of (he inner self and nature. But for many the ingoing movement is indispensable. Its effect is to break
life would be a progress In felicity, a march through light to
Light or rays of light arc always light of the higher conscious- ness working in the being to illumine or to purify or to awaken the consciousness or attune it to the Truth.
Madhav: “Gropes means moves without direction, searching for direction; our desires, our passions, our intensities search for this fulfilment in her [the Mother].” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “protagonists of Inconscience, darkness, the hierarchy of the dark reign, the dualities and the Laws of Karma …”
Madhav: “… the perfect beings—the archetypes that project themselves in the form of Ideals on the mental horizons of man….” Readings in Savitri Vol. I.
march ::: n. 1. The steady forward movement of a body of troops. 2. Steady forward movement or progression. Also fig. marches, marchings, sun-march. v. 3. To walk steadily and rhythmically forward in step with others, as soldiers on parade; advance in step in an organized body. 4. To proceed directly and purposefully; to go forward; advance; proceed. 5. To progress steadily onward; advance. Also fig. marches, marched, marching. ::: forced marches. Marches that are longer than troops are accustomed to and maintained at a faster pace than usual, generally undertaken for a particular objective under emergency conditions.
march ::: the border or boundary of a country or an area of land; a frontier. marches".
Mental visions arc meant to bring in the mind the influences of the things they represent.
Mind and the Divine Sakti ::: Be on your guard and do not try to understand and judge the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves to subject even the things that arc beyond it to its own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge. The human mind shut in the prison of its half-lit obscurity cannot follow the many-sided freedom of the steps of the Divine Shakti. The rapidity and com- plexity of her vision and action outrun its stumbling comprehen- sion ; the measures of her movement are not its measures. Open rather your soul to her and be content to feel her with the psychic nature and see her with the psychic vision that alone make a straight response to the Truth.
MIND. ::: Part of the nature which has to do with cognillon and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, siith the truly mental mos’c- ments and formations, mental visions and will etc. that arc part of the intelligence.
monarch ::: in the manner of, belonging to, or characteristic of a sovereign, as a king, queen or emperor.
monarchy ::: supreme power and authority held by one person; autocracy.
movement ::: 1. The act or an instance of moving; a change in place or position. A particular manner of moving. 2. Usually, movements, actions or activities, as of a person or a body of persons. ::: movement"s, movements, many-movemented.
Sri Aurobindo: "When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm." *The Life Divine
". . . the purest, freest form of insight into existence as it is shows us nothing but movement. Two things alone exist, movement in Space, movement in Time, the former objective, the latter subjective.” The Life Divine
"The world is a cyclic movement (samsâra ) of the Divine Consciousness in Space and Time. Its law and, in a sense, its object is progression; it exists by movement and would be dissolved by cessation of movement. But the basis of this movement is not material; it is the energy of active consciousness which, by its motion and multiplication in different principles (different in appearance, the same in essence), creates oppositions of unity and multiplicity, divisions of Time and Space, relations and groupings of circumstance and Causality. All these things are real in consciousness, but only symbolic of the Being, somewhat as the imaginations of a creative Mind are true representations of itself, yet not quite real in comparison with itself, or real with a different kind of reality.” The Upanishads*
movement ::: “When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm.” The Life Divine
“My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths,—living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive root-words with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general significances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds. The process of this association was also in no sense artificial but natural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws.” The Secret of the Veda
n. 1. An arched structure, usually of masonry or concrete, serving to cover a space. Also fig. 2. An arched overhead covering, such as the sky, that resembles the architectural structure in form. Chiefly poet. v. **3. vaulted. **Having a hemispherical vault or dome.
n. 1. The horizontal line or plane in which anything is situated, with regard to its elevation. 2. A plane or position in a graded scale; position in a hierarchy. 3. On the same plane, on an equality (with). levels. *adj. 4.** *Having a surface without slope, tilt in which no part is higher or lower than another. 5. Height, position, strength, rank, plane, etc. Also fig. v. 6. Fig. To bring persons or things to an equal level; equalize. levelled, all-levelling.**
Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal ope- rations. Id the ancient tradition of Hatha Yoga it has always been supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hatha Yogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the ner- vous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments. These are called prana- yama, the control of the breath or vital power ; for breathing is the chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Prdnayaina, for the Hatha Yogin, serves a double purpose. First, it completes the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature ; robust health, prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity arc attained.
Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. An integral knowledge demands an exploration, an unveiling of all the possible domains of consciousness and experience. For there are subjective domains of our being which lie behind the obvious surface; these have to be fathomed and whatever is ascertained must be admitted within the scope of the total reality. An inner range of spiritual experience is one very great domain of human consciousness ; it has to be entered into up to its deepest depths and its vastest reaches. The supraphysical is as real as the physical ; to know it is part of a complete knowledge. The knowledge of the supraph>'sical has been associated with mysti- efsm and occultism, and occultism has been banned as a super- stition and fantastic error. But the occult Is a part of existence ; a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden Jaws of being and
Nolini: “Mind is always searching, bubbling, the bubbling is that of a dwarf. A dwarf when he walks is not elegant, is ungainly as are mind’s movements.”
not searched out or asked for.
not searched; unexamined, uninvestigated.
Occultism is the knowledge and right use of the hidden forces of Nature. True occultism means a search into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and
occult ::: “The ancient knowledge in all countries was full of the search after the hidden truths of our being and it created that large field of practice and inquiry which goes in Europe by the name of occultism,—we do not use any corresponding word in the East, because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us and the veil between our normal material life and this larger life is much thinner.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Of course, there is a sort of labour and effort when you try to produce or else to think on a certain subject, but that is a con- centration for making thoughts come up, come in, come down, as the case may be, and fit themselves together. The idea that you arc shaping the thoughts or fitting them together is an egoistic delusion ; they are doing it themselves, or Nature is doing it for you, only under a certain compulsion.
of the loucr \ilal planes who has aisumetl the discarded \1ial sheath of a departed human being or a fracmcnl of his vital personality and appears and acts in the form'and perhaps with the surface thoughts and memories of that person. (4) A being of the lower vita! plane who by tUe medium of a living human being or by some other means or agency 1$ able to materialise itself sufficiently so as to appear and act in a visible form or speech with an audible vtrfcc or, without so appearing, to move about material things, c.g.. furniture or to materialise objects or to shift them from place to place. This accounts for what arc called poltergeists, phenomena of stone-throwing, ircc-inliabiting
oligarchies ::: governments by the few, especially by small factions of persons or families; those making up such governments.
One day I began researching all that I could find on this unique word, ‘remembrancer’.
one goes beyond, there arc no vim.^ t • things do not belong to the Divine Nature
overarching ::: spanning with or like an arch; forming an arch over something. (Sri Aurobindo employs the word as a n.)
Oversoul ::: We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance, luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery. We become aware, in a certain experience, of a range of being superconscient to all these three, aware too of something, a supreme highest Reality sustaining and exceeding them all, which humanity speaks of vaguely as Spirit, God, the Oversoul: from these superconscient ranges we have visitations and in our highest being we tend towards them and to that supreme Spirit. There is then in our total range of existence a superconscience as well as a subconscience and inconscience, overarching and perhaps enveloping our subliminal and our waking selves, but unknown to us, seemingly unattainable and incommunicable.
Pain and pleasure arc both of them degradations of an origi- nal Ananda and can be reduced Into terms of each other or else sublimated into their original principle of Ananda.
PAIN. ::: Pain and suffering arc necessary results of the Igno- rance in which we live ; men grow by all l>.inds of experience, pain and suflcring as well as their opposites, joy and happiness and ecstasy. One can get strength from them if one meets them in the right way.
palimpsest ::: a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.
pamful, first, because it is obscure and docs not understand and, secondly, because there arc parts of it that want to be left to their crude notions and not to change. That is why the inter- vention of a psychic attitude is so heJpfuI. For the psychic has the happy confidence, the ready understanding and response, the spontaneous surrender ; it knows that the touch of the Guru is meant to help and not to hurt, or, like Radha in the poem, that whatever the Beloved does is meant to lead to the Divine
passes out.** Walks or marches out or through; leaves or exits by means of.
pattern ::: 1. A model or original used as an archetype. 2. A plan or diagram used as a guide in making something. 3. An artistic or decorative design. 4. A combination of qualities, acts, tendencies, etc., forming a consistent or characteristic arrangement; order or form discernible in things, actions, ideas, situations, etc. patterns, patterned, many-patterned.
parcellings ::: separations or divisions into parts, distributed, allotted or apportioned.
pedestal ::: 1. An architectural support or base, as for a column or statue. 2. A support or foundation.
peered ::: 1. Looked narrowly or searchingly as in the effort to discern clearly. 2. Came into view. peering.
PHYSICAL OPENING. ::: The opening of the physical and the subconscient always takes a long time as it is a thing of habits and constant repetition of the old movements, obscure and stiff and not plastic, yielding only little by little. The physical mind can be more easily opened and converted than the rest but the vital-physical and the mental-physical arc obstinate. The old things are always recurring there without reason and by force of habit. Much of the vital-physical and most of the material are in the subconsciencc or depend upon it. U needs a strong and sustained action to progress there.
pioneers ::: those who venture into the unknown to open up new areas of thought, research, or development, that others may follow: forerunners.
PISaCA. ::: Demon ; beings of Ihc lower vital planes, who arc in opposition to the Gods.
portioned ::: divided into parts or shares for distribution; parcelled.
Powers undivine in their nature present themselves as the Sup- reme Lord or as the Divine Mother and claim the being’s service and surrender. 1C these (hiags are accepted, there will be an extremely disastrous consequence. If indeed there is the assent of the sSdhaka to the Divine working alone and the submission or surrender to that guidance, then all can go smoothly. This assent and a rejection of all egoistic force or forces that appeal to the ego are the safeguard throughout the sadhana. But the ways of nature are full of snares, the disguises of the ego are innumerable, the ilfusions of the Powers of Darkness, Rakshasi Maya, are e.ttraordinariIy skilful ; the reason is an insulBdent guide and often turns traitor; vital desire is ahvays with us tempting to follow any alluring call. This is the reason why in this Yoga we insist so much on what we call samarpana — rather inade- quately rendered by the Engikh word surrender. If the heart centre is fully opened and the psychic is always in control, then there is no question ; all fe Safe. But the psychic can at any moment be veiled by a lower upsurge. It is only a few who arc exempt from these dangers and it is precisely those to whom surrender is easily possible. The guidance of one who is himself
Prakrit is the Force that acts. A Force may be in action or in quiescence, but when it acts it is as much a force as when it does not act. The gunas arc an action of the Force, they are in the Force itself.
PRAYER. ::: The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever crudi- ties there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which ima- gines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flat- tered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and gifts and has often little te^td to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essen- tial movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth.
The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that, being omniscient, his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual's desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least, human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes, -and there are plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used, -- or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way, again, may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the guidance, the protection and fruition demanded, yogaksemam vahamyaham. ~ TSOY, SYN
Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is (here consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the givinc of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange.
In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily, in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, -- in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there, -- or remains only for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.
Prayer for others ::: The fact of praying and the attitude it brings, especially unselfish prayer for others, itself opens you to the higher Power, even if there is no corresponding result in the person prayed for. 'Nothing can be positively said about that, for the result must necessarily depend on the persons, whe- ther they arc open or receptive or something in them can res- pond to any Force the prayer brings down.
Prayer must well up from the heart on a crest of emotion or aspiration.
Prayer {Ideal)'. Not prayer insisting on immediate fulfilment, but prayer that is itself a communion of the mind and heart with the Divine*and can have the joy and satisfaction of itself, trusting for fulfilment by the Divine in his own time.
presence ::: 1. The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence. 2. A divine, spiritual, or supernatural spirit or influence felt or conceived as present. 3. The immediate proximity of someone or something.
Sri Aurobindo: "It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one"s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any further qualification or description. Thus, of the ‘ineffable Presence" it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. The word may be used sometimes in a less absolute sense, but that is always the fundamental significance, — the essential perception of the essential Presence supporting everything else.” *Letters on Yoga
"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” Essays Divine and Human
"But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master — a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within.” *The Life Divine
"The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine
"If we need any personal and inner witness to this indivisible All-Consciousness behind the ignorance, — all Nature is its external proof, — we can get it with any completeness only in our deeper inner being or larger and higher spiritual state when we draw back behind the veil of our own surface ignorance and come into contact with the divine Idea and Will behind it. Then we see clearly enough that what we have done by ourselves in our ignorance was yet overseen and guided in its result by the invisible Omniscience; we discover a greater working behind our ignorant working and begin to glimpse its purpose in us: then only can we see and know what now we worship in faith, recognise wholly the pure and universal Presence, meet the Lord of all being and all Nature.” *The Life Divine
"The presence of the Spirit is there in every living being, on every level, in all things, and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure spiritual existence and consciousness, of the delight of a divine presence, closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors are flung sufficiently open, the light from the sanctuary can suffuse the nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer being.” *The Life Divine
"There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"One must have faith in the Master of our life and works, even if for a long time He conceals Himself, and then in His own right time He will reveal His Presence.” *Letters on Yoga
"They [the psychic being and the Divine Presence in the heart] are quite different things. The psychic being is one"s own individual soul-being. It is not the Divine, though it has come from the Divine and develops towards the Divine.” *Letters on Yoga
"For it is quietness and inwardness that enable one to feel the Presence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” *Essays Divine and Human
The Mother: "For, in human beings, here is a presence, the most marvellous Presence on earth, and except in a few very rare cases which I need not mention here, this presence lies asleep in the heart — not in the physical heart but the psychic centre — of all beings. And when this Splendour is manifested with enough purity, it will awaken in all beings the echo of his Presence.” Words of the Mother, MCW, Vol. 15.
princess ::: a woman member of a royal family other than the monarch, especially a daughter of a monarch.
PROCESS. ::: At first what has (o be established comes with difficulty and is felt as if abnormal, an experience that one loses easily: afterwards it comes of itself, but docs not )ci stay; finally it becomes a frequent and intimate state of the being and makes itself constant and normal On the other hand all the confusions and erron habitual to the nature arc pushed out ; at first they return frequently, but afterxsards they in their turn
"Progress admittedly does not march on securely in a straight line like a man sure of his familiar way or an army covering an unimpeded terrain or well-mapped unoccupied spaces. Human progress is very much an adventure through the unknown, an unknown full of surprises and baffling obstacles; it stumbles often, it misses its way at many points, it cedes here in order to gain there, it retraces its steps frequently in order to get more widely forward.” *The Renaissance in India
“Progress admittedly does not march on securely in a straight line like a man sure of his familiar way or an army covering an unimpeded terrain or well-mapped unoccupied spaces. Human progress is very much an adventure through the unknown, an unknown full of surprises and baffling obstacles; it stumbles often, it misses its way at many points, it cedes here in order to gain there, it retraces its steps frequently in order to get more widely forward.” The Renaissance in India
prowl ::: an act or the action of roaming or roving about stealthily, esp. in search of plunder or prey. prowls, prowled, prowling. [As verbs, in the same sense as the noun.]
Psychic love finds itself wholly when it is the radiation of the diviner consciousness for t^hich uc arc seeking; till then it is diflicult for it to put out its undimmed integral self and figure.
questing ::: seeking; searching for; pursuing something.
quest ::: the act or an instance of seeking or pursuing something; a search.
Rajayoga must cod. For its action is the stilling of the waves of consciousness, its manifold activities, cinovfUl, first, through a habitual replacing of the turbid rajaslc activities by the quiet and luminous sattwic, then, by the stilling of all activities, and its object is to enter into silent communion of soul and unity with the Divine. As a matter of fact we find that the system of Raja- yoga includes other objects, — such as the practice and use of occult powers, — some of which seem to be unconnected with and even inconsistent with its main purpose. These powers or siddhis arc indeed frequently condemned as dangers and dis- tractions wWch draw away the Yogin from his sole legitimate aim of divine union. On the way, therefore, it would naturally seem as if they ought to bfe* avoided; and once the goal is reached, it would seem that they are then frivolous and super- fluous. But Rajayoga is a psychic science and it includes the attainment of all the higher slates of consciousness and their powers by which the mental being rises towards the super- conscient as well as its ultimate and supreme possibility of union wnth the Highest. Moreover, the Yo^n, while in the body, is not always mentally inactive and sunk in Samadhi and an account of the powers and states which arc possible to him on the higher planes of his being is necessary to the completeness of the science.
ransacks ::: searches carefully for plunder; pillages.
refugee ::: One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution. Also fig. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.)
refugee ::: one who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution. Also fig. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.)
regal ::: 1. Of or pertaining to a king or queen; royal. 2. Belonging to or befitting a monarch; magnificent; splendid.
reign ::: n. 1. Dominating power or influence. 2. Exercise of sovereign power, as by a monarch. 3. Poet. Dominance or widespread influence in a specific sphere. v. 4. To exercise sovereign power. 5. To be predominant or prevalent. reigns, reigned.
Relations which are part of the ordinary vital nature in human life arc of no value in the spiritual life ; they rather interfere with the progress ; for the mind and rital also should be wholly turned towards the Divine.
Relatives in dreams ; Figures of the physical mother and father and relatives are very often symbolical of the physical or the hereditary nature or generally of the ordinary nature in which we arc born.
Removal of faith ::: It is a spiritual principle not to take away any faith or support of faith, unless the persons who have it arc able to replace it by something larger and more complete.
rummages ::: searches thoroughly or actively through (a place, receptacle), esp. by moving around, turning over, or looking through contents.
Samadhi and norma! sleep, between the dream*state of Yoga and the physical state of dream. The latter belongs to the physical mind ; in the former the mind proper and subtle is at work liberated from the immixture of the physical mentality. The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind*faculttes disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the brain>memory, partly of refieclions from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflec- tions which arc, ordinarily, received without intelligence or co- ordination, wildly distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, with brain-memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world. In the Yogic dream-state, on the other hand, the mind is in clear possession of itself, though not of the physical world, works coherently and is able to use either its ordinary will and intelligence with a concentrated power or else the higher will and intelligence of the more exalted planes of mind. It withdraws from experience of the outer world, it puts its seals upon the physical senses and their doors of conununicatinn with maJerJal things ; but everything that is proper to itself, thought, reasoning, reflection, vision, it can continue to execute with an increased purity and power of sovereign concentration free from the dis- tractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind. It can use too its will and produce upon itself or upon its environment mental, moral and even physical effects which may continue and have
sceptre ::: a ceremonial ornamental staff carried by a monarch on important occasions as a sign of power.
scroll ::: a roll, as of parchment or papyrus, used especially for writing a document.
seed-sounds ::: Sri Aurobindo: "My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths, — living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive root-words with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general significances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds. The process of this association was also in no sense artificial but natural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws.” *The Secret of the Veda
see **forced marches.**
seek ::: to try to locate or discover; search for. seeks, seeking, seeking"s, seekings, all-seeking, heart-seeking, self-seeking.
seer ::: “The seer does not need the aid of thought in its process as a means of knowledge, but only as a means of representation and expression,—thought is to him a lesser power and used for a secondary purpose. If a further extension of knowledge is required, he can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of support of the mental search and its feeling out for truth,—even as we scrutinise with the eye to find what escaped our first observation” The Synthesis of Yoga
Self is the fundamental aspect of the Brahman with a certain stress on its impersonality. We arc conscious of Self as eternal, unborn, unembodied, uninvolved in its workings. It is omni- present, same in everything, intimate, pure and intangible. The
SMALL BEGINNINGS. ::: Small beginnings arc of the greatest importance and have to be cherished and affowed with great
sovereign ::: n. 1. One that exercises supreme, permanent authority, as a king, queen or monarch. Often applied to the Divine. child-sovereign. adj. 2. Supreme; pre-eminent; indisputable. 3. Being above all others in character, importance, excellence, etc. 4. Having supreme rank, power or authority. 5. Belonging to or characteristic of a king, queen or other supreme ruler; royal, regal, majestic.
span ::: n. 1. A very small extent, distance or space. 2. The complete duration or extent of a person"s life. 3. The extent or measure of space between two points or extremities, as of a bridge or roof; the breadth. spans. v. 4. To stretch or extend across, over, around, as a bridge or an arch. Also transf. or fig. **spanned, spanning.**
Sri Aurobindo: "History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour; we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we espouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others, perhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim.” *The Human Cycle etc.
Sri Aurobindo: "The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.” Essays Divine and Human*
Sri Aurobindo: "The ancient knowledge in all countries was full of the search after the hidden truths of our being and it created that large field of practice and inquiry which goes in Europe by the name of occultism, — we do not use any corresponding word in the East, because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us and the veil between our normal material life and this larger life is much thinner.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: *"The seer does not need the aid of thought in its process as a means of knowledge, but only as a means of representation and expression, — thought is to him a lesser power and used for a secondary purpose. If a further extension of knowledge is required, he can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of support of the mental search and its feeling out for truth, — even as we scrutinise with the eye to find what escaped our first observation” The Synthesis of Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above.” Letters on Yoga*
study ::: n. 1. A room furnished with books and intended or equipped for studying or writing. 2. The pursuit of knowledge, as by reading, observation, or research. v. 3. To examine closely; scrutinize. Also fig. studies, studied, studying.
SUBTLE FORCES. ::: There is such a thing as a willed use of any subtle force — it may be spiritual, mental or siral — to secure a particular result at some point in the world. Just as there arc waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there arc mind-waves, ihought*currcnts. waves of emotion, ~ for example, anger, sorrow, etc. — which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them coming and invad> ing him. Influences good or bad can propagate themsefves in that way ::: chat can happen without Intention and naturally, but also a deliberate use can be made of them. There can also be a power- ful generation of force, spiritual or other. There can be too the use of the effective will or idea acting directly without the aid of any outward action, speech or other instrumentation which is not concrete in that sense, but is all the same effective.
SUCCESS. ::: There arc always two elements in spiritual success — one’s own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of endeavour.
Suggestions of ambition, etc. arc always born in the vital mind or, as it might be called, the mind of the vital and from there they rush up to the thinking mind and claim its assent and the sanction of the mental will. When the thinking mind gets clouded by the uprush, it Is carried away and gives its assent. The think- ing mind (reason) has always to remain unmoved above and judge what is right without being caught and carried away by the vital.
*sun"s, suns, sun-beams, sun-beat, sun-blaze, sun-bright, sun-capped,, sun-clear, sun-dream, sun-eyed, sun-frank, sun-gaze, sun-gazing, sun-god"s, sun-gold, sun-held, sun-herds, sun-kissed, sun-laugh, sun-lift, sun-like, sun-march, sun-orb, sun-steppes, sun-stone, sun-thoughts, sun-vast, sun-veil, sun-white, sun-word, Sun-Word.
SUPRAMENTAUSATION. ::: If the redemption of the soul from the physical vesture be the object, then there is no need of supramcntalisation. Spiritual Mukti and Nirvana arc suflicicnt-
Supreme Lord, as the Divine Mother and claim the being’s ser- vice and surrender. If these things are accepted, there will be an extremely disastrous consequence. If indeed there is the assent of the sadhaka to the Divine working alone and the submission or surrender to that guidance, then all can go smoothly. This assent and a rejection of all egoistic forces or forces that appeal to the ego are the safeguard throughout the sadhana. But the ways of nature are full of snares, the disguises of the ego arc innumerable, the illusions of the Powers of Darkness, Rakshasl,
SYMBOL. ::: A symbol is the form of one plane that represents a truth of another. Generally all forms are symbols. Everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There arc different kinds of symbols ::: ( 1 ) Conventional symbols, c.g. Vcdic cow for light.
taliscd vita], middle vital and lower vital planes) who arc in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too arc
termless ::: 1. Having no bounds or limits; unending. 2. An archaic word for indescribable. Chiefly poet. **3.** Unconditional.
That gives a meaning to our will and action. Our will and action can often annul or modify even the past karma, it is only cer- tain strong effects, called tiikata karma, that arc non-modifiable.
The conditions of the future birth arc determined fundamental- ly not during the stay in the psychic world but at the time of death — the psychic being then chooses what it should work out in the next appearance and the conditions arrange themselves accordingly.
(the cow is the symbol of spiritual Light) of which the souls there arc keepers or possessors, Gopas and Gopis.
The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Sbakti, Shraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments. The Self that is quiescent, at rest, vacant of things and happenings is n support and background to existence, a silent channel or a hypostasis of something Supreme ::: it is not itself the one entirely real existence, not itself the Supreme. The Eternal, the Supreme is the Lord and the all-originating Spirit. Superior to all activi- ties and not bound by any of them, it is the source, sanction, material, efficient power, master of all activities. All activities proceed from this supreme Self and are determined by it ; all are its operations, processes of its own conscious force and not ot something alien to Self, some power other than this Spirit.
"The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
“The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The more complete y-our faith, sincerity and surrender, the more will grace and protection be with you. And when the grace and protection of the Divine Mother arc with you, what is there lliat can touch you or whom need you fear? A little of it even will carry you through all diiliculties, obstacles and dangers ; surrounded by its full presence you can go securely on your way because it is hers, careless of all menace, unaffected by any hostility however powerful, whether from this world or from worlds invisible. Its touch can turn difficulties into oppor- tunities, failure into success and weakness into unfaltering strength. For the grace of the Divine Mother is the sanction of the Supreme and now or tomorrow its ciTect is sure, a thing decreed. Inevitable and irresistible.
The Mother: "And this Vibration (which I feel and see) gives the feeling of a fire. That"s probably what the Vedic Rishis translated as the "Flame” – in the human consciousness, in man, in Matter. They always spoke of a "Flame.” It is indeed a vibration with the intensity of a higher fire. Mother"s Agenda 25 March 1964.
The Mother: “And this Vibration (which I feel and see) gives the feeling of a fire. That’s probably what the Vedic Rishis translated as the”Flame”—in the human consciousness, in man, in Matter. They always spoke of a”Flame.” It is indeed a vibration with the intensity of a higher fire. Mother’s Agenda 25 March 1964.
Then there arc experiences that help or lead towards the realisation of things spiritual or divine or bring openings or progressions in the sadhana or arc supports on the way, — experiences of a symbolic character, visions, contacts of one kind or another with the Divine or with the workings of higher Truth, things like the waking of the Kundalini, the opening of the
theocracies ::: systems of government in which God or a deity is held to be the civil ruler; thearchy.
The psychical sight receives characteristically the images that arc formed in the subtle matter of the mental or psychical ether.
The Rajayogic Pranayama purifies and clears- theaiervous system ; it enables us to circulate the vital energy equally through the body and direct it also where we will nccarding to need, and thus maintain a perfect health and soundness of the body and the vital being ; it gives us control of all the five habitual opera- tions of the vital energy in the system and at the same time breaks down the habitual divisions by which only the ordinary mechanical processes of the vitality arc possible (o the norma! life. It opens entirely the six centres of the psycho-physical system and brings Into (he waking consciousness the power of the awakened Shakti and the light of the unveiled Furusba on each of the as^nding planes. Cbupled with (be use of the mantra it brings the ^vine energy into the body and prepares for and facilitates that concentration in Samadbi which is the crown of the Rajayogic method.
There are two classes of thmgs that happen in yoga, realisa- tions and experiences. Realisations are the reception in the cons- ciousness and the establishment there of the fundamental truths of the Divine, of the Higher or Divine Nature, of the world- consciousness and the play of its forces, of one’s own self and real nature and the inner nature of things, the power of these things growing in one till they arc part of one’s inner life and existence, — as for instance, the realisation of the Divine Pre- sence, the Descent and settling of the higher Peace, Light, Force,
There arc conditions that have been laid down by a Supreme
There arc some who have the expansive tendency of the vital, others who have the concentrative. The latter are absorbed in their own intensity of endeavour and certainly they gather from that great force for progress and are saved the expense and loss of energy which frequently comes to the more communicative and also make themselves less open to reactions from others
There is a vital plane (self-existent) above the material uni- verse which we see ; there is a mental plane (self-existent) above the vital and material. These three together, — mental, vital, physical — arc called the triple universe of the lower hemisphere.
There is the danger that he may become the instrument of some apparently brilliant but ignorant formation ; for these inter* mediate planes arc full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialise something or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth life and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhaka and make him (heir instrument for the purpose.
The seeds of the old relations, their impressions, their memories remain suppressed in the subconscient and rise up whenever they can. It is only when these seeds arc pulled out and disappear
The sounds of bells arc signs of the opening of the inner consciousness which brings with it an opening also to sights and sounds of other planes than the physical. Some of these things like the sound* of bells, crickets etc. seem even to help the opening.
The subconscient retains (he impression of all our past experi- ences of life and they can come up from there in dream forms ; most dreams in ordinary sleep arc foimaiions made from sub- conscient impressions. The habit of strong recurrence of the same things in our physical consciousness so that it is difScult to gel rid of its habits is largely due to a subconscient support.
“The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The true love for the Divine is a self-giving, free of demand, full of submission and surrender ; it makes no claim, imposes no condition, strikes no bargain, indulges in no violences of jealousy or pride or anger — for these things arc not in its composition. In return the Divine Mother also gives herself, but freely — and this represents itself in an inner giving — hei presence in your mind, your vital, your physical consciousness, her power recreating you in the divine nature, taking up aU the move'ments of your being and Erecting them towards perfection and fulfilment, her love enveloping you and carrying you in its arms Godwards.
“The will of man works in the ignorance by a partial light or more often flickerings of light which mislead as much as they illuminate. His mind is an ignorance striving to erect standards of knowledge, his will an ignorance striving to erect standards of right, and his whole mentality as a result very much a house divided against itself, idea in conflict with idea, the will often in conflict with the ideal of right or the intellectual knowledge. The will itself takes different shapes, the will of the intelligence, the wishes of the emotional mind, the desires and the passion of the vital being, the impulsions and blind or half-blind compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient nature, and all these make by no means a harmony, but at best a precarious concord among discords. The will of the mind and life is a stumbling about in search of right force, right Tapas which can wholly be attained in its true and complete light and direction only by oneness with the spiritual and supramental being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
thirsty ::: 1. Desiring or craving something akin to thirst. 2. Arid; parched:
Thoughts are not the essence of mind*bcinc, they arc only an activity of mental nature ; if that activity ceases, what appears then as a tbought-fiee existence that manifests in its place is not a blank or void but something ytry real, substantial, con- crete we may say — a mental being that extends itself widely and can be its own field of existence silent or active as well as the Witness Knower,, Master of that field and its action. Some feel it first as a void but that is because their observ-ation is un- trained and insufficient and loss of activity gives them the sense of blank ; an emptiness tKete is, but it is an emptiness of the ordinary activities, not a blank of eiustencc.
Three ways of the Mothers bring ; There arc three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original supreme
tndilTcrcncc and inerlia, or revolt or hostility, m sonic gross desire, that they arc out of place and can have a contrary effect.
torrid ::: scorching; burning; intensely hot, esp. parched with the heat of the sun.
To spend all the energy in japa or meditation is a strain which even those who arc accustomed to successful meditation find it difficult to maintain — unless in periods when there is an uninterrupted flow of experiences from above.
trace ::: n. 1. A surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the former existence, influence, or action of some agent or event; vestige. 2. Evidence or an indication of the former presence or existence of something non-material; a vestige. 3. A barely discernable indication or evidence of some quality, quality, characteristic, expression, etc. v. 4. To make one"s way over, through, or along (something). Also fig. 5. To follow a course, trail, etc.; make one"s way. 6. To follow, make out, or determine the course or line of, especially by going backward from the latest evidence, nearest existence, etc. 7. To locate or discover by searching or researching evidence; follow the history of. 8. To draw an outline of something. Also fig. 9. To decorate with tracery. 10. To copy (a design, map, etc.) by drawing over the lines visible through a superimposed sheet of transparent paper or other material. 11. To draw or delineate a plan or diagram of. traced, tracing.
tramp ::: 1. A firm, heavy, resounding tread. 2. A journey, often long, on foot, a march.
transcendent ::: Sri Aurobindo: "A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence — and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal — of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth — a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"We see then that there are three terms of the one existence, transcendent, universal and individual, and that each of these always contains secretly or overtly the two others. The Transcendent possesses itself always and controls the other two as the basis of its own temporal possibilities; that is the Divine, the eternal all-possessing God-consciousness, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, which informs, embraces, governs all existences. The human being is here on earth the highest power of the third term, the individual, for he alone can work out at its critical turning-point that movement of self-manifestation which appears to us as the involution and evolution of the divine consciousness between the two terms of the Ignorance and the Knowledge.” The Life Divine
The Transcendent
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her — the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.” Letters on Yoga
**Transcendent"s.**
twain ::: n. 1. An archaic word for two. adj. 2. Disunited separated.
unsearched :::
Variability in sadhana: Each sadhaka has ‘a nature or turn of nature of his own and the morement of the yoga of hvo sadhakas, even when there arc some resemblances between them, is seldom exactly the same.
Vilal being — its four parts ::: There arc four parts of the vital being— first, the menial vital which gives a mental expres- sion by thought, speech or olher^vise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being ; the emotional vital which is the seat of various feelings such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred, and the rest ; the central vital which is the seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions, e.g. ambi- tion, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passions of various kinds and the field of many vital ener- gies ; last, the lower vital which is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as make the greater part of daily life, e.g. food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, litfle wishes of all kinds — and a numberless host of other things. Their respective seats are
Vital being — its four parts: There arc four parts of the vital being — first, the mental vital which gives a mental expres- sion by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being ; the emotional vital which is the scat of various feelings such as love, Joy, sorrow, hatred, and the rest ; the central vital which is the seat of the stronger rilal longings and reactions, e.g. ambi- tion, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passions of various kinds and the held of many vital ener- gies ; last, the lower vital which is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as make the greater part of daily life, e.g. food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes of all kinds — and a numberless host of other tlungs. Their respective seats are
Whatever defects there arc would go much sooner, if you did not harp on them too much ; for by dwelling on them so much you lose confidence in yourself and in your power of openness to the Force — which is there all the same — and put unneces- sary difficulties in the way of its working-
What for Instance would be the utility of a supramental creation on earth if it were just the same thing as a supramental creation on the supramental plane? It is that, in principle, but yet some- thing else, a triumphant new self-discovery of the Divine in conditions that arc not elsewhere.
What we call our mind is only an outer mind, a surface mental action, instrumental for the partial expression of a larger mind behind of which wc arc not ordinarily aware and can only know by going inside ourselves. So too what we know of the vital in us is only the outer vital, a surface activity partially expressing a larger secret vital which we can only know by gomg within.
When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant’s groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we arc so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in uniwrsal Nature. The self-abnega- tion of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment ; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
When 'we go very deeply asleep, we have what appears to us as a dreamless slumber; but in fact dreams arc going on, but they are either too deep dowu to toeh the recordmg surface or am forgotten ail recollection of their having existed even rs wiped oS fa Se transition to the waling eo^etousness. Ordmary dreams are for the most part or semn to be mcobemnt, h^use they are either woven by the snbeonsceat out of dcep-lymc
will, human ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The will of man works in the ignorance by a partial light or more often flickerings of light which mislead as much as they illuminate. His mind is an ignorance striving to erect standards of knowledge, his will an ignorance striving to erect standards of right, and his whole mentality as a result very much a house divided against itself, idea in conflict with idea, the will often in conflict with the ideal of right or the intellectual knowledge. The will itself takes different shapes, the will of the intelligence, the wishes of the emotional mind, the desires and the passion of the vital being, the impulsions and blind or half-blind compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient nature, and all these make by no means a harmony, but at best a precarious concord among discords. The will of the mind and life is a stumbling about in search of right force, right Tapas which can wholly be attained in its true and complete light and direction only by oneness with the spiritual and supramental being.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
wilt ::: archaic. Second pers. sing. pres. ind. of will.
Without the liberation of the psychic and the realization of the true Self the ego cannot go, both arc necessary.
Wm/ttJ, and other well-known phenomena. (5j Apparitions which arc formations of one's ow-n mind and tale to the senses an objec- tive appearance. (6) Temporary possession of people by vital beings who somclimcs pretend to be departed refatives etc. (7)
wood ::: 1. A dense growth of trees or underbrush covering a relatively small or confined area. Often used in the plural. 2. The trunks or main stems of trees as suitable for architectural and other purposes; timber or lumber. wood"s, woods.
Worship with physical means ::: Physical means can be and arc used in the approach to divine Jove and worship ; they have not been allowed merely as a concession to human weakness, nor is it the fact that in the psychic way there is no place for such things. On the contrary they arc one means of approaching the
KEYS (10k)
1 Susan Sontag
1 Marcus Aurelius
1 Franz Kafka
1 Archilochus
1 Abraham Maslow
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
57 Marcus Tullius Cicero
37 Gabriel Garc a M rquez
36 Kami Garcia
35 Marcus Aurelius
29 Jeffrey Archer
27 Plutarch
17 Marcel Proust
15 Melina Marchetta
14 Meghan March
9 Jerry Garcia
9 Anonymous
7 Marc Levy
6 Otto von Bismarck
6 Marc Chagall
6 Joan of Arc
5 Tracy March
5 Rita Williams Garcia
5 Marcus Buckingham
5 Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5 Erin Hunter
1:That which we arc is that, yes, it is that that we become, and if one knows it not, great is the perdition : it is they who who have discovered it that become immortal. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
2:By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
Thou hast brought me, thy illimitable gift!
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
Make still my life through thee a song of joy
And all my silence wide and deep with thee.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Return to Earth,#KEYS
3:Too seldom is the shadow of what must come
Cast in an instant on the secret sense
Which feels the shock of the invisible,
And seldom in the few who answer give
The mighty process of the cosmic Will
Communicates its image to our sight,
Identifying the world’s mind with ours. ||11.30||
Our range is fixed within the crowded arc
Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess
And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown
Waking in us the prophet and the seer. ||11.31|| ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:4, || 11.30 - 11.31 ||,#KEYS
4:It is not pillage, assassinations and executions that arc terrifying. What is pillage? It is the passing of property from some to others. That always has been and always will be and there is nothing in it that is terrifying. What are executions and asssassinalions? It is the passing of men from life to death. These passings have been, are and always will be, and there equally there is nothing that is terrifying. What is really terrifying is the hatred of men which engenders brigandage, theft and murder. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
5:
"The beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne d'Arc would, if seen by an Indian, have quite a different appearance; for when one sees, one projects the forms of one's mind.... You have the vision of one in India whom you call the Divine Mother; the Catholics say it is the Virgin Mary, and the Japanese call it Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy; and others would give other names. It is the same force, the same power, but the images made of it are different in different faiths." Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (21 April 1929)
And then? You are not very talkative today! Is that all?
You say that "each person has his own world of dreamimagery peculiar to himself." Ibid.
Each individual has his own way of expressing, thinking, speaking, feeling, understanding. It is the combination of all these ways of being that makes the individual. That is why everyone can understand only according to his own nature. As long as you are shut up in your own nature, you can know only what is in your consciousness. All depends upon the height of the nature of your consciousness. Your world is limited to what you have in your consciousness. If you have a very small consciousness, you will understand only a few things. When your consciousness is very vast, universal, only then will you understand the world. If the consciousness is limited to your little ego, all the rest will escape you.... There are people whose brain and consciousness are smaller than a walnut. You know that a walnut resembles the brain; well these people look at things and don't understand them. They can understand nothing else except what is in direct contact with their senses. For them only what they taste, what they see, hear, touch has a reality, and all the rest simply does not exist, and they accuse us of speaking fancifully! "What I cannot touch does not exist", they say. But the only answer to give them is: "It does not exist for you, but there's no reason why it shouldn't exist for others." You must not insist with these people, and you must not forget that the smaller they are the greater is the audacity in their assertions.
One's cocksureness is in proportion to one's unconsciousness; the more unconscious one is, the more is one sure of oneself. The most foolish are always the most vain. Your stupidity is in proportion to your vanity. The more one knows... In fact, there is a time when one is quite convinced that one knows nothing at all. There's not a moment in the world which does not bring something new, for the world is perpetually growing. If one is conscious of that, one has always something new to learn. But one can become conscious of it only gradually. One's conviction that one knows is in direct proportion to one's ignorance and stupidity.
Mother, have the scientists, then, a very small consciousness?
Why? All scientists are not like that. If you meet a true scientist who has worked hard, he will tell you: "We know nothing. What we know today is nothing beside what we shall know tomorrow. This year's discoveries will be left behind next year." A real scientist knows very well that there are many more things he doesn't know than those he knows. And this is true of all branches of human activity. I have never met a scientist worthy of the name who was proud. I have never met a man of some worth who has told me: "I know everything." Those I have seen have always confessed: "In short, I know nothing." After having spoken of all that he has done, all that he has achieved, he tells you very quietly: "After all, I know nothing." ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, [T8],#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 2:The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 3:The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 4:We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 5:The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 6:For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 7:Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 8:A writer's job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You're always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 9:We must move forward in the days ahead with audacious faith. The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 10:As a feminine cocreator, having lived through the arc of evolution from 1929 to the present, I offer encouragement and vocational arousal to all! ~ barbara-marx-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 11:When we're in our right minds, we are hopeful. Because the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, nature does bend toward healing, and the heart does bend toward love. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 12:To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. & 13:When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 14:Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life." "Your strength?" "Your work." He tossed the branch aside. "The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . . ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 15:As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it very loose, the line of the law so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Act, and God will act. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
2:Joan of Arc, ~ James Fenimore Cooper, #NFDB
3:Courage! Do not fall back. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
4:Now I know how Joan of Arc felt. ~ Morrissey, #NFDB
5:I fear nothing for God is with me! ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
6:Help yourself and God will help you ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
7:In God's name let us go on bravely. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
8:I am not afraid; I was born to do this. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
9:she had the strongest emotional arc— ~ Shawn Speakman, #NFDB
10:Napoleon-commissioned Arc de Triomphe. ~ Denise Kiernan, #NFDB
11:Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
12:I die for speaking the language of the angels. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
13:All battles are first won or lost, in the mind. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
14:Men are sometimes hanged for telling the truth. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
15:... since God commanded me to go, I must do it. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
16:I am the drum on which God is beating out his message. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
17:The angels are as perfect in form as they are in spirit. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
18:The point of a story is the character arc, the change. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
19:Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
20:What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want! ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
21:How else would God speak to me, if not through my imagination? ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
22:Go forward bravely. Fear nothing. Trust in God; all will be well. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
23:In the long arc of time, you are only relevant if customers love you. ~ Tim Cook, #NFDB
24:Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
25:They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it. ~ Gracie Allen, #NFDB
26:The arc of history does not bend toward justice unless we bend it. ~ Adam Benforado, #NFDB
27:The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
28:The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
29:There arc no such things as desperate situations. Only desperate men. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
30:The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ Theodore Parker, #NFDB
31:The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. ~ Theodore Parker, #NFDB
32:We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
33:I think every woman character, every female character, has her own arc. ~ Katheryn Winnick, #NFDB
34:The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
35:As Joan of Arc said, “In the evenings of our life, we will be examined on Love. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
36:I place trust in God, my creator, in all things; I love Him with all my heart. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
37:Az izzadság tönkreteszi a púdert. Márpedig a csillogó arc a tévésztár halála. ~ Marie Phillips, #NFDB
38:The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Perhaps ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
39:When I look at the arc of my career, my focus is on lyricism, right? I own that. ~ Talib Kweli, #NFDB
40:Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg, #NFDB
41:I answered the voice that I was a poor girl who knew nothing of riding and warfare. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
42:If I said that God did not send me, I should condemn myself; truly God did send me. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
43:You hope to see an arc of growth in your ability to become a character on television. ~ Marc Maron, #NFDB
44:If anyone uses the words 'marvelous imagery' or 'narrative arc,' slap them for me. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
45:I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
46:Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
47:I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself. ~ Charles de Gaulle, #NFDB
48:Dona la llibertat als colors i llavors trobaràs l'arc de sant Marti a tot arreu. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
49:Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
50:When you guest-star, you're usually at the center of the dramatic arc, so that's fun. ~ Bellamy Young, #NFDB
51:Even little children repeat that oftentimes people are hanged for having told the truth. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
52:In the scope of the universe, and the arc of justice, my life is of little consequence. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
53:It spun end over end in a lazy arc. She caught it thoughtlessly, easily, ready to fight. ~ B R Sanders, #NFDB
54:I used to say, "Go boldly in among the English," and then I used to go boldly in myself. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
55:The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
56:It is true I wished to escape; and so I wish still: is not this lawful for all prisoners? ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
57:For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
58:I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God's will. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
59:Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
60:Think of a rainbow. It's one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light. ~ John Green, #NFDB
61:A man who took history in his hands, and bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
62:Joan of Arc said a lot of interesting things before they burned her at the stake. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
63:Even though I saw the executioner and the fire, I could not say anything but what I have said. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
64:Hope in God. If you have good hope and faith in Him, you shall be delivered from your enemies. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
65:Sometimes there's a general arc that you want to try and get better the longer you do something. ~ Colin Hay, #NFDB
66:People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction. ~ Will Self, #NFDB
67:I'm increasingly less interested in classic storylines and that arc that we have come to expect. ~ Danzy Senna, #NFDB
68:If I be not in a state of grace, I pray God place me in it; if I be in it, I pray God keep me so. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
69:It's a real challenge to complete a story arc and end up with a cool punchline in 120 characters. ~ Mark Hoppus, #NFDB
70:Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through. ~ Matthew Fox, #NFDB
71:Theodore Parker, who said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
72:The poor folk gladly came to me, for I did them no unkindness, but helped them as much as I could. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
73:Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
74:All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake. ~ Indira Gandhi, #NFDB
75:Alas! that my body, clean and whole, never been corrupted, today must be consumed and burnt to ashes! ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
76:Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
77:The brief arc of our days,
O Sestius,
prevents us from launching
prolonged hopes. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,#NFDB
78:It's a whole other way of working when you work in films: You know exactly the arc of your character. ~ Sissy Spacek, #NFDB
79:The character drives the plot, and the plot molds the character’s arc. They cannot work independently. ~ K M Weiland, #NFDB
80:The world turns, and there's another victim, another bully. It's the arc of someone else's story now. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
81:Why now? Why realize this now? Was it the natural arc of an asshole? An inevitable day of retribution? ~ Josh Malerman, #NFDB
82:[Before being burned at the stake for her faith:] Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
83:It's rather rare when you play an older character in a movie in a supporting role to even get an arc. ~ Sigourney Weaver, #NFDB
84:Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
85:My understanding of the world was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
86:If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire war before her eighteenth birthday, you can get out of bed. ~ E Jean Carroll, #NFDB
87:Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
88:The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie. ~ Simon Kinberg, #NFDB
89:The fundamental story arc of the Bible is God is passionate about rescuing this world, restoring it, renewing it. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
90:About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
91:My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
92:The arc of the celebrity phenomenon ultimately is: everything turns to dust and everything does go away. ~ George Hickenlooper, #NFDB
93:The ARC defined Appalachia as a coherent political entity during the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. ~ Elizabeth Catte, #NFDB
94:Maybe some of my quest for success comes from Joan of Arc but theres no conscious part of Catholicism in my life. ~ Joan Van Ark, #NFDB
95:Nothing surprises me now," I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
96:The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters. ~ Eric Balfour, #NFDB
97:some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
98:She had changed the arc of her own story, merely by typing a couple of thousand words each day for thirty days. ~ Scott Westerfeld, #NFDB
99:So believe me when I say that the arc of the pool cue slicing through the air towards my head was a thing of beauty, ~ L H Thomson, #NFDB
100:I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up. ~ Edward Norton, #NFDB
101:Get back!” I slashed the air in a wide arc, driving the rest of the demigods away from Annabeth. “No one touches her! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
102:If the long arc of history bends toward social justice, it also bends toward environmental justice and ecological sanity. ~ David Jaber, #NFDB
103:A writer's job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You're always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
104:Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
105:Once she kissed me, my heart slowed, and every muscle in my body relaxed. How much I needed her terrified me. -pg 252/ARC ~ Jamie McGuire, #NFDB
106:Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace? Joan: If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
107:I miss theater. I miss living the arc of the character, from curtain to curtain, and I miss the immediate audience response. ~ David Anders, #NFDB
108:Through the music I hope to give it an arc that gives it a greater sense of a journey through the set rather than a bunch of songs. ~ Gotye, #NFDB
109:Every man gives his life for what he believes ... one life is all we have to live and we live it according to what we believe. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
110:Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
111:You look beautiful and tragic, just the way a heroine should on the eve of battle. Like Joan of Arc in her silver armor. ~ Melissa de la Cruz, #NFDB
112:Drama is a complete meal, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates. It's a slow burn thing. It's got an arc. Comedy is more like coke. ~ Eddie Izzard, #NFDB
113:This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
114:Whenever a woman describes herself as a 'post-feminist' I picture women lashed to posts. Joan of Arc was an early post-feminist. ~ Kate Clinton, #NFDB
115:For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character. I love being able to see a character go through something and to learn. ~ Mae Whitman, #NFDB
116:I was in my thirteenth year when I heard a voice from God to help me govern my conduct. And the first time I was very much afraid. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
117:The park was deserted. The arc-lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
118:You’d never break this one. You’d never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile. ~ Elizabeth Bear, #NFDB
119:the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”3 It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King’s career, ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
120:I saw the sun’s bolt arc an unerring path to the man’s forehead. As it struck, the crows converged like night drawing breath. Dog ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
121:I saw them with my bodily eyes as clearly as I see you. And when they departed, I used to weep and wish they would take me with them. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
122:The Maid and her soldiers will have the victory. Therefore the Maid is willing that you, Duke of Bedford, should not destroy yourself. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
123:.... yet all experience is an arc, where through gleams the untraveled world, whose margin fades forever, and forever as I move... ~ Alfred Tennyson, #NFDB
124:This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone. ~ Carolina De Robertis, #NFDB
125:We must move forward in the days ahead with audacious faith. The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
126:I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards. ~ Cary Elwes, #NFDB
127:The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter, #NFDB
128:We’re going to stroll up the Champs-Élysées like proper tourists and then sit at a cafe and have coffee in view of the Arc de Triomphe. ~ Melanie Harlow, #NFDB
129:Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
130:Courage! Do not fall back; in a little the place will be yours. Watch! When the wind blows my banner against the bulwark, you shall take it. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
131:ROSE: I seriously have the DUMBEST arc anyone could conceivably imagine.
DAVE: rose we dont have fuckin "arcs" we are just human beings ~ Andrew Hussie,#NFDB
132:A horse which stops dead just before a jump and thus propels its rider into a graceful arc provides a splendid excuse for general merriment. ~ Prince Philip, #NFDB
133:It seemed to take Sirius an age to fall: his body curved in a graceful arc as he sank backwards through the ragged veil hanging from the arch. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
134:Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
135:Joan of Arc is my namesake. I played her character while still in my teens, at a music festival held at the University of Colorado in Boulder. ~ Joan Van Ark, #NFDB
136:You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
137:As Joan of Arc probably said: “Build a girl a fire and she’s warm for a few minutes. Set a girl on fire and she’s warm for the rest of her life. ~ Jodi Taylor, #NFDB
138:Happy Hunger Games!” He plucks a few blackberries from the bushes around us. “And may the odds —” He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
139:If ever I do escape, no one shall reproach me with having broken or violated my faith, not having given my word to any one, whosoever it may be. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
140:Joan of Arc was their patron saint, and I heard that they died out in part because girls were required to join by the time they were fifteen. ~ Katherine Howe, #NFDB
141:Her legs made a graceful arc, ankles as delicate as a fossil of an ancient sea creature, like her body progressed back in time from head to foot. ~ Amelia Gray, #NFDB
142:With a film, you know the beginning, middle and end of your character's arc. But on a TV show, you have no idea where they're going to end up. ~ Michael Eklund, #NFDB
143:I think Rick Berman just called me and asked me if I wanted to do the show [Star Trek: Enterprise], and he said they'd write an arc if I'd do it. ~ Brent Spiner, #NFDB
144:It's a challenge to work a character's arc into a format in which you only have a very limited amount of time to grow and develop a character. ~ Ginnifer Goodwin, #NFDB
145:When you make a movie, a dramatization based on the real experience of a living subject, you cant airbrush that away into to a perfect movie arc. ~ Simon Beaufoy, #NFDB
146:As Joan of Arc probably said: “Build a girl a fire and she’s warm for a few minutes. Set a girl on fire and she’s warm for the rest of her life.”’ I ~ Jodi Taylor, #NFDB
147:Celui qui se relève de ses faux pas aura gagné l'estime des dieux. De toutes les couleurs qu'on lui en a fait voir, il construira un arc-en-ciel. ~ Yasmina Khadra, #NFDB
148:Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
149:Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century. ~ Stewart Brand, #NFDB
150:I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
151:Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I’ll never wash it off. ~ C D Wright, #NFDB
152:Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was just me and her. Maybe together we were this volatile entity that would either implode or meld together.-pg 252/ARC ~ Jamie McGuire, #NFDB
153:As a feminine cocreator, having lived through the arc of evolution from 1929 to the present, I offer encouragement and vocational arousal to all! ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, #NFDB
154:Everything I have said or done is in the hands of God. I commit myself to Him! I certify to you that I would do or say nothing against the Christian faith. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
155:I was admonished ot adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
156:Human rights. For everyone. Because that was the only way the world made sense. When the arc of care went far and wide, it journeyed and battled to exclude none. ~ S K Ali, #NFDB
157:Jules’s hair and swinging her head across the floor in a blood-smearing arc. He slammed the door shut again, falling against it just as the thing smashed into ~ Tim Lebbon, #NFDB
158:Another week done with. How quickly the time goes as the season advances, the earth hurtling along its groove into the years's sharply descending final arc. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
159:It is better to be alone with God. His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
160:Its really interesting working in television as opposed to the theater, where you know the arc of the character and you are able to create this whole backstory. ~ Yael Stone, #NFDB
161:Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It’s one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light. ~ John Green, #NFDB
162:The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve —an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy, #NFDB
163:I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
164:The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man? ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
165:Watching Abby own my brothers--hand after hand was turning me on. I'd never seen a woman so sexy in my life, and this one happened to be my girlfriend.-pg 257/ARC ~ Jamie McGuire, #NFDB
166:You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
167:One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
168:The earth together with its surrounding waters must in fact have such a shape as its shadow reveals, for it eclipses the moon with the arc of a perfect circle. ~ Nicolaus Copernicus, #NFDB
169:General de Gaulle was a thoroughly bad boy. The day he arrived, he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted that he was Georges Clemenceau. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
170:[Responding to trick query about whether she believed herself in a state of grace:] If I am not, may it please God to bring me into it; if I am, may He preserve me in it. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
171:It doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy, the need to get the emotion and the character arc across is way harder in something like this so was more of a preparation. ~ Colin Farrell, #NFDB
172:Tom and I sit on a bench in the garden to watch the moon melt in an arc below the horizon as fast as ice on a warm hand before we can call the others to witness its exit. ~ Marion Coutts, #NFDB
173:We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches. ~ Tatiana Maslany, #NFDB
174:Ah well,’ he said, jovially. ‘As Joan of Arc probably said: “Build a girl a fire and she’s warm for a few minutes. Set a girl on fire and she’s warm for the rest of her life. ~ Jodi Taylor, #NFDB
175:trapped in his past, refusing to move forward. Unless this is a specific part of the character’s arc, a character caught under this mountain of backstory can be painful to ~ Jordan McCollum, #NFDB
176:Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches. ~ Jenna Bush, #NFDB
177:if one doesn’t have a character like Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc, a diet simply disintegrates into eating exactly what you want to eat, but with a bad conscience. ~ Maria Augusta von Trapp, #NFDB
178:It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me. I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens. ~ Joan Baez, #NFDB
179:You want to see the people you've sort of come to know and love, or love to hate, you want to see them develop in some way. And I hope people get sort of caught up in that arc. ~ Ricky Gervais, #NFDB
180:They sat in companionable silence for a few moments after that, while the sun settled into its downward arc in the west and long shadows began to creep across the face of the city. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
181:That which we arc is that, yes, it is that that we become, and if one knows it not, great is the perdition : it is they who who have discovered it that become immortal. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, #NFDB
182:The “feel” of a short story should be that it follows one trajectory, or arc. It concerns a character (or, in some cases, a group) heading through one primary crisis or concern. ~ James Scott Bell, #NFDB
183:Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
184:I think that sharpens the intention of a scene and clarifies a story's arc. Of course, I don't seek the questions until after I've written a scene - or maybe after I've daydreamed it. ~ Edan Lepucki, #NFDB
185:To have a man be able to touch her and bring her to the edge of release in a matter of seconds was a skill rarely found. "As rare as the Arc of the Covenant," Sophie mumbled to herself. ~ Donna Grant, #NFDB
186:I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else. ~ Nathalie Sarraute, #NFDB
187:Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.’ I’m no god and I’ll contend no longer. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
188:When we're in our right minds, we are hopeful. Because the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, nature does bend toward healing, and the heart does bend toward love. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
189:In France it was Joan of Arc; in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale; in the deep south there was Rosa Parks; in India there was Mother Teresa and in Florida there was Katherine Harris. ~ Larry Gatlin, #NFDB
190:For me, a tour show should have a narrative; it should have an arc. It shouldn't just be, "Here's one joke, here's another joke." That's not my style. They all have to somehow link together. ~ John Bishop, #NFDB
191:Show a girl a pioneering hero—Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc—and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
192:Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
193:On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
194:In '7th Heaven,' more than 'Teen Wolf,' was that I got to learn more about my character. In 'Teen Wolf,' I'd always get a new arc for that character every season, which was discovery for me. ~ Tyler Hoechlin, #NFDB
195:The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession. ~ Jamaica Kincaid, #NFDB
196:I pulled her arms around me without apology, tight enough that it was difficult to expand my chest enough to fully inhale but for the first time all night, I felt like I could breathe.-pg 232/ARC ~ Jamie McGuire, #NFDB
197:Since God had commanded it, it was necessary that I do it. Since God commanded it, even if I had a hundred fathers and mothers, even if I had been a King's daughter, I would have gone nevertheless. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
198:The sun rises on Newfoundland, sets on British Columbia, island to island. Chilly Atlantic mornings and warm Pacific sunsets. An arc that traces a path from the dawn of an empire to its twilight. ~ Will Ferguson, #NFDB
199:mivdiodi da vmRerodi. saerTod, yovelTvis vmReri, roca bednieri var, rogorc yvela bednieri adamiani, romelsac arc megobrebi hyavs, arc moyvaruli nacnobebi da, Sesabamisad, arc bednierebis gamziarebelni ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
200:There was also no character arc. Change only comes when we face the difficulty of reality head-on. Fantasy changes nothing, which is why, once we're done fantasizing, it feels like a bankrupt story. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
201:And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over. Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
202:Truly, if you were to tear me limb from limb and separate my soul from my body, I would not say anything more. If I did say anything, afterwards I would always declare that you made me say it by force! ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
203:In 2001, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc), an avant-garde architecture school that has produced some of the prominent architects in the country, relocated to the Artists District ~ James Frey, #NFDB
204:I started my career giving a clinic in bad acting in the film, "The Silver Chalice," and now I'm playing a crusty old man who's an animated automobile [in "Cars"]. That's a creative arc for you, isn't it? ~ Paul Newman, #NFDB
205:I... was not too happy to suddenly take on this public role thrust upon me. They just assumed I was the Joan of Arc of the women's movement. And I wasn't at all. It put a lot of unnecessary pressure on me. ~ Bea Arthur, #NFDB
206:She (Annabeth) put her hand on my spine, and my skin tingled. I (Percy) moved her fingers to the one spot that grounded me to my mortal life. A thousand volts of electricity seemed to arc through my body. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
207:It's a long arc and a long storyline, and I think it leaves us in a great place to see how we interact again, whether that be for The Defenders, Jessica Jones Season 2, or whatever. We'll see. I don't know. ~ Mike Colter, #NFDB
208:A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
209:No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
210:Ceux qui, espérant le bonheur, n’ont soif que de plaisirs, de richesses, de gloire, de pouvoir et d’héroïsme, sont aussi naïfs que l’enfant qui cherche à attraper un arc-en-ciel pour s’en faire un manteau. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
211:I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one [film], because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in. ~ Wes Craven, #NFDB
212:Most stories aren’t meant to tell every detail of a character’s life. A story is just a snapshot, a set period of time chosen and extracted from a character’s life because it offers the necessary dramatic arc. ~ K M Weiland, #NFDB
213:Drizzt swung a long and heavy halberd, a polearm more than twice his height, in a slow arc. For all of Drizzt’s attempts to keep the weapon under control, its momentum spun his tiny frame right to the ground. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
214:I'm not a huge fan of scary movies, but I love doing them because your character arc gets condensed, and everything is elevated, and so you kind of have this amazing opportunity to go in many different places. ~ Imogen Poots, #NFDB
215:What concerns this dress is a small thing - less than nothing. I did not take it by the advice of any man in the world. I did not take this dress or do anything but by the command of Our Lord and of the Angels. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
216:But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own. ~ Salvador Plascencia, #NFDB
217:The beech leaves surged and shimmered in the wind. Far below, a vixen paused to stare up, then melted away. Stars burned tiny holes in the twilight and then a pale moon traced a slow silver arc through the sky. ~ Laline Paull, #NFDB
218:Above all there's a love which is real, the ultimate love. We merge not only physically, but mentally and spiritually, in arc-line, aura and subtle body. We amalgamate with each other. That is real love. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi, #NFDB
219:Sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore. Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
220:I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life. ~ Vincent Piazza, #NFDB
221:The iron arc of the avoiding journey Curves back upon my weakness at the end; Whether the faint light spark against my face Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight, Centre and circumference are both my weakness. ~ Stephen Spender, #NFDB
222:Final Execution is Wolverine's spotlight arc. He goes through a crazy thing here. I think the fear with him is that he's in so many books that his growth can become stagnant. He ends this story in a very different place. ~ Rick Remender, #NFDB
223:For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
224:I've never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has bee simultaneously hostile and rapt. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
225:Some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. Some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
226:It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
227:You can perfect genius because genius is not perfection. On his level and his practice and his methodology, it's almost inhuman. So, that's been a fantastic arc to play, and boy does it go somewhere in this series. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch, #NFDB
228:It's scary times for humanity, it seems. But as my octogenarian father tells me, "The world has seen harder times, and the world will survive." The arc of history is long, and the mess we're currently making is just a blip. ~ Debbie Harry, #NFDB
229:Used to be you could see the orange glow of the hi-intensity arc-sodiums from North Conway, but no more. Now there’s just the White Mountains, looking like dark triangles of crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
230:When you're in sync with the director, on the type of movie you want to make, the arc of the characters, how the characters intertwine and interact, plotlines and story, and things like that, it really makes a difference. ~ Dwayne Johnson, #NFDB
231:Far rather would I sit and sew beside my poor mother, for this thing is not of my condition. But I must go, and I must do this thing, because my Lord will have it so. Rather now than tomorrow, and tomorrow than the day after! ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
232:Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.) ~ Tristan Tzara, #NFDB
233:Now that you are here--now that we're together-- I can't imagine going back to the life I had before. I don't know what I'd do if I lost you now. I love you too much. ~ Amy PlumVincent Delacroix, Until I Die (ARC), Amy Plum p. 71 ~ Amy Plum, #NFDB
234:I was nervous when I first started True Blood because if you do a play or a movie, you know the complete arc of the character. You can see the end. But with a show like True Blood, you don't know what's going to happen. ~ Alexander Skarsgard, #NFDB
235:But now I have something that blows that feeling out of the water. Every time I need a hit of joy, I think about you. You are my solace, Kate. Just knowing that you are in this world, everything makes sense. p. 275 Until I Die (ARC) ~ Amy Plum, #NFDB
236:Not that it was a crazy complicated skill, but operating an espresso machine during high traffic could be added to my repertoire along with card tricks and how to fire a Colt .45.
(Quote taken from ARC, subject to change) ~ Karina Halle,#NFDB
237:It is true that the king has made a truce with the duke of Burgundy for fifteen days and that the duke is to turn over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
238:Description, which had seemed like background in novels, static and inert as a butterfly pinned to the pages of my notebook, proved to be a dynamic engine that stoked voice and, even more, propelled the occasional narrative arc. ~ Patricia Hampl, #NFDB
239:The only way for white folks to reclaim the full arc of their humanity, the full trajectory of their ethical content, of their ethical identity, is to surrender the white innocence that prevents them from being fully mature. ~ Michael Eric Dyson, #NFDB
240:The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
241:My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing. ~ Henry Louis Gates, #NFDB
242:If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he
had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. ~ Annie Proulx,#NFDB
243:I have often told people that they need to evaluate their lives by the video, and not by the snapshot. That is, they should not just look at one moment in time, but rather consider trajectories, tendencies, and narrative arc as well. ~ Douglas Wilson, #NFDB
244:Word slowly spread among Manhattan’s elite that a man of incomparable genius was digging ditches to survive. Sensing an opportunity, a band of wealthy investors eventually approached Tesla to develop an improved system of arc lighting. ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
245:But life, Clay knew, didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a circle; you didn’t go round and round again. It was an arc, its course as inexorable as the sun’s trek across the sky, destined at its highest, brightest moment to begin its fall. ~ Nicholas Eames, #NFDB
246:But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow. ~ Alexandra Fuller, #NFDB
247:Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
248:I'd like to do the young cadet thing again for sure, but that's why I wanted to do this, to see if I could do it. I took the scenes out of the script and put them together and read them as one little arc, story and that seemed to work. ~ Scott Speedman, #NFDB
249:I rose from the bed, my heart thudding in my chest. "Kiss me," I whispered, and saw his eyebrow arc in surprise. "Just once more," I pleaded, "And I promise it will be the last time. I'll be able to forget you after that."
-Meghan ~ Julie Kagawa,#NFDB
250:Orleans . . . the place where Joan of Arc, while depending on God, had defeated the British in a great battle for freedom.
Joan and I had a lot in common. But there would be no burning at the stake for me.
Robert would not allow it. ~ Nancy Moser,#NFDB
251:She can see the outline of Miss Justineau’s body, not close but closer to her than the others. She wants to crawl over to her and curl up against her, her shoulders pressed into the precisely right-shaped arc of Miss Justineau’s lower back. ~ M R Carey, #NFDB
252:The joy of 'Crash' was that it was all about the work. It was my first real part. Before that, it was a line here and there, maybe a scene. 'Crash' was five scenes, a beautiful arc, a little vignette of my own. It really meant something. ~ Michael Pena, #NFDB
253:I’m just a teenager.” “History is filled with teenagers who lead the fight. Joan of Arc. Okita Soji, the samurai. Alexander the Great. They were all teenagers when they began leading their armies. I think we’re back to those times again, kid. ~ Susan Ee, #NFDB
254:The prophet laments, that notwithstanding all his preaching, the generality arc still corrupt in their manners: therefore their desolation is at hand: but they shall be restored again and prosper; and all mankind shall be redeemed by Christ. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
255:This asshole had better open the door,” Jackal growled, spinning his fire ax in a graceful arc as the horde came on. “I didn’t come all the way to Eden to be eaten at the damn gates. Some might call it ironic, but that just pisses me off. ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
256:A Spider sewed at Night
A Spider sewed at Night
Without a Light
Upon an Arc of White.
If Ruff it was of Dame
Or Shroud of Gnome
Himself himself inform.
Of Immortality
His Strategy
Was Physiognomy.
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
257:I am just a teenage.'
'History is filled with teenagers who lead the fight. Joan of Arc. Okita Soji, the samurai. Alexander the Great.They were all teenagers when they began leading their armies. I think we're back to those times again, kid. ~ Susan Ee,#NFDB
258:But this wasn't a movie. In life, we didn't get to have credits roll to tell us when we'd come to the end of our epiphany arc. To know when to applaud. In life, there were no credits, no sound tracks. In life, things often didn't work out. ~ Kim Culbertson, #NFDB
259:I am just a teenager.'
'History is filled with teenagers who lead the fight. Joan of Arc. Okita Soji, the samurai. Alexander the Great.They were all teenagers when they began leading their armies. I think we're back to those times again, kid. ~ Susan Ee,#NFDB
260:I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there's a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms. ~ Sarah Ruhl, #NFDB
261:Her mind was made up. Had Michelangelo tried dentistry before he painted the Sistine ceiling? Had Joan of Arc weighed the pros and cons of listening to her angels? Did the Queen of England send out résumés, in case something better came up? ~ Shanthi Sekaran, #NFDB
262:A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it's pretty much the same every week. ~ Adam Baldwin, #NFDB
263:And may the odds -" He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me.
I catch it in my mouth and break the delicate skin with my teeth. The sweet tartness explodes across my tongue. "- be ever in your favor!" I finish with equal verve. ~ Suzanne Collins,#NFDB
264:Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB
265:Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end. ~ Elizabeth George, #NFDB
266:Sanchez looked at me and we locked eyes a second too long. There was nothing I could do about it. The signal went out. A moment of clear, silent hostility passed between us as hotly charged and unintentional as a thousand-volt arc through a squirrel. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
267:Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural references were the sign of a colonized mind. ~ Kamila Shamsie, #NFDB
268:With my personal work I prefer not to work from storyboards because being a director, producer and animator in one person I don't have to communicate my idea to anyone else, I can keep the feeling of the story, the story arc and structure in my head. ~ Signe Baumane, #NFDB
269:He whom you see-along the downward arc- was William, and the land that mourns his death, for living Charles and Frederick, now laments; now he has learned how Heaven loves the just ruler, and he would show this outwardly as well, so radiantly visible. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
270:I hate that she's hurt. I hate that she's been hurt, by me and by others, throughout the entire arc of her life. I barely remember pain, but when I see it in her I feel it in myself, in disproportionate measure. it creeps into my eyes, stinging, burning. ~ Isaac Marion, #NFDB
271:The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties. ~ James McGreevey, #NFDB
272:It's the same kind of preparation you do for something like this you do for anything. It doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy, the need to get the emotion and the character arc across is way harder in something like this so was more of a preparation. ~ Jessica Biel, #NFDB
273:King of England, and you, duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France... settle your debt to the king of Heaven; return to the Maiden, who is envoy of the king of Heaven, the keys to all the good towns you took and violated in France. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
274:They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage." (Rule of Four, 54-55) ~ Ian Caldwell, #NFDB
275:Closing the gate is meant to be a season-long arc, but the questions that come up in the quest, and the series of reveals and discoveries, are meant to start being the under-pinings for questions, secrets and things that will be explored in future seasons. ~ Jeremy Carver, #NFDB
276:If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to. ~ Richard Russo, #NFDB
277:Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You
were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to
me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural
references were the sign of a colonized mind. ~ Kamila Shamsie,#NFDB
278:Henry said, and sat up. His hands clawed at the air, as if for holds which only Henry could see. His gouged eye leaked and dribbled; its bottom arc now bulged pregnantly down onto his cheek. He looked around, saw Eddie shrinking back against the wall, and tried ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
279:It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
280:A creative person can suddenly realize it's not 90 minutes. They haven't got to do three acts, they haven't got to do the arc, but they can do other things. I think just as novellas turned into novels, I think that television series can begin to have that depth. ~ Steven Knight, #NFDB
281:The Archbishop often liked to quote one of his heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn was quoting one of his heroes, an abolitionist minister named Theodore Parker, who said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Perhaps ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
282:desensitization: helping patients become less reactive to certain emotions and sensations. But is this the correct goal? Maybe the issue is not desensitization but integration: putting the traumatic event into its proper place in the overall arc of one’s life. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
283:Azon töprengtem, ahogy abban a korban sokszor, hogy ki vagyok én, hogy valójában mi nézi az arcomat a tükörben. Ha az arc, amit nézek, nem én vagyok – és tudtam, hogy nem, mert akármi történne az arcommal, én attól még én lennék –, akkor mi vagyok én? És mi figyel engem? ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
284:...the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but justice needs help. Justice only happens when good people take a stand against injustice. The moral arc of the universe needs people to support it as it bends. And yes, it also needs people to pick a side. ~ Anthony Ray Hinton, #NFDB
285:In every take, that you're not sure of what they're going to cut and paste together and what the arc or the purpose or the intention of your character's journey will be in the story. You don't have control. Sometimes that's wonderful, and sometimes that can be scary. ~ Shannyn Sossamon, #NFDB
286:I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
287:I think there was a lot of working out the arc of how Manny [Daniel Radcliffe] talks. Scene to scene [in the Swiss army Man], if I would start talking a little too well, they would come in and say like, "Hey, you need to [dial back] your ability to speak" - things like that. ~ Paul Dano, #NFDB
288:Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America’s story arc. ~ Jonah Goldberg, #NFDB
289:I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. ~ Theodore Parker, #NFDB
290:She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
291:I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject. ~ David Maraniss, #NFDB
292:In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. ~ Alice McDermott, #NFDB
293:She could stay invisible forever. She didn't completely understand her power, but she was beginning to understand who she was. Goddess, she thought, and her molecules formed a smile before she rode the breeze with arc-shaped leaps, like a dolphin, up and down toward home. ~ Lynne Ewing, #NFDB
294:She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. Ine modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
295:Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet. ~ Annie Dillard, #NFDB
296:Getting the audience to cry for the Terminator at the end of T2, for me that was the whole purpose of making that film. If you can get the audience to feel emotion for a character that in the previous film you despised utterly and were terrified by, then that's a cinematic arc. ~ James Cameron, #NFDB
297:Josiah became King of Judah at the age of eight. Joan of Arc led the French Army at nineteen. King Tut led all of Egypt at age nine. Age isn't everything you think it is. Your heart and your spirit speak more than a simple candle count on your birthday cake. ~Tony (Exposing ELE) ~ Rebecca Gober, #NFDB
298:Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ Ben Shapiro, #NFDB
299:Comedy to the Senate? Well, there certainly hasn't been a satirist or a political satirist who's done that. So, that really was uncharted territory during the campaign. But I think it's a good thing. Some people thought that it was an odd career arc, but to me it made absolute sense. ~ Al Franken, #NFDB
300:His name is Juan García, but he goes by Juanga, which is the nickname of Juan Gabriel, Mexico’s most beloved singer, who is flaming but has never officially come out of the closet. How can he compare himself to him? I mean, it’s like calling yourself Jesus Christ or Joan of Arc. ~ Erika L S nchez, #NFDB
301:We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy. ~ Bill Ayers, #NFDB
302:He cranks up his arm, rears back, and throws, and the ball, taking an even more perfect path than it took off the bat, travels in a white arc, seeming to leave behind a line like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean. ~ W P Kinsella, #NFDB
303:Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones. ~ Dexter Palmer, #NFDB
304:If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
305:For me it's just so exciting to have a daughter because I do think she will have even more opportunities than I had, and I had more opportunities than certainly my grandmother had. It's the arc of history, always bending toward justice and opportunity, and she will be part of that. ~ Chelsea Clinton, #NFDB
306:Marxists are more right than wrong when they argue that the problems scientists take up,. the way they go about solving them, and even the solutions they arc inclined to accept, arc conditioned by the intellectual, social, and economic environments in which they live and work. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky, #NFDB
307:Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood. ~ Brittany Cavallaro, #NFDB
308:There’s a scientific phenomenon to describe something that happens when an object is in motion. You think you know exactly what path it will take and where it will end up. Then suddenly, for no reason you can see . . . the arc changes. It goes somewhere you would never have expected. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
309:I shall last a year, and but little longer: we must think to do good work in that year. Four things are laid upon me: to drive out the English; to bring you to be crowned and anointed at Reims; to rescue the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orléans. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
310:At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. ~ Julia Bacha, #NFDB
311:In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part. ~ Andy Serkis, #NFDB
312:It's an interesting arc. You start with a character [Doctor Strange] who's likeable and charming but very arrogant and distant. He's funny but you can see there are massive holes in his life. It's a very painful transition and all that he becomes is tested so quickly and violently. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch, #NFDB
313:We've got this arc of instability from North Africa to South Asia, and we have to pay close attention to it. And we have to build coalitions, something that I did to take on the Iranian nuclear program, and what I will do as president to make sure that we defeat these terrorist networks. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
314:He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a net is no more than holes tied together, they were bonded by what was no longer there." (ARC p. 63) ~ Anthony Marra, #NFDB
315:Instead, he slammed the throttle, gunning Sewee in a tight arc toward the strange glow. Chance’s arms pinwheeled as the boat accelerated beneath him. He toppled backward onto Shelton, who heroically tried to break his fall.
“Ugh!” Shelton lay on his back, pancaked by the much larger boy. ~ Kathy Reichs,#NFDB
316:If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record. ~ Amos Lee, #NFDB
317:Thank you for this, Megan. I have not enjoyed something—or someone—as much in too long to recall.” “Me neither.” She smiled at him, pulsing her hips upward as if trying to capture this moment for all time. “You’re one hell of a lover, Dante.” “I aim to please,” he joked. “Your aim is dead on, cowboy. ~ Bianca D Arc, #NFDB
318:I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin. ~ Said Sayrafiezadeh, #NFDB
319:It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way. ~ Kevin Spacey, #NFDB
320:I want to be William Shakespeare and Galileo and Robert Frost. I want to be Sappho. I want to be Jane Austen. I want to be Holden Caulfield and Marilyn Monroe and Joan of Arc. I’m sad to think they came before me in history, they made their mark without me.
But they were there.
They happened. ~ Brenna Yovanoff,#NFDB
321:There are very few horror shows, where you have a long running arc. Most horror shows play as a sort of an anthology. Buffy - a terrific show - had the-demon-of-the-week. Twilight Zone - X Files - these things had an anthology approach. Our show is a long running drama with the same creatures every week. ~ Glen Mazzara, #NFDB
322:The soul is symphonic. Such is the sweetness of music that it banishes human weakness and fear, and draws us back to our original state of grace, reuniting us with heaven. All creation seemed to share our joy, the sky a pure and cloudless arc above our heads, the rising sun filling the leaves with gold. ~ Mary Sharratt, #NFDB
323:The more closely [the German army] converged on [Stalingrad], the narrower became their scope for tactical manoeuvre as a lever in loosening resistance. By contrast, the narrowing of the frontage made it easier for the defender to switch his local reserves to any threatened point on the defensive arc. ~ B H Liddell Hart, #NFDB
324:Then his story started to sink into the surface, saturating him. A swampy mess at first. No plot, no arc, no thread. For a month, he simply threw handfuls of mud and gunk at the screen. He began to find rocks, then bones. And finally, he hit the vein of gold at the intersection of challenge and passion. ~ Suanne Laqueur, #NFDB
325:She Staked Her Feathers—gained An Arc
798
She staked her Feathers—Gained an Arc—
Debated—Rose again—
This time—beyond the estimate
Of Envy, or of Men—
And now, among Circumference—
Her steady Boat be seen—
At home—among the Billows—As
The Bough where she was born—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
326:I am the blade that is swung by your hand,
Slicing a rainbow's arc,
I am the clapper, but you are the bell,
Tolling the gathering dark.
If you are the singer, then I am the song,
A threnody, requiem, dirge.
You've mad me the answer for all the world’s need,
Humanity’s undying urge ~ Neal Shusterman,#NFDB
327:plot structure and character arc are integral to one another. In his classic guide Story, Robert McKee says: We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure. They’re the same thing, and therefore one cannot be more important than the other. ~ K M Weiland, #NFDB
328:We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
329:As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
330:Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
331:The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
332:There's lots of flaws and frailties and cracks in the armor, and nobody wants to put themselves out there as some kind of Joan of Arc because none of us can live up to that, but I'm grateful to be a role model and be respected because I have a whole slew of people, men and women, that I feel the same way about. ~ Bonnie Raitt, #NFDB
333:I’ve learned and unlearned all my life; it’s helped me to survive. There are no constants, nothing is immutable, only random circumstance from which our experience builds a coherent arc of life. And for that arc you have only to be truly done with one thing before moving to another. There’s an art in letting go. ~ Parke Godwin, #NFDB
334:The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the police and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
335:The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the police and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
336:Above the curving arc of the planet, a mammoth explosion plumed crimson and charcoal then erupted in a starburst of crystaline white which for a microsecond shone brighter than a sun. For the briefest moment he allowed himself to entertain the notion that they might win this battle.
Then the real battle began. ~ G S Jennsen,#NFDB
337:Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc. ~ Nancy Kress, #NFDB
338:Then word it like this: 'The chief of staff is commanded to make known to the King's forces in garrison and in the field, that the General-in-Chief of the Armies of France will not face the English on the morrow, she being afraid she may get hurt. Signed, JOAN OF ARC, by the hand of CATHERINE BOUCHER, who loves France. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
339:In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments--which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For hum beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
340:Evidently, rigging cables is therapy for the Swiss: or part of their theology. What was it that he used to say? A balanced arc between mountain rows / as servant to his master shows / the power of besieged belief / in something something something, something something something-something to do with ducks, or rainbows. ~ Mark Helprin, #NFDB
341:(Family rumor has it that he was originally cloistered off - that is relieved of his duties as a secular priest in Astoria - to free him of a persistent temptation to administer the sacramental wafer to his parishioners' lips by standing back two or three feet and trajecting it in a lovely arc over his left shoulder.) ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
342:We are having the 100th anniversary of 2015 year of the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire. And these voters take their responsibility very seriously. They like to kick the tires. They get the most up close and personal look in the entire arc of the campaign at the candidates. And debates are time consuming. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
343:Baseball calmed me down; every play and mistake had corresponding consequences, each scenario governed by a set of regulations I could memorize. It was a game I imagined my real father would love as well, the steady cadence of throwing and swinging as rhythmic as a whispered song, the innings’ narrative arc like a bedtime story. ~ Sara Novi, #NFDB
344:His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't anybody else there, or anything. There was just violet light -- and a hum.
And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
345:Plot is certainly a part of constructing a story. It’s a factor in outlining. But believe it or not, it’s the least important factor. If you focus your efforts on the Three Legs—character arc, pacing, and theme—you can change the specifics of the plot a hundred different times, and you’ll still have essentially the same story. ~ Libbie Hawker, #NFDB
346:We have a great deal of documentation from the life of Joan of Arc. But I think one thing she said is particularly telling about her character and her convictions. She said 'life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying. ~ Amy Harmon, #NFDB
347:year to read out the names at the leaping. “I almost forgot! Happy Hunger Games!” He plucks a few blackberries from the bushes around us. “And may the odds—” He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me. I catch it in my mouth and break the delicate skin with my teeth. The sweet tartness explodes across my tongue. “—be ever in your favor! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
348:He read aloud to me as I curled next to him, both of our bodies in a warm arc of light. For nearly ten years I’d wanted this…this exactly. Is he really here? I thought. Am I? Denys read on, his voice rising and falling, while a leopard moth that had got caught in the curtains stopped struggling for a moment, and realized it was free. ~ Paula McLain, #NFDB
349:At the individual level, you need to examine what you truly value, share this with key stakeholders in various life domains both to get feedback and support, and then to experiment with new ways of doing things so that - over the arc of a life - you can achieve harmony and have more of what it is that you uniquely want out of life. ~ Stewart D Friedman, #NFDB
350:Nearly every therapist I know is feeling personal stress and is dealing with clients whose reactions range from reliving experiences of being bullied to fears of deportation to a sense that the arc of the moral universe no longer seems to bend inevitably toward justice. We’re seeing families and friendships fracture along political lines. ~ Bandy X Lee, #NFDB
351:If you ever get stuck, ask yourself what happens next, then next, then next. Don’t get an idea for a situation; develop the arc for your story. Pretty much every story goes like this: Someone is complacent, they face a challenge, the challenge nearly beats them, they find a way to conquer the challenge, then emerge changed at the other end. ~ Sean Platt, #NFDB
352:The things done, the victories gained over circumstances by St. Bernard or St. Joan of Arc, by St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Teresa, George Fox, are hardly to be explained unless these great spirits had indeed a closer, more intimate, more bracing contact than their fellows with that Life "which is the light of men. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
353:There's a scientific phenomenon to describe something that happens when an object is in motion. You think you know exactly what path it will take and where it will end up. Then suddenly, for no reason you can see.... the arc changes. It goes somewhere you would never have expected."
[......]
"It's called the Magnus effect," he said. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
354:The Unknown sometimes holds surprises for the spirit of man. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will momentarily reveal the invisible and then close up again. Such visions sometimes have a transfiguring effect, turning a camel driver into a Mohammed, a goat girl into a Joan of Arc. Solitude brings out a certain amount of sublime exaltation. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
355:A single thread of self generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made... The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead. ~ Kevin Kelly, #NFDB
356:I discovered [Joan of Arc] toward the age of ten or twelve, when I went to France. I don't remember where I read about her, but I recall that she immediately took on a definite importance for me. I wanted to sacrifice my life for my country. It seems like foolishness and yet...what happens when we're children is engraved forever on our lives. ~ Indira Gandhi, #NFDB
357:For centuries, dreams have been used to communicate instruction and direction to people of purpose - great men and women. God used dreams to prepare Joseph for his future as a leader of nations. He gave battle plans to Gideon in a dream. Joan of Arc, Jacob, George Washington, Marie Curie, and the apostle Paul were all guided by their dreams. ~ Andy Andrews, #NFDB
358:Daily bread," muttered the handsome girl. "It's main and fine what He do gie us, niver a bit o' wheat-loaf mayhap for weeks and weeks togither 1" But she muttered it under her breath, and she did not dare let him hear it. I heard it; but then dogs hear and see a great many things to which men, in their arrogance and their stupidity, arc deaf and blind. ~ Ouida, #NFDB
359:A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899–1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919–40) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940–60) forms a synthesis – and a new thesis. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
360:A story is a character arc—a personality making a progression from an emotional or psychological Point A to an emotional or psychological Point B. Story is all about internal growth, not external events. It’s a character’s struggle to shed old behaviors or beliefs that have held him back from becoming his “true self”—the person he was always “meant to be. ~ Libbie Hawker, #NFDB
361:He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, "I'm sorry." No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
362:To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions? ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
363:The arc of my mind has an equal swing in all directions. I should say the same of your mind if I thought you would believe it. But we are so saturated with the notion that Time is a dimension accessible from one direction only, that you will at first probably be shocked by my saying that I can see truly as far in front of me as I can see exactly behind me. ~ Mary Hunter Austin, #NFDB
364:I've got a number of stories written so far in that mythos, more lined up to be written, and a narrative arc taking shape between them. I was experimenting with releasing the stories online for Paypal donations, so the existing ones are currently available via the blog for free download, but the ball didn't keep rolling in terms of meeting the targets I was setting. ~ Hal Duncan, #NFDB
365:Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
366:By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
Thou hast brought me, thy illimitable gift!
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
Make still my life through thee a song of joy
And all my silence wide and deep with thee.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Return to Earth,#NFDB
367:I think my science career had an arc to it that peaked in, let's say 2003/2004. I was in hog heaven, working in a corporation, getting paid pretty good money and doing really exciting research. And we had just done the Cool To Be You record, and I said well, we'll put this record out, but I can't tour it because I just want to do science. That's my gig, my future. ~ Milo Aukerman, #NFDB
368:The language they used to talk about the issues showed that they thought of them as their own. “Is there a way, other than Braintrust notes, that we could do a better job of teaching our directors the importance of an emotional arc?” asked one person. “I feel like I should be formally sharing my experience with other people,” said another. I could not have been prouder. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
369:As a writer, you know what the purpose of the scene is. It really has nothing to do with the actor so you have to really get out of that space because for actors it's a micro-focus and then you figure out your arc through what the writers have given you to say. But that arc is just one little piece of the huge arc of the whole film. It took a while to get out of that. ~ Grant Heslov, #NFDB
370:Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms. ~ Annie Dillard, #NFDB
371:I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now). ~ Gregory Orr, #NFDB
372:He threw open the shutters and was silent. “There,” he said, pointing to a shooting star. “Wish to stay together. Hurry.” She watched the star’s arc fade and wished, secure in her love’s embrace. “I wish that we’ll be together forever,” she whispered. He pressed his lips against her ear. “I wish that we’ll be together forever,” he echoed. “Now it can’t help but come to pass. ~ Lynn Kurland, #NFDB
373:...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
374:You can't let other people dictate what your art is supposed to be. That's the opposite of art. You should constantly be challenging yourself to grow and change and create and evolve. I'm into that spirit of experimental and underground music. The constant, the groping, seeking, moving forward, regardless of where it might take you at that moment. It's all part of a larger arc. ~ Mark McGwire, #NFDB
375:I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
376:Why is it a shame for me to cause
them to die and try to exterminate
them, tell me? You did not talk that
way when you used to come to my house
in Jeanne-d'Arc street. Ah! it is a
shame! You have not done as much,
with your cross of honor! I deserve
more merit than you, do you understand,
more than you, for I have killed more Prussians than you! ~ Guy de Maupassant,#NFDB
377:As an actor, you don't want to know the beginning and end to your character's arc. It makes it more fun. You're not playing the end. You're playing it realistically. You don't know where this character is going to go and what's going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch. They're going on the journey with you, as the actor and the character. ~ Jordan Gavaris, #NFDB
378:Miss Temple, perhaps you will demonstrate the proper curtsy for us?"
Without ado, Cecily temple, She Who Can Do No Wrong, settles to the floor in a long, slow, graceful arc that seems to defy gravity. It is a thing of beauty. I am hideously jealous.
"Thank you, Miss Temple."
Yes. Thank you, you little demon beast. May you marry a man who eats garlic with every meal. ~ Libba Bray,#NFDB
379:No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
380:Door in the Dark:
In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before. ~ Robert Frost,#NFDB
381:If you mess up the performance on stage, you do it again the next night. You're like alright, you let yourself off the hook, and you've got to go back in there. Whereas, with a film, I would go home and be like, "Well, I've ruined the arc of the character forever. That scene is never going to work. I know because I can never shoot it again." So, it's all miserable, but in different ways. ~ Emma Stone, #NFDB
382:He breathed and settled into the ground, feeling Earth’s motion in his bones, the slow spin of the planet, ponderous on its axis, traveling in its accustomed arc around the sun. Continental plates ground and shattered. Far away the sun lifted water from the oceans and rained it back onto the land. Life squirmed and sprouted, inhaling, exhaling, it spoke and wept, hatched and died. ~ James A McLaughlin, #NFDB
383:That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch, #NFDB
384:Then as she dwindled away to nothing he glided on towards me with increasing speed, his huge Jewish face growing like a great egg above the silken wings of his gown. I swung the sword in an arc before him but as it moved the blade came away and flew upwards into the winter darkness which had collected above us. Clinging in fear and guilt to what remained in my hand I recognized my father. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
385:Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers. ~ Paul Graham (2001) "Arc: An Unfinished Dialect of Lisp." paulgraham.com, November 2001., #NFDB
386:Make your character flawed in a serious, big, scary, potentially life-wrecking way. When you start with a badly flawed character, the arc will be all about correcting that flaw—about your character growing into a better person, the kind of mythic hero archetype he was “meant to be” but couldn’t become until this adventure—the events of your plot—pushed him to change himself for the better. ~ Libbie Hawker, #NFDB
387:The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. ~ Barbara Kingsolver, #NFDB
388:Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.” His voice was like thunder now. “You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
389:Who?”
“Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.’ I’m no god and I’ll contend no longer. Let it go, Pete, and go your way. Maybe the world will last our time and, if not, there’s nothing that can be done anyway. I’m sorry, Pete. You fought the good fight, but you lost, and I’m through. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
390:His lips were like a caress as he brushed them across mine; slow and soft.
He lingered, breathing in deeply as if he couldn't breathe without me. Eventually, he moved on to plant a tender kiss on my bottom lip, before pilling back and looking at me. His cocky grin was gone, replaced with something tender and nervous. His thumb ran over my lip once, before he let go, and smiled. -Loc 1471 ARC ~ Nichole Chase,#NFDB
391:This was the first time in his life he ever played well. “Don’t you mind people grinning in your face,” Tommy sang. “Don’t mind people grinning in your face.” Few on the platform gave him their attention, another guitar man in Harlem being as unremarkable as the arc lights along the sidewalks. “I said bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find. Don’t you mind people grinning in your face. ~ Victor LaValle, #NFDB
392:The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.
Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the labored breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another. ~ Ian Fleming,#NFDB
393:For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
394:Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rainforests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn’t compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
395:Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn’t compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
396:Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, nevertheless they give up their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it's gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that's more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
397:Mi a legnagyobb, kérded? Talán arany, vagyon, cím, rang? Ilyesmi nekem sohasem volt nagy. Igazán nagy a pillanat, egy csók, egy pohár bor, egy szép erdei gyalogút, egy virág. Sohasem lettem volna képes elveszni azért, mert aranyért akartam küzdeni. Ez nekem mindig is kicsiny volt. A nagy, amiért gondolkozni sem tudtam soha: az alkalom, egy csinos arc, vagy egy sűrűhajú göndör fej, egy alma, szóval, igen: a pillanat. ~ B la Hamvas, #NFDB
398:The conversation went on for another half hour, before this man's girlfriend, who had not said much of anything until then, remarked, Being a woman, you can't just say you don't want a child. You have to have some big plan or idea of what you're going to do instead. And it better be something great. And you had better be able to tell it convincingly - before it even happens - what the arc of your life will be. ~ Sheila Heti, #NFDB
399:...a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, fail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
400:CUP AND OCEAN
These forms we seem to be are cups floating in an ocean of living consciousness.
They fill and sink without leaving an arc of bubbles or any good-bye spray. What we
are is that ocean, too near to see, though we swim in it and drink it in. Don't
be a cup with a dry rim, or someone who rides all night and never knows the horse
beneath his thighs, the surging that carries him along. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
401:I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker. ~ Steven Spielberg, #NFDB
402:I have to go through that arc with Dolores, and I didn't know what my arc was going to be. We found out episode by episode, and the more it went on, the more I felt a change in myself and allowed myself to be strong and to get angry and to access emotions that I don't normally, and I think a lot of women don't because we're kind of conditioned not to. It's freed me in a way, and it made me find a strength in myself. ~ Evan Rachel Wood, #NFDB
403:I am not the heroine of this story.
And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others. ~ Leah Raeder,#NFDB
404:Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best. ~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
405:But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own. If I could walk into the house and say, "Froggy, I'm sorry I left." If I could hug him and unbutton his shirt and pick the petals from his hair. If I could do that, there would be no reason for me to fight this war. ~ Salvador Plascencia, #NFDB
406:Joan of Arc speaks of her “contemptible estate” as a shepherd’s daughter, and afterward, denying her father, calls him “Decrepit miser! base, ignoble wretch!” (Henry VI., Part 1, Act 1, Sc. 2, and Act 5, Sc. 4.) It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have so frequently allowed his characters to express their contempt for members of the lower orders of society if he had not had some sympathy with their opinions. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
407:If the only one who can kill an angel can’t do it, then who can?’
It’s a good question, one that takes me a minute to come up with an answer. ‘Obadiah West can. Him and his freedom fighters. I’m just a teenager.’
‘History is filled with teenagers who lead the fight. Joan of Arc. Okita Soji, the samurai. Alexander the Great. They were all teenagers when they began leading their armies. I think we’re back to those times again, kid. ~ Susan Ee,#NFDB
408:I try to just be open to what the next experience is and how it makes me feel, just reading a project, or trying to get involved with a project, or thinking about a project, and what particular emotional flavor that brings. To me, it's never really about planning the next thing, or the career arc. It's about investigating how I feel, from project to project, and finding things that I haven't explored and what that would be like. ~ Chiwetel Ejiofor, #NFDB
409:When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
410:Ah, Marilyn, Hollywood's Joan of Arc, our Ultimate Sacrificial Lamb. Well, let me tell you, she was mean, terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever known in this town. I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it's getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous. I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo. ~ Billy Wilder, #NFDB
411:I spoke the hardest words and almost broke:
'There is another kinsman still
More close to you than I. He will
Be given legal right to take
You if he will. Tomorrow make
Your prayer, and I will settle this
With elder in the gate.' No kiss
That night. But when she left, still dark,
She took my hand and drew and arc
And said, 'The God of Exodus
And flood at dawn will fight for us.'
That was our only touch. ~ John Piper,#NFDB
412:The Blue Vanda hadn’t sickened in Winterborne’s care...it had thrived.
Helen leaned over the orchid, touching the beautiful arc of its stem with a single fingertip. Shaking her head in wonder, she felt a tickle at the edge of her chin, and didn’t realize it was a tear until she saw it drop onto one of the Vanda’s leaves.
“Oh, Mr. Winterborne,” she whispered, and reached up to wipe at her wet cheeks. “Rhys. There’s been a mistake. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
413:Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168) ~ Geraldine Brooks, #NFDB
414:Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life." "Your strength?" "Your work." He tossed the branch aside. "The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . . ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
415:I don't believe in Gods and devils. I think it's man-made stories to try and help people understand where all this came from. They said 'Where did the world come from if there's no God', 'Where did life come from'. Just say 'I don't know'. Don't say some guy made a man and a woman. You have no business doing that, you know what I mean? And then He got mad and flooded the whole world; told Noah to build an arc. These are terrible stories. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
416:As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it very loose, the line of the law so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
417:I don't particularly like the idea that there's an arc to the story and that therefore in this scene you have to convey this bit of information or emotion. I like more the feeling that, of course, there is a shape to the story, but that each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and that gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that's interesting. ~ Michael Winterbottom, #NFDB
418:Joan of Arc wrote, “I know this now. Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and yet they give their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it and then it’s gone. But to surrender what you are and to live without belief is more terrible than dying—even more terrible than dying young. ~ Matthew Kelly, #NFDB
419:Alec was used to feeling a combination of affection and annoyance toward the people he loved. Typically, he’d start the relationship with a feeling of total annoyance and minimal affection, and then as time passed, the annoyance diminished and the affection grew. This described the arc of his relationship with Jace, his parabatai and closest friend, and more recently described how he’d felt about Clary Fairchild when she’d come into their lives. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
420:It's hard for comic actors used to pulling faces just to be on screen, but Tina Fey does a good job. I liked watching her. The part, though, isn't filled in. When Baker announces that she's gotten too used to the madness of Afghanistan, that she's worried she's thinking of it as normal, the sentiment comes out of nowhere. The dramatic arc in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is nonexistent. The movie evaporates in the mind like water in the Afghan desert. ~ David Edelstein, #NFDB
421:Of course, all animals have different things to learn while traversing the arc that takes them from sexually immature, vulnerable child to reproductively capable, developed adult. In our case, those include advanced language skills and critical thinking. But there’s one feature that defines adolescence in species from condors to capuchin monkeys to college freshmen. It’s a time when they learn by taking risks and sometimes making mistakes. ~ Barbara Natterson Horowitz, #NFDB
422:What I saw—what I sensed but could not yet comprehend—was the arc of a life that was not just the rise and fall of a small, forgettable man, but the story of the American Century: its booms and busts, its catastrophes and regenerations, its fortunes built up from sweat and moxie only to be dashed by bad luck and bad choices, its false hopes and promises broken by the plain fact that we are all mere antic clay, bedeviled by the mystery that animates us. ~ Ed Tarkington, #NFDB
423:I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed! ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick, #NFDB
424:We had some ups and downs, creatively, as the season went on, which is true of any show. If you compound that by the production that we go through, in terms of original songwriting and recordings, and all that is happening simultaneously, where we didn't do as good a job, as I hope we do this year, is the arcing of the storylines and the consistency of going in one direction with a character, and continuing in a really interesting way with that arc. ~ Robert Greenblatt, #NFDB
425:Then the triumph was swept away by something much stronger and deeper. Something fierce and joyous-and pure. They were clinging together, he was holding her as hard as she was holding him.
Electricity seemed to arc between them. Everywhere they touched Kaitlyn could feel the sparks. His hand tangled in her hair, and she was frighteningly moved by the tiny tugs, the little pain it caused as his fingers worked. His lips brushed against hers again and again. ~ L J Smith,#NFDB
426:Was There A Time
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has sent its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
427:Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows ... not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. ... The fire burned it's steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
428:Our title as mother isn't defined, by biology or science. It can't be measured in centimeters or the arc of a curve. Mothering is the thing all women do, with the small and big kids under our care, the neighbor boys up the street, our students, our grown nieces, the children we can only hold in our hearts, , and the ones we don't even know yet to hope for. What I'm trying to say is that none of us is off the hook here.
Humanity is crying out to be nurtured. ~ Shannan Martin,#NFDB
429:It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls' bodies ease from one place to another, from arc to the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to wait to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I'd noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance. ~ John Green, #NFDB
430:MOON VIOLENCE
The peace I will not pray for
Silence I won't sit in
Zero surrender
The manbaby splayed for my affection
I say no
I ride an animal along the shore
Any animal
I have my knife and money
A throat
I am a woman and no woman at all
The honey drips
I taste myself
I eat me in an arc on the water
Dig out my third eye
The hole I fill with sickness this time
Every time
This is what I do with love ~ Melissa Broder,#NFDB
431:A great novel didn’t involve tossing together words that didn’t interconnect. In a great novel, each sentence mattered, each word had a meaning to the overall story arc. There was always forewarning to the plot twists and the different paths the novel would travel down, too. If a reader looked closely enough, they could always witness the warning signs. They could taste the heart of every word that bled on the page, and by the end, their palate would be satisfied. ~ Brittainy C Cherry, #NFDB
432:Here’s what I love about painting. It’s not about words or voice or tone or point of view or narrative arc (perish the thought); it’s about the way certain branches stick straight out from the trunks of certain trees; it’s about the clouds that you can barely see as well as the ones that pile on top of each other; it’s about the swoop of telephone wires and the shapes and colors of shadows. A real painter recently told me that all artists want to draw telephone wires. ~ Abigail Thomas, #NFDB
433:I slashed a wide arc with Riptide and vaporized the entire front row of monsters.
Back off!” I yelled at the rest, trying to sound fierce. Behind them stood their instructor—a six-foot-tall telekhine with Doberman fangs snarling at me. I did my best to stare him down.
New lesson, class,” I announced. “Most monsters will vaporize when sliced with a celestial bronze sword. This change is perfectly normal, and will happen to you right now if you don’t BACK OFF! ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
434:... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal "the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry]." He said he didn't know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate's coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc. ~ Anna Julia Cooper, #NFDB
435:If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable. ~ Tim Wu, #NFDB
436:Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
437:It sounds to me like you're being cruel to yourself."
After a moment, I said, "How can you be anything to your self? I mean, if you can be something to your self, then your self isn't, like, singular."
"You're deflecting." I just stared at her. "You're right that self isn't simple, Aza. Maybe it's not even singular. Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It's one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light. ~ John Green,#NFDB
438:With any television series - and it's something that is taken for granted with movies because you have the whole arc within two hours - you establish who the character is and it's a two-dimensional version, or if you're lucky, a two and a half-dimensional character. Once you establish that, you can move forward and break all the rules. Once the audience has accepted who the person is, then you can do the exact opposite. What makes it funny and interesting is doing the opposite. ~ Rashida Jones, #NFDB
439:And at each hour it would seem to me only a few moments since the preceding hour had rung; the most recent would come and inscribe itself close to the other in the sky, and I would not be able to believe that sixty minutes were held in that little blue arc comprised between their two marks of gold. Sometimes, even, this premature hour would ring two strokes more than the last; there was therefore one that I had not heard, something had taken place that had not taken place for me. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
440:Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories. ~ Mark Slouka, #NFDB
441:High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
442:Somebody put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse, on to the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she became indistinct among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and like a time machine departing for the future, forever too soon for Zoyd, boomed away up the thin, cloudpressed lane. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
443:This needs to work on that level, but it has the additional strain of it's going to be profoundly scrutinized by political junkies from the right and the left who will pick apart every little thing. We are inherently dramatizing Hillary Rodham, or Hillary Clinton, who's a very famous figure. There's a lot of biographies about her, but there's also elements that are private moments, that are dramatized with an arc, and we have to take creative license. Everything is sort of a cost-benefit. ~ James Ponsoldt, #NFDB
444:Sometimes Duane imagined that he was the single crewman on a receding starship, already light-years from Earth, unable to turn around, doomed never to return, unable even to reach his destination in a human lifetime, but still connected by this expanding arc of electromagnetic radiation, rising now through the onionlike layers of old radio shows, traveling back in time as he traveled forward in space, listening to voices whose owners had long since died, moving back toward Marconi and then silence. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
445:It is not pillage, assassinations and executions that arc terrifying. What is pillage? It is the passing of property from some to others. That always has been and always will be and there is nothing in it that is terrifying. What are executions and asssassinalions? It is the passing of men from life to death. These passings have been, are and always will be, and there equally there is nothing that is terrifying. What is really terrifying is the hatred of men which engenders brigandage, theft and murder. ~ Tolstoi, #NFDB
446:I tell me:
Let these words be footsteps, because I have a long way to travel. Let the words walk the dirty streets. Let them make their way across the crying grass. Let them stand and breathe and pant smoke in winter evenings. And when they're tired and have fallen down, let them buckle to their feet ad arc around me, watchful.
I want these words to be actions.
Give them flesh and bones, I say to me, and eyes of hunger and desire, so they can write and fight me through the night. ~ Markus Zusak,#NFDB
447:Fields Of Soria
Hills of silver plate,
grey heights, dark red rocks
through which the Duero bends
its crossbow arc
round Soria, shadowed oaks,
stone dry-lands, naked mountains,
white roads and river poplars,
twilights of Soria, warlike and mystical,
today I feel, for you,
in my hearts depths, sadness,
sadness of love! Fields of Soria,
where it seems the stones have dreams,
you go with me! Hills of silver plate,
grey heights, dark red rocks.
~ Antonio Machado,#NFDB
448:You begged me for clemency once,” he called over the dead reaches of the Fold, over the hungry shrieks of the horrors he had made. “Is this your idea of mercy?” Another bullet hit the sand, only inches from us. Yes, I thought as the power rose up inside me, the mercy you taught me. I raised my hand and brought it down in a blazing arc, slashing through the air. An earth-shaking crack echoed through the Fold as the sandskiff split in half. Raw screams filled the air and the volcra shrieked in their frenzy. I ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
449:[Dewey’s ‘Reflex Arc’ paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing. ~ Louis Menand, #NFDB
450:I could not respect how he functioned so completely immersed in the structures of his professional micro-universe. Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm's exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one's emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
451:what transported me into raptures were the sweeping cloaks, the wraps, the shawls, the veils, all those yielding, magnificent, unused materials that were soft and caressing, or so sheer that I could hardly keep hold of them, or so light that they flew by me like a wind, or simply heavy with all their own weight. It was in them I saw, for the first time, truly free and infinitely variable possibilities: to be a slave girl and sold off, or to be Joan of Arc, or an old king, sorcerer; all these I now held in my hand ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
452:A Scot To Jeanne D’arc
DARK Lily without blame,
Not upon us the shame,
Whose sires were to the Auld Alliance true;
They, by the Maiden’s side,
Victorious fought and died;
One stood by thee that fiery torment through,
Till the White Dove from thy pure lips had passed,
And thou wert with thine own St. Catherine at the last.
Once only didst thou see,
In artist’s imagery,
Thine own face painted, and that precious thing
Was in an Archer’s hand
From the leal Northern land.
~ Andrew Lang,#NFDB
453:Dragon watched the heavens turn. He saw his namesake, Draco, the dragon, arc across the sky. There were men who said the brightest star in Draco had once been the constant star by which men measured the way north. It was no longer, but the heavens changed in their own slow time, far beyond the brief ages of man, so perhaps it once had been so.
He drank more wine. A star streaked across the sky, burning brightly in its swift flight. Then it was gone, extinguished as though it had never been.
Life was too damn short. ~ Josie Litton,#NFDB
454:Kiara's common sense told her to leave, that he was too angry to talk to, but she couldn't.
Before she could rethink her actions, she crossed the room and shoved him away from the bag.
Stumbling two steps before he caught himself, he gave her an astonished look. The bag swung in an arc between them. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"
"Apparently. 'Cause I'd have to be to shove at you after what I just saw, but it got your attention, didn't it? And now you're going to talk to me."
-Nykyrian & Kiara ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
455:the Sun completed the last couple of degrees in its most recent arc around the Milky Way, another type of evolution evolved here on Earth, one perhaps again as profoundly new as the origin of life: the origin of culture, a meta-biological way for ideas to propagate, accumulate, persevere, and evolve. Under this influence the biosphere has been morphing into something else entirely: something with electric lights and angst about the future; something that does comedy, chemistry, and cosmology and asks a lot of questions. One ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
456:The Bat Is Dun With Wrinkled Wings
THE BAT is dun with wrinkled wings
Like fallow article,
And not a song pervades his lips,
Or none perceptible.
His small umbrella, quaintly halved,
Describing in the air
An arc alike inscrutable,—
Elate philosopher!
Deputed from what firmament
Of what astute abode,
Empowered with what malevolence
Auspiciously withheld.
To his adroit Creator
Ascribe no less the praise;
Beneficent, believe me,
His eccentricities.
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
457:and echoes to my singing. More sounds went on—an arc-like melody created using an echo machine, and then a guitar solo at the end that was made by selecting fragments from a number of improvised solos. Finally, I sang the song after jogging in the studio, because for some reason I wanted to sound out of breath. Of course, I was singing the same words and melody as I had been on the earlier, straighter, version of the song, but now to a vastly altered musical track—a fact that also affected how I sang. The song, as it was released, ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
458:Some of my favorite scenes from the books I read are those pivotal points in the arc of the story when the guy declares his love for the girl in a huge way. But the way this one little kiss from Ben just left me feeling, I think I’ve been overlooking the best parts of romance novels. Maybe the grand gestures don’t matter nearly as much as all the inconsequential things between the two main characters. It makes me want to go back and reread everything I’ve ever read, now that I’m experiencing these things with someone in real life ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
459:Word slowly spread among Manhattan’s elite that a man of incomparable genius was digging ditches to survive. Sensing an opportunity, a band of wealthy investors eventually approached Tesla to develop an improved system of arc lighting. Although it wasn’t the ideal opportunity for Tesla, it beat shoveling dirt. Plus, the group was willing to finance the Tesla Electric Company, so Tesla agreed. As the proud owner of a new company, he immersed himself in the venture and developed a unique arc lamp of beautiful design and efficiency. Once ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
460:The magic went away. Maerlyn retired to his cave in one world, the sword of Eld gave way to the pistols of the gunslingers in another, and the magic went away. And across the arc of years, great alchemists, great scientists, and great—what?—technicians, I think? Great men of thought, anyway, that’s what I mean, great men of deduction—these came together and created the machines which ran the Beams. They were great machines but they were mortal machines. They replaced the magic with machines, do ya kennit, and now the machines are failing. In ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
461:Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success. Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination. Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
462:He had always been consumed with miserable longing, loving Win and knowing nothing would ever come of it. Now, holding her, he felt something unfamiliar, a bloom of euphoric heat. He let himself kiss her, unable to resist following the glinting arc of her eyebrow with his lips. He moved on to the rosy curve of her cheek. The tip of a nose so adorable that it seemed worthy of an entire sonnet. He loved every part of her. It occurred to him that he had not yet kissed the spaces between her toes, an omission that desperately needed to be corrected. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
463:The general arc of the story seemed to be a growing detachment from reality that had afflicted J.B.F. and some of her inner circle. Luisa likened it to the growth of spiritualism after the First World War. During the 1920s, many who had not been able to bring themselves to accept the loss of life in the trenches and the subsequent influenza epidemic had fallen prey to the belief that they could communicate with their lost loved ones from beyond the grave. They had, in effect, sidestepped grief by convincing themselves that nothing had happened. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
464:How blind to believe the civil rights movement ever ended. The civil rights movement never ends, and it never will. It has been marching since the beginning of time. Where Martin Luther King started is where Gandhi left off, and where he started, Abe Lincoln left off, and before that Whitfield all the way back to Moses. God has not moved. We have. But it is never too late. We are not at the mercy of these events. We can alter the course of history. We can stand against the dangerous arc of this story. But we need people who are willing to speak truth. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
465:Joan Of Arc
This word had Merlin said from of old:—
That out of the Oak Tree Shade
In the day of France's direst dule,
God's hand should send a Maid.
And where Domremy, by Burgundy,
Sits crowned with its oakenshaw,
Even there Joan d'Arc, the Maid of God's Ark,
The light of the day first saw.
Where spirits go, what man may know?
Yet this may of man be said:—
That, when Time is o'er and all hath sufficed,
Shall the world's chief Christ-fire rise to Christ
From the ashes of Joan the Maid.
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,#NFDB
466:Oberon asked me. After my bathtime story, he wanted to be the Genghis Khan of dogs. He wanted a harem full of French poodles, all of whom were named either Fifi or Bambi. It was an amusing habit of his: Oberon had, in the past, wanted to be Vlad the Impaler, Joan of Arc, Bertrand Russell, and any other historical figure I had recently told him about while he was getting a thorough cleansing. His Liberace period had been particularly good for my soul: You haven’t lived until you’ve seen an Irish wolfhound parading around in rhinestone-studded gold lamé. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
467:The mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and paradox, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We can't escape any of these experiences in the vast terrain of our existence. It is part of what makes life grand-and it is also why our minds take us on such a crazy ride. If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience, if we can lean into the difficulties of life and the ride of our minds, we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
468:Wouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
469:Richard Branson is probably the most visible of the private commercial space guys, and what is venture, Virgin Galactic is about is sub orbital flight. That is, you'll see a spacecraft that looks more or less like an airplane and it will fly into space, but only spend about 15 minutes. It'll go up in a parabolic arc and then fall back down, and so the customers on that flight will only get about five minutes of weightlessness. They'll get to glimpse the horizon of the Earth, take a look at it before just before they start coming back down into the atmosphere. ~ Leroy Chiao, #NFDB
470:I have often thought about this, and I have come to the conclusion that everything that I am is owed to you. You were like a gun that fired me a long way off, but the aim was yours. If you are proud of me it is because your aim was true.” The General smiled. “I could have trusted you to come up with a metaphor that I would have understood. Did you know that a shell when it comes out of the barrel wobbles badly for the first part of its trajectory? And then it settles to a perfect arc? Perhaps your behavior when you were younger was your way of wobbling. ~ Louis de Berni res, #NFDB
471:And so began my final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn't be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it's away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home. ~ Richard Russo, #NFDB
472:At the water's edge, barrels of pitch blazed like huge bonfires. Their reflection, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in long, wide stripes. The burning barrels threw light on their own smoke and on the long human shadows that flitted about the fire; but further to the sides and behind them, where the velvet ringing rushed from, was the same impenetrable darkness. Suddenly slashing it open, the golden ribbon of a rocket soared skywards; it described an arc and, as if shattering against the sky, burst and came sifting down in sparks.
- Easter Night ~ Anton Chekhov,#NFDB
473:At one point, a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, with a Joan of Arc haircut, passed right in front of the glass. When Mitchell looked at her, the girl did an amazing thing: she looked back. She met his gaze with frank sexual meaning. Not that she "wanted" to have sex with him, necessarily. Only that she was happy to acknowledge, on this late-summer evening, that he was a man and she a woman, and if he found her attractive, that was all right with her. No American girl had ever looked at Mitchell like that.
Deanie was right: Europe was a nice spot. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides,#NFDB
474:When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing? ~ Hermann von Helmholtz, #NFDB
475:In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
476:In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
477:Bless the baby !" she cried, as though she bad been a matron and a mastiff at the least. "What an ignoramus it is! Why, my dear, she will sell you as soon as she shall have had you a month or two. She sells us all; and the more we are worth the quicker we go :—provided she can do it decently. They don't know that, you sec. Oh, no!—we arc always 'stolen' or 'lost,' she tells them. And they are such out-and-out fools—they believe it! And then they send her others to replace us; and the game goes on again; and altogether she makes a very pretty annual perquisite out of her 'pets ~ Ouida, #NFDB
478:Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.
How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
479:Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action--like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
480:Onun duygusal heyecanlarının nasıl olduğunu merak ediyorum. Belli ki hiç âşık olmamış, bunu yapamayacak kadar özgür süzülen bir ruhu var; o, sevdiği birinin kollarında olmayı günü gelmeden çok önce kolayca düşleyebilen, teoride deneyimli bakirelerden biri hiç değil. Gerçek yaşamda karşılaştığı karakterler onu, düşlerinin gerçekle ilgisi konusunda düşündürecek kadar çok değildir. Ruhu hâlâ ideallerin kutsal nektarıyla besleniyor. Ama önünde uçuşan ideal, bir çoban kızı sayılmaz, ya da bir aşk romanının kadın kahramanı bir sevgili de değil; bir Jeanne d’Arc ya da öyle bir şey. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
481:Something snapped," said Madeline. She saw Perry's hand shining back in its graceful, practiced arc. She heard Bonnie's guttural voice. It occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child's nanny. And then there was the sort of evil which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
482:We need merely understand that the evolutionary process is neither random nor determined but creative. It follows the general pattern of all creativity. While there is no way of fully understanding the origin moment of the universe we can appreciate the direction of evolution in its larger arc of development as moving from lesser to great complexity in structure and from lesser to greater modes of consciousness. We can also understand the governing principles of evolution in terms of its three movements toward differentiation, inner spontaneity, and comprehensive bonding. ~ Thomas Berry, #NFDB
483:I felt as if I could walk into the house and lay on the bed, and everything would be as before. And Froggy would be happy and I would be happy too. But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to I wrote and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own.
"If I could walk into the house and say, 'Froggy, I'm sorry I left.' If I could hug him and unbutton his shirt and pick the petals from his hair. If I could do that, there would be no reason for me to fight this war. ~ Salvador Plascencia,#NFDB
484:I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much, and to kind of look to where your vision is going now. But I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one, because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in. Feeling like I'd done something horrible, "I'm a despicable person and I'm perverse," and all these things, to a sense of the power and the necessity, in a sense, of horror films and dealing with dark material. ~ Wes Craven, #NFDB
485:I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it... that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people. ~ Daniel Mendelsohn, #NFDB
486:Coming in to land at the recently opened Boston Airport (on the site of the present Logan Airport), he raced across Boston Harbor just above the water line, then at the last possible instant shot straight up into the sky to the point where it looked as if his plane must surely stall, then nonchalantly rolled to one side in a graceful arc and made a pinpoint landing, coming to a halt just before the doors of the hangar set aside for his arrival—all this in a plane with no brakes or forward visibility. The delighted roar of the crowd could be heard on Boston Common, three miles away. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
487:Most remember Hitchcock as a skilled storyteller, but what few know is that the director shot his movies using two separate scripts. The first, known as “the Blue Script,” was entirely functional. In it were all the tangible onscreen components, including dialogue, props, camera angles and set descriptions. The second script, which Hitchcock referred to as “the Green Script,” chronicled in fine detail the emotional arc, or “beats,” of the film he was shooting. Hitchcock relied on both scripts, but the Green Script reminded him how he wanted moviegoers to feel, and at what point, ~ Martin Lindstrom, #NFDB
488:The pineal gland is a link between the consciousness of man and the invisible worlds of Nature. Whenever the arc of the pituitary body contacts this gland there are flashes of temporary clairvoyance, but the process of making these two work together consistently is one requiring not only years bur lives of consecration and special physiological and biological training. This third eye is the Cyclopean eye of the ancients, for it was an organ of conscious vision long before the physical eyes were formed, although vision was a sense of cognition rather than sight in those ancient days. ~ Manly P Hall, #NFDB
489:Static cackled from the cafeteria speaker. A bored female voice come on. “Victoria Brennan, please report to the headmaster's office. Victoria Brennan to the headmaster's office.”
Classmates glanced our way. Whispers sprang up around me.
“Not good.” Shelton was reaching for his earlobe.
“Tell them you have amnesia,” Hi said. “Or dementia. Pretend you're Joan of Arc.”
“Thanks for the support, guys. If I'm not back for class, look for my body in the harbor.”
Hiram's hand flew up. “I call her iTunes collection. Shelton can have the mutt.”
“Nice. ~ Kathy Reichs,#NFDB
490:Did Genghis Khan take his coffee black?" Oberon asked me. After my bathtime story, he wanted to be the Genghis Khan of dogs. He wanted a harem full of French poodles, all of whom were named either Fifi or Bambi. It was an amusing habit of his: Oberon had, in the past, wanted to be Vlad the Impaler, Joan of Arc, Bertrand Russell, and any other historical figure I had recently told him about while he was getting a thorough cleansing. His Liberace period had been particularly good for my soul: You haven’t lived until you’ve seen an Irish wolfhound parading around in rhinestone-studded gold lamé. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
491:Aş vrea să-i cunosc adevăratele sentimente.Cred că n-a fost niciodată îndrăgostită,prea pare cu capu-n lună;în orice caz nu face parte din categoria demoazelelor,teoretic pline de experienţă,pentru care e atât de uşor să se imagineze,mult înante de vremea cuvenită,în braţele unui soţ iubit.Personajele din viaţa reală cu care ea a avut de-a face n-au reuşit să-i tulbure modul de a concepe visul şi realitatea.Inima ei e hrănită şi acum cu ambrozia divină a iealurilor.Numai că idealul ei nu e nici o veselă păstoriţă,nici o eroină de roman,nici o îndrăgostită,ci o Jeanne d'arc sau cam aşa ceva. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
492:L’orgueil, c’est se prendre pour ce qu’on n’est pas et rabaisser les autres; la fierté, c’est savoir ce qu’on est et ne pas se laisser abaisser. La fierté n’empêche pas l’homme de s’abaisser devant ce qui le dépasse; elle est loin d’être contraire à l’humilité vraie, quoi qu’en disent les moralistes les plus superficiels.
A la question : « Croyez-vous en Dieu? » Jeanne d’Arc répondit : « Mieux que vous! » —
Un autre exemple d’humble fierté est cette réponse d’un guru hindou à un voyageur mondain : « Je ne suis pas digne d’être votre maître, et vous n’êtes pas digne d’être mon disciple. » ~ Frithjof Schuon,#NFDB
493:The second is that some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl “I’m here for you”, the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed, or maybe just acknowledged a commitment. It has nothing to do with guilt for earlier crimes (although she has a pretty fair understanding of what she deserves), or any hope of redemption. It’s just the outermost point on an arc. She’s risen as far as she can, and now she’s falling again, no longer in control (if she ever was to start with) of her own movements. ~ M R Carey, #NFDB
494:So how does it happen that -- while most people instinctively try to save themselves and their families from a catastrophe -- a few slow down, look back, and suddenly reach out to strangers? Instead of fleeing in the opposite direction, a few wade into the rising waters to try to yank the drowning onto higher land. ... In the coming months and years, I would learn that -- just as there is no blood test to identify who will jump into the fray -- there is no simple biographical arc either. No resume can predict why this man or woman, at a safe remove from crisis, suddenly announces, "This is my fight. ~ Melissa Fay Greene, #NFDB
495:In The Binnacle
The Church's compass, if you please,
Has two or three (or more) degrees
Of variation;
And many a soul has gone to grief
On this or that or t'other reef
Through faith unreckoning or brief
Miscalculation.
Misguidance is of perils chief
To navigation.
The obsequious thing makes, too, you'll mark,
Obeisance through a little arc
Of declination;
For Satan, fearing witches, drew
From Death's pale horse, one day, a shoe,
And nailed it to his door to undo
Their machination.
Since then the needle dips to woo
His habitation.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
496:With a mixture of naïveté and British arrogance, she had always thought of London as the center of all culture and knowledge, but Paris was a revelation. The city was astonishingly modern, making London look like a dowdy country cousin. And yet for all its intellectual and social advancements, the streets of Paris were nearly medieval in appearance; dark, narrow and crooked as they twined through arrondissements of artfully shaped buildings. It was a messy, delightful assault to the senses, with architecture that ranged from the gothic spires of ancient churches to the solid grandeur of the Arc de Triomphe. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
497:Only after the trial did things come into focus, that night taking on the now familiar arc. Every detail and blip made public. There are times I try to guess what part I might have played. What amount would belong to me. It's easiest to think I wouldn't have done anything, like I would have stopped them, my presence the mooring that kept Suzanne in the human realm. That was the wish, the cogent parable. But there was another possibility that slouched along, insistent and unseen. The bogeyman under the bed, the snake at the bottom of the stairs: maybe I would have done something, too. Maybe it would have been easy. ~ Emma Cline, #NFDB
498:Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless. ~ Adrienne Maree Brown, #NFDB
499:I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. “The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. That ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
500:1172
Under The Light, Yet Under
949
Under
Under
Under
Under
the
the
the
the
Light, yet under,
Grass and the Dirt,
Beetle's Cellar
Clover's Root,
Further than Arm could stretch
Were it Giant long,
Further than Sunshine could
Were the Day Year long,
Over
Over
Over
Over
the
the
the
the
Light, yet over,
Arc of the Bird—
Comet's chimney—
Cubit's Head,
Further than Guess can gallop
Further than Riddle ride—
Oh for a Disc to the Distance
Between Ourselves and the Dead!
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
501:The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer … They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth … [Then the Creator said]: 'They know all … what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!… Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
502:Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
503:Ford leaped to the controls—only a few of them made any immediate sense to him so he pulled those. The ship shook and screamed as its guidance rocket jets tried to push it every which way simultaneously. He released half of them and the ship spun round in a tight arc and headed back the way it had come, straight toward the oncoming missiles. Air cushions ballooned out of the walls in an instant as everyone was thrown against them. For a few seconds the inertial forces held them flattened and squirming for breath, unable to move. Zaphod struggled and pushed in manic desperation and finally managed a savage kick at a small lever ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
504:When all these data were collected they came into the hands of Kepler,* who then tried to analyse what kind of motion the planets made around the sun. And he did this by a method of trial and error. At one stage he thought he had it; he figured out that they went round the sun in circles with the sun off centre. Then Kepler noticed that one planet, I think it was Mars, was eight minutes of arc off, and he decided this was too big for Tycho Brahe to have made an error, and that this was not the right answer. So because of the precision of the experiments he was able to proceed to another trial and ultimately found out three things. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
505:Contemplation
I muse upon the distant town
In many a dreamy mood.
Above my head the sunbeams crown
The graveyard's giant rood.
The lupin blooms among the tombs.
The quail recalls her brood.
Ah, good it is to sit and trace
The shadow of the cross;
It moves so still from place to place
O'er marble, bronze and moss;
With graves to mark upon its arc
Our time's eternal loss.
And sweet it is to watch the bee
That reve's in the rose,
And sense the fragrance floating free
On every breeze that blows
O'er many a mound, where, safe and sound,
Mine enemies repose.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
506:Merit,” Catcher said, sitting beside Mallory on the couch, an arm around her shoulders. “It’s nice to see you clothed again.”
“And now that she is,” Gabriel said, standing, “we should get moving.”
“Where are we going, exactly?” Catcher asked.
“To a land beyond space and time,” Jeff said drawing an arc in the air. “Where the rules of mortals have no meaning.”
Gabriel looked up at the ceiling as if he might find patience there. “We’re going to the Brecks’ backyard. Into the woods, right here in Illinois, where most of us are quite mortal.”
“Illi-noise,” Jeff said with cheeky enthusiasm. “Because the wolves will howl. ~ Chloe Neill,#NFDB
507:Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. The albums on my mother’s shelves are full of family photographs. But also other things. A starling with a crooked beak. A day of hoarfrost and smoke. A cherry tree thick with blossom. Thunderclouds, lightning strikes, comets and eclipses: celestial events terrifying in their blind distances but reassuring you, too, that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course. ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB
508:LOVE'S BAPTISM. I'm ceded, I've stopped being theirs; The name they dropped upon my face With water, in the country church, Is finished using now, And they can put it with my dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools I've finished threading too. Baptized before without the choice, But this time consciously, of grace Unto supremest name, Called to my full, the crescent dropped, Existence's whole arc filled up With one small diadem. My second rank, too small the first, Crowned, crowing on my father's breast, A half unconscious queen; But this time, adequate, erect, With will to choose or to reject. And I choose — just a throne. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
509:The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer … They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth … [Then the Creator said]: “They know all … what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!… Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods ? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
510:A magyarságnak mindig legalább két arca van: vagy és vagy, Szent István és Koppány, lázadó és lojális, józan és tékozló, az, aki a gyepűk között él, és aki szétszóródik, a „keleti és a nyugati", a zártság és nyíltság, a közöny az idegennel szemben, de ugyanakkor az, hogy teljesen nyíltan fogadja be a külső hatásokat. „A két arc úgy egymáshoz tartozik, hogy egyiknek sincs a másik nélkül kifejezése… jellemzően kitűnik ez már abból is, hogy egyik a másik szerepét is vállalhatja… mind a kettő csak eshetőség és alkalom, és szüntelenül keresnie kell közöttük az egyensúlyt, lépésről lépésre meg kell alkudnia velük, hogy belőlük valóságot formáljon. ~ B la Hamvas, #NFDB
511:The god of Delos, proud in victory,
Saw Cupid draw his bow's taut arc, and said:
'Mischievous boy, what are a brave man's arms
To you? That gear becomes my shoulders best.
My aim is sure; I wound my enemies,
I wound wild beasts; my countless arrows slew
But now the bloated Python, whose vast coils
Across so many acres spread their blight.
You and your loves! You have your torch to light them!Let that content you; never claim my fame!'
And Venus' son replied: 'Your bow, Apollo,
May vanquish all, but mine shall vanquish you.
As every creature yields to power divine,
So likewise shall your glory yield to mine. ~ Ovid,#NFDB
512:The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
513:Every particular society, when it is narrow and unified, is estranged from the all-encompassing society. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners. They arc only men. They arc nothing in his eyes - This is a drawback, inevitable but not compelling. The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious. iniquitous. But disinterestedness, equity, and concord reigned within his walls. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
514:Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings us together in a valley community, a story that brings together the human community with every living being in the valley, a story that brings us together under the arc of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night, a story that will drench us with rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to one another that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites in its downward journey, the story that Storm King Mountain images forth in the fullness of its grandeur. ~ Thomas Berry, #NFDB
515:she knows why she hasn’t left: because she believed that things would change. That they would get better. She wasn’t sure why—she just thought it would. Such an idea had been engraved in her mind since childhood: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It is the American story, or so she thought. Yet she’s realized all too late that it is exactly that—a story. An idea, a fiction, or maybe even a piece of propaganda designed to keep her here and quiet. Perhaps change isn’t always slow and incrementally positive. Perhaps it can be fast, and for the worse. Perhaps things will never get better. Perhaps the present is also the future. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett, #NFDB
516:My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don’t remember mixed genes with a woman I can’t recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.
This is the arc of the average life—unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable—and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity. ~ Isaac Marion,#NFDB
517:[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up
You jerk you didn't call me up
I haven't seen you in so long
You probably have a fucking tan
& besides that instead of making love tonight
You're drinking your parents to the airport
I'm through with you bourgeois boys
All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but
Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set
Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time
Wake up! It's the middle of the night
You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander
~ Bernadette Mayer,#NFDB
518:What an excellent and really marvellous thing is this materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah! when one does have it, one is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without uneasiness,—places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of conscience,—and that they shall enter the tomb with their digestion accomplished. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
519:And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance. ~ John Green, #NFDB
520:Faith is the belief that certain outcomes will happen, and hope is the belief that certain outcomes can happen. So when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," he is speaking from a place of faith. He is confident that justice is inevitable, even if it may come in another lifetime. Faith is often rooted in the belief of a higher power, in God. Hope on the other hand would mean reframing the statement to say, "The arc of the moral universe is long, and it will bend toward justice, if we bend it. Faith is rooted in certainty, hope is rooted in possibility, and they both require their own different kinds of work. ~ DeRay Mckesson, #NFDB
521:The power of her climax rolled over him, firing his senses. If he’d had any doubts, this would have blown them all away. He was blown away by the experience. Everything was new again—with her. “Mmm. I’m glad you feel that way.” Her sexy tone whispered through his mind. “I feel the same.” “I know, my love.” He eased away after licking the wounds on her neck closed with a little zap of his magic. “You are my light, Megan. My sun. My world.” Her breath caught, and he knew she was as touched by what they shared as he was. All was finally right with his world. She was the center of his universe, and he’d never be alone again. They’d never be alone again. It was a calming, sustaining thought. ~ Bianca D Arc, #NFDB
522:Having a character change during the course of the screenplay is not a requirement if it doesn't fit your character. But transformation, change, seems to be an essential aspect of our humanity, especially at this time in our culture. I think we're all a little like Melvin (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as it Gets. Melvin may be complex and fastidious as a person, but his dramatic need is expressed toward the end of the film when he says, 'When I'm with you I want to be a better person.' I think we all want that. Change, transformation, is a constant of life, and if you can impel some kind of emotional change within your character, it creates an arc of behavior and adds another dimension to who he/she is. ~ Syd Field, #NFDB
523:Graduates: Throughout your lives, do not be afraid of saying what you believe is right, no matter how unpopular it may be, especially when it comes to defending the rights of others. “Standing up for the rights of others is in some ways even more important than standing up for your own rights. Because when people seek to repress freedom for some, and you remain silent, you are complicit in that repression and you may well become its victim. “Do not be complicit, and do not follow the crowd. Speak up, and fight back. “You will take your lumps, I can assure you of that. You will lose some friends and make some enemies. But the arc of history will be on your side, and our nation will be stronger for it. “Now, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
524:The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman's smile. Because if you're forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you've simply chosen to live alone, you're easily flattered by a young woman's seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age. ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
525:… I do not feel that life is a downhill run. Nor do I think of it as an arc that rises steadily until it reaches its apogee, tapers, and arches back to earth. The fate we choose is inscribed in multiple flights. Some follow the gravity of rise and fall, while others - those of the spirit for example - may never head downward, but climb steadily to the end, where they just drop cliff-like into the dark.
Consequently, there is no right time for last words, no point of demarcation for our adieux. There is no designated moment to set down the summary thoughts of a mind still counting. Whether you begin to die at the beginning … or whether you burn brightly to the end, you can’t wait forever to pass to others what you have learned… ~ David Horowitz,#NFDB
526:Speak
Obscured the sun, the world is dark;
Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc,
Send down thy spark.
Let every heart in France be stirred,
By such an all-compelling word
As thou once heard.
Say to each soul, 'Lo! I am near;
My voice still speaks in accents clear.
Be still and hear.
'The France I saved can not be lost;
Though tempest-torn and terror-tossed,
Count not the cost.
'Give as the maid of Domrémy
Gave all-gave life itself to see
Her country free.
'Back of great France my spirit towers
To aid her through the darkest hours
With God's own powers!'
Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc
Shine through the night, speak through the dark
The while we hark.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB
527:Don't go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don't see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.
I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.
There's nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don't know where I'm going.
You're the road, and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, In The Arc Of Your Mallet
,#NFDB
528:I'M Ceded—i'Ve Stopped Being Theirs
508
I'm ceded—I've stopped being Theirs—
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading—too—
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace—
Unto supremest name—
Called to my Full—The Crescent dropped—
Existence's whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.
My second Rank—too small the first—
Crowned—Crowing—on my Father's breast—
A half unconscious Queen—
But this time—Adequate—Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
529:Maybe there was something special about her that affected his power so strongly. He wouldn’t be surprised. The woman herself affected him as no woman ever had. He wanted so badly to be inside her, to know whether she was silent, or a screamer, when he made love to her. He wanted to hold her in the aftermath and bask in the knowledge that he had brought her pleasure. He wanted a lot of things he’d never contemplated before, and didn’t know if he deserved. He was only here for a short time. A mission that would be over sooner rather than later. Did he dare get involved with a woman who could break his seldom-seen heart? Kate frightened him. Him. The big, bad, black cat. His mother would laugh if she knew he was afraid of a small, human woman. ~ Bianca D Arc, #NFDB
530:Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. ~ Siri Hustvedt, #NFDB
531:...but tonight he remembered only the warm rooms and the faces of men and women bent over their bowls of steaming soup, and the children already asleep in their beds. He felt for them all a profound love, and he glowed. The moment of his loving was in the world of time merely sixty seconds ticked out by his watch, but in another dimension it was an arc of light encircling the city and leaving not one heart within it untouched by blessedness. Then the clocks began to strike, and the light of the ugly little man's moment of self-forgetfulness was drawn back again into the deep warmth within him. And he understood nothing of what had happened to him, only that now, for a little while, for a few moments or a few days, he would be happy and feel safe. ~ Elizabeth Goudge, #NFDB
532:She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor. And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance. ~ John Green, #NFDB
533:Viable
Motion's the dead giveaway,
eye catcher, the revealing risk:
the caterpillar sulls on the hot macadam
but then, risking, ripples to the bush:
the cricket, startled, leaps the
quickest arc: the earthwrom, casting,
nudges a grassblade, and the sharp robin
strikes: sound's the other
announcement: the redbird lands in
an elm branch and tests the air with
cheeps for an answering, reassuring
cheep, for a motion already cleared:
survival organizes these means down to
tension, to enwrapped, twisting suasions:
every act or non-act enceinte with risk or
prize: why must the revelations be
sound and motion, the point, too, moving and
saying through the scary opposites to death.
~ Archie Randolph Ammons,#NFDB
534:In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
535:A demigod!" one snarled.
"Eat it!" yelled another.
But that's as far as they got before I slashed a wide arc with Riptide and vaporized the entire front row of monsters.
"Back off!" I yelled at the rest, trying to sound fierce. Behind them stood their instructor--a six-foot tall telekhine with Doberman fangs snarling at me. I did my best to stare him down.
"New lesson, class," I announced. "Most monsters will vaporize when sliced with a celestial bronze sword. This change is completely normal, and will happen to you right now if you don't BACK OFF!"
To my surprise, it worked. The monsters backed off, but there was at least twenty of them. My fear factor wasn't going to last that long.
I jumped out of the cart, yelled, "CLASS DISMISSED!" and ran for the exit. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
536:It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you." Among ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
537:The first touch came when Bull was lying full-length along the skirting board in the little six-foot vestibule that connected the bathroom to the kitchenette and the front door. He was the picture of powerlessness. His sensible, striped M&S shirt was rucked up around his back, his white, cotton Y- fronts dewlapped over the flat surfaces of his buttocks. Alan’s fine and tapering hand described an arc over him. He knelt as if stroking a cat. At the zenith of the arc Alan’s palm made contact with the small of Bull’s back. Bull stiffened bur did not cry out or resist…Oh, cruel deceiver! For how could Margoulis not have known that in this moment of breakdown, of cracking distress, the thing that Bull, of course, still desired most ardently, was the dry, sensible touch of a doctor. ~ Will Self, #NFDB
538:It’s not fair,” Sam grumbled. “People always say ‘when you’re older’ Where would the world be if Alexander the Great had ‘waited until he was older’? And how about Joan of Arc? If she’d ‘waited until she was older’, the English might have conquered and colonized France. Who decides when someone’s old enough to make decisions for themselves? It should be down to the individual.” He ranted on for a while longer, complaining about adults and the “corrupt, bloody system” and about the time being ripe for a children’s revolution. It was like listening to a crazy politician on television. “If a child wants to open a chocolate factory, let him open one,” Sam stormed. “If he wants to become a jockey, fine. If he wants to be an explorer and set off for strange, cannibal-populated islands, OK! ~ Darren Shan, #NFDB
539:Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing. . . . Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival. ~ David Allen, #NFDB
540:As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom. ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
541:A vast canvass had been stretched across the back of [the stage] and painted to look like an idealized vision of Golden Square stretching off into a hazy distance. Before it, model town houses had been erected to perfect the illusion. It tricked the eye very well until a bloody, slashed-up man vaulted over the parapets and rolled to the ground in the deep upstage. He looked like a giant, thirty feet tall, fee-fie-fo-fumming around Golden Square and bleeding on the bowling green, which was most inexplicable, until a moment later, the very fabric of the universe was rent open, for a blade of watered steel had been shoved through the taught canvas upstage and slashed across it in a great arc, tearing the heavens asunder. Through the gap leapt Jack Shaftoe, and then giants dueled in Golden Square. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
542:Weak sunlight slanted across the table, flecked with glimmering, floating dust motes, some of them swirling around the light blue petals. Confusion spread through her as she saw the inflorescence of glowing blooms. The broad ovoid leaves were clan and glossy, and the roots anchored among the crushed clay pottery shards had been carefully trimmed and kept damped.
The Blue Vanda hadn't sickened in Winterborne's care... it had thrived.
Helen leaned over the orchid, touching the beautiful arc of its stem with a single fingertip. Shaking her head in wonder, she felt a tickle at the edge of her chin, and didn't realize it was a tear until she saw it drop onto one of the Vanda's leaves.
"Oh, Mr. Winterborne," she whispered, and reached up to wipe at her wet cheeks. "Rhys. There's been a mistake. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
543:You will have your earthly inheritance without all the death and destruction and bloodshed of the Day of the Lord.” And then he spilled the barley. “All I ask is one teeny tiny thing in return. All you have to do is fall down and worship me.” Jesus looked Belial in his eyes, deep dark pools of malevolence. He whispered back, “Be gone, Accuser. For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” Belial sighed and said, “Fine, have it your way. But just let it be written, I gave you the chance to avoid Armageddon and you blew it.” He grabbed his cloak off of Jesus and swung it around in an arc, creating a whirlwind of snow that blinded Jesus for a moment in its swirling white coldness. Jesus found himself in the desert again. But now he was alone. Belial was gone. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
544:But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone. ~ Junot D az, #NFDB
545:Phury...I was going to come find you before I left."
With a towel under his chin, Z looked at his reflection in the mirror, seeing his new yellow eyes. He thought of the arc of his life and knew most of it was for shit. But there had been two things that hadn't been. One female. And one male.
"I love you," he said in a rough voice, realizing it was the first time he'd ever said the words to his twin. "Just wanted to get that out."
Phury stepped in behind him.
Z coiled in horror at his twin's reflection. No hair. Scar down his face. Eyes flat and lifeless.
"Oh, sweet Virgin," Z breathed. "What the fuck did you do to yourself...?"
"I love you, too, my brother." Phury raised his arm. In his hand was a hypodermic syringe, one of the two that had been left for Bella. "And you need to live. ~ J R Ward,#NFDB
546:Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I'm not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it's shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with that statue of the women missing her arms. And there are cafes and bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
I've heard they don't like Americans, and they don't like white sneakers. ~ Stephanie Perkins,#NFDB
547:The most fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner’s half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run; working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after-theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
548:Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends.
Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was.
Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill.
Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia.
Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him.
Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.
And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance. ~ Iain Thomas,#NFDB
549:Spring Mcmxl
London Bridge is falling down, Rome's burnt and Babylon
The Great is now but dust; yet still Spring must
Swing back through Time's continual arc to earth.
Though every land become as a black field
Dunged with the dead, drenched by the dying's blood,
Still must a punctual goddess waken and ascend
The rocky stairs, up into earth's chilled air,
And pass upon her mission through those carrion ranks,
Picking her way among a maze of broken brick
To quicken with her footsteps the short sooty grass between;
While now once more their futile matchwood empires flare and blaze
And through the smoke men gaze with bloodshot eyes
At the translucent apparition, clad in trembling nascent green
Of one they still can recognize, though scarcely understand.
~ David Gascoyne,#NFDB
550:Joan of Arc was no fierce amazon. Far from it. There was nothing even slightly “manly” about her. On the contrary, it was her youth, innocence, purity, and holiness that made it possible for her to do what she did. Only just past girlhood she was deeply affected by the suffering she saw in the battles around her, never becoming inured to the carnage and agonies of war, as a male soldier typically will do. It was precisely her vulnerability and womanly virtue that stunned and inspired the rough soldiers in a way that no man ever could do. It was because of these qualities that they were in awe of her and respected her. Though her spirit was as large as anyone’s who has ever lived, she herself was neither big nor strong. In other words, there could never be a male Joan of Arc. The very idea is a laughable oxymoron. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
551:Earlier that morning, Escoffier ad brought up a large bucket of white rose petals, white violets and vanilla orchids that he'd been thinking of creating a dish with. The pâtissier had crystalized some of the flowers, and left him a plate of meringue shells, a handful of vanilla beans and fresh cream. He wanted to create a new dish for Sarah, a sweet, something surprising, something to engage her. She'd been playing Joan of Arc, the virgin saint, a seventeen-year-old girl. It was a role she made famous, difficult at any age, but for a woman in her mid-forties, it was nearly impossible.
Escoffier tossed a handful of white rose petals into Rosa's bathwater.
The white skin. The white roses. 'The essence of Saint Joan is in shades of white, like shades of innocence.'
'Spun sugar,' he thought. 'Vanilla cream, of course. ~ N M Kelby,#NFDB
552:Ismered az ifjúság nagyszerű örömeit?
A kedves pajtások, a vidám szó és a nevető arc örömét?
A derűs, fénysugaras nap örömét, a kifullasztó játékok örömét?
Az édes muzsika örömét? a fényes bálterem és a táncolók örömét?
A bőséges ebéd, a nagy mulatás és ivás örömét?
És – ó, felsőbbrendű lelkem! Ismered a töprengés örömét?
A szabad, magányos szív, az érző, szomorú szív örömét?
A magányos séta örömét, a lélek fáradt már, de mégis büszke; a szenvedés és harc örömét?
A kínlódást, az elragadtatást, a csendes tűnődés örömeit éjjel és nappal?
A halálra-gondolás, a nagy Idő és Tér örömeit?
A szebb, emelkedettebb szerelem elképzelésének profétikus gyönyörűségeit, az isteni feleséget, az édes, sírig hű, tökéletes barátságot?
Minden örömödet, mindazt, ami hozzád méltó, ó, halhatatlan lélek! ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
553:We shrink therefore from God, knowing that He wants to enrich our being, rather than our having—that He wishes to elevate our nature, not to submerge and lose it in trifles. He has called us to the superior vocation of being His children, of partaking of His nature, and of being related to Him as branches to a vine. Few of us completely want that elevation; it is our petty desire to have more,not to share the glory of being more.We want the poor shadows, not the light—the sparks, and not the sun—the arc, and not the circle. As the desire for the world and things increases in us, God makes less and less appeal. We hold back, our fists closed about our few pennies, and thus lose the fortune He holds out to us. That is why the initial step of coming to God is so hard. We cling to our nursery toys and lose the pearl of great price. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
554:Aeropagus
WHERE suns chase suns in rhythmic dance,
Where seeds are springing from the dust,
Where mind sways mind with spirit-glance,
High court is held, and law is just.
No hill alone, a sovereign bar;
Through space the fiery sparks are whirled
That draw and cling, and shape a star, That burn and cool, and form a world
Whose hidden forces hear a voice
That leads them by a perfect plan:
'Obey,' it cries, 'with steadfast choice,
Law shall complete what law began.
'Refuse, - behold the broken arc,
The sky of all its stars despoiled;
The new germ smothered in the dark,
The snow-pure soul with sin assoiled.'
The voice still saith, 'While atoms weave
Both world and soul for utmost joy,
Who sins must suffer, - no reprieve;
The law that quickens must destroy.'
~ Edith Wharton,#NFDB
555:How had the Maid, a lowly commoner, gained an audience at the royal court? How had she, an illiterate young woman from a tiny village at the very edge of the kingdom, come to know so much about the complex political situation in France, and indeed, to see into the deepest recesses of her sovereign's heart?...The answers to these questions have remained hidden, not because the mystery surrounding Joan cannot be penetrated, but because their solution is inextricably tied to the life of another woman entirely, that of Yolande of Aragon, queen of Sicily...For those who wonder after reading these pages how it is possible that the evidence of Yolande's involvement in the story of Joan of Arc has never before been adequately explored, I can only respond that there is no more effective camouflage in history than to have been born a woman. ~ Nancy Goldstone, #NFDB
556:In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
557:Kant’s ethic is important, because it is anti-utilitarian, a priori, and what is called “noble.” Kant says that if you are kind to your brother because you arc fond of him, you have no moral merit: an act only has moral merit when it is performed because the moral law enjoins it. Although pleasure is not the good, it is nevertheless unjust—so Kant maintains— that the virtuous should suffer. Since this often happens in this world, there must be another world where they are rewarded after death, and there must be a God to secure justice in the life hereafter. He rejects all the old metaphysical arguments for God and immortality, but considers his new ethical argument irrefutable. Kant himself was a man whose outlook on practical affairs was kindly and humanitarian, but the same cannot be said of most of those who rejected happiness as the good. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
558:Pitching Horseshoes
Some of your buddies might come around
for a couple of beers and a game,
but most evenings, you pitched horseshoes
alone. I washed up the dishes
or watered the garden to the thudding
sound of the horseshoe in the pit,
or the practiced ring of metal
against metal, after the silent
arc—end over end. That last
summer you played a seamless, unscored
game against yourself, or night
falling, or coming in the house.
You were good at it. From the porch
I watched you become shadowless,
then featureless, until I knew
you couldn't see either, and still
the dusk rang out, your aim that easy;
between the iron stakes you had driven
into the hard earth yourself, you paced
back and forth as if there were a decision
to make, and you were the one to make it
~ Claudia Emerson,#NFDB
559:Slade lowered his head to kiss her lips once, very gently. “They will love you because you’re the only woman in the world who can complete me. They will love your kind heart and gentle ways. Your fierce courage and Goddess-given magic. How could they not, when I love you with all my being? They’ll see what I see when I look at you.” He kissed her again, this time with more passion. “They will see a bright and loving future for not only us, but for the Clan. Great-grandmother will especially love the fact that you are a priestess.” “I hope you’re right.” She bit her lip nervously, but Slade kissed her again, taking her lip between his own teeth for a quick, painless nip before letting her go again. “Trust me, kitten. I know them as well as I know myself. Eventually, you will too. Snowcats live a very long time. You’ll have centuries to get used to them. ~ Bianca D Arc, #NFDB
560:At a moment in history somebody says, “I was there.” I wasn’t. They were marching down to the Arc de Triomphe and I didn’t know it. All I knew is I wanted some perfume and scarves. I went to the Galerie Lafayette, a great department store. Nobody was on the street. We walked through the store, wearing boots, with the .45s on the hip and wearin’ a helmet. Great. Out from behind the counters came all those little French girls. They followed us: “Ohhh! Marvelous Américain.” We bought scarves and all of a sudden someone said, in broken English, they are firing on the Place de la Concorde. The diehards were in the eaves of the building sniping at the parade. They had to rout ’em out. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t see the parade. I wasn’t on the Place de la Concorde at this marvelous moment in history. I was in the goddamn Galerie Lafayette buying perfume and scarves. Shit. ~ Studs Terkel, #NFDB
561:Improvisations: Light And Snow: 10
It is night time, and cold, and snow is falling,
And no wind grieves the walls.
In the small world of light around the arc-lamp
A swarm of snowflakes falls and falls.
The street grows silent. The last stranger passes.
The sound of his feet, in the snow, is indistinct.
What forgotten sadness is it, on a night like this,
Takes possession of my heart?
Why do I think of a camellia tree in a southern garden,
With pink blossoms among dark leaves,
Standing, surprised, in the snow?
Why do I think of spring?
The snowflakes, helplessly veering,,
Fall silently past my window;
They come from darkness and enter darkness.
What is it in my heart is surprised and bewildered
Like that camellia tree,
Beautiful still in its glittering anguish?
And spring so far away!
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
562:I’m not sure what to say about this book and this series and this piece of my soul. I’ve spent almost every day of the last eight years with Ty and Zane, and saying good-bye to them as this series comes to a close is bittersweet. My world will be an emptier place without them. Ty and Zane started their lives as a message between myself and my former cowriter. A message asking, “What should we do now?” “How about murder?” was my reply, and that was that. We wrote Cut & Run, and we finished it with enough content to fill two books, and in the end Ty and Zane walked off into the sunset, happy and in love. It didn’t feel right. After a day to let the ending settle, it was painfully obvious that this was not the proper end of the story. There was more to tell, and the rewrite began. A story arc formed—a tortuous, cruel story that would force Ty and Zane to work for their happy ending. It ~ Abigail Roux, #NFDB
563:World-class rower Craig Lambert has described how it feels in Mind Over Water (Houghton Mifflin, 1998): Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing. . . . Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival. The ~ David Allen, #NFDB
564:Have I told you yet just how handsome you look tonight?” He grinned, her stilted attempt at flirtation so out of character that he knew she was flustered. “Are you flirting with me, Mrs. McClare?” he asked with a jut of his brow, laughing out loud when her cheeks fused bright pink. He neatly executed a wide spin, as fluid as if they were one. “And have I ever told you just how adorable you are when you’re nervous?” “I am not nervous,” she said with a thrust of her chin, a flicker of a smile at the edge of her lips. A familiar spark in those mesmerizing green eyes told him he’d struck a nerve. “Ah, now there’s the Caitlyn I know and love.” Palm grazing her shoulder blade, he swept her in a wide arc, her body as graceful and light as the chiffon folds of her dress as they fluttered in the breeze. His smile faded to tender. “This is me, Cait, remember?” he said quietly. “No need to be nervous.” She ~ Julie Lessman, #NFDB
565:I believe you,” he said, gently; “there arc sensitive plants, so fresh and fair, that it is a sin they should ever have to shiver in rude hands, and learn to bend with the world’s breath. But live as long as we have, and you will know that the deep feeling of which you are thinking is never found in unison with the poetic and drivelling sentiment we ridicule. Boys’ sorrows vent themselves in words — men’s griefs are voiceless. If ever you feel — pray God you never may — vital suffering, you will find that it will never seek solace in confidences, never lament itself, but rather hug its torture closer, as the Spartan child hugged the fierce wolf-fangs. You will find the difference between the fictitious sorrows which run abroad proclaiming their own wrongs; and the grief which lies next the heart night and day, and, like the iron cross of the Romish priest, eats it slowly, but none the less surely, away. ~ Ouida, #NFDB
566:The door opened in a well-oiled arc. She saw the shadows change, felt a presence in the room. Turning with a start, she saw Cam Rohan standing just inside the door. Her heart began to drum with furious force. He looked like something from a dream, a dark enigmatic ghost.
He approached her slowly. The closer he came, the more it seemed everything around her was unraveling, falling away, leaving her exposed and vulnerable.
Cam’s breathing wasn’t quite steady. Neither was hers. After a long pause, he finally spoke. “The Rom believe you should take the road that calls to you, and never turn back. Because you never know what adventures await.” He reached for her slowly, giving her every opportunity to object. Through the cottony gauze of her nightgown, he touched the curve of her hips. He brought her close, into his hard weight.
“So we’re going to take this road,” he murmured, “and see where it leads. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
567:On the first day of fifth grade, Liz was sitting on the swing beside Liam's at recess. Falling and flying, her hair fanned out behind her and her eyes were closed, and that was what had caught his attention, her closed eyes. She looked a little bit silly and very much alive, and Liam couldn't stop watching.
Liz, on her part, was aware that the boy beside her was watching, but she loved swinging too much to care what he thought. She loved the wind hitting her face and the brief moment of suspension at the top of the arc and the falling sensation that was magnified by the darkness of her eyelids. She imagined that she was a bird, an angel, a wayward star.
At the height of the arc, she let go. And she flew.
Liam watched with his mouth hanging wide open, expecting her to crumple on the asphalt and die tragically before his eyes.
She didn't, and when she walked away, Liam's heart followed. ~ Amy Zhang,#NFDB
568:See, girl,” Rowan said. “You cannot learn the sword. No woman can.”
“What about Jeanne d’Arc?” Cass asked. “She wielded a sword.”
Rowan snorted as he sheathed his blade. “She wielded words.”
Cass knew from her lessons that Jeanne had been more of a charismatic leader than an actual fighter, but she had led men into battle. “It’s as if you believe women to be useless for fighting,” she said.
“Of course they’re not,” Rowan said. He approached Cass and made a slow circle around her, his dark eyes studying each curve of her body in the least sensual way possible. Cass felt like a cow being evaluated for the roasts and fillets it could become. “But like everyone else, if you want to be effective, it helps to play to your strengths.” His eyes lingered on her breasts for a moment.
Cass resisted the urge to cross her arms. “Meaning what?”
“Distraction, for one.”
A couple of the men chortled. ~ Fiona Paul,#NFDB
569:They were assembling a rocket there.
It was a big rocket.
It all more or less made sense. There was no cargo too big to be barged up the Columbia River and then trucked the last few miles to Moses Lake. There was no airplane that couldn’t be accommodated by that runway. There was no object that the aerospace machine shops of the Seattle area couldn’t build. And from this latitude, the same as Baikonur, a well-worn and understood flight plan could take payloads to Izzy.
A mere four days later, Doob stood in the bed of a rusty pickup truck with a random assortment of space rednecks, hoisting a longnecked beer bottle into the sky in emulation of the rocket lifting off from the pad. They all hooted and screamed as they watched it arc gracefully downrange and take off in the general direction of Boise. And the next morning, when they had all sobered up, they got busy building another rocket. ~ Neal Stephenson,#NFDB
570:The stacks of pav have been sprinkled with chutney—
the top half of the inside of the bun is bathed in green chutney, the bottom with red garlic chutney—
and the assistant reaches out with one hand, in one continuous arc of his arm opening the pav, scooping up two of the vadas, one in each nest of pav, and delivering it to the hungry customer. I walk away from the stall and crush the vada by pressing down on it with the pav; little cracks appear in the crispy surface, and the vada oozes out its potato-and-pea mixture. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of the vada mixture —dark with garam masala and studded with whole cloves of garlic that look like cashews—get masticated into a good mouthful, a good mouth-feel. My stomach is getting filled, and I feel I am eating something nourishing after a long spell of sobbing. Borkar has done his dharma. ~ Suketu Mehta,#NFDB
571:Miles tells King Mob that “we do not merely destroy our enemies. We change them.” This is a critical line because it illuminates the true nature of the war. It is not a war of violence; it is a war of ideas. The goal of each side is to win over people, to convince them that their side is right and the other’s is wrong. Chaos and order are in perpetual conflict, and it is the interplay between the two elements that allows society to grow and change. If one errs too far in one direction, things will fall apart – as we see with the descent into ultra-violence that is literally called “Things Fall Apart” (issue #9). Generally, Morrison supports the Invisibles’ cause, as does the reader. But the point of King Mob’s Volume Two arc, as well as the character of Jolly Roger, is to demonstrate that excessive chaos can result in the same kind of oppression as excessive order. It’s best when the elements are in balance. ~ Patrick Meaney, #NFDB
572:Tu sais, le moment révolutionnaire - j'ai essayé de l'expliquer de différentes manières - est un moment exaltant parce que c'est quelque chose de nouveau pour lequel on peut s'engager. Je l'ai dit de la façon la plus simple que j'aie pu trouver : "La révolution est comme un enfant : il est tout mignon quand il naît, mais il est possible que, dix ans plus tard, il devienne con, bossu et méchant." De la même manière, quand elle naît, la Révolution est fascinante, car elle promet la nouveauté. Imagine : si aujourd'hui, en Italie, arrivait un Savonarole, ou une Jeanne d'Arc disant : "Allez, renonçons à tout, mangeons deux fois moins !", les gens n'hésiteraient pas une seconde, Folco. Un jeune sur deux aujourd'hui serait heureux de jeter son téléphone portable dans le lac pour avoir quelque chose de mieux. Mais, plus tard, on se rendrait compte que le portable était utile, que le lac est pollué... Ainsi va la vie... (p. 255) ~ Tiziano Terzani, #NFDB
573:Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you’ve learned about the grand themes of life. It’s time enough to realize that every generalization stands opposed by a mosaic of exceptions, and that the biggest truths are few indeed. Meanwhile, you feel the wind shift and the temperature change. You might simply decide to be present, and observe a few facts about the drifting clouds…Fishing in a place is a meditation on the rhythm of a tide, a season, the arc of a year, and the seasons of life... I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains. I fish to wash off some of my grief for the peace we so squander. I fish to dip into that great and awesome pool of power that propels these epic migrations. I fish to feel- and steal- a little of that energy. ~ Carl Safina, #NFDB
574:to its talented cast and crew, fundamentally the program utilized a simple formula to keep people tuning in. At the heart of every episode—and also across each season’s narrative arc—is a problem the characters must resolve. For example, during an episode in the first season, Walter White must find a way to dispose of the bodies of two rival drug dealers. Challenges prevent resolution of the conflict and suspense is created as the audience waits to find out how the story line ends. In this particular episode White discovers one of the drug dealers is still alive and is faced with the dilemma of having to kill someone he thought was already dead. Invariably, each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. By design, the only way to know how Walter gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
575:Irena heard a faint cry – a strange mournful sound, like a mewling cat, muffled and hitching. A shadow moved along the wall – a woman wrapped in brown and gray rags like condensed smoke – holding a swaddled infant in the crook of her elbow. The woman stooped to pick up a small rock and heaved it over the wall, then retreated to crouch in the shadows. A moment later the same rock arched back over the wall from the Aryan side, and the woman stood up with intent, holding her bundle close to her chest and face. Even at this distance, Irena heard the woman suck two deep breaths, bend forward, swing her baby in both her arms, three times, and then with blazing purpose hurl it up in an arc that barely cleared the jagged glass atop the wall. No sound came back from the other side. The woman collapsed against the wall, her hands stroking the bricks, the two inches that separated her from her baby. She slunk away in the shadow of the wall. ~ Jack Mayer, #NFDB
576:[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
577:Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary
Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures. ~ Eavan Boland,#NFDB
578:The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet REvolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927- there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgement has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder. ~ Katherine Anne Porter, #NFDB
579:Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she'd touched their lives. Marcia would have liked it, John thought - all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She'd have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her? What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room. In the days since her death, he'd felt her drifting through the apartment. He'd done double takes the way you do when you think you see your own cat or dog begging for food under the table at a restaurant. Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia's coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about? ~ Ottessa Moshfegh, #NFDB
580:that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
581:What do grown-up people know about the things boys are afraid of? Oh, hickory switches and such like, they know that. But what about what goes on in their minds when they have to come home alone at night through the lonesome places? What do they know about lonesome places where no light from the street-corner ever comes? What do they know about a place and time when a boy is very small and very alone, and the night is as big as the town, and the darkness is the whole world? When grown-ups are big, old people who cannot understand anything, no matter how plain? A boy looks up and out, but he can't look very far when the trees bend down over and press close, when the sheds rear up along one side and the trees on the other, when the darkness lies like a cloud along the sidewalk and the arc-lights are far, far away. No wonder then that Things grow in that dark place near the grain elevator. No wonder a boy runs like the wind until his heartbeats sound like a drum and push up to suffocate him. ~ August Derleth, #NFDB
582:But Saeed’s father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared that if he said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life only appears for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
583:I saw myself before an infuriated mob, facing the firing squad, weeping out of pity for the evil they could not understand, and forgiving!-Like Jeanne d'Arc!-'Priests, professors, masters, you are making a mistake in turning me over to the law. I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race that sang under torture; laws I have never understood; I have no moral sense, I am a brute: you are making a mistake.'
Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drunk of the untaxed liquor of Satan's still.-Fever and cancer inspire this people. Cripples and old men are so respectable they are fit to be boiled.-The smartest thing would be to leave this continent where madness stalks to provide hostages for these wretches. I enter the true kingdom of the children of Ham. ~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
584:Ti gonosztevők a bíróság előtt,
Ti börtöncellákba zárt fegyencek, ti elítélt, megvasalt, bilincsbevert gyilkosok,
Ki vagyok én, hogy felettem nem ítélkeznek és nem vetnek börtönbe?
Nekem, aki éppoly kegyetlen és sátáni vagyok, mint bárki közületek, miért nincs vasban a csuklóm, és miért nem bilincsbevert a bokám?
Ti ringyók, utcán lófrálók s a szobák mélyén paráználkodók,
Ki vagyok én, hogy titeket romlottabbnak nevezzelek magamnál?
Ó, elzüllöttek! Fennhangon kiáltom: Beismerem! Megvallom!
(Ó, csodálóim, ne dicsérjetek — ne hízelegjetek — megborzadok tőle.
Én látom, amit ti nem láttok — én tudom, amit ti nem tudtok.)
Mellkasomba zártan fekszem, szennyben fuldokolva,
E mögött a közömbösnek látszó arc mögött a pokol örvénylik,
Kéjvágy és elvetemültség nem idegen tőlem,
Parázsló szeretettel járok a bűnösök között,
Ügy érzem, közülük való vagyok – magam is a bűnözők és ringyók közé tartozom,
Többé nem tagadom meg őket – hogyan is tagadhatnám meg önmagam? ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
585:Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.
When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
586:It is in fact surprising that such a body of doctrine as the Buddhist, with its profoundly other-wordly and even anti-social emphasis, in the Buddha's own words "hard to be understood by you who are of different views, another tolerance, other tastes, other allegiance and other training", can have become even as "popular" as it is in the modern Western environment.
[...]
We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we are in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy,#NFDB
587:I think it's an indulgence to [write] the other [non-linear] way. I think it's a kind of cowardice. There are places in anyone's books that are going to be easier than other parts. And if when you come to a part that's difficult and think, 'Hm, I'll skip that,' all you're doing is lining up these problems that are going to wait for you and kick you in the ass. So I'm very rigorous with myself. I won't allow myself to go on to a fun bit, like the sex. I think if you write big books like I do, and don't write in a linear fashion, something inevitably gets screwed up in the emotional flow. In Coldheart Canyon there are many characters, and each character has its own arc. The arcs start at divergent points, but they converge at roughly the same point. So what you try to do is induce in the reader an incredible feeling of excitement, because everybody's arcs are resolving because they're encountering one another, right? It's not that they're resolving in an abstraction. They're resolving because A meets B meets C and so on. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
588:O wind, songs have ye in her name? Plucked her did ye from midnight blasted millyard winds and made her renown ring in stone and brick and ice? Hard implacable bridges of iron cross her milk of brows? God bent from his steel arc welded her a hammer of honey and of balm?
The rutted mud of hardrock Time . . . was it wetted, springified, greened, blossomied for me to grow in nameless bloodied lutey naming of her? Wood on cold trees would her coffin bare? Keys of stone rippled by icy streaks would ope my needy warm interiors and make her eat the soft sin of me? No iron bend or melt to make my rocky travail ease--I was all alone, my fate was banged behind an iron door, I'd come like butter looking for Hot Metals to love, I'd raise my feeble orgone bones and let them be rove and split the half and goop the big sad eyes to see it and say nothing. The laurel wreath is made of iron, and thorns of nails; acid spit, impossible mountains, and incomprehensible satires of blank humanity--congeal, cark, sink and seal my blood-- ~ Jack Kerouac,#NFDB
589:Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived. Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
590:..[My friend Marco said]. essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability and then they find themselves at an ending tha seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates. ...[I wondered] that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
591:Tyson emails back: “I’m going to tell you the same thing that I told Henry Louis Gates” (Gates had asked Tyson to appear on his show Finding Your Roots): My philosophy of root-finding may be unorthodox. I just don’t care. And that’s not a passive, but active absence of caring. In the tree of life, any two people in the world share a common ancestor—depending only on how far back you look. So the line we draw to establish family and heritage is entirely arbitrary. When I wonder what I am capable of achieving, I don’t look to family lineage, I look to all human beings. That’s the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Gandhi and MLK, the bravery of Joan of Arc, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. Couldn’t care less if I were a descendant of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the valorous or cowardly. My life is what I make of it. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
592:And - just as with winning the lottery, or becoming famous - there is no manual for becoming a woman, even though the stakes are so high. God knows, when I was 13, I tried to find one. You can read about other people's experience on the matter - by way of trying to crib, in advance, for an exam - but I found that this is, in itself, problematic. For throughout history, you can read stories of women who - against all odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed. Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or - most crucially of all, for a teenage girl - simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right - right, down into their clever, brilliant bones - but lonely. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
593:Successful American presidents project a populist image. They do not place themselves above their compatriots but strive whenever possible to show qualities typical of “average” Americans. If they have an intellectual bent, they do their best to hide it. To be likable, smiling, and unpretentious is all-important, to express the values of middle America an essential prerequisite for greatness. In France, great leaders historically do exactly the opposite: They stand above the masses, remote figures embodying France’s gloire and grandeur. They don’t try to be folksy or common in speech. No one cultivated this image more assiduously than de Gaulle. The general was not shy about invoking Notre Dame de France—Our Lady of France—or about identifying himself with national heroes such as Jeanne d’Arc and Clemenceau. Roosevelt, though reasonably familiar with the French language and culture, did not comprehend this French mythmaking, while de Gaulle, in his general ignorance of American ways, viewed FDR’s geniality as a guise for hypocrisy and artifice.3 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
594:One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort — youth’s toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc
of pain; but the artist knows he is ready. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,#NFDB
595:THE FUTURE
And I know full well you won’t be there.
You won’t be in the street, in the hum that buzzes
from the arc lamps at night, nor in the gesture
of selecting from the menu, nor in the smile
that lightens people packed into the subway,
nor in the borrowed books, nor in the see-you-tomorrow.You won’t be in my dreams,
in my words’ first destination,
nor will you be in a telephone number
or in the color of a pair of gloves or a blouse.
I’ll get angry, love, without it being on account of you,
and I’ll buy chocolates but not for you,
I’ll stop at the corner you’ll never come to,
and I’ll say the words that are said
and I’ll eat the things that are eaten
and I’ll dream the dreams that are dreamed
and I know full well you won’t be there,
nor here inside, in the prison where I still hold you,
nor there outside, in this river of streets and bridges.
You won’t be there at all, you won’t even be a memory,
and when I think of you I’ll be thinking a thought
that’s obscurely trying to recall you. ~ Julio Cort zar,#NFDB
596:The next day, I am almost afraid. Love? It was more like dragonflies in the sun, 100 degrees at noon, the ends of their abdomens stuck together.
I close my eyes when I remember. I hardly knew myself, like something twisting and twisting out of a chrysalis, enormous, without language, all head, all shut eyes, and the humming like madness, the way they writhe away, and do not leave, back, back, away, back. Did I know you?
No kiss, no tenderness—more like killing, death-grip holding to life, genitals like violent hands clasped tight barely moving, more like being closed in a great jaw and eaten, and the screaming.
I groan to remember it, and when we started to die, then I refuse to remember, the way a drunkard forgets.
After, you held my hands extremely hard as my body moved in shudders like the ferry when its axle is loosed past engagement, you kept me sealed exactly against you, our hairlines wet as the arc of a gateway after a cloudburst, you secured me in your arms till I slept - clasped, fragrant, buoyant, that was the morning after love. ~ Sharon Olds,#NFDB
597:The court is my escape and my paradise. I love basketball. I love the way you can be exhausted and sweaty and running with nine other guys, and yet, at the risk of sounding overly Zen, you are still so wonderfully alone. On the court, nothing bothers me. I see things a few seconds before they actually happen. I love anticipating a teammate’s cut and then throwing a bounce pass between two defenders. I love the rebound, boxing out, figuring angles and positioning myself, willing the ball into my hands. I love dribbling without looking down, the feel, the sense of trust, of control, almost as though the ball were on a leash. I love catching the pass, locking my eyes on the front rim, sliding my fingers into the grooves, raising the ball above my head, cocking my wrist as I begin to leap. I love the feel as I release the shot at the apex of the jump, the way my fingertips stay on the leather until the last possible moment, the way I slowly come back to the ground, the way the ball moves in an arc toward the rim, the way the bottom of the net dances when the ball goes swish. I ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
598:to move. More gunfire. Although his vision was dimmed, Alex saw two more grenades arc through the air. They landed next to one of the ships and exploded, a huge fireball of flame. Two of Sarov’s men were lifted into the air. At the same time, two or even three machine guns began to chatter simultaneously. There were screams. More flames. Conrad loomed over him. He seemed to have forgotten what was happening in the shipyard. Or perhaps he didn’t care. He tossed aside the metal rod, then slowly pulled up his sleeves. Finally he dropped down so that he was sitting on Alex’s chest, one knee on either side. His hands closed around Alex’s neck. Gently, enjoying what he was doing, he began to squeeze. Alex felt fingers as hard as iron clamp shut on his throat. He couldn’t breathe. There were already black spots in front of his eyes. Straining past Conrad, he saw something moving toward him. It was the magnetic disc. Conrad had left the controls on in the cabin in his haste to get over to Alex, and the arm of the crane was still swinging around. There was a sudden, loud clang. The ~ Anthony Horowitz, #NFDB
599:Who?”
“Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.’ I’m no god and I’ll contend no longer. Let it go, Pete, and go your way. Maybe the world will last our time and, if not, there’s nothing that can be done anyway. I’m sorry, Pete. You fought the good fight, but you lost, and I’m through.”
It worked perfectly. The Obin had enough time for a surprised squawk before the hovercraft’s gun struck it square in the chest, punching backward like it was a toy on a string, hurling down nearly the entire length of the hall. The other Obin in the room looked up while Harvey’s victim pinwheeled to the ground, then turned their multiple eyes toward the doorway, Harvey, and the hovercraft with its big gun poking right into the room.
“Hello, boys!” Harvey said in a big, booming voice. “The 2nd Platoon sends its regards!” And with that, he jammed down the “fire” button on the gun and set to work.
Things got messy real fast after that. It was just fucking beautiful.
Harvey loved his job. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
600:Gentry was reclining on his side, propped up on one elbow, the broad outline of his shoulders obscuring most of the light shed by the bedside lamp. His body was so large and sheltering, his self-confidence so substantial, that it seemed as if she could wrap it around herself like a blanket and stay safe forever.
Shrewdly, he understood her Achilles' heel- that terrible need for sanctuary- and he did not hesitate to make use of it. He slid his arm over her waist, his hand resting on the middle of her back, his thumb brushing along the stiff arc of her spine. "I'll take care of you, Lottie. I'll keep you safe and provide all the comforts you require. All I want in return is for you to enjoy yourself with me. That isn't so terrible, is it?"
He had Lucifer's own skill of making what he sounded perfectly reasonable. Discerning her weakness, he leaned over until the solid weight of his body was poised above her and his thigh pressed into the mattress between her legs. "Kiss me," he whispered. The sweet, drugging spice of his breath and skin sent her thoughts scattering like dry leaves in the wind. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
601:Que les forts attaquent les faibles, c'est un mal parfois inévitable et même à certains égards une loi naturelle, à condition toutefois que les moyens ne violent pas les normes de la nature comme c'est le cas dans les guerres mécanisées, et que la force ne serve pas des idées intrinsèquement fausses, ce qui serait une anomalie de plus (1) ; mais que les forts écrasent les faibles au moyen d'une hypocrisie intéressée et des bassesses qui en résultent, cela n'est ni naturel ni inévitable, et il est gratuit et même infame de mettre sur le compte de la "sensiblerie" toute opinion qui condamne ces méthodes ; le "réalisme" politique peut justifier les violences, jamais les vilénies.
(1) C'est donc surtout aux guerres tribales ou féodales que nous pensons, ou encore aux guerres d'expansion des civilisations traditionnelles. D'aucuns objecteront qu'il y a toujours eu des machines et qu'un arc n'est pas autre chose, ce qui est aussi faux que de prétendre qu'un cercle est une sphère ou qu'un dessin est une statue. Il y a là une différence de dimensions dont les causes sont profondes et non quantitatives. ~ Frithjof Schuon,#NFDB
602:Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth, whack and whack, rallies so long that she was giggling with happiness by the end of them. The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting. The ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball’s inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
603:És nincs útmutató a nővé váláshoz – ahogy a lottónyeréshez vagy a híressé váláshoz sincs –, noha a tét igen magas. Csak a jó ég tudja, 13 évesen mennyire kerestem ilyet. Lehet mások tapasztalatairól olvasni e témában – ahogy az ember a vizsgákra próbál magolni –, de úgy találtam, hogy ez önmagában is problematikus. Mert olyan nők történeteit lehet olvasni a történelem minden korszakából, akik – minden esély ellenére – nőként igazán megvalósították magukat, de végül megalkudtak, boldogtalanok lettek, nyomorultak, vagy tönkrementek, mert körülöttük a társadalom még mindig tévedésben volt. Mutassanak csak egy lánynak egy úttörő hősnőt – mint Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Kleopátra, Boudicca vagy Jeanne D'Arc –, és legtöbbször olyan nőt látnak, akit végül porrá zúztak. A nehezen kivívott győzelmek teljességgel semmissé válnak, ha olyan környezetben élünk, ahol e diadalokat fenyegetőnek, helytelennek, ízléstelennek vagy – és egy kamaszlány esetében ez a legsarkalatosabb – cikinek ítélik. Kevés lány lány választja azt, hogy igaza legyen – igaza, egészen az okos, zseniális csontja velejéig –, viszont magányos maradjon. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
604:In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. Irish Mary, Eva's sister, would have been happy enough to accept my father's ring, I suppose, had Eva not chosen to stay in Ireland and marry Tom. My mother's first fiancé would have married her gladly if he hadn't been kept too long overseas by the Navy, if my father hadn't beaten him home, on points, a full year before. It might have been Cody or John in the car with your father, that day on Long Island. I might have been gone. Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more. ~ Alice McDermott, #NFDB
605:The chopper canted forward, the quiet whup-whup of its blades grew slightly louder, and it began to move forward and up. The rope was swinging back at them, but the bottom of its arc was rising as the helicopter picked up altitude. The end of the rope was going to hit their position at ground level, at chest height, at head height, at three meters, four, rising… Feng slammed open the door, jumped onto the hood of the car, then the roof, took two steps and leapt out and up into the air, more than three meters up and three meters out. He hung in mid-air for a split second, one arm extended, a man in mid-leap, legs akimbo, detached from the earth, soaring through the night sky at a slender line that was swinging back towards him, but rising ever higher as it did… Feng snagged the very end of the rope with his black-gloved left hand as it hit the bottom of its arc. He roared in triumph. The Confucian Fist hung there for a moment, swinging beneath the chopper. Then he brought his gloved right hand up to join his left. He grinned up savagely at the chopper, a maniacal Asian man in a black chauffeur’s suit, and began to climb hand over hand. ~ Ramez Naam, #NFDB
606:As she fretted and paced around the room, Helen’s gaze happened to stray across an object on the table near the parlor window. Her eyes widened as she realized it was the potted Blue Vanda she had given him. The orchid he hadn’t wanted but had taken anyway. He had sent it back.
Helen hurried to the orchid, wondering what condition it was in.
Weak sunlight slanted across the table, flecked with glimmering, floating dust motes, some of them swirling around the light blue petals. Confusion spread through her as she saw the inflorescence of glowing blooms. The broad ovoid leaves were clean and glossy, and the roots anchored among the crushed clay pottery shards had been carefully trimmed and kept damp.
The Blue Vanda hadn’t sickened in Winterborne’s care...it had thrived.
Helen leaned over the orchid, touching the beautiful arc of its stem with a single fingertip. Shaking her head in wonder, she felt a tickle at the edge of her chin, and didn’t realize it was a tear until she saw it drop onto one of the Vanda’s leaves.
“Oh, Mr. Winterborne,” she whispered, and reached up to wipe at her wet cheeks. “Rhys. There’s been a mistake. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
607:He could feel the end of the battle approaching, and so could the blur of the Sith he faced in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear.
Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow's fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge.
Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half kilometer drop.
Out where the shadow's fear's fear made it hesitate.
Out where the shadow's fear turned some of it's Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.
Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow's lightsaber in half.
One piece flipped back in through the cut open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain towards the distant alleys below.
Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.
'For all your power, my lord,you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord,' Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, 'is under arrest. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover,#NFDB
608:Marcos explained that our bodies were designed to change and it isn't possible to be stagnant. He showed me a slide of himself at the beginning of the year and of the new lines on his face that had deepened since. He said our interaction with each other, with the outside world, and with intangible elements such as time made us different people every season. His conclusion was that the human body displayed physical evidence that we are not the same person we were when we were kids, or even a season before. He said we think we are the same person, but we aren't. 'People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren't.'
For instance, Marcos said, 'The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly ever cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February,' he told me.
I thought about Marcos's conclusions and wondered [...] if he wasn't right, that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change. ~ Donald Miller,#NFDB
609:Hogy a férfiak csak nemzenek, az asszonyok csak szülnek, de az embereket a művész teremti, oly tény, amit nem kell igazolni. Csak nézze meg az ember a mai férfit és nőt, mindje ugyanaz - a mozisztár. Volt idő, amikor a brutális romantika teremtett, aztán a "szellemiség kora" következett, s ma mindenki a film hőseihez akar hasonlítani. Ez a példa. Modell. A művészet teremti meg az emberforma lényegét, a művészet az a bájital, amely emberré tesz semleges lényt, amely sem nem állat, sem valami más. Ez a varázsital nem tartalmat ad, hanem lényeget, a példa hatása mindig a leghatásosabb fizikai valóság. Ha egy város tele van korcs szoborral, a város lakóinak korcsosodását varázsolja valósággá. Ez a hatás oly nagy, hogy az ellentétet is kiváltja, hogyha hazudik - valószínű, hogy a keskeny gótikus szobrok idején azért volt oly sok pohos ember -, de mind a kettő torz. A film új embertípust teremtett, a sztárok mosolyát látni minden arcon, ez a mosoly alakítja át az izmokat, változtatja meg az arcot, és azt, ami az arc mögött van. Mozipillantás, mozijárás, mozigesztus, mozicsáb. Sztársóhaj, sztárbánat, sztárkönnyek. Úgy látszik, ez az, amit a mai emberiség megérdemelt. ~ B la Hamvas, #NFDB
610:The Spring Equinox
Now is the pause between asleep and awake:
Two seasons take
A colour and quality each from each as yet.
The new stage-set
Spandril, column and fan of spring is raised against the
winter backdrop
Murrey and soft;
Now aloft
The sun swings on the equinoctial line.
Few flowers yet shine:
The hellebore hangs a clear green bell and opulent leaves
above dark mould;
The light is cold
In arum leaves, and a primrose flickers
Here and there; the first cool bird-song flickers in the thicket.
Clouds arc pale as the pollen from sallows;
March fallows are white with lime like frost.
This is the pause between asleep and awake:
The pause of contemplation and of peice,
Before the earth must teem and the heart ache.
This is the child's pause, before it sees
That the choice of one way has denied the other ;
Must choose the either, or both, of to care and not to care;
Before the light or darkness shall discover
Irreparable loss; before it must take
Blame for the creature caught in the necessary snare:
Receiving a profit, before it holds a snare.
~ Anne Barbara Ridler,#NFDB
611:He did not waste time greeting her, but fell upon her at once with a vicious snarl. With his powerful jaws he tore at her, pulled her apart. He ripped open her guts and they spilled with a rank smell across the broken road surface. He tore off her leg and threw it into the darkness like so much poisoned meat.
The pain was intense, but she could not complain or fight him off. She lacked the energy to even raise her head. He tore and bit and ripped her apart and she could only experience it passively, as if from some remove.
Somehow she knew that he wasn’t killing her.
That he was saving her.
When he was done, when all the silver was torn out of her body and cast away from her, she breathed a little easier, and then she sank into a fitful sleep. He stood watch over her throughout the night, occasionally howling as the moon rode its arc across the night sky. Occasionally he would lick her face, her ears, to wake her up, to keep her from fading out of existence altogether. Once when he could not wake her he grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her violently until her eyes cracked open and her tongue leapt from her mouth and she croaked out a whine of outrage. ~ David Wellington,#NFDB
612:Then, by the light of the Mark, he saw Dumbledore’s wand flying in an arc over the edge of the ramparts and understood. . . . Dumbledore had wordlessly immobilized Harry, and the second he had taken to perform the spell had cost him the chance of defending himself. Standing against the ramparts, very white in the face, Dumbledore still showed no sign of panic or distress. He merely looked across at his disarmer and said, “Good evening, Draco.” Malfoy stepped forward, glancing around quickly to check that he and Dumbledore were alone. His eyes fell upon the second broom. “Who else is here?” “A question I might ask you. Or are you acting alone?” Harry saw Malfoy’s pale eyes shift back to Dumbledore in the greenish glare of the Mark. “No,” he said. “I’ve got backup. There are Death Eaters here in your school tonight.” “Well, well,” said Dumbledore, as though Malfoy was showing him an ambitious homework project. “Very good indeed. You found a way to let them in, did you?” “Yeah,” said Malfoy, who was panting. “Right under your nose and you never realized!” “Ingenious,” said Dumbledore. “Yet . . . forgive me . . . where are they now? You seem unsupported.” “They met some of your guards. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
613:the rhythm which was barely intricate to most ears in the commons was to him painful because it was timed to the processes of his body, to jar and strike against them…and she was surprised he had held up this long. “All right, Cord, to be lord of this black barrack, Tarik’s, you need more than jackal lore, or a belly full of murder and jelly knees. Open your mouth and your hands. To understand power, use your wit, please. Ambition like a liquid ruby stains your brain, birthed in the cervixed will to kill, swung in the arc of death’s again, you name yourself victim each time you fill with swill the skull’s cup lipping murder. It predicts your fingers’ movement toward the blade long laid against the leather sheath cord-fixed to pick the plan your paling fingers made; you stayed in safety, missing worlds of wonder, under the lithe hiss of the personafix inflicting false memories to make them blunder while thunder cracks the change of Tarik. You stick pins in peaches, place your strange blade, ranged with a grooved tooth, while the long and strong lines of my meaning make your mind change from fulgent to frangent. Now you hear the wrong cord-song, to instruct you. Assassin, pass in… ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
614:First Poem From The
Pyotr Pavlovich (entering the room):
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
I am carrying someone's elbow
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
Where's Professor De Dispenchin?
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
Where on Earth are office hours?
If this little clockie dangling
Its two weights a-reaching down
Oldish clockie while still pending
Flew an arc without a frown
Zdagger Upper Ooster Ooster
I broke down the rhythm of time
Carabeester on a booster
Works instead of Zdagger Upper
Hand is stretched ever farther
Yielding something arrow-handed
From one minute to another
Rushing blindly as if branded
Right from milk-white clockface down
Pancake's winding Ooster Ooster
Tightly wrapped in dressing-gown
Proudly sits the Carabeester
He is during office seconds
Looking into metered engine
So the time will not be wayward
Like Professor De Dispenchin
Like Andrey Semyonych Zdagger
Single-handed Zdagger Upper
Cares for Zdagger Upper Ooster
His lost hand adjusting aptly
Fixing fingers with a hammer
Zdagger Upper he is nailing
Zdagger Upper Ooster them.
~ Daniil Ivanovich Kharms,#NFDB
615:Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity, and I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such a generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to walk his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsongs and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc. I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and a tongue fluent only in praise. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
616:Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift.
If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.
Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.
As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.
And the present moment is perfectly transparent.
It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . . ~ Vera Nazarian,#NFDB
617:You're cute when you're worried," she muttered. "Your eyebrows get all scrunched together."
"You are not going to die while I owe you a favor," I said. "Why did you take that knife?"
"You would've done the same for me."
It was true. I guess we both knew it. Still, I felt like somebody was poking my heart with a cold metal rod.
"How did you know?"
"Know what?"
I looked around to make sure we were alone. Then I leaned in close and whispered: "My Achilles spot. If you hadn't taken that knife, I would've died."
She got a faraway look in her eyes. Her breath smelled like grapes, maybe from the nectar. "I don't know, Percy. I just had this feeling you were in danger. Where... where is the spot?"
I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. But this was Annabeth. If I couldn't trust her, I couldn't trust anyone.
"The small of my back."
She lifted her hand. "Where? Here?"
She put her hand on my spine, and my skin tingled. I moved her fingers to the one spot that grounded me to my mortal life. A thousand volts of electricity seemed to arc through my body.
"You saved me." I said. "Thanks."
She removed her hand, but I kept holding it.
"So you owe me," she said weakly. "What else is new? ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
618:Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs
of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the
surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness
reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to
embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would
then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What
we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic
theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it
turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life.
And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by
its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and
imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source
of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely
the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation
of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return
to anthropology. ~ Tim Ingold,#NFDB
619:Tired
O For wings! that I might soar
A little way above the floor,
A little way beyond the roar—
A little nearer to the sky!
To the blue hills, lifted high
Out of all our misery.
Where alone is heard the lark,
Warbling in the infinite arc
From the dawning to the dark;
Where the callow eaglets wink
On the bare and breezy brink,
And slow pinions rise and sink.
Where the dim white breakers beat
Under cloud-drifts at our feet,
Singing, singing, low and sweet;
Where we see the glimmering bay
Greyly melting far away,
On the confines of the day;
Where the green larch-fringes sweep
Rocky defiles, still and steep;
Where the tender lichens creep;
Where the gentian-blossoms blow,
Set in crystal stars of snow;
Where the downward torrents flow
To the plains and yellow leas,
Glancing, twinkling through the trees—
Pure, as from celestial seas.
Where the face of heaven has smiled
Aye on freedom, sweet and wild,
Aye on beauty undefiled.
282
Where no sound of human speech,
And no human passions, reach;
Where the angels sit and teach.
Where no troublous foot has trod;
Where is impressed on the sod
Only hand and heart of God!
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
620:Le véritable objet de l’architecture islamique, c’est l’espace comme tel, dans sa plénitude indifférenciée. Les arcades et leur majestueuse ampleur – elles dépassent le plein cintre et se dilatent légèrement en fer à cheval – suffisent pour rendre cette qualité manifeste. Ce n’est pas pour rien qu’en arabe le nom de l’arcade, rawq (au pluriel riwaq) est devenu le synonyme de beau, gracieux et pur. Une simple arcade bâtie selon de justes proportions possède la vertu de transformer l’espace d’une réalité purement quantitative en une réalité qualitative. Et l’on sait que l’art islamique a développé une grande variété de formes d’arc, qui s’annoncent déjà dans l’architecture omeyyade et dont deux sont les plus typiques : l’arc en fer à cheval, qui trouve son expression la plus parfaite dans l’art maghrébin, et l’arc « en carène », qui caractérise l’art persan. L’une et l’autre de ces formes combinent les deux qualités de calme statique et de légèreté ascendante. L’arc persan est à la fois généreux et gracieux ; il s’élève sans aucun effort, comme la flamme calme d’une lampe à l’huile protégée du vent. Quant à l’arc maghrébin, il se caractérise par son expansion extrême, souvent contenue par un cadre rectangulaire, d’où une synthèse de stabilité et d’ampleur. ~ Titus Burckhardt, #NFDB
621:Although Breaking Bad owes a great deal of its success to its talented cast and crew, fundamentally the program utilized a simple formula to keep people tuning in. At the heart of every episode — and also across each season’s narrative arc — is a problem the characters must resolve. For example, during an episode in the first season, Walter White must find a way to dispose of the bodies of two rival drug dealers. Challenges prevent resolution of the conflict and suspense is created as the audience waits to find out how the storyline ends. In this particular episode, White discovers one of the drug dealers is still alive and is faced with the dilemma of having to kill someone he thought was already dead. Invariably, each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. By design, the only way to know how Walter gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode. The cycle of conflict, mystery and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is variability. The unknown is fascinating and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next. In a phenomenon called “experience-taking, ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
622:Ieronym took hold of the cable with both hands, curved himself into a question mark, and grunted. The ferry creaked and lurched. The silhouette of the peasant in the tall hat slowly began to recede from me--which meant that the ferry was moving. Soon Ieronym straightened up and began working with one hand. We were silent and looked at the bank towards which we were now moving. There the "lumination" which the peasant had been waiting for was already beginning. At the water's edge, barrels of pitch blazed like huge bonfires. Their reflection, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in long, wide stripes. The burning barrels threw light on their own smoke and on the long human shadows that flitted about the fire; but further to the sides and behind them, where the velvet ringing rushed from, was the same impenetrable darkness. Suddenly slashing it open, the golden ribbon of a rocket soared skywards; it described an arc and, as if shattering against the sky, burst and came sifting down in sparks. On the bank a noise was heard resembling a distant "hoorah."
"How beautiful," I said.
"It's even impossible to say how beautiful!" sighed Ieronym. "It's that kind of night, sir! At other times you don't pay attention to rockets, but now any vain thing makes you glad. Where are you from? ~ Anton Chekhov,#NFDB
623:My father peed like a horse. His urine lowed in one great sweeping dream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object—and arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver—and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the interesting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a non-viscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bed-sheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted appreciative whistle that culminated in a tunneled gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeters. In the tiny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes.
‘’Thank goodness,’’ my mother said when the car door closed again. ‘’I was getting a little bored in here. ~ Ethan Canin,#NFDB
624:As I pass Logan’s room, I catch a glorious purple glow. My curiosity gets the best of me. I walk in and flick on the light switch. On the wall above a bookshelf hangs something truly magnificent. Delicately, I pick up the Mace Windulightsaber replica. It reminds me of those super expensive knives professional chefs use that are weighted perfectly for precision. I take a step back and brandish the weapon at a poster of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings on the wall.
“Don’t worry, your highness. Your Jedi escort will see you to safety,” I say in my best Obi Wan accent.
“The force is strong with this one.” The words come from behind me.
I whip around out of pure freaked-out instinct, swinging the lightsaber in a big arc. It clashes with one just like it, except it’s blue. I look up into Dan’s smug face and wish these lightsabers weren’t replicas. Sure, it’s a cute face, but it’s a face I’m not in the mood to deal with at the moment. I swirl my saber to move his out of the way and put the point of it to his chin.
“Don’t make me slice your nose off, you scruffy-looking nerf herder.” I’ve always wanted to call someone that, but the opportunity never presented itself until now.
He tosses his lightsaber onto the bed and holds his hands up in surrender. “I yield, but only because that is a limited edition. ~ Leah Rae Miller,#NFDB
625:Yaşlı adam der: melegim nasıl istersen,
yeter ki, şu pırıl pırıl akşamı doyurmayı bilsen
ve koluma girip bir süre yürüsen,
sözleşmiş ıhlamur ağaçlarının kehanetini çözebilsen,
ölüdür kitaplar, gerilimini yitirmiştir dünyanın kutupları,
kalmışsa daha karanlık akışın bir arada tuttukları,
onları da birbirinden ayırır senin saçlarındaki toka.
Rüzgar, durmaksızın girer, vurmadan kapıma,
ayın ıslığı -ve sonra bir hamle, gözün alabildiğine,
aşk, artık bilenmiştir anıların gücüyle.
Genç adam sorar: ve hep gelecek misin?
Odamdaki gölgelerin üstüne yemin etmelisin,
ve karanlık ama gerçekse ıhlamurların kehaneti,
söyle onu çiçeklerin diliyle, aç saçlarının tellerini
ve gecenin coşup taşmak isteyen nabzını!
Sonra aydan gelen bir işaret, durdurun rüzgarı.
Rahatı simgeler mavi ışıkta lambalar,
ta ki oda, soluk bir zamana bürünene kadar,
hafiften ısırılan dudakların varır benimkilere,
o zaman acıdır başlayan, sana ders vermeye:
dünyanın kazandığı, oynadığı ve yitirdiği sözcük, canlıdır,
ondan sonrası ise, aşkın başlangıcıdır.
Genç kız susuyor iğ dönene kadar.
Yıldız kayıyor. Geçip gidiyor güllerin zamanı:
-Siz, beyler, verin elime kılıcı,
ve Jeanne d'Arc vatanı kurtarıyor.
Sizler, gemiyi geçiriyoruz buzların arasından,
ben, artık kimsenin bilmediği rotada ilerlemekteyim. ~ Ingeborg Bachmann,#NFDB
626:Joan Of Arc
She and the fire
fight adjectives. Their concreteness
deflects reification
by language. She simply is
a pronoun. It may signify
say, my wife (coming from me
'she' often does) or, yes
a medieval French woman, her being
so roughly abridged
by the pronoun, as brutally fed
to the fire. Regarding the fire
dazzling, heaving, devouring
won't do. It only suggests
a familiar occurrence: ouch
when flame touches skin. Indeed
flame doesn't suffice (rhymes with lame)
and a pyre, much more poetic,
based on the transcripts based on
wordy statements. So much
reliance on the makeshift engine
of abstraction, language. She
did, I think, end in fire, but hero
saint, witch, schizophrenic
won't do. Will numbers rectify
the flaws of alphabetical signs: 1412
to 1431? Historians can't be certain
56
about either: no records
other than her reserved guess
on the first day of trial
apropos birth, and her famed death
also contested by theorists
of bad conspiracies. So I can't
force the ephemeral stuff
of her matter into a mould (a poem)
with description, facts
or even an attempted evocation. She
floats and evades
perhaps - if I may hazard a simile like her ashes, diffused
by an English guard over the Seine.
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
627:Often we can get caught in our own struggles, our own small stories, that we forget our place in the larger story arc – the way that our actions, our choices, our achievements can and will blaze trails for that who come after us, so that they do not have to spend their time and energy re-fighting the same battles.
For sure we walk a spiral path, but for generations of women the spirals were so tightly packed that it seemed they were going round in circles – let us blaze trails so that the path we walk takes in wider and wider sweeps of human experience.
Trail blazing is what we do when we find ourselves in the wilderness, with no path to guide us but our own intuitive understanding of nature and our destination. At times we must walk through the night, guided only by the stars. We know when to sit and rest, to shelter from storms, when to gather water, and what on the trail will sustain us and what will do us harm. We are courageous and cautious in equal measure, but we are driven forward, not only by our own desire to reach our destination, but also by the desire to leave a viable way for others who follow.
Trail blazing is an art-form. It is how we find paths through what before was wilderness. We push aside braches, or cut them back, we tramp down nettles and long grasses, ford rivers and streams, through the inner and outer landscapes. ~ Lucy H Pearce,#NFDB
628:The last shot wasn’t bad,” he said, dropping the subject of the duel. “However, the target is the twig, not the leaves. The end of the twig,” he added.
“You must have missed the twig yourself,” she pointed out, lifting the gun and aiming it carefully, “since it’s still there.”
“True, but it’s shorter than it was when I started.”
Elizabeth momentarily forgot what she was doing as she stared at him in disbelief and amazement. “Do you mean you’ve been clipping the end off it?”
“A bit at a time,” he said, concentrating on her next shot.
She hit another leaf on the twig and handed the gun back to him.
“You’re not bad,” he complimented.
She was an outstanding shot, and his smile said he knew it as he handed her a freshly loaded gun. Elizabeth shook her head. “I’d rather see you try it.”
“You doubt my word?”
“Let’s merely say I’m a little skeptical.”
Taking the gun, Ian raised it in a swift arc, and without pausing to aim, he fired. Two inches of twig spun away and fell to the ground. Elizabeth was so impressed she laughed aloud. “Do you know,” she exclaimed with an admiring smile, “I didn’t entirely believe until this moment that you really meant to shoot the tassel off Robert’s boot!”
He sent her an amused glance as he reloaded and handed her the gun. “At the time I was sorely tempted to aim for something more vulnerable. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
629:Any girl faced with daily attention from a gorgeous boy with a cute accent and perfect hair would be hard-pressed not to develop a big,stinking, painful,all-the-time,all consuming crush.
Not that that's what's happening to me.
Like I said.It's a relief to know it won't happen. It makes things easier. Most girls laugh too hard at his jokes and find excuses to gently press his arm. To touch him.Instead,I argue and roll my eyes and act indifferent. And when I touch his arm,I shove it.Because that's what friends do.
Besides,I have more important things on my mind: movies.
I've been in France for a month, and though I have ridden the elevators to the top of La Tour Eiffel (Mer took me while St. Clair and Rashmi waited below on the lawn-St. Clair because he's afraid of falling and Rashmi because she refuses to do anything touristy), and though I have walked the viewing platform of L'Arc de Triomphe (Mer took me again,of course, while St. Clair stayed below and threatened to push Josh and Rashmi into the insane traffic circle),I still haven't been to the movies.
Actually,I have yet to leave campus alone. Kind of embarrassing.
But I have a plan.First,I'll convince someone to go to a theater with me. Shouldn't be too difficult; everyone likes the movies.And then I'll take notes on everything they say and do, and then I'll be comfortable going back to that theater alone.A ~ Stephanie Perkins,#NFDB
630:Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well. Take water. It’s common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived. Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view. Want ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
631:But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died yesterday at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as undeliverable in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not unwanted. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories.
Each room has its own mosif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with huamn stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. there is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost hisotry we citizens of Norvelt thank her. ~ Jack Gantos,#NFDB
632:THE SEVEN KEY CHARACTERIZATION VARIABLES Think of these as realms, as areas of potential character illumination. Here they are, in no particular order: Surface affectations and personality—What the world sees and perceives about a character, including quirks, ticks, habits, and visual presentation. Backstory—All that happened in the character’s life before the story begins that conspires to make him who he is now. Character arc—How the character learns lessons and grows (changes) over the course of the story, how she evolves and conquers her most confounding issues. Inner demons and conflicts—The nature of the issues that hold a character back and define his outlook, beliefs, decisions, and actions. Fear of meeting new people, for example, is a demon that definitely compromises one’s life experience. Worldview—An adopted belief system and moral compass; the manifested outcome of backstory and inner demons. Goals and motivations—What drives a character’s decisions and actions, and the belief that the benefits of those decisions and actions outweigh any costs or compromises. Decisions, actions, and behaviors—The ultimate decisions and actions that are the sum of all of the above. Everything about your characters depends on this final variable, and the degree to which the character’s decisions, actions, and behaviors have meaning and impact depends on how well you’ve manipulated the first six variables before, during, and after the moment of decision or action. ~ Larry Brooks, #NFDB
633:We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,#NFDB
634:Sri Yukteswar discovered the mathematical application of a 24,000-year equinoctial cycle to our present age. 4 The cycle is divided into an Ascending Arc and a Descending Arc, each of 12,000 years. Within each Arc fall four Yugas or Ages, called Kali, Dwapara, Treta, and Satya, corresponding to the Greek ideas of Iron, Bronze, Silver, and Golden Ages. My guru determined by various calculations that the last Kali Yuga or Iron Age, of the Ascending Arc, started about a.d. 500. The Iron Age, 1200 years in duration, is a span of materialism; it ended about a.d. 1700. That year ushered in Dwapara Yuga, a 2400-year period of electrical and atomic-energy developments: the age of telegraphy, radio, airplanes, and other space-annihilators. The 3600-year period of Treta Yuga will start in a.d. 4100; the age will be marked by common knowledge of telepathic communications and other time-annihilators. During the 4800 years of Satya Yuga, final age in an Ascending Arc, the intelligence of man will be highly developed; he will work in harmony with the divine plan. A Descending Arc of 12,000 years, starting with a Descending Golden Age of 4800 years, then begins for the world (in a.d. 12,500); man gradually sinks into ignorance. These cycles are the eternal rounds of maya, the contrasts and relativities of the phenomenal universe. 5 Men, one by one, escape from creation’s prison of duality as they awaken to consciousness of their inseverable divine unity with the Creator. Master ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
635:Swing of the heart. O firmly hung, fastened on what
invisible branch. Who, who gave you the push,
that you swung with me into the leaves?
How near I was to the exquisite fruits. But not-staying
is the essence of this motion. Only the nearness, only
toward the forever-too-high, all at once the possible
nearness. Vicinities, then
from an irresistibly swung-up-to place
already, once again, lostthe new sight, the outlook.
And now: the commanded return
back and across and into equilibrium's arms.
Below, in between, hesitation, the pull of earth, the passage
through the turning-point of the heavy, past it: and the
catapult stretches,
weighted with the heart's curiosity,
to the other side, opposite, upward.
Again how different, how new! How they envy each other
at the ends of the rope, these opposite halves of pleasure.
Or, shall I dare it: these quarters?And include, since it
withholds itself,
that other half-circle, the one whose impetus pushes the
swing?
I'm not just imagining it, as the mirror of my here-and-now
arc. Guess nothing. It will be
newer someday. But from endpoint to endpoint
of the arc that I have most dared, I already fully possess it:
overflowings from me plunge over to it and fill it,
stretch it apart, almost. And my own parting,
when the force that pushes me someday
stops, makes it all the more near.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Dedication To M...
,#NFDB
636:There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It’s not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there’s an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It’s a very concentrated thing; you can’t think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there’s such a rich field. It’s astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . . but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks for years before I discovered tango! ~ Alan Lee, #NFDB
637:The Bishop clapped his hands.
‘That’s talking!’ he exclaimed. ‘What an excellent and
really marvellous thing is this materialism! Not every one
who wants it can have it. Ah! when one does have it, one
is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly allow one’s self
to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor burned
alive like Jeanne d’Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring
this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling
themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour
everything without uneasiness,—places, sinecures,
dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative
recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of
conscience,—and that they shall enter the tomb with their
digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say
that with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible
for me to refrain from congratulating you. You
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 57
great lords have, so you say, a philosophy of your own, and
for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined, accessible to the
rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons the voluptuousness
of life admirably. This philosophy has been
extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers.
But you are good-natured princes, and you do not think
it a bad thing that belief in the good God should constitute
the philosophy of the people, very much as the goose stuffed
with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor. ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
638:A spring sun was shining on the rue St. Honore, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Someone overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.
I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back - a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these. years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivioli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.
("In The Court of the Dragon") ~ Robert W Chambers,#NFDB
639:Oscar hung his jacket on the back of a chair and undid the first few buttons of his checked shirt. Camille’s fingers trembled as she reached for the lamp on the dresser and twisted the knob, lowering the wick until the light it gave off was that of a small candle’s flame. She sat on the bed, and the other side of the hand-rolled mattress dipped with Oscar’s weight. She didn’t know how to look at him, if she should lie down or just come to her senses and ask him to leave. God, she wasn’t doing any of this right.
“You sleep sitting up?” he asked.
Camille smiled, thankful he’d lightened the moment enough for her to lean back onto one of the pillows. Turning on her side, she saw he’d already taken the same position. They lay without touching, without talking, only looking. His eyes grazed her body, slowly absorbing the pink skin of her neck, the slight curves of her breasts, and the arc of her hip. He didn’t need to lay a finger on her for the breath to stall in her lungs.
He breeched the few inches between them by sliding his hand atop hers, his skin warm and dry while beads of nervous sweat formed hot on her back. Camille reached out and let her fingertip travel along the fullness of his lower lip and down the curve of his chin. With one sweeping movement, Oscar pulled her tight against his chest and kissed her. A sensation kindled between her hips, spreading to every nerve ending in her body. This was it, the fire and heat she’d always yearned for. All these years, and Oscar had been right in front of her the whole time. ~ Angie Frazier,#NFDB
640:Lastly, he hit on the idea of transferring the observer's position into the centre of the world, and to examine the variations in angular velocity, regardless of distance, as seen from the sun. And lo! it worked.
The results were even more gratifying than he had expected. Saturn, for instance, when farthest away from the sun, in its aphelion, moves at the rate of 106 seconds arc per day; when closest to the sun, and its speed is at maximum, at 135 seconds arc per day. The ratio between the two extreme velocities is 106 to 135, which only differs by two seconds from 4:5. - the major third. With similar, very small deviations (which were all perfectly explained away at the end), the ratio of Jupiter's slowest to its fastest motion is a minor third, Mars' the quint, and so forth. So much for each planet considered by itself. But when he compared the extreme angular velocities of pairs of different planets, the results were even marvellous:
"At the first glance the Sun of Harmony broke in all its clarity through the clouds."
The extreme values yield in fact the intervals of the complete scale. But not enough: if we start with the outermost planet, Saturn, in the aphelion, the scale will be in the major key; if we start with Saturn in the perihelion, it will be in the minor key. Lastly, if several planets are simultaneously at the extreme points of their respective orbits, the result is a motet where Saturn and Jupiter represent the bass, Mars the tenor, Earth and Venus the contralto, Mercury the soprano. On some occasions all six can be heard together: ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
641:Nagyon későn értettem meg, mi az, amiben megmérhetetlen magasságban állnak fölöttem egyszerű kis emberkék. Tudnak valamit, amit én nem tudok. Lényükben megvan a ragyogás, ami belőlem hiányzik. Közelebb állnak a legmagasabbhoz, és hozzájuk képest minden megszerzett fennsőbbségemmel milyen kicsiny vagyok. Elsősorban nem a szentekre gondolok, akikben oly sok a szakrális és megható képmutatás, de nem is az anyákra, akik ügyefogyottan és mániákusan gyakorolják anyaságuk tehetségeit. Van egy fajta gondtalan mosoly, amit csak olyanok arcán látok, akiket szeretnek. Lao-ce mondja, hogy a legbiztosabb hely, ha az ember magát szeretettel őrizteti. Ezt ismerem. Van, aki őriz és akinek szárnyai alatt megnyugodva tudok mosolyogni. De van egy mosoly, amely ennél több, azé, aki maga szeret. A becsvágy a kétségbeesés egy neme, mondják. Kétségbeesés pedig annyi, mint a szeretet hiánya. Ezért a hajsza és az ember olyan, mint „az éjszakába kilőtt nyíl". Ez a paradicsomi arc, a szerető arc, félelem és gond nélkül, védekezés és taktika és stratégia nélkül. Önzés nélkül, amit olyan mélyen megvetek, de amin nem tudom magam átsegíteni. Nem tudom megvalósítani azt, ami ezt fölöslegessé teszi. A tisztátalan én nem is tudja megérteni. Értem, de csak értem és meghódolok előtte. A szeretet nem okvetlen áldozat, de bármit tesz, azzá válik. Ismerem, és nem ismerem egyszerre, jelenlétéről tudomásom van, de nem tud bennem életre kelni. Van valaki, akinek lényéből a paradicsomi meleg sugárzik. Semmi feltűnő, semmi aggodalom, a legegyszerűbb, ami van, és amíg nem értettem, semmit sem tudtam. Értem. Mindent érteni. ~ B la Hamvas, #NFDB
642:felt something open and blossom inside of her at the expressions she found there: strength, desire… hunger. And she’d known, deep in her heart, that it would be only a matter of time before she and Ethan became joined in the most intimate manner possible. Now Lettie blinked, allowing her eyes to slip from Ethan’s jaw to the breadth of his shoulders. He’d flung an arm above his head during his sleep, and her eyes lovingly traced the firm contour made by his ribs as they swept in a beguiling arc to the narrowness of his stomach. Her breath paused, then quickened. The sheet had slipped low upon his hips. So very low. Lettie straightened, her chin lifting from her knees without her really being aware of it. Her eyes widened ever so slightly, and she found herself tracing the dark hair that feathered down his stomach from his chest, swirling around the slight indentation of his navel before slipping lower. Lettie felt herself growing warm. Though the sheet covered Ethan where it counted, there was no denying the washboard honing of his stomach, the flat scoop of his pelvis, and the masculine jut of his hips beneath the sheet. Lettie’s eyes grew wider still. Her heart began a slow, methodic pounding at the base of her throat and the pit of her stomach. Impulsively, she pushed aside the covers and slipped from the bed. Her bare feet made no sound on the hooked rug in the center of the floor as she padded across the garret to where Ethan lay beside the wardrobe. Slowly, silently, she knelt beside him, her nightgown puddling onto the floor beside them. Her hair became a curtain of honey-brown waves as she bent toward him. ~ Lisa Bingham, #NFDB
643:If My Head Hurt A Hair's Foot
'If my head hurt a hair's foot
Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my breath
Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.
Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat
Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.
'All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:
I'll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,
Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time
Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,
Strike light, and bloody a loud room.
'If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel
Rage me back to the making house. My hand unravel
When you sew the deep door. The bed is a cross place.
Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make
A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.'
'No. Not for Christ's dazzling bed
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven's host of waters breaks.
'Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave
To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,
O my lost love bounced from a good home;
The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave
Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.
'Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,
At the breast stored with seas. No return
Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton's thin ways.
The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.'
~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
644:Loh-rhett-ah, you will be silent and let him say the God words.”
“He can say the God words until snowballs melt in--” She broke off and blushed. “I’m the one who has to say the words, Hunter, and I won’t. Do you understand?”
“My dear child,” the priest inserted, “it’s not often one of these”--he threw a meaningful glance at Hunter--“gentlemen offers to make an honorable woman of a captive. Wouldn’t it be wise to accept?”
“I’m in no need of matrimony, Father. I still have my honor.”
Hunter jerked her to his side and, in an ominously even voice, said, “Your honor will soon go the way of the wind, Blue Eyes. You made a God promise. You are my woman! Now I say you will be my wife!”
Loretta wet her lips, trying to meet his gaze without wavering.
“I brought you a Black Robe, yes? So this will be a marriage in your heart. If you do not say your God words to make it so, I will sure enough marry you my way.” He swept his hand in a wide arc. “Your honor will fly away on the wind. Suvate, it is finished. You choose.”
Her voice hoarse with frustration, Loretta cried, “But I don’t want to marry you. If I do, it’s for forever! Don’t you understand?”
“For forever is very much good.”
“No, it’s very much bad. I’ll never be able to leave you!”
Hunter threw up his hands. “No Black Robe, no marriage for your God. I am sure enough happy with a marriage my way.” With a determined glint in his eyes, he turned toward the crowd, raising his arms, and shouted something. Then he shrugged. “There. Suvate, it is finished. I have said my words. We are married.” Seizing her by the arm, he growled, “Keemah, come, wife. ~ Catherine Anderson,#NFDB
645:We were both quiet for a bit. With my last brilliant idea a failure, the reality that maybe we could never fix this hung like a chain around my neck, cutting off the air. I’d fought so hard to get—really get—Lend. From escaping the Center to stopping Vivian to overcoming my own stupid issues, I’d been fighting for this relationship since the day I first saw water eyes. I couldn’t have come this far just to lose him physically forever. It wasn’t fair. And I was sick and tired of things not being fair.
“So, where’s my present?”
I wiped under my eyes. “Oh, right. You have your laptop in there?”
“Yeah.”
Smiling, I grabbed my laptop off the coffee table and emailed him the link, then waited.
“Ooh, I’ve got mail.” After a few seconds I heard the video playing, and Lend laughed. “How long did this take you?”
“I had a lot of time on my hands while you were in finals.” I leaned my head against the wall as I heard the soundtrack to the clips. I’d gone through all four seasons of Easton Heights and found every single time any of the characters said “I love you,” then (with copious amounts of help from Arianna) pieced them all together back to back, with one of Lend’s favorite songs as the soundtrack.
“I love you!” “I love you. “I LOVE YOU, idiot!” “You are so—I hate you! I love you!” “Shut up and tell me you love me.” “Te amo!” Ah, yes, the quest arc of the Spanish hottie. That was a good season.
Given the number of relationships that show cycled through, the video lasted several minutes. When it ended, I heard Lend’s laptop closing.
“Well?” I asked.
“I love you,” he answered.
“I love you, too.” I put my palm against the wall, fingers splayed out. ~ Kiersten White,#NFDB
646:His mouth twisted into a perceptive, sexy smile.
"Hmm."
"Hmm?" I looked away, flustered, automatically using irritation to cover my discomfort up. "What does 'hmm' have to do with anything? Could you ever use more than five words? All this grunting and miced words make you come across--primal."
His smile tipped higher. "Primal."
"You're impossible."
"Me Jev, you Nora."
"Stop it." But I nearly smiled in spite of myself.
"Since we're keeping it primal, you smell good," he observed. Hw moved closer, makin me acutely aware of his size, the rise and fall of his chest, the warm burn of his skin on mine. Electricity tingled along my scalp, and I shuddered with pleasure.
"It's called a shower...," I began automatically, then trailed off. My memory snagged, taken aback by a compelling and forceful sense of undue familiarity. "Soap, shampoo, hot water," I added, almost as an afterthought.
"Naked. I know the drill," Jev said, something unreadable passing over his eyes.
Unsure how to proceed, I attempted to wash away the moment with an airy laugh. "Are you flirting with me, Jev?"
"Does it feel that way to you?"
"I don't know you well enough to say either way." I tried to keep my voice level, neutral even.
"Then we'll have to change that."
Still uncertain of his motives, I cleared my throat. Two could play this game. "Running from bad guys together is your idea of playing getting-to-know-you?"
"No. This is." He dipped my body backward, drawing me up in a slow arc until he raised me flush against him. In his arms, my joints loosened, my defenses melting as he led me through the sultry steps. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
647:To A Canadian Aviator Who Died For His Country In
France
Tossed like a falcon from the hunter's wrist,
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.
Peril below thee and above, peril
Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt
Thy peerless heart: gathering wing and poise,
Thy plane transfigured, and thy motor-chant
Subduéd to a whisper -- then a silence, -And thou art but a disembodied venture
In the void.
But Death, who has learned to fly,
Still matchless when his work is to be done,
Met thee between the armies and the sun;
Thy speck of shadow faltered in the sky;
Then thy dead engine and thy broken wings
Drooped through the arc and passed in fire,
A wreath of smoke -- a breathless exhalation.
But ere that came a vision sealed thine eyes,
Lulling thy senses with oblivion;
And from its sliding station in the skies
Thy dauntless soul upward in circles soared
To the sublime and purest radiance whence it sprang.
In all their eyries, eagles shall mourn thy fate,
And leaving on the lonely crags and scaurs
Their unprotected young, shall congregate
High in the tenuous heaven and anger the sun
With screams, and with a wild audacity
Dare all the battle danger of thy flight;
Till weary with combat one shall desert the light,
Fall like a bolt of thunder and check his fall
On the high ledge, smoky with mist and cloud,
Where his neglected eaglets shriek aloud,
And drawing the film across his sovereign sight
Shall dream of thy swift soul immortal
140
Mounting in circles, faithful beyond death.
~ Duncan Campbell Scott,#NFDB
648:Do a cartwheel, Tania,” said Dimitri with his hand on her back. “Show us what you can do.” “Yes, Tania!” Dasha said. “Come on. This is the perfect place for it, don’t you think? Here in front of a majestic palace, fountains, lawn, gardenias blooming—” “Germans in Minsk,” said Tatiana, trying not to look at Alexander, lying on the blanket on his side, propped up by his elbow. He looked so casual, so familiar, so… And yet, at the same time, utterly untouchable and unattainable. “Forget the Germans,” Dimitri said. “This is the place for love.” That’s what Tatiana was afraid of. “Come on, Tania,” Alexander said softly, sitting up and crossing his legs. “Let’s see these famous cartwheels.” He lit a cigarette. Dasha prodded her. “You never say no to a cartwheel.” Tatiana wanted to say no today. Sighing, she got up from their old blanket. “Fine. Though, frankly, I don’t know what kind of a queen I’d make, doing cartwheels for my subjects.” Tatiana was wearing a dress, not the dress but a casual pink sundress. Walking a few meters away from them, she said, “Are you ready?” And from a distance she saw Alexander’s eyes swallowing her. “Watch,” she said, putting her right foot forward. She flung herself upside down on her right arm, swinging her body in a perfect arc around onto her left arm and then her left foot, and then, without taking a breath and with her hair flying, Tatiana whirled around again, and again and again in an empyrean circle, down a straight trajectory on the grass toward the Great Palace, toward childhood and innocence, away from Dimitri and Dasha and Alexander. As she walked back, her face flushed and her hair everywhere, she allowed herself a glance at Alexander’s face. Everything she had wanted to see was there. ~ Paullina Simons, #NFDB
649:Sara nöbeti eğer şakak lobundaki (temporal lob) belirli bir noktada odaklanıyorsa kişi motor nöbetler geçirmeyecek, daha üst kapalı bir deneyim yaşayacaktır. Bir tür bilişsel nöbet olarak tanımlanabilecek bu etki, kişilik değişimleri, aşırı dinsellik (din saplantısı ve din konusunda kendinden aşırı emin olma), hipergrafi (genellikle de din olmak üzere belirli bir konuda aşırı derecede yazma isteği duyma), çevrede bir dışsal varlık olduğu yanılgısı ve sıklıkla da, tanrıya atfedilen sesler duyma gibi durumlarla kendini gösterir. Tarihte ortaya çıkmış peygamberler, kahramanlar ve liderlerin bir bölümünün şakak lobu odaklı sara hastaları olduğu düşünülmektedir. Baş melek Mikail'in, İskenderiyeli Aziz Katerina'nın, Aziz Margaret'in ve Cebrail'in seslerini duyduğu konusunda hem kendisini hem de Fransız askerlerini ikna ederek on altı yaşındayken Yüz Yıl Savaşları'nın gidişatını değiştirmeyi başaran Jean D'Arc'ı düşünün. Kendisi, bu deneyimini şöyle anlatmıştı: "On üç yaşımdayken, Tanrı'nın, kendimi yönlendirmemde bana yardımcı olan sesini duydum. İlk seferinde çok korkmuştum. Ses bana öğle vakti duyurmuştu kendini. Mevsimlerden yazdı ve o sırada babamın bahçesindeydim." Şöyle devam ediyordu: "Tanrı bana gitmemi emrettiğine göre gitmeliydim. Ve bu emri bana veren Tanrı olduğu için, yüz babaya ve yüz anneye sahip olsaydım ya da bir kralın kızı olsaydım bile giderdim yine de." Geriye dönük kesin tanı koymak bu durumda olanaksız olsa da Jean D'Arc'ın sunduğu veriler, artan dindarlığı, süregiden sesler, şakak lobu sarasıyla kesinlikle uyumludur. Beyin doğru noktada uyarıldığında, insan sesler duyar. Doktor, sara etkilerine karşı koyacak ilaçlar yazdığındaysa nöbetler ortadan kalkar, sesler kaybolur. Sonuçta gerçekliğimiz, biyolojimizin ne işler karıştırdığına bağlıdır. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
650:My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. I t was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.
Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern I talian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.
Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted. ~ Ernest Hemingway,#NFDB
651:Westcliff’s assessing gaze slid from her tumbled hair to the uncorseted lines of her figure, not missing the unbound shapes of her breasts. Wondering if he was going to give her a public dressing-down for daring to play rounders with a group of stable boys, Lillian returned his evaluating gaze with one of her own. She tried to look scornful, but that wasn’t easy when the sight of Westcliff’s lean, athletic body had brought another unnerving quiver to the pit of her stomach. Daisy had been right—it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a younger man who could rival Westcliff’s virile strength.
Still holding Lillian’s gaze, Westcliff pushed slowly away from the paddock fence and approached.
Tensing, Lillian held her ground. She was tall for a woman, which made them nearly of a height, but Westcliff still had a good three inches on her, and he outweighed her by at least five stone. Her nerves tingled with awareness as she stared into his eyes, which were a shade of brown so intense that they appeared to be black.
His voice was deep, textured like gravel wrapped in velvet. “You should tuck your elbows in.”
Having expected criticism, Lillian was caught off-guard. “What?”
The earl’s thick lashes lowered slightly as he glanced down at the bat that was gripped in her right hand. “Tuck your elbows in. You’ll have more control over the bat if you decrease the arc of the swing.”
Lillian scowled. “Is there any subject that you’re not an expert on?”
A glint of amusement appeared in the earl’s dark eyes. He appeared to consider the question thoughtfully. “I can’t whistle,” he finally said. “And my aim with a trebuchet is poor. Other than that…” The earl lifted his hands in a helpless gesture, as if he was at a loss to come up with another activity at which he was less than proficient. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
652:Clarisse’s friends were all laughing, and I was trying to find the strength I’d used to fight the Minotaur, but it just wasn’t there. “Like he’s ‘Big Three’ material,” Clarisse said as she pushed me toward one of the toilets. “Yeah, right. Minotaur probably fell over laughing, he was so stupid looking.” Her friends snickered. Annabeth stood in the corner, watching through her fingers. Clarisse bent me over on my knees and started pushing my head toward the toilet bowl. It reeked like rusted pipes and, well, like what goes into toilets. I strained to keep my head up. I was looking at the scummy water, thinking, I will not go into that. I won’t. Then something happened. I felt a tug in the pit of my stomach. I heard the plumbing rumble, the pipes shudder. Clarisse’s grip on my hair loosened. Water shot out of the toilet, making an arc straight over my head, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the bathroom tiles with Clarisse screaming behind me. I turned just as water blasted out of the toilet again, hitting Clarisse straight in the face so hard it pushed her down onto her butt. The water stayed on her like the spray from a fire hose, pushing her backward into a shower stall. She struggled, gasping, and her friends started coming toward her. But then the other toilets exploded, too, and six more streams of toilet water blasted them back. The showers acted up, too, and together all the fixtures sprayed the camouflage girls right out of the bathroom, spinning them around like pieces of garbage being washed away. As soon as they were out the door, I felt the tug in my gut lessen, and the water shut off as quickly as it had started. The entire bathroom was flooded. Annabeth hadn’t been spared. She was dripping wet, but she hadn’t been pushed out the door. She was standing in exactly the same place, staring at me in shock. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
653:How many times, she reflected ruefully, she had sought to understand a wounded wild creature. But it was another matter entirely to penetrate the mystery of a human being.
Reaching Christopher’s door, she knocked softly. When there came no response, she let herself inside.
To her surprise, the room brimmed with daylight, the late August sun illuminating tiny floating dust motes by the window. The air smelled like liquor and smoke and bath soap. A portable bath occupied one corner of the room, sodden footprints tracking across the carpet.
Christopher reclined on the unmade bed, half propped on a haphazard stack of pillows, a bottle of brandy clasped negligently in his fingers. His incurious gaze moved to Beatri and held, his eyes becoming alert.
He was clad in a pair of fawn-colored trousers, only partially fastened, and…nothing more. His body was a long golden arc on the bed, lean and complexly muscled. Scars marred the sun-browned skin in places…there was a ragged triangular shape where a bayonet had pierced his shoulder, a liberal scattering of marks from shrapnel, a small circular depression on his side that must have been caused by a bullet.
Slowly Christopher levered himself upward and placed the bottle on the bedside table. Half leaning on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet braced on the floor, he regarded Beatrix without expression. The locks of his hair were still damp, darkened to antique gold. How broad his shoulders were, their sturdy slopes flowing into the powerful lines of his arms.
“Why are you here?” His voice sounded rusty from disuse.
Somehow Beatrix managed to drag her mesmerized gaze away from the glinting fleece on his chest.
“I came to return Albert,” she said. “He appeared at Ramsay House today. He says you’ve been neglecting him. And that you haven’t taken him on any walks lately.”
“Has he? I had no idea he was so loose-tongued. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
654:How To Accompany The Moon Without Walking
Harsh, harsh, the maram grass on the salt dune,
seen by the cricket’s eye against the harbor moon,
anchor-frost and seaward, the lighthouse moon—
the bellbuoy-beating moon, the tiderip bronze
ringing above deep channels and old bones,
the hawsehole moon, where blood and money runs—
foremast and mainmast moon, up harbor still,
island and smokestack moon, and the wind-spill
falling from the sail-throat for the moon to fill—
up harbor, the old wharf moon, the capstan moon,
and round it the capstan bars, the heeling tune,
India Wharf, we'll bring you to Rio soon—
the shipyard moon, the grain-elevator moon,
derrick and gantry, and the turbine croon
sweet under seafoam as a bird in June—
red-warehouse moon, yacht-basin moon, where spars
tangle and telegraph with stays and stars—
hi ho, the queen of accordions and guitars—
ship-chandler moon, sea-boots and Wharf Street shine,
the ropewalk moon that spins in turpentine,
sail-loft invaded with a pour of silver twine—
and high! up spinning! skyscraper tipped on purple!
skyscraper moon, and high! for the stare of people—
skysign and belltower moon, moon for the steeple—
bells breaking bronze, gold, down, the scattered tinkle,
silver-bell moon, cornice and rooftop twinkle,
Christmas and graveyard moon, the tinsel sprinkle—
and dead, the stockyard moon, where blood drips down,
dead longhorn and mute snout; the barrelhouse moon,
moonmusic doubling, rigadoon, jigadoon—
54
so down, and down, who will be darkened soon,
red and green lights, the pallid airport moon—
ah! on the flying field, the captive balloon!
and cold; for the rim of night, the earth’s black arc,
swings up, blots out the stars, to the last spark;
while, underworld, the moon drowns dead and dark.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
655:Takes them less than a week to run the Line thro’ somebody’s House. About a mile and a half west of the Twelve-Mile Arc, twenty-four Chains beyond Little Christiana Creek, on Wednesday, April 10th, the Field-Book reports, “At 3 Miles 49 Chains, went through Mr. Price’s House.” “Just took a wild guess,” Mrs. Price quite amiable, “where we’d build it,— not as if my Husband’s a Surveyor or anything. Which side’s to be Pennsylvania, by the way?” A mischievous glint in her eyes that Barnes, Farlow, Moses McClean and others will later all recall. Mr. Price is in Town, in search of Partners for a Land Venture. “Would you Gentlemen mind coming in the House and showing me just where your Line does Run?” Mason and Dixon, already feeling awkward about it, oblige, Dixon up on the Roof with a long Plumb-line, Mason a-squint at the Snout of the Instrument. Mrs. Price meantime fills her Table with plates of sour-cherry fritters, Neat’s-Tongue Pies, a gigantick Indian Pudding, pitchers a-slosh with home-made Cider,— then producing some new-hackl’d Streaks of Hemp, and laying them down in a Right Line according to the Surveyors’ advice,— fixing them here and there with Tacks, across the room, up the stairs, straight down the middle of the Bed, of course, . . . which is about when Mr. Rhys Price happens to return from his Business in town, to find merry Axmen lounging beneath his Sassafras tree, Strange Stock mingling with his own and watering out of his Branch, his house invaded by Surveyors, and his wife giving away the Larder and waving her Tankard about, crying, “Husband, what Province were we married in? Ha! see him gape, for he cannot remember. ’Twas in Pennsylvania, my Tortoise. But never in Maryland. Hey? So from now on, when I am upon this side of the House, I am in Maryland, legally not your wife, and no longer subject to your Authority,— isn’t that right, Gents?” “Ask the Rev,” they reply together, ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
656:In One's Age to One's Youth
Listen, thou child I used to be!
I know what thou didst fret to knowKnowledge thou couldst not lure to thee,
Whatever bribe thou wouldst bestow.
That knowledge but a waymark plants
Along the road of ignorance.
Listen, thou child I used to be!
I am enlarged where thou wert bound,
Though vaunting still that thou wast free,
And lord of thine own pleasure crowned.
True freedom heeds a hidden stress,
Whereby desire to range grows less.
Listen, thou child I used to be!
Unmoved I meet thy fear of old,
Where thou, but masked with bravery,
Didst ever charge thyself, Be bold!
True courage owns a dread extremeLed blind through the blind battle's scheme!
Listen, thou child I used to be!
I love, I serve with proffered veins,
Where thou demandest praise thy fee,
And grateful solace for thy pains.
True love and service do but win
That I may more exceed therein.
Listen, thou child I used to be!
My soul to wrath 'gainst wrong is used,
Where thy rash combat utterly
The doer and the deed confused.
Right wrath the deed stabs soon or late,
The doer spares, his deed to hate.
Listen, thou child I used to be!
Unproud I move, and yet unbowed,
Where thou wast fed with vanity,
Thy chiefest pride- thou wast not proud!
True lowliness forgets its state,
And equal trains with small or great.
Listen, thou child I used to be!
I am what thy dream-wandering sense
Did shape, and thy fresh will decree,
Yet all with subtle difference:
Where heaven's arc did seem to end,
Still on and on fair fields extend.
Yet listen, child I used to be!
Nothing of thine I dare despise,
Nor passion, deed, nor fantasy;
For lo! the soul's far years shall rise
And with unripeness charge this hour
Would boast o'er thine its riper power.
~ Edith Matilda Thomas,#NFDB
657:Because Aristotle’s was the accepted lens on the universe, centuries of medieval scientists and thinkers went to great lengths to make epicycles work. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century, with one simple but profound observation, that Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus reframed our view of the universe. The planets revolved not around the earth, but around the sun. Finally, understanding that provided a foundation for some of the most important advances in history and the foundation for modern astronomy and calculus. Of course, it took eighteen centuries for someone like Copernicus to see and articulate the flaws in Aristotle’s logic. And even he died without knowing that the world would accept he was right. Changing a well-established view of the world rarely happens overnight—and even when it happens, it still takes time to refine and perfect the right new perspective. In the world of innovation, many companies are stuck in a world of creating “epicycles”: elaborate approximations, estimations, and extrapolations. Because we gather, fine-tune, and cross-reference all manner of data, it seems like we should be getting better and better at predicting success. But if we fail to understand why customers make the choices they make, we’re just getting better and better at a fundamentally flawed process. Without the right understanding of the causal mechanism at the center of the innovation universe, companies are trying to make sense of the universe revolving around the earth. They’re forced to rely on an array of borrowed best practices, probabilistic tools, and tips and tricks that have worked for other companies, but which can’t guarantee success. As you look at innovation through the lenses of the Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Job to Be Done. It may seem like a small distinction—just a few minutes of arc—but it matters a great deal. In fact, it changes everything. ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
658:Urgent Story"
When the oracle said, ‘If you keep pigeons
you will never lose home.’ I kept pigeons.
They flicked their red eyes over me,
a deft trampling
of that humanly proud distance
by which remaining aloof
in it’s own fullness. I administered
crumbs, broke sky with them like breaking
the lemon-light of the soul's amnesia
for what It wants but will neither take
nor truh let go. How it revived me,
to release them! And at that moment of flight
to disavow the imprint, to tear
their compass, out by the roots of
some green meadow they might fly over
on the way to an immaculate freedom, meadow
in which a woman has taken off
her blouse, then taken off the man's flannel shirt
in their sky-drenched arc
of one, then the other above
each other's eyelids is a branding of daylight,
the interior of its black ambush
in which two joys lame the earth a while
with heat and cloudwork under wing-beats.
Then she was quiet with him. And he
with her. The world hummed
with crickets, with bees nudging the lupins.
It is like that when the earth counts
its riches—noisy with desire
even when desire has strengthened our bodies
and moved us into the soak of harmony.
Her nipples in sunlight have crossed his palm
wind-sweet with savor and the rest
is so knelt before
that when they stand upright
the flight-cloud of my tamed birds shapes an arm
too short for praise. Oracle, my dovecot
is an over and over nearer to myself
when its black eyes are empty.
But by nightfall I am dark
before dark if one bird is missing.
Dove left open by love in a meadow,
Dove commanding me not to know
where it sank into the almost-night—for you
I will learn to play the concertina,
to write poems full of hateful jasmine and
longing, to keep the dead alive, to sicken
at the least separation.
Dove, for whose sake
I will never reach home. ~ Tess Gallagher,#NFDB
659:In Memoriam—rev. J. J. Lyons
ROSH-HASHANAH, 5638.
The golden harvest-tide is here, the corn
Bows its proud tops beneath the reaper's hand.
Ripe orchards' plenteous yields enrich the land;
Bring the first fruits and offer them this morn,
With the stored sweetness of all summer hours,
The amber honey sucked from myriad flowers,
And sacrifice your best first fruits to-day,
With fainting hearts and hands forespent with toil,
Offer the mellow harvest's splendid spoil,
To Him who gives and Him who takes away.
Bring timbrels, bring the harp of sweet accord,
And in a pleasant psalm your voice attune,
And blow the cornet greeting the new moon.
Sing, holy, holy, holy, is the Lord,
Who killeth and who quickeneth again,
Who woundeth and who healeth mortal pain,
Whose hand afflicts us, and who sends us peace.
Hail thou slim arc of promise in the West,
Thou pledge of certain plenty, peace, and rest.
With the spent year, may the year's sorrows cease.
For there is mourning now in Israel,
The crown, the garland of the branching tree
Is plucked and withered. Ripe of years was he.
The priest, the good old man who wrought so well
Upon his chosen globe. For he was one
Who at his seed-plot toiled through rain and sun.
Morn found him not as one who slumbereth,
Noon saw him faithful, and the restful night
Stole o'er him at his labors to requite
The just man's service with the just man's death.
What shall be said when such as he do pass?
Go to the hill-side, neath the cypress-trees,
Fall midst that peopled silence on your knees,
And weep that man must wither as the grass.
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But mourn him not, whose blameless life complete
Rounded its perfect orb, whose sleep is sweet,
Whom we must follow, but may not recall.
Salute with solemn trumpets the New Year,
And offer honeyed fruits as were he here,
Though ye be sick with wormwood and with gall.
~ Emma Lazarus,#NFDB
660:A força que os códigos possuem para impor a obediência, é, sobretudo, moral. Nenhuma potência material conseguiria tornar respeitada uma lei que toda a gente violasse.
Se um gênio malfazejo quisesse destruir uma sociedade em poucos dias, bastar-lhe-ia sugerir a todos os seus membros a recusa de obedecer às leis. O desastre seria muito maior do que uma invasão a que se seguisse a conquista. Um conquistador limita-se geralmente, com efeito, a mudar o nome dos senhores que dispõem do poder, mas é seu interesse conservar cuidadosamente os quadros sociais cuja acção é sempre mais eficaz do que a dos exércitos
Destruir a crença na necessidade do respeito aos freios sociais, representados pelas leis, é preparar uma revolução moral infinitamente mais perigosa do que uma revolução material. Os monumentos saqueados rapidamente se reconstroem, mas para refazer a alma de um povo, são necessários. em muitos casos, alguns séculos.
Já tivemos de suportar, em várias épocas da nossa história, essas desagregações mentais, e no seu livro sobre Joana d’Arc Hanotaux indicou uma delas em termos preciosos: "Quando foi abolida toda a hierarquia, quando o próprio comando dissipou a sua autoridade, quando, pelos seus erros, ele deixou de ser respeitado, quando o organismo social está derrotado, fica livre o campo para as iniciativas individuais. Elas surgem e, segundo as leis naturais, procuram o crescimento e a florescência na deliqüescência das instituições destruídas"
Combatendo a tradição em nome do progresso e sonhando destruir a sociedade para apoderar-se das suas riquezas, como Átila sonhava saquear Roma, os sectários não vêm que a sua vida é um estreito tecido de aquisições ancestrais, sem as quais não viveriam um só dia.
Sabe-se como finalizam sempre semelhantes tentativas. Será, entretanto, preciso suportá-las, sem dúvida ainda pois só a experiência repetida instrui. As verdades formuladas nos livros são palavras vãs. Só penetram profundamente na, alma dos povos ao clarão dos incêndios e ao troar dos canhões. ~ Gustave Le Bon,#NFDB
661:In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter. Yet we also recognize that the experiencing self should not be ignored. The peak and the ending are not the only things that count. In favoring the moment of intense joy over steady happiness, the remembering self is hardly always wise. “An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds,” Kahneman observes. “We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory … has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.” When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
662:Free Fantasia On Japanese Themes
All the afternoon there has been a chirping of birds,
And the sun lies warm and still on the western sides of swollen branches.
There is no wind;
Even the little twigs at the ends of the branches do not move,
And the needles of the pines are solid
Bands of inarticulated blackness
Against the blue-white sky.
Still, but alert;
And my heart is still and alert,
Passive with sunshine,
Avid of adventure.
I would experience new emotions,
Submit to strange enchantments,
Bend to influences
Bizarre, exotic,
Fresh with burgeoning.
I would climb a sacred mountain,
Struggle with other pilgrims up a steep path through pine-trees,
Above to the smooth, treeless slopes,
And prostrate myself before a painted shrine,
Beating my hands upon the hot earth,
Quieting my eyes upon the distant sparkle
Of the faint spring sea.
I would recline upon a balcony
In purple curving folds of silk,
And my dress should be silvered with a pattern
Of butterflies and swallows,
And the black band of my obi
Should flash with gold circular threads,
And glitter when I moved.
I would lean against the railing
While you sang to me of wars
Past and to come—
Sang, and played the samisen.
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Perhaps I would beat a little hand drum
In time to your singing;
Perhaps I would only watch the play of light
Upon the hilt of your two swords.
I would sit in a covered boat,
Rocking slowly to the narrow waves of a river,
While above us, an arc of moving lanterns,
Curved a bridge,
A hiss of gold
Blooming out of darkness,
Rockets exploded,
And died in a soft dripping of colored stars.
We would float between the high trestles,
And drift away from other boats,
Until the rockets flared soundless,
And their falling stars hung silent in the sky,
Like wistaria clusters above the ancient entrance of a temple.
I would anything
Rather than this cold paper;
With outside, the quiet son on the sides of burgeoning branches,
And inside, only my books.
~ Amy Lowell,#NFDB
663:Absorbingly articulate and infinitely intelligent . . . There is nothing pop about Kahneman's psychology, no formulaic story arc, no beating you over the head with an artificial, buzzword -encrusted Big Idea. It's just the wisdom that comes from five decades of honest, rigorous scientific work, delivered humbly yet brilliantly, in a way that will forever change the way you think about thinking:' -MARIA POPOVA, The Atlantic "Kahneman's primer adds to recent challenges to economic orthodoxies about rational actors and efficient markets; more than that, it's a lucid, mar- velously readable guide to spotting-and correcting-our biased misunder- standings of the world:' -Publishers Weekly (starred review) "The ramifications of Kahneman's work are wide, extending into education, business, marketing, politics ... and even happiness research. Call his field 'psychonomics: the hidden reasoning behind our choices. Thinking, Fast and Slow is essential reading for anyone with a mind:' -KYLE SMITH,NewYorkPost "A stellar accomplishment, a book for everyone who likes to think and wants to do it better." - E. JAMES LIEBERMAN ,Libraryfournal "Daniel Kahneman demonstrates forcefully in his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, how easy it is for humans to swerve away from rationality:' -CHRISTOPHER SHEA , The Washington Post "A tour de force .. . Kahneman's book is a must-read for anyone interested in either human behavior or investing. He clearly shows that while we like to think of ourselves as rational in our decision making, the truth is we are subject to many biases. At least being aware of them will give you a better chance of avoiding them, or at least making fewer of them:' -LARRY SWEDROE, CBS News "Brilliant .. . It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahne- man's contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most important psycholo- gist in history, Kahneman has reshaped cognitive psychology, the analysis of rationality and reason, the understanding of risk and the study of hap pi- ness and well-being ... A magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
664:I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.
But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.
Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.
[…]
I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown.
Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown.
You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete.
This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing. ~ Debbie Millman,#NFDB
665:Now that is a sword,” Freddy said in awe as he went to look at an impressive saber hanging from the hat rack near the door.
“Stay away from it,” she cautioned. “I’m sure it’s sharper than yours.”
As usual, Freddy ignored her. “Just think what I could do with this,” he said as he lifted it off its hook.
“So far I haven’t seen you do anything with a sword, my boy,” Oliver remarked dryly. “Though I shudder to think what your cousin would attempt.”
Maria glared at Oliver, which only made him laugh. Meanwhile, Freddy unsheathed the saber with a flourish.
“Curse it, Freddy, put it back,” Maria ordered.
“What a fine piece of steel.” Freddy swished it through the air. “Even the one Uncle Adam gave me isn’t near so impressive.”
Maria appealed to Oliver. “Do something, for pity’s sake. Make him stop.”
“And get myself skewered for the effort? No, thank you. Let the pup have his fun.”
Freddy cast him a belligerent glance. “You wouldn’t call me a pup if I came at you with this.”
“No, I’d call you insane,” Oliver drawled. “But you’re welcome to try and see what happens.”
Don’t encourage him,” Maria told Oliver.
The door opened suddenly, and Freddy whirled with the sword in hand, knocking a lamp off the desk. As the glass chimney shattered, spilling oil in a wide arc, the wick lit the lot, and fire sprang to life.
Maria jumped back with a cry of alarm while Oliver leaped out of his chair to stamp it out, first with his boots and then with his coat. A string of curses filled the air, most of them Oliver’s, though Freddy got in a few choice ones as the fire licked at his favorite trousers.
When at last Oliver put the flames out and nothing was left but a charred circle on the wood floor, dotted with shards of glass, the three of them turned to the door to find a dark-haired man observing the scene with an expression that gave nothing away.
“If you hoped to catch my attention,” he remarked, “you’ve succeeded.”
“Mr. Pinter, I presume?” Oliver said, tossing his now ruined coat and singed gloves into a nearby rubbish pail. “I hope you’ll forgive us for the dramatic intrusion. I’m Stonevi-“
“I know who you are, my lord,” he interrupted. “It’s what you’re doing here setting fire to my office that I’m not certain of. ~ Sabrina Jeffries,#NFDB
666:noncontradicţiei este fals -, n - a r putea f i gândit sau comunicat. Or, în fapt, toată lumea gândeşte ş i comunică ceva anume , i n c l u s i v sofiştii, cei c a r e cont e s t ă pr inc ipiul noncontrad iqi e i . Altminteri, dacă nu a r comunica, omul a r fi, zice Aristotel, "aidoma unei l e gume " . Iar dacă nu ar comunica ceva determinat, omul nu ar comuni c a , în fapt, n imi c . R ealitatea comunicării unu i subiea determinat, aşadar, pr e supune acceptarea une i con sistenţe a gândirii, a unei determinări coerente a gândului gândit ş i apoi comunicat, ceea ce, la rândul său, impl i c ă pr inc ipiul noncont r adiqi e i . Pentru ca omul s ă rămână în domeniul logos-ului , al g ândului coe r ent ş i al expresiei ve rba l e ne e chi voc e , e necesar c a el să ut i l i z e z e imp l i c i t pr inc ipiul noncontra dicţiei, fie şi atunci când, explicit, el ar dori să-I conteste. Chiar da c ă - aşa cum crede de e x emplu J. Lukasiewicz - acest pr inc ipiu nu este o "lege a l o g i c i i " ş i nu arc valoare logică ca atare, el întemeiază orice l im b aj omenesc ş i înfiinţează orice responsabilitate pentru spusele rostite şi faptele comise. Iar dacă el nu este încă logic, cu siguranţă că el întemeiază logica. Or, pe de altă parte, după cum s-a spus, e pl auz ibi l ca orice consistenţă a gândirii să fie un reflex al consistenţei lumii. (Prin c ipiul noncontradicţiei nu poate funcţiona în cazul unor obiecte imaginare inconsistente, precum un triunghi dreptunghic cehi lateral.) I a r o lume consistentă este o lume unde există Fi inţ ă . Aş ada r , pr int r -un f e l de " a r gument ontologic" imp l i c it, subt i l ş i ma i p u ţ i n pretenţios decât cel " c la s i c " al l u i An s e lm din Cantcrbury, Aristotel deduce, din faptul incontestabil a l comu nicării umane, că trebuie să existe Fiinţă. Unde este Fiinţa ? Dar, chiar dacă acum ş t im că trebuie să existe Fi inţ a , încă n u ş t im unde s e află ea, sau ce anume este ea - altfel spus, cu ce porţiune din realitate s e identifică ea. Problema pare etern ă : " iată subiectul cercetat şi controversat şi în vechime, şi a cum, ş i p u r u re a : ce e s t e ceea-ce-este, adi c ă ce e s t e F i i nţa ? " - scrie Aristotel. Într-adevăr, filozofii, predecesorii săi, au identificat Fiinţa - adică porţiunea de stabilitate şi coerenţă din lume ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
667:noncontradicţiei este fals -, n - a r putea f i gândit sau comunicat. Or, în fapt, toată lumea gândeşte ş i comunică ceva anume , i n c l u s i v sofiştii, cei c a r e cont e s t ă pr inc ipiul noncontrad iqi e i . Altminteri, dacă nu a r comunica, omul a r fi, zice Aristotel, "aidoma unei l e gume " . Iar dacă nu ar comunica ceva determinat, omul nu ar comuni c a , în fapt, n imi c . R ealitatea comunicării unu i subiea determinat, aşadar, pr e supune acceptarea une i con sistenţe a gândirii, a unei determinări coerente a gândului gândit ş i apoi comunicat, ceea ce, la rândul său, impl i c ă pr inc ipiul noncont r adiqi e i . Pentru ca omul s ă rămână în domeniul logos-ului , al g ândului coe r ent ş i al expresiei ve rba l e ne e chi voc e , e necesar c a el să ut i l i z e z e imp l i c i t pr inc ipiul noncontra dicţiei, fie şi atunci când, explicit, el ar dori să-I conteste. Chiar da c ă - aşa cum crede de e x emplu J. Lukasiewicz - acest pr inc ipiu nu este o "lege a l o g i c i i " ş i nu arc valoare logică ca atare, el întemeiază orice l im b aj omenesc ş i înfiinţează orice responsabilitate pentru spusele rostite şi faptele comise. Iar dacă el nu este încă logic, cu siguranţă că el întemeiază logica. Or, pe de altă parte, după cum s-a spus, e pl auz ibi l ca orice consistenţă a gândirii să fie un reflex al consistenţei lumii. (Prin c ipiul noncontradicţiei nu poate funcţiona în cazul unor obiecte imaginare inconsistente, precum un triunghi dreptunghic cehi lateral.) I a r o lume consistentă este o lume unde există Fi inţ ă . Aş ada r , pr int r -un f e l de " a r gument ontologic" imp l i c it, subt i l ş i ma i p u ţ i n pretenţios decât cel " c la s i c " al l u i An s e lm din Cantcrbury, Aristotel deduce, din faptul incontestabil a l comu nicării umane, că trebuie să existe Fiinţă. Unde este Fiinţa ? Dar, chiar dacă acum ş t im că trebuie să existe Fi inţ a , încă n u ş t im unde s e află ea, sau ce anume este ea - altfel spus, cu ce porţiune din realitate s e identifică ea. Problema pare etern ă : " iată subiectul cercetat şi controversat şi în vechime, şi a cum, ş i p u r u re a : ce e s t e ceea-ce-este, adi c ă ce e s t e F i i nţa ? " - scrie Aristotel. Într-adevăr, filozofii, predecesorii săi, au identificat Fiinţa - adică porţiunea de stabilitate şi coerenţă din lume - ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
668:Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to the world after we die. If self-interests were the primary source of meaning in life, then it wouldn’t matter to people if an hour after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from the face of the earth. Yet, it matters greatly to most people. We feel that such an occurrence would make our lives meaningless. The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater; a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror, but if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, solves the paradox of our ordinary existence, by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves, the will which delights to do this service, and is not thwarted, but enriched and expressed in such service… Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential.
As our time winds down, we all seek comfort in simple pleasures; companionship, everyday routines, the taste of good food, the warmth of sunlight on our faces. We become less interested in the awards of achieving and accumulating and more interested in the rewards of simply being. Yet, while we may feel less ambitious, we also have become concerned for our legacy, and we have a deep need to identify purposes outside ourselves that make living feel meaningful and worthwhile.
In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments, which after all is mostly nothing much, plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments; the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute by minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self, which is absorbed in the moment, your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery, but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. ~ Atul Gawande,#NFDB
669:Do you have any cheese preferences?” Jack asked.
“All cheese is good cheese, Lend said.
“True dat.” I nodded solemnly.
“You did not just say ‘true dat,’” Arianna said, walking into the kitchen. “Because if you think you have any ability whatsoever to pull that off, we are going to have to have a long, long talk.”
“Can I at least use it ironically? Or ‘dude.’ Can I use ‘dude?’ Because I really want to be able to use ‘dude.’”
“No. No, you cannot, but thank you for asking. Besides, ironic use always segues into non-ironic use, and unless you suddenly become far cooler or far more actually Californian than you are now, I simply cannot allow it.”
“But on Easton Heights—”
“You are not going to bring up Cary’s cousin Trevyn’s multiepisode arc where he’s sent there as punishment for his pot-smoking surf-bum ways, are you? Because that arc sucked, and he wasn’t even very hot. Also, what’s the lunatic doing?” She jerked her head toward Jack.
He flipped a gorgeous looking omelet onto a plate and placed it with a flourish in front of Lend. “I am providing insurance against frying pan boy deciding to enact all the very painful fantasies he’s no doubt entertained about me for the last few weeks. An omelet this good should rule out any dismemberment vengeance.”
“Have you been reading his diary?” I asked. “Because I’ll bet he got really creative with the violence ideas.”
“No, I only ever read yours. But let me tell you, one more exclamation mark dotted with a heart while talking about how good a kisser Lend is and I was about ready to do myself in. You’re rather single-minded when it comes to adoring him.”
“True dat,” Arianna said, nodding.
“How come you can use ‘true dat’ if I can’t?” I asked, rightfully outraged.
“Because I’m dead, and none of the rules apply anymore.”
Lend ate his omelet, refusing to answer Jack’s questions about just how delicious it was on a scale from cutting off limbs to just breaking his nose. I gave Jack full points for flavor but noted the texture was slightly off, exempting him from name-calling but not from dirty looks.
Arianna lounged against the counter, and when I finished first we debated the usage rules of “dude,” “true dat,” and my favorite, “for serious.”
“I kind of wish they’d shut up,” Jack said.
“Dude, true dat,” Lend answered.
Jack nodded solemnly. “For serious. ~ Kiersten White,#NFDB
670:Sometimes you characters give me a pain in the back of my lap,” said Manuel abruptly. “I hang around with you and listen to simple-minded gobbledegook in yard-long language, if it’s you talking, Dran, and pink-and-purple sissification from the brat here. Why I do it I’ll never know. And it goes that way up to the last gasp. So you’re going to leave. Dran has to make a speech, real logical. Vaughn has to blow out a sigh and get misty-eyed.” He spat.
“How would you handle it?” Dran asked, amused. Vaughn stared at Manuel whitely.
“Me? You really want to know?”
“This I want to hear,” said Vaughn between her teeth.
“I’d wait a while—a long while—until neither of you was talking. Then I’d say, ‘I joined the Marines yesterday.’ And you’d both look at me a little sad. There’s supposed to be something wrong with coming right out and saying something. Let’s see. Suppose I do it the way Vaughn would want me to.” He tugged at an imaginary braid and thrust out his lower lip in a lampoon of Vaughn’s full mouth. He sighed gustily. “I have felt …” He paused to flutter his eyelashes. “I have felt the call to arms,” he said in a histrionic whisper. He gazed off into the middle distance. “I have heard the sound of trumpets. The drums stir in my blood.” He pounded his temples with his fists. “I can’t stand it—I can’t! Glory beckons. I will away to foreign strands.”
Vaughn turned on her heel, though she made no effort to walk away. Dran roared with laughter.
“And suppose I’m you,” said Manuel, his face taut with a suppressed grin. He leaned easily against the base of the statue and crossed his legs. He flung his head back. “Zeno of Miletus,” he intoned, “in reflecting on the cromislon of the fortiseetus, was wont to refer to a razor as ‘a check for a short beard.’ While shaving this morning I correlated ‘lather’ with ‘leather’ and, seeing some of it on my neck, I recalled the old French proverb, ‘Jeanne D’Arc,’ which means: The light is out in the bathroom. The integration was complete. If the light was out I could no longer shave. Therefore I can not go on like this. Also there was this matter of the neck. I shall join the Marines. Q. E. D., which means thus spake Zarathusiasm.”
Dran chuckled. Vaughn made a furious effort, failed, and burst out laughing. When it subsided, Manuel said soberly, “I did.”
“You did what?”
“I joined the Marines yesterday. ~ Theodore Sturgeon,#NFDB
671:Drunk
Too far away, oh love, I know,
To save me from this haunted road,
Whose lofty roses break and blow
On a night-sky bent with a load
Of lights: each solitary rose,
Each arc-lamp golden does expose
Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows
Night blenched with a thousand snows.
Of hawthorn and of lilac trees,
White lilac; shows discoloured night
Dripping with all the golden lees
Laburnum gives back to light.
And shows the red of hawthorn set
On high to the purple heaven of night,
Like flags in blenched blood newly wet,
Blood shed in the noiseless fight.
Of life for love and love for life,
Of hunger for a little food,
Of kissing, lost for want of a wife
Long ago, long ago wooed.
Too far away you are, my love,
To steady my brain in this phantom show
That passes the nightly road above
And returns again below.
The enormous cliff of horse-chestnut trees
Has poised on each of its ledges
An erect small girl looking down at me;
White-night-gowned little chits I see,
And they peep at me over the edges
Of the leaves as though they would leap, should I call
Them down to my arms;
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“But, child, you’re too small for me, too small
Your little charms.”
White little sheaves of night-gowned maids,
Some other will thresh you out!
And I see leaning from the shades
A lilac like a lady there, who braids
Her white mantilla about
Her face, and forward leans to catch the sight
Of a man’s face,
Gracefully sighing through the white
Flowery mantilla of lace.
And another lilac in purple veiled
Discreetly, all recklessly calls
In a low, shocking perfume, to know who has hailed
Her forth from the night: my strength has failed
In her voice, my weak heart falls:
Oh, and see the laburnum shimmering
Her draperies down,
As if she would slip the gold, and glimmering
White, stand naked of gown.
The pageant of flowery trees above
The street pale-passionate goes,
And back again down the pavement, Love
In a lesser pageant flows.
Two and two are the folk that walk,
They pass in a half embrace
Of linkèd bodies, and they talk
With dark face leaning to face.
Come then, my love, come as you will
Along this haunted road,
Be whom you will, my darling, I shall
Keep with you the troth I trowed.
~ David Herbert Lawrence,#NFDB
672:Counterpoint: Two Rooms
He, in the room above, grown old and tired;
She, in the room below, his floor her ceiling,
Pursue their separate dreams. He turns his light,
And throws himself on the bed, face down, in laughter.
She, by the window, smiles at a starlight night.
His watch—the same he has heard these cycles of ages—
Wearily chimes at seconds beneath his pillow.
The clock upon her mantelpiece strikes nine.
The night wears on. She hears dull steps above her.
The world whirs on. New stars come up to shine.
His youth—far off—he sees it brightly walking
In a golden cloud .... wings flashing about it....
Darkness
Walls it around with dripping enormous walls.
Old age, far off—or death—what do they matter?
Down the smooth purple night a streaked star falls.
She hears slow steps in the street; they chime like music,
They climb to her heart, they break and flower in beauty,
Along her veins they glisten and ring and burn.
He hears his own slow steps tread down to silence.
Far off they pass. He knows they will never return.
Far off, on a smooth dark road, he hears them faintly.
The road, like a sombre river, quietly flowing,
Moves among murmurous walls. A deeper breath
Swells them to sound: he hears his steps more clearly.
And death seems nearer to him; or he to death.
What's death?—she smiles. The cool stone hurts her elbow,
The last few raindrops gather and fall from elm-boughs,
She sees them glisten and break. The arc-lamp sings,
The new leaves dip in the warm wet air and fragrance,
A sparrbw whirs to the eaves and shakes its wings.
What's death—what's death ? The spring returns like music ;
The trees are like dark lovers who dream in starlight;
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The soft grey clouds go over the stars like dreams.
The cool stone wounds her arms to pain, to pleasure.
Under the lamp a circle of wet street gleams.
And death seems far away—a thing of roses,
A golden portal where golden music closes,
Death seems far away;
And spring returns, the countless singing of lovers,
And spring returns to stay....
He, in the room above, grown old and tired,
Flings himself on the bed, face down, in laughter,
And clenches his hands, and remembers, and desires to die.
And she, by the window, smiles at a night of starlight....
The soft grey clouds go slowly across the sky.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
673:The Cave Painters
Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch
until the great rock chamber
flowered around them and they stood
in an enormous womb of
flickering light and darklight, a place
to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows
over the sleeker shapes of radiance.
They've left the world of weather and panic
behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark
in their wake, pushing as one pulse
to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells
are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries
and the binding juices oozed
out of chosen barks. The beasts
begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts
(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)
stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours
mould those forms from chance, coaxing
rigid dips and folds and bulges
to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,
a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes
curling to a crazy gallop.
Intent and human, they attach
the mineral, vegetable, animal
realms to themselves, inscribing
the one unbroken line
everything depends on, from that
impenetrable centre
to the outer intangibles of light and air, even
the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc
of gentleness that this big-bellied cow
arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing
dance of death that
bristles out of the buck's
struck flank. On this one line they leave
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a beak-headed human figure of sticks
and one small, chalky, human hand.
We'll never know if they worked in silence
like people praying—the way our monks
illuminated their own dark ages
in cross-hatched rocky cloisters,
where they contrived a binding
labyrinth of lit affinities
to spell out in nature's lace and fable
their mindful, blinding sixth sense
of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds
tracing their great bloodlines over the globe)
they kept a constant gossip up
of praise, encouragement, complaint.
It doesn't matter: we know
they went with guttering rushlight
into the dark; came to terms
with the given world; must have had
—as their hands moved steadily
by spiderlight—one desire
we'd recognise: they would—before going on
beyond this border zone, this nowhere
that is now here—leave something
upright and bright behind them in the dark.
~ Eamon Grennan,#NFDB
674:Blue
The earth again like a ship steams out of the dark sea over
The edge of the blue, and the sun stands up to see us glide
Slowly into another day; slowly the rover
Vessel of darkness takes the rising tide.
I, on the deck, am startled by this dawn confronting
Me who am issued amazed from the darkness, stripped
And quailing here in the sunshine, delivered from haunting
The night unsounded whereon our days are shipped.
Feeling myself undawning, the day’s light playing upon me,
I who am substance of shadow, I all compact
Of the stuff of the night, finding myself all wrongly
Among the crowds of things in the sunshine jostled and racked.
I with the night on my lips, I sigh with the silence of death;
And what do I care though the very stones should cry me unreal, though the
clouds
Shine in conceit of substance upon me, who am less than the rain.
Do I know the darkness within them? What are they but shrouds?
The clouds go down the sky with a wealthy ease
Casting a shadow of scorn upon me for my share in death; but I
Hold my own in the midst of them, darkling, defy
The whole of the day to extinguish the shadow I lift on the breeze.
Yea, though the very clouds have vantage over me,
Enjoying their glancing flight, though my love is dead,
I still am not homeless here, I’ve a tent by day
Of darkness where she sleeps on her perfect bed.
And I know the host, the minute sparkling of darkness
Which vibrates untouched and virile through the grandeur of night,
But which, when dawn crows challenge, assaulting the vivid motes
Of living darkness, bursts fretfully, and is bright:
Runs like a fretted arc-lamp into light,
Stirred by conflict to shining, which else
Were dark and whole with the night.
30
Runs to a fret of speed like a racing wheel,
Which else were aslumber along with the whole
Of the dark, swinging rhythmic instead of a-reel.
Is chafed to anger, bursts into rage like thunder;
Which else were a silent grasp that held the heavens
Arrested, beating thick with wonder.
Leaps like a fountain of blue sparks leaping
In a jet from out of obscurity,
Which erst was darkness sleeping.
Runs into streams of bright blue drops,
Water and stones and stars, and myriads
Of twin-blue eyes, and crops
Of floury grain, and all the hosts of day,
All lovely hosts of ripples caused by fretting
The Darkness into play.
~ David Herbert Lawrence,#NFDB
675:[...] Dans cette question des limites de fait ou de droit du sentiment patriotique, il convient de rappeler tout d’abord qu’il y a patrie et patrie : il y a celle de la terre et celle du Ciel ; la seconde est prototype et mesure de la première, elle lui donne son sens et sa légitimité. C’est ainsi que dans l’enseignement évangélique l’amour de Dieu prime, et peut par conséquent contredire, l’amour des proches parents, sans qu’il y ait là aucune offense à la charité ; la créature doit d’ailleurs être aimée « en Dieu », c’est à dire que l’amour ne lui appartient jamais en entier. Le Christ ne s’est soucié que de la Patrie céleste, qui « n’est pas de ce monde » ; c’est suffisant, non pour renier le fait naturel d’une patrie terrestre, mais pour s’abstenir de tout culte abusif – et avant tout illogique – du pays d’origine. Si le Christ a désavoué les attachements temporels, il n’en a pas moins admis les droits de la nature, dans le domaine qui est le leur, droits éminemment relatifs qu’il ne s’agit pas d’ériger en idoles ; c’est ce que saint Augustin a magistralement traité, sous un certain rapport tout au moins, dans Civitas Dei. Le patriotisme normal est à la fois déterminé et limité par les valeurs éternelles ; « il ne s’enfle point » et ne pervertit pas l’esprit ; il n’est pas, comme le chauvinisme, l’oubli officiel de l’humilité et de la charité en même temps que l’anesthésie de toute une partie de l’intelligence ; restant dans ses limites, il est capable de susciter les plus belles vertus, sans être un parasite de la religion.
Il faut se garder des interprétations abusives du passé historique ; l’œuvre de Jeanne d’Arc n’a rien à voir avec le nationalisme moderne, d’autant que la sainte à suivi l’impulsion, non point d’un nationalisme naturel – ce qui eût été légitime – mais celle d’une volonté céleste, qui voyait loin. La France fut pendant des siècles le pivot du Catholicisme ; une France anglaise eût signifié en fin de compte une Europe protestante et la fin de l’Eglise catholique ; c’est ce que voulurent prévenir les « voix ». L’absence de toute passion, chez Jeanne, ses paroles sereines à l’égard des Anglais, corroborent pleinement ce que nous venons de dire et devrait suffire pour mettre la sainte à l’abri de toute imposture rétrospective (1).[...]
1 – De même, l’étendard de Jeanne fut tout autre chose qu’un drapeau révolutionnaire unissant, dans un même culte profane, croyants et incroyants.
["Usurpations du sentiment religieux", Études Traditionnelles, décembre 1965.] ~ Frithjof Schuon,#NFDB
676:[...] Dans cette question des limites de fait ou de droit du sentiment patriotique, il convient de rappeler tout d’abord qu’il y a patrie et patrie : il y a celle de la terre et celle du Ciel ; la seconde est prototype et mesure de la première, elle lui donne son sens et sa légitimité. C’est ainsi que dans l’enseignement évangélique l’amour de Dieu prime, et peut par conséquent contredire, l’amour des proches parents, sans qu’il y ait là aucune offense à la charité ; la créature doit d’ailleurs être aimée « en Dieu », c’est à dire que l’amour ne lui appartient jamais en entier. Le Christ ne s’est soucié que de la Patrie céleste, qui « n’est pas de ce monde » ; c’est suffisant, non pour renier le fait naturel d’une patrie terrestre, mais pour s’abstenir de tout culte abusif – et avant tout illogique – du pays d’origine. Si le Christ a désavoué les attachements temporels, il n’en a pas moins admis les droits de la nature, dans le domaine qui est le leur, droits éminemment relatifs qu’il ne s’agit pas d’ériger en idoles ; c’est ce que saint Augustin a magistralement traité, sous un certain rapport tout au moins, dans Civitas Dei. Le patriotisme normal est à la fois déterminé et limité par les valeurs éternelles ; « il ne s’enfle point » et ne pervertit pas l’esprit ; il n’est pas, comme le chauvinisme, l’oubli officiel de l’humilité et de la charité en même temps que l’anesthésie de toute une partie de l’intelligence ; restant dans ses limites, il est capable de susciter les plus belles vertus, sans être un parasite de la religion.
Il faut se garder des interprétations abusives du passé historique ; l’œuvre de Jeanne d’Arc n’a rien à voir avec le nationalisme moderne, d’autant que la sainte à suivi l’impulsion, non point d’un nationalisme naturel – ce qui eût été légitime – mais celle d’une volonté céleste, qui voyait loin. La France fut pendant des siècles le pivot du Catholicisme ; une France anglaise eût signifié en fin de compte une Europe protestante et la fin de l’Eglise catholique ; c’est ce que voulurent prévenir les « voix ». L’absence de toute passion, chez Jeanne, ses paroles sereines à l’égard des Anglais, corroborent pleinement ce que nous venons de dire et devrait suffire pour mettre la sainte à l’abri de toute imposture rétrospective (1).[...]
1 – De même, l’étendard de Jeanne fut tout autre chose qu’un drapeau révolutionnaire unissant, dans un même culte profane, croyants et incroyants.
"Usurpations du sentiment religieux", Études Traditionnelles, décembre 1965. ~ Frithjof Schuon,#NFDB
677:In The Virgins
You can't put in the ground swell of the organ
from the Christiansted, , Anglican Church
behind the paratrooper's voice: 'Turned cop
after Vietnam. I made thirty jumps.'
Bells punish the dead street and pigeons lurch
from the stone belfry, opening their chutes,
circling until the rings of ringing stop.
'Salud!' The paratrooper's glass is raised.
The congregation rises to its feet
like a patrol, with scuffling shoes and boots,
repeating orders as the organ thumps:
'Praise Ye the Lord. The Lord's name be praised.'
You cannot hear, beyond the quiet harbor,
the breakers cannonading on the bruised
horizon, or the charter engines gunning for
Buck Island. The only war here is a war
of silence between blue sky and sea,
and just one voice, the marching choir's, is raised
to draft new conscripts with the ancient cry
of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' into pews
half-empty still, or like a glass, half-full.
Pinning itself to a cornice, a gull
hangs like a medal from the serge-blue sky.
Are these boats all? Is the blue water all?
The rocks surpliced with lace where they are moored,
dinghy, catamaran, and racing yawl,
nodding to the ground swell of 'Praise the Lord'?
Wesley and Watts, their evangelical light
lanced down the mine shafts to our chapel pew,
its beam gritted with motes of anthracite
that drifted on us in our chapel benches:
from God's slow-grinding mills in Lancashire,
ash on the dead mired in Flanders' trenches,
as a gray drizzle now defiles the view
of this blue harbor, framed in windows where
two yellow palm fronds, jerked by the wind's rain,
41
agree like horses' necks, and nodding bear,
slow as a hearse, a haze of tasseled rain,
and, as the weather changes in a child,
the paradisal day outside grows dark,
the yachts flutter like moths in a gray jar,
the martial voices fade in thunder, while
across the harbor, like a timid lure,
a rainbow casts its seven-colored arc.
Tonight, now Sunday has been put to rest.
Altar lights ride the black glass where the yachts
stiffly repeat themselves and phosphoresce
with every ripple - the wide parking-lots
of tidal affluence - and every mast
sways the night's dial as its needle veers
to find the station which is truly peace.
Like neon lasers shot across the bars
discos blast out the music of the spheres,
and, one by one, science infects the stars.
~ Derek Walcott,#NFDB
678:The House Of Dust: Part 04: 04: Counterpoint: Two
Rooms
He, in the room above, grown old and tired,
She, in the room below—his floor her ceiling—
Pursue their separate dreams. He turns his light,
And throws himself on the bed, face down, in laughter. . . .
She, by the window, smiles at a starlight night,
His watch—the same he has heard these cycles of ages—
Wearily chimes at seconds beneath his pillow.
The clock, upon her mantelpiece, strikes nine.
The night wears on. She hears dull steps above her.
The world whirs on. . . .New stars come up to shine.
His youth—far off—he sees it brightly walking
In a golden cloud. . . .Wings flashing about it. . . . Darkness
Walls it around with dripping enormous walls.
Old age—far off—her death—what do they matter?
Down the smooth purple night a streaked star falls.
She hears slow steps in the street—they chime like music;
They climb to her heart, they break and flower in beauty,
Along her veins they glisten and ring and burn. . . .
He hears his own slow steps tread down to silence.
Far off they pass. He knows they will never return.
Far off—on a smooth dark road—he hears them faintly.
The road, like a sombre river, quietly flowing,
Moves among murmurous walls. A deeper breath
Swells them to sound: he hears his steps more clearly.
And death seems nearer to him: or he to death.
What's death?—She smiles. The cool stone hurts her elbows.
The last of the rain-drops gather and fall from elm-boughs,
She sees them glisten and break. The arc-lamp sings,
The new leaves dip in the warm wet air and fragrance.
A sparrow whirs to the eaves, and shakes his wings.
What's death—what's death? The spring returns like music,
291
The trees are like dark lovers who dream in starlight,
The soft grey clouds go over the stars like dreams.
The cool stone wounds her arms to pain, to pleasure.
Under the lamp a circle of wet street gleams. . . .
And death seems far away, a thing of roses,
A golden portal, where golden music closes,
Death seems far away:
And spring returns, the countless singing of lovers,
And spring returns to stay. . . .
He, in the room above, grown old and tired,
Flings himself on the bed, face down, in laughter,
And clenches his hands, and remembers, and desires to die.
And she, by the window, smiles at a night of starlight.
. . . The soft grey clouds go slowly across the sky.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
679:Silence
I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities -We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
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There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus" -Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
680:Days after the elections of 2016, asha sent me a link to a talk by
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We have to have hope, she says
to me across 3,000 miles, she in Brooklyn, me in Los Angeles. We
listen together as Dr. deGrasse Tyson explains that the very atoms and
molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of
stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas
clouds formed other stars and those stars possessed the divine-right
mix of properties needed to create not only planets, including our
own, but also people, including us, me and her. He is saying that not
only are we in the universe, but that the universe is in us. He is saying
that we, human beings, are literally made out of stardust.
And I know when I hear Dr. deGrasse Tyson say this that he is
telling the truth because I have seen it since I was a child, the magic,
the stardust we are, in the lives of the people I come from.
I watched it in the labor of my mother, a Jehovah's Witness and a
woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs at a time, keeping
other people's children, working the reception desks at gyms,
telemarketing, doing anything and everything for 16 hours a day the
whole of my childhood in the Van Nuys barrio where we lived. My
mother, cocoa brown and smooth, disowned by her family for the
children she had as a very young and unmarried woman. My mother,
never giving up despite never making a living wage.
I saw it in the thin, brown face of my father, a boy out of Cajun
country, a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world
that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly. My
father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a
version of himself there were no mirrors for.
And I knew it because I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a
people who survived the hulls of slave ships, survived the chains, the
whips, the months laying in their own shit and piss. The human
beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their
languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and
beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families
snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this
built language and honored God and created movement and upheld
love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to
die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that
their children's lives did not matter? ~ Patrisse Khan Cullors,#NFDB
681:Are you persuaded of what you do or not? Do you need something to happen or not in order to do what you do? Do you need the correlations to coincide always, because the end is never in what you do, even if what you do is vast and distant but is always in your continuation? Do you say you are persuaded of what you do, no matter what? Yes? Then I tell you: tomorrow you will certainly be dead. It doesn't matter? Are you thinking about fame? About your family? But your memory dies with you,with you your family is dead. Are you thinking about your ideals? You want to make a will? You want a headstone? But tomorrow those too are dead, dead. All men die with you. Your death is an unwavering comet. Do you turn to god? There is no god, god dies with you. The kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead. Tomorrow everything is finished—your body, family, friends, country, what you’re doing now, what you might do in the future, the good, the bad, the true, the false, your ideas, your little part, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, everything. Tomorrow everything is over—in twenty four hours is death.
Well, then the god of today is no longer yesterday’s, no longer the country, the good, the bad, friends, or family. You want to eat? No, you cannot. The taste of food is no longer the same; honey is bitter, milk is sour, meat nauseating, and the odor, the odor sickens you: it reeks of the dead. You want a woman to comfort you in your last moments? No, worse: it is dead flesh. You want to enjoy the sun, air, light, sky? Enjoy?! The sun is a rotten orange, the light extinguished, the air suffocating. The sky is a low, oppressive arc. . . .No, everything is closed and dark now. But the sun shines, the air is pure, everything is like before, and yet you speak like a man buried alive, describing his tomb. And persuasion? You are not even persuaded of the sunlight; you cannot move a finger, cannot remain standing. The god who kept you standing,made your day clear and your food sweet, gave you family, country, paradise—he betrays you now and abandons you because the thread of your philopsychia is broken.
The meaning of things, the taste of the world, is only for continuation’s sake. Being born is nothing but wanting to go on on: men live in order to live, in order not to die. Their persuasion is the fear of death. Being born is nothing but fearing death, so that, if death becomes certain in a certain future, they are already dead in the present. All that they do and say with fixed persuasion, a clear purpose, and evident reason is nothing but fear of death– ‘indeed, believing one is wise without being wise is nothing but fearing death. ~ Carlo Michelstaedter,#NFDB
682:Altarwise By Owl-Light
Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentlemen, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the genders strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of nettles and feathers
Over the groundworks thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.
First there was the lamb on knocking knees
And three dead seasons on a climbing grave
That Adam's wether in the flock of horns,
Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,
Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes
On thunderous pavements in the garden of time;
Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
Out of the wrinkled undertaker's van,
And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
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Dipped me breast-deep in the descending bone;
The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,
Alone alive among his mutton fold,
We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.
What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark's gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of the Pharaohs echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper.)
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow.)
What of a bamboo man amomg your acres?
Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?
Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,
My camel's eyes will needle through the shroud.
Loves reflection of the mushroom features,
Still snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.
~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
683:The Feast Of Stephen
The coltish horseplay of the locker room,
Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,
With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,
Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels
Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs,
In some such setting of thick basement pipes
And janitorial realities
Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,
Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,
And what they see is not so much another
As a strange, possible version of themselves,
And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,
Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,
Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.
II
If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body
Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,
Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,
And known to captains as esprit de corps.
What is this brisk fraternity of timing,
Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,
Mens sana in men’s sauna, in the flush
Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,
These fleet caroms, plies and genuflections
Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain
All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?
From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,
Among the stumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,
The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.
III
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Think of those barren places where men gather
To act in the terrible name of rectitude,
Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,
The bully’s thin superiority.
Think of the Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant
Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,
Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes
Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,
Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,
Flick their live butts into the standing weeds,
And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows
Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep
In darkened readiness for their occasion
The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.
IV
Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,
In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.
The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths
Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.
They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,
Having flung down their wet and salty garments
At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.
He watches sharply these superbly tanned
Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,
A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,
And in between their sleek, converging bodies,
Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,
He catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair
And hears an unintelligible prayer.
~ Anthony Evan Hecht,#NFDB
684:Avis
With a golden rolling sound
Booming came a bell,
From the aery in the tower
Eagles fell;
So with regal wings
Hurled, and gleaming sound and power,
Sprang the fatal spell.
Ten a storm of burnished doves
Gleaming from the cote
Flurried by the almonry
O'er the moat,-Fell and soared and fell
With the arc and iris eye
Burning breast and throat.
Avis heard the beaten bell
Break the quiet space,
Gathering softly in the room
Round her face;
And the sound of wings
From the deeps of rosy gloom
Rustled in the place.
Nothing moved along the wall,
Weltered on the floor;
Only in the purple deep,
Streaming o'er,
Came the dream of sound
Silent as the dale of sleep,
Where the dreams are four.
(One of love without a word,
Wan to look upon,
One of fear without a cry,
Cowering stone,
And the dower of life,
Grief without a single sigh,
Pain without a moan.)
26
"Avis-Avis!" Cried a voice;
Then the voice was mute.
"Avis!" Soft the echo lay
As the lute.
Where she was she fell,
Drowsy as mandragora,
Trancèd to the root.
Then she heard her mother's voice,
Tender as a dove;
Then her lover plain and sigh,
"Avis--Love!"
Like the mavis bird
Calling, calling lonelily
From the eerie grove.
Then she heard within the vast
Closure of the spell,
Rolled and moulded into one
Rounded swell,
All the sounds that ever were
Uttered underneath the sun,
Heard in heaven or hell.
In the arras moved the wind,
And the window cloth
Rippled like a serpent barred,
Gray with wrath;
In the brazier gold
The wan ghost of a rose charred
Fluttered like a moth.
Tranquil lay her darkened eyes
As the pools that keep
Auras dim of fern and frond
Dappled, deep,
Dreamy as the map of Nod;
Moveless was she as a wand
In the wind of sleep.
Then the birds began to cry
27
From the crannied wall,
Piping as the morning rose
Mystical,
Gray with whistling rain,
Silver with the light that flows
In the interval.
Pallid poplars cast a shade,
Twinkling gray and dun,
Where the wind and water wove
Into one
All the linnet leaves,
Greening from the mere and grove
In the undern sun.
Night fell with the ferny dusk,
Planets paled and grew,
Up, with lily and clarid turns
Throbbing through,
Rose the robin's song,
Heart of home and love that burns beating in the dew.
But she neither moved nor heard,
Trancèd was her breath;
Lip on charmèd lip was laid
(One who saith
"Love-Undone" and falls).
Silent was she as a shade
In the dells of death.
~ Duncan Campbell Scott,#NFDB
685:As Merripen gave the ribbons to a stableman at the mews, Amelia glanced toward the end of the alley.
A pair of street youths crouched near a tiny fire, roasting something on sticks. Amelia did not want to speculate on the nature of the objects being heated. Her attention moved to a group—three men and a woman—illuminated in the uncertain blaze. It appeared two of the men were engaged in fisticuffs. However, they were so inebriated that their contest looked like a performance of dancing bears.
The woman’s gown was made of gaudily colored fabric, the bodice gaping to reveal the plump hills of her breasts. She seemed amused by the spectacle of two men battling over her, while a third attempted to break up the fracas.
“’Ere now, my fine jacks,” the woman called out in a Cockney accent, “I said I’d take ye both on—no need for a cockfight!”
“Stay back,” Merripen murmured.
Pretending not to hear, Amelia drew closer for a better view. It wasn’t the sight of the brawl that was so interesting—even their village, peaceful little Primrose Place, had its share of fistfights. All men, no matter what their situation, occasionally succumbed to their lower natures. What attracted Amelia’s notice was the third man, the would-be peacemaker, as he darted between the drunken fools and attempted to reason with them.
He was every bit as well dressed as the gentlemen on either side … but it was obvious this man was no gentleman. He was black-haired and swarthy and exotic. And he moved with the swift grace of a cat, easily avoiding the swipes and lunges of his opponents.
“My lords,” he was saying in a reasonable tone, sounding relaxed even as he blocked a heavy fist with his forearm. “I’m afraid you’ll both have to stop this now, or I’ll be forced to—” He broke off and dodged to the side just as the man behind him leaped.
The prostitute cackled at the sight. “They got you on the ’op tonight, Rohan,” she exclaimed.
Dodging back into the fray, Rohan attempted to break it up once more. “My lords, surely you must know”—he ducked beneath the swift arc of a fist—“that violence”—he blocked a right hook—“never solves anything.”
“Bugger you!” one of the men said, and butted forward like a deranged goat.
Rohan stepped aside and allowed him to charge straight into the side of the building. The attacker collapsed with a groan and lay gasping on the ground.
His opponent’s reaction was singularly ungrateful. Instead of thanking the dark-haired man for putting a stop to the fight, he growled, “Curse you for interfering, Rohan! I would’ve knocked the stuffing from him!” He charged forth with his fists churning like windmill blades.
Rohan evaded a left cross and deftly flipped him to the ground. He stood over the prone figure, blotting his forehead with his sleeve. “Had enough?” he asked pleasantly. “Yes? Good. Please allow me to help you to your feet, my lord. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
686:Glorious France
You have become a forge of snow-white fire,
A crucible of molten steel, O France!
Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn
And fade in light for you, O glorious France!
They pass through meteor changes with a song
Which to all islands and all continents
Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame,
Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child,
Nor love, nor youth's delight, nor manhood's power,
Nor many days spent in a chosen work,
Nor honored merit, nor the patterned theme
Of daily labor, nor the crowns nor wreaths
Of seventy years.
These are not all of life,
O France, whose sons amid the rolling thunder
Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead
Clog the ensanguined ice. But life to these
Prophetic and enraptured souls in vision,
And the keen ecstasy of faded strife,
And divination of the loss as gain,
And reading mysteries with brightened eyes
In fiery shock and dazzling pain before
The orient splendour of the face of Death,
As a great light beside a shadowy sea;
And in a high will's strenuous exercise,
Where the warmed spirit finds its fullest strength
And is no more afraid, and in the stroke
Of azure lightning when the hidden essence
And shifting meaning of man's spiritual worth
And mystical significance in time
Are instantly distilled to one clear drop
Which mirrors earth and heaven.
This is life
Flaming to heaven in a minute's span
When the breath of battle blows the smouldering spark.
And across these seas
We who cry Peace and treasure life and cling
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To cities, happiness, or daily toil
For daily bread, or trail the long routine
Of seventy years, taste not the terrible wine
Whereof you drink, who drain and toss the cup
Empty and ringing by the finished feast;
Or have it shaken from your hand by sight
Of God against the olive woods.
As Joan of Arc amid the apple trees
With sacred joy first heard the voices, then
Obeying plunged at Orleans in a field
Of spears and lived her dream and died in fire,
Thou, France, hast heard the voices and hast lived
The dream and known the meaning of the dream,
And read its riddle: how the soul of man
May to one greatest purpose make itself
A lens of clearness, how it loves the cup
Of deepest truth, and how its bitterest gall
Turns sweet to soul's surrender.
And you say:
Take days for repitition, stretch your hands
For mocked renewal of familiar things:
The beaten path, the chair beside the window,
The crowded street, the task, the accustomed sleep,
And waking to the task, or many springs
Of lifted cloud, blue water, flowering fields The prison-house grows close no less, the feast
A place of memory sick for senses dulled
Down to the dusty end where pitiful Time
Grown weary cries Enough!
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
687:O Glorious France
You have become a forge of snow-white fire,
A crucible of molten steel, O France!
Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn
And fade in light for you, O glorious France!
They pass through meteor changes with a song
Which to all islands and all continents
Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame,
Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child,
Nor love, nor youth's delight, nor manhood's power,
Nor many days spent in a chosen work,
Nor honored merit, nor the patterned theme
Of daily labor, nor the crowns nor wreaths
Of seventy years.
These are not all of life,
O France, whose sons amid the rolling thunder
Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead
Clog the ensanguined ice. But life to these
Prophetic and enraptured souls in vision,
And the keen ecstasy of faded strife,
And divination of the loss as gain,
And reading mysteries with brightened eyes
In fiery shock and dazzling pain before
The orient splendour of the face of Death,
As a great light beside a shadowy sea;
And in a high will's strenuous exercise,
Where the warmed spirit finds its fullest strength
And is no more afraid, and in the stroke
Of azure lightning when the hidden essence
And shifting meaning of man's spiritual worth
And mystical significance in time
Are instantly distilled to one clear drop
Which mirrors earth and heaven.
This is life
Flaming to heaven in a minute's span
When the breath of battle blows the smouldering spark.
And across these seas
We who cry Peace and treasure life and cling
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To cities, happiness, or daily toil
For daily bread, or trail the long routine
Of seventy years, taste not the terrible wine
Whereof you drink, who drain and toss the cup
Empty and ringing by the finished feast;
Or have it shaken from your hand by sight
Of God against the olive woods.
As Joan of Arc amid the apple trees
With sacred joy first heard the voices, then
Obeying plunged at Orleans in a field
Of spears and lived her dream and died in fire,
Thou, France, hast heard the voices and hast lived
The dream and known the meaning of the dream,
And read its riddle: how the soul of man
May to one greatest purpose make itself
A lens of clearness, how it loves the cup
Of deepest truth, and how its bitterest gall
Turns sweet to soul's surrender.
And you say:
Take days for repitition, stretch your hands
For mocked renewal of familiar things:
The beaten path, the chair beside the window,
The crowded street, the task, the accustomed sleep,
And waking to the task, or many springs
Of lifted cloud, blue water, flowering fields -The prison-house grows close no less, the feast
A place of memory sick for senses dulled
Down to the dusty end where pitiful Time
Grown weary cries Enough!
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
688:St. Clair tucks the tips of his fingers into his pockets and kicks the cobblestones with the toe of his boots. "Well?" he finally asks.
"Thank you." I'm stunned. "It was really sweet of you to bring me here."
"Ah,well." He straightens up and shrugs-that full-bodied French shrug he does so well-and reassumes his usual, assured state of being. "Have to start somewhere. Now make a wish."
"Huh?" I have such a way with words. I should write epic poetry or jingles for cat food commercials.
He smiles. "Place your feet on the star, and make a wish."
"Oh.Okay,sure." I slide my feet together so I'm standing in the center. "I wish-"
"Don't say it aloud!" St. Clair rushes forward, as if to stop my words with his body,and my stomach flips violently. "Don't you know anything about making wishes? You only get a limited number in life. Falling stars, eyelashes,dandelions-"
"Birthday candles."
He ignores the dig. "Exactly. So you ought to take advantage of them when they arise,and superstition says if you make a wish on that star, it'll come true." He pauses before continuing. "Which is better than the other one I've heard."
"That I'll die a painful death of poisoning, shooting,beating, and drowning?"
"Hypothermia,not drowning." St. Clair laughs. He has a wonderful, boyish laugh. "But no. I've heard anyone who stands here is destined to return to Paris someday. And as I understand it,one year for you is one year to many. Am I right?"
I close my eyes. Mom and Seany appear before me. Bridge.Toph.I nod.
"All right,then.So keep your eyes closed.And make a wish."
I take a deep breath. The cool dampness of the nearby trees fills my lungs. What do I want? It's a difficult quesiton.
I want to go home,but I have to admit I've enjoyed tonight. And what if this is the only time in my entire life I visit Paris? I know I just told St. Clair that I don't want to be here, but there's a part of me-a teeny, tiny part-that's curious. If my father called tomorrow and ordered me home,I might be disappointed. I still haven't seen the Mona Lisa. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower.Walked beneath the Arc de Triomphe.
So what else do I want?
I want to feel Toph's lips again.I want him to wait.But there's another part of me,a part I really,really hate,that knows even if we do make it,I'd still move away for college next year.So I'd see him this Christmas and next summer,and then...would that be it?
And then there's the other thing.
The thing I'm trying to ignore. The thing I shouldn't want,the thing I can't have.
And he's standing in front of me right now.
So what do I wish for? Something I'm not sure I want? Someone I'm not sure I need? Or someone I know I can't have?
Screw it.Let the fates decide.
I wish for the thing that is best for me.
How's that for a generalization? I open my eyes,and the wind is blowing harder. St. Clair pushes a strand of hair from his eyes. "Must have been a good one," he says. ~ Stephanie Perkins,#NFDB
689:To J. S.
The wind, that beats the mountain, blows
More softly round the open wold,
And gently comes the world to those
That are cast in gentle mould.
And me this knowledge bolder made,
Or else I had not dare to flow
In these words toward you, and invade
Even with a verse your holy woe.
'Tis strange that those we lean on most,
Those in whose laps our limbs are nursed,
Fall into shadow, soonest lost:
Those we love first are taken first.
God gives us love. Something to love
He lends us; but, when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone.
This is the curse of time. Alas!
In grief I am not all unlearn'd;
Once thro' mine own doors Death did pass;
One went, who never hath return'd.
He will not smile--not speak to me
Once more. Two years his chair is seen
Empty before us. That was he
Without whose life I had not been.
Your loss is rarer; for this star
Rose with you thro' a little arc
Of heaven, nor having wander'd far
Shot on the sudden into dark.
I knew your brother: his mute dust
I honour and his living worth:
A man more pure and bold and just
Was never born into the earth.
I have not look'd upon you nigh,
865
Since that dear soul hath fall'n asleep.
Great nature is more wise than I:
I will not tell you not to weep.
And tho' mine own eyes fill with dew,
Drawn from the spirit thro' the brain,
I will not even preach to you,
"Weep, weeping dulls the inward pain."
Let Grief be her own mistress still.
She loveth her own anguish deep
More than much pleasure. Let her will
Be done--to weep or not to weep.
I will not say "God's ordinance
Of death is blown in every wind;"
For that is not a common chance
That takes away a noble mind.
His memory long will live alone
In all our hearts, as mournful light
That broods above the fallen sun,
And dwells in heaven half the night.
Vain solace! Memory standing near
Cast down her eyes, and in her throat
Her voice seem'd distant, and a tear
Dropt on the letters as I wrote.
I wrote I know not what. In truth,
How should I soothe you anyway,
Who miss the brother of your youth?
Yet something I did wish to say:
For he too was a friend to me:
Both are my friends, and my true breast
Bleedeth for both: yet it may be
That only silence suiteth best.
Words weaker than your grief would make
Grief more. 'Twere better I should cease;
Although myself could almost take
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The place of him that sleeps in peace.
Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;
Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.
Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet.
Nothing comes to thee new or strange,
Sleep full of rest from head to feet:
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
690:The Things
The house in Broad Street, red brick, with nine rooms
the weedgrown graveyard with its rows of tombs
the jail from which imprisoned faces grinned
at stiff palmettos flashing in the wind
the engine-house, with engines, and a tank
in which young alligators swam and stank,
the bell-tower, of red iron, where the bell
gonged of the fires in a tone from hell
magnolia trees with whitehot torch of bud
the yellow river between banks of mud
the tall striped lighthouse like a barber’s pole
snake in the bog and locust in the hole
worn cigarette cards, of white battleships,
or flags, or chorus girls with scarlet lips,
jackstones of copper, peach tree in the yard
splashing ripe peaches on an earth baked hard
children beneath the arc-light in a romp
with Run sheep Run, and rice-birds in the swamp,
the organ-grinder’s monkey, dancing bears,
okras in baskets, Psyche on the stairs—
and then the north star nearer, and the snow
silent between the now and long ago
time like a train that roared from place to place
new crowds, new faces, for a single face
no longer then the chinaberry tree
nor the dark mockingbird to sing his glee
nor prawns nor catfish; icicles instead
and Indian-pipes, and cider in the shed
arbutus under pinewoods in the spring
and death remembered as a tropic thing
with picture postcard angels to upraise it
and trumpet vines and hummingbirds to phrase it
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then wisdom come, and Shakspere’s voice far off,
to be or not, upon the teacher’s cough,
the latent heat of melting ice, the brief
hypotenuse from ecstasy to grief
amo amas, and then the cras amet,
the new-found eyes no slumber could forget,
Vivien, the affliction of the senses,
and conjugation of historic tenses
and Shakspere nearer come, and louder heard,
and the disparateness of flesh and word,
time growing swifter, and the pendulums
in shorter savage arcs that beat like drums—
hands held, relinquished, faces come and gone,
kissed and forgotten, and become but one,
old shoes worn out, and new ones bought, the gloves
soiled, and so lost in limbo, like the loves—
then Shakspere in the heart, the instant speech
parting the conscious terrors each from each—
wisdom’s dishevelment, the purpose lamed,
and purposeless the footsteps eastward aimed
the bloodstream always slower, while the clock
followed the tired heart with louder knock,
fatigue upon the eye, the tardy springs
inviting to no longer longed-for things—
the birdsong nearer now than Shakspere’s voice,
whispers of comfort—Death is near, rejoice!—
remember now the red house with nine rooms
the graveyard with its trumpetvines and tombs—
play jackstones now and let your jackstones be
the stars that make Orion’s galaxy
so to deceive yourself until you move
into that house whose tenants do not love.
305
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
691:Drake's whip hand spun Diana like a top.
She cried out. That sound, her cry, pierced Caine like an arrow.
Diana staggered and almost righted herself, but Drake was too quick, too ready.
His second strike yanked her through the air. She flew and then fell.
“Catch her!” Caine was yelling to himself. Seeing her arc as she fell. Seeing where she would hit. His hands came up, he could use his power, he could catch her, save her. But too slow.
Diana fell. Her head smashed against a jutting point of rock. She made a sound like a dropped pumpkin.
Caine froze.
The fuel rod, forgotten, fell from the air with a shattering crash.
It fell within ten feet of the mine shaft opening. It landed atop a boulder shaped like the prow of a ship.
It bent, cracked, rolled off the boulder, and crashed heavily in the dirt.
Drake ran straight at Caine, his whip snapping. But Jack stumbled in between them, yelling, “The uranium! The uranium!”
The radiation meter in his pocket was counting clicks so fast, it became a scream.
Drake piled into Jack, and the two of them went tumbling.
Caine stood, staring in horror at Diana. Diana did not move. Did not move. No snarky remark. No smart-ass joke.
“No!” Caine cried.
“No!”
Drake was up, disentangling himself with an angry curse from Jack.
“Diana,” Caine sobbed.
Drake didn’t rely on his whip hand now, too far away to use it before Caine could take him down. He raised his gun. The barrel shot flame and slugs, BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.
Inaccurate, but on full automatic, Drake had time. He swung the gun to his right and the bullets swooped toward where Caine stood like he was made of stone.
Then the muzzle flash disappeared in an explosion of green-white light that turned night into day. The shaft of light missed its target. But it was close enough that the muzzle of Drake’s gun wilted and drooped and the rocks behind Drake cracked from the blast of heat.
Drake dropped the gun. And now it was Drake’s turn to stare in stark amazement. “You!”
Sam wobbled atop the rise. Quinn caught him as he staggered.
Now Caine snapped back to the present, seeing his brother, seeing the killing light.
“No,” Caine said. “No, Sam: He’s mine.”
He raised a hand, and Sam went flying backward along with Quinn.
“The fuel rod!” Jack was yelling, over and over. “It’s going to kill us all. Oh, God, we may already be dead!”
Drake rushed at Caine. His eyes were wide with fear. Knowing he wouldn’t make it. Knowing he was not fast enough.
Caine raised his hand, and the fuel rod seemed to jump off the ground.
A javelin.
A spear. He held it poised. Pointed straight at Drake.
Caine reached with his other hand, extending the telekinetic power to hold Drake immobilized.
Drake held up his human hand, a placating gesture. “Caine…you don’t want to…not over some girl. She was a witch, she was…”
Drake, unable to run, a human target. The fuel rod aimed at him like a Spartan’s spear.
Caine threw the fuel rod. Tons of steel and lead and uranium.
Straight at Drake. ~ Michael Grant,#NFDB
692:Who gave thee, O Beauty!
The keys of this breast,
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old;
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all!
I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and first!
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men;
New-born we are melting
Into nature again.
Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err,
Guest of million painted forms
Which in turn thy glory warms,
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn's cup, the raindrop's arc,
The swinging spider's silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond
In thy momentary play
Would bankrupt Nature to repay.
Ah! what avails it
To hide or to shun
Whom the Infinite One
Hath granted his throne?
The heaven high over
Is the deep's lover,
The sun and sea
Informed by thee,
Before me run,
And draw me on,
Yet fly me still,
As Fate refuses
To me the heart Fate for me chooses,
Is it that my opulent soul
Was mingled from the generous whole,
Sea valleys and the deep of skies
Furnished several supplies,
And the sands whereof I'm made
Draw me to them self-betrayed?
I turn the proud portfolios
Which hold the grand designs
Of Salvator, of Guercino,
And Piranesi's lines.
I hear the lofty Pans
Of the masters of the shell,
Who heard the starry music,
And recount the numbers well:
Olympian bards who sung
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
Oft in streets or humblest places
I detect far wandered graces,
Which from Eden wide astray
In lowly homes have lost their way.
Thee gliding through the sea of form,
Like the lightning through the storm,
Somewhat not to be possessed,
Somewhat not to be caressed,
No feet so fleet could ever find,
No perfect form could ever bind.
Thou eternal fugitive
Hovering over all that live,
Quick and skilful to inspire
Sweet extravagant desire,
Starry space and lily bell
Filling with thy roseate smell,
Wilt not give the lips to taste
Of the nectar which thou hast.
All that's good and great with thee
Stands in deep conspiracy.
Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely
To report thy features only,
And the cold and purple morning
Itself with thoughts of thee adorning,
The leafy dell, the city mart,
Equal trophies of thine art,
E'en the flowing azure air
Thou hast touched for my despair,
And if I languish into dreams,
Again I meet the ardent beams.
Queen of things! I dare not die
In Being's deeps past ear and eye,
Lest there I find the same deceiver,
And be the sport of Fate forever.
Dread power, but dear! if God thou be,
Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ode To Beauty
,#NFDB
693:Stop!” she called out.
To a one, the crewmen froze. A dozen heads swiveled to face her.
Sophia swallowed and turned to Mr. Grayson. “What about me? I’m also a virgin voyager.”
His lips quirked as his gaze swept her from head to toe and then back up partway. “Are you truly?”
“Yes. And I haven’t a coin to my name. Do you plan to dunk and shave me, too?”
“Now there’s an idea.” His grin widened. “Perhaps. But first, you must submit to an interrogation.”
A lump formed in Sophia’s throat, impossible to speak around.
Mr. Grayson raised that sonorous baritone to a carrying pitch. “What’s your name then, miss?” When Sophia merely firmed her chin and glared at him, he warned dramatically, “Truth or eels.”
Bang.
Excited whispers crackled through the assembly of sailors. Davy was completely forgotten, dropped to the deck with a dull thud. Even the wind held its breath in anticipation, and Sophia gave a slight jump when a sail smacked limp against the mast.
Though her heart pounded an erratic rhythm of distress, she willed her voice to remain even. “I’ve no intention of submitting myself to any interrogation, by god or man.” She lifted her chin and arched an eyebrow. “And I’m not impressed by your staff.”
She paused several seconds, waiting for the crew’s boisterous laughter to ebb.
Mr. Grayson pinned her with his bold, unyielding gaze. “You dare to speak to me that way? I’m Triton.” With each word, he stepped closer. “King of the Sea. A god among men.” Now they stood just paces apart. Hunger gleamed in his eyes. “And I demand a sacrifice.”
Her hand remained pressed against her throat, and Sophia nervously picked at the neckline of her frock. This close, he was all bronzed skin stretched tight over muscle and sinew. Iridescent drops of seawater paved glistening trails down his chest, snagging on the margins of that horrific scar, just barely visible beneath his toga.
“A sacrifice?” Her voice was weak. Her knees were weaker.
“A sacrifice.” He flipped the trident around, his biceps flexing as he extended the blunt end toward her, hooking it under her arm. He lifted the mop handle, pulling her hand from her throat and raising her wrist for his inspection.
Sophia might have yanked her arm away at any moment, but she was as breathless with anticipation as every other soul on deck. She’d become an observer of her own scene, helpless to alter the drama unfolding, on the edge of her seat to see how it would play out.
He studied her arm. “An unusually fine specimen of female,” he said casually. “Young. Fair. Unblemished.” Then he withdrew the stick, and Sophia’s hand dropped to her side. “But unsatisfactory.”
She felt a sharp twinge of pride. Unsatisfactory? Those words echoed in her mind again. I don’t want you.
“Unsatisfactory. Too scrawny by far.” He looked around at the crew, sweeping his makeshift trident in a wide arc. “I demand a sacrifice with meat on her bones. I demand…”
Sophia gasped as the mop handle clattered to a rest at her feet. Mr. Grayson gave her a sly wink, bracing his hands on his hips in a posture of divine arrogance. “I demand a goat. ~ Tessa Dare,#NFDB
694:When he got out of the car to do his business, my mother stared straight ahead. But I turned to watch. There was always something wild and charismatically uncaring about my father’s demeanor in these moments, some mysterious abandonment of his frowning and cogitative state that already meant a lot to me, even though at that age I understood almost nothing about him. Paulie had long ago stopped whispering 'perv' to me for observing him as he relieved himself. She of course, kept her head n her novels.
I remember that it was cold that day, and windy but that the sky had been cut from the crackling blue gem field of a late midwestern April. Outside the car, as other families sped past my father stepped to the leeward side of the open door then leaning back from the waist and at the same time forward the ankles. His penis poked out from his zipper for this part, Bernie always stood up at the rear window. My father paused fo a moment rocking slightly while a few indistinct words played on his lips. Then just before his stream stared he tiled back his head as if there were a code written in the sky that allowed the event to begin. This was the moment I waited for, the movement seemed to be a marker of his own private devotion as though despite his unshakable atheism and despite his sour, entirely analytic approach to every affair of life, he nonetheless felt the need to acknowledge the heavens in the regard to this particular function of the body. I don't know perhaps I sensed that he simply enjoyed it in a deep way that I did. It was possible I already recognized that the eye narrowing depth of his physical delight in that moment was relative to that paucity of other delights in his life. But in any case the prayerful uplifting of his cranium always seemed to democratize him for me, to make him for a few minutes at least, a regular man. Bernie let out a bark.
‘’Is he done?’’ asked my mother.
I opened my window. ‘’Almost.’’
In fact he was still in the midst. My father peed like a horse. His urine lowed in one great sweeping dream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object—and arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver—and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the interesting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a non-viscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bed-sheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted appreciative whistle that culminated in a tunneled gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeters. In the tiny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes.
‘’Thank goodness,’’ my mother said when the car door closed again. ‘’I was getting a little bored in here. ~ Ethan Canin,#NFDB
695:consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
696:I drove to the bar Theodosha had called from and parked on the street. The bar was a gray, dismal place, ensconced like a broken matchbox under a dying oak tree, its only indication of gaiety a neon beer sign that flickered in one window. She was at a table in back, the glow of the jukebox lighting her face and the deep blackness of her hair. She tipped a collins glass to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine. “Let me take you home,” I said. “No, thanks,” she replied. “Getting swacked?” “Merchie and I had another fight. He says he can’t take my pretensions anymore. I love the word ‘pretensions.’” “That doesn’t mean you have to get drunk,” I said. “You’re right. I can get drunk for any reason I choose,” she replied, and took another hit from the glass. Then she added incongruously, “You once asked Merchie what he was doing in Afghanistan. The answer is he wasn’t in Afghanistan. He was in one of those other God-forsaken Stone Age countries to the north, helping build American airbases to protect American oil interests. Merchie says they’re going to make a fortune. All for the red, white, and blue.” “Who is they?” But her eyes were empty now, her concentration and anger temporarily spent. I glanced at the surroundings, the dour men sitting at the bar, a black woman sleeping with her head on a table, a parolee putting moves on a twenty-year-old junkie and mother of two children who was waiting for her connection. These were the people we cycled in and out of the system for decades, without beneficial influence or purpose of any kind that was detectable. “Let’s clear up one thing. Your old man came looking for trouble at the club today. I didn’t start it,” I said. “Go to a meeting, Dave. You’re a drag,” she said. “Give your guff to Merchie,” I said, and got up to leave. “I would. Except he’s probably banging his newest flop in the hay. And the saddest thing is I can’t blame him.” “I think I’m going to ease on out of this. Take care of yourself, kiddo,” I said. “Fuck that ‘kiddo’ stuff. I loved you and you were too stupid to know it.” I walked back outside into a misting rain and the clean smell of the night. I walked past a house where people were fighting behind the shades. I heard doors slamming, the sound of either a car backfiring or gunshots on another street, a siren wailing in the distance. On the corner I saw an expensive automobile pull to the curb and a black kid emerge from the darkness, wearing a skintight bandanna on his head. The driver of the car, a white man, exchanged money for something in the black kid’s hand. Welcome to the twenty-first century, I thought. I opened my truck door, then noticed the sag on the frame and glanced at the right rear tire. It was totally flat, the steel rim buried deep in the folds of collapsed rubber. I dropped the tailgate, pulled the jack and lug wrench out of the toolbox that was arc-welded to the bed of the truck, and fitted the jack under the frame. Just as I had pumped the flat tire clear of the puddle it rested in, I heard footsteps crunch on the gravel behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a short, thick billy club whip through the air. Just before it exploded across the side of my head, my eyes seemed to close like a camera lens on a haystack that smelled of damp-rot and unwashed hair and old shoes. I was sure as I slipped into unconsciousness that I was inside an ephemeral dream from which I would soon awake. ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
697:And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being
extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled. And I wanted to show all these things to my father.
Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold.
Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing tgem out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely
yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again. ~ Iris Murdoch,#NFDB
698:The House Of Dust: Part 02: 06: Adele And Davis
She turned her head on the pillow, and cried once more.
And drawing a shaken breath, and closing her eyes,
To shut out, if she could, this dingy room,
The wigs and costumes scattered around the floor,—
Yellows and greens in the dark,—she walked again
Those nightmare streets which she had walked so often . . .
Here, at a certain corner, under an arc-lamp,
Blown by a bitter wind, she stopped and looked
In through the brilliant windows of a drug-store,
And wondered if she dared to ask for poison:
But it was late, few customers were there,
The eyes of all the clerks would freeze upon her,
And she would wilt, and cry . . . Here, by the river,
She listened to the water slapping the wall,
And felt queer fascination in its blackness:
But it was cold, the little waves looked cruel,
The stars were keen, and a windy dash of spray
Struck her cheek, and withered her veins . . . And so
She dragged herself once more to home, and bed.
Paul hadn't guessed it yet—though twice, already,
She'd fainted—once, the first time, on the stage.
So she must tell him soon—or else—get out . . .
How could she say it? That was the hideous thing.
She'd rather die than say it! . . . and all the trouble,
Months when she couldn't earn a cent, and then,
If he refused to marry her . . . well, what?
She saw him laughing, making a foolish joke,
His grey eyes turning quickly; and the words
Fled from her tongue . . . She saw him sitting silent,
Brooding over his morning coffee, maybe,
And tried again . . . she bit her lips, and trembled,
And looked away, and said . . . 'Say Paul, boy,—listen—
There's something I must tell you . . . ' There she stopped,
Wondering what he'd say . . . What would he say?
'Spring it, kid! Don't look so serious!'
'But what I've got to say—IS—serious!'
Then she could see how, suddenly, he would sober,
His eyes would darken, he'd look so terrifying—
231
He always did—and what could she do but cry?
Perhaps, then, he would guess—perhaps he wouldn't.
And if he didn't, but asked her 'What's the matter?'—
She knew she'd never tell—just say she was sick . . .
And after that, when would she dare again?
And what would he do—even suppose she told him?
If it were Felix! If it were only Felix!—
She wouldn't mind so much. But as it was,
Bitterness choked her, she had half a mind
To pay out Felix for never having liked her,
By making people think that it was he . . .
She'd write a letter to someone, before she died,—
Just saying 'Felix did it—and wouldn't marry.'
And then she'd die . . . But that was hard on Paul . . .
Paul would never forgive her—he'd never forgive her!
Sometimes she almost thought Paul really loved her . . .
She saw him look reproachfully at her coffin.
And then she closed her eyes and walked again
Those nightmare streets that she had walked so often:
Under an arc-lamp swinging in the wind
She stood, and stared in through a drug-store window,
Watching a clerk wrap up a little pill-box.
But it was late. No customers were there,—
Pitiless eyes would freeze her secret in her!
And then—what poison would she dare to ask for?
And if they asked her why, what would she say?
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
699:In The White Giant's Thigh
Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,
And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay
Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,
Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.
Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush
Rough as cows' tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,
Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
98
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime
And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round-(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)-Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.
The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.
~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
700:The Cloud
One summer morn, out of the sea-waves wild,
A speck-like Cloud, the season’s fated child,
Came softly floating up the boundless sky,
And o’er the sun-parched hills all brown and dry.
Onward she glided through the azure air,
Borne by its motion without toil or care,
When looking down in her ethereal joy,
She marked earth’s moilers at their hard employ;
“And oh!” she said, “that by some act of grace
’Twere mine to succour yon fierce-toiling race,
To give the hungry meat, the thirsty drink—
The thought of good is very sweet to think.”
The day advanced, and the cloud greater grew,
And greater; likewise her desire to do
Some charity to men had more and more,
As the long sultry summer day on wore,
Greatened and warmed within her fleecy breast,
Like a dove fledging in its downy nest.
The heat waxed fiercer, until all the land
Clared in the sun as ’twere a monstrous brand
And the shrunk rivers, few and far between,
Like molten metal lightened in the scene.
Ill could Earth’s sons endure their toilsome state,
Though still they laboured, for their need was great,
And many a long beseeching look they sped
Towards that fair cloud, with many a sigh that said:
“We famish for thy bounty! For our sake
O break thou! in a showery blessing, break!”
“I feel, and fain would help you, ” said the cloud,
And towards the earth her bounteous being bowed;
But then remem’bring a tradition she
Had in her youth learned from her native sea,
That when a cloud adventures from the skies
Too near the altar of the hills, it dies!
Awhile she wavered and was blown about
144
Hither and thither by the winds of doubt;
But in the midst of heaven at length all still
She stood; then suddenly, with a keen thrill
Of light, she said within herself, “I will!
Yea, in the glad strength of devotion, I Will help
you, though in helping you I die.”
Filled with this thought’s divinity, the cloud
Grew worldlike vast, as earthward more she bowed!
Oh, never erewhile had she dreamed her state
So great might be, beneficently great!
O’er the parched fields in her angelic love
She spread her wide wings like a brooding dove
Till as her purpose deepened, drawing near,
Divinely awful did her front appear,
And men and beasts all trembled at the view,
And the woods bowed, though well all creatures knew
That near in her, to every kind the same,
A great predestined benefactress came.
And then wide-flashed throughout her full-grown form
The glory of her will! the pain and storm
Of life’s dire dread of death, whose mortal threat
From Christ himself drew agonizing sweat,
Flashed seething out of rents amid her heaps
Of lowering gloom, and thence with arrowy leaps
Hissed jagging downward, till a sheety glare
Illumined all the illimitable air;
The thunder followed, a tremendous sound,
Loud doubling and reverberating round;
Strong was her will, but stronger yet the power
Of love, that now dissolved her in a shower,
Dropping in blessings to enrich the earth
With health and plenty at one blooming birth.
Far as the rain extended o’er the land,
A splendid bow the freshened landscape spanned
Like a celestial arc, hung in the air
By angel artists, to illumine there
The parting triumph of that spirit fair.
The rainbow vanished, but the blessing craved
Rested upon the land the cloud had saved.
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~ Charles Harpur,#NFDB
701:
"The beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne d'Arc would, if seen by an Indian, have quite a different appearance; for when one sees, one projects the forms of one's mind.... You have the vision of one in India whom you call the Divine Mother; the Catholics say it is the Virgin Mary, and the Japanese call it Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy; and others would give other names. It is the same force, the same power, but the images made of it are different in different faiths." Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (21 April 1929)
And then? You are not very talkative today! Is that all?
You say that "each person has his own world of dreamimagery peculiar to himself." Ibid.
Each individual has his own way of expressing, thinking, speaking, feeling, understanding. It is the combination of all these ways of being that makes the individual. That is why everyone can understand only according to his own nature. As long as you are shut up in your own nature, you can know only what is in your consciousness. All depends upon the height of the nature of your consciousness. Your world is limited to what you have in your consciousness. If you have a very small consciousness, you will understand only a few things. When your consciousness is very vast, universal, only then will you understand the world. If the consciousness is limited to your little ego, all the rest will escape you.... There are people whose brain and consciousness are smaller than a walnut. You know that a walnut resembles the brain; well these people look at things and don't understand them. They can understand nothing else except what is in direct contact with their senses. For them only what they taste, what they see, hear, touch has a reality, and all the rest simply does not exist, and they accuse us of speaking fancifully! "What I cannot touch does not exist", they say. But the only answer to give them is: "It does not exist for you, but there's no reason why it shouldn't exist for others." You must not insist with these people, and you must not forget that the smaller they are the greater is the audacity in their assertions.
One's cocksureness is in proportion to one's unconsciousness; the more unconscious one is, the more is one sure of oneself. The most foolish are always the most vain. Your stupidity is in proportion to your vanity. The more one knows... In fact, there is a time when one is quite convinced that one knows nothing at all. There's not a moment in the world which does not bring something new, for the world is perpetually growing. If one is conscious of that, one has always something new to learn. But one can become conscious of it only gradually. One's conviction that one knows is in direct proportion to one's ignorance and stupidity.
Mother, have the scientists, then, a very small consciousness?
Why? All scientists are not like that. If you meet a true scientist who has worked hard, he will tell you: "We know nothing. What we know today is nothing beside what we shall know tomorrow. This year's discoveries will be left behind next year." A real scientist knows very well that there are many more things he doesn't know than those he knows. And this is true of all branches of human activity. I have never met a scientist worthy of the name who was proud. I have never met a man of some worth who has told me: "I know everything." Those I have seen have always confessed: "In short, I know nothing." After having spoken of all that he has done, all that he has achieved, he tells you very quietly: "After all, I know nothing." ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, [T8],#NFDB
702:Flowers of France
Flowers of France in the Spring,
Your growth is a beautiful thing;
But give us your fragrance and bloom,
Yea, give us your lives in truth,
Give us your sweetness and grace
To brighten the resting-place
Of the flower of manhood and youth,
Gone into the dust of the tomb.
This is the vast stupendous hour of Time,
When nothing counts but sacrifice and faith,
Service and self-forgetfulness. Sublime
And awful are these moments charged with death
And red with slaughter. Yet God's purpose thrives
In all this holocaust of human lives.
I say God's purpose thrives. Just in the measure
That men have flung away their lust for gain,
Stopped in their mad pursuit of worldly pleasure,
And boldly faced unprecedented pain
And dangers, without thinking of the cost,
So thrives God's purpose in the holocaust.
Death is a little thing: all men must die;
But when ideals die, God grieves in Heaven.
Therefore I think it was the reason why
This Armageddon to the world was given.
The Soul of man, forgetful of its birth,
Was losing sight of everything but earth.
Up from these many million graves shall spring
A shining harvest for the coming race.
An Army of Invisibles shall bring
A glorified lost faith back to its place.
And men shall know there is a higher goal
Than earthly triumphs for the human soul.
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They are not dead-they are not dead, I say,
These men whose mortal forms are in the sod.
A grand Advance-Guard marching on its way,
Their Souls move upwards to salute their God!
While to their comrades who are in the strife
They cry, 'Fight on! Death is the dawn of life.'
We had forgotten all the depth and beauty
And lofty purport of that old true word
Deplaced by pleasure-that old good word duty.
Now by its meaning is the whole world stirred.
These men died for it; for it, now, we give,
And sacrifice, and serve, and toil, and live.
From out our hearts had gone a high devotion
For anything. It took a mighty wrath
Against great evil to wake strong emotion,
And put us back upon the righteous path.
It took a mingled stream of tears and blood
To cut the channel through to Brotherhood.
That word meant nothing on our lips in peace:
We had despoiled it by our castes and classes.
But when this savage carnage finds surcease
A new ideal will unite the masses.
And there shall be True Brotherhood with menThe Christly Spirit stirring earth again.
For this our men have suffered, fought, and died.
And we who can but dimly see the end
Are guarded by their spirits glorified,
Who help us on our way, while they ascend.
They are not dead-they are not dead, I say,
These men whose graves we decorate to-day.
251
America and France walk hand in hand;
As one, their hearts beat through the coming years:
One is the aim and purpose of each land,
Baptised with holy water of their tears.
To-day they worship with one faith, and know
Grief's first Communion in God's House of Woe.
Great Liberty, the Goddess at our gates,
And great Jeanne d'Arc, are fused into one soul:
A host of Angels on that soul awaits
To lead it up to triumph at the goal.
Along the path of Victory they tread,
Moves the majestic cort?ge of our dead.
Flowers of France in the Spring,
Your growth is a beautiful thing;
But give us your fragrance and bloomYea, give us your lives in truth,
Give us your sweetness and grace
To brighten the resting-place
Of the flower of manhood and youth,
Gone into the dust of the tomb.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB
703:From La Pucelle: The Epic Of Joan Of Arc
––Listen my Prince. This is important. I could feel
the dew setting on the leaves and petals of lilies and camellias.
I was aware of the soil’s moisture being
absorbed by the roots of hollies and cedars. I could smell
the aroma of blooming jasmine and carnations. I could
taste the sweetness of wild berries and apples that hadn’t
ripened yet. My finger could already stroke the creeping
ivy that had not yet covered the oaks. And the immense moon
the heart of the vast mother nature, vitality
desire filling the universe from it…by God I was
so terrified to be there, alone, a lost little girl
in the presence of such greatness, and the white circle
was getting larger, expanding, devouring me
I was drowning in the heavenly brightness. What was
happening to me? The moon was now the shape
of an infinitely huge person’s face. No, don’t look at me
like that! By God I’m not lying. I saw this
huge face before me, a ghost, or a fairy, or a monster
whose eyes were a hundred stars, whose smile
the entire horizon, and I was on my knees by now
shivering, about to faint. I was screaming. Brightness
above the thing’s head, I couldn’t tell horns or
***
halo, glistening. Had a gigantic sword. And I
closed my eyes. I can’t believe how horrified I was. I thought
23
this thing, a demon, would kill me with its sword
but when I closed my eyes I saw, my Prince, I tell you
the truth: I saw houses burning, cities burning, countries
burning I saw hundreds of hundreds of soldiers of an unholy
empire destroying me, destroying the village, and
the whole world. I can’t remember if I saw anything more
that night before I collapsed after the first visitation
by Catherine of Alexandria herself, Matron Saint of Maidens.
II
––Well, no, I’m not mad. That’s what Mama thought
after one of my brothers found me passed out. She
became so angry. And vicious. When she found out
I hadn’t been to the stupid ceremony at the Hermitage
she lost her mind. She first broke a wooden ladle
on my back, then started whacking me with a broom
screaming: Jeannette, useless girl. Sick girl.
Shameful girl. After all I’ve done for you. Of course
I didn’t tell her what exactly I’d seen in the woods.
She would’ve said I was possessed by the Devil. I cried
for so many days, weeks, because now beautiful
Marguerite, all my friends, had been confirmed
as young women, started going to the village dances
without their parents, and they never took me. I don’t
know why I was all of a sudden so hated by everyone
and I kept getting so, so many pimples . . . no, I won’t
***
bore you with that my Prince. But you need to know
that I started going to the church frequently, and
24
started praying to the statue of Saint Catherine. I took
flowers, bread and wool to the alter, fasted every Friday
and said Pater Noster, Ave Maria and Credo in Mass
every Sunday. I confessed to our priest every week, then
every day. I spoke to Saint Catherine when there was
no one in the church. I knelt on the altar floor in the weak,
shimmering light of the votive candles and begged Her
to guide me. I wanted Mama to love me again. I wanted
Marguerite to stop flirting with idiot boys and ask me
over to her house to spin wool. And the serene statue
of Saint Catherine remained silent and looked on
as I cried. I tried to imagine what it’d be like if Her spirit
could hear me. I didn’t know I had just been visited by
the noble Saint. I was so sad, my Prince, so lonely
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
704:The House Of Dust: Part 02: 02: The Fulfilled Dream
More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed—
Great rocks hoisted in air;
And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes . . .
And so he did not mention his dream of falling
But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath
Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by
And the small tree swell beneath him . . .
He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,—
And so went out . . . For once, he forgot his pail.
Something had changed—but it was not the street—
The street was just the same—it was himself.
Puddles flashed in the sun. In the pawn-shop door
The same old black cat winked green amber eyes;
The butcher stood by his window tying his apron;
The same men walked beside him, smoking pipes,
Reading the morning paper . . .
He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly,
As if he knew for certain he walked to death:
But with his usual pace,—deliberate, firm,
Looking about him calmly, watching the world,
Taking his ease . . . Yet, when he thought again
Of the same dream, now dreamed three separate times,
Always the same, and heard that whistling wind,
And saw the windows flashing upward past him,—
He slowed his pace a little, and thought with horror
How monstrously that small tree thrust to meet him! . . .
He slowed his pace a little and remembered his wife.
Was forty, then, too old for work like this?
Why should it be? He'd never been afraid—
His eye was sure, his hand was steady . . .
But dreams had meanings.
He walked more slowly, and looked along the roofs,
All built by men, and saw the pale blue sky;
224
And suddenly he was dizzy with looking at it,
It seemed to whirl and swim,
It seemed the color of terror, of speed, of death . . .
He lowered his eyes to the stones, he walked more slowly;
His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;
He thought of the pail . . . Why, then, was it forgotten?
Because he would not need it?
Then, just as he was grouping his thoughts again
About that drug-store corner, under an arc-lamp,
Where first he met the girl whom he would marry,—
That blue-eyed innocent girl, in a soft blouse,—
He waved his hand for signal, and up he went
In the dusty chute that hugged the wall;
Above the tree; from girdered floor to floor;
Above the flattening roofs, until the sea
Lay wide and waved before him . . . And then he stepped
Giddily out, from that security,
To the red rib of iron against the sky,
And walked along it, feeling it sing and tremble;
And looking down one instant, saw the tree
Just as he dreamed it was; and looked away,
And up again, feeling his blood go wild.
He gave the signal; the long girder swung
Closer to him, dropped clanging into place,
Almost pushing him off. Pneumatic hammers
Began their madhouse clatter, the white-hot rivets
Were tossed from below and deftly caught in pails;
He signalled again, and wiped his mouth, and thought
A place so high in the air should be more quiet.
The tree, far down below, teased at his eyes,
Teased at the corners of them, until he looked,
And felt his body go suddenly small and light;
Felt his brain float off like a dwindling vapor;
And heard a whistle of wind, and saw a tree
Come plunging up to him, and thought to himself,
'By God—I'm done for now, the dream was right . . .'
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
705:At The Making Of Man
First all the host of Raphael
In liveries of gold,
Lifted the chorus on whose rhythm
The spinning spheres are rolled,–
The Seraphs of the morning calm
Whose hearts are never cold.
He shall be born a spirit,
Part of the soul that yearns,
The core of vital gladness
That suffers and discerns,
The stir that breaks the budding sheath
When the green spring returns,–
The gist of power and patience
Hid in the plasmic clay,
The calm behind the senses,
The passionate essay
To make his wise and lovely dream
Immortal on a day.
The soft Aprilian ardours
That warm the waiting loam
Shall whisper in his pulses
To bid him overcome,
And he shall learn the wonder-cry
Beneath the azure dome.
And though all-dying nature
Should teach him to deplore,
The ruddy fires of autumn
Shall lure him but the more
To pass from joy to stronger joy,
As through an open door.
He shall have hope and honour,
Proud trust and courage stark,
To hold him to his purpose
Through the unlighted dark,
49
And love that sees the moon's full orb
In the first silver arc.
And he shall live by kindness
And the heart's certitude,
Which moves without misgiving
In ways not understood,
Sure only of the vast event,–
The large and simple good.
Then Gabriel's host in silver gear
And vesture twilight blue,
The spirits of immortal mind,
The warders of the true,
Took up the theme that gives the world
Significance anew.
He shall be born to reason,
And have the primal need
To understand and follow
Wherever truth may lead,–
To grow in wisdom like a tree
Unfolding from a seed.
A watcher by the sheepfolds,
With wonder in his eyes,
He shall behold the seasons,
And mark the planets rise,
Till all the marching firmament
Shall rouse his vast surmise.
Beyond the sweep of vision,
Or utmost reach of sound,
This cunning fire-maker,
This tiller of the ground,
Shall learn the secrets of the suns
And fathom the profound.
For he must prove all being,
Sane, beauteous, benign,
And at the heart of nature
Discover the divine,–
50
Himself the type and symbol
Of the eternal trine.
He shall perceive the kindling
Of knowledge, far and dim,
As of the fire that brightens
Below the dark sea-rim,
When ray by ray the splendid sun
Floats to the world's wide brim.
And out of primal instinct,
The lore of lair and den,
He shall emerge to question
How, wherefore, whence, and when,
Till the last frontier of the truth
Shall lie within his ken.
Then Michael's scarlet-suited host
Took up the word and sang;
As though a trumpet had been loosed
In heaven, the arches rang;
For these were they who feel the thrill
Of beauty like a pang.
He shall be framed and balanced
For loveliness and power,
Lithe as the supple creatures,
And coloured as a flower,
Sustained by the all-feeding earth,
Nurtured by wind and shower,
To stand within the vortex
Where surging forces play,
A poised and pliant figure
Immutable as they,
Till time and space and energy
Surrender to his sway.
He shall be free to journey
Over the teeming earth,
An insatiable seeker,
A wanderer from his birth,
51
Clothed in the fragile veil of sense,
With fortitude for girth.
His hands shall have dominion
Of all created things,
To fashion in the likeness
Of his imaginings,
To make his will and thought survive
Unto a thousand springs.
The world shall be his province,
The princedom of his skill;
The tides shall wear his harness,
The winds obey his will;
Till neither flood, nor fire, nor frost,
Shall work to do him ill.
A creature fit to carry
The pure creative fire,
Whatever truth inform him,
Whatever good inspire,
He shall make lovely in all things
To the end of his desire.
~ Bliss William Carman,#NFDB
706:Winter Hue's Recalled
Life is not all for effort: there are hours,
When fancy breaks from the exacting will,
And rebel though takes schoolboy's holiday,
Rejoicing in its idle strength. 'Tis then,
And only at such moments, that we know
The treasure of hours gone-scenes once beheld,
Sweet voices and words bright and beautiful,
Impetuous deeds that woke the God within us,
The loveliness of forms and thoughts and colors,
A moment marked and then as soon forgotten.
These things are ever near us, laid away,
Hidden and waiting the appropriate times,
In the quiet garner-house of memory.
There in the silent unaccounted depth,
Beneath the heated strainage and the rush
That teem the noisy surface of the hours,
All things that ever touched us are stored up,
Growing more mellow like sealed wine with age;
We thought them dead, and they are but asleep.
In moments when the heart is most at rest
And least expectant, from the luminous doors,
And sacred dwelling place of things unfeared,
They issue forth, and we who never knew
Till then how potent and how real they were,
Take them, and wonder, and so bless the hour.
Such gifts are sweetest when unsought. To me,
As I was loitering lately in my dreams,
Passing from one remembrance to another,
Like him who reads upon an outstretched map,
Content and idly happy, these rose up,
Out of that magic well-stored picture house,
No dream, rather a thing most keenly real,
The memory of a moment, when with feet,
Arrested and spell bound, and captured eyes,
Made wide with joy and wonder, I beheld
The spaces of a white and wintery land
Swept with the fire of sunset, all its width,
Vale, forest, town, and misty eminence,
273
A miracle of color and of beauty.
I had walked out, as I remember now,
With covered ears, for the bright air was keen,
To southward up the gleaming snow-packed fields,
With the snowshoer's long rejoicing stride,
Marching at ease. It was a radiant day
In February, the month of the great struggle
'Twixt sun and frost, when with advancing spears,
The glittering golden vanguard of the spring
Holds the broad winter's yet unbroken rear
In long-closed wavering contest. Thin pale threads
Like streaks of ash across the far off blue
Were drawn, nor seemed to move. A brooding silence
Kept all the land, a stillness as of sleep;
But in the east the grey and motionless woods,
Watching the great sun's fiery slow decline,
Grew deep with gold. To westward all was silver.
An hour had passed above me; I had reached;
The loftiest level of the snow-piled fields,
Clear eyed, but unobservant noting not,
That all the plain beneath me and the hills
Took on a change of colour, splendid, gradual,
Leaving no spot the same; nor that the sun
Now like a fiery torrent overflamed
The great line of the west. Ere yet I turned
With long stride homeward, being heated
With the loose swinging motion, weary too,
Nor uninclined to rest, a buried fence,
Whose topmost log just shouldered from the snow,
Made me a seat, and thence with heated cheeks,
Grazed by the northwind's edge of stinging ice,
I looked far out upon the snow-bound waste,
The lifting hills and intersecting forests,
The scarce marked courses of the buried streams,
And as I looked I list memory of the frost,
Transfixed with wonder, overborne with joy.
I saw them in their silence and their beauty;
Swept by the sunset's rapid hand of fire,
Sudden, mysterious, every moment deepening
To some new majesty of rose or flame.
The whole broad west was like molten sea
274
Of crimson. In the north the light-lined hills
Were veiled far off as with a mist of rose
Wondrous and soft. Along the darkening east
The gold of all the forests slowly changed
To purple. In the valley far before me,
Low sunk in sapphire shadows, from its hills,
Softer and lovelier than an opening flower,
Uprose a city with its sun-touched towers,
A bunch of amethysts.
Like one spell-bound
Caught in the presence of some god, I stood,
Nor felt the keen wind and the deadly air,
But watched the sun go down, and watched the gold
Fade from the town and the withdrawing hills,
Their westward shapes athwart the dusky red
Freeze into sapphire, saw the arc of rose
Rise ever higher in the violet east,
Above the frore front of the uprearing night
Remorsefully soft and sweet. Then I awoke
As from a dream, and from my shoulders shook
The warning chill, till then unfelt, unfeared.
~ Archibald Lampman,#NFDB
707:Improvisations: Light And Snow
The girl in the room beneath
Before going to bed
Strums on a mandolin
The three simple tunes she knows.
How inadequate they are to tell how her heart feels!
When she has finished them several times
She thrums the strings aimlessly with her finger-nails
And smiles, and thinks happily of many things.
II
I stood for a long while before the shop window
Looking at the blue butterflies embroidered on tawny silk.
The building was a tower before me,
Time was loud behind me,
Sun went over the housetops and dusty trees;
And there they were, glistening, brilliant, motionless,
Stitched in a golden sky
By yellow patient fingers long since turned to dust.
III
The first bell is silver,
And breathing darkness I think only of the long scythe of time.
The second bell is crimson,
And I think of a holiday night, with rockets
Furrowing the sky with red, and a soft shatter of stars.
The third bell is saffron and slow,
And I behold a long sunset over the sea
With wall on wall of castled cloud and glittering balustrades.
The fourth bell is color of bronze,
I walk by a frozen lake in the dun light of dusk:
Muffled crackings run in the ice,
Trees creak, birds fly.
The fifth bell is cold clear azure,
Delicately tinged with green:
One golden star hangs melting in it,
58
And towards this, sleepily, I go.
The sixth bell is as if a pebble
Had been dropped into a deep sea far above me . . .
Rings of sound ebb slowly into the silence.
IV
On the day when my uncle and I drove to the cemetery,
Rain rattled on the roof of the carriage;
And talkng constrainedly of this and that
We refrained from looking at the child's coffin on the seat before us.
When we reached the cemetery
We found that the thin snow on the grass
Was already transparent with rain;
And boards had been laid upon it
That we might walk without wetting our feet.
When I was a boy, and saw bright rows of icicles
In many lengths along a wall
I was dissappointed to find
That I could not play music upon them:
I ran my hand lightly across them
And they fell, tinkling.
I tell you this, young man, so that your expectations of life
Will not be too great.
VI
It is now two hours since I left you,
And the perfume of your hands is still on my hands.
And though since then
I have looked at the stars, walked in the cold blue streets,
And heard the dead leaves blowing over the ground
Under the trees,
I still remember the sound of your laughter.
How will it be, lady, when there is none left to remember you
Even as long as this?
Will the dust braid your hair?
VII
59
The day opens with the brown light of snowfall
And past the window snowflakes fall and fall.
I sit in my chair all day and work and work
Measuring words against each other.
I open the piano and play a tune
But find it does not say what I feel,
I grow tired of measuring words against each other,
I grow tired of these four walls,
And I think of you, who write me that you have just had a daughter
And named her after your first sweetheart,
And you, who break your heart, far away,
In the confusion and savagery of a long war,
And you who, worn by the bitterness of winter,
Will soon go south.
The snowflakes fall almost straight in the brown light
Past my window,
And a sparrow finds refuge on my window-ledge.
This alone comes to me out of the world outside
As I measure word with word.
VIII
Many things perplex me and leave me troubled,
Many things are locked away in the white book of stars
Never to be opened by me.
The starr'd leaves are silently turned,
And the mooned leaves;
And as they are turned, fall the shadows of life and death.
Perplexed and troubled,
I light a small light in a small room,
The lighted walls come closer to me,
The familiar pictures are clear.
I sit in my favourite chair and turn in my mind
The tiny pages of my own life, whereon so little is written,
And hear at the eastern window the pressure of a long wind, coming
From I know not where.
How many times have I sat here,
How many times will I sit here again,
Thinking these same things over and over in solitude
As a child says over and over
60
The first word he has learned to say.
IX
This girl gave her heart to me,
And this, and this.
This one looked at me as if she loved me,
And silently walked away.
This one I saw once and loved, and never saw her again.
Shall I count them for you upon my fingers?
Or like a priest solemnly sliding beads?
Or pretend they are roses, pale pink, yellow, and white,
And arrange them for you in a wide bowl
To be set in sunlight?
See how nicely it sounds as I count them for you -'This girl gave her heart to me
And this, and this, . . . !
And nevertheless, my heart breaks when I think of them,
When I think their names,
And how, like leaves, they have changed and blown
And will lie, at last, forgotten,
Under the snow.
It is night time, and cold, and snow is falling,
And no wind grieves the walls.
In the small world of light around the arc-lamp
A swarm of snowflakes falls and falls.
The street grows silent. The last stranger passes.
The sound of his feet, in the snow, is indistinct.
What forgotten sadness is it, on a night like this,
Takes possession of my heart?
Why do I think of a camellia tree in a southern garden,
With pink blossoms among dark leaves,
Standing, surprised, in the snow?
Why do I think of spring?
The snowflakes, helplessly veering,,
Fall silently past my window;
61
They come from darkness and enter darkness.
What is it in my heart is surprised and bewildered
Like that camellia tree,
Beautiful still in its glittering anguish?
And spring so far away!
XI
As I walked through the lamplit gardens,
On the thin white crust of snow,
So intensely was I thinking of my misfortune,
So clearly were my eyes fixed
On the face of this grief which has come to me,
That I did not notice the beautiful pale colouring
Of lamplight on the snow;
Nor the interlaced long blue shadows of trees;
And yet these things were there,
And the white lamps, and the orange lamps, and the lamps of lilac were there,
As I have seen them so often before;
As they will be so often again
Long after my grief is forgotten.
And still, though I know this, and say this, it cannot console me.
XII
How many times have we been interrupted
Just as I was about to make up a story for you!
One time it was because we suddenly saw a firefly
Lighting his green lantern among the boughs of a fir-tree.
Marvellous! Marvellous! He is making for himself
A little tent of light in the darkness!
And one time it was because we saw a lilac lightning flash
Run wrinkling into the blue top of the mountain, -We heard boulders of thunder rolling down upon us
And the plat-plat of drops on the window,
And we ran to watch the rain
Charging in wavering clouds across the long grass of the field!
Or at other times it was because we saw a star
Slipping easily out of the sky and falling, far off,
Among pine-dark hills;
62
Or because we found a crimson eft
Darting in the cold grass!
These things interrupted us and left us wondering;
And the stories, whatever they might have been,
Were never told.
A fairy, binding a daisy down and laughing?
A golden-haired princess caught in a cobweb?
A love-story of long ago?
Some day, just as we are beginning again,
Just as we blow the first sweet note,
Death itself will interrupt us.
XIII
My heart is an old house, and in that forlorn old house,
In the very centre, dark and forgotten,
Is a locked room where an enchanted princess
Lies sleeping.
But sometimes, in that dark house,
As if almost from the stars, far away,
Sounds whisper in that secret room -Faint voices, music, a dying trill of laughter?
And suddenly, from her long sleep,
The beautiful princess awakes and dances.
Who is she? I do not know.
Why does she dance? Do not ask me! -Yet to-day, when I saw you,
When I saw your eyes troubled with the trouble of happiness,
And your mouth trembling into a smile,
And your fingers pull shyly forward, -Softly, in that room,
The little princess arose
And danced;
And as she danced the old house gravely trembled
With its vague and delicious secret.
XIV
Like an old tree uprooted by the wind
And flung down cruelly
63
With roots bared to the sun and stars
And limp leaves brought to earth -Torn from its house -So do I seem to myself
When you have left me.
XV
The music of the morning is red and warm;
Snow lies against the walls;
And on the sloping roof in the yellow sunlight
Pigeons huddle against the wind.
The music of evening is attenuated and thin -The moon seen through a wave by a mermaid;
The crying of a violin.
Far down there, far down where the river turns to the west,
The delicate lights begin to twinkle
On the dusky arches of the bridge:
In the green sky a long cloud,
A smouldering wave of smoky crimson,
Breaks in the freezing wind: and above it, unabashed,
Remote, untouched, fierly palpitant,
Sings the first star.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
708:Bahaman
To T. B. M.
IN the crowd that thronged the pierhead, come to see their friends take ship
For new ventures in seafaring, when the hawsers were let slip
And we swung out in the current, with good-byes on every lip,
'Midst the waving caps and kisses, as we dropped down with the tide
And the faces blurred and faded, last of all your hand I spied
Signalling, Farewell, Good fortune! then my heart rose up and cried:
'While the world holds one such comrade, whose sweet durable regard
Would so speed my safe departure, lest home-leaving should be hard,
What care I who keeps the ferry, whether Charon or Cunard!'
Then we cleared the bar, and laid her on the course, the thousand miles
From the Hook to the Bahamas, from midwinter to the isles
Where frost never laid a finger, and eternal summer smiles.
Three days through the surly storm-beat, while the surf-heads threshed and
flew,
And the rolling mountains thundered to the trample of the screw,
The black liner heaved and scuffled and strained on, as if she knew.
On the fourth, the round blue morning sparkled there, all light and breeze,
Clean and tenuous as a bubble blown from two immensities,
Shot and coloured with sheer sunlight and the magic of those seas.
In that bright new world of wonder, it was life enough to laze
All day underneath the awnings, and through half-shut eyes to gaze
At the marvel of the sea-blue; and I faltered for a phrase
Should half give you the impression, tell you how the very tint
Justified your finest daring, as if Nature gave the hint,
'Plodders, see Imagination set his pallet without stint!'
Cobalt, gobelin, and azure, turquoise, sapphire, indigo,
Changing from the spectral bluish of a shadow upon snow
To the deep of Canton china,—one unfathomable glow.
And the flying-fish,—to see them in a scurry lift and flee,
Silvery as the foam they sprang from, fragile people of the sea,
Whom their heart's great aspiration for a moment had set free.
From the dim and cloudy ocean, thunder-centred, rosy-verged,
At the lord sun's Sursum Corda, as implicit impulse urged,
Frail as vapour, fine as music, these bright spirit-things emerged;
Like those flocks of small white snowbirds we have seen start up before
Our brisk walk in winter weather by the snowy Scituate shore;
And the tiny shining sea-folk brought you back to me once more.
So we ran down Abaco; and passing that tall sentinel
54
Black against the sundown, sighted, as the sudden twilight fell,
Nassau light; and the warm darkness breathed on us from breeze and swell.
Stand-by bell and stop of engine; clank of anchor going down;
And we're riding in the roadstead off a twinkling-lighted town,
Low dark shore with boom of breakers and white beach the palm-trees crown.
In the soft wash of the sea air, on the long swing of the tide,
Here for once the dream came true, the voyage ended close beside
The Hesperides in moonlight on mid-ocean where they ride!
And those Hesperidean joy-lands were not strange to you and me.
Just beyond the lost horizon, every time we looked to sea
From Testudo, there they floated, looming plain as plain could be.
Who believed us? 'Myth and fable are a science in our time.'
'Never saw the sea that colour. ''Never heard of such a rhyme.'
Well, we've proved it, prince of idlers,—knowledge wrong and faith sublime.
Right were you to follow fancy, give the vaguer instinct room
In a heaven of clear colour, where the spirit might assume
All her elemental beauty, past the fact of sky or bloom.
Paint the vision, not the view,—the touch that bids the sense good-bye,
Lifting spirit at a bound beyond the frontiers of the eye,
To suburb unguessed dominions of the soul's credulity.
Never yet was painter, poet, born content with things that are,—
Must divine from every beauty other beauties greater far,
Till the arc of truth be circled, and her lantern blaze, a star.
This alone is art's ambition, to arrest with form and hue
Dominant ungrasped ideals, known to credence, hid from view,
In a mimic of creation,—to the life, yet fairer too,—
Where the soul may take her pleasure, contemplate perfection's plan,
And returning bring the tidings of his heritage to man,—
News of continents uncharted she has stood tip-toe to scan.
So she fires his gorgeous fancy with a cadence, with a line,
Till the artist wakes within him, and the toiler grows divine,
Shaping the rough world about him nearer to some fair design.
Every heart must have its Indies,—an inheritance unclaimed
In the unsubstantial treasure of a province never named,
Loved and longed for through a lifetime, dull, laborious, and unfamed,
Never wholly disillusioned. Spiritus, read, haeres sit
Patriæ quæ tristia mescit. This alone the great king writ
O'er the tomb of her he cherished in this fair world she must quit.
Love in one farewell for ever, taking counsel to implore
Best of human benedictions on its dead, could ask no more.
The heart's country for a dwelling, this at last is all our lore.
But the fairies at your cradle gave you craft to build a home
55
In the wide bright world of colour, with the cunning of a gnome;
Blessed you so above your fellows of the tribe that still must roam.
Still across the world they go, tormented by a strange unrest,
And the unabiding spirit knocks for ever at their breast,
Bidding them away to fortune in some undiscovered West;
While at home you sit and call the Orient up at your command,
Master of the iris seas and Prospero of the purple land.
Listen, here was one world-corner matched the cunning of your hand.
Not, my friend, since we were children, and all wonder-tales were true,—
Jason, Hengest, Hiawatha, fairy prince or pirate crew—
Was there ever such a landing in a country strange and new?
Up the harbour where there gathered, fought and revelled many a year,
Swarthy Spaniard, lost Lucayan, Loyalist, and Buccaneer,
'Once upon a time' was now, and 'far across the sea' was here.
Tropic moonlight, in great floods and fathoms pouring through the trees
On a ground as white as sea-froth its fantastic traceries,
While the poincianas, rustling like the rain, moved in the breeze,
Showed a city, coral-streeted, melting in the mellow shine,
Built of creamstone and enchantment, fairy work in every line,
In a velvet atmosphere that bids the heart her haste resign.
Thanks to Julian Hospitator, saint of travellers by sea,
Roving minstrels and all boatmen,—just such vagabonds as we—
On the shaded wharf we landed, rich in leisure, hale and free.
What more would you for God's creatures, but the little tide of sleep?
In a clean white room I wakened, saw the careless sunlight peep
Through the roses at the window, lay and listened to the creep
Of the soft wind in the shutters, heard the palm-tops stirring high,
And that strange mysterious shuffle of the slipshod foot go by.
In a world all glad with colour, gladdest of all things was I;
In a quiet convent garden, tranquil as the day is long,
Here to sit without intrusion of the world or strife or wrong,—
Watch the lizards chase each other, and the green bird make his song;
Warmed and freshened, lulled yet quickened in that Paradisal air,
Motherly and uncapricious, healing every hurt or care,
Wooing body, mind, and spirit, firmly back to strong and fair;
By the Angelus reminded, silence waits the touch of sound,
As the soul waits her awaking to some Gloria profound;
Till the mighty Southern Cross is lighted at the day's last bound.
And if ever your fair fortune make you good Saint Vincent's guest,
At his door take leave of trouble, welcomed to his decent rest,
Of his ordered peace partaker, by his solace healed and blessed;
Where this flowered cloister garden, hidden from the passing view,
56
Lies behind its yellow walls in prayer the holy hours through:
And beyond, that fairy harbour, floored in malachite and blue.
In that old white-streeted city gladness has her way at last
Under burdens finely poised, and with a freedom unsurpassed,
Move the naked-footed bearers in the blue day deep and vast.
This is Bay Street broad and low-built, basking in its quiet trade;
Here the sponging fleet is anchored; here shell trinkets are displayed;
Here the cable news is posted daily; here the market's made,
With its oranges from Andros, heaps of yam and tamarind,
Red-juiced shadducks from the Current, ripened in the long trade-wind,
Gaudy fish from their sea-gardens, yellow-tailed and azure-tinned.
Here a group of diving boys in bronze and ivory, bright and slim,
Sparkling copper in the high noon, dripping loin-cloth, polished limb,
Poised a moment and then plunged in that deep daylight green and dim.
Here the great rich Spanish laurels spread across the public square
Their dense, solemn shade; and near by, half within the open glare,
Mannerly in their clean cottons, knots of blacks are waiting there
By the court-house, where a magistrate is hearing cases through,
Dealing justice prompt and level, as the sturdy English do,—
One more tent-peg of the Empire, holding that great shelter true.
Last the picture from the town's end, palmed and foam-fringed through the cane,
Where the gorgeous sunset yellows pour aloft and spill and stain
The pure amethystine sea and far faint islands of the main.
Loveliest of the Lucayas, peace be yours till time be done!
In the gray North I shall see you, with your white streets in the sun,
Old pink walls and purple gateways, where the lizards bask and run,
Where the great hibiscus blossoms in their scarlet loll and glow,
And the idling gay bandannas through the hot noons come and go,
While the ever-stirring sea-wind sways the palm-tops to and fro.
Far from stress and storm for ever, dream behind your jalousies,
While the long white lines of breakers crumble on your reefs and keys,
And the crimson oleanders burn against the peacock seas.
~ Bliss William Carman,#NFDB
709:A Roxbury Garden
Hoops
Blue and pink sashes,
Criss-cross shoes,
Minna and Stella run out into the garden
To play at hoop.
Up and down the garden-paths they race,
In the yellow sunshine,
Each with a big round hoop
White as a stripped willow-wand.
Round and round turn the hoops,
Their diamond whiteness cleaving the yellow sunshine.
The gravel crunches and squeaks beneath them,
And a large pebble springs them into the air
To go whirling for a foot or two
Before they touch the earth again
In a series of little jumps.
Spring, Hoops!
Spit out a shower of blue and white brightness.
The little criss-cross shoes twinkle behind you,
The pink and blue sashes flutter like flags,
The hoop-sticks are ready to beat you.
Turn, turn, Hoops! In the yellow sunshine.
Turn your stripped willow whiteness
Along the smooth paths.
Stella sings:
'Round and round, rolls my hoop,
Scarcely touching the ground,
With a swoop,
And a bound,
Round and round.
With a bumpety, crunching, scattering sound,
Down the garden it flies;
24
In our eyes
The sun lies.
See it spin
Out and in;
Through the paths it goes whirling,
About the beds curling.
Sway now to the loop,
Faster, faster, my hoop.
Round you come,
Up you come,
Quick and straight as before.
Run, run, my hoop, run,
Away from the sun.'
And the great hoop bounds along the path,
Leaping into the wind-bright air.
Minna sings:
'Turn, hoop,
Burn hoop,
Twist and twine
Hoop of mine.
Flash along,
Leap along,
Right at the sun.
Run, hoop, run.
Faster and faster,
Whirl, twirl.
Wheel like fire,
And spin like glass;
Fire's no whiter
Glass is no brighter.
Dance,
Prance,
Over and over,
About and about,
With the top of you under,
And the bottom at top,
But never a stop.
Turn about, hoop, to the tap of my stick,
I follow behind you
To touch and remind you.
25
Burn and glitter, so white and quick,
Round and round, to the tap of a stick.'
The hoop flies along between the flower-beds,
Swaying the flowers with the wind of its passing.
Beside the foxglove-border roll the hoops,
And the little pink and white bells shake and jingle
Up and down their tall spires;
They roll under the snow-ball bush,
And the ground behind them is strewn with white petals;
They swirl round a corner,
And jar a bee out of a Canterbury bell;
They cast their shadows for an instant
Over a bed of pansies,
Catch against the spurs of a columbine,
Jostle the quietness from a cluster of monk's-hood.
Pat! Pat! behind them come the little criss-cross shoes,
And the blue and pink sashes stream out in flappings of colour.
Stella sings:
'Hoop, hoop,
Roll along,
Faster bowl along,
Hoop.
Slow, to the turning,
Now go! - Go!
Quick!
Here's the stick.
Rat-a-tap-tap it,
Pat it, flap it.
Fly like a bird or a yellow-backed bee,
See how soon you can reach that tree.
Here is a path that is perfectly straight.
Roll along, hoop, or we shall be late.'
Minna sings:
'Trip about, slip about, whip about
Hoop.
Wheel like a top at its quickest spin,
Then, dear hoop, we shall surely win.
First to the greenhouse and then to the wall
26
Circle and circle,
And let the wind push you,
Poke you,
Brush you,
And not let you fall.
Whirring you round like a wreath of mist.
Hoopety hoop,
Twist,
Twist.'
Tap! Tap! go the hoop-sticks,
And the hoops bowl along under a grape arbour.
For an instant their willow whiteness is green,
Pale white-green.
Then they are out in the sunshine,
Leaving the half-formed grape clusters
A-tremble under their big leaves.
'I will beat you, Minna,' cries Stella,
Hitting her hoop smartly with her stick.
'Stella, Stella, we are winning,' calls Minna,
As her hoop curves round a bed of clove-pinks.
A humming-bird whizzes past Stella's ear,
And two or three yellow-and-black butterflies
Flutter, startled, out of a pillar rose.
Round and round race the little girls
After their great white hoops.
Suddenly Minna stops.
Her hoop wavers an instant,
But she catches it up on her stick.
'Listen, Stella!'
Both the little girls are listening;
And the scents of the garden rise up quietly about them.
'It's the chaise! It's Father!
Perhaps he's brought us a book from Boston.'
Twinkle, twinkle, the little criss-cross shoes
Up the garden path.
Blue - pink - an instant, against the syringa hedge.
But the hoops, white as stripped willow-wands,
Lie in the grass,
And the grasshoppers jump back and forth
27
Over them.
II
Battledore and Shuttlecock
The shuttlecock soars upward
In a parabola of whiteness,
Turns,
And sinks to a perfect arc.
Plat! the battledore strikes it,
And it rises again,
Without haste,
Winged and curving,
Tracing its white flight
Against the clipped hemlock-trees.
Plat!
Up again,
Orange and sparkling with sun,
Rounding under the blue sky,
Dropping,
Fading to grey-green
In the shadow of the coned hemlocks.
'Ninety-one.' 'Ninety-two.' 'Ninety-three.'
The arms of the little girls
Come up - and up Precisely,
Like mechanical toys.
The battledores beat at nothing,
And toss the dazzle of snow
Off their parchment drums.
'Ninety-four.' Plat!
'Ninety-five.' Plat!
Back and forth
Goes the shuttlecock,
Icicle-white,
Leaping at the sharp-edged clouds,
Overturning,
Falling,
Down,
And down,
Tinctured with pink
28
From the upthrusting shine
Of Oriental poppies.
The little girls sway to the counting rhythm;
Left foot,
Right foot.
Plat! Plat!
Yellow heat twines round the handles of the battledores,
The parchment cracks with dryness;
But the shuttlecock
Swings slowly into the ice-blue sky,
Heaving up on the warm air
Like a foam-bubble on a wave,
With feathers slanted and sustaining.
Higher,
Until the earth turns beneath it;
Poised and swinging,
With all the garden flowing beneath it,
Scarlet, and blue, and purple, and white Blurred colour reflections in rippled water Changing - streaming For the moment that Stella takes to lift her arm.
Then the shuttlecock relinquishes,
Bows,
Descends;
And the sharp blue spears of the air
Thrust it to earth.
Again it mounts,
Stepping up on the rising scents of flowers,
Buoyed up and under by the shining heat.
Above the foxgloves,
Above the guelder-roses,
Above the greenhouse glitter,
Till the shafts of cooler air
Meet it,
Deflect it,
Reject it,
Then down,
Down,
Past the greenhouse,
Past the guelder-rose bush,
29
Past the foxgloves.
'Ninety-nine,' Stella's battledore springs to the impact.
Plunk! Like the snap of a taut string.
'Oh! Minna!'
The shuttlecock drops zigzagedly,
Out of orbit,
Hits the path,
And rolls over quite still.
Dead white feathers,
With a weight at the end.
III
Garden Games
The tall clock is striking twelve;
And the little girls stop in the hall to watch it,
And the big ships rocking in a half-circle
Above the dial.
Twelve o'clock!
Down the side steps
Go the little girls,
Under their big round straw hats.
Minna's has a pink ribbon,
Stella's a blue,
That is the way they know which is which.
Twelve o'clock!
An hour yet before dinner.
Mother is busy in the still-room,
And Hannah is making gingerbread.
Slowly, with lagging steps,
They follow the garden-path,
Crushing a leaf of box for its acrid smell,
Discussing what they shall do,
And doing nothing.
'Stella, see that grasshopper
Climbing up the bank!
What a jump!
Almost as long as my arm.'
30
Run, children, run.
For the grasshopper is leaping away,
In half-circle curves,
Shuttlecock curves,
Over the grasses.
Hand in hand, the little girls call to him:
'Grandfather, grandfather gray,
Give me molasses, or I'll throw you away.'
The grasshopper leaps into the sunlight,
Golden-green,
And is gone.
'Let's catch a bee.'
Round whirl the little girls,
And up the garden.
Two heads are thrust among the Canterbury bells,
Listening,
And fingers clasp and unclasp behind backs
In a strain of silence.
White bells,
Blue bells,
Hollow and reflexed.
Deep tunnels of blue and white dimness,
Cool wine-tunnels for bees.
There is a floundering and buzzing over Minna's head.
'Bend it down, Stella. Quick! Quick!'
The wide mouth of a blossom
Is pressed together in Minna's fingers.
The stem flies up, jiggling its flower-bells,
And Minna holds the dark blue cup in her hand,
With the bee
Imprisoned in it.
Whirr! Buzz! Bump!
Bump! Whiz! Bang!
BANG!!
The blue flower tears across like paper,
And a gold-black bee darts away in the sunshine.
'If we could fly, we could catch him.'
31
The sunshine is hot on Stella's upturned face,
As she stares after the bee.
'We'll follow him in a dove chariot.
Come on, Stella.'
Run, children,
Along the red gravel paths,
For a bee is hard to catch,
Even with a chariot of doves.
Tall, still, and cowled,
Stand the monk's-hoods;
Taller than the heads of the little girls.
A blossom for Minna.
A blossom for Stella.
Off comes the cowl,
And there is a purple-painted chariot;
Off comes the forward petal,
And there are two little green doves,
With green traces tying them to the chariot.
'Now we will get in, and fly right up to the clouds.
Fly, Doves, up in the sky,
With Minna and me,
After the bee.'
Up one path,
Down another,
Run the little girls,
Holding their dove chariots in front of them;
But the bee is hidden in the trumpet of a honeysuckle,
With his wings folded along his back.
The dove chariots are thrown away,
And the little girls wander slowly through the garden,
Sucking the salvia tips,
And squeezing the snapdragons
To make them gape.
'I'm so hot,
Let's pick a pansy
And see the little man in his bath,
And play we're he.'
A royal bath-tub,
Hung with purple stuffs and yellow.
32
The great purple-yellow wings
Rise up behind the little red and green man;
The purple-yellow wings fan him,
He dabbles his feet in cool green.
Off with the green sheath,
And there are two spindly legs.
'Heigho!' sighs Minna.
'Heigho!' sighs Stella.
There is not a flutter of wind,
And the sun is directly overhead.
Along the edge of the garden
Walk the little girls.
Their hats, round and yellow like cheeses,
Are dangling by the ribbons.
The grass is a tumult of buttercups and daisies;
Buttercups and daisies streaming away
Up the hill.
The garden is purple, and pink, and orange, and scarlet;
The garden is hot with colours.
But the meadow is only yellow, and white, and green,
Cool, and long, and quiet.
The little girls pick buttercups
And hold them under each other's chins.
'You're as gold as Grandfather's snuff-box.
You're going to be very rich, Minna.'
'Oh-o-o! Then I'll ask my husband to give me a pair of garnet earrings
Just like Aunt Nancy's.
I wonder if he will.
I know. We'll tell fortunes.
That's what we'll do.'
Plump down in the meadow grass,
Stella and Minna,
With their round yellow hats,
Like cheeses,
Beside them.
Drop,
Drop,
Daisy petals.
'One I love,
Two I love,
Three I love I say . . .'
33
The ground is peppered with daisy petals,
And the little girls nibble the golden centres,
And play it is cake.
A bell rings.
Dinner-time;
And after dinner there are lessons.
~ Amy Lowell,#NFDB
710:L'Aveugle
'Dieu dont l'arc est d'argent, dieu de Claros, écoute;
O Sminthée-Apollon, je périrai sans doute,
Si tu ne sers de guide à cet aveugle errant.'
C'est ainsi qu'achevait l'aveugle en soupirant,
Et près des bois marchait, faible, et sur une pierre
S'asseyait. Trois pasteurs, enfants de cette terre,
Le suivaient, accourus aux abois turbulents
Des molosses, gardiens de leurs troupeaux bêlants.
Ils avaient, retenant leur fureur indiscrète,
Protégé du vieillard la faiblesse inquiète;
Ils l'écoutaient de loin, et s'approchant de lui:
Quel est ce vieillard blanc, aveugle et sans appui?
Serait-ce un habitant de l'empire céleste?
Ses traits sont grands et fiers; de sa ceinture agreste
Pend une lyre informe; et les sons de sa voix
Émeuvent l'air et l'onde, et le ciel et les bois.'
Mais il entend leurs pas, prête l'oreille, espère,
Se trouble, et tend déjà les mains à la prière.
'Ne crains point, disent-ils, malheureux étranger,
Si plutôt, sous un corps terrestre et passager,
Tu n'es point quelque dieu protecteur de la Grèce,
Tant une grâce auguste ennoblit ta vieillesse!
Si tu n'es qu'un mortel, vieillard infortuné,
Les humains près de qui les flots t'ont amené
Aux mortels malheureux n'apportent point d'injures.
Les destins n'ont jamais de faveurs qui soient pures.
Ta voix noble et touchante est un bienfait des dieux;
Mais aux clartés du jour ils ont fermé tes yeux.
--Enfants, car votre voix est enfantine et tendre,
Vos discours sont prudents plus qu'on n'eût dû l'attendre;
Mais, toujours soupçonneux, l'indigent étranger
Croit qu'on rit de ses maux et qu'on veut l'outrager.
Ne me comparez point à la troupe immortelle:
Ces rides, ces cheveux, cette nuit éternelle,
Voyez, est-ce le front d'un habitant des cieux?
Je ne suis qu'un mortel, un des plus malheureux!
96
Si vous en savez un, pauvre, errant, misérable,
C'est à celui-là seul que je suis comparable;
Et pourtant je n'ai point, comme fit Thamyris,
Des chansons à Phoebus voulu ravir le prix;
Ni, livré comme Oedipe à la noire Euménide,
Je n'ai puni sur moi l'inceste parricide;
Mais les dieux tout-puissants gardaient à mon déclin
Les ténèbres, l'exil, l'indigence et la faim.
--Prends, et puisse bientôt changer ta destinée!'
Disent-ils. Et tirant ce que, pour leur journée,
Tient la peau d'une chèvre aux crins noirs et luisants,
Ils versent à l'envi, sur ses genoux pesants,
Le pain de pur froment, les olives huileuses,
Le fromage et l'amande et les figues mielleuses;
Et du pain à son chien entre ses pieds gisant,
Tout hors d'haleine encore, humide et languissant,
Qui, malgré les rameurs, se lançant à la nage,
L'avait loin du vaisseau rejoint sur le rivage.
'Le sort, dit le vieillard, n'est pas toujours de fer;
Je vous salue, enfants venus de Jupiter;
Heureux sont les parents qui tels vous firent naître!
Mais venez, que mes mains cherchent à vous connaître;
Je crois avoir des yeux. Vous êtes beaux tous trois.
Vos visages sont doux, car douce est votre voix.
Qu'aimable est la vertu que la grâce environne!
Croissez, comme j'ai vu ce palmier de Latone,
Alors qu'ayant des yeux je traversai les flots;
Car jadis, abordant à la sainte Délos,
Je vis près d'Apollon, à son autel de pierre,
Un palmier, don du ciel, merveille de la terre.
Vous croîtrez, comme lui, grands, féconds, révérés,
Puisque les malheureux sont par vous honorés.
Le plus âgé de vous aura vu treize années:
A peine, mes enfants, vos mères étaient nées,
Que j'étais presque vieux. Assieds-toi près de moi,
Toi, le plus grand de tous; je me confie à toi.
Prends soin du vieil aveugle.--O sage magnanime!
Comment, et d'où viens-tu? car l'onde maritime
Mugit de toutes parts sur nos bords orageux.
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--Des marchands de Cymé m'avaient pris avec eux.
J'allais voir, m'éloignant des rives de Carie,
Si la Grèce pour moi n'aurait point de patrie,
Et des dieux moins jaloux, et de moins tristes jours;
Car jusques à la mort nous espérons toujours.
Mais pauvre et n'ayant rien pour payer mon passage,
Ils m'ont, je ne sais où, jeté sur le rivage.
--Harmonieux vieillard, tu n'as donc point chanté?
Quelques sons de ta voix auraient tout acheté.
--Enfants! du rossignol la voix pure et légère
N'a jamais apaisé le vautour sanguinaire;
Et les riches, grossiers, avares, insolents,
N'ont pas une âme ouverte à sentir les talents.
Guidé par ce bâton, sur l'arène glissante,
Seul, en silence, au bord de l'onde mugissante,
J'allais, et j'écoutais le bêlement lointain
De troupeaux agitant leurs sonnettes d'airain.
Puis j'ai pris cette lyre, et les cordes mobiles
Ont encor résonné sous mes vieux doigts débiles
Je voulais des grands dieux implorer la bonté,
Et surtout Jupiter, dieu d'hospitalité,
Lorsque d'énormes chiens à la voix formidable
Sont venus m'assaillir; et j'étais misérable,
Si vous (car c'était vous), avant qu'ils m'eussent pris,
N'eussiez armé pour moi les pierres et les cris.
--Mon père, il est donc vrai: tout est devenu pire,
Car jadis, aux accents d'une éloquente lyre,
Les tigres et les loups, vaincus, humiliés,
D'un chanteur comme toi vinrent baiser les pieds.
--Les barbares! J'étais assis près de la poupe.
'Aveugle vagabond, dit l'insolente troupe,
Chante, si ton esprit n'est point comme tes yeux,
Amuse notre ennui; tu rendras grâce aux dieux.'
J'ai fait taire mon coeur qui voulait les confondre:
Ma bouche ne s'est point ouverte à leur répondre;
Ils n'ont pas entendu ma voix, et sous ma main
J'ai retenu le dieu courroucé dans mon sein.
98
Cymé, puisque tes fils dédaignent Mnémosyne,
Puisqu'ils ont fait outrage à la muse divine,
Que leur vie et leur mort s'éteignent dans l'oubli,
Que ton nom dans la nuit demeure enseveli!
--Viens, suis-nous à la ville; elle est toute voisine,
Et chérit les amis de la muse divine.
Un siège aux clous d'argent te place à nos festins;
Et là les mets choisis, le miel et les bons vins,
Sous la colonne où pend une lyre d'ivoire,
Te feront de tes maux oublier la mémoire.
Et si, dans le chemin, rapsode ingénieux,
Ta veux nous accorder tes chants dignes des cieux,
Nous dirons qu'Apollon, pour charmer les oreilles,
T'a lui-même dicté de si douces merveilles.
--Oui, je le veux; marchons. Mais où m'entraînez-vous?
Enfants du vieil aveugle, en quel lieu sommes-nous?
--Syros est l'île heureuse où nous vivons, mon père.
--Salut, belle Syros, deux fois hospitalière!
Car sur ses bords heureux je suis déjà venu:
Amis, je la connais. Vos pères m'ont connu.
Ils croissaient comme vous; mes yeux s'ouvraient encore
Au soleil, au printemps, aux roses de l'aurore;
J'étais jeune et vaillant. Aux danses des guerriers,
A la course, aux combats, j'ai paru des premiers.
J'ai vu Corinthe, Argos, et Crète et les cent villes,
Et du fleuve Egyptus les rivages fertiles;
Mais la terre et la mer, et l'âge et les malheurs,
Ont épuisé ce corps fatigué de douleurs.
La voix me reste. Ainsi la cigale innocente,
Sur un arbuste assise, et se console et chante.
Commençons par les dieux: 'Souverain Jupiter,
Soleil qui vois, entends, connais tout, et toi, mer,
Fleuves, terre, et noirs dieux des vengeances trop lentes,
Salut! Venez à moi, de l'Olympe habitantes,
Muses! vous savez tout, vous, déesses, et nous,
Mortels, ne savons rien qui ne vienne de vous.''
Il poursuit; et déjà les antiques ombrages
99
Mollement en cadence inclinaient leurs feuillages;
Et pâtres oubliant leur troupeau délaissé,
Et voyageurs quittant leur chemin commencé,
Couraient. Il les entend près de son jeune guide,
L'un sur l'autre pressés, tendre une oreille avide;
Et nymphes et sylvains sortaient pour l'admirer,
Et l'écoutaient en foule, et n'osaient respirer,
Car en de longs détours de chansons vagabondes
Il enchaînait de tout les semences fécondes,
Les principes du feu, les eaux, la terre et l'air,
Les fleuves descendus du sein de Jupiter,
Les oracles, les arts, les cités fraternelles,
Et depuis le chaos les amours immortelles;
D'abord le roi divin, et l'Olympe, et les cieux,
Et le monde ébranlé d'un signe de ses yeux,
Et les dieux partagés en une immense guerre,
Et le sang plus qu'humain venant rougir la terre,
Et les rois assemblés, et sous les pieds guerriers
Une nuit de poussière, et les chars meurtriers,
Et les héros armés, brillant dans les campagnes
Comme un vaste incendie aux cimes des montagnes,
Les coursiers hérissant leur crinière à longs flots,
Et d'une voix humaine excitant les héros;
De là, portant ses pas dans les paisibles villes,
Les lois, les orateurs, les récoltes fertiles;
Mais bientôt de soldats les remparts entourés,
Les victimes tombant dans les parvis sacrés,
Et les assauts mortels aux épouses plaintives,
Et les mères en deuil, et les filles captives;
Puis aussi les moissons joyeuses, les troupeaux
Bêlants ou mugissants, les rustiques pipeaux,
Les chansons, les festins, les vendanges bruyantes,
Et la flûte et la lyre, et les noces dansantes.
Puis, déchaînant les vents à soulever les mers,
Il perdait les rochers sur les gouffres amers;
De là, dans le sein frais d'une roche azurée,
En foule il appelait les filles de Nérée,
Qui, bientôt à ses cris s'élevant sur les eaux,
Aux rivages troyens parcouraient les vaisseaux.
Puis il ouvrait du Styx la rive criminelle,
Et puis les demi-dieux et les champs d'asphodèle,
Et la foule des morts: vieillards seuls et souffrants,
100
Jeunes gens emportés aux yeux de leurs parents,
Enfants dont au berceau la vie est terminée,
Vierges dont le trépas suspendit l'hyménée.
Mais, ô bois, ô ruisseaux, ô monts, ô durs cailloux!
Quels doux frémissements vous agitèrent tous,
Quand bientôt à Lemnos, sur l'enclume divine,
Il forgeait cette trame irrésistible et fine
Autant que d'Arachné les pièges inconnus,
Et dans ce fer mobile emprisonnait Vénus,
Et quand il revêtait d'une pierre soudaine
La fière Niobé, cette mère thébaine;
Et quand il répétait en accents de douleur
De la triste Aédon l'imprudence et les pleurs,
Qui d'un fils méconnu marâtre involontaire,
Vola, doux rossignol, sous le bois solitaire!
Ensuite, avec le vin, il versait aux héros
Le puissant népenthès, oubli de tous les maux;
Il cueillait le moly, fleur qui rend l'homme sage;
Du paisible lotos il mêlait le breuvage:
Les mortels oubliaient, à ce philtre charmés,
Et la douce patrie et les parents aimés.
Enfin l'Ossa, l'Olympe et les bois du Pénée
Voyaient ensanglanter les banquets d'hyménée,
Quand Thésée, au milieu de la joie et du vin,
La nuit où son ami reçut à son festin
Le peuple monstrueux des enfants de la nue,
Fut contraint d'arracher l'épouse demi-nue
Au bras ivre et nerveux du sauvage Eurytus.
Soudain, le glaive en main, l'ardent Pirithoüs:
'Attends; il faut ici que mon affront s'expie,
Traître!' Mais avant lui, sur le centaure impie
Dryas a fait tomber, avec tous ses rameaux,
Un long arbre de fer hérissé de flambeaux.
L'insolent quadrupède en vain s'écrie; il tombe,
Et son pied bat le sol qui doit être sa tombe.
Sous l'effort de Nessus, la table du repas
Roule, écrase Cymèle, Évagre, Périphas.
Pirithoüs égorge Antimaque et Pétrée,
Et Cyllare aux pieds blancs, et le noir Macarée,
Qui de trois fiers lions, dépouillés par sa main,
Couvrait ses quatre flancs, armait son double sein.
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Courbé, levant un roc choisi pour leur vengeance,
Tout à coup, sous l'airain d'un vase antique, immense,
L'imprudent Bianor, par Hercule surpris,
Sent de sa tête énorme éclater les débris.
Hercule et la massue entassent en trophée
Clanis, Démoléon, Lycotas, et Riphée
Qui portait sur ses crins, de taches colorés,
L'héréditaire éclat des nuages dorés.
Mais d'un double combat Eurynome est avide,
Car ses pieds, agités en un cercle rapide,
Battent à coups pressés l'armure de Nestor;
Le quadrupède Hélops fuit; l'agile Crantor,
Le bras levé, l'atteint; Eurynome l'arrête;
D'un érable noueux il va fendre sa tête,
Lorsque le fils d'Égée, invincible, sanglant,
L'aperçoit, à l'autel prend un chêne brûlant,
Sur sa croupe indomptée, avec un cri terrible,
S'élance, va saisir sa chevelure horrible,
L'entraîne, et, quand sa bouche, ouverte avec effort,
Crie, il y plonge ensemble et la flamme et la mort.
L'autel est dépouillé. Tous vont s'armer de flamme,
Et le bois porte au loin des hurlements de femme,
L'ongle frappant la terre, et les guerriers meurtris,
Et les vases brisés, et l'injure, et les cris.
Ainsi le grand vieillard, en images hardies,
Déployait le tissu des saintes mélodies.
Les trois enfants émus, à son auguste aspect,
Admiraient, d'un regard de joie et de respect,
De sa bouche abonder les paroles divines,
Comme en hiver la neige aux sommets des collines.
Et, partout accourus, dansant sur son chemin,
Hommes, femmes, enfants, les rameaux à la main,
Et vierges et guerriers, jeunes fleurs de la ville,
Chantaient: 'Viens dans nos murs, viens habiter notre île;
Viens, prophète éloquent, aveugle harmonieux,
Convive du nectar, disciple aimé des dieux;
Des jeux, tous les cinq ans, rendront saint et prospère
Le jour où nous avons reçu le grand HOMÈRE.'
~ Andre Marie de Chenier,#NFDB
711:The Princess (Part 6)
My dream had never died or lived again.
As in some mystic middle state I lay;
Seeing I saw not, hearing not I heard:
Though, if I saw not, yet they told me all
So often that I speak as having seen.
For so it seemed, or so they said to me,
That all things grew more tragic and more strange;
That when our side was vanquished and my cause
For ever lost, there went up a great cry,
The Prince is slain. My father heard and ran
In on the lists, and there unlaced my casque
And grovelled on my body, and after him
Came Psyche, sorrowing for Aglaïa.
But high upon the palace Ida stood
With Psyche's babe in arm: there on the roofs
Like that great dame of Lapidoth she sang.
'Our enemies have fallen, have fallen: the seed,
The little seed they laughed at in the dark,
Has risen and cleft the soil, and grown a bulk
Of spanless girth, that lays on every side
A thousand arms and rushes to the Sun.
'Our enemies have fallen, have fallen: they came;
The leaves were wet with women's tears: they heard
A noise of songs they would not understand:
They marked it with the red cross to the fall,
And would have strown it, and are fallen themselves.
'Our enemies have fallen, have fallen: they came,
The woodmen with their axes: lo the tree!
But we will make it faggots for the hearth,
And shape it plank and beam for roof and floor,
And boats and bridges for the use of men.
'Our enemies have fallen, have fallen: they struck;
With their own blows they hurt themselves, nor knew
778
There dwelt an iron nature in the grain:
The glittering axe was broken in their arms,
Their arms were shattered to the shoulder blade.
'Our enemies have fallen, but this shall grow
A night of Summer from the heat, a breadth
Of Autumn, dropping fruits of power: and rolled
With music in the growing breeze of Time,
The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs
Shall move the stony bases of the world.
'And now, O maids, behold our sanctuary
Is violate, our laws broken: fear we not
To break them more in their behoof, whose arms
Championed our cause and won it with a day
Blanched in our annals, and perpetual feast,
When dames and heroines of the golden year
Shall strip a hundred hollows bare of Spring,
To rain an April of ovation round
Their statues, borne aloft, the three: but come,
We will be liberal, since our rights are won.
Let them not lie in the tents with coarse mankind,
Ill nurses; but descend, and proffer these
The brethren of our blood and cause, that there
Lie bruised and maimed, the tender ministries
Of female hands and hospitality.'
She spoke, and with the babe yet in her arms,
Descending, burst the great bronze valves, and led
A hundred maids in train across the Park.
Some cowled, and some bare-headed, on they came,
Their feet in flowers, her loveliest: by them went
The enamoured air sighing, and on their curls
From the high tree the blossom wavering fell,
And over them the tremulous isles of light
Slided, they moving under shade: but Blanche
At distance followed: so they came: anon
Through open field into the lists they wound
Timorously; and as the leader of the herd
That holds a stately fretwork to the Sun,
And followed up by a hundred airy does,
Steps with a tender foot, light as on air,
779
The lovely, lordly creature floated on
To where her wounded brethren lay; there stayed;
Knelt on one knee,--the child on one,--and prest
Their hands, and called them dear deliverers,
And happy warriors, and immortal names,
And said 'You shall not lie in the tents but here,
And nursed by those for whom you fought, and served
With female hands and hospitality.'
Then, whether moved by this, or was it chance,
She past my way. Up started from my side
The old lion, glaring with his whelpless eye,
Silent; but when she saw me lying stark,
Dishelmed and mute, and motionlessly pale,
Cold even to her, she sighed; and when she saw
The haggard father's face and reverend beard
Of grisly twine, all dabbled with the blood
Of his own son, shuddered, a twitch of pain
Tortured her mouth, and o'er her forehead past
A shadow, and her hue changed, and she said:
'He saved my life: my brother slew him for it.'
No more: at which the king in bitter scorn
Drew from my neck the painting and the tress,
And held them up: she saw them, and a day
Rose from the distance on her memory,
When the good Queen, her mother, shore the tress
With kisses, ere the days of Lady Blanche:
And then once more she looked at my pale face:
Till understanding all the foolish work
Of Fancy, and the bitter close of all,
Her iron will was broken in her mind;
Her noble heart was molten in her breast;
She bowed, she set the child on the earth; she laid
A feeling finger on my brows, and presently
'O Sire,' she said, 'he lives: he is not dead:
O let me have him with my brethren here
In our own palace: we will tend on him
Like one of these; if so, by any means,
To lighten this great clog of thanks, that make
Our progress falter to the woman's goal.'
She said: but at the happy word 'he lives'
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My father stooped, re-fathered o'er my wounds.
So those two foes above my fallen life,
With brow to brow like night and evening mixt
Their dark and gray, while Psyche ever stole
A little nearer, till the babe that by us,
Half-lapt in glowing gauze and golden brede,
Lay like a new-fallen meteor on the grass,
Uncared for, spied its mother and began
A blind and babbling laughter, and to dance
Its body, and reach its fatling innocent arms
And lazy lingering fingers. She the appeal
Brooked not, but clamouring out 'Mine--mine--not yours,
It is not yours, but mine: give me the child'
Ceased all on tremble: piteous was the cry:
So stood the unhappy mother open-mouthed,
And turned each face her way: wan was her cheek
With hollow watch, her blooming mantle torn,
Red grief and mother's hunger in her eye,
And down dead-heavy sank her curls, and half
The sacred mother's bosom, panting, burst
The laces toward her babe; but she nor cared
Nor knew it, clamouring on, till Ida heard,
Looked up, and rising slowly from me, stood
Erect and silent, striking with her glance
The mother, me, the child; but he that lay
Beside us, Cyril, battered as he was,
Trailed himself up on one knee: then he drew
Her robe to meet his lips, and down she looked
At the armed man sideways, pitying as it seemed,
Or self-involved; but when she learnt his face,
Remembering his ill-omened song, arose
Once more through all her height, and o'er him grew
Tall as a figure lengthened on the sand
When the tide ebbs in sunshine, and he said:
'O fair and strong and terrible! Lioness
That with your long locks play the Lion's mane!
But Love and Nature, these are two more terrible
And stronger. See, your foot is on our necks,
We vanquished, you the Victor of your will.
What would you more? Give her the child! remain
Orbed in your isolation: he is dead,
781
Or all as dead: henceforth we let you be:
Win you the hearts of women; and beware
Lest, where you seek the common love of these,
The common hate with the revolving wheel
Should drag you down, and some great Nemesis
Break from a darkened future, crowned with fire,
And tread you out for ever: but howso'er
Fixed in yourself, never in your own arms
To hold your own, deny not hers to her,
Give her the child! O if, I say, you keep
One pulse that beats true woman, if you loved
The breast that fed or arm that dandled you,
Or own one port of sense not flint to prayer,
Give her the child! or if you scorn to lay it,
Yourself, in hands so lately claspt with yours,
Or speak to her, your dearest, her one fault,
The tenderness, not yours, that could not kill,
Give ~me~ it: ~I~ will give it her.
He said:
At first her eye with slow dilation rolled
Dry flame, she listening; after sank and sank
And, into mournful twilight mellowing, dwelt
Full on the child; she took it: 'Pretty bud!
Lily of the vale! half opened bell of the woods!
Sole comfort of my dark hour, when a world
Of traitorous friend and broken system made
No purple in the distance, mystery,
Pledge of a love not to be mine, farewell;
These men are hard upon us as of old,
We two must part: and yet how fain was I
To dream thy cause embraced in mine, to think
I might be something to thee, when I felt
Thy helpless warmth about my barren breast
In the dead prime: but may thy mother prove
As true to thee as false, false, false to me!
And, if thou needs must needs bear the yoke, I wish it
Gentle as freedom'--here she kissed it: then-'All good go with thee! take it Sir,' and so
Laid the soft babe in his hard-mailèd hands,
Who turned half-round to Psyche as she sprang
To meet it, with an eye that swum in thanks;
Then felt it sound and whole from head to foot,
782
And hugged and never hugged it close enough,
And in her hunger mouthed and mumbled it,
And hid her bosom with it; after that
Put on more calm and added suppliantly:
'We two were friends: I go to mine own land
For ever: find some other: as for me
I scarce am fit for your great plans: yet speak to me,
Say one soft word and let me part forgiven.'
But Ida spoke not, rapt upon the child.
Then Arac. 'Ida--'sdeath! you blame the man;
You wrong yourselves--the woman is so hard
Upon the woman. Come, a grace to me!
I am your warrior: I and mine have fought
Your battle: kiss her; take her hand, she weeps:
'Sdeath! I would sooner fight thrice o'er than see it.'
But Ida spoke not, gazing on the ground,
And reddening in the furrows of his chin,
And moved beyond his custom, Gama said:
'I've heard that there is iron in the blood,
And I believe it. Not one word? not one?
Whence drew you this steel temper? not from me,
Not from your mother, now a saint with saints.
She said you had a heart--I heard her say it-"Our Ida has a heart"--just ere she died-"But see that some on with authority
Be near her still" and I--I sought for one-All people said she had authority-The Lady Blanche: much profit! Not one word;
No! though your father sues: see how you stand
Stiff as Lot's wife, and all the good knights maimed,
I trust that there is no one hurt to death,
For our wild whim: and was it then for this,
Was it for this we gave our palace up,
Where we withdrew from summer heats and state,
And had our wine and chess beneath the planes,
And many a pleasant hour with her that's gone,
Ere you were born to vex us? Is it kind?
Speak to her I say: is this not she of whom,
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When first she came, all flushed you said to me
Now had you got a friend of your own age,
Now could you share your thought; now should men see
Two women faster welded in one love
Than pairs of wedlock; she you walked with, she
You talked with, whole nights long, up in the tower,
Of sine and arc, spheroïd and azimuth,
And right ascension, Heaven knows what; and now
A word, but one, one little kindly word,
Not one to spare her: out upon you, flint!
You love nor her, nor me, nor any; nay,
You shame your mother's judgment too. Not one?
You will not? well--no heart have you, or such
As fancies like the vermin in a nut
Have fretted all to dust and bitterness.'
So said the small king moved beyond his wont.
But Ida stood nor spoke, drained of her force
By many a varying influence and so long.
Down through her limbs a drooping languor wept:
Her head a little bent; and on her mouth
A doubtful smile dwelt like a clouded moon
In a still water: then brake out my sire,
Lifted his grim head from my wounds. 'O you,
Woman, whom we thought woman even now,
And were half fooled to let you tend our son,
Because he might have wished it--but we see,
The accomplice of your madness unforgiven,
And think that you might mix his draught with death,
When your skies change again: the rougher hand
Is safer: on to the tents: take up the Prince.'
He rose, and while each ear was pricked to attend
A tempest, through the cloud that dimmed her broke
A genial warmth and light once more, and shone
Through glittering drops on her sad friend.
'Come hither.
O Psyche,' she cried out, 'embrace me, come,
Quick while I melt; make reconcilement sure
With one that cannot keep her mind an hour:
Come to the hollow hear they slander so!
Kiss and be friends, like children being chid!
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~I~ seem no more: ~I~ want forgiveness too:
I should have had to do with none but maids,
That have no links with men. Ah false but dear,
Dear traitor, too much loved, why?--why?--Yet see,
Before these kings we embrace you yet once more
With all forgiveness, all oblivion,
And trust, not love, you less.
And now, O sire,
Grant me your son, to nurse, to wait upon him,
Like mine own brother. For my debt to him,
This nightmare weight of gratitude, I know it;
Taunt me no more: yourself and yours shall have
Free adit; we will scatter all our maids
Till happier times each to her proper hearth:
What use to keep them here--now? grant my prayer.
Help, father, brother, help; speak to the king:
Thaw this male nature to some touch of that
Which kills me with myself, and drags me down
From my fixt height to mob me up with all
The soft and milky rabble of womankind,
Poor weakling even as they are.'
Passionate tears
Followed: the king replied not: Cyril said:
'Your brother, Lady,--Florian,--ask for him
Of your great head--for he is wounded too-That you may tend upon him with the prince.'
'Ay so,' said Ida with a bitter smile,
'Our laws are broken: let him enter too.'
Then Violet, she that sang the mournful song,
And had a cousin tumbled on the plain,
Petitioned too for him. 'Ay so,' she said,
'I stagger in the stream: I cannot keep
My heart an eddy from the brawling hour:
We break our laws with ease, but let it be.'
'Ay so?' said Blanche: 'Amazed am I to her
Your Highness: but your Highness breaks with ease
The law your Highness did not make: 'twas I.
I had been wedded wife, I knew mankind,
And blocked them out; but these men came to woo
Your Highness--verily I think to win.'
So she, and turned askance a wintry eye:
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But Ida with a voice, that like a bell
Tolled by an earthquake in a trembling tower,
Rang ruin, answered full of grief and scorn.
'Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all,
Not only he, but by my mother's soul,
Whatever man lies wounded, friend or foe,
Shall enter, if he will. Let our girls flit,
Till the storm die! but had you stood by us,
The roar that breaks the Pharos from his base
Had left us rock. She fain would sting us too,
But shall not. Pass, and mingle with your likes.
We brook no further insult but are gone.'
She turned; the very nape of her white neck
Was rosed with indignation: but the Prince
Her brother came; the king her father charmed
Her wounded soul with words: nor did mine own
Refuse her proffer, lastly gave his hand.
Then us they lifted up, dead weights, and bare
Straight to the doors: to them the doors gave way
Groaning, and in the Vestal entry shrieked
The virgin marble under iron heels:
And on they moved and gained the hall, and there
Rested: but great the crush was, and each base,
To left and right, of those tall columns drowned
In silken fluctuation and the swarm
Of female whisperers: at the further end
Was Ida by the throne, the two great cats
Close by her, like supporters on a shield,
Bow-backed with fear: but in the centre stood
The common men with rolling eyes; amazed
They glared upon the women, and aghast
The women stared at these, all silent, save
When armour clashed or jingled, while the day,
Descending, struck athwart the hall, and shot
A flying splendour out of brass and steel,
That o'er the statues leapt from head to head,
Now fired an angry Pallas on the helm,
Now set a wrathful Dian's moon on flame,
And now and then an echo started up,
And shuddering fled from room to room, and died
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Of fright in far apartments.
Then the voice
Of Ida sounded, issuing ordinance:
And me they bore up the broad stairs, and through
The long-laid galleries past a hundred doors
To one deep chamber shut from sound, and due
To languid limbs and sickness; left me in it;
And others otherwhere they laid; and all
That afternoon a sound arose of hoof
And chariot, many a maiden passing home
Till happier times; but some were left of those
Held sagest, and the great lords out and in,
From those two hosts that lay beside the walls,
Walked at their will, and everything was changed.
Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;
The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
But O too fond, when have I answered thee?
Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: what answer should I give?
I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:
Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;
Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are sealed:
I strove against the stream and all in vain:
Let the great river take me to the main:
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;
Ask me no more.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
712:Goblin Market
MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherriesMelons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries-All ripe together
In summer weather-Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."
Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
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With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
"Come buy," call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
"O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men."
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
"Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds' weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes."
"No," said Lizzie, "no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us."
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.
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Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
Backwards up the mossy glen
Turned and trooped the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
"Come buy, come buy."
When they reached where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the moss,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
One set his basket down,
One reared his plate;
One began to weave a crown
Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown
(Men sell not such in any town);
One heaved the golden weight
Of dish and fruit to offer her:
"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry.
Laura stared but did not stir,
Longed but had no money:
The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste
In tones as smooth as honey,
The cat-faced purr'd,
The rat-paced spoke a word
Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard;
One parrot-voiced and jolly
Cried "Pretty Goblin" still for "Pretty Polly";
One whistled like a bird.
But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:
"Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
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And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather."
"You have much gold upon your head,"
They answered altogether:
"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away,
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
"Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the moonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
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That never blow.
You should not loiter so."
"Nay hush," said Laura.
"Nay hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more," and kissed her.
"Have done with sorrow;
I'll bring you plums to-morrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons, icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink,
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap."
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings,
They lay down, in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars beamed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.
Early in the morning
When the first cock crowed his warning,
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Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,
Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should
Lizzie with an open heart,
Laura in an absent dream,
One content, one sick in part;
One warbling for the mere bright day's delight,
One longing for the night.
At length slow evening came-They went with pitchers to the reedy brook;
Lizzie most placid in her look,
Laura most like a leaping flame.
They drew the gurgling water from its deep
Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags,
Then turning homeward said: "The sunset flushes
Those furthest loftiest crags;
Come, Laura, not another maiden lags,
No wilful squirrel wags,
The beasts and birds are fast asleep."
But Laura loitered still among the rushes
And said the bank was steep.
And said the hour was early still,
The dew not fallen, the wind not chill:
Listening ever, but not catching
The customary cry,
"Come buy, come buy,"
With its iterated jingle
Of sugar-baited words:
Not for all her watching
Once discerning even one goblin
Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling;
Let alone the herds
That used to tramp along the glen,
In groups or single,
173
Of brisk fruit-merchant men.
Till Lizzie urged, "O Laura, come,
I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look:
You should not loiter longer at this brook:
Come with me home.
The stars rise, the moon bends her arc,
Each glow-worm winks her spark,
Let us get home before the night grows dark;
For clouds may gather even
Though this is summer weather,
Put out the lights and drench us through;
Then if we lost our way what should we do?"
Laura turned cold as stone
To find her sister heard that cry alone,
That goblin cry,
"Come buy our fruits, come buy."
Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit?
Must she no more such succous pasture find,
Gone deaf and blind?
Her tree of life drooped from the root:
She said not one word in her heart's sore ache;
But peering thro' the dimness, naught discerning,
Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way;
So crept to bed, and lay
Silent 'til Lizzie slept;
Then sat up in a passionate yearning,
And gnashed her teeth for balked desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.
Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain,
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
"Come buy, come buy,"
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay, and burn
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Her fire away.
One day remembering her kernel-stone
She set it by a wall that faced the south;
Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root,
Watched for a waxing shoot,
But there came none;
It never saw the sun,
It never felt the trickling moisture run:
While with sunk eyes and faded mouth
She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees
False waves in desert drouth
With shade of leaf-crowned trees,
And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.
She no more swept the house,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney-nook
And would not eat.
Tender Lizzie could not bear
To watch her sister's cankerous care,
Yet not to share.
She night and morning
Caught the goblins' cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy."
Beside the brook, along the glen
She heard the tramp of goblin men,
The voice and stir
Poor Laura could not hear;
Longed to buy fruit to comfort her,
But feared to pay too dear.
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest winter-time,
175
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.
Till Laura, dwindling,
Seemed knocking at Death's door:
Then Lizzie weighed no more
Better and worse,
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook,
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.
Laughed every goblin
When they spied her peeping:
Came towards her hobbling,
Flying, running, leaping,
Puffing and blowing,
Chuckling, clapping, crowing,
Clucking and gobbling,
Mopping and mowing,
Full of airs and graces,
Pulling wry faces,
Demure grimaces,
Cat-like and rat-like,
Ratel and wombat-like,
Snail-paced in a hurry,
Parrot-voiced and whistler,
Helter-skelter, hurry-skurry,
Chattering like magpies,
Fluttering like pigeons,
Gliding like fishes, -Hugged her and kissed her;
Squeezed and caressed her;
Stretched up their dishes,
Panniers and plates:
"Look at our apples
Russet and dun,
Bob at our cherries
Bite at our peaches,
Citrons and dates,
Grapes for the asking,
176
Pears red with basking
Out in the sun,
Plums on their twigs;
Pluck them and suck them,
Pomegranates, figs."
"Good folk," said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie,
"Give me much and many"; -Held out her apron,
Tossed them her penny.
"Nay, take a seat with us,
Honor and eat with us,"
They answered grinning;
"Our feast is but beginning.
Night yet is early,
Warm and dew-pearly,
Wakeful and starry:
Such fruits as these
No man can carry;
Half their bloom would fly,
Half their dew would dry,
Half their flavor would pass by.
Sit down and feast with us,
Be welcome guest with us,
Cheer you and rest with us."
"Thank you," said Lizzie; "but one waits
At home alone for me:
So, without further parleying,
If you will not sell me any
Of your fruits though much and many,
Give me back my silver penny
I tossed you for a fee."
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One called her proud,
Cross-grained, uncivil;
Their tones waxed loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
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They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously, -Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire, -Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee, -Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguered by a fleet
Mad to tear her standard down.
One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
At last the evil people,
Worn out by her resistance,
178
Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit
Along whichever road they took,
Not leaving root or stone or shoot.
Some writhed into the ground,
Some dived into the brook
With ring and ripple.
Some scudded on the gale without a sound,
Some vanished in the distance.
In a smart, ache, tingle,
Lizzie went her way;
Knew not was it night or day;
Sprang up the bank, tore through the furze,
Threaded copse and dingle,
And heard her penny jingle
Bouncing in her purse, -Its bounce was music to her ear.
She ran and ran
As if she feared some goblin man
Dogged her with gibe or curse
Or something worse:
But not one goblin skurried after,
Nor was she pricked by fear;
The kind heart made her windy-paced
That urged her home quite out of breath with haste
And inward laughter.
She cried "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me ?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men."
Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
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"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruined in my ruin;
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
Her lips began to scorch,
That juice was wormwood to her tongue,
She loathed the feast:
Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast.
Her locks streamed like the torch
Borne by a racer at full speed,
Or like the mane of horses in their flight,
Or like an eagle when she stems the light
Straight toward the sun,
Or like a caged thing freed,
Or like a flying flag when armies run.
Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart,
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame,
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
180
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped water-spout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life ?
Life out of death.
That night long Lizzie watched by her,
Counted her pulse's flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cooled her face
With tears and fanning leaves:
But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,
And early reapers plodded to the place
Of golden sheaves,
And dew-wet grass
Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,
And new buds with new day
Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream,
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way,
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of gray,
Her breath was sweet as May,
And light danced in her eyes.
Days, weeks, months,years
Afterwards, when both were wives
With children of their own;
Their mother-hearts beset with fears,
Their lives bound up in tender lives;
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat,
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town;)
Would tell them how her sister stood
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In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
"For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands."
~ Christina Georgina Rossetti,#NFDB
713:Les Heures Claires
O la splendeur de notre joie,
Tissée en or dans l'air de soie!
Voici la maison douce et son pignon léger,
Et le jardin et le verger.
Voici le banc, sous les pommiers
D'où s'effeuille le printemps blanc,
A pétales frôlants et lents.
Voici des vols de lumineux ramiers
Plânant, ainsi que des présages,
Dans le ciel clair du paysage.
Voici--pareils à des baisers tombés sur terre
De la bouche du frêle azur-Deux bleus étangs simples et purs,
Bordés naïvement de fleurs involontaires.
O la splendeur de notre joie et de nous-mêmes,
En ce jardin où nous vivons de nos emblèmes!
Là-bas, de lentes formes passent,
Sont-ce nos deux âmes qui se délassent,
Au long des bois et des terrasses?
Sont-ce tes seins, sont-ce tes yeux
Ces deux fleurs d'or harmonieux?
Et ces herbes--on dirait des plumages
Mouillés dans la source qu'ils plissent-Sont-ce tes cheveux frais et lisses?
Certes, aucun abri ne vaut le clair verger,
Ni la maison au toit léger,
Ni ce jardin, où le ciel trame
Ce climat cher à nos deux âmes.
Quoique nous le voyions fleurir devant nos yeux,
Ce jardin clair où nous passons silencieux,
C'est plus encore en nous que se féconde
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Le plus joyeux et le plus doux jardin du monde.
Car nous vivons toutes les fleurs,
Toutes les herbes, toutes les palmes
En nos rires et en nos pleurs
De bonheur pur et calme.
Car nous vivons toutes les transparences
De l'étang bleu qui reflète l'exubérance
Des roses d'or et des grands lys vermeils:
Bouches et lèvres de soleil.
Car nous vivons toute la joie
Dardée en cris de fête et de printemps,
En nos aveux, où se côtoient
Les mots fervents et exaltants.
Oh! dis, c'est bien en nous que se féconde
Le plus joyeux et clair jardin du monde.
Ce chapiteau barbare, où des monstres se tordent,
Soudés entre eux, à coups de griffes et de dents,
En un tumulte fou de sang, de cris ardents,
De blessures et de gueules qui s'entre-mordent,
C'était moi-même, avant que tu fusses la mienne,
O toi la neuve, ô toi l'ancienne!
Qui vins à moi des loins d'éternité,
Avec, entre tes mains, l'ardeur et la bonté.
Je sens en toi les mêmes choses très profondes
Qu'en moi-même dormir
Et notre soif de souvenir
Boire l'écho, où nos passés se correspondent.
Nos yeux ont dû pleurer aux mêmes heures,
Sans le savoir, pendant l'enfance:
Avoir mêmes effrois, mêmes bonheurs,
Mêmes éclairs de confiance:
Car je te suis lié par l'inconnu
Qui me fixait, jadis au fond des avenues
Par où passait ma vie aventurière,
Et, certes, si j'avais regardé mieux,
187
J'aurais pu voir s'ouvrir tes yeux
Depuis longtemps en ses paupières.
Le ciel en nuit s'est déplié
Et la lune semble veiller
Sur le silence endormi.
Tout est si pur et clair,
Tout est si pur et si pâle dans l'air
Et sur les lacs du paysage ami,
Qu'elle angoisse, la goutte d'eau
Qui tombe d'un roseau
Et tinte et puis se tait dans l'eau.
Mais j'ai tes mains entre les miennes
Et tes yeux sûrs, qui me retiennent,
De leurs ferveurs, si doucement;
Et je te sens si bien en paix de toute chose,
Que rien, pas même un fugitif soupçon de crainte,
Ne troublera, fût-ce un moment,
La confiance sainte
Qui dort en nous comme un enfant repose.
Chaque heure, où je pense à ta bonté
Si simplement profonde,
Je me confonds en prières vers toi.
Je suis venu si tard
Vers la douceur de ton regard
Et de si loin, vers tes deux mains tendues,
Tranquillement, par à travers les étendues!
J'avais en moi tant de rouille tenace
Qui me rongeait, à dents rapaces,
La confiance;
J'étais si lourd, j'étais si las,
J'étais si vieux de méfiance,
J'étais si lourd, j'étais si las
Du vain chemin de tous mes pas.
Je méritais si peu la merveilleuse joie
188
De voir tes pieds illuminer ma voie,
Que j'en reste tremblant encore et presqu'en pleurs,
Et humble, à tout jamais, en face du bonheur.
Tu arbores parfois cette grâce bénigne
Du matinal jardin tranquille et sinueux
Qui déroule, là-bas, parmi les lointains bleus,
Ses doux chemins courbés en cols de cygne.
Et, d'autres fois, tu m'es le frisson clair
Du vent rapide et miroitant
Qui passe, avec ses doigts d'éclair,
Dans les crins d'eau de l'étang blanc.
Au bon toucher de tes deux mains,
Je sens comme des feuilles
Me doucement frôler;
Que midi brûle le jardin.
Les ombres, aussitôt recueillent
Les paroles chères dont ton être a tremblé.
Chaque moment me semble, grâce à toi,
Passer ainsi divinement en moi.
Aussi, quand l'heure vient de la nuit blême,
Où tu te cèles en toi-même,
En refermant les yeux,
Sens-tu mon doux regard dévotieux,
Plus humble et long qu'une prière,
Remercier le tien sous tes closes paupières?
Oh! laisse frapper à la porte
La main qui passe avec ses doigts futiles;
Notre heure est si unique, et le reste qu'importe,
Le reste, avec ses doigts futiles.
Laisse passer, par le chemin,
La triste et fatigante joie,
Avec ses crécelles en mains.
Laisse monter, laisse bruire
Et s'en aller le rire;
Laisse passer la foule et ses milliers de voix.
189
L'instant est si beau de lumière,
Dans le jardin, autour de nous,
L'instant est si rare de lumière trémière,
Dans notre coeur, au fond de nous.
Tout nous prêche de n'attendre plus rien
De ce qui vient ou passe,
Avec des chansons lasses
Et des bras las par les chemins.
Et de rester les doux qui bénissons le jour.
Même devant la nuit d'ombre barricadée,
Aimant en nous, par dessus tout, l'idée
Que bellement nous nous faisons de notre amour.
Comme aux âges naïfs, je t'ai donné mon coeur,
Ainsi qu'une ample fleur
Qui s'ouvre, au clair de la rosée;
Entre ses plis frêles, ma bouche s'est posée.
La fleur, je la cueillis au pré des fleurs en flamme;
Ne lui dis rien: car la parole entre nous deux
Serait banale, et tous les mots sont hasardeux.
C'est à travers les yeux que l'âme écoute une âme.
La fleur qui est mon coeur et mon aveu,
Tout simplement, à tes lèvres confie
Qu'elle est loyale et claire et bonne, et qu'on se fie
Au vierge amour, comme un enfant se fie à Dieu.
Laissons l'esprit fleurir sur les collines,
En de capricieux chemins de vanité;
Et faisons simple accueil à la sincérité
Qui tient nos deux coeurs clairs, en ses mains cristallines;
Et rien n'est beau comme une confession d'âmes,
L'une à l'autre, le soir, lorsque la flamme
Des incomptables diamants
Brûle, comme autant d'yeux
Silencieux,
Le silence des firmaments.
190
Le printemps jeune et bénévole
Qui vêt le jardin de beauté
Elucide nos voix et nos paroles
Et les trempe dans sa limpidité.
La brise et les lèvres des feuilles
Babillent--et effeuillent
En nous les syllabes de leur clarté.
Mais le meilleur de nous se gare
Et fuit les mots matériels;
Un simple et doux élan muet
Mieux que tout verbe amarre
Notre bonheur à son vrai ciel:
Celui de ton âme, à deux genoux,
Tout simplement, devant la mienne,
Et de mon âme, à deux genoux,
Très doucement, devant la tienne.
Viens lentement t'asseoir
Près du parterre, dont le soir
Ferme les fleurs de tranquille lumière,
Laisse filtrer la grande nuit en toi:
Nous sommes trop heureux pour que sa mer d'effroi
Trouble notre prière.
Là-haut, le pur cristal des étoiles s'éclaire.
Voici le firmament plus net et translucide
Qu'un étang bleu ou qu'un vitrail d'abside;
Et puis voici le ciel qui regarde à travers.
Les mille voix de l'énorme mystère
Parlent autour de toi.
Les mille lois de la nature entière
Bougent autour de toi,
Les arcs d'argent de l'invisible
Prennent ton âme et son élan pour cible,
Mais tu n'as peur, oh! simple coeur,
Mais tu n'as peur, puisque ta foi
Est que toute la terre collabore
A cet amour que fit éclore
La vie et son mystère en toi.
191
Joins donc les mains tranquillement
Et doucement adore;
Un grand conseil de pureté
Et de divine intimité
Flotte, comme une étrange aurore,
Sous les minuits du firmament.
Combien elle est facilement ravie,
Avec ses yeux d'extase ignée,
Elle, la douce et résignée
Si simplement devant la vie.
Ce soir, comme un regard la surprenait fervente,
Et comme un mot la transportait
Au pur jardin de joie, où elle était
Tout à la fois reine et servante.
Humble d'elle, mais ardente de nous,
C'était à qui ploierait les deux genoux,
Pour recueillir le merveilleux bonheur
Qui, mutuel, nous débordait du coeur.
Nous écoutions se taire, en nous, la violence
De l'exaltant amour qu'emprisonnaient nos bras
Et le vivant silence
Dire des mots que nous ne savions pas.
Au temps où longuement j'avais souffert
Où les heures m'étaient des pièges,
Tu m'apparus l'accueillante lumière
Qui luit, aux fenêtres, l'hiver,
Au fonds des soirs, sur de la neige.
Ta clarté d'âme hospitalière
Frôla, sans le blesser, mon coeur,
Comme une main de tranquille chaleur;
Un espoir tiède, un mot clément,
Pénétrèrent en moi très lentement;
Puis vint la bonne confiance
Et la franchise et la tendresse et l'alliance,
192
Enfin, de nos deux mains amies,
Un soir de claire entente et de douce accalmie.
Depuis, bien que l'été ait succédé au gel,
En nous-mêmes et sous le ciel,
Dont les flammes éternisées
Pavoisent d'or tous les chemins de nos pensées,
Et que l'amour soit devenu la fleur immense,
Naissant du fier désir,
Qui, sans cesse, pour mieux encor grandir,
En notre coeur, se recommence,
Je regarde toujours la petite lumière
Qui me fut douce, la première.
Je ne détaille pas, ni quels nous sommes
L'un pour l'autre, ni les pourquois, ni les raisons:
Tout doute est mort, en ce jardin de floraisons
Qui s'ouvre en nous et hors de nous, si loin des hommes.
Je
Et
Et
Et
ne raisonne pas, et ne veux pas savoir,
rien ne troublera ce qui n'est que mystère
qu'élans doux et que ferveur involontaire
que tranquille essor vers nos parvis d'espoir.
Je te sens claire avant de te comprendre telle;
Et c'est ma joie, infiniment,
De m'éprouver si doucement aimant,
Sans demander pourquoi ta voix m'appelle.
Soyons simples et bons--et que le jour
Nous soit tendresse et lumière servies,
Et laissons dire que la vie
N'est point faite pour un pareil amour.
A ces reines qui lentement descendent
Les escaliers en ors et fleurs de la légende,
Dans mon rêve, parfois, je t'apparie;
Je te donne des noms qui se marient
A la clarté, à la splendeur et à la joie,
Et bruissent en syllabes de soie,
Au long des vers bâtis comme une estrade
Pour la danse des mots et leurs belles parades.
193
Mais combien vite on se lasse du jeu,
A te voir douce et profonde et si peu
Celle dont on enjolive les attitudes;
Ton front si clair et pur et blanc de certitude,
Tes douces mains d'enfant en paix sur tes genoux,
Tes seins se soulevant au rythme de ton pouls
Qui bat comme ton coeur immense et ingénu,
Oh! comme tout, hormis cela et ta prière,
Oh! comme tout est pauvre et vain, hors la lumière
Qui me regarde et qui m'accueille en tes yeux nus.
Je dédie à tes pleurs, à ton sourire,
Mes plus douces pensées,
Celles que je te dis, celles aussi
Qui demeurent imprécisées
Et trop profondes pour les dire.
Je dédie à tes pleurs, à ton sourire
A toute ton âme, mon âme,
Avec ses pleurs et ses sourires
Et son baiser.
Vois-tu, l'aurore naît sur la terre effacée,
Des liens d'ombre semblent glisser
Et s'en aller, avec mélancolie;
L'eau des étangs s'écoule et tamise son bruit,
L'herbe s'éclaire et les corolles se déplient,
Et les bois d'or se désenlacent de la nuit.
Oh! dis, pouvoir un jour,
Entrer ainsi dans la pleine lumière;
Oh! dis, pouvoir un jour
Avec toutes les fleurs de nos âmes trémières,
Sans plus aucun voile sur nous,
Sans plus aucun mystère en nous,
Oh dis, pouvoir, un jour,
Entrer à deux dans le lucide amour!
Je noie en tes deux yeux mon âme toute entière
Et l'élan fou de cette âme éperdue,
Pour que, plongée en leur douceur et leur prière,
194
Plus claire et mieux trempée, elle me soit rendue.
S'unir pour épurer son être,
Comme deux vitraux d'or en une même abside
Croisent leurs feux différemment lucides
Et se pénètrent!
Je suis parfois si lourd, si las,
D'être celui qui ne sait pas
Etre parfait, comme il se veut!
Mon coeur se bat contre ses voeux,
Mon coeur dont les plantes mauvaises,
Entre des rocs d'entêtement,
Dressent, sournoisement,
Leurs fleurs d'encre ou de braise;
Mon coeur si faux, si vrai, selon les jours,
Mon coeur contradictoire,
Mon coeur exagéré toujours
De joie immense ou de crainte attentatoire.
Pour nous aimer des yeux,
Lavons nos deux regards, de ceux
Que nous avons croisés, par milliers, dans la vie
Mauvaise et asservie.
L'aube est en fleur et en rosée
Et en lumière tamisée
Très douce:
On croirait voir de molles plumes
D'argent et de soleil, à travers brumes,
Frôler et caresser, dans le jardin, les mousses.
Nos bleus et merveilleux étangs
Tremblent et s'animent d'or miroitant,
Des vols émeraudés, sous les arbres, circulent;
Et la clarté, hors des chemins, des clos, des haies,
Balaie
La cendre humide, où traîne encor le crépuscule.
Au clos de notre amour, l'été se continue:
Un paon d'or, là-bas traverse une avenue;
Des pétales pavoisent,
195
--Perles, émeraudes, turquoises-L'uniforme sommeil des gazons verts;
Nos étangs bleus luisent, couverts
Du baiser blanc des nénuphars de neige;
Aux quinconces, nos groseillers font des cortèges;
Un insecte de prisme irrite un coeur de fleur;
De merveilleux sous-bois se jaspent de lueurs;
Et, comme des bulles légères, mille abeilles
Sur des grappes d'argent, vibrent, au long des treilles.
L'air est si beau qu'il paraît chatoyant;
Sous les midis profonds et radiants,
On dirait qu'il remue en roses de lumière;
Tandis qu'au loin, les routes coutumières,
Telles de lents gestes qui s'allongent vermeils,
A l'horizon nacré, montent vers le soleil.
Certes, la robe en diamants du bel été
Ne vêt aucun jardin d'aussi pure clarté;
Et c'est la joie unique éclose en nos deux âmes
Qui reconnait sa vie en ces bouquets de flammes.
Que tes yeux clairs, tes yeux d'été,
Me soient, sur terre,
Les images de la bonté.
Laissons nos âmes embrasées
Exalter d'or chaque flamme de nos pensées.
Que mes deux mains contre ton coeur
Te soient, sur terre,
Les emblèmes de la douceur.
Vivons pareils à deux prières éperdues
L'une vers l'autre, à toute heure, tendues.
Que nos baisers sur nos bouches ravies
Nous soient sur terre,
Les symboles de notre vie.
Dis-moi, ma simple et ma tranquille amie,
196
Dis, combien l'absence, même d'un jour,
Attriste et attise l'amour
Et le réveille, en ses brûlures endormies.
Je m'en vais au devant de ceux
Qui reviennent des lointains merveilleux,
Où, dès l'aube, tu es allée;
Je m'assieds sous un arbre, au détour de l'allée,
Et, sur la route, épiant leur venue,
Je regarde et regarde, avec ferveur, leurs yeux
Encore clairs de t'avoir vue.
Et je voudrais baiser leurs doigts qui t'ont touchée,
Et leur crier des mots qu'ils ne comprendraient pas,
Et j'écoute longtemps se cadencer leurs pas
Vers l'ombre, où les vieux soirs tiennent la nuit penchée.
En ces heures où nous sommes perdus
Si loin de tout ce qui n'est pas nous-mêmes.
Quel sang lustral ou quel baptême
Baigne nos coeurs vers tout l'amour tendus?
Joignant les mains, sans que l'on prie,
Tendant les bras, sans que l'on crie,
Mais adorant on ne sait quoi
De plus lointain et de plus pur que soi,
L'esprit fervent et ingénu,
Dites, comme on se fond, comme on se vit dans l'inconnu.
Comme on s'abîme en la présence
De ces heures de suprême existence,
Comme l'âme voudrait des cieux
Pour y chercher de nouveaux dieux,
Oh! l'angoissante et merveilleuse joie
Et l'espérance audacieuse
D'être, un jour, à travers la mort même, la proie
De ces affres silencieuses.
Oh! ce bonheur
Si rare et si frêle parfois
Qu'il nous fait peur!
197
Nous avons beau taire nos voix,
Et nous faire comme une tente,
Avec toute ta chevelure,
Pour nous créer un abri sûr,
Souvent l'angoisse en nos âmes fermente.
Mais notre amour étant comme un ange à genoux,
Prie et supplie,
Que l'avenir donne à d'autres que nous
Même tendresse et même vie,
Pour que leur sort de notre sort ne soit jaloux.
Et puis, aux jours mauvais, quand les grands soirs
Illimitent, jusques au ciel, le désespoir,
Nous demandons pardon à la nuit qui s'enflamme
De la douceur de notre âme.
Vivons, dans notre amour et notre ardeur,
Vivons si hardiment nos plus belles pensées
Qu'elles s'entrelacent, harmonisées
A l'extase suprême et l'entière ferveur.
Parce qu'en nos âmes pareilles,
Quelque chose de plus sacré que nous
Et de plus pur et de plus grand s'éveille,
Joignons les mains pour l'adorer à travers nous.
Il n'importe que nous n'ayons que cris ou larmes
Pour humblement le définir,
Et que si rare et si puissant en soit le charme,
Qu'à le goûter, nos coeurs soient prêts à défaillir.
Restons quand même et pour toujours, les fous
De cet amour presqu'implacable,
Et les fervents, à deux genoux,
Du Dieu soudain qui règne en nous,
Si violent et si ardemment doux
Qu'il nous fait mal et nous accable.
Sitôt que nos bouches se touchent,
Nous nous sentons tant plus clairs de nous-mêmes
198
Que l'on dirait des Dieux qui s'aiment
Et qui s'unissent en nous-mêmes;
Nous nous sentons le coeur si divinement frais
Et si renouvelé par leur lumière
Première
Que l'univers, sous leur clarté, nous apparaît.
La joie est à nos yeux l'unique fleur du monde
Qui se prodigue et se féconde,
Innombrable, sur nos routes d'en bas;
Comme là haut, par tas,
En des pays de soie où voyagent des voiles
Brille la fleur myriadaire des étoiles.
L'ordre nous éblouit, comme les feux, la cendre,
Tout nous éclaire et nous paraît: flambeau;
Nos plus simples mots ont un sens si beau
Que nous les répétons pour les sans cesse entendre.
Nous sommes les victorieux sublimes
Qui conquérons l'éternité,
Sans nul orgueil et sans songer au temps minime:
Et notre amour nous semble avoir toujours été.
Pour que rien de nous deux n'échappe à notre étreinte,
Si profonde qu'elle en est sainte
Et qu'à travers le corps même, l'amour soit clair,
Nous descendons ensemble au jardin de ta chair.
Tes seins sont là, ainsi que des offrandes,
Et tes deux mains me sont tendues;
Et rien ne vaut la naïve provende
Des paroles dites et entendues.
L'ombre des rameaux blancs voyage
Parmi ta gorge et ton visage
Et tes cheveux dénouent leur floraison,
En guirlandes, sur les gazons.
La nuit est toute d'argent bleu,
La nuit est un beau lit silencieux,
199
La nuit douce, dont les brises vont, une à une,
Effeuiller les grands lys dardés au clair de lune.
Bien que déjà, ce soir,
L'automne
Laisse aux sentes et aux orées,
Comme des mains dorées,
Lentes, les feuilles choir;
Bien que déjà l'automne,
Ce soir, avec ses bras de vent,
Moissonne
Sur les rosiers fervents,
Les pétales et leur pâleur,
Ne laissons rien de nos deux âmes
Tomber soudain avec ces fleurs.
Mais tous les deux autour des flammes
De l'âtre en or du souvenir,
Mais tous les deux blottissons-nous,
Les mains au feu et les genoux.
Contre les deuils à craindre ou à venir,
Contre le temps qui fixe à toute ardeur sa fin,
Contre notre terreur, contre nous-mêmes, enfin,
Blottissons-nous, près du foyer,
Que la mémoire en nous fait flamboyer.
Et si l'automne obère
A grands pans d'ombre et d'orages plânants,
Les bois, les pelouses et les étangs,
Que sa douleur du moins n'altère
L'intérieur jardin tranquillisé,
Où s'unissent, dans la lumière,
Les pas égaux de nos pensées.
Le don du corps, lorsque l'âme est donnée
N'est rien que l'aboutissement
De deux tendresses entraînées
L'une vers l'autre, éperdûment.
Tu n'es heureuse de ta chair
Si simple, en sa beauté natale,
200
Que pour, avec ferveur, m'en faire
L'offre complète et l'aumône totale.
Et je me donne à toi, ne sachant rien
Sinon que je m'exalte à te connaître,
Toujours meilleure et plus pure peut-être
Depuis que ton doux corps offrit sa fête au mien.
L'amour, oh! qu'il nous soit la clairvoyance
Unique, et l'unique raison du coeur,
A nous, dont le plus fol bonheur
Est d'être fous de confiance.
Fût-il en nous une seule tendresse,
Une pensée, une joie, une promesse,
Qui n'allât, d'elle-même, au devant de nos pas?
Fût-il une prière en secret entendue,
Dont nous n'ayons serré les mains tendues
Avec douceur, sur notre sein?
Fût-il un seul appel, un seul dessein,
Un voeu tranquille ou violent
Dont nous n'ayons épanoui l'élan?
Et, nous aimant ainsi,
Nos coeurs s'en sont allés, tels des apôtres,
Vers les doux coeurs timides et transis
Des autres:
Ils les ont conviés, par la pensée,
A se sentir aux nôtres fiancés,
A proclamer l'amour avec des ardeurs franches,
Comme un peuple de fleurs aime la même branche
Qui le suspend et le baigne dans le soleil;
Et notre âme, comme agrandie, en cet éveil,
S'est mise à célébrer tout ce qui aime,
Magnifiant l'amour pour l'amour même,
Et à chérir, divinement, d'un désir fou,
Le monde entier qui se résume en nous.
Le beau jardin fleuri de flammes
Qui nous semblait le double ou le miroir,
201
Du jardin clair que nous portions dans l'âme,
Se cristallise en gel et or, ce soir.
Un grand silence blanc est descendu s'asseoir
Là-bas, aux horizons de marbre,
Vers où s'en vont, par défilés, les arbres
Avec leur ombre immense et bleue
Et régulière, à côté d'eux.
Aucun souffle de vent, aucune haleine.
Les grands voiles du froid,
Se déplient seuls, de plaine en plaine,
Sur des marais d'argent ou des routes en croix.
Les étoiles paraissent vivre.
Comme l'acier, brille le givre,
A travers l'air translucide et glacé.
De clairs métaux pulvérisés
A l'infini, semblent neiger
De la pâleur d'une lune de cuivre.
Tout est scintillement dans l'immobilité.
Et c'est l'heure divine, où l'esprit est hanté
Par ces mille regards que projette sur terre,
Vers les hasards de l'humaine misère,
La bonne et pure et inchangeable éternité.
S'il arrive jamais
Que nous soyons, sans le savoir,
Souffrance ou peine ou désespoir,
L'un pour l'autre; s'il se faisait
Que la fatigue ou le banal plaisir
Détendissent en nous l'arc d'or du haut désir;
Si le cristal de la pure pensée
De notre amour doit se briser,
Si malgré tout, je me sentais
Vaincu pour n'avoir pas été
Assez en proie à la divine immensité
De la bonté;
Alors, oh! serrons-nous comme deux fous sublimes
Qui sous les cieux cassés, se cramponnent aux cimes
202
Quand même.--Et d'un unique essor
L'âme en soleil, s'exaltent dans la mort.
~ Emile Verhaeren,#NFDB
714:From 'Omeros'
BOOK SIX
Chapter XLIV
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago's highways. The first breeze
rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain
marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.
In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles
the light brought the bitter history of sugar
across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,
to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora.
The drizzling light blew across the savannah
darkening the racehorses' hides; mist slowly erased
the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the
hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed
shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion
jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder
muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in
like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under
one fist, then with the other tightening the rein
and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder
and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain
which can lose an entire archipelago
in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,
hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,
and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof
22
tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed
with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar
of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered
Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector
trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen
as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure
I'd never see her again. All of a sudden
the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water
down the guttering. I opened the window when
the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms
of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized
roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms
led the horses over the new grass and exercised
them again, and there was a different brightness
in everything, in the leaves, in the horses' eyes.
II
I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year
in green January over the orange villas
and military barracks where the Plunketts were,
the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas,
edged with the Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël;
it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter.
It freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle,
and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle
on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell
of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle
of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin;
I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra,
the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in,
the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer;
I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in,
23
and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains
like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca;
I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains.
III
Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense:
a past, they assured us, born in degradation,
and a present that lifted us up with the wind's
noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation
that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs
of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints,
the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls
of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense.
I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils.
Chapter XLV
One side of the coast plunges its precipices
into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks,
since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses
a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks
between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery,
with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base
the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea
whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace
the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind
thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent
from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find
purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current.
24
The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road
where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats,
so fast a man on a donkey trying to read
its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats
from the up-tempo zouk that its stereo played
when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend
away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade
that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend,
where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet
and thought of Plunkett's warning as he heard it screel
with the same sound that the tires of the Comet
made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel.
The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm.
The piglet trots down the safer side of the road.
Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame.
Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed
under the swaying statue of the Madonna
of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood,
and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her
dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm
common oval of prayer, the head's usual angle
over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm,
small as a doll's from its cerulean mantle,
indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace
of foam round the cliff's altar, that now, if he wished,
he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place,
the way a man will remain when Mass is finished,
not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross
forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel
facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse,
for her mercy at what he had done to Achille,
his brother. But his arc was over, for the course
25
of every comet is such. The fated crescent
was printed on the road by the scorching tires.
A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went
in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped
the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted
wind herded the long African combers, and whipped
the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead.
II
Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage
off the porter's cart. The rest burst into patois,
with gestures of despair at the lost privilege
of driving me, then turned to other customers.
In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet
with light that shot its lances over the combers.
I had the transport all to myself.
"You all set?
Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot
of his called the Comet."
He turned in the front seat,
spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out
in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet.
"You never know when, eh? I was at the airport
that day. I see him take off like a rocket.
I always said that thing have too much horsepower.
And so said, so done. The same hotel, chief, correct?"
I saw the coastal villages receding as
the highway's tongue translated bush into forest,
the wild savannah into moderate pastures,
that other life going in its "change for the best,"
its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete
future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks
26
of hotel development with the obsolete
craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat
marinas, the fisherman's phantom. Old oarlocks
and rusting fretsaw. My craft required the same
crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion
of the hand that stencilled a flowered window-frame
or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone
with the spirit in the wood, as wood grew obsolete
and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete.
I watched the afternoon sea. Didn't I want the poor
to stay in the same light so that I could transfix
them in amber, the afterglow of an empire,
preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks
to that blue bus-stop? Didn't I prefer a road
from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax
of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read
as a schoolboy? That cove, with its brown shallows
there, Praslin? That heron? Had they waited for me
to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence
of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy
of loving them from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence
smothered in love-vines, scenes to which I was attached
as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful research?
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched
roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church
above a bleached village. The gap between the driver
and me increased when he said:
"The place changing, eh?"
where an old rumshop had gone, but not that river
with its clogged shadows. That would make me a stranger.
"All to the good," he said. I said, "All to the good,"
27
then, "whoever they are," to myself. I caught his eyes
in the mirror. We were climbing out of Micoud.
Hadn't I made their poverty my paradise?
His back could have been Hector's, ferrying tourists
in the other direction home, the leopard seat
scratching their damp backs like the fur-covered armrests.
He had driven his burnt-out cargo, tired of sweat,
who longed for snow on the moon and didn't have to face
the heat of that sinking sun, who knew a climate
as monotonous as this one could only produce
from its unvarying vegetation flashes
of a primal insight like those red-pronged lilies
that shot from the verge, that their dried calabashes
of fake African masks for a fake Achilles
rattled with the seeds that came from other men's minds.
So let them think that. Who needed art in this place
where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines,
and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace
these people had, but what they envied most in them
was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt
still in the shells of their ears, like the surf's rhythm,
until too much happiness was shadowed with guilt
like any Eden, and they sighed at the sign:
HEWANNORRA (Iounalao), the gold sea
flat as a credit-card, extending its line
to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else,
Greece or Hawaii. Now the goddamn souvenir
felt absurd, excessive. The painted gourds, the shells.
Their own faces as brown as gourds. Mine felt as strange
as those at the counter feeling their bodies change.
III
28
Change lay in our silence. We had come to that bend
where the trees are warped by wind, and the cliffs, raw,
shelve surely to foam.
"Is right here everything end,"
the driver said, and rammed open the transport door
on his side, then mine.
"Anyway, chief, the view nice."
I joined him at the gusting edge.
"His name was Hector."
The name was bent like the trees on the precipice
to point inland. In its echo a man-o'-war
screamed on the wind. The driver moved off for a piss,
then shouted over his shoulder:
"A road-warrior.
He would drive like a madman when the power took.
He had a nice woman. Maybe he died for her."
For her and tourism, I thought. The driver shook
himself, zipping then hoisting his crotch.
"Crazy, but
a gentle fellow anyway, with a very good brain."
Cut to a leopard galloping on a dry plain
across Serengeti. Cut to the spraying fans
drummed by a riderless stallion, its wild mane
scaring the Scamander. Cut to a woman's hands
clenched towards her mouth with no sound. Cut to the wheel
of a chariot's spiked hubcap. Cut to the face
of his muscling jaw, then flashback to Achille
hurling a red tin and a cutlass. Next, a vase
with a girl's hoarse whisper echoing "Omeros,"
as in a conch-shell. Cut to a shield of silver
rolling like a hubcap. Rewind, in slow motion,
myrmidons gathering by a village river
29
with lances for oars. Cut to the surpliced ocean
droning its missal. Cut. A crane hoisting a wreck.
A horse nosing the surf, then shuddering its neck.
He'd paid the penalty of giving up the sea
as graceless and as treacherous as it had seemed,
for the taxi-business; he was making money,
but all of that money was making him ashamed
of the long afternoons of shouting by the wharf
hustling passengers. He missed the uncertain sand
under his feet, he sighed for the trough of a wave,
and the jerk of the oar when it turned in his hand,
and the rose conch sunset with its low pelicans.
Castries was corrupting him with its roaring life,
its littered market, with too many transport vans
competing. Castries had been his common-law wife
who, like Helen, he had longed for from a distance,
and now he had both, but a frightening discontent
hollowed his face; to find that the sea was a love
he could never lose made every gesture violent:
ramming the side-door shut, raking the clutch. He drove
as if driven by furies, but furies paid the rent.
A man who cursed the sea had cursed his own mother.
Mer was both mother and sea. In his lost canoe
he had said his prayers. But now he was in another
kind of life that was changing him with his brand-new
stereo, its endless garages, where he could not
whip off his shirt, hearing the conch's summoning note.
Chapter XLVI
30
Hector was buried near the sea he had loved once.
Not too far from the shallows where he fought Achille
for a tin and Helen. He did not hear the sea-almond's
moan over the bay when Philoctete blew the shell,
nor the one drumbeat of a wave-thud, nor a sail
rattling to rest as its day's work was over,
and its mate, gauging depth, bent over the gunwale,
then wearily sounding the fathoms with an oar,
the same rite his shipmates would repeat soon enough
when it was their turn to lie quiet as Hector,
lowering a pitch-pine canoe in the earth's trough,
to sleep under the piled conchs, through every weather
on the violet-wreathed mound. Crouching for his friend to hear,
Achille whispered about their ancestral river,
and those things he would recognize when he got there,
his true home, forever and ever and ever,
forever, compère. Then Philoctete limped over
and rested his hand firmly on a shaking shoulder
to anchor his sorrow. Seven Seas and Helen
did not come nearer. Achille had carried an oar
to the church and propped it outside with the red tin.
Now his voice strengthened. He said: "Mate, this is your spear,"
and laid the oar slowly, the same way he had placed
the parallel oars in the hull of the gommier
the day the African swift and its shadow raced.
And this was the prayer that Achille could not utter:
"The spear that I give you, my friend, is only wood.
Vexation is past. I know how well you treat her.
You never know my admiration, when you stood
crossing the sun at the bow of the long canoe
with the plates of your chest like a shield; I would say
any enemy so was a compliment. 'Cause no
31
African ever hurled his wide seine at the bay
by which he was born with such beauty. You hear me? Men
did not know you like me. All right. Sleep good. Good night."
Achille moved Philoctete's hand, then he saw Helen
standing alone and veiled in the widowing light.
Then he reached down to the grave and lifted the tin
to her. Helen nodded. A wind blew out the sun.
II
Pride set in Helen's face after this, like a stone
bracketed with Hector's name; her lips were incised
by its dates in parenthesis. She seemed more stern,
more ennobled by distance as she slowly crossed
the hot street of the village like a distant sail
on the horizon. Grief heightened her. When she smiled
it was with such distance that it was hard to tell
if she had heard your condolence. It was the child,
Ma Kilman told them, that made her more beautiful.
III
The rites of the island were simplified by its elements,
which changed places. The grooved sea was Achille's garden,
the ridged plot of rattling plantains carried their sense
of the sea, and Philoctete, on his height, often heard, in
a wind that suddenly churned the rage of deep gorges,
the leafy sound of far breakers plunging with smoke,
and for smoke there were the bonfires which the sun catches
on the blue heights at sunrise, doing the same work
as Philoctete clearing his plot, just as, at sunset,
smoke came from the glowing rim of the horizon as if
from his enamel pot. The woodsmoke smelt of a regret
32
that men cannot name. On the charred field, the massive
sawn trunks burnt slowly like towers, and the great
indigo dusk slowly plumed down, devouring the still leaves,
igniting the firefly huts, lifting the panicky egret
to beat its lagoon and shelve in the cage of the mangroves,
take in the spars of its sails, then with quick-pricking head
anchor itself shiftingly, and lift its question again.
At night, the island reversed its elements, the heron
of a quarter-moon floated from Hector's grave, rain
rose upwards from the sea, and the corrugated iron
of the sea glittered with nailheads. Ragged
plantains bent and stepped with their rustling powers
over the furrows of Philoctete's garden, a chorus of aged
ancestors and straw, and, rustling, surrounded every house
in the village with its back garden, with its rank midden
of rusted chamber pots, rotting nets, and the moon's cold basin.
They sounded, when they shook, after the moonlit meridian
of their crossing, like the night-surf; they gazed in
silence at the shadows of their lamplit children.
At Philoctete, groaning and soaking the flower on his shin
with hot sulphur, cleaning its edges with yellow Vaseline,
and, gripping his knee, squeezing rags from the basin.
At night, when yards are asleep, and the broken line
of the surf hisses like Philo, "Bon Dieu, aie, waie, my sin
is this sore?" the old plantains suffer and shine.
Chapter XLVII
Islands of bay leaves in the medicinal bath
of a cauldron, a sibylline cure. The citron
33
sprig of a lime-tree dividing the sky in half
dipped its divining rod. The white spray of the thorn,
which the swift bends lightly, waited for a black hand
to break it in bits and boil its leaves for the wound
from the pronged anchor rusting in clean bottom-sand.
Ma Kilman, in a black hat with its berried fringe,
eased herself sideways down the broken concrete step
of the rumshop's back door, closed it, and rammed the hinge
tight. The bolt caught a finger and with that her instep
arch twisted and she let out a soft Catholic
curse, then crossed herself. She closed the gate. The asphalt
sweated with the heat, the limp breadfruit leaves were thick
over the fence. Her spectacles swam in their sweat.
She plucked an armpit. The damn wig was badly made.
She was going to five o'clock Mass, to la Messe,
and sometimes she had to straighten it as she prayed
until the wafer dissolved her with tenderness,
the way a raindrop melts on the tongue of a breeze.
In the church's cool cave the sweat dried from her eyes.
She rolled down the elastic bands below the knees
of her swollen stockings. It was then that their vise
round her calves reminded her of Philoctete. Then,
numbering her beads, she began her own litany
of berries, Hail Mary marigolds that stiffen
their aureoles in the heights, mild anemone
and clear watercress, the sacred heart of Jesus
pierced like the anthurium, the thorns of logwood,
called the tree of life, the aloe good for seizures,
the hole in the daisy's palm, with its drying blood
that was the hole in the fisherman's shin since he was
pierced by a hook; there was the pale, roadside tisane
34
of her malarial childhood. There was this one
for easing a birth-breach, that one for a love-bath,
before the buds of green sugar-apples in the sun
ripened like her nipples in girlhood. But what path
led through nettles to the cure, the furious sibyl
couldn't remember. Mimosa winced from her fingers,
shutting like jalousies at some passing evil
when she reached for them. The smell of incense lingers
in her clothes. Inside, the candle-flames are erect
round the bier of the altar while she and her friends
old-talk on the steps, but the plant keeps its secret
when her memory reaches, shuttering in its fronds.
II
The dew had not yet dried on the white-ribbed awnings
and the nodding palanquins of umbrella yams
where the dark grove had not heat but early mornings
of perpetual freshness, in which the bearded arms
of a cedar held council. Between its gnarled toes
grew the reek of an unknown weed; its pronged flower
sprang like a buried anchor; its windborne odours
diverted the bee from its pollen, but its power,
rooted in bitterness, drew her bowed head by the nose
as a spike does a circling bull. To approach it
Ma Kilman lowered her head to one side and screened
the stench with a cologned handkerchief. The mulch it
was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened,
of Philoctete's cut. In her black dress, her berried
black hat, she climbed a goat-path up from the village,
past the stones with dried palms and conchs, where the buried
suffer the sun all day Sunday, while goats forage
the new wreaths. Once more she pulled at the itch in her
35
armpits, nearly dropping her purse. Then she climbed hard
up the rain-cracked path, the bay closing behind her
like a wound, and rested. Everything that echoed
repeated its outline: a goat's doddering bleat,
a hammer multiplying a roof, and, through the back yards,
a mother cursing a boy too nimble to beat.
Ma Kilman picked up her purse and sighed on upwards
to the thread of the smell, one arm behind her back,
passing the cactus, the thorn trees, and then the wood
appeared over her, thick green, the green almost black
as her dress in its shade, its border of flowers
flecking the pasture with spray. Then she staggered back
from the line of ants at her feet. She saw the course
they had kept behind her, following her from church,
signalling a language she could not recognize.
III
A swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach
centuries ago from its antipodal shore,
skimming the sea-troughs, outdarting ospreys, her luck
held to its shadow. She aimed to carry the cure
that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight
of Benin was her bow, her target the ringed haze
of a circling horizon. The star-grains at night
made her hungrier; the leafless sea with no house
for her weariness. Sometimes she dozed in her flight
for a swift's second, closing the seeds of her stare,
then ruddering straight. The dry sea-flakes whitened her
breast, her feathers thinned. Then, one dawn the day-star
rose slowly from the wrong place and it frightened her
because all the breakers were blowing from the wrong
36
east. She saw the horned island and uncurled her claws
with one frail cry, since swifts are not given to song,
and fluttered down to a beach, ejecting the seed
in grass near the sand. She nestled in dry seaweed.
In a year she was bleached bone. All of that motion
a pile of fragile ash from the fire of her will,
but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean
it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille,
the women carrying coals after the dark door
slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour
so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar,
where the flower was anchored at the mottled root
as a lizard crawled upwards, foot by sallow foot.
~ Derek Walcott,#NFDB
715:The Princess (Part 4)
'There sinks the nebulous star we call the Sun,
If that hypothesis of theirs be sound'
Said Ida; 'let us down and rest;' and we
Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices,
By every coppice-feathered chasm and cleft,
Dropt through the ambrosial gloom to where below
No bigger than a glow-worm shone the tent
Lamp-lit from the inner. Once she leaned on me,
Descending; once or twice she lent her hand,
And blissful palpitations in the blood,
Stirring a sudden transport rose and fell.
But when we planted level feet, and dipt
Beneath the satin dome and entered in,
There leaning deep in broidered down we sank
Our elbows: on a tripod in the midst
A fragrant flame rose, and before us glowed
Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.
Then she, 'Let some one sing to us: lightlier move
The minutes fledged with music:' and a maid,
Of those beside her, smote her harp, and sang.
'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
'Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
'Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
748
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
'Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.'
She ended with such passion that the tear,
She sang of, shook and fell, an erring pearl
Lost in her bosom: but with some disdain
Answered the Princess, 'If indeed there haunt
About the mouldered lodges of the Past
So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,
Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool
And so pace by: but thine are fancies hatched
In silken-folded idleness; nor is it
Wiser to weep a true occasion lost,
But trim our sails, and let old bygones be,
While down the streams that float us each and all
To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice,
Throne after throne, and molten on the waste
Becomes a cloud: for all things serve their time
Toward that great year of equal mights and rights,
Nor would I fight with iron laws, in the end
Found golden: let the past be past; let be
Their cancelled Babels: though the rough kex break
The starred mosaic, and the beard-blown goat
Hang on the shaft, and the wild figtree split
Their monstrous idols, care not while we hear
A trumpet in the distance pealing news
Of better, and Hope, a poising eagle, burns
Above the unrisen morrow:' then to me;
'Know you no song of your own land,' she said,
'Not such as moans about the retrospect,
But deals with the other distance and the hues
Of promise; not a death's-head at the wine.'
Then I remembered one myself had made,
What time I watched the swallow winging south
749
From mine own land, part made long since, and part
Now while I sang, and maidenlike as far
As I could ape their treble, did I sing.
'O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.
'O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.
'O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.
'O were I thou that she might take me in,
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.
'Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,
Delaying as the tender ash delays
To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?
'O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:
Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,
But in the North long since my nest is made.
'O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
And brief the sun of summer in the North,
And brief the moon of beauty in the South.
'O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,
Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,
And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.'
I ceased, and all the ladies, each at each,
Like the Ithacensian suitors in old time,
Stared with great eyes, and laughed with alien lips,
And knew not what they meant; for still my voice
750
Rang false: but smiling 'Not for thee,' she said,
O Bulbul, any rose of Gulistan
Shall burst her veil: marsh-divers, rather, maid,
Shall croak thee sister, or the meadow-crake
Grate her harsh kindred in the grass: and this
A mere love-poem! O for such, my friend,
We hold them slight: they mind us of the time
When we made bricks in Egypt. Knaves are men,
That lute and flute fantastic tenderness,
And dress the victim to the offering up,
And paint the gates of Hell with Paradise,
And play the slave to gain the tyranny.
Poor soul! I had a maid of honour once;
She wept her true eyes blind for such a one,
A rogue of canzonets and serenades.
I loved her. Peace be with her. She is dead.
So they blaspheme the muse! But great is song
Used to great ends: ourself have often tried
Valkyrian hymns, or into rhythm have dashed
The passion of the prophetess; for song
Is duer unto freedom, force and growth
Of spirit than to junketing and love.
Love is it? Would this same mock-love, and this
Mock-Hymen were laid up like winter bats,
Till all men grew to rate us at our worth,
Not vassals to be beat, nor pretty babes
To be dandled, no, but living wills, and sphered
Whole in ourselves and owed to none. Enough!
But now to leaven play with profit, you,
Know you no song, the true growth of your soil,
That gives the manners of your country-women?'
She spoke and turned her sumptuous head with eyes
Of shining expectation fixt on mine.
Then while I dragged my brains for such a song,
Cyril, with whom the bell-mouthed glass had wrought,
Or mastered by the sense of sport, began
To troll a careless, careless tavern-catch
Of Moll and Meg, and strange experiences
Unmeet for ladies. Florian nodded at him,
I frowning; Psyche flushed and wanned and shook;
The lilylike Melissa drooped her brows;
751
'Forbear,' the Princess cried; 'Forbear, Sir' I;
And heated through and through with wrath and love,
I smote him on the breast; he started up;
There rose a shriek as of a city sacked;
Melissa clamoured 'Flee the death;' 'To horse'
Said Ida; 'home! to horse!' and fled, as flies
A troop of snowy doves athwart the dusk,
When some one batters at the dovecote-doors,
Disorderly the women. Alone I stood
With Florian, cursing Cyril, vext at heart,
In the pavilion: there like parting hopes
I heard them passing from me: hoof by hoof,
And every hoof a knell to my desires,
Clanged on the bridge; and then another shriek,
'The Head, the Head, the Princess, O the Head!'
For blind with rage she missed the plank, and rolled
In the river. Out I sprang from glow to gloom:
There whirled her white robe like a blossomed branch
Rapt to the horrible fall: a glance I gave,
No more; but woman-vested as I was
Plunged; and the flood drew; yet I caught her; then
Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left
The weight of all the hopes of half the world,
Strove to buffet to land in vain. A tree
Was half-disrooted from his place and stooped
To wrench his dark locks in the gurgling wave
Mid-channel. Right on this we drove and caught,
And grasping down the boughs I gained the shore.
There stood her maidens glimmeringly grouped
In the hollow bank. One reaching forward drew
My burthen from mine arms; they cried 'she lives:'
They bore her back into the tent: but I,
So much a kind of shame within me wrought,
Not yet endured to meet her opening eyes,
Nor found my friends; but pushed alone on foot
(For since her horse was lost I left her mine)
Across the woods, and less from Indian craft
Than beelike instinct hiveward, found at length
The garden portals. Two great statues, Art
And Science, Caryatids, lifted up
A weight of emblem, and betwixt were valves
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Of open-work in which the hunter rued
His rash intrusion, manlike, but his brows
Had sprouted, and the branches thereupon
Spread out at top, and grimly spiked the gates.
A little space was left between the horns,
Through which I clambered o'er at top with pain,
Dropt on the sward, and up the linden walks,
And, tost on thoughts that changed from hue to hue,
Now poring on the glowworm, now the star,
I paced the terrace, till the Bear had wheeled
Through a great arc his seven slow suns.
A step
Of lightest echo, then a loftier form
Than female, moving through the uncertain gloom,
Disturbed me with the doubt 'if this were she,'
But it was Florian. 'Hist O Hist,' he said,
'They seek us: out so late is out of rules.
Moreover "seize the strangers" is the cry.
How came you here?' I told him: 'I' said he,
'Last of the train, a moral leper, I,
To whom none spake, half-sick at heart, returned.
Arriving all confused among the rest
With hooded brows I crept into the hall,
And, couched behind a Judith, underneath
The head of Holofernes peeped and saw.
Girl after girl was called to trial: each
Disclaimed all knowledge of us: last of all,
Melissa: trust me, Sir, I pitied her.
She, questioned if she knew us men, at first
Was silent; closer prest, denied it not:
And then, demanded if her mother knew,
Or Psyche, she affirmed not, or denied:
From whence the Royal mind, familiar with her,
Easily gathered either guilt. She sent
For Psyche, but she was not there; she called
For Psyche's child to cast it from the doors;
She sent for Blanche to accuse her face to face;
And I slipt out: but whither will you now?
And where are Psyche, Cyril? both are fled:
What, if together? that were not so well.
Would rather we had never come! I dread
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His wildness, and the chances of the dark.'
'And yet,' I said, 'you wrong him more than I
That struck him: this is proper to the clown,
Though smocked, or furred and purpled, still the clown,
To harm the thing that trusts him, and to shame
That which he says he loves: for Cyril, howe'er
He deal in frolic, as tonight--the song
Might have been worse and sinned in grosser lips
Beyond all pardon--as it is, I hold
These flashes on the surface are not he.
He has a solid base of temperament:
But as the waterlily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind,
Though anchored to the bottom, such is he.'
Scarce had I ceased when from a tamarisk near
Two Proctors leapt upon us, crying, 'Names:'
He, standing still, was clutched; but I began
To thrid the musky-circled mazes, wind
And double in and out the boles, and race
By all the fountains: fleet I was of foot:
Before me showered the rose in flakes; behind
I heard the puffed pursuer; at mine ear
Bubbled the nightingale and heeded not,
And secret laughter tickled all my soul.
At last I hooked my ankle in a vine,
That claspt the feet of a Mnemosyne,
And falling on my face was caught and known.
They haled us to the Princess where she sat
High in the hall: above her drooped a lamp,
And made the single jewel on her brow
Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head,
Prophet of storm: a handmaid on each side
Bowed toward her, combing out her long black hair
Damp from the river; and close behind her stood
Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men,
Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain,
And labour. Each was like a Druid rock;
Or like a spire of land that stands apart
Cleft from the main, and wailed about with mews.
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Then, as we came, the crowd dividing clove
An advent to the throne: and therebeside,
Half-naked as if caught at once from bed
And tumbled on the purple footcloth, lay
The lily-shining child; and on the left,
Bowed on her palms and folded up from wrong,
Her round white shoulder shaken with her sobs,
Melissa knelt; but Lady Blanche erect
Stood up and spake, an affluent orator.
'It was not thus, O Princess, in old days:
You prized my counsel, lived upon my lips:
I led you then to all the Castalies;
I fed you with the milk of every Muse;
I loved you like this kneeler, and you me
Your second mother: those were gracious times.
Then came your new friend: you began to change-I saw it and grieved--to slacken and to cool;
Till taken with her seeming openness
You turned your warmer currents all to her,
To me you froze: this was my meed for all.
Yet I bore up in part from ancient love,
And partly that I hoped to win you back,
And partly conscious of my own deserts,
And partly that you were my civil head,
And chiefly you were born for something great,
In which I might your fellow-worker be,
When time should serve; and thus a noble scheme
Grew up from seed we two long since had sown;
In us true growth, in her a Jonah's gourd,
Up in one night and due to sudden sun:
We took this palace; but even from the first
You stood in your own light and darkened mine.
What student came but that you planed her path
To Lady Psyche, younger, not so wise,
A foreigner, and I your countrywoman,
I your old friend and tried, she new in all?
But still her lists were swelled and mine were lean;
Yet I bore up in hope she would be known:
Then came these wolves: ~they~ knew her: ~they~ endured,
Long-closeted with her the yestermorn,
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To tell her what they were, and she to hear:
And me none told: not less to an eye like mine
A lidless watcher of the public weal,
Last night, their mask was patent, and my foot
Was to you: but I thought again: I feared
To meet a cold "We thank you, we shall hear of it
From Lady Psyche:" you had gone to her,
She told, perforce; and winning easy grace
No doubt, for slight delay, remained among us
In our young nursery still unknown, the stem
Less grain than touchwood, while my honest heat
Were all miscounted as malignant haste
To push my rival out of place and power.
But public use required she should be known;
And since my oath was ta'en for public use,
I broke the letter of it to keep the sense.
I spoke not then at first, but watched them well,
Saw that they kept apart, no mischief done;
And yet this day (though you should hate me for it)
I came to tell you; found that you had gone,
Ridden to the hills, she likewise: now, I thought,
That surely she will speak; if not, then I:
Did she? These monsters blazoned what they were,
According to the coarseness of their kind,
For thus I hear; and known at last (my work)
And full of cowardice and guilty shame,
I grant in her some sense of shame, she flies;
And I remain on whom to wreak your rage,
I, that have lent my life to build up yours,
I that have wasted here health, wealth, and time,
And talent, I--you know it--I will not boast:
Dismiss me, and I prophesy your plan,
Divorced from my experience, will be chaff
For every gust of chance, and men will say
We did not know the real light, but chased
The wisp that flickers where no foot can tread.'
She ceased: the Princess answered coldly, 'Good:
Your oath is broken: we dismiss you: go.
For this lost lamb (she pointed to the child)
Our mind is changed: we take it to ourself.'
756
Thereat the Lady stretched a vulture throat,
And shot from crooked lips a haggard smile.
'The plan was mine. I built the nest' she said
'To hatch the cuckoo. Rise!' and stooped to updrag
Melissa: she, half on her mother propt,
Half-drooping from her, turned her face, and cast
A liquid look on Ida, full of prayer,
Which melted Florian's fancy as she hung,
A Niobëan daughter, one arm out,
Appealing to the bolts of Heaven; and while
We gazed upon her came a little stir
About the doors, and on a sudden rushed
Among us, out of breath as one pursued,
A woman-post in flying raiment. Fear
Stared in her eyes, and chalked her face, and winged
Her transit to the throne, whereby she fell
Delivering sealed dispatches which the Head
Took half-amazed, and in her lion's mood
Tore open, silent we with blind surmise
Regarding, while she read, till over brow
And cheek and bosom brake the wrathful bloom
As of some fire against a stormy cloud,
When the wild peasant rights himself, the rick
Flames, and his anger reddens in the heavens;
For anger most it seemed, while now her breast,
Beaten with some great passion at her heart,
Palpitated, her hand shook, and we heard
In the dead hush the papers that she held
Rustle: at once the lost lamb at her feet
Sent out a bitter bleating for its dam;
The plaintive cry jarred on her ire; she crushed
The scrolls together, made a sudden turn
As if to speak, but, utterance failing her,
She whirled them on to me, as who should say
'Read,' and I read--two letters--one her sire's.
'Fair daughter, when we sent the Prince your way,
We knew not your ungracious laws, which learnt,
We, conscious of what temper you are built,
Came all in haste to hinder wrong, but fell
Into his father's hands, who has this night,
You lying close upon his territory,
757
Slipt round and in the dark invested you,
And here he keeps me hostage for his son.'
The second was my father's running thus:
'You have our son: touch not a hair of his head:
Render him up unscathed: give him your hand:
Cleave to your contract: though indeed we hear
You hold the woman is the better man;
A rampant heresy, such as if it spread
Would make all women kick against their Lords
Through all the world, and which might well deserve
That we this night should pluck your palace down;
And we will do it, unless you send us back
Our son, on the instant, whole.'
So far I read;
And then stood up and spoke impetuously.
'O not to pry and peer on your reserve,
But led by golden wishes, and a hope
The child of regal compact, did I break
Your precinct; not a scorner of your sex
But venerator, zealous it should be
All that it might be: hear me, for I bear,
Though man, yet human, whatsoe'er your wrongs,
From the flaxen curl to the gray lock a life
Less mine than yours: my nurse would tell me of you;
I babbled for you, as babies for the moon,
Vague brightness; when a boy, you stooped to me
From all high places, lived in all fair lights,
Came in long breezes rapt from inmost south
And blown to inmost north; at eve and dawn
With Ida, Ida, Ida, rang the woods;
The leader wildswan in among the stars
Would clang it, and lapt in wreaths of glowworm light
The mellow breaker murmured Ida. Now,
Because I would have reached you, had you been
Sphered up with Cassiopëia, or the enthroned
Persephonè in Hades, now at length,
Those winters of abeyance all worn out,
A man I came to see you: but indeed,
Not in this frequence can I lend full tongue,
O noble Ida, to those thoughts that wait
758
On you, their centre: let me say but this,
That many a famous man and woman, town
And landskip, have I heard of, after seen
The dwarfs of presage: though when known, there grew
Another kind of beauty in detail
Made them worth knowing; but in your I found
My boyish dream involved and dazzled down
And mastered, while that after-beauty makes
Such head from act to act, from hour to hour,
Within me, that except you slay me here,
According to your bitter statute-book,
I cannot cease to follow you, as they say
The seal does music; who desire you more
Than growing boys their manhood; dying lips,
With many thousand matters left to do,
The breath of life; O more than poor men wealth,
Than sick men health--yours, yours, not mine--but half
Without you; with you, whole; and of those halves
You worthiest; and howe'er you block and bar
Your heart with system out from mine, I hold
That it becomes no man to nurse despair,
But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms
To follow up the worthiest till he die:
Yet that I came not all unauthorized
Behold your father's letter.'
On one knee
Kneeling, I gave it, which she caught, and dashed
Unopened at her feet: a tide of fierce
Invective seemed to wait behind her lips,
As waits a river level with the dam
Ready to burst and flood the world with foam:
And so she would have spoken, but there rose
A hubbub in the court of half the maids
Gathered together: from the illumined hall
Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press
Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes,
And rainbow robes, and gems and gemlike eyes,
And gold and golden heads; they to and fro
Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale,
All open-mouthed, all gazing to the light,
Some crying there was an army in the land,
And some that men were in the very walls,
759
And some they cared not; till a clamour grew
As of a new-world Babel, woman-built,
And worse-confounded: high above them stood
The placid marble Muses, looking peace.
Not peace she looked, the Head: but rising up
Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so
To the open window moved, remaining there
Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves
Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light
Dash themselves dead. She stretched her arms and called
Across the tumult and the tumult fell.
'What fear ye, brawlers? am not I your Head?
On me, me, me, the storm first breaks: ~I~ dare
All these male thunderbolts: what is it ye fear?
Peace! there are those to avenge us and they come:
If not,--myself were like enough, O girls,
To unfurl the maiden banner of our rights,
And clad in iron burst the ranks of war,
Or, falling, promartyr of our cause,
Die: yet I blame you not so much for fear:
Six thousand years of fear have made you that
From which I would redeem you: but for those
That stir this hubbub--you and you--I know
Your faces there in the crowd--tomorrow morn
We hold a great convention: then shall they
That love their voices more than duty, learn
With whom they deal, dismissed in shame to live
No wiser than their mothers, household stuff,
Live chattels, mincers of each other's fame,
Full of weak poison, turnspits for the clown,
The drunkard's football, laughing-stocks of Time,
Whose brains are in their hands and in their heels
But fit to flaunt, to dress, to dance, to thrum,
To tramp, to scream, to burnish, and to scour,
For ever slaves at home and fools abroad.'
She, ending, waved her hands: thereat the crowd
Muttering, dissolved: then with a smile, that looked
A stroke of cruel sunshine on the cliff,
760
When all the glens are drowned in azure gloom
Of thunder-shower, she floated to us and said:
'You have done well and like a gentleman,
And like a prince: you have our thanks for all:
And you look well too in your woman's dress:
Well have you done and like a gentleman.
You saved our life: we owe you bitter thanks:
Better have died and spilt our bones in the flood-Then men had said--but now--What hinders me
To take such bloody vengeance on you both?-Yet since our father--Wasps in our good hive,
You would-be quenchers of the light to be,
Barbarians, grosser than your native bears-O would I had his sceptre for one hour!
You that have dared to break our bound, and gulled
Our servants, wronged and lied and thwarted us-~I~ wed with thee! ~I~ bound by precontract
Your bride, our bondslave! not though all the gold
That veins the world were packed to make your crown,
And every spoken tongue should lord you. Sir,
Your falsehood and yourself are hateful to us:
I trample on your offers and on you:
Begone: we will not look upon you more.
Here, push them out at gates.'
In wrath she spake.
Then those eight mighty daughters of the plough
Bent their broad faces toward us and addressed
Their motion: twice I sought to plead my cause,
But on my shoulder hung their heavy hands,
The weight of destiny: so from her face
They pushed us, down the steps, and through the court,
And with grim laughter thrust us out at gates.
We crossed the street and gained a petty mound
Beyond it, whence we saw the lights and heard the voices murmuring. While I
listened, came
On a sudden the weird seizure and the doubt:
I seemed to move among a world of ghosts;
The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard,
The jest and earnest working side by side,
The cataract and the tumult and the kings
761
Were shadows; and the long fantastic night
With all its doings had and had not been,
And all things were and were not.
This went by
As strangely as it came, and on my spirits
Settled a gentle cloud of melancholy;
Not long; I shook it off; for spite of doubts
And sudden ghostly shadowings I was one
To whom the touch of all mischance but came
As night to him that sitting on a hill
Sees the midsummer, midnight, Norway sun
Set into sunrise; then we moved away.
Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,
That beat to battle where he stands;
Thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands:
A moment, while the trumpets blow,
He sees his brood about thy knee;
The next, like fire he meets the foe,
And strikes him dead for thine and thee.
So Lilia sang: we thought her half-possessed,
She struck such warbling fury through the words;
And, after, feigning pique at what she called
The raillery, or grotesque, or false sublime-Like one that wishes at a dance to change
The music--clapt her hands and cried for war,
Or some grand fight to kill and make an end:
And he that next inherited the tale
Half turning to the broken statue, said,
'Sir Ralph has got your colours: if I prove
Your knight, and fight your battle, what for me?'
It chanced, her empty glove upon the tomb
Lay by her like a model of her hand.
She took it and she flung it. 'Fight' she said,
'And make us all we would be, great and good.'
He knightlike in his cap instead of casque,
A cap of Tyrol borrowed from the hall,
Arranged the favour, and assumed the Prince.
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~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
716: Ahana
Ahana
(Ahana, the Dawn of God, descends on the world where amid the strife and trouble of mortality the Hunters of Joy, the
Seekers after Knowledge, the Climbers in the quest of Power are toiling up the slopes or waiting in the valleys. As she stands on the mountains of the East, voices of the Hunters of Joy are the first to greet her.)
Vision delightful alone on the hills whom the silences cover,
Closer yet lean to mortality; human, stoop to thy lover.
Wonderful, gold like a moon in the square of the sun where thou strayest
Glimmers thy face amid crystal purities; mighty thou playest
Sole on the peaks of the world, unafraid of thy loneliness. Glances
Leap from thee down to us, dream-seas and light-falls and magical trances;
Sun-drops flake from thy eyes and the heart's caverns packed are with pleasure
Strange like a song without words or the dance of a measureless measure.
Tread through the edges of dawn, over twilight's grey-lidded margin;
Heal earth's unease with thy feet, O heaven-born delicate virgin.
Children of Time whose spirits came down from eternity, seizing
Joys that escape us, yoked by our hearts to a labour unceasing,
Earth-bound, torn with our longings, our life is a brief incompleteness.
Thou hast the stars to sport with, the winds run like bees to thy sweetness.
Art thou not heaven-bound even as I with the earth? Hast thou ended
All desirable things in a stillness lone and unfriended?
Only is calm so sweet? is our close tranquillity only?
Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.
Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre.
Art thou not weary of only the stars in their solemn muster,
Sky-hung the chill bare plateaus and peaks where the eagle rejoices
In the inhuman height of his nesting, solitude's voices
Making the heart of the silence lonelier? strong and untiring,
Deaf with the cry of the waterfall, lonely the pine lives aspiring.
Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother:
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Pondicherry, c. 1910 - 1920
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other, -
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture,
Heaven needing earth's passion to quiver its peace into rapture.
Marry, O lightning eternal, the passion of a moment-born fire!
Out of thy greatness draw close to the breast of our mortal desire!
Is he thy master, Rudra the mighty, Shiva ascetic?
Has he denied thee his world? In his dance that they tell of, ecstatic,
Slaying, creating, calm in the midst of the movement and madness,
Stole there no rhythm of an earthly joy and a mortal sadness?
Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate; joy's delicate blossom
Sleeps in thy lids of delight; all Nature hides in thy bosom
Claiming her children unborn and the food of her love and her laughter.
Is he the first? was there none then before him? shall none come after?
He who denies and his blows beat down on our hearts like a hammer's,
He whose calm is the silent reply to our passion and clamours!
Is not there deity greater here new-born in a noble
Labour and sorrow and struggle than stilled into rapture immobile?
Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven's that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying.
Earth has her godheads; the Tritons sway on the toss of the billows,
Emerald locks of the Nereids stream on their foam-crested pillows,
Dryads peer out from the branches, Naiads glance up from the waters;
High are her flame-points of joy and the gods are ensnared by her daughters.
Artemis calls as she flees through the glades and the breezes pursue her;
Cypris laughs in her isles where the ocean-winds linger to woo her.
Here thou shalt meet amid beauty forgotten the dance of the Graces;
Night shall be haunted for ever with strange and delicate faces.
Music is here of the fife and the flute and the lyre and the timbal,
Wind in the forests, bees in the grove, - spring's ardent cymbal
Thrilling, the cry of the cuckoo; the nightingale sings in the branches,
Human laughter is heard and the cattle low in the ranches.
Frankly and sweetly she gives to her children the bliss of her body,
Breath of her lips and the green of her garments, rain-pourings heady
Tossed from her cloud-carried beaker of tempest, oceans and streamlets,
Dawn and the mountain-air, corn-fields and vineyards, pastures and hamlets,
Ahana
479
Tangles of sunbeams asleep, mooned dream-depths, twilight's shadows,
Taste and scent and the fruits of her trees and the flowers of her meadows,
Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture.
Still must they mutter that all here is vision and passing appearance,
Magic of Maya with falsehood and pain for its only inherence.
One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning, -
He who has sent through his soul's wide spaces the universe spinning.
One eternal, Time an illusion, life a brief error!
One eternal, Master of heaven - and of hell and its terror!
Spirit of silence and purity rapt and aloof from creation, -
Dreaming through aeons unreal his splendid and empty formation!
Spirit all-wise in omnipotence shaping a world but to break it, -
Pushed by what mood of a moment, the breath of what fancy to make it?
None is there great but the eternal and lonely, the unique and unmated,
Bliss lives alone with the self-pure, the single, the forever-uncreated.
Truths? or thought's structures bridging the vacancy mute and unsounded
Facing the soul when it turns from the stress of the figures around it?
Solely we see here a world self-made by some indwelling Glory
Building with forms and events its strange and magnificent story.
Yet at the last has not all been solved and unwisdom demolished,
Myth cast out and all dreams of the soul, and all worship abolished?
All now is changed, the reverse of the coin has been shown to us; Reason
Waking, detecting the hoax of the spirit, at last has arisen,
Captured the Truth and built round her its bars that she may not skedaddle,
Gallop again with the bit in her teeth and with Fancy in the saddle.
Now have the wise men discovered that all is the craft of a superMagic of Chance and a movement of Void and inconscient Stupor.
Chance by a wonderful accident ever her ripples expanding
Out of a gaseous circle of Nothingness, implacably extending
Freak upon freak, repeating rigidly marvels on marvels,
Making a world out of Nothing, started on the arc of her travels.
Nothingness born into feeling and action dies back to Nothing.
Sea of a vague electricity, romping through space-curves and clothing
Strangely the Void with a semblance of Matter, painfully flowered
Into this giant phenomenon universe. Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
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Pondicherry, c. 1910 - 1920
Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and mechanic.
Once by an accident queer but quite natural, provable, simple,
Out of blind Space-Nought lashed into life, wearing Mind as its wimple,
Dupe of a figment of consciousness, doped with behaviour and feature,
Matter deluded claimed to be spirit and sentient creature.
All the high dreams man has dreamed and his hopes and his deeds, his soul's greatness
Are but a food-seeking animal's acts with the mind for their witness, -
Mind a machine for the flickers of thought, Matter's logic unpremissed, -
Are but a singular fireworks, chemistry lacking the chemist,
Matter's nervous display; the heart's passion, the sorrow and burning
Fire of delight and sweet ecstasy, love and its fathomless yearning,
Boundless spiritual impulses making us one with world-being,
Outbursts of vision opening doors to a limitless seeing,
Gases and glands and the genes and the nerves and the brain-cells have done it,
Brooded out drama and epic, structured the climb of the sonnet,
Studied the stars and discovered the brain and the laws of its thinking,
Sculptured the cave-temple, reared the cathedral, infinity drinking
Wrought manufacturing God and the soul for the uplift of Nature, -
Science, philosophy, head of his mystical chemical stature,
Music and painting revealing the godhead in sound and in colour,
Acts of the hero, thoughts of the thinker, search of the scholar,
All the magnificent planning, all the inquiry and wonder
Only a trick of the atom, its marvellous magical blunder.
Who can believe it? Something or someone, a Force or a Spirit
Conscious, creative, wonderful shaped out a world to inherit
Here for the beings born from its vast universal existence, -
Fields of surprise and adventure, vistas of light-haunted distance,
Play-routes of wisdom and vision and struggle and rapture and sorrow,
Sailing in Time through the straits of today to the sea of tomorrow.
Worlds and their wonders, suns and their flamings, earth and her nations,
Voyages endless of Mind through the surge of its fate-tossed creations,
Star upon star throbbing out in the silence of infinite spaces,
Species on species, bodies on bodies, faces on faces,
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Souls without number crossing through Time towards eternity, aeons
Crowding on aeons, loving and battle, dirges and paeans,
Thoughts ever leaping, hopes ever yearning, lives ever streaming,
Millions and millions on trek through the days with their doings and dreaming,
Herds of the Sun who move on at the cry of the radiant drover, -
Countless, surviving the death of the centuries, lost to recover,
Finished, but only to begin again, who is its tireless creator,
Cause or the force of its driving, its thinker or formless dictator?
Surely no senseless Vacancy made it, surely 'twas fashioned
By an almighty One million-ecstasied, thousand-passioned.
Self-made? then by what self from which thought could arise and emotion,
Waves that well up to the surface, born from what mysteried ocean?
Nature alone is the fountain. But what is she? Is she not only
Figure and name for what none understands, though all feel, or a lonely
Word in which all finds expression, spirit-heights, dumb work of Matter, -
Vague designation filling the gaps of our thought with its clatter?
Power without vision that blunders in man into thinking and sinning?
Rigid, too vast inexhaustible mystery void of a meaning?
Energy blindly devising, unconsciously ranging in order?
Chance in the march of a cosmic Insanity crossing the border
Out of the eternal silence to thought and its strangeness and splendour?
Consciousness born by an accident until an accident end her?
Nought else is she but the power of the Spirit who dwells in her ever,
Witness and cause of her workings, lord of her pauseless endeavour.
All things she knows, though she seems here unseeing; even in her slumber
Wondrous her works are, design and its magic and magic of number,
Plan of her mighty cosmic geometry, balance of forces,
Universe flung beyond universe, law of the stars and their courses,
Cosmos atomic stretched to the scale of the Infinite's measure.
Mute in the trance of the Eternal she sleeps with the stone and the azure.
Now she awakes; for life has just stirred in her, stretching first blindly
Outward for sense and its pleasure and pain and the gifts of the kindly
Mother of all, for her light and her air and the sap from her flowing,
Pleasure of bloom and inconscient beauty, pleasure of growing.
Then into mind she arises; heart's yearning awakes and reflection
Looks out on struggle and harmony, - conscious, her will of selection
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Studies her works and illumines the choice of her way; last, slowly
Inward she turns and stares at the Spirit within her. Holy
Silences brood in her heart and she feels in her ardent recesses
Passions too great for her frame, on her body immortal caresses.
Into the calm of the Greatness beyond her she enters, burning
Now with a light beyond thought's, towards Self and Infinity turning,
Turned to beatitude, turned to eternity, spiritual grandeur,
Power without limit, ecstasy imperishable, shadowless splendour.
Then to her mortals come, flashing, thoughts that are wisdom's fire-kernel;
Leaping her flame-sweeps of might and delight and of vision supernal
Kindle the word and the act, the Divine and humanity fusing,
Illuminations, trance-seeds of silence, flowers of musing, -
Light of our being that yet has to be, its glory and glimmer
Smiting with sunrise the soul of the sage and the heart of the dreamer.
Or is it all but a vain expectation and effort ungrounded,
Wings without body, sight without object, waters unsounded,
Hue of a shimmer that steals through some secret celestial portal,
Glory of a gleam or a dream in an animal brief-lived and mortal?
Are they not radiances native to heaven's more fortunate ether,
Won when we part from this body, this temporal house of a nether
Mystery of life lived in vain? Upon earth is the glory forbidden,
Nature for ever accursed, frustrated, grief-vexed, fate-ridden?
Half of the glory she dreamed of forgotten or lost in earth's darkness,
Half of it mangled and missed as the death-wheels whirl in their starkness,
Cast out from heaven a goddess rebellious with mind for her mirror,
Cursed with desire and self-will and doomed to self-torture and error,
Came she to birth then with God for her enemy? Were we created
He unwilling or sleeping? did someone transgress the fated
Limits he set, outwitting God? In the too hasty vision
Marred of some demiurge filmed there the blur of a fatal misprision,
Making a world that revolves on itself in a circuit of failure,
Aeons of striving, death for a recompense, Time for our tenure?
Out of him rather she came and for him are her cry and her labour;
Deep are her roots in him; topless she climbs, to his greatness a neighbour.
All is himself in her, brooding in darkness, mounting the sun-ways;
Air-flight to him is man's journey with heaven and earth for the runways.
He is the witness and doer, he is the loved and the lover,
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He the eternal Truth that we look in ourselves to discover.
All is his travel in Time; it is he who turns history's pages,
Act and event and result are the trail that he leaves through the ages;
Form and idea are his signs and number and sound are his symbols,
Music and singing, the word and its rhythm are Divinity's cymbals,
Thunder and surge are the drums of his marching. Through us, with urges
Self-ward, form-bound, mute, motionless, slowly inevitably emerges
Vast as the cosmos, minute as the atom, the Spirit eternal.
Often the gusts of his force illumining moments diurnal
Flame into speech and idea; transcendences splendid and subtle
Suddenly shoot through the weft of our lives from a magical shuttle;
Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers.
Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher;
Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature.
Out of his Void we arise to a mighty and shining existence,
Out of Inconscience, tearing the black Mask's giant resistance;
Waves of his consciousness well from him into these bodies in Nature,
Forms are put round him; his oneness, divided by mind's nomenclature,
High on the summits of being ponders immobile and single,
Penetrates atom and cell as the tide drenches sand-grain and shingle.
Oneness unknown to us dwells in these millions of figures and faces,
Wars with itself in our battles, loves in our clinging embraces,
Inly the self and the substance of things and their cause and their mover
Veiled in the depths which the foam of our thoughts and our life's billows cover,
Heaves like the sea in its waves; like heaven with its star-fires it gazes
Watching the world and its works. Interned in the finite's mazes,
Still shall he rise to his vast superconscience, we with him climbing;
Truth of man's thought with the truth of God's spirit faultlessly timing,
That which was mortal shall enter immortality's golden precincts,
Hushed breath of ecstasy, honey of lotus depths where the bee sinks,
Timeless expanses too still for the voice of the hours to inveigle,
Spaces of spirit too vast for the flight of the God-bearing eagle, -
Enter the Splendour that broods now unseen on us, deity invading,
Sight without error, light without shadow, beauty unfading,
Infinite largeness, rapture eternal, love none can sever,
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Life, not this death-play, but a power God-driven and blissful for ever.
"No," cry the wise, "for a circle was traced, there was pyloned a limit
Only we escape through dream's thin passages. None can disclaim it;
All things created are made by their borders, sketched out and coded;
Vain is the passion to divinise manhood, humanise godhead.
None can exceed himself; even to find oneself hard for our search is:
Only we see as in night by a lustre of flickering torches.
To be content with our measure, our space is the law of our living.
All of thyself to thy manhood and Nature and Circumstance giving,
Be what thou must be or be what thou canst be, one hour in an era.
Knowing the truth of thy days, shun the light of ideal and chimera:
Curb heart's impatience, bind thy desires down, pause from self-vexing."
Who is the nomad then? who is the seeker, the gambler risking
All for a dream in a dream, the old and the sure and the stable
Flung as a stake for a prize that was never yet laid on the table?
Always the world is expanding and growing from minute to minute;
Playing the march of the adventure of Time with our lives for her spinet
Maya or Nature, the wonderful Mother, strikes out surprising
Strains of the spirit disprisoned; creation heavenward rising
Wrestles with Time and Space and the Unknown to give form to the Formless.
Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race.
All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle.
Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. Guided by Powers that surround and precede us
Fearful and faltering steps are our perishing efforts that lead us
On through the rooms of the finite till open the limitless spaces
And we can look into all-seeing eyes and imperishable faces.
But we must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles:
Caught by the moments, held back from the spirit's timelessness, slowly
Wading in shallows we take not the sea-plunge vastly and wholly.
Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle.
Here in this world that knows not its morrow, this reason that stumbles
Onward from error to truth and from truth back to error while crumbles
All that it fashioned, after the passion and travail are ended,
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After the sacrifice offered when the will and the strength are expended,
Nothing is done but to have laid down one stone of a road without issue,
Added our quota of evil and good to an ambiguous tissue.
Destiny's lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory's inextricable twining.
In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven.
Ignorance darkens, death and inconscience gape to absorb us;
Thick and persistent the Night confronts us, its hunger enormous
Swallowing our work and our lives. Our love and our knowledge squandered
Lie like a treasure refused and trod down on the ways where we wandered;
All we have done is effaced by the thousands behind us arriving.
Trapped in a round fixed for ever circles our thought and our living.
Fiercely the gods in their jealousy strike down the heads that have neighboured
Even for a moment their skies; in the sands our achievements are gravured.
Yet survives bliss in the rhythm of our heart-beats, yet is there wonder,
Beauty's immortal delight, and the seals of the mystery sunder.
Honied a thousand whispers come, in the birds, in the breezes,
Moonlight, the voices of streams; with a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure.
Passionate we seek for him everywhere, yearn for some sign of him, calling,
Scanning the dust for his footprints, praying and stumbling and falling;
Nothing is found and no answer comes from the masks that are passing.
Memories linger, lines from the past like a half-faded tracing.
He has passed on into silence wearing his luminous mantle.
Out of the melodied distance a laugh rings pure-toned, infantile,
Sole reminder that he is, last signal recalling his presence.
There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
All things have bliss for their secret; only our consciousness falters
Fearing to offer itself as a victim on ecstasy's altars.
Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders.
Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning:
Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening
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Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther.
These too were magic of Maya, smiles of the marvellous Mother.
Oh, but the cruelty! oh, but the empty pain we go rueing!
Edges of opposite sweetness, calls to a closer pursuing.
All that we meet is a symbol and gateway; cryptic intention
Lurks in a common appearance, smiles from a casual mention:
Opposites hide in each other; in the laughter of Nature is danger,
Glory and greatness their embryos form in the womb of her anger.
Why are we terrified? wherefore cry out and draw back from the smiting -
Blows from the hands of a lover to direr exactions exciting,
Fiery points of his play! Was he Rudra only the mighty?
Whose were the whispers of sweetness, whose were the murmurs of pity?
Something opposes our grasp on the light and the sweetness and power,
Something within us, something without us, trap-door or tower,
Nature's gap in our being - or hinge! That device could we vanquish,
Once could we clasp him and hold, his joy we could never relinquish.
Then we could not be denied, for our might would be single and flawless.
Sons of the Eternal, sovereigns of Nature absolute and lawless,
Termlessly our souls would possess as he now enjoys and possesses,
Termlessly probe the delight of his laughter's lurking recesses,
Chasing its trail to the apex of sweetness and secrecy. Treasured
Close to the beats of Eternity's heart in a greatness unmeasured,
Locked into a miracle and mystery of Light we would live in him, - seated
Deep in his core of beatitude ceaselessly by Nature repeated,
Careless of Time, with no fear of an end, with no need for endeavour
Caught by his ecstasy dwell in a rapture enduring for ever.
What was the garden he built when the stars were first set in their places,
Soul and Nature together mid streams and in cloudless spaces
Naked and innocent? Someone offered a fruit of derision,
Knowledge of good and of evil, cleaving in God a division.
Though He who made all said, "It is good; I have fashioned perfection,"
"No, there is evil," someone whispered, "'tis screened from detection."
Wisest he of the beasts of the field, one cunning and creeping;
"See it," he said, "be wise; you shall be as the gods are, unsleeping,
They who know all." And they ate. The roots of our being were shaken;
Hatred and weeping and wrath at once trampled a world overtaken,
Terror and fleeing and anguish and shame and desires unsated;
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Cruelty stalked like a lion; Revenge and her brood were created.
Out to the desert he drove the rebellious. Flaming behind them
Streamed out the sword of his wrath and it followed leaping to find them,
Stabbing at random. The pure and the evil, the strong and the tempted,
All are confounded in punishment; justly is no one exempted.
Virtuous? yes, there are many, but who is there innocent? Toiling
Therefore we seek, but find not that Eden. Planting and spoiling,
"This is the garden," we say, "lo, the trees and this is the river."
Vainly redeemers came, not one has availed to deliver.
Never can Nature go back to her careless and childlike beginning,
Laugh of the babe and the song of the wheel in its delicate spinning,
Smile of the sun upon flowers and earth's beauty, life without labour
Plucking the fruits of the soil and rejoicing in cottage and arbour.
Once we have chosen to be as the gods, we must follow that motion.
Knowledge must grow in us, might like a Titan's, bliss like an ocean,
Calmness and purity born of the spirit's gaze on the Real,
Rapture of his oneness embracing the soul in a clasp hymeneal.
Was it not he once in Brindavan? Woods divine to our yearning,
Memorable always! O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning,
Grasses his herds have grazed and crushed by his feet in the dancing,
Yamuna flowing with song, through the greenness always advancing,
You unforgotten remind; for his flute with its sweetness ensnaring
Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring
Hales us out naked and absolute, out to his woodlands eternal,
Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal,
And we go stumbling, maddened and thrilled to his dreadful embraces,
Slaves of his rapture to Brindavan crowded with amorous faces,
Luminous kine in the green glades seated, soft-eyed gazing,
Flowers on the branches distressing us, moonbeams unearthly amazing,
Yamuna flowing before us, laughing low with her voices,
Brindavan arching o'er us where Shyama sports and rejoices.
Inly the miracle trembles repeated; mist-walls are broken
Hiding that country of God and we look on the wonderful token,
Clasp the beautiful body of the Eternal; his flute-call of yearning
Cries in our breast with its blissful anguish for ever returning;
Life flows past us with passionate voices, a heavenly river,
All our being goes back as a bride of his bliss to the Giver.
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Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting,
Gaze on its mighty Companion; the load of mortality casting,
Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander
Thrilling body and soul and its endless felicity squander;
All world-sorrow is finished, the cry of the parting is over;
Ecstasy laughs in our veins, in our heart is the heart of the Lover.
As when a stream from a highl and plateau green mid the mountains
Draws through broad lakes of delight the gracious sweep of its fountains,
Life from its heaven of desire comes down to the toil of the earth-ways;
Streaming through mire it pours still the mystical joy of its birthplace,
Green of its banks and the green of its trees and the hues of the flower.
Something of child-heart beauty, something of greatness and power,
Dwell with it still in its early torrent laughter and brightness,
Call in the youth of its floods and the voice of the wideness and whiteness.
But in its course are set darkness and fall and the spirit's ordeal.
Hating its narrowness, forced by an ardour to see all and be all,
Dashed on the inconscient rocks and straining through mud, over gravel,
Flows, like an ardent prisoner bound to the scenes of his travail,
Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart's toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow.
Out of the sun-rays and moon-rays, the winds' wing-glimmer and revel,
Out of the star-fields of wonder, down to earth's danger and evil
Headlong cast with a stridulant thunder, the doom-ways descending,
Shuddering below into sunless depths, across chasms unending,
Baulked of the might of its waters, a thread in a mountainous vastness,
Parcelled and scanted it hurries as if storming a Titan fastness,
Carving the hills with a sullen and lonely gigantic labour.
Hurled into strangling ravines it escapes with a leap and a quaver,
Breaks from the channels of hiding it grooves out and chisels and twistens,
Angry, afraid, white, foaming. A stony and monstrous resistance
Meets it piling up stubborn limits. Afflicted the river
Treasures a scattered sunbeam, moans for a god to deliver,
Longing to lapse through the plain's green felicity, yearning to widen
Joined to the ocean's shoreless eternity far-off and hidden.
High on the cliffs the Great Ones are watching, the Mighty and Deathless,
Soaring and plunging the roadway of the Gods climbs uplifted and breathless;
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Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us.
Ignorant, circled with death and the abyss, we have dreamed of a human
Paradise made from the mind of a man, from the heart of a woman,
Dreamed of the Isles of the Blest in a light of perpetual summer,
Dreamed of the joy of an earthly life with no pain for incomer.
Never, we said, can these waters from heaven be lost in the marshes,
Cease in the sands of the desert, die where the simoom parches;
Plains are beyond, there are hamlets and fields where the river rejoices
Pacing once more with a quiet step and with amical voices:
Bright amid woodlands red with the berries and cool with the breezes
Glimmer the leaves; all night long the heart of the nightingale eases
Sweetly its burden of pity and sorrow. There amid flowers
We shall take pleasure in arbours delightful, leng thening the hours,
Time for our servitor waiting our fancy through moments unhasting,
Under the cloudless blue of those skies of tranquillity resting,
Lying on beds of lilies, hearing the bells of the cattle
Tinkle, and drink red wine of life and go forth to the battle,
Fight and unwounded return to our beautiful home by the waters,
Fruit of our joy rear tall strong sons and radiant daughters.
Then shall the Virgins of Light come down to us clad in clear raiment
Woven from sunbeam and moonbeam and lightnings, limitless payment
Bring of our toil and our sorrow, carrying life-giving garlands
Plucked by the fountains of Paradise, bring from imperishable star-lands
Hymn-words of wisdom, visions of beauty, heaven-fruit ruddy,
Wine-cups of ecstasy sending the soul like a stream through the body.
Fate shall not know; if her spies come down to our beautiful valley,
They shall grow drunk with its grapes and wander in woodl and and alley.
There leaps the anger of Rudra? there will his lightnings immortal
Circle around with their red eye of cruelty stabbing the portal?
Fearless is there life's play; I shall sport with my dove from his highlands,
Drinking her laughter of bliss like a god in my Grecian islands.
Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle.
These are but dreams and the truth shall be greater. Heaven made woman!
Flower of beatitude! living shape of the bliss of the Brahman!
Art thou not she who shall bring into life and time the Eternal?
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Body of the summer of the Gods, a sweetness virginal, vernal,
Breathes from thy soul into Nature; Love sits dreaming in thy bosom,
Wisdom gazes from thy eyes, thy breasts of God-rapture are the blossom.
If but the joy of thy feet once could touch our spaces smiting
Earth with a ray from the Unknown, on the world's heart heaven's script writing,
All then would change into harmony and beauty, Time's doors shudder
Swinging wide on their hinges into Eternity, other
Voices than earth's would be fire in our speech and make deathless our thinking.
One who is hidden in Light would grow visible, multitudes linking,
Lyres of a single ecstasy, throbs of the one heart beating,
Wonderful bodies and souls in the spirit's identity meeting
Even as stars in sky-vastness know their kindred in grandeur.
Yet may it be that although in the hands of our destiny stands sure
Fixed to its hour the Decree of the Advent, still it is fated
Only when kindling earth's bodies a mightier Soul is created.
Far-off the gold and the greatness, the rapture too splendid and dire.
Are not the ages too young? too low in our hearts burns the fire.
Bringest thou only a gleam on the summits, a cry in the distance,
Seen by the eyes that are wakened, heard by a spirit that listens?
Form of the formless All-Beautiful, lodestar of Nature's aspirance,
Music of prelude giving a voice to the ineffable Silence,
First white dawn of the God-Light cast on these creatures that perish,
Word-key of a divine and eternal truth for mortals to cherish,
Come! let thy sweetness and force be a breath in the breast of the future
Making the god-ways alive, immortality's golden-red suture:
Deep in our lives there shall work out a honeyed celestial leaven,
Bliss shall grow native to being and earth be a kin-soil to heaven.
Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy beauty enamour.
Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the dawn-moment's glamour,
Forcing the heart of the Midnight where slumber and secrecy linger,
Guardians of Mystery, touching her bosom with thy luminous finger,
Daughter of Heaven, break through to me moonlike, mystic and gleaming;
Tread through the margins of twilight, cross over borders of dreaming.
Vision delightful alone on the peaks whom the silences cover,
Vision of bliss, stoop down to mortality, lean to thy lover.
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AHANA
Voice of the sensuous mortal, heart of eternal longing,
Thou who hast lived as in walls, thy soul with thy senses wronging!
But I descend at last. Fickle and terrible, sweet and deceiving,
Poison and nectar one has dispensed to thee, luring thee, leaving.
We two together shall capture the flute and the player relentless.
Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with the flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. But I come and midnight shall sunder.
Lo, I come, and behind me Knowledge descends and with thunder
Filling the spaces Strength, the Angel, bears on his bosom
Joy to thy arms. Thou shalt look on her face like a child's or a blossom,
Innocent, free as in Eden of old, not afraid of her playing,
When thy desires I have seized and devoured like a lioness preying.
Thou shalt not suffer always nor cry to me lured and forsaken:
I have a snare for his footsteps, I have a chain for him taken.
Come then to Brindavan, soul of the joyous; faster and faster
Follow the dance I shall teach thee with Shyama for slave and for master.
Follow the notes of the flute with a soul aware and exulting;
Trample Delight that submits and crouch to a sweetness insulting.
Then shalt thou know what the dance meant, fathom the song and the singer,
Hear behind thunder its rhymes, touched by lightning thrill to his finger,
Brindavan's rustle shalt understand and Yamuna's laughter,
Take thy place in the Ras1 and thy share of the ecstasy after.
1 The dance-round of Krishna with the cowherdesses in the moonlit groves of Brindavan, type of the dance of Divine Delight with the souls of men liberated in the world of
Bliss secret within us.
Poems from Manuscripts
Circa 1912 - 1913
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Ahana
,#NFDB
717: Ilion
Book I: The Book of the Herald
Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,
Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,
Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine.
Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness
Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty,
All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother.
Out of the formless vision of Night with its look on things hidden
Given to the gaze of the azure she lay in her garment of greenness,
Wearing light on her brow. In the dawn-ray lofty and voiceless
Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks into diamond lustres,
Ida first of the hills with the ranges silent beyond her
Watching the dawn in their giant companies, as since the ages
First began they had watched her, upbearing Time on their summits.
Troas cold on her plain awaited the boon of the sunshine.
There, like a hope through an emerald dream sole-pacing for ever,
Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his currents,
Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds and the grasses.
Headlong, impatient of Space and its boundaries, Time and its slowness,
Xanthus clamoured aloud as he ran to the far-surging waters,
Joining his call to the many-voiced roar of the mighty Aegean,
Answering Oceans limitless cry like a whelp to its parent.
Forests looked up through their rifts, the ravines grew aware of their shadows.
Closer now gliding glimmered the golden feet of the goddess.
Over the hills and the headlands spreading her garment of splendour,
Fateful she came with her eyes impartial looking on all things,
Bringer to man of the day of his fortune and day of his downfall.
Full of her luminous errand, careless of eve and its weeping,
Fateful she paused unconcerned above Ilions mysteried greatness,
Domes like shimmering tongues of the crystal flames of the morning,
Opalesque rhythm-line of tower-tops, notes of the lyre of the sungod.
High over all that a nation had built and its love and its laughter,
Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market and temple,
Looking on men who must die and women destined to sorrow,
Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter,
Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals,
Deep in the invisible air that folds in the race and its morrows
Fixed it, and passed on smiling the smile of the griefless and deathless,
Dealers of death though death they know not, who in the morning
Scatter the seed of the event for the reaping ready at nightfall.
Over the brooding of plains and the agelong trance of the summits
Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal,
And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sungod,
Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas.
Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether,
Swiftly when Life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift,
And, with the choice that has chanced or the fate man has called and now suffers
Weighted, the moment travels driving the past towards the future,
Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it carries.
Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.
Earth sees not; lifes clamour deafens the ear of the spirit:
Man knows not; least knows the messenger chosen for the summons.
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his hearts ignorant whisper,
Whistle of winds in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature.
Now too the messenger hastened driving the car of the errand:
Even while dawn was a gleam in the east, he had cried to his coursers.
Half yet awake in lights turrets started the scouts of the morning
Hearing the jar of the wheels and the throb of the hooves exultation,
Hooves of the horses of Greece as they galloped to Phrygian Troya.
Proudly they trampled through Xanthus thwarting the foam of his anger,
Whinnying high as in scorn crossed Simois tangled currents,
Xanthus reed-girdled twin, the gentle and sluggard river.
One and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was he, shrunken,
Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with strength Cyclopean
Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals,
Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.
Ilion, couchant, saw him arrive from the sea and the darkness.
Heard mid the faint slow stirrings of life in the sleep of the city,
Rapid there neared a running of feet, and the cry of the summons
Beat round the doors that guarded the domes of the splendour of Priam.
Wardens charged with the night, ye who stand in Laomedons gateway,
Waken the Ilian kings. Talthybius, herald of Argos,
Parleying stands at the portals of Troy in the grey of the dawning.
High and insistent the call. In the dimness and hush of his chamber
Charioted far in his dreams amid visions of glory and terror,
Scenes of a vivider world,though blurred and deformed in the brain-cells,
Vague and inconsequent, there full of colour and beauty and greatness,
Suddenly drawn by the pull of the conscious thread of the earth-bond
And of the needs of Time and the travail assigned in the transience
Warned by his body, Deiphobus, reached in that splendid remoteness,
Touched through the nerve-ways of life that branch to the brain of the dreamer,
Heard the terrestrial call and slumber startled receded
Sliding like dew from the mane of a lion. Reluctant he travelled
Back from the light of the fields beyond death, from the wonderful kingdoms
Where he had wandered a soul among souls in the countries beyond us,
Free from the toil and incertitude, free from the struggle and danger:
Now, compelled, he returned from the respite given to the time-born,
Called to the strife and the wounds of the earth and the burden of daylight.
He from the carven couch upreared his giant stature.
Haste-spurred he laved his eyes and regained earths memories, haste-spurred
Donning apparel and armour strode through the town of his fathers,
Watched by her gods on his way to his fate, towards Pergamas portals.
Nine long years had passed and the tenth now was wearily ending,
Years of the wrath of the gods, and the leaguer still threatened the ramparts
Since through a tranquil morn the ships came past Tenedos sailing
And the first Argive fell slain as he leaped on the Phrygian beaches;
Still the assailants attacked, still fought back the stubborn defenders.
When the reward is withheld and endlessly leng thens the labour,
Weary of fruitless toil grows the transient heart of the mortal.
Weary of battle the invaders warring hearthless and homeless
Prayed to the gods for release and return to the land of their fathers:
Weary of battle the Phrygians beset in their beautiful city
Prayed to the gods for an end of the danger and mortal encounter.
Long had the high-beached ships forgotten their measureless ocean.
Greece seemed old and strange to her children camped on the beaches,
Old like a life long past one remembers hardly believing
But as a dream that has happened, but as the tale of another.
Time with his tardy touch and Nature changing our substance
Slowly had dimmed the faces loved and the scenes once cherished:
Yet was the dream still dear to them longing for wife and for children,
Longing for hearth and glebe in the far-off valleys of Hellas.
Always like waves that swallow the shingles, lapsing, returning,
Tide of the battle, race of the onset relentlessly thundered
Over the Phrygian corn-fields. Trojan wrestled with Argive,
Caria, Lycia, Thrace and the war-lord mighty Achaia
Joined in the clasp of the fight. Death, panic and wounds and disaster,
Glory of conquest and glory of fall, and the empty hearth-side,
Weeping and fortitude, terror and hope and the pang of remembrance,
Anguish of hearts, the lives of the warriors, the strength of the nations
Thrown were like weights into Destinys scales, but the balance wavered
Pressed by invisible hands. For not only the mortal fighters,
Heroes half divine whose names are like stars in remoteness,
Triumphed and failed and were winds or were weeds on the dance of the surges,
But from the peaks of Olympus and shimmering summits of Ida
Gleaming and clanging the gods of the antique ages descended.
Hidden from human knowledge the brilliant shapes of Immortals
Mingled unseen in the mellay, or sometimes, marvellous, maskless,
Forms of undying beauty and power that made tremble the heart-strings
Parting their deathless secrecy crossed through the borders of vision,
Plain as of old to the demigods out of their glory emerging,
Heard by mortal ears and seen by the eyeballs that perish.
Mighty they came from their spaces of freedom and sorrowless splendour.
Sea-vast, trailing the azure hem of his clamorous waters,
Blue-lidded, maned with the Night, Poseidon smote for the future,
Earth-shaker who with his trident releases the coils of the Dragon,
Freeing the forces unborn that are locked in the caverns of Nature.
Calm and unmoved, upholding the Word that is Fate and the order
Fixed in the sight of a Will foreknowing and silent and changeless,
Hera sent by Zeus and Athene lifting his aegis
Guarded the hidden decree. But for Ilion, loud as the surges,
Ares impetuous called to the fire in mens hearts, and his passion
Woke in the shadowy depths the forms of the Titan and demon;
Dumb and coerced by the grip of the gods in the abyss of the being,
Formidable, veiled they sit in the grey subconscient darkness
Watching the sleep of the snake-haired Erinnys. Miracled, haloed,
Seer and magician and prophet who beholds what the thought cannot witness,
Lifting the godhead within us to more than a human endeavour,
Slayer and saviour, thinker and mystic, leaped from his sun-peaks
Guarding in Ilion the wall of his mysteries Delphic Apollo.
Heavens strengths divided swayed in the whirl of the Earth-force.
All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages;
Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure;
Goal seems there none for the ball that is chased throughout Time by the Fate-teams;
Evil once ended renews and no issue comes out of living:
Only an Eye unseen can distinguish the thread of its workings.
Such seemed the rule of the pastime of Fate on the plains of the Troad;
All went backwards and forwards tossed in the swing of the death-game.
Vain was the toil of the heroes, the blood of the mighty was squandered,
Spray as of surf on the cliffs when it moans unappeased, unrequited
Age after fruitless age. Day hunted the steps of the nightfall;
Joy succeeded to grief; defeat only greatened the vanquished,
Victory offered an empty delight without guerdon or profit.
End there was none of the effort and end there was none of the failure.
Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate measure
Faced and turned as a man and a maiden trampling the grasses
Face and turn and they laugh in their joy of the dance and each other.
These were gods and they trampled lives. But though Time is immortal,
Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish ends like the rapture.
Artists of Nature content with their work in the plan of the transience,
Beautiful, deathless, august, the Olympians turned from the carnage,
Leaving the battle already decided, leaving the heroes
Slain in their minds, Troy burned, Greece left to her glory and downfall.
Into their heavens they rose up mighty like eagles ascending
Fanning the world with their wings. As the great to their luminous mansions
Turn from the cry and the strife, forgetting the wounded and fallen,
Calm they repose from their toil and incline to the joy of the banquet,
Watching the feet of the wine-bearers rosily placed on the marble,
Filling their hearts with ease, so they to their sorrowless ether
Passed from the wounded earth and its air that is ploughed with mens anguish;
Calm they reposed and their hearts inclined to the joy and the silence.
Lifted was the burden laid on our wills by their starry presence:
Man was restored to his smallness, the world to its inconscient labour.
Life felt a respite from height, the winds breathed freer delivered;
Light was released from their blaze and the earth was released from their greatness.
But their immortal content from the struggle titanic departed.
Vacant the noise of the battle roared like the sea on the shingles;
Wearily hunted the spears their quarry; strength was disheartened;
Silence increased with the march of the months on the tents of the leaguer.
But not alone on the Achaians the steps of the moments fell heavy;
Slowly the shadow deepened on Ilion mighty and scornful:
Dragging her days went by; in the rear of the hearts of her people
Something that knew what they dared not know and the mind would not utter,
Something that smote at her soul of defiance and beauty and laughter,
Darkened the hours. For Doom in her sombre and giant uprising
Neared, assailing the skies: the sense of her lived in all pastimes;
Time was pursued by unease and a terror woke in the midnight:
Even the ramparts felt her, stones that the gods had erected.
Now no longer she dallied and played, but bounded and hastened,
Seeing before her the end and, imagining massacre calmly,
Laughed and admired the flames and rejoiced in the cry of the captives.
Under her, dead to the watching immortals, Deiphobus hastened
Clanging in arms through the streets of the beautiful insolent city,
Brilliant, a gleaming husk but empty and left by the daemon.
Even as a star long extinguished whose light still travels the spaces,
Seen in its form by men, but itself goes phantom-like fleeting
Void and null and dark through the uncaring infinite vastness,
So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from the Real.
Timeless its vision of Time creates the hour by things coming.
Borne on a force from the past and no more by a power for the future
Mighty and bright was his body, but shadowy the shape of his spirit
Only an eidolon seemed of the being that had lived in him, fleeting
Vague like a phantom seen by the dim Acherontian waters.
But to the guardian towers that watched over Pergamas gateway
Out of the waking city Deiphobus swiftly arriving
Called, and swinging back the huge gates slowly, reluctant,
Flung Troy wide to the entering Argive. Ilions portals
Parted admitting her destiny, then with a sullen and iron
Cry they closed. Mute, staring, grey like a wolf descended
Old Talthybius, propping his steps on the staff of his errand;
Feeble his body, but fierce still his glance with the fire within him;
Speechless and brooding he gazed on the hated and coveted city.
Suddenly, seeking heaven with her buildings hewn as for Titans,
Marvellous, rhythmic, a child of the gods with marble for raiment,
Smiting the vision with harmony, splendid and mighty and golden,
Ilion stood up around him entrenched in her giant defences.
Strength was uplifted on strength and grandeur supported by grandeur;
Beauty lay in her lap. Remote, hieratic and changeless,
Filled with her deeds and her dreams her gods looked out on the Argive,
Helpless and dumb with his hate as he gazed on her, they too like mortals
Knowing their centuries past, not knowing the morrow before them.
Dire were his eyes upon Troya the beautiful, his face like a doom-mask:
All Greece gazed in them, hated, admired, grew afraid, grew relentless.
But to the Greek Deiphobus cried and he turned from his passion
Fixing his ominous eyes with the god in them straight on the Trojan:
Messenger, voice of Achaia, wherefore confronting the daybreak
Comest thou driving thy car from the sleep of the tents that besiege us?
Fateful, I deem, was the thought that, conceived in the silence of midnight,
Raised up thy aged limbs from the couch of their rest in the stillness,
Thoughts of a mortal but forged by the Will that uses our members
And of its promptings our speech and our acts are the tools and the image.
Oft from the veil and the shadow they leap out like stars in their brightness,
Lights that we think our own, yet they are but tokens and counters,
Signs of the Forces that flow through us serving a Power that is secret.
What in the dawning bringst thou to Troya the mighty and dateless
Now in the ending of Time when the gods are weary of struggle?
Sends Agamemnon challenge or courtesy, Greek, to the Trojans?
High like the northwind answered the voice of the doom from Achaia:
Trojan Deiphobus, daybreak, silence of night and the evening
Sink and arise and even the strong sun rests from his splendour.
Not for the servant is rest nor Time is his, only his death-pyre.
I have not come from the monarch of men or the armoured assembly
Held on the wind-swept marge of the thunder and laughter of ocean.
One in his singleness greater than kings and multitudes sends me.
I am a voice out of Phthia, I am the will of the Hellene.
Peace in my right I bring to you, death in my left hand. Trojan,
Proudly receive them, honour the gifts of the mighty Achilles.
Death accept, if Ate deceives you and Doom is your lover,
Peace if your fate can turn and the god in you chooses to hearken.
Full is my heart and my lips are impatient of speech undelivered.
It was not made for the streets or the market, nor to be uttered
Meanly to common ears, but where counsel and majesty harbour
Far from the crowd in the halls of the great and to wisdom and foresight
Secrecy whispers, there I will speak among Ilions princes.
Envoy, answered the Laomedontian, voice of Achilles,
Vain is the offer of peace that sets out with a threat for its prelude.
Yet will we hear thee. Arise who are fleetest of foot in the gateway,
Thou, Thrasymachus, haste. Let the domes of the mansion of Ilus
Wake to the bruit of the Hellene challenge. Summon Aeneas.
Even as the word sank back into stillness, doffing his mantle
Started to run at the bidding a swift-footed youth of the Trojans
First in the race and the battle, Thrasymachus son of Aretes.
He in the dawn disappeared into swiftness. Deiphobus slowly,
Measuring Fate with his thoughts in the troubled vasts of his spirit,
Back through the stir of the city returned to the house of his fathers,
Taming his mighty stride to the pace infirm of the Argive.
But with the god in his feet Thrasymachus rapidly running
Came to the halls in the youth of the wonderful city by Ilus
Built for the joy of the eye; for he rested from war and, triumphant,
Reigned adored by the prostrate nations. Now when all ended,
Last of its mortal possessors to walk in its flowering gardens,
Great Anchises lay in that luminous house of the ancients
Soothing his restful age, the far-warring victor Anchises,
High Bucoleons son and the father of Rome by a goddess;
Lonely and vagrant once in his boyhood divine upon Ida
White Aphrodite ensnared him and she loosed her ambrosial girdle
Seeking a mortals love. On the threshold Thrasymachus halted
Looking for servant or guard, but felt only a loneness of slumber
Drawing the souls sight within away from its life and things human;
Soundless, unheeding, the vacant corridors fled into darkness.
He to the shades of the house and the dreams of the echoing rafters
Trusted his high-voiced call, and from chambers still dim in their twilight
Strong Aeneas armoured and mantled, leonine striding,
Came, Anchises son; for the dawn had not found him reposing,
But in the night he had left his couch and the clasp of Cresa,
Rising from sleep at the call of his spirit that turned to the waters
Prompted by Fate and his mother who guided him, white Aphrodite.
Still with the impulse of speed Thrasymachus greeted Aeneas:
Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top.
Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the morning,
Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we can see it,
Glows on their anvils of destiny, clang we can hear of their hammers.
Something they forge there sitting unknown in the silence eternal,
Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose who are masters
Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out their iron caprices.
Troy is their stage and Argos their background; we are their puppets.
Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. Action and impulse,
Yearning and thought are their engines, our will is their shadow and helper.
Now too, deeming he comes with a purpose framed by a mortal,
Shaft of their will they have shot from the bow of the Grecian leaguer,
Lashing themselves at his steeds, Talthybius sent by Achilles.
Busy the gods are always, Thrasymachus son of Aretes,
Weaving Fate on their looms, and yesterday, now and tomorrow
Are but the stands they have made with Space and Time for their timber,
Frame but the dance of their shuttle. What eye unamazed by their workings
Ever can pierce where they dwell and uncover their far-stretching purpose?
Silent they toil, they are hid in the clouds, they are wrapped with the midnight.
Yet to Apollo I pray, the Archer friendly to mortals,
Yet to the rider on Fate I abase myself, wielder of thunder,
Evil and doom to avert from my fatherland. All night Morpheus,
He who with shadowy hands heaps error and truth upon mortals,
Stood at my pillow with images. Dreaming I erred like a phantom
Helpless in Ilions streets with the fire and the foeman around me.
Red was the smoke as it mounted triumphant the house-top of Priam,
Clang of the arms of the Greeks was in Troya, and thwarting the clangour
Voices were crying and calling me over the violent Ocean
Borne by the winds of the West from a land where Hesperus harbours.
Brooding they ceased, for their thoughts grew heavy upon them and voiceless.
Then, in a farewell brief and unthought and unconscious of meaning,
Parting they turned to their tasks and their lives now close but soon severed:
Destined to perish even before his perishing nation,
Back to his watch at the gate sped Thrasymachus rapidly running;
Large of pace and swift, but with eyes absorbed and unseeing,
Driven like a car of the gods by the whip of his thoughts through the highways,
Turned to his mighty future the hero born of a goddess.
One was he chosen to ascend into greatness through fall and disaster,
Loser of his world by the will of a heaven that seemed ruthless and adverse,
Founder of a newer and greater world by daring adventure.
Now, from the citadels rise with the townships crowding below it
High towards a pondering of domes and the mystic Palladium climbing,
Fronted with the morning ray and joined by the winds of the ocean,
Fate-weighed up Troys slope strode musing strong Aeneas.
Under him silent the slumbering roofs of the city of Ilus
Dreamed in the light of the dawn; above watched the citadel, sleepless
Lonely and strong like a goddess white-limbed and bright on a hill-top,
Looking far out at the sea and the foe and the prowling of danger.
Over the brow he mounted and saw the palace of Priam,
Home of the gods of the earth, Laomedons marvellous vision
Held in the thought that accustomed his will to unearthly achievement
And in the blaze of his spirit compelling heaven with its greatness,
Dreamed by the harp of Apollo, a melody caught into marble.
Out of his mind it arose like an epic canto by canto;
Each of its halls was a strophe, its chambers lines of an epode,
Victor chant of Ilions destiny. Absent he entered,
Voiceless with thought, the brilliant megaron crowded with paintings,
Paved with a splendour of marble, and saw Deiphobus seated,
Son of the ancient house by the opulent hearth of his fathers,
And at his side like a shadow the grey and ominous Argive.
Happy of light like a lustrous star when it welcomes the morning,
Brilliant, beautiful, glamoured with gold and a fillet of gem-fire,
Paris, plucked from the song and the lyre by the Grecian challenge,
Came with the joy in his face and his eyes that Fate could not alter.
Ever a child of the dawn at play near a turn of the sun-roads,
Facing destinys look with the careless laugh of a comrade,
He with his vision of delight and beauty brightening the earth-field
Passed through its peril and grief on his way to the ambiguous Shadow.
Last from her chamber of sleep where she lay in the Ilian mansion
Far in the heart of the house with the deep-bosomed daughters of Priam,
Noble and tall and erect in a nimbus of youth and of glory,
Claiming the world and life as a fief of her strength and her courage,
Dawned through a doorway that opened to distant murmurs and laughter,
Capturing the eye like a smile or a sunbeam, Penthesilea.
She from the threshold cried to the herald, crossing the marble,
Regal and fleet, with her voice that was mighty and dire in its sweetness.
What with such speed has impelled from the wind-haunted beaches of Troas,
Herald, thy car though the sun yet hesitates under the mountains?
Comest thou humbler to Troy, Talthybius, now than thou camest
Once when the streams of my East sang low to my ear, not this Ocean
Loud, and I roamed in my mountains uncalled by the voice of Apollo?
Bringest thou dulcet-eyed peace or, sweeter to Penthesilea,
Challenge of war when the spears fall thick on the shields of the fighters,
Lightly the wheels leap onward chanting the anthem of Ares,
Death is at work in his fields and the heart is enamoured of danger?
What says Odysseus, the baffled Ithacan? what Agamemnon?
Are they then weary of war who were rapid and bold and triumphant,
Now that their gods are reluctant, now victory darts not from heaven
Down from the clouds above Ida directing the luminous legions
Armed by Fate, now Pallas forgets, now Poseidon slumbers?
Bronze were their throats to the battle like bugles blaring in chorus;
Mercy they knew not, but shouted and ravened and ran to the slaughter
Eager as hounds when they chase, till a woman met them and stayed them,
Loud my war-shout rang by Scamander. Herald of Argos,
What say the vaunters of Greece to the virgin Penthesilea?
High was the Argives answer confronting the mighty in Troya.
Princes of Pergama, whelps of the lion who roar for the mellay,
Suffer my speech! It shall ring like a spear on the hearts of the mighty.
Blame not the herald; his voice is an impulse, an echo, a channel
Now for the timbrels of peace and now for the drums of the battle.
And I have come from no cautious strength, from no half-hearted speaker,
But from the Phthian. All know him! Proud is his soul as his fortunes,
Swift as his sword and his spear are the speech and the wrath from his bosom.
I am his envoy, herald am I of the conquering Argives.
Has not one heard in the night when the breezes whisper and shudder,
Dire, the voice of a lion unsatisfied, gnawed by his hunger,
Seeking his prey from the gods? For he prowls through the glens of the mountains,
Errs a dangerous gleam in the woodlands, fatal and silent.
So for a while he endures, for a while he seeks and he suffers
Patient yet in his terrible grace as assured of his banquet;
But he has lacked too long and he lifts his head and to heaven
Roars in his wonder, incensed, impatiently. Startled the valleys
Shrink from the dreadful alarum, the cattle gallop to shelter.
Arming the herdsmen cry to each other for comfort and courage.
So Talthybius spoke, as a harper voicing his prelude
Touches his strings to a varied music, seeks for a concord;
Long his strain he prepares. But one broke in on the speaker,
Sweet was his voice like a harps though heard in the front of the onset,
One of the sons of Fate by the people loved whom he ruined,
Leader in counsel and battle, the Priamid, he in his beauty
Carelessly walking who scattered the seeds of Titanic disaster.
Surely thou dreamedst at night and awaking thy dreams have not left thee!
Hast thou not woven thy words to intimidate children in Argos
Sitting alarmed in the shadows who listen pale to their nurses?
Greek, thou art standing in Ilion now and thou facest her princes.
Use not thy words but thy kings. If friendship their honey-breathed burden,
Friendship we clasp from Achilles, but challenge outpace with our challenge
Meeting the foe ere he moves in his will to the clash of encounter.
Such is the way of the Trojans since Phryx by the Hellespont halting
Seated Troy on her hill with the Ocean for comrade and sister.
Shaking in wrath his filleted head Talthybius answered:
Princes, ye speak their words who drive you! Thus said Achilles:
Rise, Talthybius, meet in her spaces the car of the morning;
Challenge her coursers divine as they bound through the plains of the Troad.
Hasten, let not the day wear gold ere thou stand in her ramparts.
Herald charged with my will to a haughty and obstinate nation,
Speak in the palace of Priam the word of the Phthian Achilles.
Freely and not as his vassal who leads, Agamemnon, the Argive,
But as a ruler in Hellas I send thee, king of my nations.
Long I have walked apart from the mellay of gods in the Troad,
Long has my listless spear leaned back on the peace of my tent-side,
Deaf to the talk of the trumpets, the whine of the chariots speeding;
Sole with my heart I have lived, unheeding the Hellene murmur,
Chid when it roared for the hunt the lion pack of the war-god,
Day after day I walked at dawn and in blush of the sunset,
Far by the call of the seas and alone with the gods and my dreaming,
Leaned to the unsatisfied chant of my heart and the rhythms of ocean,
Sung to by hopes that were sweet-lipped and vain. For Polyxenas brothers
Still are the brood of the Titan Laomedon slain in his greatness,
Engines of God unable to bear all the might that they harbour.
Awe they have chid from their hearts, nor our common humanity binds them,
Stay have they none in the gods who approve, giving calmness to mortals:
But like the Titans of old they have hugged to them grandeur and ruin.
Seek then the race self-doomed, the leaders blinded by heaven
Not in the agora swept by the winds of debate and the shoutings
Lion-voiced, huge of the people! In Troyas high-crested mansion
Speak out my word to the hero Deiphobus, head of the mellay,
Paris the racer of doom and the stubborn strength of Aeneas.
Herald of Greece, when thy feet shall be pressed on the gold and the marble,
Rise in the Ilian megaron, curb not the cry of the challenge.
Thus shalt thou say to them striking the ground with the staff of defiance,
Fronting the tempests of war, the insensate, the gamblers with downfall.
Princes of Troy, I have sat in your halls, I have slept in your chambers;
Not in the battle alone as a warrior glad of his foemen,
Glad of the strength that mates with his own, in peace we encountered.
Marvelling I sat in the halls of my enemies, close to the bosoms
Scarred by the dints of my sword and the eyes I had seen through the battle,
Ate rejoicing the food of the East at the tables of Priam
Served by the delicatest hands in the world, by Hecubas daughter,
Or with our souls reconciled in some careless and rapturous midnight
Drank of the sweetness of Phrygian wine, admiring your bodies
Shaped by the gods indeed, and my spirit revolted from hatred,
Softening it yearned in its strings to the beauty and joy of its foemen,
Yearned from the death that oertakes and the flame that cries and desires
Even at the end to save and even on the verge to deliver
Troy and her wonderful works and her sons and her deep-bosomed daughters.
Warned by the gods who reveal to the heart what the mind cannot hearken
Deaf with its thoughts, I offered you friendship, I offered you bridal,
Hellas for comrade, Achilles for brother, the world for enjoyment
Won by my spear. And one heard my call and one turned to my seeking.
Why is it then that the war-cry sinks not to rest by the Xanthus?
We are not voices from Argolis, Lacedaemonian tricksters,
Splendid and subtle and false; we are speakers of truth, we are Hellenes,
Men of the northl and faithful in friendship and noble in anger,
Strong like our fathers of old. But you answered my truth with evasion
Hoping to seize what I will not yield and you flattered your people.
Long have I waited for wisdom to dawn on your violent natures.
Lonely I paced oer the sands by the thousand-throated waters
Praying to Pallas the wise that the doom might turn from your mansions,
Buildings delightful, gracious as rhythms, lyrics in marble,
Works of the transient gods, and I yearned for the end of the war-din
Hoping that Death might relent to the beautiful sons of the Trojans.
Far from the cry of the spears, from the speed and the laughter of axles,
Heavy upon me like iron the intolerable yoke of inaction
Weighed like a load on a runner. The war-cry rose by Scamander;
Xanthus was crossed on a bridge of the fallen, not by Achilles.
Often I stretched out my hand to the spear, for the Trojan beaches
Rang with the voice of Deiphobus shouting and slaying the Argives;
Often my heart like an anxious mother for Greece and her children
Leaped, for the air was full of the leonine roar of Aeneas.
Always the evening fell or the gods protected the Argives.
Then by the moat of the ships, on the hither plain of the Xanthus
New was the voice that climbed through the din and sailed on the breezes,
High, insistent, clear, and it shouted an unknown war-cry
Threatening doom to the peoples. A woman had come in to aid you,
Regal and insolent, fair as the morning and fell as the northwind,
Freed from the distaff who grasps at the sword and she spurns at subjection
Breaking the rule of the gods. She is turbulent, swift in the battle.
Clanging her voice of the swan as a summons to death and disaster,
Fleet-footed, happy and pitiless, laughing she runs to the slaughter;
Strong with the gait that allures she leaps from her car to the slaying,
Dabbles in blood smooth hands like lilies. Europe astonished
Reels from her shock to the Ocean. She is the panic and mellay,
War is her paean, the chariots thunder of Penthesilea.
Doom was her coming, it seems, to the men of the West and their legions;
Ajax sleeps for ever, Meriones lies on the beaches.
One by one they are falling before you, the great in Achaia.
Ever the wounded are borne like the stream of the ants when they forage
Past my ships, and they hush their moans as they near and in silence
Gaze at the legions inactive accusing the fame of Achilles.
Still have I borne with you, waited a little, looked for a summons,
Longing for bridal torches, not flame on the Ilian housetops,
Blood in the chambers of sweetness, the golden amorous city
Swallowed by doom. Not broken I turned from the wrestle Titanic,
Hopeless, weary of toil in the ebb of my glorious spirit,
But from my stress of compassion for doom of the kindred nations,
But for her sake whom my soul desires, for the daughter of Priam.
And for Polyxenas sake I will speak to you yet as your lover
Once ere the Fury, abrupt from Erebus, deaf to your crying,
Mad with the joy of the massacre, seizes on wealth and on women
Calling to Fire as it strides and Ilion sinks into ashes.
Yield; for your doom is impatient. No longer your helpers hasten,
Legions swift to your call; the yoke of your pride and your splendour
Lies not now on the nations of earth as when Fortune desired you,
Strength was your slave and Troya the lioness hungrily roaring
Threatened the western world from her ramparts built by Apollo.
Gladly released from the thraldom they hated, the insolent shackles
Curbing their manhood the peoples arise and they pray for your ruin;
Piled are their altars with gifts; their blessings help the Achaians.
Memnon came, but he sleeps, and the faces swart of his nation
Darken no more like a cloud over thunder and surge of the onset.
Wearily Lycia fights; far fled are the Carian levies.
Thrace retreats to her plains preferring the whistle of stormwinds
Or on the banks of the Strymon to wheel in her Orphean measure,
Not in the revel of swords and fronting the spears of the Hellenes.
Princes of Pergama, open your gates to our Peace who would enter,
Life in her gracious clasp and forgetfulness, grave of earths passions,
Healer of wounds and the past. In a comity equal, Hellenic,
Asia join with Greece, one world from the frozen rivers
Trod by the hooves of the Scythian to farthest undulant Ganges.
Tyndarid Helen resign, the desirable cause of your danger,
Back to Greece that is empty long of her smile and her movements.
Broider with riches her coming, pomp of her slaves and the waggons
Endlessly groaning with gold that arrive with the ransom of nations.
So shall the Fury be pacified, she who exultant from Sparta
Breathed in the sails of the Trojan ravisher helping his oarsmen.
So shall the gods be appeased and the thoughts of their wrath shall be cancelled,
Justice contented trace back her steps and for brands of the burning
Torches delightful shall break into Troy with the swords of the bridal.
I like a bridegroom will seize on your city and clasp and defend her
Safe from the envy of Argos, from Lacedaemonian hatred,
Safe from the hunger of Crete and the Locrians violent rapine.
But if you turn from my voice and you hearken only to Ares
Crying for battle within you deluded by Hera and Pallas,
Swiftly the fierce deaths surges shall close over Troy and her ramparts
Built by the gods shall be stubble and earth to the tread of the Hellene.
For to my tents I return not, I swear it by Zeus and Apollo,
Master of Truth who sits within Delphi fathomless brooding
Sole in the caverns of Nature and hearkens her underground murmur,
Giving my oath to his keeping mute and stern who forgets not,
Not from the panting of Ares toil to repose, from the wrestle
Locked of hope and death in the ruthless clasp of the mellay
Leaving again the Trojan ramparts unmounted, leaving
Greece unavenged, the Aegean a lake and Europe a province.
Choosing from Hellas exile, from Peleus and Deidamia,
Choosing the field for my chamber of sleep and the battle for hearthside
I shall go warring on till Asia enslaved to my footsteps
Feels the tread of the God in my sandal pressed on her bosom.
Rest shall I then when the borders of Greece are fringed with the Ganges;
Thus shall the past pay its Titan ransom and, Fate her balance
Changing, a continent ravished suffer the fortune of Helen.
This I have sworn allying my will to Zeus and Ananke.
So was it spoken, the Phthian challenge. Silent the heroes
Looked back amazed on their past and into the night of their future.
Silent their hearts felt a grasp from gods and had hints of the heavens.
Hush was awhile in the room, as if Fate were trying her balance
Poised on the thoughts of her mortals. At length with a musical laughter
Sweet as the jangling of bells upon anklets leaping in measure
Answered aloud to the gods the virgin Penthesilea.
Long I had heard in my distant realms of the fame of Achilles,
Ignorant still while I played with the ball and ran in the dances
Thinking not ever to war; but I dreamed of the shock of the hero.
So might a poet inland who imagines the rumour of Ocean,
Yearn with his lust for the giant upheaval, the dance as of hill-tops,
Toss of the yellow mane and the tawny march and the voices
Lionlike claiming earth as a prey for the clamorous waters.
So have I longed as I came for the cry and the speed of Achilles.
But he has lurked in his ships, he has sulked like a boy that is angry.
Glad am I now of his soul that arises hungry for battle,
Glad, whether victor I live or defeated travel the shadows.
Once shall my spear have rung on the shield of the Phthian Achilles.
Peace I desire not. I came to a haughty and resolute nation,
Honour and fame they cherish, not life by the gift of a foeman.
Sons of the ancient house on whom Ilion looks as on Titans,
Chiefs whom the world admires, do you fear then the shock of the Phthian?
Gods, it is said, have decided your doom. Are you less in your greatness?
Are you not gods to reverse their decrees or unshaken to suffer?
Memnon is dead and the Carians leave you? Lycia lingers?
But from the streams of my East I have come to you, Penthesilea.
Virgin of Asia, answered Talthybius, doom of a nation
Brought thee to Troy and her haters Olympian shielded thy coming,
Vainly who feedest mens hearts with a hope that the gods have rejected.
Doom in thy sweet voice utters her counsels robed like a woman.
Answered the virgin disdainfully, wroth at the words of the Argive:
Hast thou not ended the errand they gave thee, envoy of Hellas?
Not, do I think, as our counsellor camst thou elected from Argos,
Nor as a lover to Troy hast thou hastened with amorous footing
Hurting thy heart with her frowardness. Hatred and rapine sent thee,
Greed of the Ilian gold and lust of the Phrygian women,
Voice of Achaian aggression! Doom am I truly; let Gnossus
Witness it, Salamis speak of my fatal arrival and Argos
Silent remember her wounds. But the Argive answered the virgin:
Hearken then to the words of the Hellene, Penthesilea.
Virgin to whom earths strongest are corn in the sweep of thy sickle,
Lioness vain of thy bruit who besiegest the paths of the battle!
Art thou not satiate yet? hast thou drunk then so little of slaughter?
Death has ascended thy car; he has chosen thy hand for his harvest.
But I have heard of thy pride and disdain, how thou scornest the Argives
And of thy fate thou complainest that ever averse to thy wishes
Cloisters the Phthian and matches with weaklings Penthesilea.
Not of the Ithacan boar nor the wild-cat littered in Locris
Nor of the sleek-coat Argive wild-bulls sates me the hunting;
So hast thou said, I would bury my spear in the lion of Hellas.
Blind and infatuate, art thou not beautiful, bright as the lightning?
Were not thy limbs made cunningly linking sweetness to sweetness?
Is not thy laughter an arrow surprising hearts imprudent?
Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. Distaff and girdle,
Work of the jar at the well and the hush of our innermost chambers,
These were appointed thee, but thou hast scorned them, O Titaness, grasping
Rather the shield and the spear. Thou, obeying thy turbulent nature,
Tramplest oer laws that are old to the pleasure thy heart has demanded.
Rather bow to the ancient Gods who are seated and constant.
But for thyself thou passest and what hast thou gained for the aeons
Mingled with men in their works and depriving the age of thy beauty?
Fair art thou, woman, but fair with a bitter and opposite sweetness
Clanging in war when thou matchest thy voice with the shout of assemblies.
Not to this end was thy sweetness made and the joy of thy members,
Not to this rhythm Heaven tuned its pipe in thy throat of enchantment,
Armoured like men to go warring forth and with hardness and fierceness
Mix in the strife and the hate while the varied meaning of Nature
Perishes hurt in its heart and life is emptied of music.
Long have I marked in your world a madness. Monarchs descending
Court the imperious mob of their slaves and their suppliant gesture
Shameless and venal offends the majestic tradition of ages:
Princes plead in the agora; spurred by the tongue of a coward,
Heroes march to an impious war at a priestly bidding.
Gold is sought by the great with the chaffering heart of the trader.
Asia fails and the Gods are abandoning Ida for Hellas.
Why must thou come here to perish, O noble and exquisite virgin,
Here in a cause not thine, in a quarrel remote from thy beauty,
Leaving a land that is lovely and far to be slain among strangers?
Girl, to thy rivers go back and thy hills where the grapes are aspirant.
Trust not a fate that indulges; for all things, Penthesilea,
Break with excess and he is the wisest who walks by a measure.
Yet, if thou wilt, thou shalt meet me today in the shock of the battle:
There will I give thee the fame thou desirest; captive in Hellas,
Men shall point to thee always, smiling and whispering, saying,
This is the woman who fought with the Greeks, overthrowing their heroes;
This is the slayer of Ajax, this is the slave of Achilles.
Then with her musical laughter the fearless Penthesilea:
Well do I hope that Achilles enslaved shall taste of that glory
Or on the Phrygian fields lie slain by the spear of a woman.
But to the herald Achaian the Priamid, leader of Troya:
Rest in the halls of thy foes and ease thy fatigue and thy winters.
Herald, abide till the people have heard and reply to Achilles.
Not as the kings of the West are Ilions princes and archons,
Monarchs of men who drive their nations dumb to the battle.
Not in the palace of Priam and not in the halls of the mighty
Whispered councils prevail and the few dispose of the millions;
But with their nation consulting, feeling the hearts of the commons
Ilions princes march to the war or give peace to their foemen.
Lightning departs from her kings and the thunder returns from her people
Met in the ancient assembly where Ilus founded his columns
And since her famous centuries, names that the ages remember
Leading her, Troya proclaims her decrees to obedient nations.
Ceasing he cried to the thralls of his house and they tended the Argive.
Brought to a chamber of rest in the luminous peace of the mansion,
Grey he sat and endured the food and the wine of his foemen,
Chiding his spirit that murmured within him and gazed undelighted,
Vexed with the endless pomps of Laomedon. Far from those glories
Memory winged it back to a sward half-forgotten, a village
Nestling in leaves and low hills watching it crowned with the sunset.
So for his hour he abode in earths palace of lordliest beauty,
But in its caverns his heart was weary and, hurt by the splendours,
Longed for Greece and the smoke-darkened roof of a cottage in Argos,
Eyes of a woman faded and children crowding the hearthside.
Joyless he rose and eastward expected the sunrise on Ida.
***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 1 - The Book of the Herald
,#NFDB
718:Gareth And Lynette
The last tall son of Lot and Bellicent,
And tallest, Gareth, in a showerful spring
Stared at the spate. A slender-shafted Pine
Lost footing, fell, and so was whirled away.
'How he went down,' said Gareth, 'as a false knight
Or evil king before my lance if lance
Were mine to use--O senseless cataract,
Bearing all down in thy precipitancy-And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows
And mine is living blood: thou dost His will,
The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know,
Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall
Linger with vacillating obedience,
Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to-Since the good mother holds me still a child!
Good mother is bad mother unto me!
A worse were better; yet no worse would I.
Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force
To weary her ears with one continuous prayer,
Until she let me fly discaged to sweep
In ever-highering eagle-circles up
To the great Sun of Glory, and thence swoop
Down upon all things base, and dash them dead,
A knight of Arthur, working out his will,
To cleanse the world. Why, Gawain, when he came
With Modred hither in the summertime,
Asked me to tilt with him, the proven knight.
Modred for want of worthier was the judge.
Then I so shook him in the saddle, he said,
"Thou hast half prevailed against me," said so--he-Though Modred biting his thin lips was mute,
For he is alway sullen: what care I?'
And Gareth went, and hovering round her chair
Asked, 'Mother, though ye count me still the child,
Sweet mother, do ye love the child?' She laughed,
'Thou art but a wild-goose to question it.'
'Then, mother, an ye love the child,' he said,
'Being a goose and rather tame than wild,
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Hear the child's story.' 'Yea, my well-beloved,
An 'twere but of the goose and golden eggs.'
And Gareth answered her with kindling eyes,
'Nay, nay, good mother, but this egg of mine
Was finer gold than any goose can lay;
For this an Eagle, a royal Eagle, laid
Almost beyond eye-reach, on such a palm
As glitters gilded in thy Book of Hours.
And there was ever haunting round the palm
A lusty youth, but poor, who often saw
The splendour sparkling from aloft, and thought
"An I could climb and lay my hand upon it,
Then were I wealthier than a leash of kings."
But ever when he reached a hand to climb,
One, that had loved him from his childhood, caught
And stayed him, "Climb not lest thou break thy neck,
I charge thee by my love," and so the boy,
Sweet mother, neither clomb, nor brake his neck,
But brake his very heart in pining for it,
And past away.'
To whom the mother said,
'True love, sweet son, had risked himself and climbed,
And handed down the golden treasure to him.'
And Gareth answered her with kindling eyes,
'Gold?' said I gold?--ay then, why he, or she,
Or whosoe'er it was, or half the world
Had ventured--HAD the thing I spake of been
Mere gold--but this was all of that true steel,
Whereof they forged the brand Excalibur,
And lightnings played about it in the storm,
And all the little fowl were flurried at it,
And there were cries and clashings in the nest,
That sent him from his senses: let me go.'
Then Bellicent bemoaned herself and said,
'Hast thou no pity upon my loneliness?
Lo, where thy father Lot beside the hearth
Lies like a log, and all but smouldered out!
For ever since when traitor to the King
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He fought against him in the Barons' war,
And Arthur gave him back his territory,
His age hath slowly droopt, and now lies there
A yet-warm corpse, and yet unburiable,
No more; nor sees, nor hears, nor speaks, nor knows.
And both thy brethren are in Arthur's hall,
Albeit neither loved with that full love
I feel for thee, nor worthy such a love:
Stay therefore thou; red berries charm the bird,
And thee, mine innocent, the jousts, the wars,
Who never knewest finger-ache, nor pang
Of wrenched or broken limb--an often chance
In those brain-stunning shocks, and tourney-falls,
Frights to my heart; but stay: follow the deer
By these tall firs and our fast-falling burns;
So make thy manhood mightier day by day;
Sweet is the chase: and I will seek thee out
Some comfortable bride and fair, to grace
Thy climbing life, and cherish my prone year,
Till falling into Lot's forgetfulness
I know not thee, myself, nor anything.
Stay, my best son! ye are yet more boy than man.'
Then Gareth, 'An ye hold me yet for child,
Hear yet once more the story of the child.
For, mother, there was once a King, like ours.
The prince his heir, when tall and marriageable,
Asked for a bride; and thereupon the King
Set two before him. One was fair, strong, armed-But to be won by force--and many men
Desired her; one good lack, no man desired.
And these were the conditions of the King:
That save he won the first by force, he needs
Must wed that other, whom no man desired,
A red-faced bride who knew herself so vile,
That evermore she longed to hide herself,
Nor fronted man or woman, eye to eye-Yea--some she cleaved to, but they died of her.
And one--they called her Fame; and one,--O Mother,
How can ye keep me tethered to you--Shame.
Man am I grown, a man's work must I do.
Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King,
109
Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King-Else, wherefore born?'
To whom the mother said
'Sweet son, for there be many who deem him not,
Or will not deem him, wholly proven King-Albeit in mine own heart I knew him King,
When I was frequent with him in my youth,
And heard him Kingly speak, and doubted him
No more than he, himself; but felt him mine,
Of closest kin to me: yet--wilt thou leave
Thine easeful biding here, and risk thine all,
Life, limbs, for one that is not proven King?
Stay, till the cloud that settles round his birth
Hath lifted but a little. Stay, sweet son.'
And Gareth answered quickly, 'Not an hour,
So that ye yield me--I will walk through fire,
Mother, to gain it--your full leave to go.
Not proven, who swept the dust of ruined Rome
From off the threshold of the realm, and crushed
The Idolaters, and made the people free?
Who should be King save him who makes us free?'
So when the Queen, who long had sought in vain
To break him from the intent to which he grew,
Found her son's will unwaveringly one,
She answered craftily, 'Will ye walk through fire?
Who walks through fire will hardly heed the smoke.
Ay, go then, an ye must: only one proof,
Before thou ask the King to make thee knight,
Of thine obedience and thy love to me,
Thy mother,--I demand.
And Gareth cried,
'A hard one, or a hundred, so I go.
Nay--quick! the proof to prove me to the quick!'
But slowly spake the mother looking at him,
'Prince, thou shalt go disguised to Arthur's hall,
And hire thyself to serve for meats and drinks
Among the scullions and the kitchen-knaves,
110
And those that hand the dish across the bar.
Nor shalt thou tell thy name to anyone.
And thou shalt serve a twelvemonth and a day.'
For so the Queen believed that when her son
Beheld his only way to glory lead
Low down through villain kitchen-vassalage,
Her own true Gareth was too princely-proud
To pass thereby; so should he rest with her,
Closed in her castle from the sound of arms.
Silent awhile was Gareth, then replied,
'The thrall in person may be free in soul,
And I shall see the jousts. Thy son am I,
And since thou art my mother, must obey.
I therefore yield me freely to thy will;
For hence will I, disguised, and hire myself
To serve with scullions and with kitchen-knaves;
Nor tell my name to any--no, not the King.'
Gareth awhile lingered. The mother's eye
Full of the wistful fear that he would go,
And turning toward him wheresoe'er he turned,
Perplext his outward purpose, till an hour,
When wakened by the wind which with full voice
Swept bellowing through the darkness on to dawn,
He rose, and out of slumber calling two
That still had tended on him from his birth,
Before the wakeful mother heard him, went.
The three were clad like tillers of the soil.
Southward they set their faces. The birds made
Melody on branch, and melody in mid air.
The damp hill-slopes were quickened into green,
And the live green had kindled into flowers,
For it was past the time of Easterday.
So, when their feet were planted on the plain
That broadened toward the base of Camelot,
Far off they saw the silver-misty morn
Rolling her smoke about the Royal mount,
That rose between the forest and the field.
111
At times the summit of the high city flashed;
At times the spires and turrets half-way down
Pricked through the mist; at times the great gate shone
Only, that opened on the field below:
Anon, the whole fair city had disappeared.
Then those who went with Gareth were amazed,
One crying, 'Let us go no further, lord.
Here is a city of Enchanters, built
By fairy Kings.' The second echoed him,
'Lord, we have heard from our wise man at home
To Northward, that this King is not the King,
But only changeling out of Fairyland,
Who drave the heathen hence by sorcery
And Merlin's glamour.' Then the first again,
'Lord, there is no such city anywhere,
But all a vision.'
Gareth answered them
With laughter, swearing he had glamour enow
In his own blood, his princedom, youth and hopes,
To plunge old Merlin in the Arabian sea;
So pushed them all unwilling toward the gate.
And there was no gate like it under heaven.
For barefoot on the keystone, which was lined
And rippled like an ever-fleeting wave,
The Lady of the Lake stood: all her dress
Wept from her sides as water flowing away;
But like the cross her great and goodly arms
Stretched under the cornice and upheld:
And drops of water fell from either hand;
And down from one a sword was hung, from one
A censer, either worn with wind and storm;
And o'er her breast floated the sacred fish;
And in the space to left of her, and right,
Were Arthur's wars in weird devices done,
New things and old co-twisted, as if Time
Were nothing, so inveterately, that men
Were giddy gazing there; and over all
High on the top were those three Queens, the friends
Of Arthur, who should help him at his need.
112
Then those with Gareth for so long a space
Stared at the figures, that at last it seemed
The dragon-boughts and elvish emblemings
Began to move, seethe, twine and curl: they called
To Gareth, 'Lord, the gateway is alive.'
And Gareth likewise on them fixt his eyes
So long, that even to him they seemed to move.
Out of the city a blast of music pealed.
Back from the gate started the three, to whom
From out thereunder came an ancient man,
Long-bearded, saying, 'Who be ye, my sons?'
Then Gareth, 'We be tillers of the soil,
Who leaving share in furrow come to see
The glories of our King: but these, my men,
(Your city moved so weirdly in the mist)
Doubt if the King be King at all, or come
From Fairyland; and whether this be built
By magic, and by fairy Kings and Queens;
Or whether there be any city at all,
Or all a vision: and this music now
Hath scared them both, but tell thou these the truth.'
Then that old Seer made answer playing on him
And saying, 'Son, I have seen the good ship sail
Keel upward, and mast downward, in the heavens,
And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air:
And here is truth; but an it please thee not,
Take thou the truth as thou hast told it me.
For truly as thou sayest, a Fairy King
And Fairy Queens have built the city, son;
They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,
And built it to the music of their harps.
And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son,
For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; though some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real:
Yet take thou heed of him, for, so thou pass
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become
A thrall to his enchantments, for the King
113
Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep; but, so thou dread to swear,
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field.
For an ye heard a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.'
Gareth spake
Angered, 'Old master, reverence thine own beard
That looks as white as utter truth, and seems
Wellnigh as long as thou art statured tall!
Why mockest thou the stranger that hath been
To thee fair-spoken?'
But the Seer replied,
'Know ye not then the Riddling of the Bards?
"Confusion, and illusion, and relation,
Elusion, and occasion, and evasion"?
I mock thee not but as thou mockest me,
And all that see thee, for thou art not who
Thou seemest, but I know thee who thou art.
And now thou goest up to mock the King,
Who cannot brook the shadow of any lie.'
Unmockingly the mocker ending here
Turned to the right, and past along the plain;
Whom Gareth looking after said, 'My men,
Our one white lie sits like a little ghost
Here on the threshold of our enterprise.
Let love be blamed for it, not she, nor I:
Well, we will make amends.'
With all good cheer
He spake and laughed, then entered with his twain
Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces
And stately, rich in emblem and the work
Of ancient kings who did their days in stone;
Which Merlin's hand, the Mage at Arthur's court,
Knowing all arts, had touched, and everywhere
114
At Arthur's ordinance, tipt with lessening peak
And pinnacle, and had made it spire to heaven.
And ever and anon a knight would pass
Outward, or inward to the hall: his arms
Clashed; and the sound was good to Gareth's ear.
And out of bower and casement shyly glanced
Eyes of pure women, wholesome stars of love;
And all about a healthful people stept
As in the presence of a gracious king.
Then into hall Gareth ascending heard
A voice, the voice of Arthur, and beheld
Far over heads in that long-vaulted hall
The splendour of the presence of the King
Throned, and delivering doom--and looked no more-But felt his young heart hammering in his ears,
And thought, 'For this half-shadow of a lie
The truthful King will doom me when I speak.'
Yet pressing on, though all in fear to find
Sir Gawain or Sir Modred, saw nor one
Nor other, but in all the listening eyes
Of those tall knights, that ranged about the throne,
Clear honour shining like the dewy star
Of dawn, and faith in their great King, with pure
Affection, and the light of victory,
And glory gained, and evermore to gain.
Then came a widow crying to the King,
'A boon, Sir King! Thy father, Uther, reft
From my dead lord a field with violence:
For howsoe'er at first he proffered gold,
Yet, for the field was pleasant in our eyes,
We yielded not; and then he reft us of it
Perforce, and left us neither gold nor field.'
Said Arthur, 'Whether would ye? gold or field?'
To whom the woman weeping, 'Nay, my lord,
The field was pleasant in my husband's eye.'
And Arthur, 'Have thy pleasant field again,
And thrice the gold for Uther's use thereof,
According to the years. No boon is here,
But justice, so thy say be proven true.
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Accursed, who from the wrongs his father did
Would shape himself a right!'
And while she past,
Came yet another widow crying to him,
'A boon, Sir King! Thine enemy, King, am I.
With thine own hand thou slewest my dear lord,
A knight of Uther in the Barons' war,
When Lot and many another rose and fought
Against thee, saying thou wert basely born.
I held with these, and loathe to ask thee aught.
Yet lo! my husband's brother had my son
Thralled in his castle, and hath starved him dead;
And standeth seized of that inheritance
Which thou that slewest the sire hast left the son.
So though I scarce can ask it thee for hate,
Grant me some knight to do the battle for me,
Kill the foul thief, and wreak me for my son.'
Then strode a good knight forward, crying to him,
'A boon, Sir King! I am her kinsman, I.
Give me to right her wrong, and slay the man.'
Then came Sir Kay, the seneschal, and cried,
'A boon, Sir King! even that thou grant her none,
This railer, that hath mocked thee in full hall-None; or the wholesome boon of gyve and gag.'
But Arthur, 'We sit King, to help the wronged
Through all our realm. The woman loves her lord.
Peace to thee, woman, with thy loves and hates!
The kings of old had doomed thee to the flames,
Aurelius Emrys would have scourged thee dead,
And Uther slit thy tongue: but get thee hence-Lest that rough humour of the kings of old
Return upon me! Thou that art her kin,
Go likewise; lay him low and slay him not,
But bring him here, that I may judge the right,
According to the justice of the King:
Then, be he guilty, by that deathless King
Who lived and died for men, the man shall die.'
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Then came in hall the messenger of Mark,
A name of evil savour in the land,
The Cornish king. In either hand he bore
What dazzled all, and shone far-off as shines
A field of charlock in the sudden sun
Between two showers, a cloth of palest gold,
Which down he laid before the throne, and knelt,
Delivering, that his lord, the vassal king,
Was even upon his way to Camelot;
For having heard that Arthur of his grace
Had made his goodly cousin, Tristram, knight,
And, for himself was of the greater state,
Being a king, he trusted his liege-lord
Would yield him this large honour all the more;
So prayed him well to accept this cloth of gold,
In token of true heart and felty.
Then Arthur cried to rend the cloth, to rend
In pieces, and so cast it on the hearth.
An oak-tree smouldered there. 'The goodly knight!
What! shall the shield of Mark stand among these?'
For, midway down the side of that long hall
A stately pile,--whereof along the front,
Some blazoned, some but carven, and some blank,
There ran a treble range of stony shields,-Rose, and high-arching overbrowed the hearth.
And under every shield a knight was named:
For this was Arthur's custom in his hall;
When some good knight had done one noble deed,
His arms were carven only; but if twain
His arms were blazoned also; but if none,
The shield was blank and bare without a sign
Saving the name beneath; and Gareth saw
The shield of Gawain blazoned rich and bright,
And Modred's blank as death; and Arthur cried
To rend the cloth and cast it on the hearth.
'More like are we to reave him of his crown
Than make him knight because men call him king.
The kings we found, ye know we stayed their hands
From war among themselves, but left them kings;
Of whom were any bounteous, merciful,
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Truth-speaking, brave, good livers, them we enrolled
Among us, and they sit within our hall.
But as Mark hath tarnished the great name of king,
As Mark would sully the low state of churl:
And, seeing he hath sent us cloth of gold,
Return, and meet, and hold him from our eyes,
Lest we should lap him up in cloth of lead,
Silenced for ever--craven--a man of plots,
Craft, poisonous counsels, wayside ambushings-No fault of thine: let Kay the seneschal
Look to thy wants, and send thee satisfied-Accursed, who strikes nor lets the hand be seen!'
And many another suppliant crying came
With noise of ravage wrought by beast and man,
And evermore a knight would ride away.
Last, Gareth leaning both hands heavily
Down on the shoulders of the twain, his men,
Approached between them toward the King, and asked,
'A boon, Sir King (his voice was all ashamed),
For see ye not how weak and hungerworn
I seem--leaning on these? grant me to serve
For meat and drink among thy kitchen-knaves
A twelvemonth and a day, nor seek my name.
Hereafter I will fight.'
To him the King,
'A goodly youth and worth a goodlier boon!
But so thou wilt no goodlier, then must Kay,
The master of the meats and drinks, be thine.'
He rose and past; then Kay, a man of mien
Wan-sallow as the plant that feels itself
Root-bitten by white lichen,
'Lo ye now!
This fellow hath broken from some Abbey, where,
God wot, he had not beef and brewis enow,
However that might chance! but an he work,
Like any pigeon will I cram his crop,
And sleeker shall he shine than any hog.'
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Then Lancelot standing near, 'Sir Seneschal,
Sleuth-hound thou knowest, and gray, and all the hounds;
A horse thou knowest, a man thou dost not know:
Broad brows and fair, a fluent hair and fine,
High nose, a nostril large and fine, and hands
Large, fair and fine!--Some young lad's mystery-But, or from sheepcot or king's hall, the boy
Is noble-natured. Treat him with all grace,
Lest he should come to shame thy judging of him.'
Then Kay, 'What murmurest thou of mystery?
Think ye this fellow will poison the King's dish?
Nay, for he spake too fool-like: mystery!
Tut, an the lad were noble, he had asked
For horse and armour: fair and fine, forsooth!
Sir Fine-face, Sir Fair-hands? but see thou to it
That thine own fineness, Lancelot, some fine day
Undo thee not--and leave my man to me.'
So Gareth all for glory underwent
The sooty yoke of kitchen-vassalage;
Ate with young lads his portion by the door,
And couched at night with grimy kitchen-knaves.
And Lancelot ever spake him pleasantly,
But Kay the seneschal, who loved him not,
Would hustle and harry him, and labour him
Beyond his comrade of the hearth, and set
To turn the broach, draw water, or hew wood,
Or grosser tasks; and Gareth bowed himself
With all obedience to the King, and wrought
All kind of service with a noble ease
That graced the lowliest act in doing it.
And when the thralls had talk among themselves,
And one would praise the love that linkt the King
And Lancelot--how the King had saved his life
In battle twice, and Lancelot once the King's-For Lancelot was the first in Tournament,
But Arthur mightiest on the battle-field-Gareth was glad. Or if some other told,
How once the wandering forester at dawn,
Far over the blue tarns and hazy seas,
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On Caer-Eryri's highest found the King,
A naked babe, of whom the Prophet spake,
'He passes to the Isle Avilion,
He passes and is healed and cannot die'-Gareth was glad. But if their talk were foul,
Then would he whistle rapid as any lark,
Or carol some old roundelay, and so loud
That first they mocked, but, after, reverenced him.
Or Gareth telling some prodigious tale
Of knights, who sliced a red life-bubbling way
Through twenty folds of twisted dragon, held
All in a gap-mouthed circle his good mates
Lying or sitting round him, idle hands,
Charmed; till Sir Kay, the seneschal, would come
Blustering upon them, like a sudden wind
Among dead leaves, and drive them all apart.
Or when the thralls had sport among themselves,
So there were any trial of mastery,
He, by two yards in casting bar or stone
Was counted best; and if there chanced a joust,
So that Sir Kay nodded him leave to go,
Would hurry thither, and when he saw the knights
Clash like the coming and retiring wave,
And the spear spring, and good horse reel, the boy
Was half beyond himself for ecstasy.
So for a month he wrought among the thralls;
But in the weeks that followed, the good Queen,
Repentant of the word she made him swear,
And saddening in her childless castle, sent,
Between the in-crescent and de-crescent moon,
Arms for her son, and loosed him from his vow.
This, Gareth hearing from a squire of Lot
With whom he used to play at tourney once,
When both were children, and in lonely haunts
Would scratch a ragged oval on the sand,
And each at either dash from either end-Shame never made girl redder than Gareth joy.
He laughed; he sprang. 'Out of the smoke, at once
I leap from Satan's foot to Peter's knee-These news be mine, none other's--nay, the King's--
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Descend into the city:' whereon he sought
The King alone, and found, and told him all.
'I have staggered thy strong Gawain in a tilt
For pastime; yea, he said it: joust can I.
Make me thy knight--in secret! let my name
Be hidden, and give me the first quest, I spring
Like flame from ashes.'
Here the King's calm eye
Fell on, and checked, and made him flush, and bow
Lowly, to kiss his hand, who answered him,
'Son, the good mother let me know thee here,
And sent her wish that I would yield thee thine.
Make thee my knight? my knights are sworn to vows
Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness,
And, loving, utter faithfulness in love,
And uttermost obedience to the King.'
Then Gareth, lightly springing from his knees,
'My King, for hardihood I can promise thee.
For uttermost obedience make demand
Of whom ye gave me to, the Seneschal,
No mellow master of the meats and drinks!
And as for love, God wot, I love not yet,
But love I shall, God willing.'
And the King
'Make thee my knight in secret? yea, but he,
Our noblest brother, and our truest man,
And one with me in all, he needs must know.'
'Let Lancelot know, my King, let Lancelot know,
Thy noblest and thy truest!'
And the King-'But wherefore would ye men should wonder at you?
Nay, rather for the sake of me, their King,
And the deed's sake my knighthood do the deed,
Than to be noised of.'
Merrily Gareth asked,
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'Have I not earned my cake in baking of it?
Let be my name until I make my name!
My deeds will speak: it is but for a day.'
So with a kindly hand on Gareth's arm
Smiled the great King, and half-unwillingly
Loving his lusty youthhood yielded to him.
Then, after summoning Lancelot privily,
'I have given him the first quest: he is not proven.
Look therefore when he calls for this in hall,
Thou get to horse and follow him far away.
Cover the lions on thy shield, and see
Far as thou mayest, he be nor ta'en nor slain.'
Then that same day there past into the hall
A damsel of high lineage, and a brow
May-blossom, and a cheek of apple-blossom,
Hawk-eyes; and lightly was her slender nose
Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower;
She into hall past with her page and cried,
'O King, for thou hast driven the foe without,
See to the foe within! bridge, ford, beset
By bandits, everyone that owns a tower
The Lord for half a league. Why sit ye there?
Rest would I not, Sir King, an I were king,
Till even the lonest hold were all as free
From cursd bloodshed, as thine altar-cloth
From that best blood it is a sin to spill.'
'Comfort thyself,' said Arthur. 'I nor mine
Rest: so my knighthood keep the vows they swore,
The wastest moorland of our realm shall be
Safe, damsel, as the centre of this hall.
What is thy name? thy need?'
'My name?' she said-'Lynette my name; noble; my need, a knight
To combat for my sister, Lyonors,
A lady of high lineage, of great lands,
And comely, yea, and comelier than myself.
She lives in Castle Perilous: a river
Runs in three loops about her living-place;
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And o'er it are three passings, and three knights
Defend the passings, brethren, and a fourth
And of that four the mightiest, holds her stayed
In her own castle, and so besieges her
To break her will, and make her wed with him:
And but delays his purport till thou send
To do the battle with him, thy chief man
Sir Lancelot whom he trusts to overthrow,
Then wed, with glory: but she will not wed
Save whom she loveth, or a holy life.
Now therefore have I come for Lancelot.'
Then Arthur mindful of Sir Gareth asked,
'Damsel, ye know this Order lives to crush
All wrongers of the Realm. But say, these four,
Who be they? What the fashion of the men?'
'They be of foolish fashion, O Sir King,
The fashion of that old knight-errantry
Who ride abroad, and do but what they will;
Courteous or bestial from the moment, such
As have nor law nor king; and three of these
Proud in their fantasy call themselves the Day,
Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star,
Being strong fools; and never a whit more wise
The fourth, who alway rideth armed in black,
A huge man-beast of boundless savagery.
He names himself the Night and oftener Death,
And wears a helmet mounted with a skull,
And bears a skeleton figured on his arms,
To show that who may slay or scape the three,
Slain by himself, shall enter endless night.
And all these four be fools, but mighty men,
And therefore am I come for Lancelot.'
Hereat Sir Gareth called from where he rose,
A head with kindling eyes above the throng,
'A boon, Sir King--this quest!' then--for he marked
Kay near him groaning like a wounded bull-'Yea, King, thou knowest thy kitchen-knave am I,
And mighty through thy meats and drinks am I,
And I can topple over a hundred such.
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Thy promise, King,' and Arthur glancing at him,
Brought down a momentary brow. 'Rough, sudden,
And pardonable, worthy to be knight-Go therefore,' and all hearers were amazed.
But on the damsel's forehead shame, pride, wrath
Slew the May-white: she lifted either arm,
'Fie on thee, King! I asked for thy chief knight,
And thou hast given me but a kitchen-knave.'
Then ere a man in hall could stay her, turned,
Fled down the lane of access to the King,
Took horse, descended the slope street, and past
The weird white gate, and paused without, beside
The field of tourney, murmuring 'kitchen-knave.'
Now two great entries opened from the hall,
At one end one, that gave upon a range
Of level pavement where the King would pace
At sunrise, gazing over plain and wood;
And down from this a lordly stairway sloped
Till lost in blowing trees and tops of towers;
And out by this main doorway past the King.
But one was counter to the hearth, and rose
High that the highest-crested helm could ride
Therethrough nor graze: and by this entry fled
The damsel in her wrath, and on to this
Sir Gareth strode, and saw without the door
King Arthur's gift, the worth of half a town,
A warhorse of the best, and near it stood
The two that out of north had followed him:
This bare a maiden shield, a casque; that held
The horse, the spear; whereat Sir Gareth loosed
A cloak that dropt from collar-bone to heel,
A cloth of roughest web, and cast it down,
And from it like a fuel-smothered fire,
That lookt half-dead, brake bright, and flashed as those
Dull-coated things, that making slide apart
Their dusk wing-cases, all beneath there burns
A jewelled harness, ere they pass and fly.
So Gareth ere he parted flashed in arms.
Then as he donned the helm, and took the shield
And mounted horse and graspt a spear, of grain
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Storm-strengthened on a windy site, and tipt
With trenchant steel, around him slowly prest
The people, while from out of kitchen came
The thralls in throng, and seeing who had worked
Lustier than any, and whom they could but love,
Mounted in arms, threw up their caps and cried,
'God bless the King, and all his fellowship!'
And on through lanes of shouting Gareth rode
Down the slope street, and past without the gate.
So Gareth past with joy; but as the cur
Pluckt from the cur he fights with, ere his cause
Be cooled by fighting, follows, being named,
His owner, but remembers all, and growls
Remembering, so Sir Kay beside the door
Muttered in scorn of Gareth whom he used
To harry and hustle.
'Bound upon a quest
With horse and arms--the King hath past his time-My scullion knave! Thralls to your work again,
For an your fire be low ye kindle mine!
Will there be dawn in West and eve in East?
Begone!--my knave!--belike and like enow
Some old head-blow not heeded in his youth
So shook his wits they wander in his prime-Crazed! How the villain lifted up his voice,
Nor shamed to bawl himself a kitchen-knave.
Tut: he was tame and meek enow with me,
Till peacocked up with Lancelot's noticing.
Well--I will after my loud knave, and learn
Whether he know me for his master yet.
Out of the smoke he came, and so my lance
Hold, by God's grace, he shall into the mire-Thence, if the King awaken from his craze,
Into the smoke again.'
But Lancelot said,
'Kay, wherefore wilt thou go against the King,
For that did never he whereon ye rail,
But ever meekly served the King in thee?
Abide: take counsel; for this lad is great
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And lusty, and knowing both of lance and sword.'
'Tut, tell not me,' said Kay, 'ye are overfine
To mar stout knaves with foolish courtesies:'
Then mounted, on through silent faces rode
Down the slope city, and out beyond the gate.
But by the field of tourney lingering yet
Muttered the damsel, 'Wherefore did the King
Scorn me? for, were Sir Lancelot lackt, at least
He might have yielded to me one of those
Who tilt for lady's love and glory here,
Rather than--O sweet heaven! O fie upon him-His kitchen-knave.'
To whom Sir Gareth drew
(And there were none but few goodlier than he)
Shining in arms, 'Damsel, the quest is mine.
Lead, and I follow.' She thereat, as one
That smells a foul-fleshed agaric in the holt,
And deems it carrion of some woodland thing,
Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose
With petulant thumb and finger, shrilling, 'Hence!
Avoid, thou smellest all of kitchen-grease.
And look who comes behind,' for there was Kay.
'Knowest thou not me? thy master? I am Kay.
We lack thee by the hearth.'
And Gareth to him,
'Master no more! too well I know thee, ay-The most ungentle knight in Arthur's hall.'
'Have at thee then,' said Kay: they shocked, and Kay
Fell shoulder-slipt, and Gareth cried again,
'Lead, and I follow,' and fast away she fled.
But after sod and shingle ceased to fly
Behind her, and the heart of her good horse
Was nigh to burst with violence of the beat,
Perforce she stayed, and overtaken spoke.
'What doest thou, scullion, in my fellowship?
Deem'st thou that I accept thee aught the more
Or love thee better, that by some device
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Full cowardly, or by mere unhappiness,
Thou hast overthrown and slain thy master--thou!-Dish-washer and broach-turner, loon!--to me
Thou smellest all of kitchen as before.'
'Damsel,' Sir Gareth answered gently, 'say
Whate'er ye will, but whatsoe'er ye say,
I leave not till I finish this fair quest,
Or die therefore.'
'Ay, wilt thou finish it?
Sweet lord, how like a noble knight he talks!
The listening rogue hath caught the manner of it.
But, knave, anon thou shalt be met with, knave,
And then by such a one that thou for all
The kitchen brewis that was ever supt
Shalt not once dare to look him in the face.'
'I shall assay,' said Gareth with a smile
That maddened her, and away she flashed again
Down the long avenues of a boundless wood,
And Gareth following was again beknaved.
'Sir Kitchen-knave, I have missed the only way
Where Arthur's men are set along the wood;
The wood is nigh as full of thieves as leaves:
If both be slain, I am rid of thee; but yet,
Sir Scullion, canst thou use that spit of thine?
Fight, an thou canst: I have missed the only way.'
So till the dusk that followed evensong
Rode on the two, reviler and reviled;
Then after one long slope was mounted, saw,
Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines
A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink
To westward--in the deeps whereof a mere,
Round as the red eye of an Eagle-owl,
Under the half-dead sunset glared; and shouts
Ascended, and there brake a servingman
Flying from out of the black wood, and crying,
'They have bound my lord to cast him in the mere.'
Then Gareth, 'Bound am I to right the wronged,
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But straitlier bound am I to bide with thee.'
And when the damsel spake contemptuously,
'Lead, and I follow,' Gareth cried again,
'Follow, I lead!' so down among the pines
He plunged; and there, blackshadowed nigh the mere,
And mid-thigh-deep in bulrushes and reed,
Saw six tall men haling a seventh along,
A stone about his neck to drown him in it.
Three with good blows he quieted, but three
Fled through the pines; and Gareth loosed the stone
From off his neck, then in the mere beside
Tumbled it; oilily bubbled up the mere.
Last, Gareth loosed his bonds and on free feet
Set him, a stalwart Baron, Arthur's friend.
'Well that ye came, or else these caitiff rogues
Had wreaked themselves on me; good cause is theirs
To hate me, for my wont hath ever been
To catch my thief, and then like vermin here
Drown him, and with a stone about his neck;
And under this wan water many of them
Lie rotting, but at night let go the stone,
And rise, and flickering in a grimly light
Dance on the mere. Good now, ye have saved a life
Worth somewhat as the cleanser of this wood.
And fain would I reward thee worshipfully.
What guerdon will ye?'
Gareth sharply spake,
'None! for the deed's sake have I done the deed,
In uttermost obedience to the King.
But wilt thou yield this damsel harbourage?'
Whereat the Baron saying, 'I well believe
You be of Arthur's Table,' a light laugh
Broke from Lynette, 'Ay, truly of a truth,
And in a sort, being Arthur's kitchen-knave!-But deem not I accept thee aught the more,
Scullion, for running sharply with thy spit
Down on a rout of craven foresters.
A thresher with his flail had scattered them.
Nay--for thou smellest of the kitchen still.
But an this lord will yield us harbourage,
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Well.'
So she spake. A league beyond the wood,
All in a full-fair manor and a rich,
His towers where that day a feast had been
Held in high hall, and many a viand left,
And many a costly cate, received the three.
And there they placed a peacock in his pride
Before the damsel, and the Baron set
Gareth beside her, but at once she rose.
'Meseems, that here is much discourtesy,
Setting this knave, Lord Baron, at my side.
Hear me--this morn I stood in Arthur's hall,
And prayed the King would grant me Lancelot
To fight the brotherhood of Day and Night-The last a monster unsubduable
Of any save of him for whom I called-Suddenly bawls this frontless kitchen-knave,
"The quest is mine; thy kitchen-knave am I,
And mighty through thy meats and drinks am I."
Then Arthur all at once gone mad replies,
"Go therefore," and so gives the quest to him-Him--here--a villain fitter to stick swine
Than ride abroad redressing women's wrong,
Or sit beside a noble gentlewoman.'
Then half-ashamed and part-amazed, the lord
Now looked at one and now at other, left
The damsel by the peacock in his pride,
And, seating Gareth at another board,
Sat down beside him, ate and then began.
'Friend, whether thou be kitchen-knave, or not,
Or whether it be the maiden's fantasy,
And whether she be mad, or else the King,
Or both or neither, or thyself be mad,
I ask not: but thou strikest a strong stroke,
For strong thou art and goodly therewithal,
And saver of my life; and therefore now,
For here be mighty men to joust with, weigh
Whether thou wilt not with thy damsel back
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To crave again Sir Lancelot of the King.
Thy pardon; I but speak for thine avail,
The saver of my life.'
And Gareth said,
'Full pardon, but I follow up the quest,
Despite of Day and Night and Death and Hell.'
So when, next morn, the lord whose life he saved
Had, some brief space, conveyed them on their way
And left them with God-speed, Sir Gareth spake,
'Lead, and I follow.' Haughtily she replied.
'I fly no more: I allow thee for an hour.
Lion and stout have isled together, knave,
In time of flood. Nay, furthermore, methinks
Some ruth is mine for thee. Back wilt thou, fool?
For hard by here is one will overthrow
And slay thee: then will I to court again,
And shame the King for only yielding me
My champion from the ashes of his hearth.'
To whom Sir Gareth answered courteously,
'Say thou thy say, and I will do my deed.
Allow me for mine hour, and thou wilt find
My fortunes all as fair as hers who lay
Among the ashes and wedded the King's son.'
Then to the shore of one of those long loops
Wherethrough the serpent river coiled, they came.
Rough-thicketed were the banks and steep; the stream
Full, narrow; this a bridge of single arc
Took at a leap; and on the further side
Arose a silk pavilion, gay with gold
In streaks and rays, and all Lent-lily in hue,
Save that the dome was purple, and above,
Crimson, a slender banneret fluttering.
And therebefore the lawless warrior paced
Unarmed, and calling, 'Damsel, is this he,
The champion thou hast brought from Arthur's hall?
For whom we let thee pass.' 'Nay, nay,' she said,
'Sir Morning-Star. The King in utter scorn
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Of thee and thy much folly hath sent thee here
His kitchen-knave: and look thou to thyself:
See that he fall not on thee suddenly,
And slay thee unarmed: he is not knight but knave.'
Then at his call, 'O daughters of the Dawn,
And servants of the Morning-Star, approach,
Arm me,' from out the silken curtain-folds
Bare-footed and bare-headed three fair girls
In gilt and rosy raiment came: their feet
In dewy grasses glistened; and the hair
All over glanced with dewdrop or with gem
Like sparkles in the stone Avanturine.
These armed him in blue arms, and gave a shield
Blue also, and thereon the morning star.
And Gareth silent gazed upon the knight,
Who stood a moment, ere his horse was brought,
Glorying; and in the stream beneath him, shone
Immingled with Heaven's azure waveringly,
The gay pavilion and the naked feet,
His arms, the rosy raiment, and the star.
Then she that watched him, 'Wherefore stare ye so?
Thou shakest in thy fear: there yet is time:
Flee down the valley before he get to horse.
Who will cry shame? Thou art not knight but knave.'
Said Gareth, 'Damsel, whether knave or knight,
Far liefer had I fight a score of times
Than hear thee so missay me and revile.
Fair words were best for him who fights for thee;
But truly foul are better, for they send
That strength of anger through mine arms, I know
That I shall overthrow him.'
And he that bore
The star, when mounted, cried from o'er the bridge,
'A kitchen-knave, and sent in scorn of me!
Such fight not I, but answer scorn with scorn.
For this were shame to do him further wrong
Than set him on his feet, and take his horse
And arms, and so return him to the King.
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Come, therefore, leave thy lady lightly, knave.
Avoid: for it beseemeth not a knave
To ride with such a lady.'
'Dog, thou liest.
I spring from loftier lineage than thine own.'
He spake; and all at fiery speed the two
Shocked on the central bridge, and either spear
Bent but not brake, and either knight at once,
Hurled as a stone from out of a catapult
Beyond his horse's crupper and the bridge,
Fell, as if dead; but quickly rose and drew,
And Gareth lashed so fiercely with his brand
He drave his enemy backward down the bridge,
The damsel crying, 'Well-stricken, kitchen-knave!'
Till Gareth's shield was cloven; but one stroke
Laid him that clove it grovelling on the ground.
Then cried the fallen, 'Take not my life: I yield.'
And Gareth, 'So this damsel ask it of me
Good--I accord it easily as a grace.'
She reddening, 'Insolent scullion: I of thee?
I bound to thee for any favour asked!'
'Then he shall die.' And Gareth there unlaced
His helmet as to slay him, but she shrieked,
'Be not so hardy, scullion, as to slay
One nobler than thyself.' 'Damsel, thy charge
Is an abounding pleasure to me. Knight,
Thy life is thine at her command. Arise
And quickly pass to Arthur's hall, and say
His kitchen-knave hath sent thee. See thou crave
His pardon for thy breaking of his laws.
Myself, when I return, will plead for thee.
Thy shield is mine--farewell; and, damsel, thou,
Lead, and I follow.'
And fast away she fled.
Then when he came upon her, spake, 'Methought,
Knave, when I watched thee striking on the bridge
The savour of thy kitchen came upon me
A little faintlier: but the wind hath changed:
I scent it twenty-fold.' And then she sang,
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'"O morning star" (not that tall felon there
Whom thou by sorcery or unhappiness
Or some device, hast foully overthrown),
"O morning star that smilest in the blue,
O star, my morning dream hath proven true,
Smile sweetly, thou! my love hath smiled on me."
'But thou begone, take counsel, and away,
For hard by here is one that guards a ford-The second brother in their fool's parable-Will pay thee all thy wages, and to boot.
Care not for shame: thou art not knight but knave.'
To whom Sir Gareth answered, laughingly,
'Parables? Hear a parable of the knave.
When I was kitchen-knave among the rest
Fierce was the hearth, and one of my co-mates
Owned a rough dog, to whom he cast his coat,
"Guard it," and there was none to meddle with it.
And such a coat art thou, and thee the King
Gave me to guard, and such a dog am I,
To worry, and not to flee--and--knight or knave-The knave that doth thee service as full knight
Is all as good, meseems, as any knight
Toward thy sister's freeing.'
'Ay, Sir Knave!
Ay, knave, because thou strikest as a knight,
Being but knave, I hate thee all the more.'
'Fair damsel, you should worship me the more,
That, being but knave, I throw thine enemies.'
'Ay, ay,' she said, 'but thou shalt meet thy match.'
So when they touched the second river-loop,
Huge on a huge red horse, and all in mail
Burnished to blinding, shone the Noonday Sun
Beyond a raging shallow. As if the flower,
That blows a globe of after arrowlets,
Ten thousand-fold had grown, flashed the fierce shield,
All sun; and Gareth's eyes had flying blots
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Before them when he turned from watching him.
He from beyond the roaring shallow roared,
'What doest thou, brother, in my marches here?'
And she athwart the shallow shrilled again,
'Here is a kitchen-knave from Arthur's hall
Hath overthrown thy brother, and hath his arms.'
'Ugh!' cried the Sun, and vizoring up a red
And cipher face of rounded foolishness,
Pushed horse across the foamings of the ford,
Whom Gareth met midstream: no room was there
For lance or tourney-skill: four strokes they struck
With sword, and these were mighty; the new knight
Had fear he might be shamed; but as the Sun
Heaved up a ponderous arm to strike the fifth,
The hoof of his horse slipt in the stream, the stream
Descended, and the Sun was washed away.
Then Gareth laid his lance athwart the ford;
So drew him home; but he that fought no more,
As being all bone-battered on the rock,
Yielded; and Gareth sent him to the King,
'Myself when I return will plead for thee.'
'Lead, and I follow.' Quietly she led.
'Hath not the good wind, damsel, changed again?'
'Nay, not a point: nor art thou victor here.
There lies a ridge of slate across the ford;
His horse thereon stumbled--ay, for I saw it.
'"O Sun" (not this strong fool whom thou, Sir Knave,
Hast overthrown through mere unhappiness),
"O Sun, that wakenest all to bliss or pain,
O moon, that layest all to sleep again,
Shine sweetly: twice my love hath smiled on me."
What knowest thou of lovesong or of love?
Nay, nay, God wot, so thou wert nobly born,
Thou hast a pleasant presence. Yea, perchance,-'"O dewy flowers that open to the sun,
O dewy flowers that close when day is done,
Blow sweetly: twice my love hath smiled on me."
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'What knowest thou of flowers, except, belike,
To garnish meats with? hath not our good King
Who lent me thee, the flower of kitchendom,
A foolish love for flowers? what stick ye round
The pasty? wherewithal deck the boar's head?
Flowers? nay, the boar hath rosemaries and bay.
'"O birds, that warble to the morning sky,
O birds that warble as the day goes by,
Sing sweetly: twice my love hath smiled on me."
'What knowest thou of birds, lark, mavis, merle,
Linnet? what dream ye when they utter forth
May-music growing with the growing light,
Their sweet sun-worship? these be for the snare
(So runs thy fancy) these be for the spit,
Larding and basting. See thou have not now
Larded thy last, except thou turn and fly.
There stands the third fool of their allegory.'
For there beyond a bridge of treble bow,
All in a rose-red from the west, and all
Naked it seemed, and glowing in the broad
Deep-dimpled current underneath, the knight,
That named himself the Star of Evening, stood.
And Gareth, 'Wherefore waits the madman there
Naked in open dayshine?' 'Nay,' she cried,
'Not naked, only wrapt in hardened skins
That fit him like his own; and so ye cleave
His armour off him, these will turn the blade.'
Then the third brother shouted o'er the bridge,
'O brother-star, why shine ye here so low?
Thy ward is higher up: but have ye slain
The damsel's champion?' and the damsel cried,
'No star of thine, but shot from Arthur's heaven
With all disaster unto thine and thee!
For both thy younger brethren have gone down
Before this youth; and so wilt thou, Sir Star;
Art thou not old?'
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'Old, damsel, old and hard,
Old, with the might and breath of twenty boys.'
Said Gareth, 'Old, and over-bold in brag!
But that same strength which threw the Morning Star
Can throw the Evening.'
Then that other blew
A hard and deadly note upon the horn.
'Approach and arm me!' With slow steps from out
An old storm-beaten, russet, many-stained
Pavilion, forth a grizzled damsel came,
And armed him in old arms, and brought a helm
With but a drying evergreen for crest,
And gave a shield whereon the Star of Even
Half-tarnished and half-bright, his emblem, shone.
But when it glittered o'er the saddle-bow,
They madly hurled together on the bridge;
And Gareth overthrew him, lighted, drew,
There met him drawn, and overthrew him again,
But up like fire he started: and as oft
As Gareth brought him grovelling on his knees,
So many a time he vaulted up again;
Till Gareth panted hard, and his great heart,
Foredooming all his trouble was in vain,
Laboured within him, for he seemed as one
That all in later, sadder age begins
To war against ill uses of a life,
But these from all his life arise, and cry,
'Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down!'
He half despairs; so Gareth seemed to strike
Vainly, the damsel clamouring all the while,
'Well done, knave-knight, well-stricken, O good knight-knave-O knave, as noble as any of all the knights-Shame me not, shame me not. I have prophesied-Strike, thou art worthy of the Table Round-His arms are old, he trusts the hardened skin-Strike--strike--the wind will never change again.'
And Gareth hearing ever stronglier smote,
And hewed great pieces of his armour off him,
But lashed in vain against the hardened skin,
And could not wholly bring him under, more
Than loud Southwesterns, rolling ridge on ridge,
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The buoy that rides at sea, and dips and springs
For ever; till at length Sir Gareth's brand
Clashed his, and brake it utterly to the hilt.
'I have thee now;' but forth that other sprang,
And, all unknightlike, writhed his wiry arms
Around him, till he felt, despite his mail,
Strangled, but straining even his uttermost
Cast, and so hurled him headlong o'er the bridge
Down to the river, sink or swim, and cried,
'Lead, and I follow.'
But the damsel said,
'I lead no longer; ride thou at my side;
Thou art the kingliest of all kitchen-knaves.
'"O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain,
O rainbow with three colours after rain,
Shine sweetly: thrice my love hath smiled on me."
'Sir,--and, good faith, I fain had added--Knight,
But that I heard thee call thyself a knave,-Shamed am I that I so rebuked, reviled,
Missaid thee; noble I am; and thought the King
Scorned me and mine; and now thy pardon, friend,
For thou hast ever answered courteously,
And wholly bold thou art, and meek withal
As any of Arthur's best, but, being knave,
Hast mazed my wit: I marvel what thou art.'
'Damsel,' he said, 'you be not all to blame,
Saving that you mistrusted our good King
Would handle scorn, or yield you, asking, one
Not fit to cope your quest. You said your say;
Mine answer was my deed. Good sooth! I hold
He scarce is knight, yea but half-man, nor meet
To fight for gentle damsel, he, who lets
His heart be stirred with any foolish heat
At any gentle damsel's waywardness.
Shamed? care not! thy foul sayings fought for me:
And seeing now thy words are fair, methinks
There rides no knight, not Lancelot, his great self,
Hath force to quell me.'
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Nigh upon that hour
When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,
Lets down his other leg, and stretching, dreams
Of goodly supper in the distant pool,
Then turned the noble damsel smiling at him,
And told him of a cavern hard at hand,
Where bread and baken meats and good red wine
Of Southland, which the Lady Lyonors
Had sent her coming champion, waited him.
Anon they past a narrow comb wherein
Where slabs of rock with figures, knights on horse
Sculptured, and deckt in slowly-waning hues.
'Sir Knave, my knight, a hermit once was here,
Whose holy hand hath fashioned on the rock
The war of Time against the soul of man.
And yon four fools have sucked their allegory
From these damp walls, and taken but the form.
Know ye not these?' and Gareth lookt and read-In letters like to those the vexillary
Hath left crag-carven o'er the streaming Gelt-'PHOSPHORUS,' then 'MERIDIES'--'HESPERUS'-'NOX'--'MORS,' beneath five figures, armd men,
Slab after slab, their faces forward all,
And running down the Soul, a Shape that fled
With broken wings, torn raiment and loose hair,
For help and shelter to the hermit's cave.
'Follow the faces, and we find it. Look,
Who comes behind?'
For one--delayed at first
Through helping back the dislocated Kay
To Camelot, then by what thereafter chanced,
The damsel's headlong error through the wood-Sir Lancelot, having swum the river-loops-His blue shield-lions covered--softly drew
Behind the twain, and when he saw the star
Gleam, on Sir Gareth's turning to him, cried,
'Stay, felon knight, I avenge me for my friend.'
And Gareth crying pricked against the cry;
But when they closed--in a moment--at one touch
Of that skilled spear, the wonder of the world--
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Went sliding down so easily, and fell,
That when he found the grass within his hands
He laughed; the laughter jarred upon Lynette:
Harshly she asked him, 'Shamed and overthrown,
And tumbled back into the kitchen-knave,
Why laugh ye? that ye blew your boast in vain?'
'Nay, noble damsel, but that I, the son
Of old King Lot and good Queen Bellicent,
And victor of the bridges and the ford,
And knight of Arthur, here lie thrown by whom
I know not, all through mere unhappiness-Device and sorcery and unhappiness-Out, sword; we are thrown!' And Lancelot answered, 'Prince,
O Gareth--through the mere unhappiness
Of one who came to help thee, not to harm,
Lancelot, and all as glad to find thee whole,
As on the day when Arthur knighted him.'
Then Gareth, 'Thou--Lancelot!--thine the hand
That threw me? An some chance to mar the boast
Thy brethren of thee make--which could not chance-Had sent thee down before a lesser spear,
Shamed had I been, and sad--O Lancelot--thou!'
Whereat the maiden, petulant, 'Lancelot,
Why came ye not, when called? and wherefore now
Come ye, not called? I gloried in my knave,
Who being still rebuked, would answer still
Courteous as any knight--but now, if knight,
The marvel dies, and leaves me fooled and tricked,
And only wondering wherefore played upon:
And doubtful whether I and mine be scorned.
Where should be truth if not in Arthur's hall,
In Arthur's presence? Knight, knave, prince and fool,
I hate thee and for ever.'
And Lancelot said,
'Blessd be thou, Sir Gareth! knight art thou
To the King's best wish. O damsel, be you wise
To call him shamed, who is but overthrown?
Thrown have I been, nor once, but many a time.
Victor from vanquished issues at the last,
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And overthrower from being overthrown.
With sword we have not striven; and thy good horse
And thou are weary; yet not less I felt
Thy manhood through that wearied lance of thine.
Well hast thou done; for all the stream is freed,
And thou hast wreaked his justice on his foes,
And when reviled, hast answered graciously,
And makest merry when overthrown. Prince, Knight
Hail, Knight and Prince, and of our Table Round!'
And then when turning to Lynette he told
The tale of Gareth, petulantly she said,
'Ay well--ay well--for worse than being fooled
Of others, is to fool one's self. A cave,
Sir Lancelot, is hard by, with meats and drinks
And forage for the horse, and flint for fire.
But all about it flies a honeysuckle.
Seek, till we find.' And when they sought and found,
Sir Gareth drank and ate, and all his life
Past into sleep; on whom the maiden gazed.
'Sound sleep be thine! sound cause to sleep hast thou.
Wake lusty! Seem I not as tender to him
As any mother? Ay, but such a one
As all day long hath rated at her child,
And vext his day, but blesses him asleep-Good lord, how sweetly smells the honeysuckle
In the hushed night, as if the world were one
Of utter peace, and love, and gentleness!
O Lancelot, Lancelot'--and she clapt her hands-'Full merry am I to find my goodly knave
Is knight and noble. See now, sworn have I,
Else yon black felon had not let me pass,
To bring thee back to do the battle with him.
Thus an thou goest, he will fight thee first;
Who doubts thee victor? so will my knight-knave
Miss the full flower of this accomplishment.'
Said Lancelot, 'Peradventure he, you name,
May know my shield. Let Gareth, an he will,
Change his for mine, and take my charger, fresh,
Not to be spurred, loving the battle as well
As he that rides him.' 'Lancelot-like,' she said,
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'Courteous in this, Lord Lancelot, as in all.'
And Gareth, wakening, fiercely clutched the shield;
'Ramp ye lance-splintering lions, on whom all spears
Are rotten sticks! ye seem agape to roar!
Yea, ramp and roar at leaving of your lord!-Care not, good beasts, so well I care for you.
O noble Lancelot, from my hold on these
Streams virtue--fire--through one that will not shame
Even the shadow of Lancelot under shield.
Hence: let us go.'
Silent the silent field
They traversed. Arthur's harp though summer-wan,
In counter motion to the clouds, allured
The glance of Gareth dreaming on his liege.
A star shot: 'Lo,' said Gareth, 'the foe falls!'
An owl whoopt: 'Hark the victor pealing there!'
Suddenly she that rode upon his left
Clung to the shield that Lancelot lent him, crying,
'Yield, yield him this again: 'tis he must fight:
I curse the tongue that all through yesterday
Reviled thee, and hath wrought on Lancelot now
To lend thee horse and shield: wonders ye have done;
Miracles ye cannot: here is glory enow
In having flung the three: I see thee maimed,
Mangled: I swear thou canst not fling the fourth.'
'And wherefore, damsel? tell me all ye know.
You cannot scare me; nor rough face, or voice,
Brute bulk of limb, or boundless savagery
Appal me from the quest.'
'Nay, Prince,' she cried,
'God wot, I never looked upon the face,
Seeing he never rides abroad by day;
But watched him have I like a phantom pass
Chilling the night: nor have I heard the voice.
Always he made his mouthpiece of a page
Who came and went, and still reported him
As closing in himself the strength of ten,
And when his anger tare him, massacring
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Man, woman, lad and girl--yea, the soft babe!
Some hold that he hath swallowed infant flesh,
Monster! O Prince, I went for Lancelot first,
The quest is Lancelot's: give him back the shield.'
Said Gareth laughing, 'An he fight for this,
Belike he wins it as the better man:
Thus--and not else!'
But Lancelot on him urged
All the devisings of their chivalry
When one might meet a mightier than himself;
How best to manage horse, lance, sword and shield,
And so fill up the gap where force might fail
With skill and fineness. Instant were his words.
Then Gareth, 'Here be rules. I know but one-To dash against mine enemy and win.
Yet have I seen thee victor in the joust,
And seen thy way.' 'Heaven help thee,' sighed Lynette.
Then for a space, and under cloud that grew
To thunder-gloom palling all stars, they rode
In converse till she made her palfrey halt,
Lifted an arm, and softly whispered, 'There.'
And all the three were silent seeing, pitched
Beside the Castle Perilous on flat field,
A huge pavilion like a mountain peak
Sunder the glooming crimson on the marge,
Black, with black banner, and a long black horn
Beside it hanging; which Sir Gareth graspt,
And so, before the two could hinder him,
Sent all his heart and breath through all the horn.
Echoed the walls; a light twinkled; anon
Came lights and lights, and once again he blew;
Whereon were hollow tramplings up and down
And muffled voices heard, and shadows past;
Till high above him, circled with her maids,
The Lady Lyonors at a window stood,
Beautiful among lights, and waving to him
White hands, and courtesy; but when the Prince
Three times had blown--after long hush--at last--
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The huge pavilion slowly yielded up,
Through those black foldings, that which housed therein.
High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms,
With white breast-bone, and barren ribs of Death,
And crowned with fleshless laughter--some ten steps-In the half-light--through the dim dawn--advanced
The monster, and then paused, and spake no word.
But Gareth spake and all indignantly,
'Fool, for thou hast, men say, the strength of ten,
Canst thou not trust the limbs thy God hath given,
But must, to make the terror of thee more,
Trick thyself out in ghastly imageries
Of that which Life hath done with, and the clod,
Less dull than thou, will hide with mantling flowers
As if for pity?' But he spake no word;
Which set the horror higher: a maiden swooned;
The Lady Lyonors wrung her hands and wept,
As doomed to be the bride of Night and Death;
Sir Gareth's head prickled beneath his helm;
And even Sir Lancelot through his warm blood felt
Ice strike, and all that marked him were aghast.
At once Sir Lancelot's charger fiercely neighed,
And Death's dark war-horse bounded forward with him.
Then those that did not blink the terror, saw
That Death was cast to ground, and slowly rose.
But with one stroke Sir Gareth split the skull.
Half fell to right and half to left and lay.
Then with a stronger buffet he clove the helm
As throughly as the skull; and out from this
Issued the bright face of a blooming boy
Fresh as a flower new-born, and crying, 'Knight,
Slay me not: my three brethren bad me do it,
To make a horror all about the house,
And stay the world from Lady Lyonors.
They never dreamed the passes would be past.'
Answered Sir Gareth graciously to one
Not many a moon his younger, 'My fair child,
What madness made thee challenge the chief knight
Of Arthur's hall?' 'Fair Sir, they bad me do it.
They hate the King, and Lancelot, the King's friend,
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They hoped to slay him somewhere on the stream,
They never dreamed the passes could be past.'
Then sprang the happier day from underground;
And Lady Lyonors and her house, with dance
And revel and song, made merry over Death,
As being after all their foolish fears
And horrors only proven a blooming boy.
So large mirth lived and Gareth won the quest.
And he that told the tale in older times
Says that Sir Gareth wedded Lyonors,
But he, that told it later, says Lynette.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
719:The House Of Dust: Complete
I.
The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.
And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.
'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.
We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .
Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.
Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.
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Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness.
Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . .
What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .
Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .
And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.
II.
One, from his high bright window in a tower,
Leans out, as evening falls,
And sees the advancing curtain of the shower
Splashing its silver on roofs and walls:
Sees how, swift as a shadow, it crosses the city,
And murmurs beyond far walls to the sea,
Leaving a glimmer of water in the dark canyons,
And silver falling from eave and tree.
One, from his high bright window, looking down,
Peers like a dreamer over the rain-bright town,
And thinks its towers are like a dream.
The western windows flame in the sun's last flare,
Pale roofs begin to gleam.
Looking down from a window high in a wall
He sees us all;
Lifting our pallid faces towards the rain,
Searching the sky, and going our ways again,
Standing in doorways, waiting under the trees . . .
There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees
What we are blind to,—we who mass and crowd
From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.
The gulls drift slowly above the city of towers,
Over the roofs to the darkening sea they fly;
Night falls swiftly on an evening of rain.
The yellow lamps wink one by one again.
The towers reach higher and blacker against the sky.
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III.
One, where the pale sea foamed at the yellow sand,
With wave upon slowly shattering wave,
Turned to the city of towers as evening fell;
And slowly walked by the darkening road toward it;
And saw how the towers darkened against the sky;
And across the distance heard the toll of a bell.
Along the darkening road he hurried alone,
With his eyes cast down,
And thought how the streets were hoarse with a tide of people,
With clamor of voices, and numberless faces . . .
And it seemed to him, of a sudden, that he would drown
Here in the quiet of evening air,
These empty and voiceless places . . .
And he hurried towards the city, to enter there.
Along the darkening road, between tall trees
That made a sinister whisper, loudly he walked.
Behind him, sea-gulls dipped over long grey seas.
Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked.
And death was observed with sudden cries,
And birth with laughter and pain.
And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies
And night came down again.
IV.
Up high black walls, up sombre terraces,
Clinging like luminous birds to the sides of cliffs,
The yellow lights went climbing towards the sky.
From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain,
Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye.
They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower,
Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew.
And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished,
And some strange shadows threw.
And behind them all the ghosts of thoughts went moving,
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Restlessly moving in each lamplit room,
From chair to mirror, from mirror to fire;
From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:
From some, a dazzling desire.
And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought,
Combing with lifted arms her golden hair,
Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night;
And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death
As she blew out her light.
And
And
And
And
And
there was one who turned from clamoring streets,
walked in lamplit gardens among black trees,
looked at the windy sky,
thought with terror how stones and roots would freeze
birds in the dead boughs cry . . .
And she hurried back, as snow fell, mixed with rain,
To mingle among the crowds again,
To jostle beneath blue lamps along the street;
And lost herself in the warm bright coiling dream,
With a sound of murmuring voices and shuffling feet.
And one, from his high bright window looking down
On luminous chasms that cleft the basalt town,
Hearing a sea-like murmur rise,
Desired to leave his dream, descend from the tower,
And drown in waves of shouts and laughter and cries.
V.
The snow floats down upon us, mingled with rain . . .
It eddies around pale lilac lamps, and falls
Down golden-windowed walls.
We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain,
We do not remember the red roots whence we rose,
But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while
We shall lie down again.
The snow floats down upon us, we turn, we turn,
Through gorges filled with light we sound and flow . . .
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One is struck down and hurt, we crowd about him,
We bear him away, gaze after his listless body;
But whether he lives or dies we do not know.
One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him;
The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.
He sings of a house he lived in long ago.
It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in;
The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.
And coiling slowly about him, and laughing at him,
And throwing him pennies, we bear away
A mournful echo of other times and places,
And follow a dream . . . a dream that will not stay.
Down long broad flights of lamplit stairs we flow;
Noisy, in scattered waves, crowding and shouting;
In broken slow cascades.
The gardens extend before us . . . We spread out swiftly;
Trees are above us, and darkness. The canyon fades . . .
And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . .
A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.
We
We
We
We
We
flow to the east, to the white-lined shivering sea;
reach to the west, where the whirling sun went down;
close our eyes to music in bright cafees.
diverge from clamorous streets to streets that are silent.
loaf where the wind-spilled fountain plays.
And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,
Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers,
Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb;
Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream
Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.
VI.
Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
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The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea,
And dreams in white at the city's feet;
On one side sleep the plains, with heaped-up hills.
Oaks and beeches whisper in rings about it.
Above the trees are towers where dread bells beat.
The fisherman draws his streaming net from the sea
And sails toward the far-off city, that seems
Like one vague tower.
The dark bow plunges to foam on blue-black waves,
And shrill rain seethes like a ghostly music about him
In a quiet shower.
Rain with a shrill sings on the lapsing waves;
Rain thrills over the roofs again;
Like a shadow of shifting silver it crosses the city;
The lamps in the streets are streamed with rain;
And sparrows complain beneath deep eaves,
And among whirled leaves
The sea-gulls, blowing from tower to lower tower,
From wall to remoter wall,
Skim with the driven rain to the rising sea-sound
And close grey wings and fall . . .
. . . Hearing great rain above me, I now remember
A girl who stood by the door and shut her eyes:
Her pale cheeks glistened with rain, she stood and shivered.
Into a forest of silver she vanished slowly . . .
Voices about me rise . . .
Voices clear and silvery, voices of raindrops,—
'We struck with silver claws, we struck her down.
We are the ghosts of the singing furies . . . '
A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me
Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret.
I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown.
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'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled,
Thinking your face so strangely young . . . '
'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'
'I am the one you followed through crowded streets,
The one who escaped you, the one with red-gleamed hair.'
'I am the one you saw to-day, who fell
Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell:
A bell that broke great memories in my brain.'
'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you,
Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.'
'I am the one who suddenly cried, beholding
The face of a certain man on the dazzling screen.
They wrote me that he was dead. It was long ago.
I walked in the streets for a long while, hearing nothing,
And returned to see it again. And it was so.'
Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
I am dissolved and woven again . . .
Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
Thousands of voices weave in the rain.
'I am the one who rode beside you, blinking
At a dazzle of golden lights.
Tempests of music swept me: I was thinking
Of the gorgeous promise of certain nights:
Of the woman who suddenly smiled at me this day,
Smiled in a certain delicious sidelong way,
And turned, as she reached the door,
To smile once more . . .
Her hands are whiter than snow on midnight water.
Her throat is golden and full of golden laughter,
Her eyes are strange as the stealth of the moon
On a night in June . . .
She runs among whistling leaves; I hurry after;
She dances in dreams over white-waved water;
Her body is white and fragrant and cool,
Magnolia petals that float on a white-starred pool . . .
I have dreamed of her, dreaming for many nights
Of a broken music and golden lights,
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Of broken webs of silver, heavily falling
Between my hands and their white desire:
And dark-leaved boughs, edged with a golden radiance,
Dipping to screen a fire . . .
I dream that I walk with her beneath high trees,
But as I lean to kiss her face,
She is blown aloft on wind, I catch at leaves,
And run in a moonless place;
And I hear a crashing of terrible rocks flung down,
And shattering trees and cracking walls,
And a net of intense white flame roars over the town,
And someone cries; and darkness falls . . .
But now she has leaned and smiled at me,
My veins are afire with music,
Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;
I shall dream to her secret heart tonight . . . '
He rises and moves away, he says no word,
He folds his evening paper and turns away;
I rush through the dark with rows of lamplit faces;
Fire bells peal, and some of us turn to listen,
And some sit motionless in their accustomed places.
Cold rain lashes the car-roof, scurries in gusts,
Streams down the windows in waves and ripples of lustre;
The lamps in the streets are distorted and strange.
Someone takes his watch from his pocket and yawns.
One peers out in the night for the place to change.
Rain . . . rain . . . rain . . . we are buried in rain,
It will rain forever, the swift wheels hiss through water,
Pale sheets of water gleam in the windy street.
The pealing of bells is lost in a drive of rain-drops.
Remote and hurried the great bells beat.
'I am the one whom life so shrewdly betrayed,
Misfortune dogs me, it always hunted me down.
And to-day the woman I love lies dead.
I gave her roses, a ring with opals;
These hands have touched her head.
'I bound her to me in all soft ways,
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I bound her to me in a net of days,
Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.
How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?
There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.
'They cover a body with roses . . . I shall not see it . . .
Must one return to the lifeless walls of a city
Whose soul is charred by fire? . . . '
His eyes are closed, his lips press tightly together.
Wheels hiss beneath us. He yields us our desire.
'No, do not stare so—he is weak with grief,
He cannot face you, he turns his eyes aside;
He is confused with pain.
I suffered this. I know. It was long ago . . .
He closes his eyes and drowns in death again.'
The wind hurls blows at the rain-starred glistening windows,
The wind shrills down from the half-seen walls.
We flow on the mournful wind in a dream of dying;
And at last a silence falls.
VII.
Midnight; bells toll, and along the cloud-high towers
The golden lights go out . . .
The yellow windows darken, the shades are drawn,
In thousands of rooms we sleep, we await the dawn,
We lie face down, we dream,
We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem
To stare at the ceiling or walls . . .
Midnight . . . the last of shattering bell-notes falls.
A rush of silence whirls over the cloud-high towers,
A vortex of soundless hours.
'The bells have just struck twelve: I should be sleeping.
But I cannot delay any longer to write and tell you.
The woman is dead.
She died—you know the way. Just as we planned.
Smiling, with open sunlit eyes.
Smiling upon the outstretched fatal hand . . .'
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He folds his letter, steps softly down the stairs.
The doors are closed and silent. A gas-jet flares.
His shadow disturbs a shadow of balustrades.
The door swings shut behind. Night roars above him.
Into the night he fades.
Wind; wind; wind; carving the walls;
Blowing the water that gleams in the street;
Blowing the rain, the sleet.
In the dark alley, an old tree cracks and falls,
Oak-boughs moan in the haunted air;
Lamps blow down with a crash and tinkle of glass . . .
Darkness whistles . . . Wild hours pass . . .
And those whom sleep eludes lie wide-eyed, hearing
Above their heads a goblin night go by;
Children are waked, and cry,
The young girl hears the roar in her sleep, and dreams
That her lover is caught in a burning tower,
She clutches the pillow, she gasps for breath, she screams . . .
And then by degrees her breath grows quiet and slow,
She dreams of an evening, long ago:
Of colored lanterns balancing under trees,
Some of them softly catching afire;
And beneath the lanterns a motionless face she sees,
Golden with lamplight, smiling, serene . . .
The leaves are a pale and glittering green,
The sound of horns blows over the trampled grass,
Shadows of dancers pass . . .
The face smiles closer to hers, she tries to lean
Backward, away, the eyes burn close and strange,
The face is beginning to change,—
It is her lover, she no longer desires to resist,
She is held and kissed.
She closes her eyes, and melts in a seethe of flame . . .
With a smoking ghost of shame . . .
Wind, wind, wind . . . Wind in an enormous brain
Blowing dark thoughts like fallen leaves . . .
The wind shrieks, the wind grieves;
It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again;
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And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams
And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.
One, whom the city imprisoned because of his cunning,
Who dreamed for years in a tower,
Seizes this hour
Of tumult and wind. He files through the rusted bar,
Leans his face to the rain, laughs up at the night,
Slides down the knotted sheet, swings over the wall,
To fall to the street with a cat-like fall,
Slinks round a quavering rim of windy light,
And at last is gone,
Leaving his empty cell for the pallor of dawn . . .
The mother whose child was buried to-day
Turns her face to the window; her face is grey;
And all her body is cold with the coldness of rain.
He would have grown as easily as a tree,
He would have spread a pleasure of shade above her,
He would have been his father again . . .
His growth was ended by a freezing invisible shadow.
She lies, and does not move, and is stabbed by the rain.
Wind, wind, wind; we toss and dream;
We dream we are clouds and stars, blown in a stream:
Windows rattle above our beds;
We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads,
Hear sounds far off,—and dream, with quivering breath,
Our curious separate ways through life and death.
VIII.
The white fog creeps from the cold sea over the city,
Over the pale grey tumbled towers,—
And settles among the roofs, the pale grey walls.
Along damp sinuous streets it crawls,
Curls like a dream among the motionless trees
And seems to freeze.
The fog slips ghostlike into a thousand rooms,
Whirls over sleeping faces,
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Spins in an atomy dance round misty street lamps;
And blows in cloudy waves over open spaces . . .
And one from his high window, looking down,
Peers at the cloud-white town,
And thinks its island towers are like a dream . . .
It seems an enormous sleeper, within whose brain
Laborious shadows revolve and break and gleam.
PART II.
I.
The round red sun heaves darkly out of the sea.
The walls and towers are warmed and gleam.
Sounds go drowsily up from streets and wharves.
The city stirs like one that is half in dream.
And the mist flows up by dazzling walls and windows,
Where one by one we wake and rise.
We gaze at the pale grey lustrous sea a moment,
We rub the darkness from our eyes,
And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . .
And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,
Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer
Compassionate over our towers bending.
There, like one who gazes into a crystal,
He broods upon our city with sombre eyes;
He sees our secret fears vaguely unfolding,
Sees cloudy symbols shape to rise.
Each gleaming point of light is like a seed
Dilating swiftly to coiling fires.
Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face,
Each hurrying face records its strange desires.
We descend our separate stairs toward the day,
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Merge in the somnolent mass that fills the street,
Lift our eyes to the soft blue space of sky,
And walk by the well-known walls with accustomed feet.
II. THE FULFILLED DREAM
More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed—
Great rocks hoisted in air;
And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes . . .
And so he did not mention his dream of falling
But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath
Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by
And the small tree swell beneath him . . .
He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,—
And so went out . . . For once, he forgot his pail.
Something had changed—but it was not the street—
The street was just the same—it was himself.
Puddles flashed in the sun. In the pawn-shop door
The same old black cat winked green amber eyes;
The butcher stood by his window tying his apron;
The same men walked beside him, smoking pipes,
Reading the morning paper . . .
He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly,
As if he knew for certain he walked to death:
But with his usual pace,—deliberate, firm,
Looking about him calmly, watching the world,
Taking his ease . . . Yet, when he thought again
Of the same dream, now dreamed three separate times,
Always the same, and heard that whistling wind,
And saw the windows flashing upward past him,—
He slowed his pace a little, and thought with horror
How monstrously that small tree thrust to meet him! . . .
He slowed his pace a little and remembered his wife.
Was forty, then, too old for work like this?
Why should it be? He'd never been afraid—
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His eye was sure, his hand was steady . . .
But dreams had meanings.
He walked more slowly, and looked along the roofs,
All built by men, and saw the pale blue sky;
And suddenly he was dizzy with looking at it,
It seemed to whirl and swim,
It seemed the color of terror, of speed, of death . . .
He lowered his eyes to the stones, he walked more slowly;
His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;
He thought of the pail . . . Why, then, was it forgotten?
Because he would not need it?
Then, just as he was grouping his thoughts again
About that drug-store corner, under an arc-lamp,
Where first he met the girl whom he would marry,—
That blue-eyed innocent girl, in a soft blouse,—
He waved his hand for signal, and up he went
In the dusty chute that hugged the wall;
Above the tree; from girdered floor to floor;
Above the flattening roofs, until the sea
Lay wide and waved before him . . . And then he stepped
Giddily out, from that security,
To the red rib of iron against the sky,
And walked along it, feeling it sing and tremble;
And looking down one instant, saw the tree
Just as he dreamed it was; and looked away,
And up again, feeling his blood go wild.
He gave the signal; the long girder swung
Closer to him, dropped clanging into place,
Almost pushing him off. Pneumatic hammers
Began their madhouse clatter, the white-hot rivets
Were tossed from below and deftly caught in pails;
He signalled again, and wiped his mouth, and thought
A place so high in the air should be more quiet.
The tree, far down below, teased at his eyes,
Teased at the corners of them, until he looked,
And felt his body go suddenly small and light;
Felt his brain float off like a dwindling vapor;
And heard a whistle of wind, and saw a tree
Come plunging up to him, and thought to himself,
'By God—I'm done for now, the dream was right . . .'
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III. INTERLUDE
The warm sun dreams in the dust, the warm sun falls
On bright red roofs and walls;
The trees in the park exhale a ghost of rain;
We go from door to door in the streets again,
Talking, laughing, dreaming, turning our faces,
Recalling other times and places . . .
We crowd, not knowing why, around a gate,
We crowd together and wait,
A stretcher is carried out, voices are stilled,
The ambulance drives away.
We watch its roof flash by, hear someone say
'A man fell off the building and was killed—
Fell right into a barrel . . .' We turn again
Among the frightened eyes of white-faced men,
And go our separate ways, each bearing with him
A thing he tries, but vainly, to forget,—
A sickened crowd, a stretcher red and wet.
A hurdy-gurdy sings in the crowded street,
The golden notes skip over the sunlit stones,
Wings are upon our feet.
The sun seems warmer, the winding street more bright,
Sparrows come whirring down in a cloud of light.
We bear our dreams among us, bear them all,
Like hurdy-gurdy music they rise and fall,
Climb to beauty and die.
The wandering lover dreams of his lover's mouth,
And smiles at the hostile sky.
The broker smokes his pipe, and sees a fortune.
The murderer hears a cry.
IV. NIGHTMARE
'Draw three cards, and I will tell your future . . .
Draw three cards, and lay them down,
Rest your palms upon them, stare at the crystal,
And think of time . . . My father was a clown,
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My mother was a gypsy out of Egypt;
And she was gotten with child in a strange way;
And I was born in a cold eclipse of the moon,
With the future in my eyes as clear as day.'
I sit before the gold-embroidered curtain
And think her face is like a wrinkled desert.
The crystal burns in lamplight beneath my eyes.
A dragon slowly coils on the scaly curtain.
Upon a scarlet cloth a white skull lies.
'Your hand is on the hand that holds three lilies.
You will live long, love many times.
I see a dark girl here who once betrayed you.
I see a shadow of secret crimes.
'There was a man who came intent to kill you,
And hid behind a door and waited for you;
There was a woman who smiled at you and lied.
There was a golden girl who loved you, begged you,
Crawled after you, and died.
'There is a ghost of murder in your blood—
Coming or past, I know not which.
And here is danger—a woman with sea-green eyes,
And white-skinned as a witch . . .'
The words hiss into me, like raindrops falling
On sleepy fire . . . She smiles a meaning smile.
Suspicion eats my brain; I ask a question;
Something is creeping at me, something vile;
And suddenly on the wall behind her head
I see a monstrous shadow strike and spread,
The lamp puffs out, a great blow crashes down.
I plunge through the curtain, run through dark to the street,
And hear swift steps retreat . . .
The shades are drawn, the door is locked behind me.
Behind the door I hear a hammer sounding.
I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad.
I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding;
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You do not guess the adventure I have had! . . .
Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures,
Your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet . . .
My peril goes out from me, is blown among you.
We loiter, dreaming together, along the street.
V. RETROSPECT
Round white clouds roll slowly above the housetops,
Over the clear red roofs they flow and pass.
A flock of pigeons rises with blue wings flashing,
Rises with whistle of wings, hovers an instant,
And settles slowly again on the tarnished grass.
And one old man looks down from a dusty window
And sees the pigeons circling about the fountain
And desires once more to walk among those trees.
Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain.
Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water.
And soon the pond must freeze.
The light wind blows to his ears a sound of laughter,
Young men shuffle their feet, loaf in the sunlight;
A girl's laugh rings like a silver bell.
But clearer than all these sounds is a sound he hears
More in his secret heart than in his ears,—
A hammer's steady crescendo, like a knell.
He hears the snarl of pineboards under the plane,
The rhythmic saw, and then the hammer again,—
Playing with delicate strokes that sombre scale . . .
And the fountain dwindles, the sunlight seems to pale.
Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream;
It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;
It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth?
Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire?
Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.
He opened his book once more, beside the window,
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And read the printed words upon that page.
The sunlight touched his hand; his eyes moved slowly,
The quiet words enchanted time and age.
'Death is never an ending, death is a change;
Death is beautiful, for death is strange;
Death is one dream out of another flowing;
Death is a chorded music, softly going
By sweet transition from key to richer key.
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.'
VI. ADELE AND DAVIS
She turned her head on the pillow, and cried once more.
And drawing a shaken breath, and closing her eyes,
To shut out, if she could, this dingy room,
The wigs and costumes scattered around the floor,—
Yellows and greens in the dark,—she walked again
Those nightmare streets which she had walked so often . . .
Here, at a certain corner, under an arc-lamp,
Blown by a bitter wind, she stopped and looked
In through the brilliant windows of a drug-store,
And wondered if she dared to ask for poison:
But it was late, few customers were there,
The eyes of all the clerks would freeze upon her,
And she would wilt, and cry . . . Here, by the river,
She listened to the water slapping the wall,
And felt queer fascination in its blackness:
But it was cold, the little waves looked cruel,
The stars were keen, and a windy dash of spray
Struck her cheek, and withered her veins . . . And so
She dragged herself once more to home, and bed.
Paul hadn't guessed it yet—though twice, already,
She'd fainted—once, the first time, on the stage.
So she must tell him soon—or else—get out . . .
How could she say it? That was the hideous thing.
She'd rather die than say it! . . . and all the trouble,
Months when she couldn't earn a cent, and then,
If he refused to marry her . . . well, what?
She saw him laughing, making a foolish joke,
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His grey eyes turning quickly; and the words
Fled from her tongue . . . She saw him sitting silent,
Brooding over his morning coffee, maybe,
And tried again . . . she bit her lips, and trembled,
And looked away, and said . . . 'Say Paul, boy,—listen—
There's something I must tell you . . . ' There she stopped,
Wondering what he'd say . . . What would he say?
'Spring it, kid! Don't look so serious!'
'But what I've got to say—IS—serious!'
Then she could see how, suddenly, he would sober,
His eyes would darken, he'd look so terrifying—
He always did—and what could she do but cry?
Perhaps, then, he would guess—perhaps he wouldn't.
And if he didn't, but asked her 'What's the matter?'—
She knew she'd never tell—just say she was sick . . .
And after that, when would she dare again?
And what would he do—even suppose she told him?
If it were Felix! If it were only Felix!—
She wouldn't mind so much. But as it was,
Bitterness choked her, she had half a mind
To pay out Felix for never having liked her,
By making people think that it was he . . .
She'd write a letter to someone, before she died,—
Just saying 'Felix did it—and wouldn't marry.'
And then she'd die . . . But that was hard on Paul . . .
Paul would never forgive her—he'd never forgive her!
Sometimes she almost thought Paul really loved her . . .
She saw him look reproachfully at her coffin.
And then she closed her eyes and walked again
Those nightmare streets that she had walked so often:
Under an arc-lamp swinging in the wind
She stood, and stared in through a drug-store window,
Watching a clerk wrap up a little pill-box.
But it was late. No customers were there,—
Pitiless eyes would freeze her secret in her!
And then—what poison would she dare to ask for?
And if they asked her why, what would she say?
VII. TWO LOVERS: OVERTONES
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Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,
Two lovers blow together like music blowing:
And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.
Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,
They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.
'Well, am I late?' Upward they look and laugh,
They look at the great clock's golden hands,
They laugh and talk, not knowing what they say:
Only, their words like music seem to play;
And seeming to walk, they tread strange sarabands.
'I brought you this . . . ' the soft words float like stars
Down the smooth heaven of her memory.
She stands again by a garden wall,
The peach tree is in bloom, pink blossoms fall,
Water sings from an opened tap, the bees
Glisten and murmur among the trees.
Someone calls from the house. She does not answer.
Backward she leans her head,
And dreamily smiles at the peach-tree leaves, wherethrough
She sees an infinite May sky spread
A vault profoundly blue.
The voice from the house fades far away,
The glistening leaves more vaguely ripple and sway . .
The tap is closed, the water ceases to hiss . . .
Silence . . . blue sky . . . and then, 'I brought you this . . . '
She turns again, and smiles . . . He does not know
She smiles from long ago . . .
She turns to him and smiles . . . Sunlight above him
Roars like a vast invisible sea,
Gold is beaten before him, shrill bells of silver;
He is released of weight, his body is free,
He lifts his arms to swim,
Dark years like sinister tides coil under him . . .
The lazy sea-waves crumble along the beach
With a whirring sound like wind in bells,
He lies outstretched on the yellow wind-worn sands
Reaching his lazy hands
Among the golden grains and sea-white shells . . .
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'One white rose . . . or is it pink, to-day?'
They pause and smile, not caring what they say,
If only they may talk.
The crowd flows past them like dividing waters.
Dreaming they stand, dreaming they walk.
'Pink,—to-day!'—Face turns to dream-bright face,
Green leaves rise round them, sunshine settles upon them,
Water, in drops of silver, falls from the rose.
She smiles at a face that smiles through leaves from the mirror.
She breathes the fragrance; her dark eyes close . . .
Time is dissolved, it blows like a little dust:
Time, like a flurry of rain,
Patters and passes, starring the window-pane.
Once, long ago, one night,
She saw the lightning, with long blue quiver of light,
Ripping the darkness . . . and as she turned in terror
A soft face leaned above her, leaned softly down,
Softly around her a breath of roses was blown,
She sank in waves of quiet, she seemed to float
In a sea of silence . . . and soft steps grew remote . .
'Well, let us walk in the park . . . The sun is warm,
We'll sit on a bench and talk . . .' They turn and glide,
The crowd of faces wavers and breaks and flows.
'Look how the oak-tops turn to gold in the sunlight!
Look how the tower is changed and glows!'
Two lovers move in the crowd like a link of music,
We press upon them, we hold them, and let them pass;
A chord of music strikes us and straight we tremble;
We tremble like wind-blown grass.
What was this dream we had, a dream of music,
Music that rose from the opening earth like magic
And shook its beauty upon us and died away?
The long cold streets extend once more before us.
The red sun drops, the walls grow grey.
VIII. THE BOX WITH SILVER HANDLES
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Well,—it was two days after my husband died—
Two days! And the earth still raw above him.
And I was sweeping the carpet in their hall.
In number four—the room with the red wall-paper—
Some chorus girls and men were singing that song
'They'll soon be lighting candles
Round a box with silver handles'—and hearing them sing it
I started to cry. Just then he came along
And stopped on the stairs and turned and looked at me,
And took the cigar from his mouth and sort of smiled
And said, 'Say, what's the matter?' and then came down
Where I was leaning against the wall,
And touched my shoulder, and put his arm around me . . .
And I was so sad, thinking about it,—
Thinking that it was raining, and a cold night,
With Jim so unaccustomed to being dead,—
That I was happy to have him sympathize,
To feel his arm, and leaned against him and cried.
And before I knew it, he got me into a room
Where a table was set, and no one there,
And sat me down on a sofa, and held me close,
And talked to me, telling me not to cry,
That it was all right, he'd look after me,—
But not to cry, my eyes were getting red,
Which didn't make me pretty. And he was so nice,
That when he turned my face between his hands,
And looked at me, with those blue eyes of his,
And smiled, and leaned, and kissed me—
Somehow I couldn't tell him not to do it,
Somehow I didn't mind, I let him kiss me,
And closed my eyes! . . . Well, that was how it started.
For when my heart was eased with crying, and grief
Had passed and left me quiet, somehow it seemed
As if it wasn't honest to change my mind,
To send him away, or say I hadn't meant it—
And, anyway, it seemed so hard to explain!
And so we sat and talked, not talking much,
But meaning as much in silence as in words,
There in that empty room with palms about us,
That private dining-room . . . And as we sat there
I felt my future changing, day by day,
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With unknown streets opening left and right,
New streets with farther lights, new taller houses,
Doors swinging into hallways filled with light,
Half-opened luminous windows, with white curtains
Streaming out in the night, and sudden music,—
And thinking of this, and through it half remembering
A quick and horrible death, my husband's eyes,
The broken-plastered walls, my boy asleep,—
It seemed as if my brain would break in two.
My voice began to tremble . . . and when I stood,
And told him I must go, and said good-night—
I couldn't see the end. How would it end?
Would he return to-morrow? Or would he not?
And did I want him to—or would I rather
Look for another job?—He took my shoulders
Between his hands, and looked down into my eyes,
And smiled, and said good-night. If he had kissed me,
That would have—well, I don't know; but he didn't . .
And so I went downstairs, then, half elated,
Hoping to close the door before that party
In number four should sing that song again—
'They'll soon be lighting candles round a box with silver handles'—
And sure enough, I did. I faced the darkness.
And my eyes were filled with tears. And I was happy.
IX. INTERLUDE
The days, the nights, flow one by one above us,
The hours go silently over our lifted faces,
We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea.
Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together.
We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
We sit at tables and sip our morning coffee,
We read the papers for tales of lust or crime.
The door swings shut behind the latest comer.
We set our watches, regard the time.
What have we done? I close my eyes, remember
The great machine whose sinister brain before me
Smote and smote with a rhythmic beat.
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My hands have torn down walls, the stone and plaster.
I dropped great beams to the dusty street.
My eyes are worn with measuring cloths of purple,
And golden cloths, and wavering cloths, and pale.
I dream of a crowd of faces, white with menace.
Hands reach up to tear me. My brain will fail.
Here, where the walls go down beneath our picks,
These walls whose windows gap against the sky,
Atom by atom of flesh and brain and marble
Will build a glittering tower before we die . . .
The young boy whistles, hurrying down the street,
The young girl hums beneath her breath.
One goes out to beauty, and does not know it.
And one goes out to death.
X. SUDDEN DEATH
'Number four—the girl who died on the table—
The girl with golden hair—'
The purpling body lies on the polished marble.
We open the throat, and lay the thyroid bare . . .
One, who held the ether-cone, remembers
Her dark blue frightened eyes.
He heard the sharp breath quiver, and saw her breast
More hurriedly fall and rise.
Her hands made futile gestures, she turned her head
Fighting for breath; her cheeks were flushed to scarlet,—
And, suddenly, she lay dead.
And all the dreams that hurried along her veins
Came to the darkness of a sudden wall.
Confusion ran among them, they whirled and clamored,
They fell, they rose, they struck, they shouted,
Till at last a pallor of silence hushed them all.
What was her name? Where had she walked that morning?
Through what dark forest came her feet?
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Along what sunlit walls, what peopled street?
Backward he dreamed along a chain of days,
He saw her go her strange and secret ways,
Waking and sleeping, noon and night.
She sat by a mirror, braiding her golden hair.
She read a story by candlelight.
Her shadow ran before her along the street,
She walked with rhythmic feet,
Turned a corner, descended a stair.
She bought a paper, held it to scan the headlines,
Smiled for a moment at sea-gulls high in sunlight,
And drew deep breaths of air.
Days passed, bright clouds of days. Nights passed. And music
Murmured within the walls of lighted windows.
She lifted her face to the light and danced.
The dancers wreathed and grouped in moving patterns,
Clustered, receded, streamed, advanced.
Her dress was purple, her slippers were golden,
Her eyes were blue; and a purple orchid
Opened its golden heart on her breast . . .
She leaned to the surly languor of lazy music,
Leaned on her partner's arm to rest.
The violins were weaving a weft of silver,
The horns were weaving a lustrous brede of gold,
And time was caught in a glistening pattern,
Time, too elusive to hold . . .
Shadows of leaves fell over her face,—and sunlight:
She turned her face away.
Nearer she moved to a crouching darkness
With every step and day.
Death, who at first had thought of her only an instant,
At a great distance, across the night,
Smiled from a window upon her, and followed her slowly
From purple light to light.
Once, in her dreams, he spoke out clearly, crying,
186
'I am the murderer, death.
I am the lover who keeps his appointment
At the doors of breath!'
She rose and stared at her own reflection,
Half dreading there to find
The dark-eyed ghost, waiting beside her,
Or reaching from behind
To lay pale hands upon her shoulders . . .
Or was this in her mind? . . .
She combed her hair. The sunlight glimmered
Along the tossing strands.
Was there a stillness in this hair,—
A quiet in these hands?
Death was a dream. It could not change these eyes,
Blow out their light, or turn this mouth to dust.
She combed her hair and sang. She would live forever.
Leaves flew past her window along a gust . . .
And graves were dug in the earth, and coffins passed,
And music ebbed with the ebbing hours.
And dreams went along her veins, and scattering clouds
Threw streaming shadows on walls and towers.
XI.
Snow falls. The sky is grey, and sullenly glares
With purple lights in the canyoned street.
The fiery sign on the dark tower wreathes and flares . . .
The trodden grass in the park is covered with white,
The streets grow silent beneath our feet . . .
The city dreams, it forgets its past to-night.
And one, from his high bright window looking down
Over the enchanted whiteness of the town,
Seeing through whirls of white the vague grey towers,
Desires like this to forget what will not pass,
The littered papers, the dust, the tarnished grass,
Grey death, stale ugliness, and sodden hours.
Deep in his heart old bells are beaten again,
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Slurred bells of grief and pain,
Dull echoes of hideous times and poisonous places.
He desires to drown in a cold white peace of snow.
He desires to forget a million faces . . .
In one room breathes a woman who dies of hunger.
The clock ticks slowly and stops. And no one winds it.
In one room fade grey violets in a vase.
Snow flakes faintly hiss and melt on the window.
In one room, minute by minute, the flutist plays
The lamplit page of music, the tireless scales.
His hands are trembling, his short breath fails.
In one room, silently, lover looks upon lover,
And thinks the air is fire.
The drunkard swears and touches the harlot's heartstrings
With the sudden hand of desire.
And
And
And
And
one goes late in the streets, and thinks of murder;
one lies staring, and thinks of death.
one, who has suffered, clenches her hands despairing,
holds her breath . . .
Who are all these, who flow in the veins of the city,
Coil and revolve and dream,
Vanish or gleam?
Some mount up to the brain and flower in fire.
Some are destroyed; some die; some slowly stream.
And
And
And
And
And
the new are born who desire to destroy the old;
fires are kindled and quenched; and dreams are broken,
walls flung down . . .
the slow night whirls in snow over towers of dreamers,
whiteness hushes the town.
PART III
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As evening falls,
And the yellow lights leap one by one
Along high walls;
And along black streets that glisten as if with rain,
The muted city seems
Like one in a restless sleep, who lies and dreams
Of vague desires, and memories, and half-forgotten pain . . .
Along dark veins, like lights the quick dreams run,
Flash, are extinguished, flash again,
To mingle and glow at last in the enormous brain
And die away . . .
As evening falls,
A dream dissolves these insubstantial walls,—
A myriad secretly gliding lights lie bare . . .
The lovers rise, the harlot combs her hair,
The dead man's face grows blue in the dizzy lamplight,
The watchman climbs the stair . . .
The bank defaulter leers at a chaos of figures,
And runs among them, and is beaten down;
The sick man coughs and hears the chisels ringing;
The tired clown
Sees the enormous crowd, a million faces,
Motionless in their places,
Ready to laugh, and seize, and crush and tear . . .
The dancer smooths her hair,
Laces her golden slippers, and runs through the door
To dance once more,
Hearing swift music like an enchantment rise,
Feeling the praise of a thousand eyes.
As darkness falls
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live tonight? Where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit halls which reach no end.
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II. THE SCREEN MAIDEN
You read—what is it, then that you are reading?
What music moves so silently in your mind?
Your bright hand turns the page.
I watch you from my window, unsuspected:
You move in an alien land, a silent age . . .
. . . The poet—what was his name—? Tokkei—Tokkei—
The poet walked alone in a cold late rain,
And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds;
For his lover was dead, he never would love again.
Rain in the dreams of the mind—rain forever—
Rain in the sky of the heart—rain in the willows—
But then he saw this face, this face like flame,
This quiet lady, this portrait by Hiroshigi;
And took it home with him; and with it came
What unexpected changes, subtle as weather!
The dark room, cold as rain,
Grew faintly fragrant, stirred with a stir of April,
Warmed its corners with light again,
And smoke of incense whirled about this portrait,
And the quiet lady there,
So young, so quietly smiling, with calm hands,
Seemed ready to loose her hair,
And smile, and lean from the picture, or say one word,
The word already clear,
Which seemed to rise like light between her eyelids . .
He held his breath to hear,
And smiled for shame, and drank a cup of wine,
And held a candle, and searched her face
Through all the little shadows, to see what secret
Might give so warm a grace . . .
Was it the quiet mouth, restrained a little?
The eyes, half-turned aside?
The jade ring on her wrist, still almost swinging? . . .
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The secret was denied,
He chose his favorite pen and drew these verses,
And slept; and as he slept
A dream came into his heart, his lover entered,
And chided him, and wept.
And in the morning, waking, he remembered,
And thought the dream was strange.
Why did his darkened lover rise from the garden?
He turned, and felt a change,
As if a someone hidden smiled and watched him . . .
Yet there was only sunlight there.
Until he saw those young eyes, quietly smiling,
And held his breath to stare,
And could have sworn her cheek had turned—a little . . .
Had slightly turned away . . .
Sunlight dozed on the floor . . . He sat and wondered,
Nor left his room that day.
And that day, and for many days thereafter,
He sat alone, and thought
No lady had ever lived so beautiful
As Hiroshigi wrought . . .
Or if she lived, no matter in what country,
By what far river or hill or lonely sea,
He would look in every face until he found her . . .
There was no other as fair as she.
And before her quiet face he burned soft incense,
And brought her every day
Boughs of the peach, or almond, or snow-white cherry,
And somehow, she seemed to say,
That silent lady, young, and quietly smiling,
That she was happy there;
And sometimes, seeing this, he started to tremble,
And desired to touch her hair,
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To lay his palm along her hand, touch faintly
With delicate finger-tips
The ghostly smile that seemed to hover and vanish
Upon her lips . . .
Until he knew he loved this quiet lady;
And night by night a dread
Leered at his dreams, for he knew that Hiroshigi
Was many centuries dead,—
And the lady, too, was dead, and all who knew her . .
Dead, and long turned to dust . . .
The thin moon waxed and waned, and left him paler,
The peach leaves flew in a gust,
And he would surely have died; but there one day
A wise man, white with age,
Stared at the portrait, and said, 'This Hiroshigi
Knew more than archimage,—
Cunningly drew the body, and called the spirit,
Till partly it entered there . . .
Sometimes, at death, it entered the portrait wholly . .
Do all I say with care,
And she you love may come to you when you call her . . . '
So then this ghost, Tokkei,
Ran in the sun, bought wine of a hundred merchants,
And alone at the end of day
Entered the darkening room, and faced the portrait,
And saw the quiet eyes
Gleaming and young in the dusk, and held the wine-cup,
And knelt, and did not rise,
And said, aloud, 'Lo-san, will you drink this wine?'
Said it three times aloud.
And at the third the faint blue smoke of incense
Rose to the walls in a cloud,
And the lips moved faintly, and the eyes, and the calm hands stirred;
And suddenly, with a sigh,
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The quiet lady came slowly down from the portrait,
And stood, while worlds went by,
And lifted her young white hands and took the wine cup;
And the poet trembled, and said,
'Lo-san, will you stay forever?'—'Yes, I will stay.'—
'But what when I am dead?'
'When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,
And then we shall die no more.'
Music came down upon them, and spring returning,
They remembered worlds before,
And years went over the earth, and over the sea,
And lovers were born and spoke and died,
But forever in sunlight went these two immortal,
Tokkei and the quiet bride . . .
III. HAUNTED CHAMBERS
The lamplit page is turned, the dream forgotten;
The music changes tone, you wake, remember
Deep worlds you lived before,—deep worlds hereafter
Of leaf on falling leaf, music on music,
Rain and sorrow and wind and dust and laughter.
Helen was late and Miriam came too soon.
Joseph was dead, his wife and children starving.
Elaine was married and soon to have a child.
You dreamed last night of fiddler-crabs with fiddles;
They played a buzzing melody, and you smiled.
To-morrow—what? And what of yesterday?
Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
Through many doors to the one door of all.
Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music:
Or see a skeleton fall . . .
We walk with you. Where is it that you lead us?
We climb the muffled stairs beneath high lanterns.
We descend again. We grope through darkened cells.
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You say: this darkness, here, will slowly kill me.
It creeps and weighs upon me . . . Is full of bells.
This is the thing remembered I would forget—
No matter where I go, how soft I tread,
This windy gesture menaces me with death.
Fatigue! it says, and points its finger at me;
Touches my throat and stops my breath.
My fans—my jewels—the portrait of my husband—
The torn certificate for my daughter's grave—
These are but mortal seconds in immortal time.
They brush me, fade away: like drops of water.
They signify no crime.
Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you:
Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you:
No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.
Dreams—they are madness. Staring eyes—illusion.
Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .
IV. ILLICIT
Of what she said to me that night—no matter.
The strange thing came next day.
My brain was full of music—something she played me—;
I couldn't remember it all, but phrases of it
Wreathed and wreathed among faint memories,
Seeking for something, trying to tell me something,
Urging to restlessness: verging on grief.
I tried to play the tune, from memory,—
But memory failed: the chords and discords climbed
And found no resolution—only hung there,
And left me morbid . . . Where, then, had I heard it? . . .
What secret dusty chamber was it hinting?
'Dust', it said, 'dust . . . and dust . . . and sunlight . .
A cold clear April evening . . . snow, bedraggled,
Rain-worn snow, dappling the hideous grass . . .
And someone walking alone; and someone saying
That all must end, for the time had come to go . . . '
These were the phrases . . . but behind, beneath them
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A greater shadow moved: and in this shadow
I stood and guessed . . . Was it the blue-eyed lady?
The one who always danced in golden slippers—
And had I danced with her,—upon this music?
Or was it further back—the unplumbed twilight
Of childhood?—No—much recenter than that.
You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it,
Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it—
Well, it was so I followed down this music,
Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry,
Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted,
Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars—;
Until, of a sudden, and least of all suspected,
The thing resolved itself: and I remembered
An April afternoon, eight years ago—
Or was it nine?—no matter—call it nine—
A room in which the last of sunlight faded;
A vase of violets, fragrance in white curtains;
And, she who played the same thing later, playing.
She played this tune. And in the middle of it
Abruptly broke it off, letting her hands
Fall in her lap. She sat there so a moment,
With shoulders drooped, then lifted up a rose,
One great white rose, wide opened like a lotos,
And pressed it to her cheek, and closed her eyes.
'You know—we've got to end this—Miriam loves you . . .
If she should ever know, or even guess it,—
What would she do?—Listen!—I'm not absurd . . .
I'm sure of it. If you had eyes, for women—
To understand them—which you've never had—
You'd know it too . . . ' So went this colloquy,
Half humorous, with undertones of pathos,
Half grave, half flippant . . . while her fingers, softly,
195
Felt for this tune, played it and let it fall,
Now note by singing note, now chord by chord,
Repeating phrases with a kind of pleasure . . .
Was it symbolic of the woman's weakness
That she could neither break it—nor conclude?
It paused . . . and wandered . . . paused again; while she,
Perplexed and tired, half told me I must go,—
Half asked me if I thought I ought to go . . .
Well, April passed with many other evenings,
Evenings like this, with later suns and warmer,
With violets always there, and fragrant curtains . . .
And she was right: and Miriam found it out . . .
And after that, when eight deep years had passed—
Or nine—we met once more,—by accident . . .
But was it just by accident, I wonder,
She played this tune?—Or what, then, was intended? . . .
V. MELODY IN A RESTAURANT
The cigarette-smoke loops and slides above us,
Dipping and swirling as the waiter passes;
You strike a match and stare upon the flame.
The tiny fire leaps in your eyes a moment,
And dwindles away as silently as it came.
This melody, you say, has certain voices—
They rise like nereids from a river, singing,
Lift white faces, and dive to darkness again.
Wherever you go you bear this river with you:
A leaf falls,—and it flows, and you have pain.
So says the tune to you—but what to me?
What to the waiter, as he pours your coffee,
The violinist who suavely draws his bow?
That man, who folds his paper, overhears it.
A thousand dreams revolve and fall and flow.
Some one there is who sees a virgin stepping
Down marble stairs to a deep tomb of roses:
At the last moment she lifts remembering eyes.
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Green leaves blow down. The place is checked with shadows.
A long-drawn murmur of rain goes down the skies.
And oaks are stripped and bare, and smoke with lightning:
And clouds are blown and torn upon high forests,
And the great sea shakes its walls.
And then falls silence . . . And through long silence falls
This melody once more:
'Down endless stairs she goes, as once before.'
So says the tune to him—but what to me?
What are the worlds I see?
What shapes fantastic, terrible dreams? . . .
I go my secret way, down secret alleys;
My errand is not so simple as it seems.
VI. PORTRAIT OF ONE DEAD
This is the house. On one side there is darkness,
On one side there is light.
Into the darkness you may lift your lanterns—
O, any number—it will still be night.
And here are echoing stairs to lead you downward
To long sonorous halls.
And here is spring forever at these windows,
With roses on the walls.
This is her room. On one side there is music—
On one side not a sound.
At one step she could move from love to silence,
Feel myriad darkness coiling round.
And here are balconies from which she heard you,
Your steady footsteps on the stair.
And here the glass in which she saw your shadow
As she unbound her hair.
Here is the room—with ghostly walls dissolving—
The twilight room in which she called you 'lover';
And the floorless room in which she called you 'friend.'
So many times, in doubt, she ran between them!—
Through windy corridors of darkening end.
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Here she could stand with one dim light above her
And hear far music, like a sea in caverns,
Murmur away at hollowed walls of stone.
And here, in a roofless room where it was raining,
She bore the patient sorrow of rain alone.
Your words were walls which suddenly froze around her.
Your words were windows,—large enough for moonlight,
Too small to let her through.
Your letters—fragrant cloisters faint with music.
The music that assuaged her there was you.
How many times she heard your step ascending
Yet never saw your face!
She heard them turn again, ring slowly fainter,
Till silence swept the place.
Why had you gone? . . . The door, perhaps, mistaken . . .
You would go elsewhere. The deep walls were shaken.
A certain rose-leaf—sent without intention—
Became, with time, a woven web of fire—
She wore it, and was warm.
A certain hurried glance, let fall at parting,
Became, with time, the flashings of a storm.
Yet, there was nothing asked, no hint to tell you
Of secret idols carved in secret chambers
From all you did and said.
Nothing was done, until at last she knew you.
Nothing was known, till, somehow, she was dead.
How did she die?—You say, she died of poison.
Simple and swift. And much to be regretted.
You did not see her pass
So many thousand times from light to darkness,
Pausing so many times before her glass;
You did not see how many times she hurried
To lean from certain windows, vainly hoping,
Passionate still for beauty, remembered spring.
You did not know how long she clung to music,
You did not hear her sing.
198
Did she, then, make the choice, and step out bravely
From sound to silence—close, herself, those windows?
Or was it true, instead,
That darkness moved,—for once,—and so possessed her? . . .
We'll never know, you say, for she is dead.
VII. PORCELAIN
You see that porcelain ranged there in the window—
Platters and soup-plates done with pale pink rosebuds,
And tiny violets, and wreaths of ivy?
See how the pattern clings to the gleaming edges!
They're works of art—minutely seen and felt,
Each petal done devoutly. Is it failure
To spend your blood like this?
Study them . . . you will see there, in the porcelain,
If you stare hard enough, a sort of swimming
Of lights and shadows, ghosts within a crystal—
My brain unfolding! There you'll see me sitting
Day after day, close to a certain window,
Looking down, sometimes, to see the people . . .
Sometimes my wife comes there to speak to me . . .
Sometimes the grey cat waves his tail around me . . .
Goldfish swim in a bowl, glisten in sunlight,
Dilate to a gorgeous size, blow delicate bubbles,
Drowse among dark green weeds. On rainy days,
You'll see a gas-light shedding light behind me—
An eye-shade round my forehead. There I sit,
Twirling the tiny brushes in my paint-cups,
Painting the pale pink rosebuds, minute violets,
Exquisite wreaths of dark green ivy leaves.
On this leaf, goes a dream I dreamed last night
Of two soft-patterned toads—I thought them stones,
Until they hopped! And then a great black spider,—
Tarantula, perhaps, a hideous thing,—
It crossed the room in one tremendous leap.
Here,—as I coil the stems between two leaves,—
It is as if, dwindling to atomy size,
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I cried the secret between two universes . . .
A friend of mine took hasheesh once, and said
Just as he fell asleep he had a dream,—
Though with his eyes wide open,—
And felt, or saw, or knew himself a part
Of marvelous slowly-wreathing intricate patterns,
Plane upon plane, depth upon coiling depth,
Amazing leaves, folding one on another,
Voluted grasses, twists and curves and spirals—
All of it darkly moving . . . as for me,
I need no hasheesh for it—it's too easy!
Soon as I shut my eyes I set out walking
In a monstrous jungle of monstrous pale pink roseleaves,
Violets purple as death, dripping with water,
And ivy-leaves as big as clouds above me.
Here, in a simple pattern of separate violets—
With scalloped edges gilded—here you have me
Thinking of something else. My wife, you know,—
There's something lacking—force, or will, or passion,
I don't know what it is—and so, sometimes,
When I am tired, or haven't slept three nights,
Or it is cloudy, with low threat of rain,
I get uneasy—just like poplar trees
Ruffling their leaves—and I begin to think
Of poor Pauline, so many years ago,
And that delicious night. Where is she now?
I meant to write—but she has moved, by this time,
And then, besides, she might find out I'm married.
Well, there is more—I'm getting old and timid—
The years have gnawed my will. I've lost my nerve!
I never strike out boldly as I used to—
But sit here, painting violets, and remember
That thrilling night. Photographers, she said,
Asked her to pose for them; her eyes and forehead,—
Dark brown eyes, and a smooth and pallid forehead,—
Were thought so beautiful.—And so they were.
Pauline . . . These violets are like words remembered . . .
Darling! she whispered . . . Darling! . . . Darling! . . . Darling!
Well, I suppose such days can come but once.
Lord, how happy we were! . . .
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Here, if you only knew it, is a story—
Here, in these leaves. I stopped my work to tell it,
And then, when I had finished, went on thinking:
A man I saw on a train . . . I was still a boy . . .
Who killed himself by diving against a wall.
Here is a recollection of my wife,
When she was still my sweetheart, years ago.
It's funny how things change,—just change, by growing,
Without an effort . . . And here are trivial things,—
A chill, an errand forgotten, a cut while shaving;
A friend of mine who tells me he is married . . .
Or is that last so trivial? Well, no matter!
This is the sort of thing you'll see of me,
If you look hard enough. This, in its way,
Is a kind of fame. My life arranged before you
In scrolls of leaves, rosebuds, violets, ivy,
Clustered or wreathed on plate and cup and platter . . .
Sometimes, I say, I'm just like John the Baptist—
You have my head before you . . . on a platter.
VIII. COFFINS: INTERLUDE
Wind blows. Snow falls. The great clock in its tower
Ticks with reverberant coil and tolls the hour:
At the deep sudden stroke the pigeons fly . . .
The fine snow flutes the cracks between the flagstones.
We close our coats, and hurry, and search the sky.
We are like music, each voice of it pursuing
A golden separate dream, remote, persistent,
Climbing to fire, receding to hoarse despair.
What do you whisper, brother? What do you tell me? . . .
We pass each other, are lost, and do not care.
One mounts up to beauty, serenely singing,
Forgetful of the steps that cry behind him;
One drifts slowly down from a waking dream.
One, foreseeing, lingers forever unmoving . . .
Upward and downward, past him there, we stream.
201
One has death in his eyes: and walks more slowly.
Death, among jonquils, told him a freezing secret.
A cloud blows over his eyes, he ponders earth.
He sees in the world a forest of sunlit jonquils:
A slow black poison huddles beneath that mirth.
Death, from street to alley, from door to window,
Cries out his news,—of unplumbed worlds approaching,
Of a cloud of darkness soon to destroy the tower.
But why comes death,—he asks,—in a world so perfect?
Or why the minute's grey in the golden hour?
Music, a sudden glissando, sinister, troubled,
A drift of wind-torn petals, before him passes
Down jangled streets, and dies.
The bodies of old and young, of maimed and lovely,
Are slowly borne to earth, with a dirge of cries.
Down cobbled streets they come; down huddled stairways;
Through silent halls; through carven golden doorways;
From freezing rooms as bare as rock.
The curtains are closed across deserted windows.
Earth streams out of the shovel; the pebbles knock.
Mary, whose hands rejoiced to move in sunlight;
Silent Elaine; grave Anne, who sang so clearly;
Fugitive Helen, who loved and walked alone;
Miriam too soon dead, darkly remembered;
Childless Ruth, who sorrowed, but could not atone;
Jean, whose laughter flashed over depths of terror,
And Eloise, who desired to love but dared not;
Doris, who turned alone to the dark and cried,—
They are blown away like windflung chords of music,
They drift away; the sudden music has died.
And one, with death in his eyes, comes walking slowly
And sees the shadow of death in many faces,
And thinks the world is strange.
He desires immortal music and spring forever,
And beauty that knows no change.
202
IX. CABARET
We sit together and talk, or smoke in silence.
You say (but use no words) 'this night is passing
As other nights when we are dead will pass . . .'
Perhaps I misconstrue you: you mean only,
'How deathly pale my face looks in that glass . . .'
You say: 'We sit and talk, of things important . . .
How many others like ourselves, this instant,
Mark the pendulum swinging against the wall?
How many others, laughing, sip their coffee—
Or stare at mirrors, and do not talk at all? . . .
'This is the moment' (so you would say, in silence)
When suddenly we have had too much of laughter:
And a freezing stillness falls, no word to say.
Our mouths feel foolish . . . For all the days hereafter
What have we saved—what news, what tune, what play?
'We see each other as vain and futile tricksters,—
Posturing like bald apes before a mirror;
No pity dims our eyes . . .
How many others, like ourselves, this instant,
See how the great world wizens, and are wise? . . .'
Well, you are right . . . No doubt, they fall, these seconds . . .
When suddenly all's distempered, vacuous, ugly,
And even those most like angels creep for schemes.
The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you,
Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.
But this is momentary . . . or else, enduring,
Leads you with devious eyes through mists and poisons
To horrible chaos, or suicide, or crime . . .
And all these others who at your conjuration
Grow pale, feeling the skeleton touch of time,—
Or, laughing sadly, talk of things important,
Or stare at mirrors, startled to see their faces,
Or drown in the waveless vacuum of their days,—
203
Suddenly, as from sleep, awake, forgetting
This nauseous dream; take up their accustomed ways,
Exhume the ghost of a joke, renew loud laughter,
Forget the moles above their sweethearts' eyebrows,
Lean to the music, rise,
And dance once more in a rose-festooned illusion
With kindness in their eyes . . .
They say (as we ourselves have said, remember)
'What wizardry this slow waltz works upon us!
And how it brings to mind forgotten things!'
They say 'How strange it is that one such evening
Can wake vague memories of so many springs!'
And so they go . . . In a thousand crowded places,
They sit to smile and talk, or rise to ragtime,
And, for their pleasures, agree or disagree.
With secret symbols they play on secret passions.
With cunning eyes they see
The innocent word that sets remembrance trembling,
The dubious word that sets the scared heart beating . . .
The pendulum on the wall
Shakes down seconds . . . They laugh at time, dissembling;
Or coil for a victim and do not talk at all.
X. LETTER
From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,—
And turns to write . . . The clock, behind ticks softly.
It is so long, indeed, since I have written,—
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,—
That these first words I write seem cold and strange.
Are you the man I knew, or have you altered?
Altered, of course—just as I too have altered—
And whether towards each other, or more apart,
We cannot say . . . I've just re-read your letter—
204
Not through forgetfulness, but more for pleasure—
Pondering much on all you say in it
Of mystic consciousness—divine conversion—
The sense of oneness with the infinite,—
Faith in the world, its beauty, and its purpose . . .
Well, you believe one must have faith, in some sort,
If one's to talk through this dark world contented.
But is the world so dark? Or is it rather
Our own brute minds,—in which we hurry, trembling,
Through streets as yet unlighted? This, I think.
You have been always, let me say, "romantic,"—
Eager for color, for beauty, soon discontented
With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing:
Even before the question grew to problem
And drove you bickering into metaphysics,
You met on lower planes the same great dragon,
Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction,
In strange aesthetics . . . You tried, as I remember,
One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid,
The cruder first, more violent sensations,
Gorgeously carnal things, conceived and acted
With splendid animal thirst . . . Then, by degrees,—
Savoring all more delicate gradations
In all that hue and tone may play on flesh,
Or thought on brain,—you passed, if I may say so,
From red and scarlet through morbid greens to mauve.
Let us regard ourselves, you used to say,
As instruments of music, whereon our lives
Will play as we desire: and let us yield
These subtle bodies and subtler brains and nerves
To all experience plays . . . And so you went
From subtle tune to subtler, each heard once,
Twice or thrice at the most, tiring of each;
And closing one by one your doors, drew in
Slowly, through darkening labyrinths of feeling,
Towards the central chamber . . . Which now you've reached.
What, then's, the secret of this ultimate chamber—
Or innermost, rather? If I see it clearly
205
It is the last, and cunningest, resort
Of one who has found this world of dust and flesh,—
This world of lamentations, death, injustice,
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,#NFDB
720:Cleanness
Clannesse who so kyndly cowþe comende
& rekken vp alle þe resounz þat ho by ri3t askez,
Fayre formez my3t he fynde in for[þ]ering his speche
& in þe contrare kark & combraunce huge.
For wonder wroth is þe Wy3þat wro3t alle þinges
Wyth þe freke þat in fylþe fol3es Hym after,
As renkez of relygioun þat reden & syngen
& aprochen to hys presens & prestez arn called;
Thay teen vnto his temmple & temen to hym seluen,
Reken with reuerence þay rychen His auter;
Þay hondel þer his aune body & vsen hit boþe.
If þay in clannes be clos þay cleche gret mede;
Bot if þay conterfete crafte & cortaysye wont,
As be honest vtwyth & inwith alle fylþez,
Þen ar þay synful hemself & sulped altogeder
Boþe God & His gere, & hym to greme cachen.
He is so clene in His courte, þe Kyng þat al weldez,
& honeste in His housholde & hagherlych serued
With angelez enourled in alle þat is clene,
Boþ withine & withouten in wedez ful bry3t;
Nif he nere scoymus & skyg & non scaþe louied,
Hit were a meruayl to much, hit mo3t not falle.
Kryst kydde hit Hymself in a carp onez,
Þeras He heuened a3t happez & hy3t hem her medez.
Me mynez on one amonge oþer, as Maþew recordez,
Þat þus clanness vnclosez a ful cler speche:
Þe haþel clene of his hert hapenez ful fayre,
For he schal loke on oure Lorde with a bone chere';
As so saytz, to þat sy3t seche schal he neuer
Þat any vnclannesse hatz on, auwhere abowte;
For He þat flemus vch fylþe fer fro His hert
May not byde þat burre þat hit His body ne3en.
Forþy hy3not to heuen in haterez totorne,
Ne in þe harlatez hod, & handez vnwaschen.
For what vrþly haþel þat hy3honour haldez
Wolde lyke if a ladde com lyþerly attyred,
When he were sette solempnely in a sete ryche,
Abof dukez on dece, with dayntys serued?
Þen þe harlot with haste helded to þe table,
55
With rent cokrez at þe kne & his clutte traschez,
& his tabarde totorne, & his totez oute,
Oþer ani on of alle þyse, he schulde be halden vtter,
With mony blame ful bygge, a boffet peraunter,
Hurled to þe halle dore & harde þeroute schowued,
& be forboden þat bor3e to bowe þider neuer,
On payne of enprysonment & puttyng in stokkez;
& þus schal he be schent for his schrowde feble,
Þa3neuer in talle ne in tuch he trespas more.
& if vnwelcum he were to a worþlych prynce,
3et hym is þe hy3e Kyng harder in her euen;
As Maþew melez in his masse of þat man ryche,
Þat made þe mukel mangerye to marie his here dere,
& sende his sonde þen to say þat þay samne schulde,
& in comly quoyntis to com to his feste:
'For my boles & my borez arn bayted & slayne,
& my fedde foulez fatted with scla3t,
My polyle þat is penne-fed & partrykez boþe,
Wyth scheldez of wylde swyn, swanez & cronez,
Al is roþeled & rosted ry3t to þe sete;
Comez cof to my corte, er hit colde worþe.'
When þay knewen his cal þat þider com schulde,
Alle excused hem by þe skyly he scape by mo3t.
On hade bo3t hym a bor3, he sayde, by hys trawþe:
'Now turne I þeder als tyd þe toun to byholde.'
Anoþer nayed also & nurned þis cawse:
'I haf 3erned & 3at 3okkez of oxen,
& for my hy3ez hem bo3t; to bowe haf I mester,
To see hem pulle in þe plow aproche me byhouez.'
'& I haf wedded a wyf,' so wer hym þe þryd;
'Excuse me at þe court, I may not com þere.'
Þus þay dro3hem adre3with daunger vchone,
Þat non passed to þe plate þa3he prayed were.
Thenne þe ludych lorde lyked ful ille,
& hade dedayn of þat dede; ful dry3ly he carpez.
He saytz: 'Now for her owne sor3e þay forsaken habbez;
More to wyte is her wrange þen any wylle gentyl.
Þenne gotz forth, my gomez, þe grete streetez,
& forsettz on vche a syde þe cete aboute;
Þe wayferande frekez, on fote & on hors,
Boþe burnez & burdez, þe better & þe wers,
Laþez hem alle luflyly to lenge at my fest,
56
& bryngez hem blyþly to bor3e as barounez þay were,
So þat my palays plat ful be py3t al aboute;
Þise oþer wrechez iwysse worþy no3t wern.'
Þen þay cayred & com þat þe cost waked,
Bro3ten bachlerez hem wyth þat þay by bonkez metten,
Swyerez þat swyftly swyed on blonkez,
& als fele vpon fote, of fre & of bonde.
When þay com to þe courte keppte weren þay fayre,
Sty3tled with þe stewarde, stad in þe halle,
Ful manerly with marchal mad for to sitte,
As he watz dere of degre dressed his seete.
Þenne seggez to þe souerayn sayden þerafter:
'Lo! Lorde, with your leue, at your lege heste
& at þi banne we haf bro3t, as þou beden habbez,
Mony renischsche renkez, & 3et is roum more.'
Sayde þe lorde to þo ledez, 'Laytez 3et ferre,
Ferre out in þe felde, & fechez mo gestez;
Waytez gorstez & greuez, if ani gomez lyggez;
Whatkyn folk so þer fare, fechez hem hider;
Be þay fers, be þay feble, forlotez none,
Be þay hol, be þay halt, be þay ony3ed,
& þa3þay ben boþe blynde & balterande cruppelez,
Þat my hous may holly by halkez by fylled.
For, certez, þyse ilk renkez þat me renayed habbe,
& denounced me no3t now at þis tyme,
Schul neuer sitte in my sale my soper to fele,
Ne suppe on sope of my seve, þa3þa3þay swelt schulde.'
Thenne þe sergauntez, at þat sawe, swengen þeroute,
& diden þe dede þat [watz] demed, as he deuised hade,
& with peple of alle plytez þe palays þay fyllen;
Hit weren not alle on wyuez sunez, wonen with on fader.
Wheþer þay wern worþy oþer wers, wel wern
þay stowed,
Ay þe best byfore & bry3test atyred,
Þe derrest at þe hy3e dese, þat dubbed wer fayrest,
& syþen on lenþe bilooghe ledez inogh.
& ay a[s] segge[s] [serly] semed by her wedez,
So with marschal at her mete mensked þay were.
Clene men in compaynye forknowen wern lyte,
& 3et þe symplest in þat sale watz serued to þe fulle,
Boþe with menske & with mete & mynstrasy noble,
& alle þe laykez þat a lorde a3t in londe schewe.
57
& þay bigonne to be glad þat god drink haden.
& vch mon with his mach made hym at ese.
Now inmyddez þe mete þe mayster hym biþo3t
Þat he wolde se þe semble þat samned was þere,
& rehayte rekenly þe riche & þe pou[eren],
& cherisch hem alle with his cher, & chaufen her joye.
Þen he bowez fro his bour into þe brode halle
& to þe best on þe bench, & bede hym be myry,
Solased hem with semblaunt & syled fyrre,
Tron fro table to table & talkede ay myrþe.
Bot as he ferked ouer þe flor, he fande with his y3e,
Hit watz not for a halyday honestly arayed,
A þral þry3t in þe þrong vnþryuandely
cloþed,
Ne no festiual frok, bot fyled with werkkez;
Þe gome watz vngarnyst with god men to dele.
& gremed þerwith þe grete lorde, & greue hym he þo3t.
'Say me, frende,' quoþ þe freke with a felle chere,
'Hov wan þou into þis won in wedez so fowle?
Þe abyt þat þou hatz vpon, no halyday hit menskez;
Þou, burne, for no brydale art busked in wedez.
How watz þou hardy þis hous for þyn vnhap [to] ne3e
In on so ratted a robe & rent at þe sydez?
Þow art a gome vngoderly in þat goun febele;
Þou praysed me & my place ful pouer & ful [g]nede,
Þat watz so prest to aproche my presens hereinne.
Hopez þou I be a harlot þi erigaut to prayse?'
Þat oper burne watz abayst of his broþe wordez,
& hurkelez doun with his hede, þe vrþe he biholdez;
He watz so scoumfit of his scylle, lest he skaþe hent,
Þat he ne wyst on worde what he warp schulde.
Þen þe lorde wonder loude laled & cryed,
& talkez to his tormenttourez: 'Takez hym,' he biddez,
'Byndez byhynde, at his bak, boþe two his handez,
& felle fetterez to his fete festenez bylyue;
Stik hym stifly in stokez, & stekez hym þerafter
Depe in my doungoun þer doel euer dwellez,
Greuing & gretyng & gryspyng harde
Of teþe tenfully togeder, to teche hym be quoynt.'
Thus comparisunez Kryst þe kyndom of heuen
To þis frelych feste þat fele arn to called;
For alle arn laþed luflyly, þe luþer & þe better,
58
Þat euer wern ful3ed in font, þat fest to haue.
Bot war þe wel, if þou wylt, þy wedez ben clene
& honest for þe halyday, lest þou harme lache,
For aproch þou to þat Prynce of parage noble,
He hates helle no more þen hem þat ar sowle.
Wich arn þenne þy wedez þou wrappez þe inne,
Þat schal schewe hem so schene schrowde of þe best?
Hit arn þy werkez, wyterly, þat þou wro3t hauez,
& lyued with þe lykyng þat ly3e in þyn hert;
Þat þo be frely & fresch fonde in þy lyue,
& fetyse of a fayr forme to fote & to honde,
& syþen alle þyn oþer lymez lapped ful clene;
Þenne may þou se þy Sauior & His sete ryche.
For fele[r] fautez may a freke forfete his blysse,
Þat he þe Souerayn ne se, þen for slauþe one;
As for bobaunce & bost & bolnande priyde
Þroly into þe deuelez þrote man þryngez bylyue.
For couetyse & colwarde & croked dedez,
For monsworne & menscla3t & to much drynk,
For þefte & for þrepyng, vnþonk may mon haue;
For roborrye & riboudrye & resounez vntrwe,
& dsyheriete & depryue dowrie of wydoez,
For marryng of maryagez & mayntnaunce of schrewez,
For traysoun & trichcherye & tyrauntyre boþe,
& for fals famacions & fayned lawez;
Man may mysse þe myrþe þat much is to prayse
For such vnþewez as þise, & þole much payne,
& in þe Creatores cort com neuermore,
Ne neuer see Hym with sy3t for such sour tournez.
Bot I haue herkned & herde of mony hy3e clerkez,
& als in resounez of ry3t red hit myseluen,
Þat þat ilk proper Prynce þat paradys weldez
Is displesed at vch a poynt þat plyes to scaþe;
Bot neuer 3et in no boke breued I herde
Þat euer He wrek so wyþerly on werk þat He made,
Ne venged for no vilte of vice ne synne,
Ne so hastyfly watz hot for hatel of His wylle,
Ne neuer so sodenly so3t vnsoundely to weng,
As for fylþe of þe flesch þat foles han vsed;
For, as I fynde, þer He for3et alle His fre þewez,
& wex wod to þe wrache for wrath at His hert.
For þe fyrste felonye þe falce fende wro3t
59
Whyl he watz hy3e in þe heuen houen vpon lofte,
Of alle þyse aþel aungelez attled þe fayrest:
& he vnkyndely, as a karle, kydde a reward.
He se3no3t bot hymself how semly he were,
Bot his Souerayn he forsoke & sade þyse wordez:
`I schal telde vp my trone in þe tramountayne,
& by lyke to þat Lorde þat þe lyft made.'
With þis worde þat he warp, þe wrake on hym ly3t:
Dry3tyn with His dere dom hym drof to þe abyme,
In þe mesure of His mode, His metz neuer þe lasse.
Bot þer He tynt þe tyþe dool of His tour ryche:
Þa3þe feloun were so fers for his fayre wedez
& his glorious glem þat glent so bry3t,
As sone as Dry3tynez dome drof to hymseluen,
Þikke þowsandez þro þrwen þeroute,
Fellen fro þe frymament fendez ful blake,
Sweued at þe fryst swap as þe snaw þikke,
Hurled into helle-hole as þe hyue swarmez.
Fylter fenden folk forty dayez lencþe,
Er þat styngande storme stynt ne my3t;
Bot as smylt mele vnder smal siue smokez forþikke.
So fro heuen to helle þat hatel schor laste,
On vche syde of þe worlde aywhere ilyche.
3is, hit watz a brem brest & a byge wrache,
& 3et wrathed not þe Wy3; ne þe wrech sa3tled,
Ne neuer wolde, for wyl[fulnes], his worþy God knawe,
Ne pray Hym for no pite, so proud watz his wylle.
Forþy þa3þe rape were rank, þe rawþe watz
lytt[el];
Þa3he be kest into kare, he kepes no better.
Bot þat oper wrake þat wex, on wy3ez hit ly3t
Þur3þe faut of a freke þat fayled in trawþe,
Adam inobedyent, ordaynt to blysse.
Þer pryuely in paradys his place watz devised,
To lyue þer in lykyng þe lenþe of a terme,
& þenne enherite þat home þat aungelez forgart;
Bot þur3þe eggyng of Eue he ete of an apple
Þat enpoysened alle peplez þat parted fro hem boþe,
For a defence þat watz dy3t of Dry3tyn Seluen,
& a payne þeron put & pertly halden.
Þe defence watz þe fryt þat þe freke towched,
& þe dom is þe deþe þat drepez vus alle;
60
Al in mesure & meþe watz mad þe vengiaunce,
& efte amended with a mayden þat make had neuer.
Bot in þe þryd watz forþrast al þat þryue schuld:
Þer watz malys mercyles & mawgre much scheued,
Þat watz for fylþe vpon folde þat þe folk vsed,
Þat þen wonyed in þe worlde withouten any maysterz.
Hit wern þe fayrest of forme & of face als,
Þe most & þe myriest þat maked wern euer,
Þe styfest, þe stalworþest þat stod euer on fete,
& lengest lyf in hem lent of ledez alle oþer.
For hit was þe forme foster þat þe folde bred,
Þe aþel aunceterez sunez pat Adam watz called,
To wham God hade geuen alle þat gayn were,
Alle þe blysse boute blame þat bodi my3t haue;
& þose lykkest to þe lede, þat lyued next after;
Forþy so semly to see syþen wern none.
Þer watz no law to hem layd bot loke to kynde,
& kepe to hit, & alle hit cors clanly fulfylle.
& þenne founden þay fylþe in fleschlych dedez,
& controeued agayn kynde contrare werkez,
& vsed hem vnþryftyly vchon on oþer,
& als with oþer, wylsfully, upon a wrange wyse:
So ferly fowled her flesch þat þe fende loked
How þe de3ter of þe douþe wern derelych fayre,
& fallen in fela3schyp with hem on folken wyse,
& engendered on hem jeauntez with her japez ille.
Þose wern men meþelez & ma3ty on vrþe,
Þat for her lodlych laykez alosed þay were;
He watz famed for fre þat fe3t loued best,
& ay þe bigest in bale þe best watz halden.
& þenne euelez on erþe ernestly grewen
& multyplyed monyfolde inmongez mankynde,
For þat þe ma3ty on molde so marre þise oþer
Þat þe Wy3e þat al wro3t ful wroþly bygynnez.
When He knew vche contre coruppte in hitseluen,
& vch freke forloyned fro þe ry3t wayez,
Felle temptande tene towched His hert.
As wy3e wo hym withinne, werp to Hymseluen:
'Me forþynkez ful much þat euer I mon made,
Bot I schal delyuer & do away þat doten on þis molde,
& fleme out of þe folde al þat flesch werez,
Fro þe burne to þe best, fro bryddez to fyschez;
61
Al schal doun & be ded & dryuen out of erþe
Þat euer I sette saule inne; & sore hit Me rwez
Þat euer I made hem Myself; bot if I may herafter,
I schal wayte to be war her wrenchez to kepe.'
Þenne in worlde watz a wy3e wonyande on lyue,
Ful redy & ful ry3twys, & rewled hym fayre,
In þe drede of Dry3tyn his dayez he vsez,
& ay glydande wyth his God, his grace watz þe more.
Hym watz þe nome Noe, as is innoghe knawen.
He had þre þryuen sunez, & þay þre wyuez:
Sem soþly þat on, þat oþer hy3t Cam,
& þe jolef Japheth watz gendered þe þryd.
Now God in nwy to Noe con speke
Wylde wrakful wordez, in His wylle greued:
'Þe ende of alle kynez flesch þat on vrþe meuez
Is fallen forþwyth My face, & forþer hit I þenk.
With her vnworþelych werk Me wlatez withinne;
Þe gore þerof Me hatz greued & þe glette nwyed.
I schal strenkle My distresse, & strye al togeder,
Boþe ledez & londe & alle þat lyf habbez.
Bot make to þe a mancioun, & þat is My wylle,
A cofer closed of tres, clanlych planed.
Wyrk wonez þerinne for wylde & for tame,
& þenne cleme hit with clay comly within[n]e,
& alle þe endentur dryuen daube withouten.
& þus of lenþe & of large þat lome þou make:
Þre hundred of cupydez þou holde to þe lenþe,
Of fyfty fayre ouerþwert forme þe brede;
& loke euen þat þyn ark haue of he3þe þrette,
& a wyndow wyd vpon[ande] wro3t vpon lo[f]te,
In þe compas of a cubit kyndely sware;
A wel dutande dor, don on þe syde;
Haf hallez þerinne & halkez ful mony,
Boþe boske[n]z & bourez & wel bounden penez.
For I schal waken vp a water to wasch alle þe worlde,
& quelle alle þat is quik with quauende flodez,
Alle þat glydez & gotz & gost of lyf habbez;
I schal wast with My wrath þat wons vpon vrþe.
Bot My forwarde with þe I festen on þis wyse,
For þou in reysoun hatz rengned & ry3twys ben euer:
Þou schal enter þis ark with þyn aþel barnez
& þy wedded wyf; with þe þou take
62
Þe makez of þy myry sunez; þis meyny of a3te
I schal saue of monnez saulez, & swelt þose oþer.
Of vche best þat berez lyf busk þe a cupple,
Of vche clene comly kynde enclose seuen makez,
Of vche horwed in ark halde bot a payre,
For to saue Me þe sede of alle ser kyndez.
& ay þou meng with þe malez þe mete ho-bestez,
Vche payre by payre to plese ayþer oþer;
With alle þe fode þat may be founde frette þy cofer,
For sustnaunce to yowself & also þose oþer.'
Ful grayþely gotz þis god man & dos Godez hestes,
In dry3dred & daunger þat durst do non oþer.
Wen hit watz fettled & forged & to þe fulle grayþed,
Þenn con Dry3ttyn hym dele dry3ly þyse wordez.
'Now Noe,' quoþ oure Lorde, 'art þou al redy?
Hatz þou closed þy kyst with clay alle aboute?'
'3e, Lorde, with þy leue,' sayde þe lede þenne,
Al is wro3t at Þi worde, as Þou me wyt lantez.'
'Enter in, þenn,' quoþ He, & haf þi wyf with þe,
Þy þre sunez, withouten þrep, & her þre wyuez;
Bestez, as I bedene haue, bosk þerinne als,
& when 3e arn staued, styfly stekez yow þerinne.
Fro seuen dayez ben seyed I sende out bylyue
Such a rowtande ryge þat rayne schal swyþe
Þat schal wasch alle þe worlde of werkez of fylþe;
Schal no flesch vpon folde by fonden onlyue,
Outtaken yow a3t in þis ark staued
& sed þat I wyl saue of þyse ser bestez.'
Now Noe neuer sty[n]tez, þat niy3[t] he bygynnez,
Er al wer stawed & stoken as þe steuen wolde.
Thenne sone com þe seuenþe day, when samned wern alle,
& alle woned in þe whichche, þe wylde & þe tame.
Þen bolned þe abyme, & bonkez con ryse,
Waltes out vch walle-heued in ful wode stremez;
Watz no brymme þat abod vnbrosten bylyue;
Þe mukel lauande loghe to þe lyfte rered.
Mony clustered clowde clef alle in clowtez;
Torent vch a rayn-ryfte & rusched to þe vrþe,
Fon neuer in forty dayez. & þen þe flod ryses,
Ouerwaltez vche a wod & þe wyde feldez.
For when þe water of þe welkyn with þe worlde mette,
Alle þat deth mo3t dry3e drowned þerinne.
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Þer watz moon for to make when meschef was cnowen,
Þat no3t dowed bot þe deth in þe depe stremez;
Water wylger ay wax, wonez þat stryede,
Hurled into vch hous, hent þat þer dowelled.
Fryst feng to þe fly3t alle þat fle my3t;
Vuche burde with her barne þe byggyng þay leuez
& bowed to þe hy3bonk þer brentest hit wern,
& heterly to þe hy3e hyllez þay [h]aled on faste.
Bot al watz nedlez her note, for neuer cowþe stynt
Þe ro3e raynande ryg, þe raykande wawez,
Er vch boþom watz brurdful to þe bonkez eggez,
& vche a dale so depe þat demmed at þe brynkez.
Þe moste mountaynez on mor þenne watz no more dry3e,
& þeron flokked þe folke, for ferde of þe wrake.
Syþen þe wylde of þe wode on þe water flette;
Summe swymmed þeron þat saue hemself trawed,
Summe sty3e to a stud & stared to þe heuen,
Rwly wyth a loud rurd rored for drede.
Harez, herttez also, to þe hy3e runnen;
Bukkez, bausenez, & bulez to þe bonkkez hy3ed;
& alle cryed for care to þe Kyng of heuen,
Recouerer of þe Creator þay cryed vchone,
Þat amounted þe masse, þe mase His mercy watz passed,
& alle His pyte departed fro peple þat He hated.
Bi þat þe flod to her fete flo3ed & waxed,
Þen vche a segge se3wel þat synk hym byhoued.
Frendez fellen in fere & faþmed togeder,
To dry3her delful deystyne & dy3en alle samen;
Luf lokez to luf & his leue takez,
For to ende alle at onez & for euer twynne.
By forty dayez wern faren, on folde no flesch styryed
Þat þe flod nade al freten with fe3tande wa3ez;
For hit clam vche a clyffe, cubites fyftene
Ouer þe hy3est hylle þat hurkled on erþe.
Þenne mourkne in þe mudde most ful nede
Alle þat spyrakle inspranc, no sprawlyng awayled,
Saue þe haþel vnder hach & his here straunge,
Noe þat ofte neuened þe name of oure Lorde,
Hym a3tsum in þat ark, as aþel God lyked,
Þer alle ledez in lome lenged druye.
Þe arc houen watz on hy3e with hurlande gotez,
Kest to kythez vncouþe þe clowdez ful nere.
64
Hit waltered on þe wylde flod, went as hit lyste,
Drof vpon þe depe dam, in daunger hit semed,
Withouten mast, oþer myke, oþer myry bawelyne,
Kable, oþer capstan to clyppe to her ankrez,
Hurrok, oþer hande-helme hasped on roþer,
Oþer any sweande sayl to seche after hauen,
Bot flote forthe with þe flyt of þe felle wyndez.
Whederwarde so þe water wafte, hit rebounde;
Ofte hit roled on rounde & rered on ende;
Nyf oure Lorde hade ben her lodezmon hem had lumpen harde.
Of þe lenþe of Noe lyf to lay a lel date,
Þe sex hundreth of his age & none odde 3erez,
Of secounde monyth þe seuen[ten]þe day ry3tez,
Towalten alle þyse welle-hedez & þe water flowed;
& þryez fyfty þe flod of folwande dayez;
Vche hille watz þer hidde with y[þ]ez ful graye.
Al watz wasted þat þer wonyed þe worlde withinne,
Þ[at] euer flote, oþer flwe, oþer on fote 3ede,
That ro3ly watz þe remnaunt þat þe rac dryuez
Þat alle gendrez so joyst wern joyned wythinne
Bot quen þe Lorde of þe lyfte lyked Hymseluen
For to mynne on His mon His meth þat abydez,
Þen He wakened a wynde on watterez to blowe;
Þenne lasned þe llak þat large watz are.
Þen He stac vp þe stangez, stoped þe wellez,
Bed blynne of þe rayn: hit batede as faste;
Þenne lasned þe lo3lowkande togeder.
After harde dayez wern out an hundreth & fyfte,
As þat lyftande lome luged aboute.
Where þe wynde & þe weder warpen hit wolde,
Hit sa3tled on a softe day, synkande to grounde;
On a rasse of a rok hit rest at þe laste,
On þe mounte of Mararach of Armene hilles.
Þat oþerwayez on Ebrv hit hat þe Thanes.
Bot þa3þe kyste in þe cragez wern closed to byde,
3et fyned not þe flod ne fel to þe boþemez,
Bot þe hy3est of þe eggez vnhuled weren a lyttel,
Þat þe burne bynne borde byhelde þe bare erþe.
Þenne wafte he vpon his wyndowe, & wysed þeroute
A message fro þat meyny hem moldez to seche:
Þat watz þe rauen so ronk, þat rebel watz euer;
He watz colored as þe cole, corbyal vntrwe.
65
& he fongez to þe fly3t & fannez on þe wyndez,
Halez hy3e vpon hy3t to herken tyþyngez.
He croukez for comfort when carayne he fyndez
Kast vp on a clyffe þer costese lay drye;
He hade þe smelle of þe smach & smoltes þeder sone,
Fallez on þe foule flesch & fyllez his wombe,
& sone 3ederly for3ete 3isterday steuen,
How þe cheuetayn hym charged þat þe kyst 3emed.
Þe rauen raykez hym forth, þat reches ful lyttel
How alle fodez þer fare, ellez he fynde mete;
Bot þe burne bynne borde þat bod to hys come
Banned hym ful bytterly with bestes alle samen.
He sechez anoþer sondezmon, & settez on þe dou[u]e,
Bryngez þat bry3t vpon borde, blessed, & sayde:
'Wende, worþelych wy3t, vus wonez to seche;
Dryf ouer þis dymme water; if þou druye fyndez
Bryng bodworde to bot blysse to vus alle.
Þa3þat fowle be false, fre be þou euer.'
Ho wyrle out on þe weder on wyngez ful scharpe,
Dre3ly alle alonge day þat dorst neuer ly3t;
& when ho fyndez no folde her fote on to pyche,
Ho vmbekestez þe coste & þe kyst sechez.
Ho hittez on þe euentyde & on þe ark sittez;
Noe nymmes hir anon & naytly hir stauez.
Noe on anoþer day nymmez efte þe doveue,
& byddez hir bowe ouer þe borne efte bonkez to seche;
& ho skyrmez vnder skwe & skowtez aboute,
Tyl hit watz ny3e at þe na3t, & Noe þen sechez.
On ark on an euentyde houez þe dowue;
On stamyn ho stod & stylle hym abydez.
What! ho bro3t in hir beke a bronch of olyue,
Gracyously vmbegrouen al with grene leuez;
Þat watz þe syngne of sauyte þat sende hem oure Lorde,
& þe sa3tlyng of Hymself with þo sely bestez.
Þen watz þer joy on þat gyn where jumpred er dry3ed,
& much comfort in þat cofer þat watz clay-daubed.
Myryly on a fayr morn, monyth þe fyrst,
Þat fallez formast in þe 3er, & þe fyrst day,
Ledez lo3en in þat lome & loked þeroute,
How þat watterez wern woned & þe worlde dryed.
Vchon loued oure Lorde, bot lenged ay stylle
Tyl þay had tyþyng fro þe Tolke þat tyned hem
66
þerinne.
Þen Godez glam to hem glod þat gladed hem alle,
Bede hem drawe to þe dor: delyuer hem He wolde.
Þen went þay to þe wykket, hit walt vpon sone;
Boþe þe burne & his barnez bowed þeroute,
Her wyuez walkez hem wyth & þe wylde after,
Þroly þrublande in þronge, þrowen ful þykke.
Bot Noe of vche honest kynde nem out an odde,
& heuened vp an auter & hal3ed hit fayre,
& sette a sakerfyse þeron of vch a ser kynde
Þat watz comly & clene: God kepez non oþer.
When bremly brened þose bestez, & þe breþe rysed,
Þe sauour of his sacrafyse so3t to Hym euen
Þat al spedez & spyllez; He spekes with þat ilke
In comly comfort ful clos & cortays wordez:
'Now, Noe, no more nel I neuer wary
Alle þe mukel mayny [on] molde for no mannez synnez,
For I se wel þat hit is sothe þat alle mannez wyttez
To vnþryfte arn alle þrawen with þo3t of her herttez,
& ay hatz ben, & wyl be 3et; fro her barnage
Al is þe mynde of þe man to malyce enclyned.
Forþy schal I neuer schende so schortly at ones
As dysstrye al for manez synne, dayez of þis erþe.
Bot waxez now & wendez forth & worþez to monye,
Multyplyez on þis molde, & menske yow bytyde.
Sesounez schal yow neuer sese of sede ne of heruest,
Ne hete, ne no harde forst, vmbre ne dro3þe,
Ne þe swetnesse of somer, ne þe sadde wynter,
Ne þe ny3t, ne þe day, ne þe newe 3erez,
Bot euer renne restlez: rengnez 3e þerinne.'
Þerwyth He blessez vch a best, & byta3t hem þis erþe.
Þen watz a skylly skyualde, quen scaped alle þe wylde,
Vche fowle to þe fly3t þat fyþerez my3t serue,
Vche fysch to þe flod þat fynne couþe nayte.
Vche beste to þe bent þat þat bytes on erbez;
Wylde wormez to her won wryþez in þe erþe,
Þe fox & þe folmarde to þe fryth wyndez,
Herttes to hy3e heþe, harez to gorstez,
& lyounez & lebardez to þe lake-ryftes:
Hernez & hauekez to þe hy3e rochez,
Þe hole-foted fowle to þe flod hy3ez,
& vche best at a brayde þer hym best lykez;
67
Þe fowre frekez of þe folde fongez þe empyre.
Lo! suche a wrakful wo for wlatsum dedez
Parformed þe hy3e Fader on folke þat He made;
Þat He chysly hade cherisched He chastysed ful hardee,
In devoydynge þe vylanye þat venkquyst His þewez.
Forþy war þe now, wy3e þat worschyp desyres
In His comlych courte þat Kyng is of blysse,
In þe fylþe of þe flesch þat þou be founden
neuer,
Tyl any water in þe worlde to wasche þe fayly.
For is no segge vnder sunne so seme of his craftez,
If he be sulped in synne, þat syttez vnclene;
On spec of spote may spede to mysse
Of þe sy3te of þe Souerayn þat syttez so hy3e;
For þat schewe me schale in þo schyre howsez,
As þe beryl bornyst byhouez be clene.
Þat is sounde on vche a syde & no sem habes,
Withouten maskle oþer mote, as margerye-perle.
Syþen þe Souerayn in sete so sore forþo3t
Þat euer He man vpon molde merked to lyuy,
For he in fylþe watz fallen, felly He uenged,
Quen fourferde alle þe flesch þat He formed hade.
Hym rwed þat He hem vprerde & ra3t hem lyflode;
& efte þat He hem vndyd, hard hit Hym þo3t.
For quen þe swemande sor3e so3t to His hert,
He knyt a couenaunde cortaysly with monkynde þere,
In þe mesure of His mode & meþe of His wylle,
Þat He schulde neuer for no syt smyte al at onez,
As to quelle alle quykez for qued þat my3t falle,
Whyl of þe lenþe of þe londe lastez þe terme.
Þat ilke skyl for no scaþe ascaped Hym neuer.
Wheder wonderly He wrak on wykked men after,
Ful felly for þat ilk faute forferde a kyth ryche,
In þe anger of His ire, þat ar3ed mony;
& al watz for þis ilk euel, þat vnhappen glette,
Þe venym & þe vylanye & þe vycios fylþe
Þat bysulpez mannez saule in vnsounde hert,
Þat he his Saueour ne see with sy3t of his y3en.
Alle illez He hates as helle þat alle stynkkez;
Bot non nuyez Hym on na3t ne neuer vpon dayez
As harlottrye vnhonest, heþyng of seluen:
Þat schamez for no schrewedschyp, schent mot he worþe.
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Bot sauyour, mon, in þyself, þa3þou a sotte lyuie,
Þa3þou bere þyself babel, byþenk þe sumtyme
Wheþer He þat stykked vche a stare in vche steppe y3e,
3if Hymsel[f] be bore blynde hit is a brod wonder;
& He þat fetly in face fettled alle eres,
If he hatz losed þe lysten hit lyftez meruayle:
Trave þou neuer þat tale, vntrwe þou hit fyndez.
Þer is no dede so derne þat dittez His y3en;
Þer is no wy3e in his werk so war ne so stylle
Þat hit ne þrawez to Hym þr[o] er he hit þo3t haue.
For He is þe gropande God, þe grounde of alle dedez,
Rypande of vche a ring þe reynyez & hert.
& þere He fyndez al fayre a freke wythinne,
Þat hert honest & hol, þat haþel He honourez,
Sendez hym a sad sy3t: to se His auen face,
& harde honysez þise oþer, & of His erde flemez.
Bot of þe dome of þe douþe for dedez of schame,
He is so skoymos of þat skaþe, He scarrez bylyue;
He may not dry3e to draw allyt, bot drepez in hast:
& þat watz schewed schortly by a scaþe onez.
Olde Abraham in erde onez he syttez
Euen byfore his hous-dore, vnder an oke grene;
Bry3t blykked þe bem of þe brode heuen;
In þe hy3e hete þerof Abraham bidez:
He watz schunt to þe schadow vnder schyre leuez.
Þenne watz he war on þe waye of wlonk Wy3ez þrynne;
If þay wer farande & fre & fayre to beholde
Hit is eþe to leue by þe last ende.
For þe lede þat þer laye þe leuez anvnder,
When he hade of Hem sy3t he hy3ez bylyue,
& as to God þe goodmon gos Hem agaynez
& haylsed Hem in onhede, & sayde: 'Hende Lorde,
3if euer Þy mon vpon molde merit disserued,
Lenge a lyttel with Þy lede, I lo3ly biseche;
Passe neuer fro Þi pouere, 3if I hit pray durst,
Er Þou haf biden with Þi burne & vnder bo3e restted,
& I schal wynne Yow wy3t of water a lyttel,
& fast aboute schal I fare Your fette wer waschene.
Resttez here on þis rote & I schal rachche after
& brynge a morsel of bred to banne Your hertte.'
'Fare forthe,' quoþ þe Frekez, '& fech as þou seggez;
By bole of þis brode tre We byde þe here.'
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Þenne orppedly into his hous he hy3ed to Sare,
Commaunded hir to be cof & quyk at þis onez:
'Þre mettez of mele menge & ma kakez;
Vnder askez ful hote happe hem byliue;
Quyl I fete sumquat fat, þou þe fyr bete,
Prestly at þis ilke poynte sum polment to make.'
He cached to his covhous & a calf bryngez,
Þat watz tender & not to3e, bed tyrue of þe hyde,
& sayde to his seruaunt þat hit seþe faste;
& he deruely at his dome dy3t hit bylyue.
Þe burne to be bare-heued buskez hym þenne,
Clechez to a clene cloþe & kestez on þe grene,
Þrwe þryftyly þeron þo þre þerue kakez,
& bryngez butter wythal & by þe bred settez;
Mete messez of mylke he merkkez bytwene,
Syþen potage & polment in plater honest.
As sewer in a god assyse he serued Hem fayre,
Wyth sadde semblaunt & swete of such as he hade;
& God as a glad gest mad god chere
Þat watz fayn of his frende, & his fest praysed.
Abraham, al hodlez, with armez vp-folden,
Mynystred mete byfore þo Men þat my3tes al weldez.
Þenne Þay sayden as Þay sete samen alle
þrynne,
When þe mete watz remued & Þay of mensk speken,
'I schal efte hereaway, Abram,' Þay sayden,
'3et er þy lyuez ly3t leþe vpon erþe,
& þenne schal Sare consayue & a sun bere,
Þat schal be Abrahamez ayre & after hym wynne
With wele & wyth worschyp þe worþely peple
Þat schal halde in heritage þat I haf men 3ark[ed].'
Þenne þe burde byhynde þe dor for busmar la3ed;
& sayde sothly to hirself Sare þe madde:
'May þou traw for tykle þat þou tonne mo3tez,
& I so hy3e out of age, & also my lorde?'
For soþely, as says þe wryt, he wern of sadde elde,
Boþe þe wy3e & his wyf, such werk watz hem fayled
Fro mony a brod day byfore; ho barayn ay byene,
Þat selue Sare, withouten sede into þat same tyme.
Þenne sayde oure Syre þer He sete: 'Se! so Sare la3es,
Not trawande þe tale þat I þe to schewed.
Hopez ho o3t may be harde My hondez to work?
70
& 3et I avow verayly þe avaunt þat I made;
I schal 3eply a3ayn & 3elde þat I hy3t,
& sothely send to Sare a soun & an hayre.'
Þenne swenged forth Sare & swer by hir trawþe
Þat for lot þat Þay laused ho la3ed neuer.
'Now innoghe: hit is not so,' þenne nurned þe Dry3tyn,
'For þou la3ed alo3, bot let we hit one.'
With þat Þay ros vp radly, as Þay rayke schulde,
& setten toward Sodamas Her sy3t alle at onez;
For þat cite þerbysyde watz sette in a vale,
No mylez fro Mambre mo þen tweyne,
Whereso wonyed þis ilke wy3, þat wendez with oure Lorde
For to tent Hym with tale & teche Hym þe gate.
Þen glydez forth God; þe godmon Hym fol3ez;
Abraham heldez Hem wyth, Hem to conueye
In towarde þe cety of Sodamas þat synned had þenne
In þe faute of þis fylþe. Þe Fader hem þretes,
& sayde þus to þe segg þat sued Hym after:
'How my3t I hyde Myn hert fro Habraham þe trwe,
Þat I ne dyscouered to his corse My counsayl so dere,
Syþen he is chosen to be chef chyldryn fader,
Þat so folk schal falle fro to flete alle þe worlde,
& vche blod in þat burne blessed schal worþe?
Me bos telle to þat tolk þe tene of My wylle,
& alle Myn atlyng to Abraham vnhaspe bilyue.
The grete soun of Sodamas synkkez in Myn erez,
& þe gult of Gomorre garez Me to wrath.
I schal ly3t into þat led & loke Myseluen
[If] þay haf don as þe dyne dryuez on lofte.
Þay han lerned a lyst þat lykez me ille,
Þat þay han founden in her flesch of fautez þe werst:
Vch male matz his mach a man as hymseluen,
& fylter folyly in fere on femmalez wyse.
I compast hem a kynde crafte & kende hit hem derne,
& amed hit in Myn ordenaunce oddely dere,
& dy3t drwry þerinne, doole alþer-swettest,
& þe play of paramorez I portrayed Myseluen,
& made þerto a maner myriest of oþer:
When two true togeder had ty3ed hemseluen,
Bytwene a male & his make such merþe schulde conne,
Welny3e pure paradys mo3t preue no better;
Ellez þay mo3t honestly ayþer oþer welde,
71
At a stylle stollen steuen, vnstered wyth sy3t,
Luf-lowe hem bytwene lasched so hote
Þat alle þe meschefez on mold mo3t hit not sleke.
Now haf þay skyfted My skyl & scorned natwre,
& henttez hem in heþyng an vsage vnclene.
Hem to smyte for þat smod smartly I þenk,
Þat wy3ez schal be by hem war, worlde withouten ende.'
Þenne ar3ed Abraham & alle his mod chaunge[d],
For hope of þe harde hate þat hy3t hatz oure Lorde.
Al sykande he sayde: 'Sir, with Yor leue,
Schal synful & saklez suffer al on payne?
Weþer euer hit lyke my Lorde to lyfte such domez
Þat þe wykked & þe worþy schal on wrake suffer,
& weye vpon þe worre half þat wrathed Þe neuer?
Þat watz neuer Þy won þat wro3tez vus alle.
Now fyfty fyn frendez wer founde in 3onde toune,
In þe cety of Sodamas & also Gomorre,
Þat neuer lakked Þy laue, bot loued ay trauþe,
& re3tful wern & resounable & redy Þe to serue,
Schal þay falle in þe faute þat oþer frekez wro3t,
& joyne to her juggement, her juise to haue?
Þat nas neuer Þyn note, vnneuened hit worþe,
Þat art so gaynly a God & of goste mylde.'
'Nay, for fyfty,' quoþ þe Fader, '& þy fayre speche,
& þay be founden in þat folk of her fylþe clene,
I schal forgyue alle þe gylt þur3My grace one,
& let hem smolt al unsmyten smoþely at onez.'
'Aa! blessed be Þow,' quoþ þe burne, 'so boner &
þewed,
& al haldez in Þy honde, þe heuen & þe erþe;
Bot, for I haf þis talke tatz to non ille
3if I mele a lyttel more þat mul am & askez.
What if fyue faylen of fyfty þe noumbre,
& þe remnaunt be reken, how restes Þy wylle?'
'And fyue wont of fyfty,' quoþ God, 'I schal for3ete alle
& wythhalde My honde for hortyng on lede.'
'& quat if faurty be fre & fauty þyse oþer:
Schalt Þow schortly al schende & schape non oþer?'
'Nay, þa3faurty forfete, 3et fryst I a whyle,
& voyde away My vengaunce, þa3Me vyl þynk.'
Þen Abraham obeched Hym & lo3ly Him þonkkez:
'Now sayned be Þou, Sauiour, so symple in Þy wrath!
72
I am bot erþe ful euel & vsle so blake,
For to mele wyth such a Mayster as my3tez hatz alle.
Bot I haue bygonnen wyth my God, & He hit gayn þynkez;
3if I forloyne as a fol Þy fraunchyse may serue.
What if þretty þryuande be þrad in 3on tounez,
What schal I leue of my Lorde, [i]f He hem leþe wolde?'
Þenne þe godlych God gef hym onsware:
'3et for þretty in þrong I schal My þro steke,
& spare spakly of spyt in space of My þewez,
& My rankor refrayne four þy reken wordez.'
'What for twenty,' quoþ þe tolke, 'vntwynez Þou hem
þenne?'
'Nay, 3if þou 3ernez hit 3et, 3ark I hem grace;
If þat twenty be trwe, I tene hem no more,
Bot relece alle þat regioun of her ronk werkkez.'
'Now, aþel Lorde,' quoþ Abraham, 'onez a speche,
& I schal schape no more þo schalkkez to helpe.
If ten trysty in toune be tan in Þi werkkez,
Wylt Þou mese Þy mode & menddyng abyde?'
'I graunt,' quoþ þe grete God, 'Graunt mercy,' þat
oþer;
& þenne arest þe renk & ra3t no fyrre.
& Godde glydez His gate by þose grene wayez,
& he conueyen Hym con with cast of his y3e;
& als he loked along þereas oure Lorde passed,
3et he cryed Hym after with careful steuen:
'Meke Mayster, on Þy mon to mynne if Þe lyked,
Loth lengez in 3on leede þat is my lef broþer;
He syttez þer in Sodomis, þy seruaunt so pouere,
Among þo mansed men þat han Þe much greued.
3if Þou tynez þat toun, tempre Þyn yre,
As Þy mersy may malte, Þy meke to spare.'
Þen he wendez, wendez his way, wepande for care,
Towarde þe mere of Mambre, wepande for sorewe;
& þere in longyng al ny3t he lengez in wones,
Whyl þe Souerayn to Sodamas sende to spye.
His sondes into Sodamas watz sende in þat tyme,
In þat ilk euentyde, by aungels tweyne,
Meuand meuande mekely togeder as myry men 3onge,
As Loot in a loge dor lened hym alone,
In a porche of þat place py3t to þe 3ates,
Þat watz ryal & ryche so watz þe renkes seluen.
73
As he stared into þe strete þer stout men played,
He sy3e þer swey in asent swete men tweyne;
Bolde burnez wer þay boþe with berdles chynnez,
Ryol rollande fax to raw sylk lyke,
Of ble as þe brere-flour whereso þe bare scheweed.
Ful clene watz þe countenaunce of her cler y3en;
Wlonk whit watz her wede & wel hit hem semed.
Of alle feturez ful fyn & fautlez boþe;
Watz non autly in ouþer, for aungels hit wern,
& þat þe 3ep vnder3ede þat in þe 3ate syttez;
He ros vp ful radly & ran hem to mete,
& lo3e he loutez hem to, Loth, to þe grounde,
& syþen soberly: 'Syrez, I yow byseche
Þat 3e wolde ly3t at my loge & lenge þerinne.
Comez to your knaues kote, I craue at þis onez;
I schal fette yow a fatte your fette for to wasche;
I norne yow bot for on ny3t ne3e me to lenge,
& in þe myry mornyng 3e may your waye take.'
& þay nay þat þay nolde ne3no howsez,
Bot stylly þer in þe strete as þay stadde wern
Þay wolde lenge þe long na3t & logge þeroute:
Hit watz hous inno3e to hem þe heuen vpon lofte.
Loth laþed so longe wyth luflych wordez
Þat þay hym graunted to go & gru3t no lenger.
Þe bolde to his byggyng bryngez hem bylyue,
Þat [watz] ryally arayed, for he watz ryche euer.
Þe wy3ez wern welcom as þe wyf couþe;
His two dere do3terez deuoutly hem haylsed,
Þat wer maydenez ful meke, maryed not 3et,
& þay wer semly & swete, & swyþe wel arayed.
Loth þenne ful ly3tly lokez hym aboute,
& his men amonestes mete for to dy3t:
'Bot þenkkez on hit be þrefte what þynk so 3e make,
For wyth no sour no no salt seruez hym neuer.'
Bot 3et I wene þat þe wyf hit wroth to dyspyt,
& sayde softely to hirself: 'Þis vn[s]auere hyne
Louez no salt in her sauce; 3et hit no skyl were
Þat oþer burne be boute, þa3boþe be nyse.'
Þenne ho sauerez with salt her seuez vchone,
Agayne þe bone of þe burne þat hit forboden hade,
& als ho scelt hem in scorne þat wel her skyl knewen.
Why watz ho, wrech, so wod? Ho wrathed oure Lorde.
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Þenne seten þay at þe soper, wern serued bylyue,
Þe gestes gay & ful glad, of glam debonere,
Welawynnely wlonk, tyl þay waschen hade,
Þe trestes tylt to þe wo3e & þe table boþe.
Fro þe seggez haden souped & seten bot a whyle,
Er euer þay bosked to bedde, þe bor3watz al vp,
Alle þat weppen my3t welde, þe wakker & þe stronger,
To vmbely3e Lothez hous þe ledez to take.
In grete flokkez of folk þay fallen to his 3atez;
As a scowte-wach scarred so þe asscry rysed;
With kene clobbez of þat clos þay clatz on þe wowez,
& wyth a schrylle scarp schout þay schewe þyse worde[z]:
'If þou louyez þy lyf, Loth, in þyse wones,
3ete vus out þose 3ong men þat 3ore-whyle here entred,
Þat we may lere hym of lof, as oure lyst biddez,
As is þe asyse of Sodomas to seggez þat passen.'
Whatt! þay sputen & speken of so spitous fylþe,
What! þay 3e3ed & 3olped of 3estande sor3e,
Þat 3et þe wynd & þe weder & þe worlde stynkes
Of þe brych þat vpbraydez þose broþelych wordez.
Þe godman glyfte with þat glam & gloped for noyse;
So scharpe schame to hym schot, he schrank at þe hert.
For he knew þe costoum þat kyþed þose wrechez,
He doted neuer for no doel so depe in his mynde.
'Allas!' sayd hym þenne Loth, & ly3tly he rysez,
& bowez forth fro þe bench into þe brode 3ates.
What! he wonded no woþe of wekked knauez,
Þat he ne passed þe port þe p[er]il to abide.
He went forthe at þe wyket & waft hit hym after,
Þat a clyket hit cle3t clos hym byhynde.
Þenne he meled to þo men mesurable wordez,
For harlotez with his hendelayk he hoped to chast:
'Oo, my frendez so fre, your fare is to strange;
Dotz away your derf dyn & derez neuer my gestes.
Avoy! hit is your vylaynye, 3e vylen yourseluen;
& 3e are jolyf gentylmen, your japez ar ille
Bot I schal kenne yow by kynde a crafte þat is better:
I haf a tresor in my telde of tow my fayre de3ter,
Þat ar maydenez vnmard for alle men 3ette;
In Sodamas, þa3I hit say, non semloker burdes;
Hit arn ronk, hit arn rype, & redy to manne;
To samen wyth þo semly þe solace is better.
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I schal biteche yow þo two þat tayt arn & quoynt,
& laykez wyth hem as yow lyst, & letez my gestes one.'
Þenne þe rebaudez so ronk rerd such a noyse
Þat a3ly hurled in his erez her harlotez speche:
'Wost þou not wel þat þou wonez here a wy3e strange,
An outcomlyng, a carle? We kylle of þyn heued!
Who joyned þe be jostyse oure japez to blame,
Þat com a boy to þis bor3, þa3þou be burne ryche?'
Þus þay þrobled & þrong & þrwe vmbe his
erez,
& distresed hym wonder strayt with strenkþe in þe prece,
Bot þat þe 3onge men, so 3epe, 3ornen þeroute,
Wapped vpon þe wyket & wonnen hem tylle,
& by þe hondez hym hent & horyed hym withinne,
& steken þe 3ates ston-harde wyth stalworth barrez.
Þay blwe a boffet inblande þat banned peple,
Þat þay blustered, as blynde as Bayard watz euer;
Þay lest of Lotez logging any lysoun to fynde,
Bot nyteled þer alle þe ny3t for no3t at þe last.
Þenne vch tolke ty3t hem, þat hade of tayt fayled,
& vchon roþeled to þe rest þat he reche mo3t;
Bot þay wern wakned al wrank þat þer in won lenged,
Of on þe vglokest vnhap þat euer on erd suffred.
Ruddon of þe day-rawe ros vpon v3ten,
When merk of þe mydny3t mo3t no more last.
Ful erly þose aungelez þis haþel þay ruþen,
& glopnedly on Godez halue gart hym vpryse;
Fast þe freke ferkez vp ful ferd at his hert;
Þay comaunded hym cof to cach þat he hade,
'Wyth þy wyf & þy wy3ez & þy wlonc de3tters,
For we laþe þe, sir Loth, þat þou þy lyf haue.
Cayre tid of þis kythe er combred þou worþe,
With alle þi here vpon haste, tyl þou a hil fynde;
Foundez faste on your fete; bifore your face lokes,
Bot bes neuer so bolde to blusch yow bihynde,
& loke 3e stemme no stepe, bot strechez on faste;
Til 3e reche to a reset, rest 3e neuer.
For we schal tyne þis toun & trayþely disstrye,
Wyth alle þise wy3ez so wykke wy3tly devoyde,
& alle þe londe with þise ledez we losen at onez;
Sodomas schal ful sodenly synk into grounde,
& þe grounde of Gomorre gorde into helle,
76
& vche a koste of þis kythe clater vpon hepes.'
Þen laled Loth: 'Lorde, what is best?
If I me fele vpon fote þat I fle mo3t,
Hov schulde I huyde me fro H[y]m þat hatz His hate kynned
In þe brath of His breth þat brennez alle þinkez?
To crepe fro my Creatour & know not wheder,
Ne wheþer His fooschip me fol3ez bifore oþer bihynde.'
Þe freke sayde: 'No foschip oure Fader hatz þe schewed,
Bot hi3ly heuened þi hele fro hem þat arn combred.
Nov wale þe a wonnyng þat þe warisch my3t,
& He schal saue hit for þy sake þat hatz vus sende hider,
For þou art oddely þyn one out of þis fylþe,
& als Abraham þyn eme hit at Himself asked.'
'Lorde, loued He worþe,' quoþ Loth, 'vpon erþe!
Þen is a cite herbisyde þat Segor hit hatte,
Here vtter on a rounde hil hit houez hit one.
I wolde, if His wylle wore, to þat won scape.'
'Þenn fare forth,' quoþ þat fre, '& fyne þou neuer,
With þose ilk þat þow wylt þat þrenge þe
after,
& ay goande on your gate, wythouten agayn-tote,
For alle þis londe schal be lorne longe er þe sonne rise.'
Þe wy3e wakened his wyf & his wlonk de3teres,
& oþer two myri men þo maydenez schulde wedde;
& þay token hit as tyt & tented hit lyttel;
Þa3fast laþed hem Loth, þay le3en ful stylle.
Þe aungelez hasted þise oþer & a3ly hem þratten,
& enforsed alle fawre forth at þe 3atez:
Þo wern Loth & his lef, his luflyche de3ter;
Þer so3t no mo to sauement of cities aþel fyue.
Þise aungelez hade hem by hande out at þe 3atez,
Prechande hem þe perile, & beden hem passe fast:
'Lest 3e be taken in þe teche of tyrauntez here,
Loke 3e bowe now bi bot; bowez fast hence!'
& þay kayre ne con, & kenely flowen.
Erly, er any heuen-glem, þay to a hil comen.
Þe grete God in His greme bygynnez on lofte
To wakan wederez so wylde; þe wyndez He callez,
& þay wroþely vpwafte & wrastled togeder,
Fro fawre half of þe folde flytande loude.
Clowdez clustered bytwene kesten vp torres,
Þat þe þik þunder-þrast þirled hem ofte.
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Þe rayn rueled adoun, ridlande þikke
Of felle flaunkes of fyr & flakes of soufre,
Al in smolderande smoke smachande ful ille,
Swe aboute Sodamas & hit sydez alle,
Gorde to Gomorra, þat þe grounde laused,
Abdama & Syboym, þise ceteis alle faure
Al birolled wyth þe rayn, rostted & brenned,
& ferly flayed þat folk þat in þose fees lenged.
For when þat þe Helle herde þe houndez of heuen,
He watz ferlyly fayn, vnfolded bylyue;
Þe grete barrez of þe abyme he barst vp at onez,
Þat alle þe regioun torof in riftes ful grete,
& clouen alle in lyttel cloutes þe clyffez aywhere,
As lauce leuez of þe boke þat lepes in twynne.
Þe brethe of þe brynston bi þat hit blende were,
Al þo citees & her sydes sunkken to helle.
Rydelles wern þo grete rowtes of renkkes withinne,
When þay wern war of þe wrake þat no wy3e achaped;
Such a 3omerly 3arm of 3ellyng þer rysed,
Þerof clatered þe cloudes, þat Kryst my3t haf rawþe.
Þe segge herde þat soun to Segor þat 3ede,
& þe wenches hym wyth þat by þe way fol3ed;
Ferly ferde watz her flesch þat flowen ay ilyche,
Trynande ay a hy3e trot, þat torne neuer dorsten.
Loth & þo luly-whit, his lefly two de3ter,
Ay fol3ed here face, bifore her boþe y3en;
Bot þe balleful burde, þat neuer bode keped,
Blusched byhynden her bak þat bale for to herkken.
Hit watz lusty Lothes wyf þat ouer he[r] lyfte schulder
Ones ho bluschet to þe bur3e, bot bod ho no lenger
Þat ho nas stadde a stiffe ston, a stalworth image,
Al so salt as ani se, & so ho 3et standez.
Þay slypped bi & sy3e hir not þat wern hir samen-feres,
Tyl þay in Segor wern sette, & sayned our Lorde;
Wyth ly3t louez vplyfte þay loued Hym swyþe,
Þat so His seruauntes wolde see & saue of such woþe.
Al watz dampped & don & drowned by þenne;
Þe ledez of þat lyttel toun wern lopen out for drede
Into þat malscrande mere, marred bylyue,
Þat no3t saued watz bot Segor, þat sat on a lawe.
Þe þre ledez þerin, Loth & his de3ter;
For his make watz myst, þat on þe mount lenged
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In a stonen statue þat salt sauor habbes,
For two fautes þat þe fol watz founde in mistrauþe:
On, ho serued at þe soper salt bifore Dry3tyn,
& syþen, ho blusched hir bihynde, þa3hir forboden were;
For on ho standes a ston, & salt for þat oþer,
& alle lyst on hir lik þat arn on launde bestes.
Abraham ful erly watz vp on þe morne,
Þat alle na3t much niye hade no mon in his hert,
Al in longing for Loth leyen in a wache;
Þer he lafte hade oure Lorde he is on lofte wonnen;
He sende toward Sodomas þe sy3t of his y3en,
Þat euer hade ben an erde of erþe þe swettest,
As aparaunt to paradis, þat plantted þe Dry3tyn;
Nov is hit plunged in a pit like of pich fylled.
Suche a roþun of a reche ros fro þe blake,
Askez vpe in þe arye & vsellez þer flowen,
As a fornes ful of flot þat vpon fyr boyles
When bry3t brennande brondez ar bet þeranvnder.
Þis watz a uengaunce violent þat voyded þise places,
Þat foundered hatz so fayr a folk & þe folde sonkken.
Þer þe fyue citees wern set nov is a see called,
Þat ay is drouy & dym, & ded in hit kynde,
Blo, blubrande, & blak, vnblyþe to ne3e;
As a stynkande stanc þat stryed synne,
Þat euer of synne & of smach smart is to fele.
Forþy þe derk Dede See hit is demed euermore,
For hit dedez of deþe duren þere 3et;
For hit is brod & boþemlez, & bitter as þe galle,
& no3t may lenge in þat lake þat any lyf berez,
& alle þe costez of kynde hit combrez vchone.
For lay þeron a lump of led, & hit on loft fletez,
& folde þeron a ly3t fyþer, & hit to founs synkkez;
& þer water may walter to wete any erþe
Schal neuer grene þeron growe, gresse ne wod nawþer.
If any schalke to be schent wer schowued þerinne,
Þa3he bode in þat boþem broþely a monyth,
He most ay lyue in þat lo3e in losyng euermore,
& neuer dry3e no dethe to dayes of ende.
& as hit is corsed of kynde & hit coostez als,
Þe clay þat clenges þerby arn corsyes strong,
As alum & alkaran, þat angre arn boþe,
Soufre sour & saundyuer, & oþer such mony;
79
& þer waltez of þat water in waxlokes grete
Þe spuniande aspaltoun þat spyserez sellen;
& suche is alle þe soyle by þat se halues,
Þat fel fretes þe flesch & festred bones.
& þer ar tres by þat terne of traytoures,
& þay borgounez & beres blomez ful fayre,
& þe fayrest fryt þat may on folde growe,
As orenge & oþer fryt & apple-garnade,
Also red & so ripe & rychely hwed
As any dom my3t deuice of dayntyez oute;
Bot quen hit is brused oþer broken, oþer byten in twynne,
No worldez goud hit wythinne, bot wyndowande askes.
Alle þyse ar teches & tokenes to trow vpon 3et,
& wittnesse of þat wykked werk, & þe wrake after
Þat oure Fader forferde for fylþe of þose ledes.
Þenne vch wy3e may wel wyt þat He þe wlonk louies;
& if He louyes clene layk þat is oure Lorde ryche,
& to be couþe in His courte þou coueytes þenne,
To se þat Semly in sete & His swete face,
Clerrer counseyl, counseyl con I non, bot þat þou clene
worþe.
For Clopyngnel in þe compas of his clene Rose,
Þer he expounez a speche to hym þat spede wolde
Of a lady to be loued: 'Loke to hir sone
Of wich beryng þat ho be, & wych ho best louyes,
& be ry3t such in vch a bor3e of body & of dedes,
& fol3þe fet of þat fere þat þou fre haldes;
& if þou wyrkkes on þis wyse, þa3ho wyk were,
Hir schal lyke þat layk þat lyknes hir tylle.'
If þou wyl dele drwrye wyth Dry3tyn þenne,
& lelly louy þy Lorde & His leef worþe,
Þenne confourme þe to Kryst, & þe clene make,
Þat euer is polyced als playn as þe perle seluen.
For, loke, fro fyrst þat He ly3t withinne þe lel mayden,
By how comly a kest He watz clos þere,
When venkkyst watz no vergynyte, ne vyolence maked,
Bot much clener watz hir corse, God kynned þerinne.
& efte when He borne watz in Beþelen þe ryche,
In wych puryte þay departed; þa3þay pouer were,
Watz neuer so blysful a bour as watz a bos þenne,
Ne no schroude hous so schene as a schepon þare,
Ne non so glad vnder God as ho þat grone schulde.
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For þer watz seknesse al sounde þat sarrest is halden,
& þer watz rose reflayr where rote hatz ben euer,
& þer watz solace & songe wher sor3hatz ay cryed;
For aungelles with instrumentes of organes & pypes,
& rial ryngande rotes & þe reken fyþel,
& alle hende þat honestly mo3t an hert glade,
Aboutte my lady watz lent quen ho delyuer were.
Þenne watz her blyþe Barne burnyst so clene
Þat boþe þe ox & þe asse Hym hered at ones;
Þay knewe Hym by His clannes for Kyng of nature,
For non so clene of such a clos com neuer er þenne.
& 3if clanly He þenne com, ful cortays þerafter,
Þat alle þat longed to luþer ful lodly He hated,
By nobleye of His norture He nolde neuer towche
O3t þat watz vngoderly oþer ordure watz inne.
3et comen lodly to þat Lede, as lazares monye,
Summe lepre, summe lome, & lomerande blynde,
Poysened, & parlatyk, & pyned in fyres,
Drye folk & ydropike, & dede at þe laste,
Alle called on þat Cortayse & claymed His grace.
He heled hem wyth hynde speche of þat þay ask after,
For whatso He towched also tyd tourned to hele,
Wel clanner þen any crafte cowþe devyse.
So clene watz His hondelyng vche ordure hit schonied,
& þe gropyng so goud of God & Man boþe,
Þat for fetys of His fyngeres fonded He neuer
Nauþer to cout ne to kerue with knyf ne wyth egge;
Forþy brek He þe bred blades wythouten,
For hit ferde freloker in fete in His fayre honde,
Displayed more pryuyly when He hit part schulde,
Þenne alle þe toles of Tolowse mo3t ty3t hit to kerue.
Þus is He kyryous & clene þat þou His cort askes:
Hov schulde þou com to His kyth bot if þou clene were?
Nov ar we sore & synful & sovly vchone;
How schulde we se, þen may we say, þat Syre vpon throne?
3is, þat Mayster is mercyable, þa3þou be man fenny,
& al tomarred in myre whyle þou on molde lyuyes;
Þou may schyne þur3schryfte, þa3þou haf
schome serued,
& pure þe with penaunce tyl þou a perle worþe.
Perle praysed is prys þer perre is schewed,
Þa3hym not derrest be demed to dele for penies.
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Quat may þe cause be called bot for hir clene hwes,
Þat wynnes worschyp abof alle whyte stones?
For ho schynes so schyr þat is of schap rounde,
Wythouten faut oþer fylþe 3if ho fyn were,
& wax euer in þe worlde in weryng so olde,
3et þe perle payres not whyle ho in pyese lasttes;
& if hit cheue þe chaunce vncheryst ho worþe,
Þat ho blyndes of ble in bour þer ho lygges,
Nobot wasch hir wyth wourchyp in wyn as ho askes,
Ho by kynde schal becom clerer þen are.
So if folk be defowled by vnfre chaunce,
Þat he be sulped in sawle, seche to schryfte,
& he may polyce hym at þe prest, by penaunce taken,
Wel bry3ter þen þe beryl oþer browden perles.
Bot war þe wel, if þou be waschen wyth water of schryfte,
& polysed als playn as parchmen schauen,
Sulp no more þenne in synne þy saule þerafter,
For þenne þou Dry3tyn dyspleses with dedes ful sore,
& entyses Hym to tene more trayþly þen euer,
& wel hatter to hate þen hade þou no waschen.
For when a sawele is sa3tled & sakred to Dry3tyn,
He holly haldes hit His & haue hit He wolde;
Þenne efte lastes hit likkes, He loses hit ille,
As hit were rafte wyth vnry3t & robbed wyth þewes.
War þe þenne for þe wrake: His wrath is achaufed
For þat þat ones watz His schulde efte be vnclene,
Þa3hit be bot a bassyn, a bolle oþer a scole,
A dysche oþer a dobler, þat Dry3tyn onez serued.
To defowle hit euer vpon folde fast He forbedes,
So is He scoymus of scaþe þat scylful is euer.
& þat watz bared in Babyloyn in Baltazar tyme,
Hov harde vnhap þer hym hent & hastyly sone,
For he þe vesselles avyled þat vayled in þe temple
In seruyse of þe Souerayn sumtyme byfore.
3if 3e wolde ty3t me a tom telle hit I wolde,
Hov charged more watz his chaunce þat hem cherych nolde
Þen his fader forloyne þat feched hem wyth strenþe,
& robbed þe relygioun of relykes alle.
Danyel in his dialokez devysed sumtyme,
As 3et is proued expresse in his profecies,
Hov þe gentryse of Juise & Jherusalem þe ryche
Watz disstryed wyth distres, & drawen to þe erþe.
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For þat folke in her fayth watz founden vntrwe,
Þat haden hy3t þe hy3e God to halde of Hym euer;
& He hem hal3ed for His & help at her nede
In mukel meschefes mony, þat meruayl [is] to here.
& þay forloyne her fayth & fol3ed oþer goddes,
& þat wakned His wrath & wrast hit so hy3e
Þat He fylsened þe faythful in þe falce lawe
To forfare þe falce in þe faythe trwe.
Hit watz sen in þat syþe þat Zedethyas rengned
In Juda, þat justised þe Juyne kynges.
He sete on Salamones solie on solemne wyse,
Bot of leaute he watz lat to his Lorde hende:
He vsed abominaciones of idolatrye,
& lette ly3t bi þe lawe þat he watz lege tylle.
Forþi oure Fader vpon folde a foman hym wakned:
Nabigodenozar nuyed hym swyþe.
He pursued into Palastyn with proude men mony,
& þer he wast wyth with werre þe wones of þorpes;
He her3ed vp alle Israel & hent of þe beste,
& þe gentylest of Judee in Jerusalem biseged,
Vmbewalt alle þe walles wyth wy3es ful stronge,
At vche a dor a do3ty duk, & dutte hem wythinne;
For þe bor3watz so bygge baytayled alofte,
& stoffed wythinne with stout men to stalle hem þeroute.
Þenne watz þe sege sette þe cete aboute,
Skete skarmoch skelt, much skaþe lached;
At vch brugge a berfray on basteles wyse
Þat seuen syþe vch a day asayled þe 3ates;
Trwe tulkkes in toures teueled wythinne,
In bigge brutage of borde bulde on þe walles;
Þay fe3t & þay fende of, & fylter togeder
Til two 3er ouertorned, 3et tok þay hit neuer.
At þe laste, vpon longe, þo ledes wythinne,
Faste fayled hem þe fode, enfannined monie;
Þe hote hunger wythinne hert hem wel sarre
Þen any dunt of þat douthe þat dowelled þeroute.
Þenne wern þo rowtes redles in þo ryche wones;
Fro þat mete watz myst, megre þay wexen,
& þay stoken so strayt þat þay ne stray my3t
A fote fro þat forselet to forray no goudes.
Þenne þe kyng of þe kyth a counsayl hym takes
Wyth þe best of his burnes, a blench for to make;
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Þay stel out on a stylle ny3t er any steuen rysed,
& harde hurles þur3þe oste er enmies hit wyste.
Bot er þay atwappe ne mo3t þe wach wythoute
Hi3e skelt watz þe askry þe skewes anvnder.
Loude alarom vpon launde lulted watz þenne;
Ryche, ruþed of her rest, ran to here wedes,
Hard hattes þay hent & on hors lepes;
Cler claryoun crak cryed on lofte.
By þat watz alle on a hepe hurlande swyþee,
Fol3ande þat oþer flote, & fonde hem bilyue,
Ouertok hem as tyd, tult hem of sadeles,
Tyl vche prynce hade his per put to þe grounde.
& þer watz þe kyng ka3t wyth Calde prynces,
& alle hise gentyle forjusted on Jerico playnes,
& presented wern as presoneres to þe prynce rychest,
Nabigodenozar, noble in his chayer;
& he þe faynest freke þat he his fo hade,
& speke spitously hem to, & spylt þerafter.
Þe kynges sunnes in his sy3t he slow euervch one,
& holkked out his auen y3en heterly boþe,
& bede þe burne to be bro3t to Babyloyn þe ryche,
& þere in dongoun be don to dre3e þer his wyrdes.
Now se, so þe Soueray[n] set hatz His wrake:
Nas hit not for Nabugo ne his noble nauþer
Þat oþer depryued watz of pryde with paynes stronge,
Bot for his beryng so badde agayn his blyþe Lorde;
For hade þe Fader ben his frende, þat hym bifore keped,
Ne neuer trespast to Him in teche of mysseleue,
To colde wer alle Calde & kythes of Ynde,
3et take Torkye hem wyth, her tene hade ben little.
3et nolde neuer Nabugo þis ilke note leue
Er he hade tuyred þis toun & torne hit to grounde.
He joyned vnto Jerusalem a gentyle duc þenne,
His name watz Nabuzardan, to noye þe Jues;
He watz mayster of his men & my3ty himseluen,
Þe chef of his cheualrye his chekkes to make;
He brek þe bareres as bylyue, & þe bur3after,
& enteres in ful ernestly, in yre of his hert.
What! þe maysterry watz mene: þe men wern away,
Þe best bo3ed wyth þe burne þat þe bor33emed,
& þo þat byden wer [s]o biten with þe bale hunger
Þat on wyf hade ben worþe þe welgest fourre.
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Nabizardan no3t forþy nolde not spare,
Bot bede al to þe bronde vnder bare egge;
Þay slowen of swettest semlych burdes,
Baþed barnes in blod & her brayn spylled;
Prestes & prelates þay presed to deþe,
Wyues & wenches her wombes tocoruen,
Þat her boweles outborst aboute þe diches,
& al watz carfully kylde þat þay cach my3t.
And alle swypped, vnswol3ed of þe sworde kene,
Þay wer cagged & ka3t on capeles al bare,
Festned fettres to her fete vnder fole wombes,
& broþely bro3t to Babyloyn þer bale to suffer,
To sytte in seruage & syte, þat sumtyme wer gentyle.
Now ar chaunged to chorles & charged wyth werkkes,
Boþe to cayre at þe kart & þe kuy mylke,
Þat sumtyme sete in her sale syres & burdes.
& 3et Nabuzardan nyl neuer stynt
Er he to þe tempple tee wyth his tulkkes alle;
Betes on þe barers, brestes vp þe 3ates,
Slouen alle at a slyp þat serued þerinne,
Pulden prestes bi þe polle & plat of her hedes,
Di3ten dekenes to deþe, dungen doun clerkkes,
& alle þe maydenes of þe munster ma3tyly hokyllen
Wyth þe swayf of þe sworde þat swol3ed hem alle.
Þenne ran þay to þe relykes as robbors wylde,
& pyled alle þe apparement þat pented to þe kyrke,
Þe pure pyleres of bras pourtrayd in golde,
& þe chef chaundeler charged with þe ly3t,
Þat ber þe lamp vpon lofte þat lemed euermore
Bifore þ[e] sancta sanctorumþer
selcouth watz ofte.
Þay ca3t away þat condelstik, & þe crowne als
Þat þe auter hade vpon, of aþel golde ryche,
Þe gredirne & þe goblotes garnyst of syluer,
Þe bases of þe bry3t postes & bassynes so schyre,
Dere disches of golde & dubleres fayre,
Þe vyoles & þe vesselment of vertuous stones.
Now hatz Nabuzardan nomen alle þyse noble þynges,
& pyled þat precious place & pakked þose godes;
Þe golde of þe gazafylace to swyþe gret noumbre,
Wyth alle þe vrnmentes of þat hous, he hamppred togeder;
Alle he spoyled spitously in a sped whyle
85
Þat Salomon so mony a sadde 3er so3t to make.
Wyth alle þe coyntyse þat he cowþe clene to wyrke,
Deuised he þe vesselment, þe vestures clene;
Wyth sly3t of his ciences, his Souerayn to loue,
Þe hous & þe anournementes he hy3tled togedere.
Now hatz Nabuzardan numnend hit al samen,
& syþen bet doun þe bur3& brend hit in askes.
Þenne wyth legiounes of ledes ouer londes he rydes,
Her3ez of Israel þe hyrne aboute;
Wyth charged chariotes þe cheftayn he fynde,
Bikennes þe catel to þe kyng, þat he ca3t hade;
Presented him þe prisoneres in pray þat þay token,
Moni a worþly wy3e whil her worlde laste,
Moni semly syre soun, & swyþe rych maydenes,
Þe pruddest of þe prouince, & prophetes childer,
As Ananie & Azarie & als Mizael,
& dere Daniel also, þat watz deuine noble,
With moni a modey moder-chylde mo þen innoghe.
& Nabugo_de_nozar makes much joye,
Nov he þe kyng hatz conquest & þe kyth wunnen,
& dreped alle þe do3tyest & derrest in armes,
& þe lederes of her lawe layd to þe grounde,
& þe pryce of þe profetie prisoners maked.
Bot þe joy of þe juelrye so gentyle & ryche,
When hit watz schewed hym so schene, scharp watz his wonder;
Of such vessel auayed, þat vayled so huge,
Neuer 3et nas Nabugo_de_nozar er þenne.
He sesed hem with solemnete, þe Souerayn he praysed
Þat watz aþel ouer alle, Israel Dry3tyn:
Such god, such gomes, such gay vesselles,
Comen neuer out of kyth to Caldee reames.
He trussed hem in his tresorye in a tryed place,
Rekenly, wyth reuerens, as he ry3t hade;
& þer he wro3t as þe wyse, as 3e may wyt hereafter,
For hade he let of hem ly3t, hym mo3t haf lumpen worse.
Þat ryche in gret rialte rengned his lyue,
As conquerour of vche a cost he cayser watz hatte,
Emperour of alle þe erþe & also þe saudan,
& als þe god of þe grounde watz grauen his name.
& al þur3dome of Daniel, fro he deuised hade
Þat alle goudes com of God, & gef hit hym bi samples,
Þat he ful clanly bicnv his carp bi þe laste,
86
& ofte hit mekned his mynde, his maysterful werkkes.
Bot al drawes to dy3e with doel vp[o]n ende:
Bi a haþel neuer so hy3e, he heldes to grounde.
& so Nabugo_de_nozar, as he nedes moste,
For alle his empire so hi3e in erþe is he grauen.
Bot þenn þe bolde Baltazar, þat watz his barn aldest,
He watz stalled in his stud, & stabled þe rengne
In þe bur3of Babiloyne, þe biggest he trawed,
Þat nauþer in heuen ne [on] erþe hade no pere;
For he bigan in alle þe glori þat hym þe gome lafte,
Nabugo_de_nozar, þat watz his noble fader.
So kene a kyng in Caldee com neu[er] er þenne;
Bot honoured he not Hym þat in heuen wonies.
Bot fals fantummes of fendes, formed with handes,
Wyth tool out of harde tre, & telded on lofte,
& of stokkes & stones, he stoute goddes callz,
When þay ar gilde al with golde & gered wyth syluer;
& þere he kneles & callez & clepes after help.
& þay reden him ry3t rewarde he hem hetes,
& if þay gruchen him his grace, to gremen his hert,
He cleches to a gret klubbe & knokkes hem to peces.
Þus in pryde & olipraunce his empyre he haldes,
In lust & in lecherye & loþelych werkkes,
& hade a wyf for to welde, a worþelych quene,
& mony a lemman, neuer þe later, þat ladis wer called.
In þe clernes of his concubines & curious wedez,
In notyng of nwe metes & of nice gettes,
Al watz þe mynde of þat man on misschapen þinges,
Til þe Lorde of þe lyfte liste hit abate.
Thenne þis bolde Baltazar biþenkkes hym ones
To vouche on avayment of his vayne g[l]orie;
Hit is not innoghe to þe nice al no3ty þink vse
Bot if alle þe worlde wyt his wykked dedes.
Baltazar þur3Babiloyn his banne gart crye,
& þur3þe cuntre of Caldee his callyng con spryng,
Þat alle þe grete vpon grounde schulde geder hem samen
& assemble at a set day at þe saudans fest.
Such a mangerie to make þe man watz auised,
Þat vche a kythyn kyng schuld com þider,
Vche duk wyth his duthe, & oþer dere lordes,
Schulde com to his court to kyþe hym for lege,
& to reche hym reuerens, & his reuel herkken,
87
To loke on his lemanes & ladis hem calle.
To rose hym in his rialty rych men so3tten,
& mony a baroun ful bolde, to Babyloyn þe noble.
Þer bowed toward Babiloyn burnes so mony,
Kynges, cayseres ful kene, to þe court wonnen,
Mony ludisch lordes þat ladies bro3ten,
Þat to neuen þe noumbre to much nye were.
For þe bour3watz so brod & so bigge alce,
Stalled in þe fayrest stud þe sterrez anvnder,
Prudly on a plat playn, plek alþer-fayrest,
Vmbesweyed on vch a syde with seuen grete wateres,
With a wonder wro3t walle wruxeled ful hi3e,
With koynt carneles aboue, coruen ful clene,
Troched toures bitwene, twenty spere lenþe,
& þiker þrowen vmbeþour with ouerþwert palle.
Þe place þat plyed þe pursaunt wythinne
Watz longe & ful large & euer ilych sware,
& vch a syde vpon soyle helde seuen myle,
& þe saudans sete sette in þe myddes.
Þat watz a palayce of pryde passande alle oþer,
Boþe of werk & of wunder, & walle[d] al aboute;
He3e houses withinne, þe halle to hit med,
So brod bilde in a bay þat blonkkes my3t renne.
When þe terme of þe tyde watz towched of þe feste,
Dere dro3en þerto & vpon des metten,
& Baltazar vpon bench was busked to sete,
Stepe stayred stones of his stoute throne.
Þenne watz alle þe halle flor hiled with kny3tes,
& barounes at þe sidebordes bounet aywhere,
For non watz dressed vpon dece bot þe dere seluen,
& his clere concubynes in cloþes ful bry3t.
When alle segges were þet set þen seruyse bygynnes,
Sturnen trumpen strake steuen in halle,
Aywhere by þe wowes wrasten krakkes,
& brode baneres þerbi blusnande of gold,
Burnes berande þe bredes vpon brode skeles
Þat were of sylueren sy3t, & served þerwyth,
Lyfte logges þerouer & on lofte coruen,
Pared out of paper & poynted of golde,
Broþe baboynes abof, besttes anvnder,
Foles in foler flakerande bitwene,
& al in asure & ynde enaumayld ryche;
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& al on blonkken bak bere hit on honde.
& ay þe nakeryn noyse, notes of pipes,
Tymbres & tabornes, tulket among,
Symbales & sonetez sware þe noyse,
& bougounz busch batered so þikke.
So watz serued fele syþe þe sale alle aboute,
With solace at þe sere course, bifore þe self lorde,
Þer þe lede & alle his loue lenged at þe table:
So faste þay we3ed to him wyne hit warmed his hert
& breyþed vppe into his brayn & blemyst his mynde,
& al waykned his wyt, & welne3e he foles;
For he waytez on wyde, his wenches he byholdes,
& his bolde baronage aboute bi þe wo3es.
Þenne a dotage ful depe drof to his hert,
& a caytif counsayl he ca3t bi hymseluen;
Maynly his marschal þe mayster vpon calles,
& comaundes hym cofly coferes to lauce,
& fech forþ þe vessel þat his fader bro3t,
Nabugo_de_nozar, noble in his strenþe,
Conquered with his kny3tes & of kyrk rafte
In Jude, in Jerusalem, in gentyle wyse:
'Bryng hem now to my borde, of beuerage hem fylles,
Let þise ladyes of hem lape, I luf hem in hert;
Þat schal I cortaysly kyþe, & þay schin knawe sone,
Þer is no bounte in burne lyk Baltazar þewes.'
Þenne towched to þe tresour þis tale watz sone,
& he with keyes vncloses kystes ful mony;
Mony burþen ful bry3t watz bro3t into halle,
& couered mony a cupborde with cloþes ful quite.
Þe jueles out of Jerusalem with gemmes ful bry3t
Bi þe syde of þe sale were semely arayed;
Þe aþel auter of brasse watz hade into place,
Þe gay coroun of golde gered on lofte.
Þat hade ben blessed bifore wyth bischopes hondes
& wyth besten blod busily anoynted,
In þe solempne sacrefyce þat goud sauor hade
Bifore þe Lorde of þe lyfte in louyng Hymseluen,
Now is sette, for to serue Satanas þe blake,
Bifore þe bolde Baltazar wyth bost & wyth pryde;
Houen vpon þis auter watz aþel vessel
Þat wyth [s]o curious a crafte coruen watz wyly.
Salamon sete him s[eue]n 3ere & a syþe more,
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With alle þe syence þat hym sende þe souerayn Lorde,
For to compas & kest to haf hem clene wro3t.
For þer wer bassynes ful bry3t of brende golde clere,
Enaumaylde with azer, & eweres of sute,
Couered cowpes foul clene, as casteles arayed,
Enbaned vnder batelment with bantelles quoynt,
& fyled out of fygures of ferlyle schappes.
Þe coperounes of þe canacles þat on þe cuppe reres
Wer fetysely formed out in fylyoles longe;
Pinacles py3t þer apert þat profert bitwene,
& al bolled abof with braunches & leues,
Pyes & papejayes purtrayed withinne,
As þay prudly hade piked of pomgarnades;
For alle þe blomes of þe bo3es wer blyknande perles,
& alle þe fruyt in þo formes of flaumbeande gemmes,
Ande safyres, & sardiners, & semely topace,
Alabaundarynes, & amaraunz, & amaffised stones,
Casydoynes, & crysolytes, & clere rubies,
Penitotes, & pynkardines, ay perles bitwene;
So trayled & tryfled atrauerce wer alle,
Bi vche bekyrande þe bolde, þe brurdes al vmbe;
Þe gobelotes of golde grauen aboute,
& fyoles fretted with flores & fleez of golde;
Vpon þat avter watz al aliche dresset.
Þe candelstik bi a cost watz cayred þider sone,
Vpon þe pyleres apyked, þat praysed hit mony,
Vpon hit basez of brasse þat ber vp þe werkes,
Þe bo3es bry3t þerabof, brayden of golde,
Braunches bredande þeron, & bryddes þer seten
Of mony kyndes, of fele kyn hues,
As þay with wynge vpon wynde hade waged her fyþeres.
Inmong þe leues of þe lampes wer grayþed,
& oþer louflych ly3t þat lemed ful fayre,
As mony morteres of wax merkked withoute
With mony a borlych best al of brende golde.
Hit watz not wonte in þat wone to wast no serges,
Bot in temple of þe trauþe trwly to stonde
Bifore þe sancta sanctorum, soþefast Dry3tyn
Expouned His speche spiritually to special prophetes.
Leue þou wel þat þe Lorde þat þe lyfte 3emes
Displesed much at þat play in þat plyt stronge,
Þat His jueles so gent wyth jaueles wer fouled,
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Þat presyous in His presens wer proued sumwhyle.
Soberly in His sacrafyce summe wer anoynted,
Þur3þe somones of Himselfe þat syttes so hy3e;
Now a boster on benche bibbes þerof
Tyl he be dronkken as þe deuel, & dotes þer he syttes.
So þe Worcher of þis worlde wlates þerwyth
Þat in þe poynt of her play He poruayes a mynde;
Bot er harme hem He wolde in haste of His yre,
He wayned hem a warnyng þat wonder hem þo3t.
Nov is alle þis guere geten glotounes to serue,
Stad in a ryche stal, & stared ful bry3t[e];
Baltazar in a brayd: 'Bede vus þerof!
We3e wyn in þis won! Wassayl!' he cryes.
Swyfte swaynes ful swyþe swepen þertylle,
Kyppe kowpes in honde kyngez to serue;
In bry3t bollez ful bayn birlen þise oþer,
& vche mon for his mayster machches alone.
Þer watz rynging, on ry3t, of ryche metalles,
Quen renkkes in þat ryche rok rennen hit to cache;
Clatering of couaclez þat kesten þo burdes
As sonet out of sau[t]eray songe als myry.
Þen þe dotel on dece drank þat he my3t;
& þenne arn dressed dukez & prynces,
Concubines & kny3tes, bi cause of þat merthe;
As vchon hade hym inhelde he haled of þe cuppe.
So long likked þise lordes þise lykores swete,
& gloryed on her falce goddes, & her grace calles,
Þat were of stokkes & stones, stille euermore,
Neuer steuen hem astel, so stoken [is] hor tonge.
Alle þe goude golden goddes þe gaulez 3et neuenen,
Belfagor & Belyal, & Belssabub als,
Heyred hem as hy3ly as heuen wer þayres,
Bot Hym þat alle goudes giues, þat God þay for3eten.
For þer a ferly bifel þat fele folk se3en;
Fryst knew hit þe kyng & alle þe cort after:
In þe palays pryncipale, vpon þe playn wowe,
In contrary of þe candelstik, þat clerest hit schyned,
Þer apered a paume, with poyntel in fyngres,
Þat watz grysly & gret, & grymly he wrytes;
Non oþer forme bot a fust faylande þe wryste
Pared on þe parget, purtrayed lettres.
When þat bolde Baltazar blusched to þat neue,
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Such a dasande drede dusched to his hert
Þat al falewed his face & fayled þe chere;
Þe stronge strok of þe stonde strayned his joyntes,
His cnes cachches toclose, & cluchches his hommes,
& he with plattyng his paumes displayes his ler[e]s,
& romyes as a rad ryth þat rorez for drede,
Ay biholdand þe honde til hit hade al grauen
& rasped on þe ro3wo3e runisch sauez.
When hit þe scrypture hade scraped wyth a strof penne,
As a coltour in clay cerues þo for3es,
Þenne hit vanist verayly & voyded of sy3t,
Bt þe lettres bileued ful large vpon plaster.
Sone so þe kynge for his care carping my3t wynne,
He bede his burnes bo3to þat were bok-lered,
To wayte þe wryt þat hit wolde, & wyter hym to say,
'For al hit frayes my flesche, þe fyngres so grymme.'
Scoleres skelten þeratte þe skyl for to fynde,
Bot þer watz neuer on so wyse couþe on worde rede,
Ne what ledisch lore ne langage nauþer,
What tyþyng ne tale tokened þo dra3tes.
Þenne þe bolde Baltazar bred ner wode,
& ede þe cete to seche segges þur3out
Þat wer wyse of wychecrafte, & warla3es oþer
Þat con dele wyth demerlayk & deuine lettres.
'Calle hem alle to my cort, þo Calde clerkkes,
Vnfolde hem alle þis ferly þat is bifallen here,
& calle wyth a hi3e cry: "He þat þe kyng wysses,
In expounyng of speche þat spredes in þise lettres,
& make þe mater to malt my mynde wythinne,
Þat I may wyterly wyt what þat wryt menes,
He schal be gered ful gaye in gounes of porpre,
& a coler of cler golde clos vmbe his þrote;
He schal be prymate & prynce of pure clergye,
& of my þreuenest lordez þe þrydde he schal,
& of my reme þe rychest to ryde wyth myseluen,
Outtaken bare two, & þenne he þe þrydde."'
Þis cry watz vpcaste, & þer comen mony
Clerkes out of Caldye þat kennest wer knauen,
As þe sage sathrapas þat sorsory couþe,
Wychez & walkyries wonnen to þat sale,
Deuinores of demorlaykes þat dremes cowþe rede,
Sorsers & exorsismus & fele such clerkes;
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& alle þat loked on þat letter as lewed þay were
As þay had loked in þe leþer of my lyft bote.
Þenne cryes þe kyng & kerues his wedes.
What! he corsed his clerkes & calde hem chorles;
To henge þe harlotes he he3ed ful ofte:
So watz þe wy3e wytles he wed wel ner.
Ho herde hym chyde to þe chambre þat watz þe chef quene.
When ho watz wytered bi wy3es what watz þe cause,
Suche a chaungande chaunce in þe chef halle,
Þe lady, to lauce þat los þat þe lorde hade,
Glydes doun by þe grece & gos to þe kyng.
Ho kneles on þe colde erþe & carpes to hymseluen
Wordes of worchyp wyth a wys speche.
'Kene kyng,' quoþ þe quene, 'kayser of vrþe,
Euer laste þy lyf in lenþe of dayes!
Why hatz þou rended þy robe for redles hereinne,
Þa3þose ledes ben lewed lettres to rede,
& hatz a haþel in þy holde, as I haf herde ofte,
Þat hatz þe gostes of God þat gyes alle soþes?
His sawle is ful of syence, sa3es to schawe,
To open vch a hide þyng of aunteres vncowþe.
Þat is he þat ful ofte hatz heuened þy fader
Of mony anger ful hote with his holy speche.
When Nabugo_de_nozar watz nyed in stoundes,
He devysed his dremes to þe dere trawþe;
He keuered hym with his counsayl of caytyf wyrdes;
Alle þat he spured hym, in space he expowned clene,
Þur3þe sped of þe spyryt, þat sprad hym withinne,
Of þe godelest goddez þat gaynes aywhere.
For his depe diuinite & his dere sawes,
Þy bolde fader Baltazar bede by his name,
Þat now is demed Danyel, of derne coninges,
Þat ca3t watz in þe captyuide in cuntre of Jues;
Nabuzardan hym nome, & now is he here,
A prophete of þat prouince & pryce of þe worlde.
Sende into þe cete to seche hym bylyue,
& wynne hym with þe worchyp to wayne þe bote;
& þa3þe mater be merk þat merked is 3ender,
He schal declar hit also as hit on clay stande.'
Þat gode counseyl at þe quene watz cached as swyþe;
Þe burne byfore Baltazar watz bro3t in a whyle.
When he com bifore þe kyng & clanly had halsed,
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Baltazar vmbebrayde hym, & 'Leue sir,' he sayde,
'Hit is tolde me bi tulkes þat þou trwe were
Profete of þat prouynce þat prayed my fader,
Ande þat þou hatz in þy hert holy connyng,
Of sapyence þi sawle ful, soþes to schawe;
Goddes gost is þe geuen þat gyes alle þynges,
& þou vnhyles vch hidde þat Heuen-Kyng myntes.
& here is a ferly byfallen, & I fayn wolde
Wyt þe wytte of þe wryt þat on þe wowe clyues,
For alle Calde clerkes han cowwardely fayled.
If þou with quayntyse con quere hit, I quyte þe þy mede:
For if þou redes hit by ry3t & hit to resoun brynges,
Fyrst telle me þe tyxte of þe tede lettres,
& syþen þe mater of þe mode mene me þerafter,
& I schal halde þe þe hest þat I þe hy3t haue,
Apyke þe in porpre cloþe, palle alþer-fynest,
& þe by3e of bry3t golde abowte þyn nekke,
& þe þryd þryuenest þat þrynges me after,
Þou schal be baroun vpon benche, bede I þe no lasse.'
Derfly þenne Danyel deles þyse wordes:
'Ryche kyng of þis rengne, rede þe oure Lorde!
Hit is surely soth þe Souerayn of heuen
Fylsened euer þy fader & vpon folde cheryched,
Gart hym grattest to be of gouernores alle,
& alle þe worlde in his wylle welde as hym lykes.
Whoso wolde wel do, wel hym bityde,
& quos deth so he dezyre, he dreped als fast;
Whoso hym lyked to lyft, on lofte watz he sone,
& quoso hym lyked to lay watz lo3ed bylyue.
So watz noted þe note of Nabugo_de_nozar,
Styfly stabled þe rengne bi þe stronge Dry3tyn,
For of þe Hy3est he hade a hope in his hert,
Þat vche pouer past out of þat Prynce euen.
& whyle þat watz cle3t clos in his hert
Þere watz no mon vpon molde of my3t as hymseluen;
Til hit bitide on a tyme towched hym pryde
For his lordeschyp so large & his lyf ryche;
He hade so huge an insy3t to his aune dedes
Þat þe power of þe hy3e Prynce he purely for3etes.
Þenne blynnes he not of blasfemy on to blame þe Dry3tyn;
His my3t mete to Goddes he made with his wordes:
"I am god of þe grounde, to gye as me lykes.
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As He þat hy3e is in heuen, His aungeles þat weldes.
If He hatz formed þe folde & folk þervpone,
I haf bigged Babiloyne, bur3alþer-rychest,
Stabled þerinne vche a ston in strenkþe of myn armes;
Mo3t neuer my3t bot myn make such anoþer."
Watz not þis ilke worde wonnen of his mowþe one
Er þenne þe Souerayn sa3e souned in his eres:
"Now Nabugo_de_nozar inno3e hatz spoken,
Now is alle þy pryncipalte past at ones,
& þou, remued fro monnes sunes, on mor most abide
& in wasturne walk & wyth þe wylde dowelle,
As best, byte on þe bent of braken & erbes,
With wroþe wolfes to won & wyth wylde asses."
Inmydde þe poynt of his pryde departed he þere
Fro þe soly of his solempnete; his solace he leues,
& carfully is outkast to contre vnknawen,
Fer into a fyr fryth þere frekes neuer comen.
His hert heldet vnhole; he hoped non oþer
Bot a best þat he be, a bol oþer an oxe.
He fares forth on alle faure, fogge watz his mete,
& ete ay as a horce when erbes were fallen;
Þus he countes hym a kow þat watz a kyng ryche,
Quyle seuen syþez were ouerseyed, someres I trawe.
By þat mony þik thy3e þry3t vmbe his lyre,
Þat alle watz dubbed & dy3t in þe dew of heuen;
Faxe, fyltered & felt, flosed hym vmbe,
Þat schad fro his schulderes to his schyre wykes,
& twenty-folde twynande hit to his tos ra3t,
Þer mony clyuy as clyde hit cly3t togeder.
His berde ibrad alle his brest to þe bare vrþe,
His browes bresed as breres aboute his brode chekes;
Hol3e were his y3en & vnder campe hores,
& al watz gray as þe glede, with ful grymme clawres
Þat were croked & kene as þe kyte paune;
Erne-hwed he watz & al ouerbrawden,
Til he wyst ful wel who wro3t alle my3tes,
& cowþe vche kyndam tokerue & keuer when Hym lyked.
Þenne He wayned hym his wyt, þat hade wo soffered,
Þat he com to knawlach & kenned hymseluen;
Þenne he loued þat Lorde & leued in trawþe
Hit watz non oþer þen He þat hade al in honde.
Þenne sone watz he sende agayn, his sete restored;
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His barounes bo3ed hym to, blyþe of his come,
Ha3erly in his aune hwe his heued watz couered,
& so 3eply watz 3arked & 3olden his state.
Bot þou, Baltazar, his barne & his bolde ayre,
Se3þese syngnes with sy3t & set hem at lyttel,
Bot ay hatz hofen þy hert agaynes þe hy3e Dry3t[y]n,
With bobaunce & with blasfamye bost at Hym kest,
& now His vessayles avyled in vanyte vnclene,
Þat in His hows Hym to honour were heuened of fyrst;
Bifore þe barounz hatz hom bro3t, & byrled þerinne
Wale wyne to þy wenches in waryed stoundes;
Bifore þy borde hatz þou bro3t beuerage in þede,
Þat blyþely were fyrst blest with bischopes hondes,
Louande þeron lese goddez þat lyf haden neuer,
Made of stokkes & stonez þat neuer styry mo3t.
& for þat froþande fylþe, þe Fader of heuen
Hatz sende into þis sale þise sy3tes vncowþe,
Þe fyste with þe fyngeres þat flayed þi hert,
Þat rasped renyschly þe wo3e with þe ro3penne.
Þise ar þe wordes here wryten, withoute werk more,
By vch fygure, as I fynde, as oure Fader lykes:
Mane, Techal, Phares: merked in þrynne,
Þat þretes þe of þyn vnþryfte vpon þre
wyse.
Now expowne þe þis speche spedly I þenk:
Manemenes als much as "Maynful Gode
Hatz counted þy kyndam bi a clene noumbre,
& fulfylled hit in fayth to þe fyrre ende".
To teche þe of Techal, þat terme þus menes:
"þy wale rengne is walt in we3tes to heng,
& is funde ful fewe of hit fayth-dedes."
& Pharesfol3es for þose fawtes, to frayst þe trawþe;
In Phares fyndeI forsoþe þise felle sa3es:
"Departed is þy pryncipalte, depryued þou worpes,
Þy rengne rafte is þe fro, & ra3t is þe Perses;
Þe Medes schal be maysteres here, & þou of menske schowued."'
Þe kyng comaunded anon to cleþe þat wyse
In frokkes of fyn cloþ, as forward hit asked;
Þenne sone watz Danyel dubbed in ful dere porpor,
& a coler of cler golde kest vmbe his swyre.
Þen watz demed a decre bi þe duk seluen:
Bolde Baltazar bed þat hym bowe schulde
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Þe comynes al of Calde þat to þe kyng longed,
As to þe prynce pryuyest preued þe þrydde,
He3est of alle oþer saf onelych tweyne,
To bo3after Baltazar in bor3e & in felde.
Þys watz cryed & knawen in cort als fast,
& alle þe folk þerof fayn þat fol3ed hym tylle.
Bot howso Danyel watz dy3t, þat day ouer3ede;
Ny3t ne3ed ry3t now with nyes fol mony,
For da3ed neuer anoþer day, þat ilk derk after,
Er dalt were þat ilk dome þat Danyel deuysed.
Þe solace of þe solempnete in þat sale dured
Of þat farand fest, tyl fayled þe sunne;
Þenne blykned þe ble of þe bry3t skwes,
Mourkenes þe mery weder, & þe myst dryues
Þor3þe lyst of þe lyfte, bi þe lo3medoes.
Vche haþel to his home hy3es ful fast,
Seten at her soper & songen þerafter;
Þen foundez vch a fela3schyp fyrre at forþ na3tes.
Baltazar to his bedd with blysse watz caryed;
Reche þe rest as hym lyst: he ros neuer þerafter.
For his foes in þe felde in flokkes ful grete,
Þat longe hade layted þat lede his londes to strye,
Now ar þay sodenly assembled at þe self tyme.
Of hem wyst no wy3e þat in þat won dowelled.
Hit watz þe dere Daryus, þe duk of þise Medes,
Þe prowde prynce of Perce, & Porros of Ynde,
With mony a legioun ful large, with ledes of armes,
Þat now hatz spyed a space to spoyle Caldeez.
Þay þrongen þeder in þe þester on
þrawen hepes,
Asscaped ouer þe skyre watteres & scaþed þe walles,
Lyfte laddres ful longe & vpon lofte wonen,
Stelen stylly þe toun er any steuen rysed.
Withinne an oure of þe niy3t an entre þay hade,
3et afrayed þay no freke. Fyrre þay passen,
& to þe palays pryncipal þay aproched ful stylle,
Þenne ran þay in on a res on rowtes ful grete;
Blastes out of bry3t brasse brestes so hy3e,
Ascry scarred on þe scue, þat scomfyted mony.
Segges slepande were slayne er þay slyppe my3t;
Vche hous heyred watz withinne a hondewhyle.
Baltazar in his bed watz beten to deþe,
97
Þat boþe his blod & his brayn blende on þe cloþes;
The kyng in his cortyn watz ka3t bi þe heles,
Feryed out bi þe fete & fowle dispysed.
Þat watz so do3ty þat day & drank of þe vessayl
Now is a dogge also dere þat in a dych lygges.
For þe mayster of þyse Medes on þe morne ryses,
Dere Daryous þat day dy3t vpon trone,
Þat cete seses ful sounde, & sa3tlyng makes
Wyth alle þe barounz þeraboute, þat bowed hym after.
& þus watz þat londe lost for þe lordes synne,
& þe fylþe of þe freke þat defowled hade
Þe ornementes of Goddez hous þat holy were maked.
He watz corsed for his vnclannes, & cached þerinne,
Done doun of his dyngnete for dedez vnfayre,
& of þyse worldes worchyp wrast out for euer,
& 3et of lykynges on lofte letted, I trowe:
To loke on oure lofly Lorde late bitydes.
Þus vpon þrynne wyses I haf yow þro schewed
Þat vnclannes tocleues in corage dere
Of þat wynnelych Lorde þat wonyes in heuen,
Entyses Hym to be tene, telled vp His wrake;
Ande clannes is His comfort, & coyntyse He louyes,
& þose þat seme arn & swete schyn se His face.
Þat we gon gay in oure gere þat grace He vus sende,
Þat we may serue in His sy3t, þer solace neuer blynnez.
Amen.
~ Anonymous Americas,#NFDB
230 Poetry
172 Integral Yoga
115 Occultism
85 Fiction
78 Psychology
56 Christianity
48 Philosophy
18 Mythology
16 Philsophy
13 Yoga
13 Integral Theory
7 Mysticism
6 Science
5 Theosophy
4 Hinduism
1 Thelema
1 Sufism
1 Kabbalah
1 Alchemy
89 Sri Aurobindo
77 Carl Jung
66 H P Lovecraft
62 Satprem
60 The Mother
49 Nolini Kanta Gupta
32 Aleister Crowley
31 William Wordsworth
27 Percy Bysshe Shelley
25 James George Frazer
23 John Keats
21 Robert Browning
20 Walt Whitman
20 Plotinus
19 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
16 Ralph Waldo Emerson
13 Friedrich Schiller
12 Ovid
12 Jorge Luis Borges
11 Sri Ramakrishna
11 Saint Augustine of Hippo
10 Plato
10 Friedrich Nietzsche
10 A B Purani
8 George Van Vrekhem
7 Jordan Peterson
6 William Butler Yeats
6 Joseph Campbell
5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
4 Rudolf Steiner
4 Nirodbaran
4 Lucretius
4 Franz Bardon
4 Anonymous
3 Vyasa
3 Rainer Maria Rilke
3 Ken Wilber
3 Edgar Allan Poe
2 Saint John of Climacus
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Lewis Carroll
2 Italo Calvino
2 Henry David Thoreau
2 Alice Bailey
2 Aldous Huxley
66 Lovecraft - Poems
32 Mysterium Coniunctionis
31 Wordsworth - Poems
27 Shelley - Poems
25 The Golden Bough
24 Savitri
23 Keats - Poems
21 Browning - Poems
20 Whitman - Poems
18 The Practice of Psycho therapy
16 Magick Without Tears
16 Liber ABA
16 Emerson - Poems
15 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
14 Collected Poems
13 The Phenomenon of Man
13 Schiller - Poems
13 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
12 Metamorphoses
12 Aion
10 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
10 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
9 City of God
8 The Divine Comedy
8 Preparing for the Miraculous
8 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
8 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
7 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
7 On the Way to Supermanhood
7 Maps of Meaning
7 Labyrinths
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
7 Agenda Vol 10
6 Yeats - Poems
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
6 The Bible
6 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
6 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
6 5.1.01 - Ilion
5 Vedic and Philological Studies
5 The Human Cycle
5 Agenda Vol 13
5 Agenda Vol 03
4 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
4 The Secret Of The Veda
4 The Life Divine
4 Record of Yoga
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
4 Of The Nature Of Things
4 Let Me Explain
4 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
4 Agenda Vol 11
4 Agenda Vol 09
4 Agenda Vol 08
4 Agenda Vol 07
4 Agenda Vol 01
3 Words Of Long Ago
3 Vishnu Purana
3 Twilight of the Idols
3 The Red Book Liber Novus
3 Theosophy
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Rilke - Poems
3 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
3 Poe - Poems
3 Faust
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
3 Borges - Poems
3 Agenda Vol 12
3 Agenda Vol 02
2 Walden
2 The Practice of Magical Evocation
2 The Perennial Philosophy
2 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
2 The Future of Man
2 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
2 The Castle of Crossed Destinies
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Questions And Answers 1953
2 Liber Null
2 Initiation Into Hermetics
2 Goethe - Poems
2 Essays Divine And Human
2 Crowley - Poems
2 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
2 Alice in Wonderland
2 Agenda Vol 06
2 Agenda Vol 05
2 Agenda Vol 04
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All the gods are poetstheir forms are perfect, surpa, suda, their Names full of beauty,cru devasya nma.31 This means also that the gods embody the different powers that constitute the poetic consciousness. Agni is the Seer-Will, the creative vision of the Poet the luminous energy born of an experience by identity with the Truth. Indra is the Idea-Form, the architectonic conception of the work or achievement. Mitra and Varuna are the large harmony, the vast cadence and sweep of movement. The Aswins, the Divine Riders, represent the intense zest of well-yoked Life-Energy. Soma is Rasa, Ananda, the Supreme Bliss and Delight.
The Vedic Poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon earth. But what is true of Life is fundamentally true of Art tooat least true of the Art as it was conceived by the ancient seers and as it found expression at their hands.32
Rig Veda, X. 124. 7
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
But the Qabalah is more. It also lays the foundation on which rests another archaic science- Magic. Not to be confused with the conjurer's sleight-of-hand, Magic has been defined by Aleister Crowley as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." Dion Fortune qualifies this nicely with an added clause, "changes in consciousness."
The Qabalah reveals the nature of certain physical and psychological phenomena. Once these are apprehended, understood and correlated, the student can use the principles of Magic to exercise control over life's conditions and circumstances not otherwise possible. In short. Magic provides the practical application of the theories supplied by the Qabalah.
--
A simple example is the concept of the Trinity in the Christian religion. The student is frequently amazed to learn through a study of the Qabalah that Egyptian mythology followed a similar concept with its trinity of gods, Osiris the father, Isis the virgin-mother, and Horus the son. The Qabalah indicates similar correspondences in the pantheon of Roman and Greek deities, proving the father-mother (Holy Spirit) - son principles of deity are primordial archetypes of man's psyche, rather than being, as is frequently and erroneously supposed a development peculiar to the Christian era.
At this juncture let me call attention to one set of attri butions by Rittangelius usually found as an appendix attached to the Sepher Yetzirah. It lists a series of "Intelligences" for each one of the ten Sephiros and the twenty-two Paths of the Tree of Life. It seems to me, after prolonged meditation, that the common attri butions of these Intelligences is altogether arbitrary and lacking in serious meaning.
--
What Jung calls archetypal images constantly rise to the surface of man's awareness from the vast unconscious that is the common heritage of all mankind.
The tragedy of civilized man is that he is cut off from awareness of his own instincts. The Qabalah can help him achieve the necessary understanding to effect a reunion with them, so that rather than being driven by forces he does not understand, he can harness for his conscious use the same power that guides the homing pigeon, teaches the beaver to build a dam and keeps the planets revolving in their appointed orbits about the sun.
000 - Humans in Universe, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
000.103 When the archaeologists' artifact-proven history of mathematics opens
4,000 years ago in Babylon and Mesopotamia, it is already a very sophisticated
--
guesswork that had previously been used in naval and land architecture. This
capability in mathematical multiplication and division opened up a whole new field
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The whole symbolic world is represented in the temple garden — the Trinity of the Nature Mother (Kali), the Absolute (Siva), and Love (Radhakanta), the arch spanning heaven and earth. The terrific Goddess of the Tantra, the soul-enthralling Flute-Player of the Bhagavata, and the Self-absorbed Absolute of the Vedas live together, creating the greatest synthesis of religions. All aspects of Reality are represented there. But of this divine household, Kali is the pivot, the sovereign Mistress. She is Prakriti, the Procreatrix, Nature, the Destroyer, the Creator. Nay, She is something greater and deeper still for those who have eyes to see. She is the Universal Mother, "my Mother" as Ramakrishna would say, the All-powerful, who reveals Herself to Her children under different aspects and Divine Incarnations, the Visible God, who leads the elect to the Invisible Reality; and if it so pleases Her, She takes away the last trace of ego from created beings and merges it in the consciousness of the Absolute, the undifferentiated God. Through Her grace "the finite ego loses itself in the illimitable Ego — Atman — Brahman". (Romain Holland, Prophets of the New India, p. 11.)
Rani Rasmani spent a fortune for the construction of the temple garden and another fortune for its dedication ceremony, which took place on May 31, 1855.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
paragraph, may be an esoteric arcanum, for the Master
of the Temple is interested in Malkuth, as Malkuth is
--
the Keystone of the Royal arch; yet the
Apprentices, instead of making bricks, put the
--
Officer in a Chapter of the Royal arch Masons.
In this chapter the author, in a sort of raging
--
in Royal arch Masonry. The Initiate will be able to
discover the most formidable secret of that degree con-
--
If only the archbishop of Canterbury were to go
make in the streets and beg his bread!
--
architectural glories of his Alma Mater.
[153]
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
attempting to put forward here arc, of course, largely tentative
and personal. Yet inasmuch as they are based on arduous investi-
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But the initial illusory consciousness of the Overmind need not at all lead to the static Brahmic consciousness or Sunyam alone. As a matter of fact, there is in this particular processes of consciousness a hiatus between the two, between Maya and Brahman, as though one has to leap from the one into the other somehow. This hiatus is filled up in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by the principle of Supermind, not synthetic-analytic2 in knowledge like Overmind and the highest mental intelligence, but inescapably unitarian even in the utmost diversity. Supermind is the Truth-consciousness at once static and dynamic, self-existent and creative: in Supermind the Brahmic consciousness Sachchidanandais ever self-aware and ever manifested and embodied in fundamental truth-powers and truth-forms for the play of creation; it is the plane where the One breaks out into the Many and the Many still remain one, being and knowing themselves to be but various self-expressions of the One; it develops the spiritual archetypes, the divine names and forms of all individualisations of an evolving existence.
SRI AUROBINDO
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
arching its neck as it paces grand to the gorges
of danger.
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An archivist of the symbols of the Beyond,
A treasurer of superhuman dreams,
--
Into Supernature's arc of living light.
This now was witnessed in that son of Force;
--
A crown of the architecture of the worlds,
A mystery of married Earth and Heaven
--
And made him an archmason of the soul,
A builder of the Immortal's secret house,
--
Sees only a little arc of God's vast sky.
The boundless with the boundless there consorts;
--
Appeared of the architect who builds in trance.
The original Desire born in the Void
--
Beyond life's arc in spirit's immensities.
Apart he lived in his mind's solitude,
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our range is fixed within the crowded arc
Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess
--
And journeyings in a larger vision's arc
And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt,
And saw the signature and fiery seal
--
Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power,
Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes,
--
Under its arches dim with infinity
And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.
--
Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers
Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Touching the very core of the malady of our age he says that our modern enlightenment seeks to cancel altogether the higher values and install instead the lower alone as true. Thus, for example, Marx and Freud, its twin arch priests, are brothers. Both declare that it is the lower, the under layer alone that matters: to one "the masses", to the other "the instincts". Their wild imperative roars: "Sweep away this pseudo-higher; let the instincts rule, let the pro-letariat dictate!" But more characteristic, Monsieur Thibon has made another discovery which gives the whole value and speciality to his outlook. He says the moderns stress the lower, no doubt; but the old world stressed only the higher and neglected the lower. Therefore the revolt and wrath of the lower, the rage of Revanche in the heart of the dispossessed in the modern world. Enlightenment meant till now the cultivation and embellishment of the Mind, the conscious Mind, the rational and nobler faculties, the height and the depth: and mankind meant the princes and the great ones. In the individual, in the scheme of his culture and education, the senses were neglected, left to go their own way as they pleased; and in the collective field, the toiling masses in the same way lived and moved as best as they could under the economics of laissez-faire. So Monsieur Thibon concludes: "Salvation has never come from below. To look for it from above only is equally vain. No doubt salvation must come from the higher, but on condition that the higher completely adopts and protects the lower." Here is a vision luminous and revealing, full of great import, if we follow the right track, prophetic of man's true destiny. It is through this infiltration of the higher into the lower and the integration of the lower into the higher that mankind will reach the goal of its evolution, both individually and collectively.
But the process, Monsieur Thibon rightly asserts, must begin with the individual and within the individual. Man must "turn within, feel alive within himself", re-establish his living contact with God, the source and origin from which he has cut himself off. Man must learn to subordinate having to being. Each individual must be himself, a free and spontaneous expression. Upon such individual , upon individuals grouped naturally in smaller collectivities and not upon unformed or ill-formed wholesale masses can a perfect human society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur Thibon insistsand very rightlyupon the variety and diversity of individual and local growths in a unified humanity and not a dead uniformity of regimented oneness. He declares, as the reviewer of the London Times succinctly puts it: "Let us abolish our insensate worship of number. Let us repeal the law of majorities. Let us work for the unity that draws together instead of idolizing the multiplicity that disintegrates. Let us understand that it is not enough for each to have a place; what matters is that each should be in his right place. For the atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do."
01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The world is full of ikons and archons; we cannot escape them, even if we try the world itself being a great ikon and as great an archon. Those who swear by principles, swear always by some personality or other, if not by a living creature then by a lifeless book, if not by Religion then by Science, if not by the East then by the West, if not by Buddha or Christ then by Bentham or Voltaire. Only they do it unwittingly they change one set of personalities for another and believe they have rejected them all. The veils of Maya are a thousand-fold tangle and you think you have entirely escaped her when you have only run away from one fold to fall into another. The wise do not attempt to reject and negate Maya, but consciously accept herfreedom lies in a knowing affirmation. So we too have accepted and affirmed an icon, but we have done it consciously and knowingly; we are not bound by our idol, we see the truth of it, and we serve and utilise it as best as we may.
***
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And a lower and more facile inspiration tempts the poet and he often speaks with a raucous voice, even as the arch-tempter sought to lure the Divine Word made flesh:
... Shrieking voices
0 1957-07-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have just received a letter from my friends in charge of the French archaeological Expedition to Afghanistan. They need someone to assist them on their next field excavations (August 15 December 15) and have offered to take me if I wish to join them.
If I must have some new experience outside, this one has the advantage of being short-termed and not far away from India, and it is also in an interesting milieu. The only disadvantage is that I would have to pay for the trip as far as Kabul. But I dont want to do anything that displeases you or of which you do not really approve. In the event you might feel this to be a worthwhile experience, I would have to leave by the beginning of August.
0 1958-12-15 - tantric mantra - 125,000, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, things are far from being what they were the first time in Rameswaram, and I am living through certain moments that are hell the enemy seems to have been unleashed with an extraordinary violence. It comes in waves, and after it recedes, I am literally SHATTEREDphysically, mentally and vitally drained. This morning, while going to the temple, I lived through one of these moments. All this suffering that suddenly sweeps down upon me is horrible. Yes, I had the feeling of being BACKED UP AGAINST A WALL, exactly as in your vision I was up against a wall. I was walking among these immense arcades of sculptured granite and I could see myself walking, very small, all alone, alone, ravaged with pain, filled with a nameless despair, for nowhere was there a way out. The sea was nearby and I could have thrown myself into it; otherwise, there was only the sanctuary of Parvati but there was no more Africa to flee to, everything closed in all around me, and I kept repeating, Why? Why? This much suffering was truly inhuman, as if my last twenty years of nightmare were crashing down upon me. I gritted my teeth and went to the sanctuary to say my mantra. The pain in me was so strong that I broke into a cold sweat and almost fainted. Then it subsided. Yet even now I feel completely battered.
I clearly see that the hour has come: either I will perish right here, or else I will emerge from this COMPLETELY changed. But something has to change. Mother, you are with me, I know, and you are protecting me, you love me I have only you, only you, you are my Mother. If these moments of utter darkness return and they are bound to return for everything to be exorcised and conqueredprotect me in spite of myself. Mother, may your Grace not abandon me. I want to be done with all these old phantoms, I want to be born anew in your Light; it has to beotherwise I can no longer go on.
0 1960-08-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(Mother looks at a piece of paper) Calling Antonin Raymond2. The architect for the construction.
Then there was also making ready temporary quarters for Z3. But then Z left; he died.
--
The architect who had already built 'Golconde,' the Ashram guest house.
An American filmmaker.
0 1960-12-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It goes back and forth between the two all the timea kind of curve like an electric arc between them; it goes up, it goes down, it falls and then climbs back up. In a flash comes the clear vision that the universal realization will be achieved along with the perfection of the material, TERRESTRIAL world. (I say terrestrial, for the earth is still something unique; the rest of the universe is differentso this blown up speck of dust becomes of capital importance!) Then, at another moment, eternity for which all the universes are simply the expression of a second, and in which all this is a sort ofnot even an interesting game, but rather a breathing in and out, in and out And at such a moment, all the importance we give to material things seems so fantastically idiotic! And it goes in and out In this state, everything is obvious and indisputable. And in the other state, everything is obvious and indisputable. But between the two there is EVERY combination and every possibility.
(silence)
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not surprising, therefore, that exegetes have seen the Vedas primarily as a collection of propitiatory rites centered around sacrificial fires and obscure incantations to Nature divinities (water, fire, dawn, the moon, the sun, etc.), for bringing rain and rich harvests to the tribes, male progeny, blessings upon their journeys or protection against the thieves of the sunas though these shepherds were barbarous enough to fear that one inauspicious day their sun might no longer rise, stolen away once and for all. Only here and there, in a few of the more modern hymns, was there the apparently inadvertent intrusion of a few luminous passages that might have justifiedjust barely the respect which the Upanishads, at the beginning of recorded history, accorded to the Veda. In Indian tradition, the Upanishads had become the real Veda, the Book of Knowledge, while the Veda, product of a still stammering humanity, was a Book of Worksacclaimed by everyone, to be sure, as the venerable Authority, but no longer listened to. With Sri Aurobindo we might ask why the Upanishads, whose depth of wisdom the whole world has acknowledged, could claim to take inspiration from the Veda if the latter contained no more than a tapestry of primitive rites; or how it happened that humanity could pass so abruptly from these so-called stammerings to the manifold richness of the Upanishadic Age; or how we in the West were able to evolve from the simplicity of arcadian shepherds to the wisdom of Greek philosophers. We cannot assume that there was nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads.5
***
0 1961-11-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On June 28, archduke Ferdin and of Austria was assassinated at Sarajevo.
Satprem no longer remembers the source of this false information.
0 1961-11-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
By 'standard,' Mother means a sort of model or archetype.
Pearson came to Pondicherry in April 1923.
0 1962-01-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing.4
Questioned about the meaning of these words, Mother said, "The state I was in was like a memory."
0 1962-02-03, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
71A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.
But thats obvious! So obvious (to us).
--
Stop being an archer!
The image is lovely. Its perfect for people who imagine they have found Truth. Its a good thing to tell those who think they have found the truth simply because theyve managed to touch one point.
--
This analogy is very apt down here on this plane, but for the higher realms it doesnt applyup there its just the opposite! As long as you remain the archer, touching one point, thats how it is; all intelligence below is like that, seeing all sorts of possibilities, so it cant make a choice and act. To see the whole target, the all-inclusive Truth, you must cross to the other side. And when you do, what you see is not the sum of countless truths, an innumerable quantity of truths added together and viewed one after another, making it impossible to grasp the whole at a glance; when you go above, its the whole you see first, AT A GLANCE, in its entirety, without division. So there is no longer any choice to be made; its a vision: THAT is to be done. The choice is no longer between this and that, it doesnt work that way any more. Things are no longer seen in succession, one after another; there is rather a simultaneous vision of a whole that exists as a unit. The choice is simply a vision.
As long as youre not in that state, you cant see the whole. The whole cant be seen successively, by adding one truth to another; this is precisely what the mind does, and why it is incapable of seeing the whole. It cant do it. The mind will always see things in succession, by addition, but thats not IT, something will always elude you the very sense of truth will elude you.
0 1962-02-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was so lovely last night! We had come upon a region all mantled in snow, pure white, and all the arctic animals were there. He wore a white robe. I walked by his side, and he began to repeat my mantra, saying, See how it is. Glorious!
And the animals the animals and all the things receiving the Influence [of the mantra] and changing.6
0 1962-06-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I found out many, many things about Joan of arcmany things. And with stunning precision, which made it extremely interesting. I wont repeat them because I dont remember with exactness, and these things have no value unless they are exact. And then, for the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa; and for the French Renaissance: Franois I, Marguerite de Valois,2 and so forth.
Twice I knew that it wasnt just images but something that had happened to ME, but it took another form. Once (when I was older, around twenty) it happened at Versailles. I had been invited to dinner by a cousin who, with no warning, served me dry champagne during dinner and I drank it unsuspectingly (I who never drank at all, neither wine nor liquor!). When I had to get up and cross the crowded room, oh, how very difficult it became, so difficult! Then we went to a place near the chateau, with a view of the whole park. And I was staring at the park, when I saw I saw the park filling up with lights (the electric lights had vanished), with all kinds of lights, torches, lanterns and then crowds of people walking about in Louis XIV dress! I was staring at this with my eyes wide open, holding on to the balustrade to keep from falling down (I wasnt too sure of myself!). I was seeing it all, then I saw myself there, engrossed in conversation with some people (I dont remember now, but there were certain corrections here too). I mean I was a certain person (I dont remember who) and there were those two brothers who were sculptors (Mother vainly tries to recollect the names3) anyhow, all kinds of people were there and I saw myself talking, chatting. And I seem to have been sufficiently in control of myself, because when I related all that I had seen, there were some quite interesting details and corrections. That was one time.
--
Almost all my memories of past lives came like that; the particular being reincarnated in me rises to the surface and begins acting as if it were all on its own! Once in Italy, when I was fifteen, it happened in an extraordinary way. But that time I did some rese arch. I was in Venice with my mother and I rese arched in museums and archives, and I discovered my name, and the names of the other people involved. I had relived a scene in the Ducal Palace, but relived it in such a such an absolutely intense way (laughinga scene where I was being strangled and thrown into a canal!) that my mother had to hurry me out of there as fast as she could! But that experience I wrote down, so the exact memory has been kept (I didnt write down the other experiences, so the details have all faded away, but this one was noted, although I didnt include any names). The next morning I did some rese arch and uncovered the whole story. I told it all to Thon and Madame Thon, and he also had the memory of a past life there, during the same period. And as a matter of fact, I had seen a portrait there that was the spitting image of Thon! The portrait of one of the doges. It was absolutely (it was a Titian) absolutely Thon! HIS portrait, you know, as if it had just been done.5
All those kinds of things came to me just like that, without my looking for them, wanting them, or understanding them, without doing any sort of discipline, nothingit was absolutely spontaneous. And they just kept on coming and coming and coming.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first zone you encounter is the zone of painting, sculpture, architecture: everything that has a material form. It is the zone of forms, colored forms that are expressed as paintings, sculptures, and architecture. They are not forms as we know them, but rather typal forms; you can see garden types, for instance, wonderfully colored and beautiful, or construction types.
Then comes the musical zone, and there you find the origin of the sounds that have inspired the various composers. Great waves of music, without sound. It seems a bit strange, but thats how it is.
--
Thus we have form, expressed in painting, sculpture or architecture; sound, expressed in musical themes; and thought, expressed in books, plays, novels, or even in philosophical and other kinds of intellectual theories (thats where you can send out ideas that will affect the whole world, because they influence receptive brains in any land, and are expressed by corresponding thoughts in the appropriate language). And above this zone, free of form, sound and though, is the play of forces appearing as colored lights. And when you go there and have the power, you can combine those forces so that they eventually materialize as creations on earth (it takes some time, its rarely immediate).
But those great waves of music you hear, which you said were beyond soundsare they part of that domain of luminous vibrations?
--
In short, when one rises to that Origin, one finds a single vibration, which can be expressed as music or thought or architectural or pictorial formsis that right?
Yes, but it goes through specific transformations en route. It passes through one zone or another, where it undergoes transformations to adapt itself to the particular mode of expression. The waves of music are one particular mode of expression of those colored wavesthey should really be called luminous waves, for they are self-luminous. Waves of colored light. Great waves of colored light.
0 1963-02-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Last night or the night before, I was in Sri Aurobindos house and he was telling me, Some things are going wrong. And he showed me around his house. There were some pipesbig pipes that had burst. You see, he told me, people have been careless. In some places they had taken away all the furniture and were cleaning up in a stupid way: See, he said, they dont do things the proper way. Then I understood it was the reflection of the way things happen here. And he was (not angry, he is never angry), but people gave him a lot of bother, they were preventing him from doing his work: I would come in a room and try to arrange a corner because he wanted to write, but it was impossible, the whole setup made it impossible for him to have even a decent corner where he could write then at other times, it would be quite fine. Because it changes continuously. The layout of rooms has an inner meaningit MEANS somethingso it always stays the same as if the setting stayed unchanged (because its not a house built from an architects plan! Its his own house, which he has arranged according to his taste, so it stays that way). But people seem to have unrestricted entry there, and everyone wants to do something, to make himself useful, (laughing) so its terrible! This is what erased my experience or pushed it back into the realm of memories. As though he were saying, Dont be too concerned with universal things, because over here (laughing) things arent too smooth!
***
0 1963-07-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw two examples of this, one physically and the other intellectually (I am referring to things I was in contact with materially). Intellectually, it was a studio friend; for years we had done painting together, she was a very gentle girl, older than I, very serious, and a very good painter. During the last years of my life in Paris, I saw her often and I spoke to her, first of occult matters and the Cosmic philosophy, then of what I knew of Sri Aurobindo (I had a group there and I used to explain certain things), and she would listen with great understandingshe understood, she approved. Now, one day, I went to her house and she told me she was in a great torment. When she was awake, she had no doubts, she understood well, she felt the limitations and obscurities of religion (she came from a family with several archbishops and a cardinalwell, one of those old French families). But at night, she told me, I suddenly wake up with an anguish and somethingfrom my subconscient, obviouslytells me, But after all this, what if you go to hell? And she repeated, When I am awake it doesnt have any force, but at night, when it comes up from the subconscient, it chokes me.
Then I looked, and I saw a kind of huge octopus over the earth: that formation of the Churchof hellwith which they hold people in their grip. The fear of hell. Even when all your reason, all your intelligence, all your feeling is against it, there is, at night, that octopus of the fear of hell which comes and grips you.
--
When I realized that I knew this man [Paul VI], a thought came to me as if in jest: what if someone showed him my photo (because I know some people who can do it), and if he himself said, But I know this woman! Then I saw that old instinct, that habit not to allow anyone even to say or express opinions contrary to theirs. And I saw the curve the curve we have traveled just the same towards freedom. He would be almost obliged to tolerate me. His predecessors predecessor [Pius XII] forbade the archbishop here to excommunicate people who came to the Ashram. (The archbishop wanted to do that, but he couldnt without the Popes permission, and the Pope answered him, Keep quiet.) The next archbishop renewed the excommunication here from his pulpit, but it didnt go beyond that. So I wondered, What will be the Popes attitude? Because naturally, that kind of individual is quite capable of ordering the excommunication of something he considers and KNOWS to be true thats just what youre seeing in this photo [Satprems sense of repulsion]. Naturally, in them the political spirit overrides everything else.
Dont record all Ive said. I dont want to have it here, I dont want it kept. Because the time hasnt come for me to meddle in these affairs.
0 1964-06-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(The following note has a curious history. Satprem had gone off on a journey to see his brother and upon his return, reaching the coast of Brittany, he saw in the sky what Breton sailors call a wind foot, an immense white cloud shaped like an archangel with wings spread and no head. Satprem was so struck by that cloud, without knowing why, that he told his brother, Look at that victorious angel coming our way! Then they went inside. This letter from Mother was awaiting Satprem:)
Take heart, my dear little child,
0 1964-07-31, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, but there has been something new here. Very recently, three days ago, a messenger from the Pope came to visit Pondicherry and, naturally, to meet the archbishop. There was a public reception and the archbishop invited people from the Ashram officially! Z was Catholic and he went, and it seems the delegate delivered a great speech in which he kept repeating that the time of division is over, that the time has come for all those who love God to unite fraternally, and so onits a step forward.
Afterwards, there was a reception at the town hall. The delegate was sitting on the dais with the archbishop and the Chief Minister of Pondicherryno one else, all the others sat on chairs below. Then, as nothing was happening, Z thought it was just a waste of time (!), he went up on the dais and asked the minister to introduce him to the Popes delegate, which he did. Then Z said he was very happy with the delegates speech and thanked him for bringing such ideasyou can imagine the archbishops face!
But its a tiny step forward.
0 1965-02-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Satprem remembers that several years earlier, Madame A. David-Neel had in a letter already advised Mother to leave Pondicherry (it was Mother herself who told this to Satprem around or a little before 1960), because, she predicted, Mother would be "assassinated by her own disciples." That letter must still exist in the Ashram's archives.
February 21: Above all the complications of the so-called human wisdom stands the luminous simplicity of the Divine's Grace, ready to act if we allow It to do so.
0 1965-06-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For a long time, I had had a plan of the ideal city, but that was during Sri Aurobindos lifetime, with Sri Aurobindo living at its center. Afterwards I was no longer interested. Then, we took up the idea of Auroville again (I was the one who called it Auroville), but from the other end: instead of the formation having to find the place, it was the place (near the Lake) that caused the formation to be born; and up to now I took a very secondary interest in it because I hadnt received anything direct. Then that little H. took it into her head to have a house there, near the Lake, and have a house for me next to hers to offer me. And she wrote to me all her dreams; one or two sentences suddenly awakened an old, old memory of something that had tried to manifesta creationwhen I was very small (I dont remember what age), and that had again tried to manifest at the very beginning of the century when I was with Thon. Then I had forgotten all about it. And it came back with that letter: suddenly I had my plan of Auroville. Now I have my general plan; I am waiting for R. to make the detailed plans because since the beginning I have said, R. will be the architect, and I have written to R.
When he came here last year he went to see Chandigarh, the city built by Le Corbusier up there in Punjab, and he wasnt very happy (it seems to me rather mediocre I dont know, I havent seen it; I only saw photographs that were dreadful). And when he spoke to me, I saw that he was feeling, Oh, if I had a city to build! So I wrote to him, If you want, I have a city to build. He is so very glad, he is coming. And when he comes, Ill show him my plan, then he will build the city.1
--
The international section We have already approached a number of ambassadors and countries so each country would have its pavilion there: a pavilion for every country (that was my old idea); some have already accepted, anyhow its under way. Each pavilion has its own garden with, as far as possible, a selection of the plants and produce of the country represented. If they have enough money and space, they can also have a sort of small museum or permanent exhibition of the achievements of the country. And the pavilion should be built according to the architecture of the country represented: it should be like a document of information. Then depending on the amount of money they want to put in, they can also have quarters for students, conference rooms, etc., the countrys cuisine, a restaurant of the country they can have all sorts of developments.
Image 2
0 1966-04-23, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the remarkable thing is that I simply told R. [the architect] the broad outlines, asking him if he was interested. Then he went back to France and he received my formation (my old formation, which I myself had left asleep); he received it there. I found that very interesting. He received it, he said to me, It came all at once, I seemed to be possessed by something, and in one night the whole thing was done. And the interesting point is that an architect friend of his came and worked with him and participated in the creation; he is now quite enthusiastic, and he is a man who has very extensive contacts with all Communist Europe, including Russia. And he is thrilled to pieces. So, on that side, its working well. And in America, too, it seems to be working.
And thats precisely what I want that these two countries clashing with each other should come here, and each of them have a pavilion of their culture and ideal, and that they should be here, face to face, and shake hands.
0 1966-08-10, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A Polytechnician3 came here with R. [the architect of the future Auroville]. There were nine who came with R.; among them is a Polytechnician who sent me a note asking, Are you God?
I had seen the man two days earlier: he is very fine. If I hadnt seen him I wouldnt have answered, but as I saw him and he happens to be fine, I suspected from the way he asked the question that he must be a-gentleman-born-in-a-Catholic-family. So I answered, This question may be asked of EVERY human being, and the answer is, yes, potentially. And out of consideration for his goodwill, I added (I dont remember the exact words): This is the task everyone must accomplish.
0 1966-08-17, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On the 15th, that boy, the Communist architect who was here left, because he found that moral laws arent sufficiently respected! His very words. He left. But then, his thought keeps coming all the timenot thought: something from here (the heart), it keeps coming and coming. He must be quite unhappy at having left! And he asked me It was on the afternoon of the 15th, it kept coming and it was tormented and it asked: How can one know the Truth? What is the Truth? How can one know? Sri Aurobindo was there, and he said to me IN FRENCH (!):
La Vrit ne peut se formuler en mots, mais elle peut tre vcue, si lon est assez pur et plastique.1
0 1966-10-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The work keeps increasing (for everyone); the mail is something unbelievable! Its pouring in from everywhere. I got (Mother laughs) a letter from America, from someone I dont know at all, who listened to phonograph records of my voice. And, I dont know, its people who seem to have occult experiences or perhaps practice spiritualism, and he writes to tell me that he hears my voice and I am giving him revelations about himself. But then (laughing) fantastic revelations! He says its my voice, he doesnt doubt it (he accepts even the seemingly most fanciful things), but still, for safetys sake hed like to ask me (!) if I am indeed the one who has told him those things. And among the things I am supposed to have told him, I seem to have declared that he is a combined reincarnation of Buddha, Christ, archangel Gabriel, Napoleon and Charlemagne! I am going to answer him that those five characters belong to different lines of manifestation and therefore they are rather unlikely to be combined in a single being (a single human being)!
Its obviously little vital entities having fun. They have fun, and the more fanciful, the greater the fun, of course!
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The nature (of Mother) was rather shy, and as a matter of fact, there wasnt much confidence in the personal capacity (although there was the sense of being able to do anything, if the need arose). Till the age of twenty or twenty-one I spoke very little, and never, never anything like a speech. I wouldnt take part in conversations: I would listen, but speak very little. Then I was put in touch with Abdul Baha (the Bahai), who was then in Paris, and a sort of intimacy grew between us. I used to go to his gatherings because I was interested. And one day (when I was in his room), he said to me, I am sick, I cant speak; go and speak for me. I said, Me! But I dont speak. He replied, You just have to go there, sit quietly and concentrate, and what you have to say will come to you. Go and do it, you will see. Well then (laughing), I did as he said. There were some thirty or forty people. I went and sat in their midst, stayed very still, and then I sat like that, without a thought, nothing, and suddenly I started speaking. I spoke to them for half an hour (I dont even know what I told them), and when it was over everybody was quite pleased. I went to find Abdul Baha, who told me, You spoke admirably. I said, It wasnt me! And from that day (I had got the knack from him, you understand!), I would stay like that, very still, and everything would come. Its especially the sense of the I that must be lost thats the great art in everything, for everything, for everything you do: for painting, for (I did painting, sculpture, architecture even, I did music), for everything, but everything, if you are able to lose the sense of the I, then you open yourself to to the knowledge of the thing (sculpture, painting, etc.). Its not necessarily beings, but the spirit of the thing that uses you.
Well, I think it should be the same thing with language. One should be tuned in to someone in that way, or through that someone to something still higher: the Origin. And then, very, very passive. But not inertly passive: vibrantly passive, receptive, like that, attentive, letting that come in and be expressed. The result would be there to see. As I said, we are limited by what we know, but that may be because were still too much of a person; if we could be perfectly plastic it might be different: there have been instances of people speaking in a language they didnt know, consequently
0 1967-08-26, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know, I had an experience of this sort quite a long time ago (a very long time), when I was still in France, in Paris. There was a student friend in the studio (because I studied in a painting studio for a long time), she was a very good painter, we were close friends, and I started telling her about the Cosmic Review and Thons teaching. She belonged to a Catholic family of archbishops, even cardinals, anyway it was And she was extremely interested and wholly convinced: she felt a liberation of the spirit and aspiration. Then, after I had Sri Aurobindos teaching, I passed it on to her, and there she was really quite taken. But she often told me, As long as I am awake, everything is fine, but in my sleep Ill suddenly wake up in a dreadful panic: and if the Catholic teaching is true, then Ill go to hell! And so, a torture. And she would tell me, When I am wide awake, I see how ridiculous it is
But all those who were baptized and went for a time to confession are part of an inner, a whole psychological entity, and its VERY DIFFICULT to break free of it; they are bound to a wholethere is there is an invisible Church, and all those people are in its grip. To break free of it, one must be a vital hero. A true hero, you understand. Because its very strong. I saw that all religions have in that way kinds of congregations in the invisible; but the Christian one is the strongest of them all from a terrestrial standpoint. Its much stronger than that of the Buddhists, much stronger than that of the Chinese, much stronger than the ancient Hindu religionsits the strongest. And naturally stronger than the more recent religions, too the strongest. And when you are baptized, you are bound. If you dont go to mass and have never been to confession, with a little vital energy you can get out of it, but those who have gone to confessionespecially confession and when you take communion, when you are given Christ to eat (another frightful thing).
0 1967-10-25, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When R. (Aurovilles architect) was here last time, he said to me, When are we going to create Aurovilles atmosphere? Everyone is quarrelling! (Mother laughs) I said, Yes, thats the difficulty. And its continuing. But anyway, there is a Pressure from above, like that, a Pressure. We shall see.
Its still a symbol.
0 1967-12-27, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a change. You know ex-brother A. wrote about that priest who abused the Ashram in coarse language the priest received the order to keep quiet and stop talking slanderously. And now its general, no one says anything about the Ashram. Then you know that on the Popes order, all the altars have been turned around; U. was asked to do it, he did it in all of Pondicherrys churches; so the archbishop wrote a note, saying, Please thank the Mother because her children have done a very good work. It means a change, you understand. It means theyve received orders.
And I received such a nice note from this ex-brother A. (because he received a hamper for Christmas), but a lovely, charming little note, that is, something felt, in which he said that the best of himself always makes itself felt in my presence. Really an inner change.
0 1968-03-02, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Mother laughs) Because everyone finds the words arent the ones he wants. There has been quite a to-do with the Communists and the Soviet consul, a very intelligent man, it seems, who has read Sri Aurobindo, is quite interested, wants to be useful and he says, What can I do with divine consciousness!1 (Mother laughs) In our country the word divine is banned. He was told, This has nothing to do with God (a ban on God I quite understand, you see, because you can put whatever you like in the word), but he said, I cant. They sent a Russian translation, which luckily came after the ceremony; it was the translation of their own thought, not at all of my text! So we answered them it had come too late. Its T. who did the translation, but she refused to read it out [at the inauguration], because, she said, it was too heavy a responsibility! (Mother laughs) They are all like that. Finally it was read out by S. But then, we have a Communist architect, a Russian, who has been working a great deal for Auroville, on the models and so on (a young man, he is very nice), and yesterday he came with a prayer: whether he could change the word divine. I asked him, What are you offering me? He said, The universal consciousness. Then I answered (laughing), You are making it shrink terribly! He was bothered: whats to be done? I told him, Listen, Ill make a concession for you; if you like, well say perfect consciousness, thats harmless. So he was happy, I wrote perfect consciousness on his paper, and he left with it!
But here, the group of (what shall we call them?) Y.s disciples, the forward group, dont at all like divine consciousness, and the woman who translated it into German (not a direct disciple of Y.s but one of M.s) went to M. to ask for his help (moral help, probably), and the best they could find was highest consciousness. So I asked, Where is your high? Where is your low?
0 1968-04-13, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
R. [Aurovilles architect] has come for five days, and he wants to make what he calls a district of Auroville, that is to say, instead of tackling the problem of ten or twenty thousand people at once, he wants to start with two or three thousand, on the level of infrastructure, but above all to see how it will work: the experiment of life in Auroville. I had thought about it, and when I spoke to you last time, thats what came: in what direction should the experiment be carried out? You see, Y. has ideas in the field of education (I am not intervening); as for R., he has ideas in the field of construction (I am not intervening); but no one has studied the problem on the level of administration or organization, and of money, and that was precisely what I spoke of to you about last time.
So if you could read me what I told you, if it does Ill give them the text. There is also this communist Russian architect, who has become quite enthusiastic: to him Auroville is the ideal realization. He is a very strong boy, with some power (also a power of conviction over people). So it would be interesting if he could have a glimpse of the direction in which were going.
(Mother listens to Satprem read out the last conversation)
0 1968-11-02, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, he says, I know who it is and Ill send you his photo. I am waiting for the photo. Heres what he writes: V.s vision has come to show me the accuracy of the persons description: it is Msgr. Z, archbishop in the Holy Sees State Secretariat, an intimate friend of the Holy Fathers and his private collaborator.
Oh!
0 1968-11-20, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
P.L. has sent photos of the man supposed to be doing magic. You know that he is an intimate friend of the Popes, his private collaborator, and at the same time archbishop at the State Secretariat of the Holy See. Heres his photo.
Oh, he wears such a big hat!
--
Are archbishops dressed like this?
What nationality is he?
0 1969-02-08, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In this connection, yesterday R. [Aurovilles architect] asked me questions so as to be able to answer people; he asked me if it was necessary to have organization and so on. And then it came, but in such an imperative manner; I replied that organization was discipline in action, and that to live, discipline is quite indispensable. I said that the bodys whole functioning is a discipline, and if there is a part that no longer wants to follow the disciplineout of revolt or incapacity or for any reasonif it stops following the discipline, you fall ill.
It came so clearly that I told him.
--
Notes of Aurovilles architect
1) To build Auroville, do we need a method of working, organization, coordination?
0 1969-06-11, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Later, regarding a letter from the Raymonds, friends of Pavitras and the architects who built Golconde, the Ashrams guest house.)
Have you seen the Raymonds letter? Theyve written a very sweet letter. In their letter, they write something I didnt know, which Pavitra had never told me; they say that when Pavitra put them in contact with here, it completely changed their lives, the aim of their lives and everything.
Raymond is a great architect. When they came here1 and built Golconde, I asked Raymond to prepare the plan for the first Auroville I had conceived (that was when Sri Aurobindo was still alive), and it was magnificent! He didnt leave it here.
But it was an Auroville with, at the center, Sri Aurobindos house (gesture on a hilltop). Sri Aurobindo was alive, so we had put him at the center.
0 1969-06-25, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
An Italian film maker, architect and painter.
The Sannyasin who initiated Satprem.
0 1969-08-27, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the druid said he is penniless, so well send him to R. [Aurovilles architect], who might be able to arrange something.
He has studied all religions, and (laughing) stopped at druidism.
0 1969-09-03, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The state of mind of the people who burned Joan of arc, for instance.
Charming
0 1969-09-17, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But theres no law. They can even elect a layman, and in that case, rapidly give him priesthood, then nominate him bishop, archbishop, and so on.
But they arent free at all.
0 1969-12-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That was my first impression. But how to have R. [Aurovilles architect] understand that? I dont know. Because it was R. who changed it; its he who wanted to begin with Auromodle, that is to say, with trials and attempts.
So the result is that everyone is concerned with his own little story and his own little hut, and theres no cement, there isnt the Thing that would bind them together and would lift them above themselves and their little stories.
--
Ill see R. tomorrow, I can tell him. Paolo is an architect, isnt he?
You alone have authority over R.
0 1970-01-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother, I told Paolo [the Italian architect] to come, he is waiting outside.
Yes. There is an interesting thing.
For a long time I had been feeling something, then we spoke about it the other day, and I SAW I told R. [Aurovilles architect] about it, I asked him to see Paolo, and I also told him that I had seen what should be done. Naturally, he didnt say no, he said yes to everything, but I felt he wasnt too keen. But here is what happened. I clearly sawvery, very distinctly saw, which means it was like that, and it still IS like that, its there (gesture showing an eternal plane)the inside of that place [the Matrimandir].
Maybe you should tell Paolo about it?
--
I told R. about it, and the next day he told me, Yes, but it will take time to prepare. (I said nothing of all Ive just told you, I just spoke of doing something.) Afterwards I had a vision of that room, so I no longer need anyone to see how it should be I know. Whats needed is an engineer more than an architect, because an architect It has to be as simple as possible.
I told Paolo what you had seen, that large room, empty, without anything. It touched him a lot, he in fact could see that large empty room. He understands quite well. So empty simply means a shape.
--
No, when I told him we had to build the center that I had seen it and it had to be buil the didnt object. Only he told me, But it will take time. I said, No, it has to be done right now. Thats why I am getting those kinds of sketches made by an engineer, so as to show him, because its not the job of an architect: its the job of an engineer, with precise calculations for the sunlight, very precise. It has to be someone really skilled. The architect will have to see that the columns are beautiful, the walls are beautiful, the proportions are correctall that is quite all rightand also that symbol at the center. The aspect of beauty is for the architect to see, naturally but the whole aspect of calculations And the important thing is the play of the sun on the center. Because it becomes a symbol the symbol of the future realization.
(Mother remains concentrated)
0 1970-01-10, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But Paolo says that from an architectural standpoint, its quite possible to extend the thing from outside without touching whats already built.
Oh, yes, its quite possible.
0 1970-05-20, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
R. [Aurovilles architect] has asked to see me tonight.
Oh, really? Why?
0 1970-05-23, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As a matter of fact, I saw R. [Aurovilles architect]. I saw him twice.
Oh! What did he tell you?
0 1971-04-28, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(On the occasion of the laying of the first stone of the Matrimandir on February 21, Satprem had written a letter to the architect of Auroville.)
I saw your letter (I saw it in English), the letter you wrote to R. for the Matrimandir. Its interesting, its good. They have a bulletin, a Gazette, it will be published there.1
0 1971-11-10, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A few days ago I received a letter from a young man who is an architect there, Z (I dont know him). He wrote me saying that he would like to see me.
Ah, why?
--
He has an idea of how to make the Matrimandir, and others have another idea, but then R. [the architect] is going to arrive soon I would like to wait for R. to be here, and he will decide.
Because he wrote me a second letter, saying, I agree that one must turn to the Source, which is the stable and welcoming reference, but unfortunately one doesnt have direct access to the Source, one has to go through intermediaries.
0 1971-11-20, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That means archbishop?
I dont know, Mother. I just know that he is in charge of an enormous charity which has millions, and he gets all his money from womenhe has a power over women. A colossal fortune. Were he to turn it to the right side, it would be good.
0 1972-03-10, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(A conversation with Auroville's architect, who, after the recent "accident," asks for money for "fire protection.")
Well, there isnt enough money here, and theres even less there. Because in peoples minds, its all the same thing [the Ashram and Auroville], and so they dont know where to give anymore.
--
(The architect:) We have to make a study, Mother. I think perhaps one or two lakhs for all of Auroville (for wells and fire hoses). Thats for the time being, but theres also the future: how are we going to develop Auroville, now that its started? At this point the main question is to know whether we shouldnt try to raise money, to ask people in the world for personal contri butions in rupees, francs or dollars, so that Auroville can be built by individual people. Perhaps some action along those lines could be undertaken in various countries as well as in India? Because Aurovilles financial situation is getting worse. Its worse than it was six months ago, and the needs are increasing, so I dont know, waiting may be a solution, but you should know the exact situation.
(after a long silence)
--
(The architect leaves. R., an American disciple, enters.)
I could put it this way: its either progress, or death. Each and everyone must, must absolutely progress, make the required progress, or else (gesture of dissolution).
--
The recording of this conversation has been kept in the Ashram, most probably never to be seen again. Satprem used to keep all the tapes of his conversations with Mother, but since this particular conversation concerned Auroville's architect and R., at the time he thought it better to entrust the tape to Mother's new attendant after transcribing it.
***
0 1972-03-11, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The document is a copy of Cardinal Tisserands letter to the archbishop of Pondicherry:
Albano, Regina Apostolorum, 13 January 1972
To His Excellency Msgr. A.R. archbishop of Pondicherry
Venerable Lord,
0 1972-04-02b, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Meeting with Auroville's architect, N. and U.N. is the Secretary of the Sri Aurobindo Society and U., his rival, the Secretary of Sri Aurobindo's Action. The architect gives Mother a flower.)
What is it?
--
(To the architect:) Did you follow?
Yes, Mother.
0 1972-04-04, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Aurovilles architect enters)
(The architect:) There has been a chain of events which makes it necessary for me to ask you a question. I have read this question to S.S., because we have spoken together at length, insofar as we feel that certain decisions must be made to try and improve the situation in Auroville. But we keep running up against the same problem, which I have summarized in this letter:
Auroville is burdened by a small group of people who are contaminating its life and spirit and jeopardizing its progress. They thwart any effort to implement safety and hygiene measures, working decisions, and they behave in contradiction to Aurovilles ideal. One solution would be to send some of these people back home and, for a certain period, to limit newcomers to those elements directly useful to the building of Auroville.
--
(The architect:) Well, Mother, I simply wanted to know if we are supposed to accept the presence of these seemingly undesirable people as a necessity for Aurovilles growth, and if so, well just have to act accordingly and face the difficulties they represent; or should we take definite measures to solve the problems of safety, the problems of hygiene.
What problems of hygiene? What problems of safety?
--
(The architect:) The question in our minds, Mother, was to know whether you saw these people as being useful in providing Auroville with a certain type of difficulty.
No! Certainly not! No, no, I dont favor deliberately adding difficulties! I know they come for. But they shouldnt be invitedon the contrary. They shouldnt. Things should be made as easy as possible. Only, we shouldnt be ruffled by difficulty, thats the point. I am not at all saying that difficulties should be accepteddont invite them at all, at all, at all; life is difficult enough as it is! But when a difficulty comes, you must take heart and face it courageously.
0 1972-05-13, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(The subject here is the conversation of last April 2 with Auroville's architect, N. and U., when Mother was trying to bring some harmony among the three. The recording of the conversation, which was never returned to Satprem, started circulating in the Ashram in all kinds of distorted transcriptions. Satprem's initiative in giving the tape, which was intended to preserve the au thenticity of Mother's words, was diverted for a typical Ashram purpose: gossip and one-upmanship, each party using Mother's words to outdo the other. Nor do we know what happened to all the other similar recordings....)
Did they give you that text? It was corrected a little. Did you see it? Is it all right?
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
At the very outset when and where the Many has come out into manifestation in the Onehere also it must be remembered that we are using a temporal figure in respect of an extra-temporal factthere and then is formed a characteristic range of reality which is a perfect equation of the one and the many: that is to say, the one in becoming many still remains the same immaculate one in and through the many, and likewise the many in spite of its manifoldnessand because of the special quality of the manifoldnessstill continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root consciousness-forms, ta cit, in Vedic terminology. They are seed-truths, the original mother-truths in the Divine Consciousness. They comprise the fundamental essential many aspects and formulations of an infinite Infinity. At this stage these do not come into clash or conflict, for here each contains all and the All contains each one in absolute unity and essential identity. Each individual formation is united with and partakes of the nature of the one supreme Reality. Although difference is born here, separation is not yet come. Variety is there, but not discord, individuality is there, not egoism. This is the first step of Descent, the earliest one-not, we must remind ourselves again, historically but psychologically and logically the descent of the Transcendent into the Cosmic as the vast and varied Supermindcitra praketo ajania vibhw of the Absolute into the relational manifestation as Vidysakti (Gnosis).
The next steps, farther down or away, arrive when the drive towards differentiation and multiplication gathers momentum becomes accentuated, and separation and isolation increase in degree and emphasis. The lines of individuation fall more and more apart from each other, tending to form closed circles, each confining more and more exclusively to itself, stressing its own particular and special value and function, in contradistinction to or even against other lines. Thus the descent or fall from the Supermind leads, in the first instance, to the creation or appearance of the Overmind. It is the level of consciousness where the perfect balance of the One and the Many is disturbed and the emphasis begins to be laid on the many. The source of incompatibility between the two just starts here as if Many is notOne and One is not Many. It is the beginning of Ignorance, Avidya, Maya. Still in the higher hemisphere of the Overmind, the sense of unity is yet maintained, although there is no longer the sense of absolute identity of the two; they are experienced as complementaries, both form a harmony, a harmony as of different and distinct but conjoint notes. The Many has come forward, yet the unity is also there supporting it-the unity is an immanent godhead, controlling the patent reality of the Many. It is in the lower hemisphere of the Overmind that unity is thrown into the background half-submerged, flickering, and the principle of multiplicity comes forward with all insistence. Division and rivalry are the characteristic marks of its organisation. Yet the unity does not disappear altogether, only it remains very much inactive, like a sleeping partner. It is not directly perceived and envisaged, not immediately felt but is evoked as reminiscence. The Supermind, then, is the first crystallisation of the Infinite into individual centres, in the Overmind these centres at the outset become more exclusively individualised and then jealously self-centred.
The next step of Descent is the Mind where the original unity and identity and harmony are disrupted to a yet greater degree, almost completely. The self-delimitation of consciousness which is proper to the Supermind and even to the Overmind, at least in its higher domainsgives way to self-limitation, to intolerant egoism and solipsism. The consciousness withdraws from its high and wide sweep, narrows down to introvert orbits. The sense of unity in the mind is, at most, a thing of idealism and imagination; it is an abstract notion, a supposition and a deduction. Here we enter into the very arcana of Maya, the rightful possession of Ignorance. The individualities here have become totally isolated and independent and mutually conflicting lines of movement. Hence the natural incapacity of mind, as it is said, to comprehend more than one object simultaneously. The Super mind and, less absolutely, the Overmind have a global and integral outlook: they can take in each one in its purview all at once the total assemblage of things, they differentiate but do not divide the Supermind not at all, the Overmind not categorically. The Mind has not this synthetic view, it proceeds analytically. It observes its object by division, taking the parts piecemeal, dismantling them, separating them, and attending to each one at a time. And when it observes it fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its attention from all the rest. If it bas to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do so by collating, aggregating and summing. Mental consciousness is thus narrowly one pointed: and in narrowing itself, being farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward gazing (p arci khni) and superficial. The One Absolute in its downward m arch towards multiplicity, fragmentation and partiality loses also gradually its subtlety, its suppleness, its refinement, becomes more and more obtuse, crude, rigid and dense.
Between the Overmind and the Mind proper, varying according to the degree of immixture of the two, according to the degree of descent and of emergence of one and the other respectively, there are several levels of consciousness of which three main ones have been named and described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is slower, duller, more uncertain, more disintegrated. The lower the consciousness descends the more veiled it becomes, losing more and more the directness, the sureness, the intensity and force and the synthetic unity native to the highest ranges of our consciousness and being.
--
The mystery of rebirth in the evolution of the human personality is nothing but the mystery of the developing psyche. At first this psyche or soul is truly a being: no bigger than the thumb it is the hardly audible still small voice. The experiences of lifesweet or bitter, happy or unhappy, good or bad, howsoever they may appear to the outward eye and perceptionall the dialectics of a terrestrial existence contri bute to the growth and development of the psychic consciousness. Each span of life means a special degree or mode of growth necessitated by the inner demand and drive of the divine Individual seated within the heart. The whole end in view of this secret soul is to move always towards and be united again with its Oversoul, its original and high archetype in the Divine Consciousness: the entire course of its earthly evolution is chalked out and patterned by the exact need of its growth. Whatever happens in each particular life, all the currents of all the lives converge and coalesce, and serve the psychic consciousness to swell in volume and intensity and be one with the Divine Consciousness. Or, in a different imagery, one can say that the multifarious experiences of various lives are as fuel to the Inner Firethis Psychic Agni which is just a spark or a thin tongue at the outset of the human evolutionary course; but with the addition of fuel from life to life this Fire flames up, indeed, becomes ultimately a conflagration that bums and purifies the entire outer vehicle and transforms it into radiant mattera fit receptacle, incarnation of the supernal Light. The mounting Fire (the consciousness-energy secreted in the earth-bound heart of Matter) finally flares up, discloses itself in its full amplitude and calls and attracts into it the incandescent supramental Solar Sphere which is the type and pattern it has to embody and express. This is the marriage of Heaven and Earth, of which the mystics all over the earth in all ages spoke and sangto which the Vedic Rishi refers when he declares:
Dyaur me pit mt pthiv iyam,1
02.02 - The Message of the Atomic Bomb, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The moralist the Christian moralist particularlyhas dubbed the atomic bomb as the Devil's engine; while the practical politician retorts that the accursed machine has cut short the war, saved more lives on the whole and reduced the extent and duration of suffering and agony. In any case the new weapon is so radical and devastating in its effectiveness that even politicians do not seem to be without a qualm and heartburning, not in the moral but in the physical and nervous sense. The atom bomb is a bombshell not upon your enemies alone, but it is a boomerang likely to turn back upon yourself, upon the whole of humanity and human civilisation. archimedes asked for a fulcrum outside the earth to be able to move it out of its orbit; we have found out something with which one hopes and fears one would do much more.
Man's invention of death-dealing weapons has an interesting history. It is, curious to say, the history of his progress and growing civilisation. The primitive man fought with the strength of his God-given limbstooth and nailto which he subsequently added the crudest of weapons, clubs, of wood or flint. A revolution was brought about when iron was discovered and archery invented. Next revolution came with the appearance of gunpowder on the stage. And then the age of gun-cotton and T.N.T. which held sway till the other day. An interim period of poison gas and chemical warfare was threatened, but everything now has gone overboard with the advent of the atomic bomb and the threatened advent of the Cosmic Death-Ray.
In one sense certainly there has been a progress. This m arch of machinery, this evolution of tools means man's increasing mastery over Nature, even though physical nature. The primitive man like the animal is a slave, a puppet driven helplessly by Nature's forces. Both lead more or less a life of reflex action: there is here no free, original initiation of action or movement. The slow discovery of Nature's secrets, the gradual application and utilisation of these secrets in actual life meant, first, a liberation of man's conscious being originally imbedded in Nature's inertial movements, and then, a growing power to react upon Nature and mould and change it according to the will of the conscious being. The result at the outset was a release and organisation on the mental level, in the domain of reason and intelligence. Of course, man found at once that this increasing self-consciousness and self-power meant immense possibilities for good, but, unfortunately, for evil also. And so to guard against the latter contingency, rules and regulations were framed to control and canalise the new-found capacities. The Dharma of the Kshatriya, the honour of the Samurai, the code of Chivalry, all meant that. The power to kill was sought to be checked and restrained by such injunctions as, for example, not to hit below the belt, not to fight a disarmed or less armed opponent and so on. The same principle of morals and manners was maintained and continued through the centuries with necessary changes and modifications in application and finds enshrined today in International Covenants and Conventions.
02.03 - The Glory and the Fall of Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In an architecture of hieratic Space
Circling and mounting towards creation's tops,
--
An archipelago of laughter and fire,
Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Insignificant architects of low-built lives
And engineers of interest and desire,
02.06 - Vansittartism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Germany is considered now, and naturally with great reason, as the arch criminal among nations. Such megalomania, such lust for wanton cruelty, such wild sadism, such abnormal velleities no people, it is said, have ever evinced anywhere on the face of the earth: the manner and the extent of it all are appalling. Hitler is not the malady; removal of the Fuehrer will not cure Germany. The man is only a sign and a symbol. The whole nation is corrupt to the core: it has been inoculated with a virus that cannot be eradicated. The peculiar German character that confronts and bewilders us now, is not a thing of today or even of yesterday; it has been there since Tacitus remarked it. Even Germans themselves know it very well; the best among them have always repudiated their mother country. Certainly there were peoples and nations that acted at times most barbarously and inhumanly. The classical example of the Spanish Terror in America is there. But all pales into insignificance when compared to the German achievement and ideal in this respect. For here is a people violent and cruel, not simply because it is their character to be so and they delight in being so, but because it forms the bedrock of their philosophy of life, their weltanschauung.
This is the very core of the matter. Germany stands for a philosophy of life, for a definite mode of human values. That philosophy was slowly developed, elaborated by the German mind, in various degrees and in various ways through various thinkers and theorists and moralists and statesmen, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The conception of the State as propounded even by her great philosophers as something self-existent, sacrosanct and almost divineaugust and grim, one has to addis profoundly significant of the type of the subconscient dynamic in the nation: it strangely reminds one of the state organised by the bee, the ant or the termite. Hitler has only precipitated the idea, given it a concrete, physical and dynamic form. That philosophy in its outlook has been culturally anti-Latin, religiously anti-Christian. Germany cherishes always in her heart the memory of the day when her hero Arminius routed the Roman legions of Varus. Germany stands for a mode of human consciousness that is not in line with the major current of its evolutionary growth: she harks back to something primeval, infra-rational, infra-human.
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Impatient architects of error's house,
Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest
--
Of the architecture of her fate's design,
It falsified the primal cosmic Will
--
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
--
Hate was the black archangel of that realm;
It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart
02.09 - The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Advancing under an arch of glory and peace,
Traveller on plateau and on musing ridge,
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An architect of knowledge, not its source.
66.19
--
On earth by the will of this arch-Intelligence
A bodiless energy put on Matter's robe;
--
The archangel's gaze who knows inspired his acts
And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.
--
Bowed under the arc-lamps of her factory-home
Amid the clatter and ringing of her tools.
--
Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.
69.6
02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And hedged into a curt horizon's arc
The irised vision of the Ineffable.
--
Above stood ranked a subtle archangel race
With larger lids and looks that se arched the unseen.
--
High architects of possibility
And engineers of the impossible,
--
Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights
And visualised the plumbless viewless depths,
02.13 - In the Self of Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He stood on a wide arc of summit Space
Alone with an enormous Self of Mind
--
And elevation by the architect Word
Imposed upon the semblances of Time.
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaishnava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to the human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms have been more or less symbols and figures having not merely human but a supra-human significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila passes not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of consciousness cinmayabehind all earthly (and human) manifestation and expression.
It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the mystic truth that man is greater than all and surpasses the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But Man here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm, not at all the human man, as modern humanists of our country would like to have. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternal in the super-consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts upon earth he does so in manner and measure that do not belong to this plane.
Only the other day I found a critic in The Manchester Guardian referring to The Gita as something frigid (and confused)!
03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an art, as any other orthodox art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophyperhaps the very large element of philosophy that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of au thentic art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy the metaphysicsof it, but only into the science the physicsof it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly formkavi kavitva divi rpam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the absolute truth is not the philosopher's taskit is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a my as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to doand nothing lessthan to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.
Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the otherhand, the m arch of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: thereis something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).
All these systems, commonly called philosophical, appear to me supremely artistic. The logical intellect has worked here exactly like a chisel or a brush in the hands of the artist. It did not care for truth per se, its prime preoccupation was arrangement, disposition; the problem it set before itself was how best to present a consistent and unified, that is to say, a beautiful whole.
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An architect hewing out self's living rock,
Phenomenon built Reality's summer-house
03.04 - The Other Aspect of European Culture, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Herein lay Europe's soul; and to it turned often and anon the gaze of those who, among a profane humanity, are still the guardians of the Spiritpoets and artistswho, even in the very midst of the maelstrom of Modernism, sought to hark back, back to the rock of the ages. The mediaevalism and archaicism of which a Rossetti or a Morris, for example, is often accused embodies only a defensive reaction on the part of Europe's soul; it is an attempt to return to her more fundamental life-intuition.
In this connection the history of Ireland's destiny affords an instructive study, since it is symbolic also of Europe's life-course. It was the natural idealism, the inborn spiritual outlook which Ireland possessed of yore the Druidic Mysteries were more ancient than the Greek culture and formed perhaps the basis of the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysterieswhich impelled her foremost to embrace the new revelation brought on by Christianity. As she was among the pioneers to champion the cause of the Christ, she became also the fortress where the new cult found a safe refuge when the old world was being overwhelmed and battered to pieces by the onrush of peoples of a dense and rough-hewn nature. When continental Europe lay a desert waste under the heels of the barbarians that almost wiped away the last vestiges of the Classical Culture, it was Ireland who nursed and reared the New Child in her bosom and when the time came sent Him out again to reconquer and revivify Europe. Once more when the tide of Modernism began to rise and swell and carry everything before it, Ireland stood firm and threw up an impregnable barrier. The story of Ireland's struggle against Anglo-Saxon domination is at bottom the story of the struggle between Europe's soul power and body power. Ireland was almost slain in the combat, physically, but would not lose her soul. And now she rises victorious at long last, her ancient spirit shines resplendent, the voice of the Irish Renaissance that speaks through Yeats and Russell1 heralds a new dawn for her and who knows if not for Europe and the whole West?
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaishnava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other, the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms are more or less symbols and figures, having not merely a human but a suprahuman significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila takes place not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of the inner consciousness cinmayabehind all earthly (and human) manifestation and expression.
It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the mystic truth that Man is greater than all and surpasses even the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But Man -here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm, not the human man at all, as modern humanists of our country would like to have it. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternally in the super-consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts on earth, he does so in a manner and measure that do not belong to this plane of humanity familiar to us.
Only the other day I found a critic in the Manchester Guardian referring to the Gita as something frigid and confused !!
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I am tempted to add a fourth view the view from behind or the occult view something of which may be found in the art of Egypt in its most ancient and na Ive aspects, in the art of archaic Tibet, in the remnants of some of the old world submerged civilizations, now known as "primitive" (Polynesian, for example).
It is not my intention to say that the art of character, even in the deeper sense, is totally absent in Europe. On the contrary, it is that which has been growing day by day,although perhaps often along rather odd lines. It is a moot question how far this orientation is due to the influence of the Eastern, especially, the Far Eastern art. In speaking of Europe, I was referring to the bedrock of the artistic tradition of Europe, its fundamental classical tone.
03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Varying the metaphor we may say again that Buddhism rises sheer in its monolithic structure, an Asokan pillar towering in its linear movement; Hinduism has its towers, but they are part of a vast architecture, spread out on ample and chequered grounds-even like a temple city.
II
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The modernist does not ask: is it good? is it beautiful? He asks: is it effective? is it expressive? And by effectivity and expressiveness he means something nervous and physical. Expressiveness to him would mean the capacity to tear off the veil over what once was considered not worth the while or decent to uncover. A strange recklessness and shamelessness, an unhealthy and perverse curiosity, characteristic of the Asura and the Pisacha, of the beings of the underworld, mark the movement of the modernist. But I forget. The Modernist is not always an an archist, for he too seeks to establish a New Order; indeed he arrogates to himself that mission and declares it to be his and his alone. Obviously it is not the order of the higher gods of Olympus: these have been ousted and dethroned. We are being led back to the mysteries of an earlier race, reverting to an infra-evolutionary status, into the arcana of Thor and Odin, godlings of an elemental Nature.
In such a world Tagore is a voice and a beacon from over the heights of the old world declaring and revealing the verities that are eternal and never die. They who seek to kill them do so at their peril. Tagore is a great poet: as such he is close to the heart of Bengal. He is a great Seer: as such humanity will claim him as its own.
04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole,
It came into the sky of mortal life
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Behind the student arch a noble power
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the gods. And Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of thought-gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to clo the our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound, external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by scholars from Latin mens, which means, as we all know, mind.
The Greek Mind, as I said, is the bridge thrown across the gulf existing between the spiritual, the occult, the intuitive and the sensuous, the physical, the material. Since the arrival of the Hellenes a highway has been built up, a metalled macada-mised road connecting these two levels of human experience and there is possible now a free and open communication from the one to the other. We need not speak any more of God and the gods and the divine principles indirectly through symbols and similes, but in mental terms which are closer to our normal understanding and we can also utilise the form of our intellection and reasoning to represent and capture something of what lies beyond intellect and reason.
04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The architecture of the Infinite
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now this superconsciousness is the true origin of creation, although the apparent and objective creation starts with and is based upon Unconsciousness. All norms and archetypes belong to the superconsciousness; for the sake of material creation they are thrown down or cast as seed into the Unconscious and in this process they undergo a change, a deformation and aberration. All the major themes of dream myths and prehistoric legends which the psychologists claim to have found imbedded in man's subconscient consciousness are in fact echoes and mirages of great spiritualsuperconscientrealities reflected here below. The theme of the Hero of the Dual Mother (Dark and Fair), of Creation and Sacrifice, these are, according to Jung, dramatisations of some fundamental movements and urges in the dark subconscient nature. Jung, however, throws a luminous suggestion in characterising the nature of this vast complex. The general sense, Jung says; is that of a movement forward, of a difficult journey, of a pull backward and downward, of yawning abysses that call, of a light that beckons. It is an effort, a travail of what lies imbedded and suppressed to come out into the open, into the normal consciousness and thus release an unhealthy tension, restore a balance in the individual's system. Modern psychology lays great stress upon the integration of personality. Most of the ills that human nature suffers from, they say, are due to this division or schism in it, a suppressed subconsciousness and an expressed consciousness seeking to express a negation of that subconsciousness. Modern psychology teaches that one should dive into the nether regions and face squarely whatever elements are there, help these to follow their natural bent to come up and see the light of the day. Only thus there can be established a unitary movement, an even consistency and an equilibrium throughout the entire consciousness and being.
So far so good. But two things are to be taken note of. First of all, the resolution of the normal conflict in man's consciousness, the integration of his personality, is not wholly practicable within the scope of the present nature and the field of the actual forces at play. That can give only a shadow of the true resolution and integration. A conscious envisaging of the conflicting forces, a calm survey of the submerged or side-tracked libidos in their true nature, a voluntary acceptance, of these dark elements as a part of normal human nature, does not automatically make for their sublimation and purification or transformation. The thing is possible only through another force and on another level, by the intervention and interfusion precisely of the superconsciousness. And here comes the second point to note. For it is this superconsciousness towards which all the strife and struggle of the under-consciousness are turned and directed. The yearning and urge in the subconsciousness to move forward, to escape outside into the light does not refer merely to the m arch towards normal awareness and consciousness: it has a deeper direction and a higher aimit seeks that of which it is an aberration and a deformation, the very origin and source, the height from which it fell.
04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
New-found through an arch of clear discovery,
This intimation of the world's delight,
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is the view, an old-world view, of eternal recurrence. That is to say, creation is ever the same; it goes through a cycle of changes, but the cycles repeat ad infinitum. There is no progress, no forward movement towards a more and more perfection. Indeed, the cycle of creation is a closed circle. The idea of progress was very much in vogue at one time. It was born under the auspices of Romantic Idealism; it was fostered and streng thened by youthful, Science in the first enthusiasm of her early discoveries, especially that of the fact of biological evolution. There has, however, been a setback since, when it was found that the original picture of evolution the emergence and growth of species in the course of a few thousand years is far from being true, that evolution means not thousands but millions of years. And when archaeologists discovered that men could build hygienic cities, run democratic states, discuss and argue acutely on recondite problems of life and philosophy, women knew the use of ornaments and jewels of consummate beauty and craftsmanship in epochs when they were expected to be no more than wild denizens of the cave or the forest, the belief in human progress, at least along a steady straight line, was very much shaken.
Yet an imperious necessity of the idea, almost as an inevitable ingredient of human consciousness, always exists and constantly makes its presence felt. If recurrence is the law of creation, this idea with its will to fruition is also a recurrent phenomenon. A modern form of it has been given a very dynamic drive in the Marxian gospel. A socio-economic progress, however, is and can be only a part, in fact, a result of a wider and deeper progress.
04.04 - The Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A prescient architect of Fate and Chance
Who builds our lives on a foreseen design
04.21 - To the HeightsXXI, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou art the architect that builds from within,
From the deepest foundations:
05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The purpose of man's existence upon earth is the growth of his consciousness. Each human being is a soul, a psyche, a spark from the Spirit sent down into Matter, a ray from the Divine Light descended upon earth and housed in a physical body. The spark, the ray is to attain the amplitude and splendour of its original form in the divine consciousness, to express that plenitude here below. This original, the archetype of each and every individual embodied upon earth is the central being, Jivatman. At the beginning the individual soul in terrestrial evolution is just a tiny particle of consciousness: it evolves, that is to say, grows and increases in stature and potency, through a series of lives upon this earth, each life bringing its quota of experience that serves to tend the flame. When the soul has thus grown and finally reached its optimum, and is in union with its original and archetype in the fullness of self-expression, what next? What is its destiny thereafter, how does it live or move henceforward?
Three courses are open to the perfected and completely developed soul. First, it may remain, contented with its fullness, self-gathered and self-sufficient, dwelling in its own domain the psychic world and enjoying the even, equal, undisturbed felicity and beatitude of union with the Divine. This status may perhaps not be chosen by many or for a long time. The second line that the Psyche can adopt is to come down or remain upon earth and take a share in the fulfilment of the Divine Purpose in the world. That purpose is the transformation of the physical, making the material an embodiment of the divine Light and Power and Bliss and Immortality. A third development also may take place; this is not strictly speaking normal, not the logical and inevitable happening in the course of things, nor does it depend wholly upon any personal choice of the psychic being, so to say. It occurs when the force of a higher destiny operates, for a special work and at a special time. It is when the psychic being is contacted with, made to identify itself with, a godhead under a higher dispensation, when, in a word, a divinity descends into a human soul.
05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A span, an arch of meditating light,
As though some secret nimbus half was seen;
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and p arcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separatesome grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness,of form and function,attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.
There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodiments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and development are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is eachthus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartmentsapart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz.,spiritual.
We say commonly souls are immortal. But in an occult sense souls are or may be mortal too. When the Vedantin speaks of laya or the Buddhist of nya, what else is it? It is nothing but the annihilation of the soul, even if it is in the Brahman or some Absolute. But we are not referring to that here. There is a merger of souls, and a dissolution of souls in a somewhat different manner, not on the highest metaphysical heights, but even here below among the growing developing souls embodied upon earth. That is to say, one soul may unite with another and both form one single entity and embodiment.
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The soul in Nature grows along a definite line and the descent also of higher principles over arching that soul happens also in the same line connecting it with its archetype in the supreme status. This we may call the major line of development through various avataras one after another: but apart from this there may also be subsidiary formations that are its emanations or are added to it from elsewhere either temporarily or even permanently. The soul can put out derivative or ancillary emanations, parts of its being and consciousness, a mental or vital or even a subtle physical movement or formation which can take a body creating a temporary, a transient personality or enter into another's body and another personality in order to go through a necessary experience and gather an element needed for the growth of its being and consciousness. One can recall here the famous story of Shankaracharya Who entered into the body of a king (just dead, made him alive and lead the life of the king) in order to experience love and enjoyment, things of which, being a Sannyasi, he was innocent. Similarly one can take into one-self such parts and elements from others which he wishes to utilise for his growth and evolution. It is said that a man with low carnal instincts and impulses becomes an animal of that type in his next life. But perhaps it is truer to say that a part only the vital part of animal appetiteenters into or takes shape in an animal: the soul itself, the true or the whole being of the person, once become human, does not revert to animalhood. The animal portion in man that refuses to be taken up and integrated, sublimated into the higher human consciousness has to be satisfied and exhausted, as much as possible, in the animal way.
There is also the other question asked very often whether men and women always follow different lines of growth or whether there may be intermixture of the lines. Although the soul is sexless, still it may be said that on the whole there are these two lines, masculine and feminine; and generally a soul follows the same line in its incarnations. The soul difference is not in the sex as we know it; but there is a disposition and character that mark the difference and each type, masculine or feminine, is that because of some special role to fulfil, a particular kind of work to be done in a particular way. The difference is difficult to define exactly; but one may say, in the language of the mystics, that it "is the difference between the left hand and the right hand. The mystics refer to the two sides of consciousness, that of light and that of force (chit-tapas), that is to say, knowledge and power. It is not that the two are quite separate entities, they are together and grow together; but in actuality one aspect is more in front than the other. The masculine aspect is often termed as the right hand and the feminine as the left hand of the conscious being. And in a general way man represents the knowledge aspect the conceptual dynamism and woman represents the executive dynamism. This definition however should not be taken absolutely or rigidly. So it can be said that a woman generally remains a woman in all her births and man like-wise remains a man. Here too, although there may not be a central metamorphosis, there may be a partial change: that is to say a part of a mantoo womanish, so to saymay enter a woman and live and fulfil itself or exhaust there; and the masculine part of a woman also can identify itself with its type and pattern in a man. The difference, however, between Purusha and Prakriti, philosophically, seems to be very definite and clear; but in actuality, when they take form and embodiment, it is not easy to define the principles or qualities that mark out the two. At the source when the difference starts, it is a matter of stress and temper and not any so-called division of labour as human mind ordinarily understands it.
05.03 - Satyavan and Savitri, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Let the dim rustling arches over thee lean;
One with the breath of things eternal live,
05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man too as a species has a generic personality, his prototype. Only, in opposition to the scientific view, that is an earlier phenomenon belonging to the very origin of things. Man in his essential form and reality is found at the source and beginning of creation. When the unmanifest Transcendent steps forward to manifest, when there is the first expression of typal variations in the infinite as the basis of physical creation, then and there appears Man in his essential and eternal divine form. He is there almost as a sentinel, guarding the passage from the formless to form. Indeed, he is the first original form of the formless. A certain poet says that man is the archetype of all living forms. A bird is a flying man, a fish a swimming man, a worm a crawling man, even a plant is but a rooted man. His form belongs to a region beyond even the first principles of creation. The first principles that bring out and shape and uphold the manifested universe are the trinity: Life, Light and Delightin other terms, Sachchidananda. The whole complex of the manifest universe is resolvable into that unity of triple status. But behind even this supernal, further on towards the final disappearance into the absolute Unmanifestsumming up, as it were, in him the whole manifestationstands this original primordial form, this first person, this archetypal Man.
The essential appearance of Man is, as we have said, the prototype of the actual man. That is to say, the actual man is a projection, even though a somewhat disfigured projection, of the original form; yet there is an essential similarity of pattern, a commensurability between the two. The winged angels, the cherubs and seraphs are reputed to be ideal figures of beauty, but they are nothing akin to the Prototype, they belong to a different line of emanation, other than that of the human being. We may have some idea of what it is like by taking recourse to the distinction that Greek philosophers used to make between the formal and the material cause of things. The prototype is the formal reality hidden and imbedded in the material reality of an object. The essential form is made of the original configuration of primary vibrations that later on consolidate and become a compact mass, arriving finally at its end physico-chemical composition. A subtle yet perfect harmony of vibrations forming a living whole is what the prototype essentially is. An artist perhaps is in a better position to understand what we have been labouring to describe. The artist's eye is not confined to the gross physical form of an object, even the most realistic artist does not hold up the mirror to Nature in that sense: he goes behind and sees the inner contour, the subtle figuration that underlies the external volume and mass. It is that that is beautiful and harmonious and significant, and it is that which the artist endeavours to bring out and fix in a system or body of lines and colours. That inner form is not the outer visible form and still it is that form fundamentally, essentially. It is that and it is not that. We may add another analogy to illustrate the point. Pythagoras, for example, spoke of numbers being realities, the real realities of all sensible objects. He was evidently referring to the basic truth in each individual and this truth appeared to him as a number, the substance and relation that remain of an object when everything concrete and superficial is extractedor abstractedout of it. A number to him is a quality, a vibration, a quantum of wave-particles, in the modern scientific terminology, a norm. The human prototype can be conceived as something of the category of the Pythagorean number.
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
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05.14 - The Sanctity of the Individual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The truth of the personality is not to be found in its horizontal, but vertical dimension. The Existentialist speaks of the existence (standing out) of the human person as a transcendence. But real transcendence is not so much in coming out as in going up and beyond. To be outside oneself is not always to transcend oneself: to be above oneself is the real transcendence. Man is a true and free person only when he is lord of Prakriti, dominating and commanding Nature, when he is identified with Ishwara, the supreme Person, the Master, and becomes an incarnate will and consciousness of His. The soul in ignorance and in ignorant relation with others must rise and envisage its archetype in the Supreme Divine, as a free formulation of an Idea-Force of the Infinite.
If we do not keep in view this vertical transcendence and confuse it with immanence, we are likely to arrive at queer conclusions, as for example, one Existentialist says: polarity being an essential truth of the reality, the law of day and night is an eternal and immutable law and therefore, God cannot subsist as pure love; there must be also anger in him. In fact, God too is a becoming God as the human being. The limitation of such a view, characteristically Germanic and intellectual, is evident.
05.26 - The Soul in Anguish, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is very interesting to observe how in the modern epoch depths of consciousness are being dug up and laid bare to the common gaze, even like the archaeological finds of great antiquity and of immense value that are springing surprise after surprise upon our present-day civilisation. In our inner explorations too we have often come to strike psychological veins of unusual importance and significance. It is natural to the Yogin to do so; for it is the business of his life. But even thinkers and philosophers who do not ostensibly lead the mystic life are arriving at judgments and conclusions that are not normally warranted or covered by the unaided activities of the human reason. That proves once more that man is not reason alone, that he has other faculties to go by even in the field of ordinary knowledge.
A range of mystics and philosophers or philosopher-mystics from Kierkegaard to Sartre have made much of the sentiment of "anguish". Naturally, it is not the usual feeling of grief or sorrow due to disappointment or frustration that they refer to, nor is it the "repentance" which is a cardinal virtue in the Christian spiritual discipline. Repentance or grief is for something amiss, for some wrong done, for some good not done. It has a definite cause that gives rise to it and determinate conditions that maintain and foster it: and therefore it has also an end, at least the possibility of an ending. It is not eternal and can be mastered and got over: it is of the category of the Sankhyan or Buddhistic dukhatrayabhighata for that matter even the lacrimae rerum(tears inherent in things) of Virgil1 are not eternal.
06.01 - The End of a Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Therefore misery stalks large upon the earth. Nothing com-parable to it, either in quality or quantity, can history offer as an example. Man finds no remedy for his ills, he does not dare to hope for any. He feels he is being irretrievably drawn into the arms of the arch-enemy.
Perhaps it was necessary that it should be so. A pralaya, a Deluge has to be there to end an epoch and begin a new one. Indeed the civilisation that man has built up over the millenniums, that has reached its culmination in modern scientism, whatever gifts it might have brought to him, however great and powerful and beautiful it might have been at its best in its own sphere, still it had and was a limitation, acted as a deterrent to a further leap and progress of the consciousness. It is the humanistic cycle that has reigned, from ancient Greece down to modern America. Is it not time that another consciousness should intervene, other gods make their appearance?
And yet if the civilisation really goes, it will not be a small thing, even when measured on the cosmic scale. A civilisation is to be judged and valued not at its nadir, but at its zenith, in its total effect and not by a temporary phase in its course. Civilisation really means preparation of the instrument: the human instrument that is to express the Divine. The purpose of creation, we have often said, is the establishment of the highest spiritual consciousness in the embodied life on earth. The embodied life means man's body and life and mind; individually and socially these constitute the instrument through which the higher light is to manifest itself. The instrument has to be prepared, made ready for the purpose; Actually it is obscure, ignorant, narrow, weak; at the outset and for a long time it expresses only or mainly the inferior animal nature. Civilisation is an attempt to raise this inferior nature, to refine, enlarge and heighten it, to cultivate and increase its potentialities and capacities. The present civilisation, we have said, is a growth of thousands of years-at least five thousand years according to the most modest archaeological computation. In this period man has developed his brain, his rational intelligence, has unravelled some of the great mysteries of nature; he has controlled and organised life to an extent that has opened new possibilities of growth and achievement; even with respect to the body he has learnt to treat it with greater skill and endowed it with finer and more potent efficiencies. There have been aberrations and misuses, no doubt; but the essence of things achieved still remains and is always an invaluable asset: that must not be allowed to go.
If the civilisation goes, it means the instrument is gone, the basis on which the edifice for the Divine Consciousness is to be raised is removed, nothing remains to stand firmly on. So the labour has to start again: one must begin from the beginning. The work has to be done and will be done, it cannot be allowed to terminate into a labour of Sisyphus.
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A blind god is not destiny's architect;
A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,
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It is an architecture high and grand
By many named and nameless masons built
06.08 - The Individual and the Collective, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An integral sadhana cannot be confined to the individual alone; an element of collectivity must enter into it. An individual is not an isolated being in any way. There are, of course, schools of Yoga and philosophy that seek to isolate the individual, consider him as an entity hemmed in by his own consciousness; indeed they view the individuals as all distinct and separate, each a closed circle or sphere, they may barely touch each other but never interpenetrate or inter-communicate. Each stands as a solitary island, all together forming the vast archipelago of the universe. This is a position; no doubt, that can be acquired by a kind of discipline of the consciousness, though not to a great perfection; but it is not a natural or necessary poise. Normally, individuals do merge into each other and form one weft of give and take. A desire, an impulse, even a thought that rises in you, goes out of you, overflows you and spreads around even to the extreme limit of the earth, like a Hertzian wave. Again, any movement in any person anywhere in the world would come to you, penetrate you, raise a similar vibration in you, even though you may not so recognise it but consider it as something exclusively personal to you. You send out vibrations into the world and the world sends out vibrations into you. Individual life is the meeting-ground of these outgoing and incoming forces. It is precisely to avoid this circle or cycle of world-vibrations that the older Yogis used to leave the world, away from society, retire to mountain-tops, into the virgin forest where they hoped to find themselves alone and aloof, to be single with the Single Self. This is a way out, but it is not the only or the best solution. It is not the best solution, for although apparent-ly one is alone on the hill-top, in the desert crypt, or the forest womb, one always carries with oneself a whole world within, the normal nature with all its instincts and impulses, reactions, memories and hopes: you cut away the outside, run away from it, but what about the outside that is within you? The taste for a tasty thing does not drop with the removal of the object. Secondly, such an individual solution, even if it were possible, would still be a purely personal matter and, in the ultimate analysis, egoistic. It is why the Buddha refused to enter definitely into Nirvana and withdrew from the brink to work among men. Indeed, the real solution is else-where. It is not to withdraw or go away but to find within the orbit here a centre, a focus of consciousness which is not controlled by the outside forces but can control them, which is not coloured by them but can lend them its own luminosity. That is the soul or the psychic centre.
And this centre is not an isolated entity in its nature: it is, as it were, a universal centre, that is to say, it links itself indissolubly in a secret sense of identity with all other centres. For this self is only one of the selves through which the One Self has multiplied itself for a varied self-objectification. The light that shines here, the fire that burns here and the delight that flows here illumine, purify and revitalise not only the individual in which it dwells, but move abroad and extend into the other individuals with which it lives in spiritual identity.
07.01 - The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And under arches misers of sunshine,
They saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage
07.42 - The Nature and Destiny of Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In ancient times, in the great ages, in Greece, for example or even during the Italian Renaissance, particularly, however, in Greece and in Egypt, they erected buildings, constructed monuments for the sake of public utility. Their buildings were meant for the most part to be temples, sanctuaries to lodge their gods and deities. What they had in view was something total, whole and entire, beautiful and complete in itself. That was the purpose of architecture embodying the harmony of sweeping and majestic lines: sculpture was a part of architecture supplying details of expression and even painting came up to complete the expression: but the whole held together in a coordinated unity which was the monument itself. The sculpture was for the monument, the painting was for the monument; it was not that each was separate from the other and existed for itself and one did not know why it was there. In India, when a temple was being built, for example, what was aimed at was a total creation, all the parts combined to give effect to one end, to make a beautiful vesture for God, the one object of their adoration. All the great epochs of art were of this kind. But in modern times, in the latter part of the last century, Art' became a matter of business. A painting was done in order to be sold. You do your paintings, put each one in a frame and place them side by side or group them, that is, lump them together without much reason. The same with regard to sculpture. You make a statue and set it up anywhere without any connection whatsoever with the surroundings. It is always something foreign, extraneous in its setting, like a mushroom or a parasite. The thing in itself may not be quite ugly, but it is out of place, it is not part of an organic whole. We exhibit art today. Indeed, it is exhibitionism, it is the showing off of cleverness, talent, skill, virtuosity. A piece of architecture does not incarnate a living force as it used to do once upon a time. It is no longer the expression of an aspiration, of something that uplifts the spirit nor the expression of the magnificence of the Divine whose dwelling it is meant to be. You build houses here and there pell-mell or somehow juxtaposed without any coordinating idea governing them, without any relation to the environment where they are situated. When you enter a house, it is the same thing. A bit of painting here, a bit of sculpture there, some objects of art in one corner, a few others in another. Yes, it is an exhibition, a museum, a kaleidoscopic collection. It gives a shock to the truly sensitive artistic taste.
I do not say that a museum is not necessary or useful. It is a good means of education, that is to say, getting information about what other people or other epochs did. It is an aid to the historic knowledge of things. But it is far from being artistic. A museum is not the place where art can find its highest or its true expression. There is an art which seeks to coordinate, integrate distinct, discrete, contrary objects. It is called decorative art. And in so far as this art is successful, we are a step forward even in these days towards true art.
10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thy vision's error drew the rainbow's arch;
Thy mortal longing made for thee a soul.
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These polities, architectures of man's brain,
That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man's spirit
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
But is it plain obstinacy? you do not exercise the sublime Art of Guru-bullying. You should have made one frenzied leap to my dying bed, thrust aside the cohorts of Mourning archimandrites, and wrung my nose until I made you do it.
And you repeatedly insist that it is difficult. It isn't. Is there, however, some deep-seated inhibition a (Freudian) fear of success? Is there some connection with that sense of guilt which is born in all but the very few?
1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Many of the readers will know, of course, that the word tarot does not mean a game of cards, serving mantical purposes, but a symbolic book of initiation which contains the greatest secrets in a symbolic form. The first tablet of this book introduces the magician representing him as the master of the elements and offering the key to the first arcanum, the secret of the ineffable name of Tetragrammaton*, the quabbalistic
Yod-He-Vau-He. Here we will, therefore, find the gate to the magicians initiation.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
Finally, in the study of the etheric body and prana comes comprehension of the method of logoic manifestation, and therefore much of interest to the metaphysician, and all abstract thinkers. The etheric body of man holds hid the secret of his objectivity. It has its correspondence on the archetypal plane,the plane we call that of the divine manifestation, the first plane of our solar system, the plane Adi. The matter of that highest plane is called often the "sea of fire" and it is the root of the akasha, the term applied to the substance of the second plane of manifestation. Let us trace the analogy a little more in detail, for in its just apprehension will be found much of illumination and much that will serve to elucidate problems both macrocosmic and microcosmic. We will begin with man and his etheric body.
The etheric body has been described as a network, permeated with fire, or as a web, animated with golden light. It is spoken of in the Bible as the "golden bowl." [80] It is a composition of that matter of the physical plane which we call etheric, and its shape is brought about by the fine interlacing strands of this matter being built by the action of the lesser Builders into the form or mould upon which later the dense physical body can be moulded. Under the Law of Attraction, the denser matter of the physical plane is made to cohere to this vitalised form, and is gradually built up around it, and within it, until the interpenetration is so complete that the two forms make but one unit; the pranic emanations of the etheric body itself play upon the dense physical body in the same manner as the pranic emanations of the sun play upon the etheric body. It is all one vast system of transmission and of interdependence within the system. All receive in order to give, and to pass on to that which is lesser or not so evolved. Upon every plane this process can be seen.
Thus the etheric body forms the archetypal plane in relation to the dense physical body. The thinker on his own plane stands, in relation to the physical, as the Logos to His system. In the synthesis of thought it might be expressed thus: The thinker on the astral plane, the plane of desire and of necessity, stands to the physical body as the Logos on the cosmic astral plane stands to His system.
As we continue the study we will work out the correspondence in the cosmos, the system, and in the three worlds, for we need to remember that the analogy must be perfect.
--
Second. The etheric body is the archetype upon which [82] the dense physical form is built, whether it is the form of a solar system, or of a human body in any one incarnation.
Third. The etheric body is a web or network of fine interlacing channels, formed of matter of the four ethers, and built into a specific form. It forms a focal point for certain radiatory emanations, which vivify, stimulate and produce the rotary action of matter.
--
In dealing with the first group of forms, it must be noted that the pranic emanations given off by units of the animal and vegetable kingdom (after they have absorbed both solar and planetary prana) are naturally a combination of the two, and are transmitted by means of surface radiation, as in solar and planetary prana, to certain lesser groups of devas of a not very high order, who have a curious and intricate relationship to the group soul of the radiating animal or vegetable. This matter cannot be dealt with here. These devas are also of a violet hue, but of such a pale color as to be almost grey; they are in a transitional state, and merge with a puzzling confusion with groups of entities that are almost on the involutionary arc. [xlii]42, [xliii]43, [xliv]43a
[96]
--
Viewed from the planetary standpoint the same conditions will be perceived, and the etheric planetary body [105] (which is fundamentally the body in the case of the sacred planets, of which the Earth is not one) will have its functional disorders, which will affect its reception of prana, will suffer its organic troubles which may affect its distribution, and those disorders which permit of trouble in the etheric web, which forms the ring-pass-not for the involved planetary Spirit. Here I would point out that in the case of the planetary Spirits Who are on the divine evolutionary arc, the Heavenly Men Whose bodies are planets, the etheric web does not form a barrier, but (like the Karmic Lords on a higher plane) They have freedom of movement outside the bounds of the planetary web within the circumference of the solar ring-pass-not. [xlvii]46
Again from the systemic standpoint, these same effects may be observed, functionally, this time in connection with the cosmic centre; organically, in connection with the sum total of the planetary systems; and statically, in connection with the solar or logoic ring-pass-not.
1.00d - Introduction, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
And we assert that there exists a future far more marvelous than all the electronic paradises of the mind: man is not the end, any more than the archaeopteryx was, at the height of the reptiles how could anything possibly be the culmination of the great evolutionary wave? We see it clearly in ourselves: We seem to invent ever more marvelous machines, ceaselessly expand the limits of the human, even progress towards Jupiter and Venus. But that is only a seeming, increasingly deceptive and oppressive, and we do not expand anything: we merely send to the other end of the cosmos a pitiful little being who does not even know how to take care of his own kind, or whether his caves harbor a dragon or a mewling baby. We do not progress; we inordinately inflate an enormous mental balloon, which may well explode in our face. We have not improved man; we have merely colosalized him. And it could not have been otherwise. The fault does not lie in some deficiency of our virtues or intellectual capacities, for pushed to their extreme these could only generate supersaints or supermachines monsters. A saintly reptile in its hole would no more make an evolutionary summit than a saintly monk would. Or else, let us forget everything. The truth is, the summit of man or the summit of anything at all does not lie in perfecting to a higher degree the type under consideration; it lies in a something else that is not of the same type and that he aspires to become. Such is the evolutionary law. Man is not the end; man is a transitional being, said Sri Aurobindo long ago. He is heading toward supermanhood as inevitably as the minutest twig of the highest branch of the mango tree is contained in its seed. Hence, our sole true occupation, our sole problem, the sole question ever to be solved from age to age, the one that is now tearing our great earthly ship apart limb from painful limb is how to make this transition.
Nietzsche said it also. But his superman was only a colossalization of man; we saw what he did as he tramped over Europe. That was not an evolutionary progress, only a return to the old barbarism of the blond or brunet brute of human egoism. We do not need a super-man, but something else, which is already murmuring in the heart of man and is as different from man as Bach's cantatas are from the first grunts of the hominid. And, truly, Bach's cantatas sound poor when our inner ear begins to open up to the harmonies of the future.
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
All lesser spheres ranging downward from these major spheres, include all grades of manifestation down to the elemental essence on the arc of involution. [lxvi]64 We need to remember that on the Path of Involution, the action of Brahma is primarily felt, seeking the line of least resistance. On the Path of Evolution the work of the second Logos is felt, beginning at a point in time and space which hides the mystery of the second chain, but finding its point of accelerated vibration or the unification of the two modes of manifestationrotary-spiral-cyclicin the middle part of what we call the third chain. This is after all the blending of the activity of Brahma with the onward progress of Vishnu. We have the correspondence to this in the sumtotal of the effects brought about in the second and third root races.
The activity of the second Logos is carried on under the cosmic Law of Attraction. The Law of Economy has for one of its branches a subsidiary Law of marked development called the Law of Repulsion. The cosmic Laws of Attraction and Economy are therefore the raison d'tre (viewed from one angle) of the eternal repulsion that goes on as Spirit seeks ever to liberate itself from form. The matter aspect always follows the line of least resistance, and repulses all tendency to group formation, while Spirit, governed by the Law of Attraction, seeks ever to separate itself from matter by the method of attracting an ever more adequate type of matter in the process of distinguishing the real from the unreal, and passing from one illusion to another until the resources of matter are fully utilised.
--
e. Smelling is the faculty of keen perception that eventually brings a man back to the source from whence he came, the archetypal plane, the plane where his true home is to be found. A perception of difference has been cultivated that has caused a divine discontent within the [202] heart of the Pilgrim in the far country; the prodigal son draws comparisons; he has developed the other four senses, and he utilises them. Now comes in the faculty of vibratory recognition of the home vibration, if it might be so expressed. It is the spiritual counterpart of that sense which in the animal, the pigeon and other birds, leads them back unerringly to the familiar spot from whence they originally came. It is the apprehension of the vibration of the Self, and a swift return by means of that instinct to the originating source.
The consideration of this subject awakens the realisation of the vastness of the region of thought concerned the region of the whole evolutionary development of the human being. Yet all that is possible here, as elsewhere, is to indicate lines of thought for careful pondering, and to emphasise certain ideas which may serve as the foundation thoughts for the future mental activity of the immediate generation. The following facts must also be borne in mind when considering the matter:
1.00 - Introduction to Alchemy of Happiness, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
While perusing these pages, and noticing how much of the language of Ghazzali corresponds in its representations of God, of a holy life and of eternity, with the solemn instructions to which we have listened from our infancy, we may think of the magicians who imitated the miracles of Moses with their enchantments. Yet assuredly a vivid and respectful interest must be awakened in our minds for the races and nations, whose ideas of their relations as immortal beings arc so serious and earnest.
[11]
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume
grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not
--
The second part of that statement certainly seemed applicable to me, although the first (the archetypal
contents of the collective unconscious) remained mysterious and obscure. Still, this was promising. Jung
--
of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for
the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea. It is absolutely necessary to
--
Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero the savior who
upholds his association with the creative Word in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to
1.00 - Preliminary Remarks, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Similarly the visions of Joan of arc were entirely Christian; but she, like all the others we have mentioned, found somewhere the force to do great things. Of course, it may be said that there is a fallacy in the argument; it may be true that all these great people saw God, but it does not follow that every one who sees God will do great things.
This is true enough. In fact, the majority of people who claim to have seen God, and who no doubt did see God just as must as those whom we have quoted, did nothing else.
1.00 - PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
(The THREE arcHANGELS come forward.)
RAPHAEL
--
(Heaven closes: the arcHANGELS separate.)
MEPHISTOPHELES (solus)
1.01 - About the Elements, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
I am penetrating far deeper into the secret of the elements and therefore I have chosen a different key, which, although being analogous to the astrological key, has, as a matter of fact, nothing to do with it. The reader, to whom this key is completely unknown, shall be taught to use it in various ways. As for the single tasks, analogies and effects of the elements, I shall deal with tem by turns and in detail in the following chapters, which will not only unveil the theoretical part of it, but point directly to the practical use, because it is here that the greatest arcanum is to be found.
In the oldest book of wisdom, the Tarot, something has already been written about this great mystery of the elements. The first card of this work represents the magicia n pointing to the knowledge and mastery of the elements. On this first card the symbols are: the sword as the fiery element, the rod as the element of the air, the goblet as that of the water and the coins as the element of the earth. This proves without any doubt that already in the mysteries of yore, the magician was destined for the first Tarot card, mastery of the elements having been chosen as the first act of initiation. In honour of this tradition I shall give my principal attention to the elements for, as you will see, the key to the elements is the panacea, with the help of which all the occurring problems may be solved.
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
the Formless like a kind of norm, model or archetype. At
that time nobody had ever spoken to me about it, for no
--
as at its end, there is a divine archetype determining the
development of Life on Earth. 1
Sri Aurobindo too has written about such archetype,
which he called the body of the creative Deity. When con-
--
cosmic Purusha or the divine archetype mirrored.
As the idea of a universal archetype is common to the
fundamental wisdom traditions everywhere, so is the idea
--
presence of a divine archetype resembling the human form
above or behind the evolution. The knowledge of this form
--
man was none other than the archetypal man perceived
by the Mother, or the cosmic Purusha mentioned by Sri
--
or archetypal Superman.
Kabbalah
--
designed the Tarot). In the Kabbalah the divine archetype
is called Adam Kadmon, meaning Primal or Primordial
--
tive approach to architecture, sculpture, and literature. The
purpose of all human creation was not only to preserve the
1.01 - An Accomplished Westerner, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
to relieve him from cold and hunger since his older brothers also partook heartily of the windfall. He was just eighteen. What was he going to that nursery-of-gentlemen for? For one reason, he was fulfilling his father's wishes though not for long. In his first year at King's College, he won all the prizes in Greek and Latin verse, but his heart was no longer in it. It was Joan of arc, Mazzini, the American Revolution that haunted him in other words, the liberation of his country. India's independence, of which he would become one of the pioneers. This unforeseen political calling was to hold him for almost twenty years, even though at the time he did not exactly know what an Indian was, let alone a Hindu! But he learned fast. As with Western 9
On Yoga II, Tome 2, 871
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
object:1.01 - archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
author class:Carl Jung
--
I - arcHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
THE CONCEPT OF THE
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES,
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE
--
although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought-
forms.
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that
--
caelesti hier archia, II, 4: "immaterial archetypes," 6 and in
De divinis nominibus, I, 6: " archetypal stone." 7 The term
--
alienis archetypis transtulit." (Cf. Roberts /Rambaut trans., I, p. 139.)
5 Scott, Hermetica, I, p. 140. 6 In Migne, P.G., vol. 3, col. 144.
--
in himself as in an archetype [in se tanquam archetypo absconditum] ... in
like manner Saturn carries the similitudes of metallic bodies hiddenly in him-
--
p. 3), the world is "ad archetypi sui similitudinem factus" (made after the like-
ness of its archetype) and is therefore called the "magnus homo" (the "homo
maximus" of Swedenborg).
--
Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth
and fairytale. But here too we are dealing with forms that have
--
ference between the archetype and the historical formula that
has evolved. Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching
the archetypes appear in a form that reveals quite unmistakably
the critical and evaluating influence of conscious elaboration.
--
more naive than in myths, for example. The archetype is essen-
tially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming con-
--
ing, and fairytale. But if we try to establish what an archetype
is psychologically, the matter becomes more complicated. So far
--
" archetypal ideas." The archetype as such is a hypothetical and irrepresen table
model, something like the "pattern of behaviour" in biology. Cf. "On the Nature
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
lunar, meteorological, vegetal, and other ideas of the kind. The
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
mysterious, richly intuitive. Naturally, the more familiar we are
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
I wish to tell you of a vision which appeared to him in the sky, on a
--
helped him to assimilate the fatal incursion of an archetypal
image and so escape being torn asunder. Angelus Silesius was
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
not so fortunate; the inner conflict tore him to pieces, because in
--
channelled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along
like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and rit-
--
mean. The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with
meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
tribes, they could easily have rejected it when the prestige of
--
to stay, because it fits in with the existing archetypal pattern. In
the course of the centuries, however, it turned into something
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
but this did not alter the fact that from then on all talk of re-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
psyche. Yes, that erstwhile fiery spirit has made a descent to the
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
excitation, not only gives us knowledge of the innermost
--
conscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The
meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I
--
psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious. No
doubt this discovery is hardly credible at present. To be con-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
content. Occasionally she causes states of fascination that rival
--
natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements
of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of lan-
--
life could be ascribed to the anima, she is yet only one archetype
among many. Therefore, she is not characteristic of the uncon-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
favour of masculinity. The smaller number of feminine genes
--
59 With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of the
gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself.
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
logical effects of a maladaptation of consciousness, as when con-
--
learn a list of archetypes by heart. archetypes are complexes of
experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
66
--
to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden
behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This
is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype
of life itself.
--
founded on primordial archetypal forms whose concreteness
dates from a time when consciousness did not think, but only
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
7 1 He was standing in the presence of a handsome old man
--
wise old man, the superior master and teacher, the archetype of
the spirit, who symbolizes the pre-existent meaning hidden in
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
affected the student in the long run, and I must emphasize that
--
style of this archetype.
79 Modern man, in experiencing this archetype, comes to know
that most ancient form of thinking as an autonomous activity
--
prejudicial, it would be a very suitable one for this archetype.
But I have been content to call it the archetype of the wise old
man, or of meaning. Like all archetypes it has a positive and a
negative aspect, though I don't want to enter into this here. The
--
80 The three archetypes so far discussed the shadow, the ani-
ma, and the wise old man are of a kind that can be directly
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
generalizations. One could, or rather should, really give a de-
--
the course of this process the archetypes appear as active per-
sonalities in dreams and fantasies. But the process itself involves
another class of archetypes which one could call the archetypes
of transformation. They are not personalities, but are typical
--
transformation in question. Like the personalities, these arche-
types are true and genuine symbols that cannot be exhaustively
--
succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and
this is most likely to happen when the archetypal images are
not made conscious. If there is already a predisposition to
psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which
are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of
--
covers the same archetypal figures that activate the deliriums
of psychotics. Finally, there is any amount of literary and histori-
cal evidence to prove that in the case of these archetypes we are
dealing with normal types of fantasy that occur practically
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
everywhere and not with the monstrous products of insanity.
--
consciousness deviates again and again from its archetypal, in-
stinctual foundation and finds itself in opposition to it. There
--
8 5 As the archetypes, like all numinous contents, are relatively
autonomous, they cannot be integrated simply by rational
--
giving only a few examples of archetypes. I have chosen the ones
that play the chief part in an analysis of the masculine psyche,
1.01 - BOOK THE FIRST, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Survey'd the fruitful fields of arcady;
And wonder'd that the mist shou'd over-run
--
The pride and joy of fair arcadia's plains,
Belov'd by deities, ador'd by swains:
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to _human_ culture, and we are still forced to cut our _spiritual_ bread far thinner than our forefa thers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.
Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
--
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a mans building his own house that there is in a birds building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.
Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another _may_ also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it,though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely,that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder,out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them _picturesque;_ and equally interesting will be the citizens suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without _ architecture_ who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the _belles-lettres_ and the _beaux-arts_ and their professors.
Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, _he_ slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin,the architecture of the grave, and
carpenter is but another name for coffin-maker. One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them.
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane.
--
I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one mans gain is not anothers loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindh and in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In
arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest mans field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric and hea thenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
--
Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his
Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
principles of the Qabalah, devoid of the theological accre- tions and hysterical superstitions which were deposited on this venerable arcane philosophy during the Middle Ages.
W. Wynn Westcott, who translated the Sepher Yetsirah into English and wrote An Introduction to the Study of the
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
paradoxical union. One is up-to-date the other, archaic. One is scientific the other, traditional, even
superstitious. We have become atheistic in our description, but remain evidently religious that is, moral
--
know, either (and it didnt really matter that they did not know). Consider this archaic creation myth
from Sumer the birthplace of history:
--
of the primordial waters, imagined as a totality at once cosmic and divine, is quite frequent in archaic
cosmogonies. In this case too, the watery mass is identified with the original Mother, who, by
--
This myth is typical of archaic descriptions of reality. What does it mean to say that the Sumerians
believed that the world emerged from a primordial sea, which was the mother of all, and that the sky and
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
underlying all the motifs are visual representations of an archetypal
character, symbolic primordial images which have served to build up and
--
produces something that looks very like the archaic world of fable, and that
the individual path looks like a regression to mans prehistory, and that
--
reached, or when mythological or archetypal contents appear, then is the
time to give up the analytical-reductive method and to treat the symbols
1.01 - Soul and God, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
In 1940, Jung presented a study of the motif of the divine child, in a collaborative volume with the Hungarian classicist Karl Kerenyi (see On the psychology of the child archetype, cw 9, I).
Jung wrote that the child motif occurs frequently in the individuation process. It does not represent one's literal childhood, as is emphasized by its mythological nature. It compensates the onesidedness of consciousness and paves the way for the future development of the personality In certain conditions of conflict, the unconscious psyche produces a symbol that unites the opposites.
--
In 1940, Jung wrote: an essential aspect of the child motif is its futural character. The child is potential future (On the psychology of the child archetype, cw 9, I, 278).
The Draft continues: My friends, as you can see, mercy is granted to the developed, not the childish. I thank my God for this message. Do not let the teachings of Christianity deceive you!
1.01 - the Call to Adventure, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
last horizons of the created world, the same archetypal images
are activated, symbolizing danger, reassurance, trial, passage,
1.01 - The Castle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
When our supper ended in a muteness which the sounds of chewing and the smacking of lips gulping wine did not make more pleasant, we remained seated, looking one another in the face, with the torment of not being able to exchange the many experiences each of us had to communicate. At that point, on the table which had just been cleared, the man who seemed the lord of the castle set a pack of playing cards. They were tarot cards, larger than the kind we use for ordinary games or that gypsies employ for predicting the future, but it was possible to discern more or less the same figures that are painted in the enamels of the most precious miniatures. Kings, Queens, Knights, and Pages were all young people magnificently dressed, as if for a princely feast; the twenty-two Major arcana seemed the tapestries of a court theater; and cups, coins, swords, clubs shone like heraldic devices adorned with scrolls and arabesques.
We began to spread out the cards on the table, face up, and to give them their proper value in games, or their true meaning in the reading of fortunes. And yet none of us seemed to wish to begin playing, and still less to question the future, since we were as if drained of all future, suspended in a journey that had not ended nor was to end. There was something else we saw in those tarots, something that no longer allowed us to take our eyes from the gilded pieces of that mosaic.
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and hier archies, to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and unchangeable form, to subject thought to infallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society has its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its forms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled in, not yet stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often very beautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture, the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back often with admiration and with something like longing to the mediaeval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of poetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and revolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid faade. So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,a nobler one than the European in which the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga. In these conventional periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not realised, not accomplished,4 but the exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form, and what we have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost in a hard mass of rule and order and convention.
For always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We see this recession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has always fallen on the new movement and annexed the names of its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy of ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great swallowers of formulas, who, rejecting robustly or fiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres. It is then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.
1.01 - The Ideal of the Karmayogin, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
NATION is building in India today before the eyes of the world so swiftly, so palpably that all can watch the process and those who have sympathy and intuition distinguish the forces at work, the materials in use, the lines of the divine architecture. This nation is not a new race raw from the workshop of Nature or created by modern circumstances.
One of the oldest races and greatest civilisations on this earth, the most indomitable in vitality, the most fecund in greatness, the deepest in life, the most wonderful in potentiality, after taking into itself numerous sources of strength from foreign strains of blood and other types of human civilisation, is now seeking to lift itself for good into an organised national unity.
1.01 - The King of the Wood, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana
under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
which we arc familiar in ourselves, physics has introduced die
precise formulation of a capacity for action or, more exactly, for
--
understanding the following pages, the two hypotheses arc equivalent, in the
sense that they put us, the one just as much as the other, in the midst of a
1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
Sharing these premises, Hakuin launched vehement attacks on what he considered the mistaken understanding purveyed by such architects of Confucian orthodoxy as Hayashi Razan (see chapter
12). Hakuin's ideas on the subject may be summed up fairly well in the calligraphic works he prepared and distributed in large numbers to people. These works consisted of one large character, filiality or parent, followed by the inscription, "There is no more valuable act of filiality than to save one's father and mother from the sad fate of an unfortunate rebirth in the next life"-exactly the sentiments Hakuin had expressed to Sukefusa as a young monk. a It was considered extremely unfilial to injure or disfigure the body of one's (male) children. This was especially heinous in the case of an eldest son, who, according to the canons of filial piety, is venerated because of his superior birth, age, and gender. b Although not all of these references can be traced, most of them are found in Tales of the TwentyFour Paragons of Filial Virtue (Ehr-shih-ssu hsiao), a popular Confucian text of the Yuan dynasty that was reprinted and widely read in Edo Japan. c A legendary sage ruler of ancient China. According to Mencius, when ministers came to him with good advice, Yu always received it with deep gratitude.
1.02 - BOOK THE SECOND, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And ev'ry land; but on arcadia most.
Her fields he cloath'd, and chear'd her blasted face
--
By chance a fair arcadian nymph he view'd,
And felt the lovely charmer in his blood.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
reflex arc as a phenomenon of central importance, and from the Marxist intellectual legacy, which regarded
work creative action as the defining feature of man. Whatever the specific historical precedents, it is
--
time he spent in the Soviet Gulag archipelago (the Soviet prison camp system):
At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectuals had reached the very brink of death: They were
--
perspective of archaic affect and subjective experience. It is of course also the case that the orienting reflex,
and the exploratory behavior that follows its manifestation, allows for the differentiation of the unknown
--
structure necessarily reflects embodiment despite the archaic presumption of the independence of spirit
and matter (or soul and body, or mind and body) because the body is, in a primary sense, the environment
--
initiating exploratory behavior. This archaic control mechanism would then drive the processes of
imagistic hypothesis generation that constitute the processes of abstract exploration fantasy we use to
--
generations to come. Narrative description of archetypal behavioral patterns and representational schemas
myth appears as an essential precondition for social construction and subsequent regulation of complexly
--
How can the fact of patterned stories archetypal stories, if you will be reconciled with the apparent
impossibility of inherited memory content? We might turn our attention to the phenomenon of language,
--
The archetypal hero makes order out of chaos, brings peace to the world, and restructures society, when it
has become rigid and anachronistic.) The collective unconscious that constitutes the basis for shared
--
Jung believed that many complexes had an archetypal (or universal) basis, rooted in biology, and that this
rooting had something specifically to do with memory. It appears that the truth is somewhat more
--
Consider once again this archaic creation myth from Sumer:
So far, no cosmogonic text properly speaking has been discovered, but some allusions permit us to
--
of the primordial waters, imagined as a totality at once cosmic and divine, is quite frequent in archaic
cosmogonies. In this case too, the watery mass is identified with the original Mother, who, by
--
imaginative hypotheses about the nature of the ideal human behavior, in the archetypal environment.
This archetypal environment was (is) composed of three domains, which easily become three characters:
The unknown is unexplored territory, nature, the unconscious, dionysian force, the id, the Great Mother
--
tyrant who forbids the emergence (or even the hypothetical existence) of anything new. The archetypal
Son is the child of order and chaos of culture and nature and is therefore clearly their product.
--
of consciousness, which is the faculty that knows (and does not know). The archetypal Son, like his
parents, has a positive aspect, and a negative aspect. The positive aspect continually reconstructs defined
--
The archetypal Son
+ +
--
juxtaposition with the unknown unexplored territory. archaic notions of reality presuppose that the
familiar world is a sacred space, surrounded by chaos (populated, variously, by demons, reptiles, spirits and
--
cosmos were not merely primitive science. archaic theories of creation attempted to account for the
existence of the world, as experienced in totality (which means, including meaning), and not for the
--
fact of the subject, who does the experiencing. The world brought into being in archaic myths of creation is
phenomenological, rather than material includes all aspects of experience, including those things we now
regard as purely subjective. The archaic mind had not yet learned how to forget what was important.
Ancient stories of the generation of the world therefore focus on all of reality, rather than on those distant
--
fundamental building blocks of the archaic world of myth. We briefly discussed an archaic Sumerian
creation myth, previously, describing the world as the consequence of the separation of the cosmic
--
embodiments of the archaic transpersonal intrapsychic phenomena that give rise to human motivation, as
well as those aspects of the objective world that activate those intrapsychic systems. The Sumerians
--
represented the god, and this, on the archaic levels of culture, also implied that he was in a way he
whom he personified. In any case, as mediator between the world of men and the world of the gods, the
--
equivalent to the spirit that founded the state the archetypal creator-god or legendary ancestor whose
courageous actions had cosmogonic significance. The current ruler (who depended for much of his power
--
The archetypal Son
Explored Territory
--
is the archetype of the [greek phrase], the All One, appearing as Leviathan and as Aion, as Oceanus, and
also as the Primal Being that says I am Alpha and Omega. As the Kneph of antiquity it is the Primal
--
devours the sun;283 and the archaic Iranians (Zoroastrians) equated the mythic struggle of King Faridun
against a foreign usurper the dragon Azdahak with the cosmogonic fight of the hero Thraetona against
--
For in the view of archaic societies everything that is not our world is not yet a world. A territory can
be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it. This religious behavior in respect to
--
development of habituation in course of exploratory behavior.297 The archaic limbic system has its own
method of classification, so to speak, experienced privately as emotion or as behavior spontaneously
--
What can now be calmly described as an archaic symbol or god from the past may also reasonably be
considered as the manifestation of a primeval independent personality the unified embodiment in
--
In the early phases of consciousness, the numinosity [that is, the emotional valence] of the archetype
exceeds mans power of representation, so much so that at first no form can be given to it. And when
later the primordial archetype takes form in the imagination of man, its representations are often
monstrous and inhuman. This is the phase of the chimerical creatures composed of different animals or
--
related abstract processes], that the mixture of symbols prevailing in the primordial archetype separates
into the groups of symbols characteristic of a single archetype or of a group of related archetypes; in
short, that they became recognizable.306
--
knowledge might be considered the archetypal representative of the adaptive process as such. The preexperimental mind considered traumatic union of this masculine representative with the destructive and
procreative feminine unknown necessary precedent to continual renewal and rebirth of the individual and
--
successful mediation of archaic or habitual strategies competing, in the new situation, for dominance over
146
--
The ultimate or archetypal representation of the original threatened state is the unselfconscious (but
incomplete) paradise that existed prior to the fall of man. More prosaically, that state is the innocence
--
represented by the hero. In the City of God that is, the archetypal human kingdom the Messiah
eternally rules.
--
Eliade continues, drawing upon Philo of Byblos archaic Phoenician History:
the first sovereign [Phoenician] god was Elioun (in Greek, Hypistos, The Most High),
--
In one sense it could almost be said that for the man of archaic societies history is closed; that it
exhausted itself in the few stupendous events of the beginning. By revealing the different modes of
--
tyranny. Culture binds nature. The archetypal Great Father protects his children from chaos; holds back
the precosmogonic water from which everything was derived, to which everything will return, and serves
1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
scious is made up essentially of archetypes.
8 9 The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable
correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the
--
my idea of the archetype literally a pre-existent form does not
stand alone but is something that is recognized and named in
--
It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only
become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to
--
quently they form very close analogies to the archetypes, so
43
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the
--
the often obviously archetypal nature of unconscious products,
for these can just as well be derived from acquisitions through
--
dual mother, an archetype to be found in many variants in
the field of mythology and comparative religion and forming
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
two mothers, or conversely that those few who shared Leo-
--
would lie in the reactivation of the dual-mother archetype,
3 [Cf. the trans, by George Boas, pp. 6%ft., and Freud, Leonardo, sec. II. Editors.]
--
because, as we have seen, this archetype functions individually
and historically without any reference to the relatively rare
--
significance of the archetype appears less fantastic. In numerous
cases of neurosis the cause of the disturbance lies in the very
--
level best to deny the existence of archetypal motifs and even
seeks to destroy them by personal analysis. I consider this a
--
a whole nation is reviving an archaic symbol, yes, even archaic
religious forms, and how this mass emotion is influencing and
--
roots exclusively in personal causes, archetypes play no role at
all. But if it is a question of a general incompatibility or an
--
presence of constellated archetypes. Since neuroses are in most
cases not just private concerns, but social phenomena, we must
assume that archetypes are constellated in these cases too. The
archetype corresponding to the situation is activated, and as a
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination
of an archetype will not fall a prey to. If thirty years ago anyone
had dared to predict that our psychological development was
--
instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure
onward millions of warriors ready for death why, that man
--
past who lived in a world of archaic "representations collec-
tives" has risen again into very visible and painfully real life,
--
99 There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations
in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into
--
archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsive-
ness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way
--
archetypes can be proved. Since archetypes are supposed to
produce certain psychic forms, we must discuss how and where
--
the humanities. Therefore, although the bird motif is an arche-
type par excellence, its existence in Leonardo's fantasy would
--
cide with the functioning of the archetype known from histori-
cal sources.
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
10 3 Finally, very interesting sources of archetypal material are
to be found in the delusions of paranoiacs, the fantasies ob-
--
nothing of mythology or archaeology in those days, so the situa-
tion was not in any way suspect. One day I found the patient
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
religious context of a distinctly ecstatic nature and describes a
--
an archetype but only to show you my method of procedure in
the simplest possible form. If we had only such cases, the task of
--
gives the impression of being an archetype by its behaviour in
the series of dreams or visions. If the material at one's disposal
1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
as if Indians were a mixture of arcane philosophers and unrepentant idolaters. But if we look at India simply, from within, without trying to divide her into paragraphs of Hinduism (which are necessarily 11
New Lamps for Old, 1:44
1.02 - The Great Process, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The secret of a circle is in the very next circle, as the secret of the arrow is in the goal it pursues, and if we could retrace our steps to the Master archer, we would have the secret of secrets, the central point that determines this circle and all circles, the goal of all goals. But the pursuit is said to be a long one, and we must go back one step at a time, from the tool to the Hand that guides the tool, since we ourselves started out by being that tool: a little vital antenna groping around a self of life before discovering itself as a moth or a millipede, a little mental antenna quivering inexplicably around a nimble self before discovering itself as a man among men, and that other, still undefined antenna which seems to dispense with senses and thought to take us toward another, still greater self. Until the day we arrive at the great Self and shall be fulfilled. We will have found the Master of all tools and the full meaning of the journey.
But how could we possibly know the secret of that which now seems an undefined and disturbing nonself, possibly even destructive of what we so concretely know as self, we who are at the end of this mental circle, in this age of the servants of the ego and ambiguous enjoyments of a little thinking self?... Actually, the path is made by walking it, as in a forest. There is no path, it does not exist: it has to be made. And once we have walked a few feet, apparently in the dark, we will realize that our groping steps led to a first clearing, and that we were all the while guided, even in our darkest stumblings, by an infallible Hand that has already directed our millipede meanderings. For, in fact, the goal we pursue is already within; it is an eternal Goal. It is a Future that is millions of years old and as young as a newborn child. It is opening its eyes to everything, constantly staring in wonderment. To find It is to enter constant wonder, a new birth of the world at each instant.
1.02 - THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[9] B C D E represent the outside, A is the inside, as it were the origin and source from which the other letters flow, and likewise the final goal to which they flow back,41 F G stands for Above and Below. Together the letters A B C D E F G clearly signify the hidden magical Septenary. The central point A, the origin and goal, the Ocean or great sea, is also called a circulus exiguus, very small circle, and a mediator making peace between the enemies or elements, that they may love one another in a meet embrace.42 This little inner circle corresponds to the Mercurial Fountain in the Rosarium, which I have described in my Psychology of the Transference. The text calls it the more spiritual, perfect, and nobler Mercurius,43 the true arcane substance, a spirit, and goes on:
For the spirit alone penetrates all things, even the most solid bodies.44 Thus the catholicity of religion, or of the true Church, consists not in a visible and bodily gathering together of men, but in the invisible, spiritual concord and harmony of those who believe devoutly and truly in the one Jesus Christ. Whoever attaches himself to a particular church outside this King of Kings, who alone is the shepherd of the true spiritual church, is a sectarian, a schismatic, and a heretic. For the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation, but is within us, as our Saviour himself says in the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke.45
1.02 - The Refusal of the Call, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
--
Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost con tinent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course; may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control.
This is a basic principle of the Indian disciplines of yoga. It has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the West. It can not be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of trans formation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved.
1.02 - The Shadow, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
lective unconscious are invariably archetypes that were present
from the beginning. Their relation to the instincts has been dis-
cussed elsewhere. 1 The archetypes most clearly characterized
from the empirical point of view are those which have the most
--
man, two corresponding archetypes whose autonomy and uncon-
sciousness explain the stubbornness of their projections. Though
--
an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima
and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
The transformation of European sensitivity to, and comprehension of, the world is nowhere more clearly discernible than in painting and architecture. Only our insight into this transformation can lead to a proper understanding of the nature and meaning of new styles and forms of expression.
Restricting ourselves here primarily to the art of the Christian era, we can distinguish two major self-contained epochs among the many artistic styles, followed today by an incipient third. The first encompasses the era up to the Renaissance, the other, now coming to a close, extends up to the present. The decisive and distinguishing characteristic of these epochs is the respective absence or presence of perspective; consequently we shall designate the first era as the "unperspectival," the second as the "perspectival," and the currently emerging epoch as the "aperspectival."'
--
Man's lack of spatial awareness is attended by a lack of ego-consciousness, since in order to objectify and qualify space, a self-conscious "I" is required that is able to stand opposite or confront space, as well as to depict or represent it by projecting it out of his soul or psyche. In this light, Worringer's statements regarding the lack of all space consciousness in Egyptian art are perfectly valid: "Only in the rudimentary form of prehistorical space and cave magic does space have a role in Egyptian architecture . . . . The Egyptians were neutral and indifferent toward space . . . . They were not even potentially aware of spatiality. Their experience was not trans-spatial but pre-spatial; . . . their culture of oasis cultivation was spaceless . . . . Their culture knew only spatial limitations and enclosures in architecture but no inwardness or interiority as such. Just as their engraved reliefs lacked shadow depth, so too was their architecture devoid of special depth. The third dimension, that is the actual dimension of life's tension and polarity, was experience not as a quality but as a mere quantity. How then was space, the moment of depth-seeking extent, to enter their awareness as an independent quality apart from all corporality? . . . The Egyptians lacked utterly any spatial consciousness."
Despite, or indeed because of, Euclidean geometry, there is no evidence of an awareness of qualitative and objectified space in early antiquity or in the epoch preceding the Renaissance.
This has been indirectly confirmed by von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, who has documented two opposing yet complementary structural elements of ancient art as it emerged from the Megalithic (stone) age. The first, Dolmen architecture, entered the Mediterranean region primarily from Northern and Western Europe and was especially influential on Greek architecture. It is phallic in nature and survives in the column architecture in Greece, as in the Par thenon. Space is visible here simply as diastyle or the intercolumnar space, whose structure is determined by the vertical posts and the horizontal lintels and corresponds to Euclidean cubic space.
The second structural element in von Kaschnitz-Weinbergs view is the uterine character of Grotto architecture that entered the Mediterranean area from the Orient (mainly from Iran) and survives in Roman dome architecture, as in the Pantheon or the Baths. Here space is merely a vault, a Grotto-space corresponding to the powerful cosmological conception of the Oriental matri archal religions for, which the world itself is nothing but a vast cavern. It is of interest that Plato, in his famous allegory, was the first to describe man in the process of leaving the cave.
We are then perhaps justified in speaking of the "space" of antiquity as undifferentiated space, as a simple inherence within the security of the maternal womb;. expressing an absence of any confrontation with actual, exterior space. The predominance of the two constitutive polar elements, the paternal phallic column and the maternal uterine cave the forces to which unperspectival man was subject reflects his inextricable relationship to his parental world and, consequently, his complete dependence on it which excluded any awareness of an ego in our modern sense. He remains sheltered and enclosed in the world of the "we" where outer objective space is still non-existent.
The two polar elements which made up the spaceless foundation of the ancient world were first united and creatively amalgamated in Christian ecclesiastical architecture. (The symbolic content of these elements does not, as we will see later emphasize the sexual, but rather the psychical and mythical aspects.) Their amalgamation subsequently gives rise to the Son of Man; the duality of the column and tower, the vault and dome of Christian church architecture made feasible for the first time the trinity represented by the son-as-man, the man who will create his own space.
Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christ the world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. The boldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examine the Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporates stylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, of course, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space found in the murals of Pompeii.
--
The early years of the Renaissance, which one might even characterize as being dramatic, are the source of further writings in the wake of Cennini's treatise. Of equally epochal importance are the three volumes of Leon Battista Alberti'sDellapittura of 1436,which, besides a theory of proportions and anatomy based anVitruvius, contain a first systematic attempt at a theory of perspectival construction (the chapter "Della prospettiva"). Earlier, Brunelleschi had achieved a perspectival construction in his dome for the cathedral of Florence, and Manetti justifiably calls him the "founder of perspectival drawing." But it was Alberti who first formulated an epistemological description of the new manner of depiction, stated, still in very general terms, in the words: "Accordingly, the painting is a slice through the visual pyramid corresponding to a particular space or interval with its Center and specific hues rendered an a given surface by lines and colors." What Vitruvius in his architettura still designated as "scenografia" has become for Alberti a "prospettiva", a clearly depicted visual pyramid.
Some dozen years later, the three Commentarii of Lorenzo Ghiberti also treat of this same perspective; but despite his attempt to remain within the tradition, his treatises describe in a novel way not only perspective but also anatomy and a theory of drawing (teorica del disegno). It is significant that he corrects his principal model, Vitruvius, by inserting a chapter an "perspective" where Vitruvius would have included a chapter an the "knowledge of rules," and consequently intentionally 'elevates perspectivity to a basic axiom of his time.
--
It is this same shape - the ellipse - which Michelangelo introduces into architecture via his dome of St. Peters, which is elliptical and not round or suggestive of the cavern or vault.
Here, too, we find a heightened sense of spatiality at the expense of antiquity's feeling of oceanic space. Galileo penetrates even deeper into space by perfecting the telescope, discovered only shortly before in Holland, and employing it for astronomical studies preparations for man's ultimate conquest of air and suboceanic space that came later and realized the designs already conceived and drawn up in advance by Leonardo.
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
physico-chemistry arc only made manifest by their outward
determinisms.
--
and we naturally study them most easily where they arc most completely
manifested ; but if die scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately
--
reveal themselves by overall effects which arc subject to the laws
of statistics. Collectively, that is, they obey the laws of mathe-
1.03 - A CAUCUS-RACE AND A LONG TALE, #Alice in Wonderland, #Lewis Carroll, #Fiction
"--'And even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable'--"
"Found _what_?" said the Duck.
--
Duck; "it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?"
The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, "'--found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown.'--How are you getting on now, my dear?" it continued, turning to
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this characteristic of the archaic mentality: the belief
that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated in the present instance, without the
--
For archaic thought, then, man is made he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old
initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the
1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
aware. Responding, perceiving, arching your brows, blinking your
eyes, moving your hands and feet, it's all your miraculously aware
1.03 - BOOK THE THIRD, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
With rocks and shelving arches vaulted round.
Deep in the dreary den, conceal'd from day,
--
With hoary moss, and arch'd with pumice-stone.
From out its rocky clefts the waters flow,
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
object:1.03 - Concerning the archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept
author class:Carl Jung
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ANIMA CONCEPT 1
Although modern man appears to believe that the non-em-
--
1 [Originally published as "Ober den archetypus mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung
des Animabegriffes" in the Zentralblatt fur Psycho therapie und ihre Grenzgebiete
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
method, as if psychic phenomena had to be viewed in a certain
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
scientific. But an experimental science makes itself impossible
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
edge of its general phenomenology that could open his eyes to
--
in archetypal ideas, that is, in primordial images which were
never reflections of physical events but are spontaneous prod-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
psyche translates physical processes into sequences of images
--
I have called archetypes.
58
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
119 One of these archetypes, which is of paramount practical
importance for the psycho therapist, I have named the anima.
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
compelled to project it again and again, at all times and in all
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
words, he behaves exactly as if he had not seen through his pro-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denom-
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
ists only in the fantasies of isolated individuals who are deluded
--
intensity. The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every
instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the
--
normal religious factors, the archetypes, and this expectation
does not prove fallacious. Any one who succeeds in putting off
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
his contemporaries. 20 In the visions that marked his initiation
--
image 22 that realized itself in visionary form; an archetypal in-
terpretation which came to life again spontaneously, independ-
ently of tradition. It was the archetype of the divine pair, the
syzygy.
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
Anna Kingsford. There he describes in detail his own experi-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
consciousness together with the memory of the repressive moral
--
dreamer its anthropomorphic stamp. They are the archetypes,
which direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths and in
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
common to all, as can be seen from the universal occurrence of
the archetypes. 25
*37 Just as the archetypes occur on the ethnological level as
myths, so also they are found in every individual, and their
--
lated to the archetypal idea of the syzygy, or conjunction of male
and female, and for this reason appeared perfect and super-
--
contradicted by the fact that a great many archetypal images and associations are
brought to light by dream psychology and psychopathology which would be abso-
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
human. 26 The latter quality invariably attaches to the archetype
and explains why the archetype appears strange and as if not be-
longing to consciousness, and also why, if the subject identifies
--
the instinctive, archetypal stage of consciousness might get lost
in the course of life, the custom has long since been adopted of
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
41 The anima image, which lends the mother such superhuman
--
a man reveals the psychology of this archetype in the form
either of boundless fascination, overvaluation, and infatuation,
--
pre-existent, feminine side of an archetypal "male-female" pair
of opposites, and secondly by an abnormal delay in detaching
--
stand the total loss of the archetype. When that happens, it gives
rise to that frightful "discontent in our culture," where nobody
--
which he lays so much stress is based on another archetype, the well-known incest
motif frequently met with in hero myths. It is logically derived from the original
--
psychological theory is forcibly applied, we have reason to suspect that an arche-
typal fantasy-image is trying to distort reality, thus bearing out Freud's own idea
of the "religious inhibition of thought." But to explain the genesis of archetypes
by means of the incest theory is about as useful as ladling water from one kettle
--
You cannot explain one archetype by another; that is, it is impossible to say where
the archetype comes from, because there is no archimedean point outside the
a priori conditions it represents.
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
that the archetype is constituted like that in itself. The male-
female syzygy is only one among the possible pairs of opposites,
--
that an archetype in its quiescent, unprojected state has no
exactly determinable form but is in itself an indefinite structure
--
CONCERNING THE arcHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT
discontent all around him. Sometimes the man's relationship to
--
in which the archetype is usually embedded. I give first place
to Rider Haggard's novels She, The Return of She, and Wis-
--
incomplete detachment from the hermaphroditic archetype,
coupled with a distinct resistance to identify with the role of a
--
the archetype of the Original Man, which a one-sided sexual
being has, up to a point, lost.
--
THE arcHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
middle life, therefore, the connection with the archetypal sphere
of experience should if possible be re-established. 32
1.03 - On Children, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with
His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archers hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
time when serious rese arch in archives and other documen-
tary sources began to be made. This means, among other
--
Mother, who exists in the archetype of an immortal, omni-
present supramental body; 3. the Supermind, active in the
1.03 - Reading, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture,geniuslearningwitbookspaintingsstatuarymusic philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do,not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefa thers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the noblemans. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the _uncommon_ school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the Indian archipelago, the placenta passes for the child's younger
brother or sister, the sex being determined by the sex of the child,
1.03 - The Desert, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
5:3). In a number of Christian communities, members talce a vow of poverty. In I934, Jung wrote: "Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to withdraw not only from the sorry remnants-which today call themselves the protestant 'churches' of a great past, but also from all the allurements of exotic aromas; in order, finally; to turn back to itself, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars" ("On the archetypes of the collective unconscious," CW 9, I, 29).
80. The Draft continues: "This, too, is an image of the ancients, that they lived in things symbolically: they renounced wealth in order to have a share of the voluntary poverty of their souls. Therefore I had to grant my soul my most extreme poverty and need. And the scorn of my cleverness rose up against this" (P.47)
1.03 - THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
narrow limit to the internal architecture of its elements. Accord-
ing to latest estimates, we have found only a few hundred silicates
1.03 - THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
For, when the son sleeps with the mother, she kills him with the stroke of a viper (viperino conatu). This viciousness recalls the murderous role of Isis,81 who laid the noble worm in the path of the heavenly Father, Ra.82 Isis, however, is also the healer, for she not only cured Ra of the poisoning but put together the dismembered Osiris. As such she personifies that arcane substance, be it dew83 or the aqua permanens84 which unites the hostile elements into one. This synthesis is described in the myth of Isis, who collected the scattered limbs of his body and bathed them with her tears and laid them in a secret grave beneath the bank of the Nile.85 The cognomen of Isis was
, the Black One.86 Apuleius stresses the blackness of her robe (palla nigerrima, robe of deepest black),87 and since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life88 as well as being adept in sundry magical arts.89 She was also called the Old One,90 and she was rated a pupil of Hermes,91 or even his daughter.92 She appears as a teacher of alchemy in the treatise Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus.93 She is mentioned in the role of a whore in Epiphanius, where she is said to have prostituted herself in Tyre.94 She signifies earth, according to Firmicus Maternus,95 and was equated with Sophia.96 She is
--
Kether, the Crown, corresponds to the upward-growing root of the Tree of the Sefiroth.118 Yesod119 signifies the genital region of the Original Man, whose head is Kether. Malchuth, conforming to the archetypal pattern, is the underlying feminine principle.120 In this wicked world ruled by evil Tifereth is not united with Malchuth.121 But the coming Messiah will reunite the King with the Queen, and this mating will restore to God his original unity.122 The Cabala develops an elaborate hierosgamos fantasy which expatiates on the union of the soul with the Sefiroth of the worlds of light and darkness, for the desire of the upper world for the God-fearing man is as the loving desire of a man for his wife, when he woos her.123 Conversely, the Shekinah is present in the sexual act:
The absconditus sponsus enters into the body of the woman and is joined with the abscondita sponsa. This is true also on the reverse side of the process, so that two spirits are melted together and are interchanged constantly between body and body. . . . In the indistinguishable state which arises it may be said almost that the male is with the female, neither male nor female,124 at least they are both or either. So is man affirmed to be composed of the world above, which is male, and of the female world below. The same is true of woman.125
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Adepts as were the originators of the cards, in painting copy sets of the Tarot cards have woefully misrepresented, misplaced, and in some cases entirely omitted some of the symbols existing on the original set of pictures. Yet any one with a knowledge of the arcane wisdom can reconstruct them with ease.
It was only in the last century that we had the statement of Eliphaz Levi that were a man inc arcerated in a dungeon cell in solitary confinement, without books or instructions of any kind, it would still be possible for him to obtain from this set of cards an encyclopaedic knowledge of the essence of all sciences, religions, and philosophies. Ignoring this specimen of typical Levi verbosity, it is only necessary to point out that instead of using the ten digits and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet for the basis of his magical alphabet, Levi adopted as his fundamental framework the twenty-two trump cards of the Book of
1.03 - The Syzygy - Anima and Animus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
mated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the mar-
riage of mother and son. What, after all, has commonplace
--
derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is in-
carnated anew in every male child.
2 7 Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is
reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be
present in women; for just as the man is compensated by a
--
pirically. Whatever we have to say about these archetypes, there-
fore, is either directly verifiable or at least rendered probable
--
peculiarities of the archetype. For the archetype, of course, exists
16
--
be integrated they themselves cannot, since they are archetypes.
As such they are the foundation stones of the psychic structure,
--
is especially important to picture the archetypes of the uncon-
scious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as
--
Both these archetypes, as practical experience shows, possess
a fatality that can on occasion produce tragic results. They are
--
nine archetypal image. The first element can be integrated into the personality
by the process of conscious realization, but the last one cannot.
--
criterion for gauging the significance of these two archetypes.
What we can discover about them from the conscious side is so
--
is, in a man, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which I have
not discussed here, and in a woman the Chthonic Mother.
--
quaternity, an archetype which I have called the marriage
quaternio. 7 The marriage quaternio provides a schema not
1.03 - The Tale of the Alchemist Who Sold His Soul, #The Castle of Crossed Destinies, #Italo Calvino, #Fiction
It would hardly have been surprising if our alchemist had got a swelled head, expecting any day an extraordinary change in the course of his life. This event must have been indicated in the following card, which was the enigmatic First arcanum, sometimes known as The Juggler, in which some see a charlatan or magician performing his tricks.
So, then, our hero, raising his eyes from his desk, had seen a magician seated before him, as he handled his alembics and his retorts.
--
Now there was still The Wheel of Fortune to interpret, one of the most complicated images in the whole tarot game. It could mean simply that fortune had turned in Faust's direction, but this explanation seemed too obvious for the alchemist's narrative style, always elliptical and allusive. On the other hand, it was legitimate to suppose that our doctor, having got possession of the diabolical secret, conceived a monstrous plan: to change into gold all that was changeable. The wheel of the Tenth arcanum would then literally mean the toiling gears of the Great Gold Mill, the gigantic mechanism which would raise up the Metropolis of Precious Metal; and the human forms of various ages seen pushing the wheel or rotating with it were there to indicate the crowds of men who eagerly lent a hand to the project and dedicated the years of their lives to turning those wheels day and night. This interpretation failed to take into account all the details of the miniature (for example, the animalesque ears and tails that adorned some of the revolving human figures), but it was a basis for interpreting the following cards of cups and coins as the Kingdom of Abundance in which the City of Gold's inhabitants wallowed. (The rows of yellow circles perhaps evoked the gleaming domes of golden skyscrapers that flanked the streets of the Metropolis.)
But when would the established price be collected by the Cloven Contracting Party? The story's two final cards were already on the table, placed there by the first narrator: the Two of Swords and Temperance. At the gates of the City of Gold armed guards blocked the way to anyone who wished to enter, to prevent access to the Cloven-hooved Collector, no matter in what guise he might turn up. And even if a simple maiden, like the one in the last card, were to approach, the guards made her halt.
1.04 - ALCHEMY AND MANICHAEISM, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[34] The inflammation by desire has its analogy in the alchemists gradual warming of the substances that contain the arcanum. Here the symbol of the sweat-bath plays an important role, as the illustrations show.227 Just as for the Manichaeans the sweat of the archons signified rain,228 so for the alchemists sweat meant dew.229 In this connection we should also mention the strange legend reported in the Acta archelai, concerning the apparatus which the son of the living Father invented to save human souls. He constructed a great wheel with twelve buckets which, as they revolved, scooped up the souls from the deep and deposited them on the moon-ship.230 In alchemy the rota is the symbol of the opus circulatorium. Like the alchemists, the Manichaeans had a virago, the male virgin Joel,231 who gave Eve a certain amount of the light-substance.232 The role she plays in regard to the princes of darkness corresponds to that of Mercurius duplex, who like her sets free the secret hidden in matter, the light above all lights, the filius philosophorum. I would not venture to decide how much in these parallels is to be ascribed directly to Manichaean tradition, how much to indirect influence, and how much to spontaneous revival.
[35] Our starting-point for these remarks was the designation of the lapis as orphan, which Dorn mentions apparently out of the blue when discussing the union of opposites. The material we have adduced shows what an archetypal drama of death and rebirth lies hidden in the coniunctio, and what immemorial human emotions clash together in this problem. It is the moral task of alchemy to bring the feminine, maternal background of the masculine psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the spirittruly a labour of Hercules! In Dorns words:
Learn therefore, O Mind, to practise sympathetic love in regard to thine own body, by restraining its vain appetites, that it may be apt with thee in all things. To this end I shall labour, that it may drink with thee from the fountain of strength,233 and, when the two are made one, that ye find peace in their union. Draw nigh, O Body, to this fountain, that with thy Mind thou mayest drink to satiety and hereafter thirst no more after vanities. O wondrous efficacy of this fount, which maketh one of two, and peace between enemies! The fount of love can make mind out of spirit and soul, but this maketh one man of mind and body.234
1.04 - BOOK THE FOURTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
In arches meet, and lend a baleful shade,
Thro' silent labyrinths a passage lies
1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
I came out of the fantasy; I realized that my mechanism had worked wonderfully well, but I was in great confusion as to the meaning of all those things I had seen. The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with
Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal, I need not seek connections. I was able to link the picture up with the sea of blood I had previously fantasized about. / Though I could not then grasp the significance of the hero killed, soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions" (Analytical Psychology, p. 48). (The killing of Siegfried occurs below in ch. 7.) Jung also anonymously cited and discussed this fantasy in his ETH lecture on
June 14, 1935 (Modern Psychology, vols. 1. and 2, p. 223).
--
99. Political assassinations were frequent at the beginning of the twentieth century: The particular event referred to here is the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand. Martin Gilbert describes this event, which played a critical role in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World
War, as "a turning point in the history of the twentieth century" ( A History of the Twentieth
1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch,
can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The
1.04 - On blessed and ever-memorable obedience, #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
About Macedonius the archdeacon
I should be quite unjust to all enthusiasts for perfection if I were to bury in the tomb of silence the achievement and reward of Macedonius, the first of the deacons there. This man, so consecrated to the Lord, just before the feast of the Holy Theophany,1 actually two days before it, once asked the pastor for permission to go to Alexandria for a certain personal need of his, promising to return from the city as soon as possible for the approaching festival and the preparation for it. But the devil, the hater of good, hindered the archdeacon, and though released by the abbot, he did not return to the monastery for the holy feast at the time appointed by the superior. On his returning a day late, the pastor deposed him from the diaconate and put him in the rank of the lowest novices. But that good deacon of patience and archdeacon of endurance accepted the fathers decision as calmly as if another had been punished and not himself. And when he had spent forty days in that state, the wise pastor raised him again to his own rank. But sc arcely a day had passed before the archdeacon begged the pastor to leave him in his former discipline and dishonour, saying: I committed an unforgivable sin in the city. But knowing that Macedonius was telling him an untruth and that he sought punishment only for the sake of humility, the Saint yielded to the good wish of the ascetic. Then what a sight there was! An honoured elder with white hair spending his days as a novice and sincerely begging everyone to pray for him. For, said he, I fell into the fornication of disobedience. But this great Macedonius in secret told me, lowly though I am, why he voluntarily pursued such a humiliating course of life. Never, he assured me, have I felt in myself such relief from every conflict and such sweetness of divine light as now. It is the property of angels, he continued, not to fall, and even, as some say, it is quite impossible for them to fall. It is the property of men to fall, and to rise again as often as this may happen. But it is the property of devils, and devils alone, not to rise once they have fallen.
1 I.e. the feast of the Baptism of Christ, corresponding to some extent to the Western Epiphany.
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
possible about primitive psychology, mythology, archaeology, and
comparative religion, because these fields offer me invaluable analogies
--
unmistakable archaic quality is present. These peculiarities point to the
nature of the underlying creative forces. They are irrational, symbolisticcurrents that run through the whole history of mankind, and are so archaic
in character that it is not difficult to find their parallels in archaeology and
comparative religion. We may therefore take it that our pictures spring
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
its goal. The nature of that goal, archetypally, is establishment of or movement towards a paradisal state
characterized by stable, dynamic relief from (unbearable) suffering, freedom from (paralyzing) anxiety,
--
where the present state of adaptation is incomplete, and where residual danger lies. The archetypal
revolutionary hero therefore faces the anger and rejection of his peers, as well as the terrors of the
--
Analysis of the archaic ecstatic practice of shamanism prevalent throughout the immense area
comprising Central and North Asia423 sheds further light on the nature of the actions and typical
--
The shaman is not simply an archaic figure, an interesting anomaly from the dead past he is the
embodiment, in cultures we do not understand, of those people we admire most in the past. The phenomena
--
analogous to that of the archaic religious leader and healer.
Figure 50: The Dual Death of the Revolutionary Hero
--
The archaic shamanic initiate was commonly someone uniquely marked by fate, by the will of the
gods by particular heredity, magical (novel) occurrence in early childhood or later in life (birth in a
--
commission of acts considered characteristic, in modern and archaic culture alike, of serious mental
breakdown. He behaves idiosyncratically, seeking solitude, flying into fits of rage, losing consciousness,
--
we know, for archaic and traditional cultures, a symbolic return to Chaos is equivalent to preparing a
new Creation. It follows that we may interpret the psychic Chaos of the future shaman as a sign that the
--
that could swim was, I think, a theriomorphized representation of the very archaic intrapsychic systems
that guide or underly the transformation of more sophisticated cortical or personality structures. The notion
--
This diagram suffers somewhat from its precise symbolic equation of the tree and the archetypal son.
Christ and Satan, for example Christian exemplars of the ambivalent son may also be viewed as
--
for example, the cross upon which Christ, the archetypal individual, crucified, suspended and tormented,
manifests for all eternity his identity with God; the tree upon which Odin, Norse savior, is likewise
--
The archetypal Son
Hero
--
apprehension of this idea that led medieval alchemy to treat the serpent as the arcane substance that
transformed itself inside the tree, and to regard the serpent as the trees life.454
--
alertness still depends on very archaic nervous system substructures. Knowledge of this dependence echoes
through myth and literature. Goethes Mephistopheles is therefore able to state, for example:
1.04 - The Crossing of the First Threshold, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
The arcadian god Pan is the best known Classical example of
this dangerous presence dwelling just beyond the protected zone
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Take, for instance, the construction of Golconde. I am not going to enter into an elaborate description of its development. Considering that our resources in men and money were then limited, how such a magnificent building was erected is a wonder. An American architect with his Japanese and Czechoslovakian assistants foregathered. Old buildings were demolished, our sadhaks along with the paid workers laboured night and day and as if from a void, the spectacular mansion rose silently and slowly like a giant in the air. It is a story hardly believable for Pondicherry of those days. But my wonder was at the part the Mother played in it, not inwardly which is beyond my depth but in the daylight itself. She was in constant touch with the work through her chosen instruments. As many sadhaks as possible were pressed into service there; to anyone young or old asking for work, part time, whole time, her one cry: "Go to Golconde, go to Golconde." It was one of her daily topics with Sri Aurobindo who was kept informed of the difficulties, troubles innumerable, and at the same time, of the need of his force to surmount "them. Particularly when rain threatened to impede or spoil some important part of the work, she would invoke his special help: for instance, when the roof was to be built. How often we heard her praying to Sri Aurobindo, "Lord, there should be no rain now." Menacing clouds had mustered strong, stormy west winds blowing ominously, rain imminent, and torrential Pondicherry rain! We would look at the sky and speculate on the result of the fight between the Divine Force and the natural force. The Divine Force would of course win: slowly the Fury would leash her forces and withdraw into the cave. But as soon as the intended object was achieved, a deluge swept down as if in revenge. Sri Aurobindo observed that that was often the rule. During the harvesting season too, S.O.S. signals would come to Sri Aurobindo through the Mother to stop the rain. He would smile and do his work silently. If I have not seen any other miracle, I can vouch for this one repeated more than once. During the roof-construction, work had to go on all night long and the Mother would mobilise and marshal all the available Ashram hands and put them there. With what cheer and ardour our youth jumped into the fray at the call of the Mother, using often Sri Aurobindo's name to put more love and zeal into the strenuous enterprise! We felt the vibration of a tremendous energy driving, supporting, inspiring the entire collective body. This was how Golconde, an Ashram guest house, was built, one of the wonders of modern architecture lavishly praised by many visitors. Let me quote the relevant portion of a letter from Sri Aurobindo, written in 1945 with regard to Golconde:
"...It is on this basis that she (Mother) planned the Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded architects and people with architectural knowledge have admired it with enthusiasm as a remarkable achievement; one spoke of it as the finest building of its kind he had seen, with no equal in all Europe or America; and a French architect, pupil of a great master, said it executed superbly the idea which his master had been seeking for but failed to realise..."2
Next in magnitude comes the Press. Today the Ashram Printing Press holds a premier place in India. That is because the Mother set from the very start the ideal of perfection before her and exacted from the workers that ideal. Kinds of business run on a commercial basis there are many outside, but here the ideal is quite different, as I have stated. This is what the Mother recently told the manager of the Press, "If any part of the world makes a demand for perfection in printing, it should be able to say to itself, The Pondicherry Ashram Press fulfils the ideal." Yet this Press began as some big establishments have done, in a very humble way; I don't know how the proposal was mooted that we must have a Press of our own to publish mainly Sri Aurobindo's books. The Mother caught the idea at once. But how to start, was the question. It was not so much the money that was wanting, as men of knowledge and experience in this field. She would not engage workers from outside; it must be run by the Ashram inmates. We had at that time made some connection with the Hyderabad Government through Sir Akbar Hydari who was instrumental in, procuring a donation from the Nizam's Government for Golconde, hence the name[3]. This connection opened the channel for an experienced officer of the Government to come and give a start to our Press. As soon as things began moving, the Mother put all her available force into it and bundled off sadhaks and sadhikas old and young, philosopher, scholar, professor, whoever was at hand, to the Press. Naturally, many difficulties cropped up; quarrels, disharmony, complaints human conflicts instead of natural calamities. The Mother was certainly prepared for them, for she knows our human nature, also that it is through work that it has to be changed, not through the escape-gate of inaction. We heard from time to time the Mother reporting about these troubles to Sri Aurobindo. With his silent Purusha-like support, and her regular visits to the Press, the initial difficulties were gradually overcome and a modicum of harmony established. One after another, Sri Aurobindo's books began to come out. Thus with our raw but energetic young band and a handful of trained paid workers, this institution was built up piecemeal, illustrating the Mother's method of working, the ideal to be achieved, and Sri Aurobindo's dictum that things must grow out of life itself, not according to a set mental pattern. In our case, of course, the process was sustained by a directly acting Divine Force. "All can be done if the God-touch is there." In fact all our institutions, the Ashram itself, have grown up in this way, from scratch, and Auroville is the latest example. We must remember, however, that activity by itself, of whatever kind, is of secondary importance, but "taken as pan of the sadhana offered to the Divine or done with the consciousness or faith that it is done by the Divine Power" that is the important point.
1.04 - The Future of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
hyper-complex, hyper-centred, hyper-conscious arch-mole-
cule, co-extensive with the heavenly body on which it was
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The beliefs and conclusions of today are, in these rapid and unsettled times, seldom the beliefs and conclusions of tomorrow. In religion, in thought, in science, in literature we m arch daily over the bodies of dead theories to enthrone fresh syntheses and worship new illuminations. The realms of scholarship are hardly more quiet and secure than these troubled kingdoms; and in that realm nowhere is the soil so boggy, nowhere does scholastic ingenuity disport itself with such light fantastic footsteps over such a quaking morass of hardy conjecture and hasty generalisation as in the Sanscrit scholarship of the last century. But the Vedic question at least seemed to have been settled. It was agreedfirmly enough, it seemed that the Vedas were the sacred chants of a rude, primitive race of agriculturists sacrificing to very material gods for very material benefits with an elaborate but wholly meaningless & arbitrary ritual; the gods themselves were merely poetical personifications of cloud & rain & wind, lightning & dawn and the sky & fire to which the semi-savage Vedic mind attributed by crude personal analogy a personality and a presiding form, the Rishis were sacrificing priests of an invading Aryan race dwelling on the banks of the Panjab rivers, men without deep philosophical or exalted moral ideas, a race of frank cheerful Pagans seeking the good things of life, afraid of drought & night & various kinds of devils, sacrificing persistently & drinking vigorously, fighting the black Dravidians whom they called the Dasyus or robbers,crude prototypes these of Homeric Greek and Scandinavian Viking.All this with many details of the early civilisation were supposed to be supplied by a philological and therefore scientificexamination of the ancient text yielding as certain results as the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyph and Persian inscription. If there are hymns of a high moral fervour, of a remarkable philosophical depth & elevation, these are later compositions of a more sophisticated age. In the earlier hymns, the vocabulary, archaic and almost unintelligible, allows an adroit & industrious scholarship waving in its hand the magic wand of philology to conjure into it whatever meaning may be most suitable to modern beliefs or preferable to the European temperament. As for Vedanta, it can be no clue to the meaning of the mantras, because the Upanishads represent a spiritual revolt against Vedic naturalism & ceremonialism and not, as has been vainly imagined for some thousands of years, the fulfilment of Vedic truth. Since then, some of these positions have been severely shaken. European Science has rudely scouted the claims of Comparative Philology to rank as a Science; European Ethnology has dismissed the Aryo-Dravidian theory of the philologist & tends to see in the Indian people a single homogeneous race; it has been trenchantly suggested and plausibly upheld that the Vedas themselves offer no evidence that the Indian races were ever outside India but even prove the contraryan advance from the south and not from the north. These theories have not only been suggested & widely approved but are gaining upon the general mind. Alone in all this overthrow the European account of Vedic religion & Vedic civilisation remains as yet intact & unchallenged by any serious questioning. Even in the minds of the Indian people, with their ancient reverence for Veda, the Europeans have effected an entire divorce between Veda & Vedanta. The consistent religious development of India has been theosophic, mystical, Vedantic. Its beginnings are now supposed to have been naturalistic, materialistic, Pagan, almost Graeco-Roman. No satisfactory explanation has been given of this strange transformation in the soul of a people, and it is not surprising that theories should have been started attri buting to Vedanta & Brahmavada a Dravidian origin. Brahmavada was, some have confidently asserted, part of the intellectual property taken over by the Aryan conquerors from the more civilised races they dispossessed. The next step in this scholars progress might well be some counterpart of Sergis Mediterranean theory,an original dark, pacific, philosophic & civilised race overwhelmed by a fairskinned & warlike horde of Aryan savages.
The object of this book is to suggest a prior possibility,that the whole European theory may be from beginning to end a prodigious error. The confident presumption that religion started in fairly recent times with the terrors of the savage, passed through stages of Animism & Nature worship & resulted variously in Paganism, monotheism or the Vedanta has stood in the way of any extension of scepticism to this province of Vedic enquiry. I dispute the presumption and deny the conclusions drawn from it. Before I admit it, I must be satisfied that a system of pure Nature worship ever existed. I cannot accept as evidence Sun & Star myth theories which, as a play of ingenious scholastic fancy, may attract the imagination, but are too haphazard, too easily self-contented, too ill-combined & inconsequent to satisfy the scientific reason. No other religion of which there is any undisputed record or sure observation, can be defined as a system of pure Nature worship. Even the savage-races have had the conception of gods & spirits who are other than personified natural phenomena. At the lowest they have Animism & the worship of spirits, ghosts & devils. Ancestor-worship & the cult of snake & four-footed animal seem to have been quite as old as any Nature-gods with whom rese arch has made us acquainted. In all probability the Python was worshipped long before Apollo. It is therefore evident that even in the lowest religious strata the impulse to personify Nature-phenomena is not the ruling cult-idea of humanity. It is exceedingly unlikely that at any time this element should have so far prevailed as to cast out all the others so as to create a type of cult confined within a pure & rigid naturalism. Man has always seen in the universe the replica of himself. Unless therefore the Vedic Rishis had no thought of their subjective being, no perception of intellectual and moral forces within themselves, it is a psychological impossibility that they should have detected divine forces behind the objective world but none behind the subjective.
--
The first passage in which Saraswati is mentioned, is the third hymn of the first Mandala, the hymn of Madhuchchhanda Vaisvamitra, in which the Aswins, Indra, the Visve devah and Saraswati are successively invokedapparently in order to conduct an ordinary material sacrifice? That is the thing that has to be seen,to be understood. What is Saraswati, whether as a Muse or a river, doing at the Soma-offering? Or is she there as the architect of the hymn, the weaver of the Riks?
The passage devoted to her occupies the three final & culminating verses of the sacred poem. Pavaka nah Saraswati vajebhir vajinivati Yajnam vashtu dhiyavasuh. Chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam Yajnam dadhe Saraswati. Maho arnas Saraswati prachetayati ketuna Dhiyo visva vi rajati. Now there is here mention in the last verse of a flowing water, arnas, whether sea or river, but this can be no material stream, since plainly the rest of the passage can only refer to a goddess whose functions are subjective. She is dhiyavasuh, stored or rich with understanding, she is the impelling power of truths, she is the awakener of or to right thoughts. She awakens something or brings it forward into consciousness (pra-chetayati) by the perceptive intelligence and she governs or shines through all the movements of the fixing & discerning mind. There are too many words here that do ordinarily & ought here to bear a purely subjective sense for any avoidance of the clear import of the passage. We start then with the conception of Saraswati as a goddess of mind, if not the goddess of mind and we have then to determine what are her functions or activities as indicated in this important passage and for what purpose she has been summoned by the son of Visvamitra to this sacrifice.
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Hence we find numbers and figures used as an expression and a record of thought in every archaic scripture." Ginsburg, referring to the Hebrew Alphabet, states : " Since the letters have no absolute value - nor can they be used as mere forms, but serve as the medium between essence and forms, and like words, assume the relation of form to the real essence, and of essence to the embryo and unexpressed
65
--
The Tarot card is VI. - The Lovers. Ancient packs describe this as representing a man between two women, who arc Vice and Virtue, Lilith, the wife of the evil Samael, and Eve. Modern cards, however, show a nude male and female figure, with an angel or a Cupid with outspread wings hovering above them.
n-cH
--
" The Tentative Intelligence ". Sagittarius is essentially a hunting sign and Diana, as the celestial archer and the
Goddess of the Chase, finds her place in this category.
--
The symbol of Sagittarius is the Centaur, half-man and half-beast, who is traditionally connected with archery ; and the Horse, too, is a correspondence of Samech. The plant appropriate is the Rush, used for making arrows; perfume Lignaloes, and Green is the colour. The Rainbow is also a correspondence of Samech, and in this connection the God Ares is attri buted.
The Tarot attri bution is XIV. -Temperance, showing an angel crowned with the golden sigil of the Sun, clothed in beautiful white robes, and on his breast are written the letters of the Tetragrammaton over a white square, wherein is a gold triangle. He pours a blue liquid from a gilt chalice into another.
1.04 - The Qabalah The Best Training for Memory, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
("How many sets of attri butions?" Well, certainly, the Hebrew and Greek Alphabets with the names and numbers of each letter, and its mean- ing: a couple of lists of God-names, with a clear idea of the character, qualities, functions, and importance of each; the "King-scale" of colour, all the Tarot attri butions, of course; then animals, plants, drugs, per- fumes, a list or two of archangels, angels, intelligences and spirits that ought to be enough for a start.)
Now you are armed! Ask yourself: why is the influence of Tiphareth transmitted to Yesod by the Path of Samekh, a fence, 60, Sagittarius, the archer, Art, blue and so on; but to Hod by the Path of Ayin, an eye, 70, Capricornus, the Goat, the Devil, Indigo, K.T.L.
Thirteen is the number of Achad {Hebrew option}, Unity, and Ahebah {Hebrew option}, Love; then what word should arise when you expand it by the Creative Dyad, and get 26; what when you multiply it by 4, and get 52? Then, suppose the Pentagram gets busy, 13 x 5 = 65, what then?
1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
in the unconscious, so that on the one hand it shares the archaic
nature of the unconscious and on the other finds itself in the
--
its archetypal context- a task that is usually discharged by poets
and prophets. Thus Holderlin, in his "Hymn to Liberty," lets
--
C. my "Psychology of the Child archetype"; also Psychology and Alchemy,
index, s.v. "Alius Philosophorum," "child," "hermaphrodite."
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Memory is the very stuff of consciousness itself. It is, to use a figure of speech, the mortar of the architecture of the mind, that integrating faculty binding together all the various sensations and impressions. The Will is a colour- less principle moved by, and comparable to, desire. It is the power of the spiritual Self in action. In ordinary life it is not, as it should be, the servant of the man, but rules him with a rod of iron binding him to those very things from which he essays to escape.
Imagination is a faculty much misunderstood, most people thinking of it as sheer fantasy used in day-dreaming.
1.05 - AUERBACHS CELLAR, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
Superbly from the arches o'er us.
FROSCH
1.05 - Bhakti Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
20. Practise the nine modes of devotion or Nava-vidha Bhakti, viz., Sravana (hearing the Lilas of the Lord), Kirtan (singing His Name), Smarana (His remembrance), Padasevana (service of His Feet), archana (offering flowers), Vandana (prostrations), Dasyam (servant-Bhava), Sakhya (His friendship), and Atmanivedana (self-surrender).
21. Say unto the Lord: I am Thine, all is Thine, Thy Will be done. Feel you are an instrument in the hands of the Lord, that the Lord works through your mind, body and senses. Offer all your actions and the fruits of the actions unto the Lord. This is the way to do self-surrender.
1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self. 5 He represents a
totality of a divine or heavenly kind, a glorified man, a son of
--
5 Cf. my observations on Christ as archetype in "A Psychological Approach to the
Dogma of the Trinity," pars. 226ff.
--
process are similar "reformations" of an a priori archetype (the
mandala). 21 As I have already emphasized, the spontaneous sym-
--
is an ever-present archetype of wholeness 22 which may easily
disappear from the purview of consciousness or may never be
--
spontaneously in the products of the unconscious as an arche-
typal quaternity bound together by inner antinomies, cannot
--
on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two
irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dual-
--
psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the arche-
type. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is
--
perature of the arctic winter, which freezes our noses and ears,
is relatively speaking only a little below the heat prevailing at
the equator. For the arctic temperature seldom falls much lower
than 230 C. above absolute zero. All things on earth are
--
The devil, like the Gnostic archons, dwells in the firmament,
and he and his angels presumably correspond to astrological
--
know how very much I stress the unity of the self, this central archetype which
is a complexio oppositorum par excellence, and that my leanings are therefore
--
ral and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and
therefore universal and eternal. 77 Now if theology describes
--
the highest archon of the hebdomad, and his first prefiguration
is Christ the son of the highest archon of the ogdoad, the
demiurge Yahweh. 88 This trichotomy of Anthropos figures cor-
--
chological fact that the archetypal image of the self has been
shown to occur in dreams even when no such conceptions exist
--
psychological evidence for the existence of an archetypal con-
tent possessing all those qualities which are characteristic of the
Christ-image in its archaic and medieval forms. Modern psy-
chology is therefore confronted with a question very like the
--
trates upon itself the characteristics of an archetype- the arche-
type of the self. My aim and method do not purport to be any-
--
find the concept of the archetype in the history of art as well as
in philology and textual criticism. The psychological archetype
differs from its parallels in other fields only in one respect: it
--
ing presence of the archetype than to the idea of the historical
Christ. As I have said, there is among certain of the alchemists,
--
the archetype of the self as the real agent and hence takes Christ
as a symbol of the self, one must bear in mind that there is a
--
so), while the archetype (so far as known) denotes completeness
68
--
ural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the arche-
type fulfils itself in completeness, and this is a TeAetWi? of quite
another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness
is forced upon us against all our conscious strivings, in accord-
ance with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual
may strive after perfection ("Be you therefore perfect- ri Add-
--
taneously brings forth an archetypal symbol of wholeness. From
this we must conclude that some such archetype occurs uni-
versally and is endowed with a certain numinosity. And there is
--
25 Whenever the archetype of the self predominates, the in-
evitable psychological consequence is a state of conflict vividly
--
words "consummatum est." Recognition of the archetype, there-
fore, does not in any way circumvent the Christian mystery;
1.05 - Definition of the Ludicrous, and a brief sketch of the rise of Comedy., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
The successive changes through which Tragedy passed, and the authors of these changes, are well known, whereas Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously. It was late before the archon granted a comic chorus to a poet; the performers were till then voluntary. Comedy had already taken definite shape when comic poets, distinctively so called, are heard of. Who furnished it with masks, or prologues, or increased the number of actors,--these and other similar details remain unknown. As for the plot, it came originally from Sicily; but of Athenian writers Crates was the first who, abandoning the 'iambic' or lampooning form, generalised his themes and plots.
Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time. This, then, is a second point of difference; though at first the same freedom was admitted in Tragedy as in Epic poetry.
1.05 - Hymns of Bharadwaja, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5. He sets like an archer his shaft for the shooting, he sharpens his power of light like an edge of steel. He is the traveller of the night with rich rapid movements; he has thighs of swift motion and is like a bird that settles on a tree.
6. This friendly Light is like a singer of the word and clothes himself with the Rays, he rhapsodises with his flame. This is the shining One who journeys by night and by day to the Gods, the shining Immortal who journeys through the day to the Gods.
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The second verse neither confirms as yet nor contradicts this initial suggestion. These three great gods, it says, are to the mortal as a multitude of arms which bring to him his desires & fill him with an abundant fullness and protect him from any who may will to do him hurt, rishah; fed with that fullness he grows until he is sarvah, complete in every part of his being(that is to say, if we admit the sense of a spiritual protection and a spiritual activity, in knowledge, in power, in joy, in mental, vital & bodily fullness)and by the efficacy of that protection he enjoys all this fullness & completeness unhurt. No part of it is maimed by the enemies of man, whose activities do him hurt, the Vritras, Atris, Vrikas, the Coverer on the heights, the devourer in the night, the tearer on the path.We may note in passing how important [it] is to render every Vedic word by its exact value; rish & dwish both mean enemy; but if we render them by one word, we lose the fine shade of meaning to which the poet himself calls our attention by the collocation pnti rishaharishta edhate. We see also the same care of style in the collocation sarva edhate, where, as it seems to me, it is clearly suggested that the completeness is the result of the prosperous growth, we have again the fine care & balance with which the causes pipratipnti are answered by the effects arishtahedhate. There is even a good literary reason of great subtlety & yet perfect force for the order of the words & the exact place of each word in the order. In this simple, easy & yet faultless balance & symmetry a great number of the Vedic hymns represent exactly in poetry the same spirit & style as the Greek temple or the Greek design in architecture & painting. Nor can anyone who neglects to notice it & give full value to it, catch rightly, fully & with precision the sense of the Vedic writings.
In the third verse we come across the first confirmation of the spiritual purport of the hymn. The protected of Varuna, Mitra & Aryama the plural is now used to generalise the idea more decisivelyare travellers to a moral & spiritual goal, nayanti durit tirah. It follows that the durgni, the obstacles in the path are moral & spiritual obstacles, not material impediments. It follows equally that the dwishah, the haters, are spiritual enemies, not human; for there would be no sense or appropriateness in the scattering of human enemies by Varuna as a condition of the seeker after Truth & Rights reaching a state of sinlessness. It is the spiritual, moral & mental obstacles, the spiritual beings & forces who are opposed to the souls perfection, Brahmadwishah, whom Varuna, Mitra & Aryama remove from the path of their worshippers. They smite them & scatter them utterly, vi durg vi dwishah,the particle twice repeated in order to emphasise the entire clearance of the path; they scatter them in front,not allowing even the least struggle to be engaged before their intervention, but going in front of the worshippers & maintaining a clear way, suga anrikshara, in which they can pass not only without hurt, but without battle. The image of the sins, the durit is that of an army besetting the way which is scattered to all sides by the divine vanguard & is compelled beyond striking distance. The armed pilgrims of the Right pass on & through & not an arrow falls across their road. The three great Kings of heaven & their hosts, rjnah, have passed before & secured the great passage for the favoured mortal.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
object:1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - arcHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN
author class:Jordan Peterson
--
CHAPTER 5: THE HOSTILE BROTHERS: arcHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN
The contamination of anomaly with the threat of death, attendant on the development of selfconsciousness, amplifies the valence of the unknown to a virtually unbearable point. This unbearable
--
No discussion of the architecture of belief can possibly be considered complete in the absence of
reference to evil. Evil is no longer a popular word, so to speak the term is generally considered oldfashioned, not applicable in a society that has theoretically dispensed with its religious preoccupations.
--
The heroic tendency the archetypal savior is an eternal spirit, which is to say, a central and
permanent aspect of human being. The same is true, precisely, of the adversarial tendency: the capacity
--
presuming that the very notion of evil is archaic a presumption truly ridiculous, in this century of
indescribable horror. In our ignorance and complaceny, we deride ancient stories about the nature of evil
--
of archaic conceptualization became the single Ruler of more modern religious thinking as a consequence
of spiritual competition, so to speak. This competition is the battle of ideas with implication for action
--
of the adversary. The most thoroughly developed archaic personification of evil outside the JudeoChristian tradition can perhaps be found in the ideas of Zoroastrianism, which flourished in relatively
explicit form from 1000-600 B.C. (and which undoubtedly depended for its form on much more ancient
--
sons of god, heroic and adversarial. The former tendency, the archetypal savior, is the everlasting spirit
of creation and transformation: characterized eternally by the capacity to admit to the unknown and,
--
revolutionary anomaly. Tolstoys ideological response to such anomaly is equally archetypal. The news
from Western Europe the revelation of the death of God cascaded through the great authors implicit
--
brick archway and sat there.
Not far away from us a big heap of coal was piled. Two zeks498 were digging into it, eagerly seeking
--
through the archives, what a find! They ran across an old brochure written by this comrade which
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself had held in his hands and in the margin of which he had written in his
--
Movement from the group to the individual like that from childhood to group follows the archetypal
transformative pattern of the heroic (paradise, breach, fall, redemption; stability, dissolution,
--
explication of a generally applicable pattern of adaptation. This archetypal model serves to aid in the
generation of all situation-specific individual behaviors. Myth evolves towards declarable description of a
--
between the individual and the savior the archetypal redeemer, the culture-bearer, the divine hero. This is
organization of incorporated behavior in accordance with recognition of the source of incorporated
--
behavior of the culture-bearer, the archetypal hero, constitutes embodiment of an elaborate procedural
(moral) code. This code is the end result of an evolutionary process, consisting of the establishment of
--
This is most truly death of unthinking adherence to authority, as in the archaic society, the past rules:
In normal times, when culture is stable and the paternal canon remains in force for generations, the
--
the comm and of the transpersonal father or father archetype who wants the world to change, collides
with the personal father who speaks for the old law. We know this conflict best from the Bible story of
--
of man. The unconscious archaic man mimics particular adaptive behaviors integrated, however, into a
procedural structure containing all other adaptive behaviors, capable of compelling imitation, and
--
initial establishment of adaptive behavior as divine first because it follows an archetypal and therefore
transpersonal pattern that governing creative exploration and second because it compels imitation, and
--
Christ presented the kingdom of heaven (the archetypal goal) as a spiritual kingdom, which is to say, a
psychological, then interpersonal, state. This state differed from the hypothetical promised land described
--
the nature of the goal of paradise itself. Christs life and words as archetypal exemplars of the heroic
manner of being place explicit stress on the process of life, rather than upon its products. The point of a
--
you will say that we do not yet know the cause, but that there must be one! Our archetypal prejudices are
so strong that one cannot defend oneself against them, they just catch us.
--
physical sciences are in a way rooted in archetypal ideas. For instance, the idea of causality as
formulated by Descartes is responsible for enormous progress in the investigation of light, of biological
--
in natural sciences are generally due to the appearance of a new archetypal model by which reality can
be described; that usually precedes big developments, for there is now a model which enables a much
--
So the archetype is the promoter of ideas and is also responsible for the emotional restrictions which
prevent the renunciation of earlier theories. It is really only a detail or specific aspect of what happens
--
I thought this was a remarkable answer. He had reproduced an archaic hero myth, in perfect form. The
idea of making a shield from the firebox was nothing short of brilliant. This gave him the power of the
--
5.3.2.2. The Material World as archaic Locus of the Unknown
...all these myth pictures represent a drama of the human psyche on the further side of consciousness,
--
relatively poor capacity for discrimination, produced archaic categories of great generality from the
modern perspective. We can identify many discriminable phenomena within each of these categories, as
--
meaning of this archaic complex of undiscriminated ideas. Gold as ultimate contrast to mere base
matter was the ideal, as it could be perceived in the concrete world. For the pre-experimental man, as
--
Annam, in India and in the Indian archipelago. The peasants of Tonkin have a saying: Black bronze is
the mother of gold. Gold is engendered naturally by bronze. But this transmutation can materialize only
--
The alchemist thought in a medieval fashion or pre-medieval using archaic preconceptions and
ideas. Analysis of that thought, projected upon matter (just as we interpret matter in the light of our
--
was a moral universe. Every aspect of that archaic world was engaged in moral endeavour, participating in
corruption, striving towards perfection. Every ore wanted to be pure metal, every pure metal, gold. All
--
fantasies associated with the archetype of the way, which always emerges of its own accord, when
individuals face their limitations and come into contact with the unknown. And it must be understood:
--
stable or rigid substance. The archetypal first stage in any moral transformation (which the alchemist
was striving to produce) constitutes tragic disruption of the previous state of being. The disintegration of
--
therefore necessarily structured according to the myth of the way, the primary archetypal manifestation of
imaginative fantasy. The alchemist worked alone, concentrating on his procedure for months and years at a
--
those archetypes that were the most suppressed by the conscious attitude. The therapist then has no other
course than to confront the ego with its adversary and thus initiate the melting and recasting process.
--
What, then, do the statements of the alchemists concerning their arcanum mean, looked at
psychologically? In order to answer this question we must remember the working hypothesis we have
--
content of consciousness or the conscious attitude. If we apply this basic rule to the alchemical arcanum,
we come to the conclusion that its most conspicuous quality, namely, its unity and uniqueness one is
--
in order to activate the archetype of unity. From this we may conclude that the more philosophically
minded alchemists were people who did not feel satisfied with the then prevailing view of the world,
--
to be a considerable number of individuals who are possesed by archetypes of a numinous nature that
force their way to the surface in order to form new dominants.
--
themselves with the archetypal contents of their unconscious, and, because they do not realize that the
role which is being thrust upon them is the effect of new contents still to be understood, they exemplify
--
In so far as the archetypal content of the Christian drama was able to give satisfying expression to the
uneasy and clamorous unconscious of the many, the consensus omnium raised this drama to a
--
Thus Jesus became the tutelary image or amulet against the archetypal powers that threatened to
possess everyone. The glad tidings announced: It has happened, but it will not happen to you inasmuch
--
When, therefore, modern psycho therapy once more meets with the activated archetypes of the
collective unconscious, it is merely the repetition of a phenomenon that has often been observed in
--
alchemy, since it leads in the ultimate phase of the work to the union of opposites in the archetypal form
of the hierosgamos or chymical wedding. Here the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the
--
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy (W.R. Trask, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
--
Eliade, M. (1975). Myths, dreams, and mysteries: The encounter between contemporary faiths and archaic
realities. New York: Harper Colophon, Harper and Row.
--
(1968a). Vol. 9. Part 1. The archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
(1978a). Vol. 9. Part 2. Aion: Rese arches into the Phenomenology of the Self.
--
Milner, B. (1963). Effects of different brain lesions on card sorting. archives of Neurology, 9, 100-110.
Milner, B. (1972). Disorders of learning and memory after temporal lobe lesions in man. Clinical
--
Neumann, E. (1955). The great mother: An analysis of the archetype (R. Manheim, Trans.). New York:
Pantheon Books.
--
Solzhenitsyn, A.I. The gulag archipelago, 1918-1956: An experiment in literary investigation (T.P.
Whitney, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row.
(1974). Vol. 1. The gulag archipelago.
(1975). Vol. 2. The gulag archipelago two.
(1978). Vol. 3. The gulag archipelago three.
Solzhenitsyn, A. I. (1990). Beauty will save the world. In J. Pelikan (Ed.), The world treasury of modern
--
emotion (think of archimedes Eureka!)]. What can reasonably be parsed out of the environmental flux as an
object is therefore determined in large part by the goal we have in mind while interacting with that flux. This
--
anima, the archetype of the feminine, with mood [see Jung. C.G. (1968a). p. 70]). Active imagination [see Jung.
C.G. (1968a). p. 190], a process which might be compared to purposive daydreaming with mood as the focus can
--
an archetype of the jealousy of an older son, Lucifer or Satan, at the preference shown to the younger Christ. [Frye,
N. (1982). pp. 180-181].
--
than the individual, which is to say that there are no more individuals but only specimens. But eternity which arches
over and high above the temporal, tranquil as the starry vault at night, and God in heaven who in the bliss of that
1.05 - The Magical Control of the Weather, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in
imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that
--
Michael the archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with
wings of pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout
--
example, in arcadia, when the corn and trees were p arched with
drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain
--
lower in the arctic sky, the Esquimaux of Iglulik play the game of
cat's cradle in order to catch him in the meshes of the string and
1.05 - The twelve simple letters, #Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice, #Anonymous, #Various
THIRD DIVISION. He let the letter predominate in sleep, crowned it, combined one with the other, and formed by them: Sagittarius (the archer) in the world, the month Kislev in the year, and the stomach of the human body, male and female.
.
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
like archimedes, Eratos thenes, Arist archus of Samos, Hip
p archus and Ptolemy. Marvin Minsky regrets the course
--
As early as 250 BC, archimedes was well on the way toward
modern physics and calculus. So, in an alternate version of
--
be considered to be the same divine archetype from whose
29 See talk 1: Adam Kadmon and the Evolution.
--
istence of this archetype that life in the evolution has gradu
ally taken on the shape which, for the time being, culminates
1.06 - BOOK THE SIXTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Its mighty arch along the heav'n displays;
From whence a thousand diff'rent colours rise,
1.06 - Hymns of Parashara, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
in us: he is like the flaming shaft of the archer with its keen
burning front. A twin he is born, a twin he is that which is
--
having knowledge. The archer loosed violently on him his
arrow of lightning, but the god set the flaming energy in his
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
tric arc) there are some of n,ooo (Sirius) and even of 23,000; and
on the other hand there are some as low as 3,500 (the red giants).
--
plex, hypercentered, hyperconscious arch-molecule, coextensive
LIFE AND THE PLANETS 109
1.06 - Magicians as Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
likewise compelled to yield to the dictates of this arch-official."
The foregoing evidence renders it probable that in Africa the king
1.06 - Psycho therapy and a Philosophy of Life, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
patients emotional states. These ideas present themselves in archetypal
form, freshly sprung from the maternal soil whence all religious and
--
always brings in its train archetypal contents of a spiritual nature, which
are at once its foundation and its limitation. In other words, an instinct is
--
however archaic, unclear, and hazy this may be. Instinct stimulates
thought, and if a man does not think of his own free will, then you get
--
As we know, this something out of the common proves, in practicalwork with the patient, to be an invasion by archetypal contents. If these
contents are to be assimilated, it is not enough to make use of the current
philosophical or religious ideas, for they simply do not fit the archaic
symbolism of the material. We are therefore forced to go back to pre-
1.06 - The Literal Qabalah, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Worship (far more than mere Phallieism) in all countries of all ages which ever has been the problem to archaeologists.
The word Naga, too, or Naja is discovered, so I am informed, on some of the cuneiform tablets in the ancient Temples of
--
" Grace ". The implication is that the study of this arcane wisdom of the Qabalah endows one with the Grace or
Shechinah from the Gods on high.
--
The letters mm YHVH of the Tetragrammaton are used to imply the whole gamut of the four elements. ' Y as the creative function of the archetypal Realm, is Fire the
Chiah ; the first n H represents the Cup, the symbol of the passive character of the Creative World, and is Water the
1.06 - The Sign of the Fishes, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Both Saturn and Ialdabaoth, the demiurge and highest archon,
have lion's faces. Origen elicits from the diagram of Celsus that
--
phus, 29 and Tacitus. 30 Sabaoth, the seventh archon, has the form
of an ass. 31 Tertullian is referring to these rumours when he says:
--
Joachim could have been seized by the archetype of the spirit.
There is no doubt that his activities were founded on a numi-
--
are gripped by an archetype. He understood the spirit in the
dogmatic sense as the third Person of the Godhead, for no other
way was possible, but not in the sense of the empirical arche-
type. This archetype is not of uniform meaning, but was orig-
inally an ambivalent dualistic figure 58 that broke through again
--
same time help the archetype of the spirit to break through in
all its characteristic ambivalence. It would be unjust to class so
--
vitalizing archetype gradually degenerated into rationalism,
intellectualism, and doctrinairism, all of which leads straight to
--
the urge of the archetype to realize itself. 61
43 The repercussions of the Holy Ghost movement spread, in
--
multifarious aspects of an archetype that manifests itself on the
one hand in a personality, and on the other hand synchro-
--
Christ's birth. Indeed, long before that, the archetype had been
written in the heavens by projection, so as then, "when the time
1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
7. A Song of Longing was translated by Lama Thubten Yeshe. Reprinted with kind permission from Lama Yeshe Wisdom archives
104
1.07 - BOOK THE SEVENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And to arcadia's shore their course apply'd;
Where sightless Phineus spent his age in grief,
1.07 - Bridge across the Afterlife, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
an architect, is one of two persons who at one time were
closest to Adolf Hitler, the other one being Rudolf Hess. In
--
materialistic and very matter-of-fact architect, powerful
minister and top Nazi, had had a near-death experience! As
--
[the cosmic Purusha, the archetype of what humanity is to
become].br idge ac r oss the afterlife
--
build the archetype of the supramental species. This is a
rather well documented real story, more fascinating than
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
repression. Freud later admitted the existence of archaic vestiges in the
unconscious, but thought they had more or less the significance of
1.07 - Raja-Yoga in Brief, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
Dhyana is spoken of, and a few examples are given of what to meditate upon. Sit straight, and look at the tip of your nose. Later on we shall come to know how that concentrates the mind, how by controlling the two optic nerves one advances a long way towards the control of the arc of reaction, and so to the control of the will. Here are a few specimens of meditation. Imagine a lotus upon the top of the head, several inches up, with virtue as its centre, and knowledge as its stalk. The eight petals of the lotus are the eight powers of the Yogi. Inside, the stamens and pistils are renunciation. If the Yogi refuses the external powers he will come to salvation. So the eight petals of the lotus are the eight powers, but the internal stamens and pistils are extreme renunciation, the renunciation of all these powers. Inside of that lotus think of the Golden One, the Almighty, the Intangible, He whose name is Om, the Inexpressible, surrounded with effulgent light. Meditate on that. Another meditation is given. Think of a space in your heart, and in the midst of that space think that a flame is burning. Think of that flame as your own soul and inside the flame is another effulgent light, and that is the Soul of your soul, God. Meditate upon that in the heart. Chastity, non-injury, forgiving even the greatest enemy, truth, faith in the Lord, these are all different Vrittis. Be not afraid if you are not perfect in all of these; work, they will come. He who has given up all attachment, all fear, and all anger, he whose whole soul has gone unto the Lord, he who has taken refuge in the Lord, whose heart has become purified, with whatsoever desire he comes to the Lord, He will grant that to him. Therefore worship Him through knowledge, love, or renunciation.
"He who hates none, who is the friend of all, who is merciful to all, who has nothing of his own, who is free from egoism, who is even-minded in pain and pleasure, who is forbearing, who is always satisfied, who works always in Yoga, whose self has become controlled, whose will is firm, whose mind and intellect are given up unto Me, such a one is My beloved Bhakta. From whom comes no disturbance, who cannot be disturbed by others, who is free from joy, anger, fear, and anxiety, such a one is My beloved. He who does not depend on anything, who is pure and active, who does not care whether good comes or evil, and never becomes miserable, who has given up all efforts for himself; who is the same in praise or in blame, with a silent, thoughtful mind, blessed with what little comes in his way, homeless, for the whole world is his home, and who is steady in his ideas, such a one is My beloved Bhakta." Such alone become Yogis.
1.07 - Samadhi, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
24:The Hindus assert that the nature of the object determines the Samadhi; that is, the nature of those lower Samadhis which confer so-called "magic powers." For example, there are the Yogapravritti. Meditating on the tip of the nose, one obtains what may be called the "ideal smell"; that is, a smell which is not any particular smell, but is the archetypal smell, of which all actual smells are modifications. It is "the smell which is "not" a smell." This is the only reasonable description; for the experience being contrary to reason, it is only reasonable that the words describing it should be contrary to reason too. footnote: Hence the Athanasian Creed. Compare the precise parallel in the Zohar: "The Head which is above all heads; the Head which is "not" a Head.'
25:Similarly, concentration on the tip of the tongue gives the "ideal taste"; on the dorsum of the tongue, "ideal contact." "Every atom of the body comes into contact with every atom in the Universe all at once," is the description Bhikku Ananda Metteya gives of it. The root of the tongue gives the "ideal sound"; and the pharynx the "ideal sight." footnote: Similarly Patanjali tells us that by making Samyama on the strength of an elephant or a tiger, the student acquires that strength. Conquer "the nerve Udana," and you can walk on the water; "Samana," and you begin to flash with light; the "elements" fire, air, earth, and water, and you can do whatever in natural life they prevent you from doing. For instance, by conquering earth, one could take a short cut to Australia; or by conquering water, one can live at the bottom of the Ganges. They say there is a holy man at Benares who does this, coming up only once a year to comfort and instruct his disciples. But nobody need believe this unless he wants to; and you are even advised to conquer that desire should it arise. It will be interesting when science really determines the variables and constants of these equations.
1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
It is my task in this chapter to give a factual account of the long process that led to Savitri in its final form. As the grand epic has captured many hearts all over the world by its supernal beauty I thought that they would be much interested in the history of its growth, development and final emergence the birth of the Golden Child. But I own that it is a formidable task. Though I had the unique good fortune to see Sri Aurobindo working on the epic in its entire revised version, and had some small share in being its scribe, to try in retrospect to reconstruct the imposing edifice from such a distance in memory is indeed difficult, for there are many versions, plenty of revisions, additions, subtractions, emendations from which the final version was made. To give an accurate report of all this process is beyond my capacity. For I am not a scholar, and have no aptitude for rese arch into old (or new) archives, neither did I ever dream that I should one day be called upon to render an account of what the Master had done, or left undone, through this poor mortal as his instrument. Had I not been helped by my esteemed and multi-capable friend Amal Kiran indefatigable rese archer no less than a poet and by a young friend as assistant, my readers would have had to remain content with just a bare outline.
The apology submitted, let the rash venture begin. Savitri, according to Dinen Roy,[1] was started by Sri Aurobindo in Baroda. From all the extant versions, for there are quite a number, it appears that originally the scheme of the poem consisted of two parts: I Earth, II Beyond. The first part had four Books and the second had three Books and an epilogue.
--
[4] Since then the Ashram's department of archives and Rese arch has done the needed classification.
[5]Eternity in Words (Chetna Prakashan, Bombay).
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
First and foremost, if this higher unfolding is to be called "religious" or "spiritual," it is a very far cry from what is ordinarily meant by those terms. We have spent several chapters painstakingly reviewing the earlier developments of the archaic, magic, and mythic structures (which are usually associated with the world's great religions), precisely because those structures are what transpersonal and contemplative development is not. And here we can definitely agree with Campbell: if 99.9 percent of people want to call magic and mythic "real religion," then so be it for them (that is a legitimate use);10 but that is not what the world's greatest yogis, saints, and sages mean by mystical or "really religious" development, and in any event is not what I have in mind. Campbell, however, is quite right that a very, very few individuals, during the magic and mythic and rational eras, were indeed able to go beyond magic, beyond mythic, and beyond rational-into the transrational and transpersonal domains. And even if their teachings (such as those of Buddha, Christ, Patanjali, Padmasambhava, Rumi, and Chih-i) were snapped up by the masses and translated downward into magic and mythic and egoic terms-"the salvation of the individual soul"-that is not what their teachings clearly and even blatantly stated, nor did they intentionally lend any support to such endeavors. Their teachings were about the release from individuality, and not about its everlasting perpetuation, a grotesque notion that was equated flat-out with hell or samsara. Their teachings, and their contemplative endeavors, were (and are) transrational through and through. That is, although all of the contemplative traditions aim at going within and beyond reason, they all start with reason, start with the notion that truth is to be established by evidence, that truth is the result of experimental methods, that truth is to be tested in the laboratory of personal experience, that these truths are open to all those who wish to try the experiment and thus disclose for themselves the truth or falsity of the spiritual claims-and that dogmas or given beliefs are precisely what hinder the emergence of deeper truths and wider visions.
Thus, each of these spiritual or transpersonal endeavors (which we will carefully examine) claims that there exist higher domains of awareness, embrace, love, identity, reality, self, and truth. But these claims are not dogmatic; they are not believed in merely because an authority proclaimed them, or because sociocentric tradition hands them down, or because salvation depends upon being a "true believer." Rather, the claims about these higher domains are a conclusion based on hundreds of years of experimental introspection and communal verification. False claims are rejected on the basis of consensual evidence, and further evidence is used to adjust and fine-tune the experimental conclusions.
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And this, as usual, contri buted to a split between Right- and Left-Hand theorists. The Right-Hand theorists, or the pure structuralists, wanted to study only the exterior structure of the system of signifiers in language and in culture (an approach which in turn gave way to the poststructuralists, who wanted to free the signifier from any grounding at all-as in Foucault's archaeology or Derrida's grammatology-and see it as free-floating or sliding, and anchored only by power or prejudice: meaning is indeed context-dependent, but contexts are boundless, and thus meaning is arbitrarily imposed by power or prejudice-the so-called "poststructural revolution" of "free-floating signifiers").
The Left-Hand theorists wanted to study the contexts within contexts of interior meaning, the signifieds that can only be interpreted, not seen, and interpreted only in a context of background cultural practices (the hermeneuticists, from Heidegger to Kuhn and Taylor and aspects of Wittgenstein).
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Several examples of referents and worldspaces: rocks exist in the sensorimotor worldspace; animistic clouds exist in the magic worldspace; Santa Claus exists in the mythic worldspace; the square root of a negative one exists in the rational worldspace; archetypes exist in the subtle worldspace, and so on-not as pregiven objects, but as the product of all four quadrants. And thus, in order to understand the referents represented by those signifiers (from "rocks" to " archetypes") one must possess the requisite depth through one's own interior development (so that those signifiers can evoke the appropriate signified: when you read "the square root of a negative one," you know what that means, what that signifies, but only if you have developed to formop). Just so, the words Buddha-nature and Godhead and Spirit and Dharmakaya are signifiers whose referents exist only in the transpersonal or spiritual worldspace, and they therefore require, for their understanding, a developmental signified, an appropriately developed interior or Left-Hand dimension corresponding with the exterior word, or else they remain only words, like the unseen dog, this unseen Spirit. And without the developmental signified, words will capture neither the dog nor the Spirit.
And note: I can run around until I find a dog and show you the dog, because we both exist in the sensorimotor worldspace and there is no developmental reason why you can't spot a dog. Or, in the other example, there is no reason you can't understand an as-if dog, whose referent exists in the rational worldspace. We already share that worldspace. We have already transformed to that level of depth: an entire and shared world of referents are therefore lying around for us to apprehend (because we have already created the worldspace or the opening in which they can manifest).
1.07 - The Fourth Circle The Avaricious and the Prodigal. Plutus. Fortune and her Wheel. The Fifth Circle The Irascible and the Sullen. Styx., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
A great arc 'twixt the dry bank and the swamp,
With eyes turned unto those who gorge the mire;
1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
World of Emanations or the archetypal World. The second is Olam Briah , the Creative World. The third is
Olam Yetsirah, the Formative World, all the above finding expression and dynamic concretion in Olam Assiah, the
World of Action or the Material World, which the Zohar considers to be the abiding truth of the harmonious co- operation of all the Sephiros, making the universe in all its orderliness and symmetry a true and exact manifestation of the Thought Divine of the archetypal World. The
Zoharic authority for this philosophic conception is to be found in Zohar, i, 156 et seq . :
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This division is contemplated in two distinct manners. In th e first method, Keser - the Sphere of the Primum Mobile - occupies the first plane alone. It is the archetype and
Creator of all the other Sephiros. Chokmah and Binah are considered as the Creative World, the region of Ideation and Cosmic Energization, from which evolves the World of
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the Tetragrammaton, and attributes each letter of this word to some one of the four Worlds. Yod to the arche- typal World, the first He to the Creative World, Vav to the
Formative World, and the final He being allocated to the
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In the second method, the Zohar places a whole Tree of ten Sephiros in each of the Four Worlds. The archetypal
World is the highest, being absolutely ideal. It is the plane of the Divine Thought, the Causal Plane of Cosmic Idea- tion, or the Mahat of Blavatslcian Theosophy.
The ten archetypal Sephiros project themselves into the
World of Briah, a plane less spiritual and less abstract.
Here the creative forces of the Gods seize upon the arche- typal ideas of things, expanding and vivifying and develop- ing the Tree on that particular plane. This is the mental plane proper, comparable in cosmical constitution to the conception of the Buach or the lower Manas of Theosophy in man. The lowest Sephirah in Atsilus thus becomes the
Keser in Briah, as the accompanying diagram shows, and the Malkus of Briah becomes the Keser of Yetsirah, and so on down the scale.
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The names of the suits, too, are descriptive to a very large extent of the nature of the Worlds. The Wand is the magical symbol of the Creative Will which evolves the original archetypal ideas in Olam Atsilus. They are pro- jected into Olam Brink, the Creative World, symbolized by the Cups. The Cup obviously is a feminine symbol, passive, and receptive, eager to receive the male influence from on high. The Sword relates to the Formative Plane, since the sword cuts, forms, and hews. The Pantacles, being formed of wax - a symbol of earth, passive and inert - symbolize the World of Action and matter, wherein the forces of the more transcendent planes have their field of manifestation.
Only one word of caution is here required. It must not be supposed that these Worlds are above one another in space or time. Such is not the Zoharic idea. This is one of the main drawbacks of diagrammatic representations. They are realms of consciousness each having an appropriate vehicle of matter, some more subtile, others more dense, than the other. Blavatsky states that they are " in co- adunition but not in consubstantiality The implication of this rather formidable phrase is that their substance is not of the same degree of density, although spatially they may occupy the same position. The distinction, however, is of quality of matter, not of position in space.
1.07 - The Prophecies of Nostradamus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Fantasy could do the rest, for the archetype had long been ready
and was only waiting for the time to be fulfilled. That a usurper
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Qabalistic texts, against archaisms and erotic forms of expression. With the rationale here extended no difficulty should be experienced in piercing the conventional forms of writing, and obtaining true understanding.)
At this juncture, however, we will deal with Meditation in its Hindu form as Yoga, since that system has been very elaborately detailed ; and consider meditation as a general formula, leaving its particular divisions for discussion in connection with the Grades attributed to the ten Sephiros.
1.08 - BOOK THE EIGHTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
His voice with loud applause, and the fair archer prais'd.
He was the first to see, and first to show
1.08 - Origin of Rudra: his becoming eight Rudras, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[1]: The sacrifice of Dakṣa is a legend of some interest, from its historical and archeological relations. It is obviously intended to intimate a struggle between the worshippers of Śiva and of Viṣṇu, in which at first the latter, but finally the former, acquired the ascendancy. It is also a favourite subject of Hindu sculpture, at least with the Hindus of the Śaiva division, and makes a conspicuous figure both at Elephanta and Ellora. A representation of the dispersion and mutilation of the gods and sages by Vīrabhadra, at the former, is published in the archæologia, VII. 326, where it is described as the Judgment of Solomon! a figure of Vīrabhadra is given by Niebuhr, vol. II. tab. 10: and the entire group in the Bombay Transactions, vol. I. p. 220. It is described, p. 229; but Mr. Erskine has not verified the subject, although it cannot admit of doubt. The groupe described, p. 224, probably represents the introductory details given in our text. Of the Ellora sculptures, a striking one occurs in what Sir C. Malet calls the Doomar Leyna cave, where is "Veer Budder, with eight hands. In one is suspended the slain Rajah Dutz." A. R. VI. 396. And there is also a representation of 'Ehr Budr,' in one of the colonades of Kailas; being, in fact, the same figure as that at Elephanta. Bombay Tr. III. 287. The legend of Dakṣa therefore was popular when those cavern temples were excavated. The story is told in much more detail in several other Purāṇas, and with some variations, which will be noticed: but the above has been selected as a specimen of the style of the Vāyu Purāṇa, and as being a narration which, from its inartificial, obscure, tautological, and uncircumstantial construction, is probably of an ancient date. The same legend, in the same words, is given in the Brāhma P.
[2]: Or this may he understood to imply, that the original story is in the Vedas; the term being, as usual in such a reference, ###. Ga
1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
recognition by being formulated as an arcane discipline and by all the
rubbish that this draws in its wake. In alchemy there lies concealed a
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achievement of Christianity that, in contrast to these archaic systems which
are all based on the original projection of psychic contents, it gave to each
1.08 - Sri Aurobindos Descent into Death, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
she has gradually realized the archetype of the supramental
body by means of her physical body. By these two realiza-
1.08 - The Change of Vision, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Truth is totally natural, which is why we do not see it. It is even the most natural thing in the world. It was there from the very first blast of atoms, otherwise when would it have ever appeared, at what period of Andromeda, the Crab or the local galaxy we live in, brought by what prophet, what discovery, what miracle? Prophets have come and gone; discovery is added to discovery and today's miracles will form archeological strata for the citizens of another era. We aren't there yet, and yet we have always been there, in the midst of the miracle. Only, there is a moment when one opens one's eyes to the miracle. And that is the only moment in the world, the Great Moment of all ages and all earths for everything is tied together, there is but one body in the world and but one look for all the universes. We cannot change one point of the world without changing everything, open our eyes here without opening them all, instantly, regardless of distance, because there is but one Truth and one center.
Is this to say that nobody has ever touched this Truth? Of course it has been touched, but on the mental heights, in rare illuminations that left a trace here or there, on a Buddha's face in Indonesia, an Athena in the Par thenon, a smile in Rheims, in some marvelous Upanishads, a few words of grace that have survived as a golden and adorable anachronism, hardly real amidst our concrete structures and civilized savagery; it has been touched in the depths of the heart, stammered out by Saint Francis of Assisi or Sri Ramakrishna. But then the world goes on, and we all know that the last word belongs to the bomb and to the triumph of the latest democratic hero, who will soon join another one under the same layer of inanity. But it has never been touched in matter; it has never been touched there. And so long as it is not touched there, it will remain what it has always been, a brilliant dream over the chaos of the ages, and the world will go on whirling vainly, adding its discoveries that discover nothing and its pseudo-knowledge that always ends up stifling us. Indeed, we labor under a bizarre delusion: we right a wrong here only to cause another one to sprout there; we seal a crack here only to see the wound open wider somewhere else. And it is always the same wound; there is only one wound in the world, and so long as we do not want to be cured of that ill, our millions of drugs and parliaments and systems and laws millions of laws, on every street corner and right in our mailbox will never cure us or the world's illness. We philanthropize and altruize, we distribute and share and equalize; but our good deeds seem to go hand in hand with our misdeeds, and the misery, the great misery of the world, infiltrates everything and gnaws surreptitiously at our functional homes and empty hearts; our equalizations are the huge, gray uniformity that descends upon the earth, smothering equally the good and the less good, the rich and the poor, the crowds from here or there the great mechanized human crowd, disincarnate, manipulated by a thousand radios and newspapers that scream and rumble all the way up to Himalayan villages. And no news at all. Not a single bit of news in those billions of novelties! Not an iota of novelty under the stars: men suffer and die in cities teeming with mental disorders. But tomorrow will be better, we think, with more machines, more drugs, more red or blue or green crosses, more laws and still more laws to remedy the world's cancer. And we seem to hear, from far, far away in the past, six thousand years in the past, the moving little voice of Lopamudra, the wife of Rishi Agastya: Many autumns have I toiled night and day; the dawns age me, age dims the glory of our bodies...,16 and that of Maitreya echoing her: What shall I do with that by which the nectar of Immortality is not attained?17
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
Teresa is positively brilliant in distinguishing the agonies of the soul in its higher mansions or stages from those emotional problems that characterize the lower faculties. She clearly distinguishes, for example, three types of "inner voices"-those of "the fancy" or "imagination," which can be hallucinatory and "diseased," she says; those that are verbal, and may or may not represent true wisdom (for they may also be deceptive and "diseased"); and those that are transverbal altogether, representing direct interior apprehension. She has an exquisite and precise discriminating awareness between "fancies" and "hallucinations" and direct intuitive apprehensions, and she explains the differences at length. She gives clear and classic phenomenological descriptions of so many of the subtle-level apprehensions: interior illumination, sound, bliss, and understanding beyond ordinary time and place; genuine archetypal Form as creative pattern (not mythic motif); and psychic vision giving way to pure nonverbal, transverbal, subtle intuition; all summating in the "union of the whole soul with uncreated Spirit."
As for the use of the term "supernatural" by certain contemplatives (both East and West), care should be taken to differentiate what they mean by that term and what, for example, the mythic or religious literalist means by it.
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The list is virtually endless. And, as we discussed earlier, they are all, as far as they go, essentially correct in many important ways, and they each can teach us much about expanding the circle and the context of care. (Previously, the mythic structure had said the same thing about itself in relation to archaic and magic: it had claimed that the coming of the mythic God was an end to all tribal history-and that was also true enough.)
Francis Fukuyama recently caused an international sensation with the publication of The End of History, in which he asks "whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us to speak of a coherent and directional
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But why, it might be asked, should each subjective order or stratum of consciousness necessarily involve the co-existence of a corresponding order of beings & objective world-stratum? For the modern mind, speculative & introspective like the Vedic, is yet speculative within the limits of sensational experience and therefore unable to believe in, even if it can conceive of existence, least of all of an objective existence under conditions different from those [with] which we are familiar and of which our senses assure us. We may therefore admit the profundity & subtlety of the subjective distinction, but we shall be apt to regard the belief in objective worlds & beings unseen by our senses as either an early poetic fancy or a crude superstition of savages. But the Vedic mentality, although perfectly rational, stood at the opposite pole of ideas from the modern and its subjective consciousness admitted a class of experiences which we reject and cut short the moment they begin to present themselves by condemning them as hallucinations. The idea of modern men that the ancients evolved their gods by a process of poetic imagination, is an error due to inability to understand an alien mentality & unwillingness to investigate from within those survivals of it which still subsist though with difficulty under modern conditions. Encouraging this order of phenomena, fostering & developing carefully the states of mind in which they were possible and the movements of mind & sense by which they were effected, the Vedic Rishis saw and communed with the gods and threw themselves into the worlds of which they had the conception. They believed in them for the same reason that Joan of arc believed in her saints & her voices, Socrates in his daemon or Swedenborg in his spirits, because they had constant experience of them and of the validity both of the experiences and of the instruments of mind & sense by which they were maintained in operation. They would have answered a modern objector that they had as good a proof of them as the scientist has of the worlds & the different orders of life revealed to his optical nerve by microscope & telescope. Some of them might even question whether these scientific discoveries were not optical illusions due to the excitation of the nerve by the instruments utilised! We may, similarly, get rid of the Vedic experiences, disbelieve and discount them, saying that they missed one essential instrument of truth, the sceptical distrust of their instruments,but we cannot argue from them in the minds that received them a childish irrationality or a savage superstition. They trusted, like us, their experience, believed their mind & senses and argued logically from their premisses.
It is true that apart from these experiences the existence of various worlds & different orders of beings was a logical necessity of the Vedic conception of existence. Existence being a life, a soul expressing itself in forms, every distinct order of consciousness, every stratum or sea of conscious-being (samudra, sindhu, apah as the Vedic thinkers preferred to call them) demanded its own order of objective experiences (lokas, worlds), tended inevitably to throw itself into forms of individualised being (vishah, ganah, prajah). Moreover, in a world so conceived, nothing could happen in this world without relation to some force or being in the worlds behind; nor could there be any material, vital or mental movement except as the expression of a life & a soul behind it. Everything here must be supported from the worlds of mind or it could not maintain its existence. From this idea to the peopling of the world with innumerable mental & vital existences,existences essentially vital like the Naiads, Dryads, Nereids, Genii, Lares & Penates of the Greeks and Romans, the wood-gods, river-gods, house-gods, tree-deities, snake-deities of the Indians, or mental like the intermediate gods of our old Pantheon, would be a natural and inevitable step. This Animism is a remarkably universal feature in the religious culture of the ancient world. I cannot accept the modern view that its survival in a crude form among the savages, those waifs & strays of human progress, is a proof of their low & savage originany more than the peculiarly crude ideas of Christianity that exist in uneducated negro minds [and] would survive in a still more degraded form if they were long isolated from civilised life, would be a proof to future rese arch that Christianity originated from a cannibal tribe on the African continent. The idea is essentially a civilised conception proceeding from keen susceptibility & only possible after a meditative dwelling upon Naturenot different indeed in rank & order from Wordsworths experience of Nature which no one, I suppose, would consider an atavistic recrudescence of old savage mentality, and impossible to the animal man. The dog & crow who reason from their senses, do not stand in awe of inanimate objects, or of dawn & rain & shine or expect from them favours.
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If the Veda is a great religious and psychological document and not an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants passages which preserve, in spite of the unavoidable difficulties of an archaic language, their ancient truth on their surface. The totality of the Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, constant in its ideas and unchanging in its terms that we may hope from even one such text a help considerably beyond the measure of its actual length & scope in fixing the nature of theVedic outlook and helping us to some clue to the secret of its characteristic expressions. Our desideratum is a passage in which the god of the Riks must be a mental or moral Power, the thoughts religious, intellectual or psychological in their substance, the expressions insistent in their clear superphysical intention.We will begin with a striking passage in a hymn, put by Vyasa very early in the order of his collection.It is the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhanda, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the three closing riks of the hymn are the indicative passage
Saraswati, a name familiar to the religious conceptions of the race from our earliest eras, & of incessant occurrence in poetic phraseology and image, is worshipped yearly even at the present day in all provinces of the peninsula no less than those many millenniums ago in the prehistoric dawn of our religion and literature. Consistently, subsequent to the Vedic times, she has been worshipped everywhere & is named in all passages as a goddess of speech, poetry, learning and eloquence. Epic, Purana and the popular imagination know her solely as this deity of speech & knowledge. She ranks therefore in the order of religious ideas with the old Hellenic conceptions of Pallas, Aphrodite or the Muses; nor does any least shadow of the material Nature-power linger to lower the clear intellectuality of her powers and functions. But there is also a river Saraswati or several rivers of that name. Therefore, the doubt suggests itself: In any given passage may it not be the Aryan river, Saraswati, which the bards are chanting? even if they sing of her or cry to her as a goddess, may it not still be the River, so dear, sacred & beneficent to them, that they worship? Or even where she is clearly a goddess of speech and thought, may it not be that the Aryans, having had originally no intellectual or moral conceptions and therefore no gods of the mind and heart, converted, when they did feel the need, this sacred flowing River into a goddess of sacred flowing song? In that case we are likely to find in her epithets & activities the traces of this double capacity.
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If the Vedas have a deep religious and psychological significance such as I have attributed to them, if they are not, as the disciples of the Europeans suppose, an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants, in the fixed formulae and individual variations of these voluminous songs to a small number of strongly characterised deities, some individual riks, some occasional passages, some entire hymns, even, which, in spite of the difficulties of an archaic diction & the concealing veil of a changed vocabulary, still bear the ancient truth on their very surface. The totality of the Rig Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, so constant in its common terms, so fixed & unchanging in its principal ideas that even one such rik, passage or hymn ought to exceed the limits of its single text & shed a wide light over the whole surface of Vedic thought & phraseology. Is there any such passage easily discoverable? There is one, I think, which occurs very early in the collection and by the nature of its presiding deity, its strongly subjective purport & its clear and striking language seems to fulfil our desideratum. It occurs in the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhandas, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the last three riks of the hymn constitute the indicative passage.
In Saraswati we have a deity with subjective functions the first desideratum in our enquiry. Still, there is a doubt, a difficulty. Saraswati of the Epics & Puranas, Saraswati, as she is worshipped today throughout India is, no doubt, a purely subjective goddess and presides only over intellectual and immaterial functions. She is our Lady of Speech, the Muse, the goddess of Poetry, Art and Learning. Saraswati, the flowing, is also the name of more than one river in modern India, but especially of the sacred stream in upper India supposed to join secretly in their confluence the waters of theGanges and Yamuna and form with them the holy Triveni or triple braid of waters in which the ceremonial ablution of the devotee is more potent than at almost any other Indian place of pilgrimage and gives the richest spiritual fruit to the believing pilgrim. But in our modern religious ideas there is no real connexion, except of name, between the goddess and the river. In the Veda also there is a Saraswati who is the goddess of speech; in the Veda also there seems to be an ancient river Saraswati, although this stream is placed by Vedic scholars in the Panjab and not in the vicinity of Prayaga and Ayodhya. Were these two deities,for every river and indeed every natural object was to the Vedic Rishis a divine being,the same goddess Saraswati? Sayana accepts, even in this passage, their identity; she is, he tells us, [].1 If this identity were accepted, we would have to ask ourselves by what process of subjective metamorphosis a material Panjab river came to be the deity of Speech, the female power of Brahma, the Muse and tutelar goddess of scholar and poet. Or was not rather the goddess of speech eponymous of the river and subsequently imaged in it by the Vedic symbolists? But before we descend to these ulterior questions, we must first know for certain whether Sayana is right in his identification of the river and the Muse. First of all, are they the same in this passage? secondly, are they the same in any passage of the Veda? It is to the first question alone that we need address ourselves for the present; for on its solution depends the whole purport, value and helpfulness of these three Riks for the purposes of our enquiry into the sense and secret of the Vedas.
1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
the same time so archaic that we may safely regard it as autoch-
thonous.
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nevertheless seems to me to hint at an archetype ("complexum generalem") of
the "spirit of gravity."
1.08 - The Magic Sword, Dagger and Trident, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
There are evocations of negative beings and such not liking being transferred into our physical world. For these beings the magician will use, should the magic wand not suffice, the magic sword, providing he insists on their manifestation. The magic sword has several symbolic meanings, but generally it serves as the symbol of absolute obedience of a being or a power to the magician. It is also the symbol of victory and superiority over any power or being. The sword is analogous to the light, it is an aspect of the fire and of the word. Already the bible says: "In the beginning was the word - light - and the word was with God". He who is somewhat acquainted with symbolism will remember that, as an example, archangel Michael, the killer of the dragon, is symbolized with a burning sword; the dragon, in this case, is the symbol of the hostile, the negative principle. Adam and Eve, too, were driven out of paradise by an angel with a burning sword.
The symbolic meaning is also in this case quite clear and unequivocal.
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The charge of the sword is done by transferring upon it, by the help of the imagination, the qualities belonging to it, such as the power over all beings, the absolute victory and the respect due to it as the symbol of combat, life etc. These qualities have to be dynamically intensified in the sword by repeated charging. The magician may also accumulate the light-fluid in the sword in such a way that it will look like the shining sun or like a flaming sword, similar to that one which archangel Michael holds in his hand in his symbolic pictures.
The main point is the attitude of the magician towards the magic sword accompanied by an unbreakable belief in his absolute victory in all planes, which will give the sword the necessary force so that every power, every being will fear and respect it under any circumstance. After each use the sword has to be wrapped up in a piece of white or black silk and put away safely like the other magic implements.
1.08 - THE QUEEN'S CROQUET GROUND, #Alice in Wonderland, #Lewis Carroll, #Fiction
Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows. The croquet balls were live hedgehogs, and the mallets live flamingos and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
The players all played at once, without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time, the Queen was in a furious passion and went stamping about and shouting, "Off with his head!" or "Off with her head!" about once in a minute.
1.096 - Powers that Accrue in the Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
There were great yogis such as Suka and Jadabharata. Jadabharatas case was very marvellous. He never exhibited powers, and there is no indication anywhere that he was even aware that he had powers. He was like an idiot. Some dacoits caught hold of him and took him to Mother Kali to offer him as a victim in the worship, and he said nothing. He kept quiet and did not open his mouth. He did not behave like a yogi. When the archaka raised his sword to offer the victim to Mother Kali, a miracle took place. That image, which was apparently made of stone, assumed life, and suddenly a force emerged. The real Kali came out, and she simply laid waste the entire gang of the dacoits. They were offered as victims, not this old man.
We have stories and stories of this kind, where great masters lived hidden, unknown to the public eye, unseen not only not known to the public eye, but sometimes not known even to themselves, inasmuch as they were absorbed in something else altogether. They had no time to think of their own powers and even their own needs. Janaka was one type of yogi, Sri Krishna was another type, Rama was a third type, Suka was another, and so on. There are various kinds of yogis who lived in different conditions and circumstances, all wielding the same powers some exhibiting, some not exhibiting.
1.09 - BOOK THE NINTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Or the fell boar that spoil'd th' arcadian land?
Did not these arms the Hydra's rage subdue,
1.09 - Civilisation and Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is mans real business, these are his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get his livelihood, support a family and then die,the vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as well as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to control, create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner existence, his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Mans consciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the supreme fact of his existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his society.
The pursuit of the mental life for its own sake is what we ordinarily mean by culture; but the word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense according to our ideas and predilections. For our mental existence is a very complex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we have its lower and fundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital. And we have in that stratum two sides, the mental life of the senses, sensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates although with the objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of the mental being concerned with the organs of action and the field of conduct in which her objective purpose predominates although with the subjective as its occasion. We have next in the scale, more sublimated, on one side the moral being and its ethical life, on the other the aesthetic; each of them attempts to possess and dominate the fundamental mind stratum and turn its experiences and activities to its own benefit, one for the culture and worship of Right, the other for the culture and worship of Beauty. And we have, above all these, taking advantage of them, helping, forming, trying often to govern them entirely, the intellectual being. Mans highest accomplished range is the life of the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of intelligent will, the buddhi, which is or should be the driver of mans chariot.
1.09 - Fundamental Questions of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
images that can only be described as archaic. They are found more
particularly in dreams and in waking fantasies. He, too, tried to interpret or
--
derive from archaic modes of psychic functioning, one must, in carrying
out these investigations, have at ones comm and a vast amount of
--
as it were, from some transcendental archimedean point outside. I am
fully aware that I am entrapped in the psyche and that I cannot do anything
1.09 - Legend of Lakshmi, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[10]: Or Vārttā, explained to mean the Śilpa śāstra, mechanics, sculpture, and architecture; Āyur-veda, medicine, &c.
[11]: The cause of this, however, is left unexplained. The Padma P. inserts a legend to account for the temporary separation of Lakṣmī from Viṣṇu, which appears to be peculiar to that work. Bhrigu was lord of Lakṣmīpur, a city on the Narmadā, given him by Brahmā. His daughter Lakṣmī instigated her husband to request its being conceded to her, which offending Bhrigu, he cursed Viṣṇu to be born upon earth ten times, to be separated from his wife, and to have no children. The legend is an insipid modern embellishment.
1.09 - Saraswati and Her Consorts, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Vedic system, as in most very ancient schools of thought. We find it recurring constantly, - the seven delights, sapta ratnani; the seven flames, tongues or rays of Agni, sapta arcis.ah., sapta jvalah.; the seven forms of the Thought-principle, sapta dhtayah.; the seven Rays or Cows, forms of the Cow unslayable, Aditi, mother of the gods, sapta gavah.; the seven rivers, the seven mothers or fostering cows, sapta matarah., sapta dhenavah., a term applied indifferently to the Rays and to the Rivers. All these sets of seven depend, it seems to me, upon the Vedic classification of the fundamental principles, the tattvas, of existence.
The enquiry into the number of these tattvas greatly interested the speculative mind of the ancients and in Indian philosophy we find various answers ranging from the One upward and running into the twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was the number of the psychological principles, because all existence was conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being.
1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
The architect manifests neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian state: In
his case it is the great act of will, the will that moveth mountains,
--
men have always inspired architects; the architect has always been
under the suggestion of power. In the architectural structure, man's
pride, man's triumph over gravitation, man's will to power, assume
a visible form. architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means
of forms. Now it is persuasive, even flattering, and at other times
1.09 - Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
the confidence. Statements like this, by the arch-scientific-
materialist and fertile popular author Peter Atkins, belong
--
24 Sri Aurobindo archives and Rese arch, 1979, vol. I, p. 9.sri aurobindo and the big bang
207
--
26 Sri Aurobindo archives and Rese arch, 1979, vol. I, p. 9 (emphasis added).
27 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 212.sri aurobindo and the big bang
1.09 - Talks, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
I have said so much about his voice, I might as well add a few words about his eyes. Opinions about them vary according to the inner quality of the person who saw them. Sir Edward Baker, Governor of Bengal, archenemy of Sri Aurobindo's fiery nationalism, described them as "the eyes of a madman" when he visited him in Alipore Jail. The English Principal of the Baroda College said, "...There is a mystic fire and light in them. They penetrate into the beyond. If Joan of arc heard heavenly voices, Aurobindo probably sees heavenly visions." Upen Banerjee, a close associate of Sri Aurobindo during his revolutionary period, describes his first meeting with him, "That sickly, dark, malaria-afflicted man is Aurobindo? He is our Chief?... My spirit was awfully damped at the sight, but just then he turned to look at me. I don't know how to describe that look. There was a liquid sparkle of amusement in it, but the pupils gave me a sense of fathomless wonder that baffled all analysis. Even today the mystery has not left me."
Arjava (J. A. Chadwick) remarked, "How beautifully he writes, how crystal clear! Not a trace of haziness anywhere. No abracadabra, wanting to show off and yet how luminous shedding light without heat like his eyes!"
1.09 - The Guardian of the Threshold, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
group soul of a people does not descend into physical reality but dwells in the higher worlds and, in order to work in the physical world, makes use of the physical organs of each individual human being. In a higher sense, it is like an architect making use of workmen for executing the details of a building. In the truest sense, everyone receives his allotted task from his family, national, or racial group soul. Now, the ordinary person is by no means initiated into the higher design of his work. He joins unconsciously in the tasks of his people and of his race. From the moment the student meets the Guardian, he must not only know his own tasks, but must knowingly collaborate in those of his folk, his race. Every extension of his horizon necessarily enlarges the scope of his duties. What actually happens is that the student adds a new body to his finer soul-body. He puts on a second garment. Hitherto he found his way through the world with the coverings enveloping his personality; and what he had to accomplish for his community, his nation, his race, was directed by higher spirits who made use of his personality.
And now, a further revelation made to him by the Guardian of the Threshold is that henceforth
1.09 - The Worship of Trees, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of elms, chestnuts, and especially of oaks. archaeology is here
confirmed by history; for classical writers contain many references
--
other trees still linger on the slopes of the high arcadian
mountains, still adorn with their verdure the deep gorge through
11.01 - The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In serene arches of translucent calm
From Wonder's dream-vasts cloudless skies slid down
--
In him the architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
--
And under revelation's arches forced
The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,
--
The forge where the archmason shapes his works.
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
1.1.05 - The Siddhis, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Siddhis, but recognised them as a part, though not the most important part of Yogic accomplishment, and used them with an abundant and unhesitating vigour. They are recognised in our sacred books, formally included in Yoga by so devotional a Purana as the Bhagawat, noted and some of their processes carefully tabled by Patanjali. Even in the midnight of the Kali great Siddhas and saints have used them more sparingly, but with power and effectiveness. It would be difficult for many of them to do otherwise than use the siddhis since by the very fact of their spiritual elevation, these powers have become not exceptional movements, but the ordinary processes of their thought and action. It is by the use of the siddhis that the Siddhas sitting on the mountains help the world out of the heart of their solitude and silence. Jesus Christ made the use of the siddhis a prominent feature of his pure, noble and spiritual life, nor did he hesitate to communicate them to his disciples - the laying of hands, the healing of the sick, the ashirvada, the abhishap, the speaking with many tongues were all given to them. The day of Pentecost is still kept holy by the Christian Church. Joan of arc used her siddhis to liberate France. Socrates had his siddhis, some of them of a very material nature. Men of great genius are usually born with some of them and use them unconsciously. Even in natures far below the power and clarity of genius we see their occasional or irregular operation. The West, always avid of knowledge, is struggling, sadly hampered by misuse and imposture, to develop them and gropes roughly for the truth about them in the phenomena of hypnotism, clairvoyance, telepathy, vouched for by men and women of great intellectuality and sincerity. Returning
Eastwards, where only their right practice has been understood, the lives of our saints northern and southern are full of the record of Siddhis. Sri Ramakrishna, whose authority is quoted against
1.10 - Aesthetic and Ethical Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
On the other hand, we are tempted to give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations, whatever their defects, which have encouraged a freely human development and like ancient Athens have concentrated on thought and beauty and the delight of living. But there were in the Athenian development two distinct periods, one of art and beauty, the Athens of Phidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the Athens of the philosophers. In the first period the sense of beauty and the need of freedom of life and the enjoyment of life are the determining forces. This Athens thought, but it thought in the terms of art and poetry, in figures of music and drama and architecture and sculpture; it delighted in intellectual discussion, but not so much with any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of thinking and the beauty of ideas. It had its moral order, for without that no society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical type, only a conventional and customary morality; and when it thought about ethics, it tended to express it in the terms of beauty, to kalon, to epieikes, the beautiful, the becoming. Its very religion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant ritual and festivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic enjoyment touched with a superficial religious sense. But without character, without some kind of high or strong discipline there is no enduring power of life. Athens exhausted its vitality within one wonderful century which left it enervated, will-less, unable to succeed in the struggle of life, uncreative. It turned indeed for a time precisely to that which had been lacking to it, the serious pursuit of truth and the evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could only think, it could not successfully practise. The later Hellenic mind and Athenian centre of culture gave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical discipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century, but could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to the characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a straining to something it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and not its fulfilment.
This insufficiency of the aesthetic view of life becomes yet more evident when we come down to its other great example, Italy of the Renascence. The Renascence was regarded at one time as pre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was rather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life. Much more than was possible even in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was divorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and reminiscent of the licence of imperial Rome. It had learning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and truth and the more finished achievements of the reason, although it helped to make free the way for philosophy and science. It so corrupted religion as to provoke in the ethically minded Teutonic nations the violent revolt of the Reformation, which, though it vindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was an insurgence not so much of the reason,that was left to Science,but of the moral instinct and its ethical need. The subsequent prostration and loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable result of the great defect of its period of fine culture, and it needed for its revival the new impulse of thought and will and character given to it by Mazzini. If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for the development of the human being, yet are will, character, self-discipline, self-mastery indispensable to that development. They are the backbone of the mental body.
1.10 - BOOK THE TENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
'Twas depth of night: arctophylax had driv'n
His lazy wain half round the northern Heav'n,
1.10 - Harmony, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
There are no miracles. There is a vast Harmony which governs the world with a precision and delicacy as faultless in the meeting of atoms and the cycle of flowering and the return of migrating birds as in the meeting of men and the unfolding of events at a particular juncture. There is a vast, unique movement we thought we were separated from because we had built our little mental turrets on the frontier of our comprehension and black dotted lines on the softness of a great earthly hill, as others had built their hunting grounds, and the sea gulls, their white archipelago on the foam-flecked waters. And because we had put on these blinders or others to protect ourselves from the formidable magnitude of our lands, erected these dwarf fences to farm our little acre, the little wave of energy trapped in our sails, the little golden (or less golden) fireflies caught in the net of our intelligence, the little note captured from too great a Harmony, we have thought that the world behaved according to our laws, or at least our laws to the factual wisdom of our instruments and calculations, and that anything that exceeded this partitioning of the world or slipped through the meshes was unthinkable or nonexistent, miraculous hallucinatory. We were caught in our own trap. And by some gracious kindness which is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries to elucidate the world began to resemble our drawings of erudite children, our illnesses to follow the doctor's prognosis, our bodies to obey the prescribed medicine, our lives to travel in the designated groove between two walls of impossibility, and even our events to bow obligingly before our statistics and our thought of events. The world actually became mentalized from one end to the other and from top to bottom. Thought is the latest magician on the list, after the Mongolian shaman, the Theban occultist or the Bantu witchdoctor. It remains to be seen whether our magic is better than the others but magic it is, and we are not yet aware of all its power. But, in truth, there is only one Power, which uses an amulet, a Tantric yantra23 or an incantation, equally as well as a differential equation or even our simple and futile little thought. What do we want? That is the question.
We manipulate thought haphazardly. Generally, we do not even manipulate it; it manipulates us. We are besieged by a thousand useless thoughts that run back and forth through our inner realm, automatically, futilely, ten, perhaps a hundred times by the time we have walked down the boulevard or climbed the stairs. It is hardly thought; it is a sort of thinking current that got into the habit of following some of our convolutions and circumvolutions and assumes a more or less neutral color, more or less brilliant, depending on our taste or inclination, our heredity, our environment, and is expressed by preferred or customary words, blue or gray philosophies in one language or another but it is one and the same current running everywhere. It is the mental machinery clicking and rumbling and working sempiternally the same range or intensity of the general current. This activity veils everything, envelops everything, and casts a pall over everything with its thick and sticky cloud. But the seeker of the new world is one step removed from this machinery; he has discovered the quiet little clearing behind; he has lit a fire of need in the center of his being; he takes his fire everywhere he goes. And everything is different for him. Unclouded in his little clearing, he begins to see the functioning of the mind; he watches the great play, uncovers step by step the secrets of the mental magic which ought perhaps to be called mental illusion, though if it is an illusion, it is a very effective one. And all sorts of phenomena begin to attract his notice, a little disorderly, in recurring little spurts that end up making a coherent picture. The more he sees, the stronger his control.
--
And the bubble grows. It takes in families, peoples, continents; it takes in every color, every wisdom, every truth, and envelops them. There is that breath of light, that note of beauty, the miracle of those few lines caught in architecture or geometry, that instant of truth that heals and delivers, that lovely curve glimpsed in a flash which links that star to this destiny, this asymptote to that hyperbola, this man to that song, this gesture to that effect and more men come, men by the thousands, who come puffing and inflating the little bubble, creating pink and blue and everlasting religions, infallible salvations in the great bubble, summits of light that are the sum of their compounded little hopes, abysses of hell that are the sum of their cherished fears; who come adding this note and that idea, this grain of knowledge and that healing second, this conjunction and that curve, that moment of effectiveness beneath the dust of the myriads of galaxies, chromatic temples, devising unquestionable medicines under the great bubble, irreducible sciences, implacable geometries, charts of illness, charts of recovery, charts of destiny. And everything twists and turns as the doctor willed it under the great fateful Bubble, as the scientist willed it, as that moment of coincidence among the countless myriads of lines in the universe has decided it for the eternity of time. We have seized a minute of the world and made it into the huge amber light that blinds and suffocates us in the great mental bubble. And there is nothing of the kind not one single law, not one single illness, not one single medical or scientific dogma, not one single temple is true,, not one perpetual chart, not one single destiny under the stars there is a tremendous mental hypnotism, and behind, far, far behind, and yet right here, so much here, immediately here, something impregnable, unseizable by any snare, unrestricted by any law, invulnerable to every illness and every hypnotism, unsaved by our salvations, unsullied by our sins, unsullied by our virtues, free from every destiny and every chart, from every golden or black bubble a pure, infallible bird that can recreate the world in the twinkling of an eye. We change our look, and everything changes. Gone is the pretty bubble. It is here if we want.
When the bubble bursts, we begin to enter supermanhood. We begin to enter Harmony. Oh, it does not burst through our efforts; it does not give way through any amount of virtues and meditation, which on the contrary further harden the bubble, give it such a lovely shine, such a captivating light that it indeed takes us captive, and we are all the more prisoners as the more beautiful the bubble is, held more captive by our good than by our evil there is nothing harder in the world then a truth caught in our traps; it does not care at all about our virtues and accumulated merits, our brilliant talents or even our obscure weaknesses. Who is great? Who is small and obscure, or less obscure, beneath the drifting of the galaxies that look like the dust of a great Sun? The Truth, the ineffable Sweetness of things and of each thing, the living Heart of millions of beings who do not know, does not require us to become true to bestow its truth upon us who could become true, who would become other than he is, what are we actually capable of? We are capable of pain and misery aplenty; we are capable of smallness and more smallness, error garbed in a speck of light, knowledge that stumbles into its own quagmires, a good that is the luminous shadow of its secret evil, freedom that imprisons itself in its own salvation we are capable of suffering and suffering, and even our suffering is a secret delight. The Truth, the light Truth, escapes our dark or luminous snares. It runs, breathes with the wind, cascades with the spring, cascades everywhere, for it is the spring of everything. It even murmurs in the depths of our falsehood, winks an eye in our darkness and pokes fun at us. It sets its light traps for us, so light we do not see them; it beckons us in a thousand ways at every instant and everywhere, but it is so fleeting, so unexpected, so contrary to our habitual way of looking at things, so unserious that we walk right past it. We cannot make head or tail out of it; or else we stick a beautiful label on it to trap it in our magic. And it still laughs. It plays along with our magic, plays along with our suffering and geometry; it plays the millipede and the statistician; it plays everything it plays whatever we want. Then, one day, we no longer really want; we no longer want any of all that, neither our gilded miseries, nor our captivating lights nor our good nor our evil, nor any of that whole polychromatic array in which each color changes into the other: hope into despair, effort into backlash, heaven into prison, summit into abyss, love into hate, and each wrested victory into a new defeat, as if each plus attracted its minus, each for its against, and everything forever went forward, backward, right and left, bumping into the wall of the same prison, white or black, green or brown, golden or less golden. We no longer want any of all that; we are only that cry of need in our depths, that call for air, that fire for nothing, that useless little flame that goes along with our every step, walks with our sorrows, walks and walks night and day, in good and evil, in the high and the low and everywhere. And this fire soon becomes like our drop of good in evil, our bit of treasure in misery, our glimmer of light in the chaos, all that remains of a thousand gestures and passing lights, the little nothing that is like everything, the tiny song of a great ongoing misery we no longer have any good or evil, any high or low, any light or darkness, any tomorrow or yesterday. It is all the same, miserable in black and white, but we have that abiding little fire, that tomorrow of today, that murmur of sweetness in the depths of pain, that virtue of our sin, that warm drop of being in the high and the low, day and night, in shame and in joy, in solitude and in the crowd, in approval and disapproval it is all the same. It burns and burns. It is tomorrow, yesterday, now and forever. It is our one song of being, our little note of fire, our paradise in a little flame, our freedom in a little flame, our knowledge in a little flame, our summit of flame in a void of being, our vastness in a tiny singing flame we know not why. It is our companion, our friend, our wife, our bearer, our country it is. And it feels good. Then, one day, we raise our head, and there is no more bubble. There is that Fire burning softly everywhere, recognizing all, loving all, understanding all, and it is like a heaven without trouble; it is so simple that we never thought of it, so tranquil that each drop is like an ocean, so smiling and clear that it goes through everything, enters and slips in everywhere it plays here, plays there, as transparent as air, a nothing that changes everything; and perhaps it is everything.
--
And the Rhythm, the great Rhythm, was scattered, broken up, pulverized to enter the heart of its world and make itself the size of the millipede or a little leaf quivering in the wind, to make itself understood by a brain, loved by a passerby. We have drawn from it syncopated music, multicolored pictures, joys, sorrows, since we could no longer contain its whole, unbroken flow. We have made it into equations, poems, architecture; we have trapped it in our machines, locked it in an amulet or a thought, since we could no longer bear the pressure of its great direct flow. And we have made dungeons, hells, which were the absence of that rhythm, the lack of a lungful of eternal air, the suffocation of a little man who believes only in his suffering, only in the push buttons of his machine and the walls of his intelligence. We have graphed, multiplied, broken down, atomized to infinity; and we could no longer make out or understand anything, since we had lost the one little breath of the great breath, the one little sign of the great Direction, the little note that loves and understands all. And since we had closed everything around us, locked ourselves in a shell, armor-plated ourselves in our thinking logic, equipped ourselves with irrefutable helmets and antennas, we have declared that that Harmony, that Rhythm, did not exist, that it was far, far above, the paradise of our virtues, the crackling of our little antennas, the dream of a collective unconscious, the product of the evolved earthworm, the meeting of two enamored molecules like the savage of old who used to cut up the unknown lands, we have cut up space and time, thrown back into another geography the Ganges and El Dorados we have not yet crossed, the pretty fords of that little river. But that Ganges and that El Dorado are here, as well as many other marvels, many other currents of the great Current. All is here, under our feet, if we will only open the little shell and stop putting off until heaven or doomsday what sings in each minute of time and each pebble of space.
This is the Harmony of the new world, the joy of the greater Self. It is here, instantly, if we want. All it takes is removing our blinders. All it takes is a true look, a simple look at the great world. All it takes is a little fire inside to consume all the shells and sufferings and bubbles for the only suffering is to be confined there.
1.10 - The Revolutionary Yogi, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Such are the mental, vital, physical and psychic discoveries that Sri Aurobindo pursued alone, step by step, between the ages of twenty and thirty, simply by following the thread of consciousness. The remarkable thing is that he practiced yoga in circumstances and places where one would usually not do yoga: while giving his lectures in French or English at the State College of Baroda, during his work at the court of the Maharaja, and more and more in the midst of his secret revolutionary activities. The hours of the night that were not devoted to studying his mother tongue or Sanskrit or to political work were spent writing poetry. "Aurobindo had the habit of writing poetry till late into the night," his Bengali teacher recalls, "and consequently he did not get up very early in the morning. . . . He would concentrate for a minute before starting, then the poetry would flow from his pen like a stream." From writing poetry, Sri Aurobindo would pass to his experimental sleep. In 1901, at the age of twenty-nine, he married Mrinalini Devi and tried to share his spiritual life with her. I am experiencing all the signs and symptoms, he wrote to her in a letter found in the archives of the British police. I should like to take you with me along this path. But Mrinalini did not understand him, and Sri Aurobindo would remain alone. We could se arch Sri Aurobindo's life in vain for those moving or miraculous anecdotes that adorn the lives of great sages and mystics, in vain for sensational yogic methods;
everything seemed so ordinary, apparently, that nothing attracted one's attention, just as in life itself. Perhaps he had found more miracles in the ordinary than in the extraordinary: With me all is different, all is uncommon, he wrote in a letter to Mrinalini. All is deep and strange to the eyes that see.103 And perhaps that is what he wants us to discover through his example, his work, his yoga all those unknown riches beneath the ordinary crust. Our lives [are] a deeper mystery than we 103
--
neither Joan of arc nor Mazzini nor Washington were apostles of "nonviolence." In 1920, when Gandhi's son went to visit him in Pondicherry to discuss nonviolence, Sri Aurobindo answered with this simple, and still applicable, question: "What would you do if tomorrow the Northern Frontiers were overrun?" Twenty years later,
in 1940, Sri Aurobindo and Mother publicly took the side of the Allies, while Gandhi, undoubtedly in an outburst of praiseworthy feelings, sent an open letter to the British people urging them not to take up arms against Hitler and to use only "spiritual force" instead. It would therefore be appropriate to explain Sri Aurobindo's spiritual position with regard to violent action.
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When was this traditional honour first lost or at least tarnished and the ancient Scripture relegated to the inferior position it occupies in the thought of Shankaracharya? I presume there can be little doubt that the chief agent in this work of destruction was the power of Buddhism. The preachings of Gautama and his followers worked against Vedic knowledge by a double process. First, by entirely denying the authority of the Veda, laying a violent stress on its ritualistic character and destroying the general practice of formal sacrifice, it brought the study of the Veda into disrepute as a means of attaining the highest good while at the same time it destroyed the necessity of that study for ritualistic purposes which had hitherto kept alive the old Vedic studies; secondly, in a less direct fashion, by substituting for a time at least the vernacular tongues for the old simple Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically impossible. For the Vedas were written in an ancient form of the literary tongue the real secret of which had already been to a great extent lost even to the learned; such knowledge of it as remained, subsisted with difficulty by means of a laborious memorising and a traditional scholarship, conservative indeed but still slowly diminishing and replacing more & more real knowledge by uncertainty, disputed significance and the continuously increasing ingenuities of the ritualist, the grammarian and the sectarian polemical disputant. When after the fall of the Buddhistic Mauryas, feeble successors of the great Asoka, first under Pushyamitra and his son and afterwards under the Guptas, Hinduism revived, a return to the old forms of the creed and the old Vedic scholarship was no longer possible. The old pre-Buddhistic Sanscrit was, to all appearance, a simple, vigorous, living language understood though not spoken by the more intelligent of the common people just as the literary language of Bengal, the language of Bankim Chandra, is understood by every intelligent Bengali, although in speech more contracted forms and a very different vocabulary are in use. But the new Sanscrit of the revival tended to be more & more a learned, scholarly, polished and rhetorical tongue, certainly one of the most smooth, stately & grandiose ever used by human lips, but needing a special & difficult education to understand its grammar, its rhetoric, its rolling compounds and its long flowing sentences. The archaic language of the Vedas ceased to be the common study even of the learned and was only mastered, one is constrained to believe with less & less efficiency, by a small number of scholars. An education in which it took seven years to master the grammar of the language, became inevitably the grave of all true Vedic knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically impossible. For the Vedas were written in an ancient form of the literary tongue the real secret of which had already been to a great extent lost even to the learned; such knowledge of it as remained, subsisted with difficulty by means of a laborious memorising and a traditional scholarship, conservative indeed but still slowly diminishing and replacing more & more real knowledge by uncertainty, disputed significance and the continuously increasing ingenuities of the ritualist, the grammarian and the sectarian polemical disputant. When after the fall of the Buddhistic Mauryas, feeble successors of the great Asoka, first under Pushyamitra and his son and afterwards under the Guptas, Hinduism revived, a return to the old forms of the creed and the old Vedic scholarship was no longer possible. The old pre-Buddhistic Sanscrit was, to all appearance, a simple, vigorous, living language understood though not spoken by the more intelligent of the common people just as the literary language of Bengal, the language of Bankim Chandra, is understood by every intelligent Bengali, although in speech more contracted forms and a very different vocabulary are in use. But the new Sanscrit of the revival tended to be more & more a learned, scholarly, polished and rhetorical tongue, certainly one of the most smooth, stately & grandiose ever used by human lips, but needing a special & difficult education to understand its grammar, its rhetoric, its rolling compounds and its long flowing sentences. The archaic language of the Vedas ceased to be the common study even of the learned and was only mastered, one is constrained to believe with less & less efficiency, by a small number of scholars. An education in which it took seven years to master the grammar of the language, became inevitably the grave of all true Vedic knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, a Scripture of ritual and of animal sacrifice, persisted in the popular mind even after the decline of Buddhism and the revival of great philosophies ostensibly based on Vedic authority. It was under the dominance of this ritualistic conception that Sayana wrote his great commentary which has ever since been to the Indian Pundit the one decisive authority on the sense of Veda. The four Vedas have definitely taken a subordinate place as karmakanda, books of ritual; and to the Upanishads alone, in spite of occasional appeals to the text of the earlier Scriptures, is reserved that aspect of spiritual knowledge & teaching which alone justifies the application to any human composition of the great name of Veda.
But in spite of this great downfall the ancient tradition, the ancient sanctity survived. The people knew not what Veda might be; but the old idea remained fixed that Veda is always the fountain of Hinduism, the standard of orthodoxy, the repository of a sacred knowledge; not even the loftiest philosopher or the most ritualistic scholar could divest himself entirely of this deeply ingrained & instinctive conception. To complete the degradation of Veda, to consummate the paradox of its history, a new element had to appear, a new form of intelligence undominated by the ancient tradition & the mediaeval method to take possession of Vedic interpretation. European scholarship which regards human civilisation as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander and ending today with Haeckel and Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily primitive culture and primitive culture as necessarily half-savage culture, has turned the light of its Comparative Philology & Comparative Mythology on the Veda. The result we all know. Not only all vestige of sanctity, but all pretension to any kind of spiritual knowledge or experience disappears from the Veda. The old Rishis are revealed to us as a race of ignorant and lusty barbarians who drank & enjoyed and fought, gathered riches & procreated children, sacrificed and praised the Powers of Nature as if they were powerful men & women, and had no higher hope or idea. The only idea they had of religion beyond an occasional sense of sin and a perpetual preoccupation with a ritual barbarously encumbered with a mass of meaningless ceremonial details, was a mythology composed of the phenomena of dawn, night, rain, sunshine and harvest and the facts of astronomy converted into a wildly confused & incoherent mass of allegorical images and personifications. Nor, with the European interpretation, can we be proud of our early forefa thers as poets and singers. The versification of the Vedic hymns is indeed noble and melodious,though the incorrect method of writing them established by the old Indian scholars, often conceals their harmonious construction,but no other praise can be given. The Nibelungenlied, the Icelandic Sagas, the Kalewala, the Homeric poems, were written in the dawn of civilisation by semi-barbarous races, by poets not superior in culture to the Vedic Rishis; yet though their poetical value varies, the nations that possess them, need not be ashamed of their ancient heritage. The same cannot be said of the Vedic poems presented to us by European scholarship. Never surely was there even among savages such a mass of tawdry, glittering, confused & purposeless imagery; never such an inane & useless burden of epithets; never such slipshod & incompetent writing; never such a strange & almost insane incoherence of thought & style; never such a bald poverty of substance. The attempt of patriotic Indian scholars to make something respectable out of the Veda, is futile. If the modern interpretation stands, the Vedas are no doubt of high interest & value to the philologist, the anthropologist & the historian; but poetically and spiritually they are null and worthless. Its reputation for spiritual knowledge & deep religious wealth, is the most imposing & baseless hoax that has ever been worked upon the imagination of a whole people throughout many millenniums.
11.15 - Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is in other words at bottom the Vedantic status of Sat-chit-ananda (perfect Being, Consciousness-energy and Beatitude), but individualised serving as the basic reality of the world-life and existence: it is this that seeks to manifest and embody itself in its own dharmasupreme lawin and through the physical forms and modes of that life and existence. Beyond this it is not possible here to enter into the further mysteries of the arcanum.
Lastly, another point and we have done. It is that all human efforts in the past in any realm or domain towards a higher life has been contri butory to this supreme consummation that Sri Aurobindo envisages as coming or sure to come. It is very often asserted that human nature is irremediable and although we may try at a little amelioration of his instinctive life, especially as a social being, there can be no permanent or radical cure of the original sin of Ignorance and Inconscience with which his earthly nature is branded. Reformers, idealists, even saints and sages have seen and sought to counter the evilsome tried to get rid of it, others round it: but it is still there, as rampant as ever, apparently with no effect upon it. For one thing, evil was sought to be cured by its opposite, the good, but the good that belongs to the level of consciousness to which evil too belongs. In other words, we tried to deal with the world and treat it with the force of the Mind, even though in some cases, the mind was a high or even the highest spiritual mind. To touch the roots of the malady that extend into our deepest fibres, our most material being, dead inconscience, one must rise to the very source of consciousness, the creative truth-consciousness: the Supermind alone can transform the earth, transfigure the earthly life. In the second place, the past attempts did not all go in vain: they were preparations, the first ground-work, on various levels and in various domains of human life and consciousness where the light infiltrated, to whatever extent it may be and things, and forces were shaken and reshuffled to admit of other forces and inspirations; if nothing else, at least the possibility was created.
1.11 - BOOK THE ELEVENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And flying draws an arch (a segment of the skies):
Then leaves her bending bow, and from the steep
1.11 - Correspondence and Interviews, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
The next interview was with K. M. Munshi in April 1950. In previous years Sri Aurobindo had often mentioned Munshi in our talks. After the interview Munshi said, "A deep light of knowledge and wisdom shone in his eyes. The wide calm of the spirit appeared to have converted the whole personality into the radiant Presence of one who shone with the light of Consciousness. He was the absolute integration of personality, the Central Idea in Aryan Culture materialised in human shape, one of the greatest architects of creative life."
At another place, Munshi writes:
1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
nor does it take into account the divine sexless archetype
which supports the evolution and directs it towards its
1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Feel piqued at God and say to Him: 'You have created me. Now You must reveal Yourself to me.' Whether you live in the world or elsewhere, always fix your mind on God. The mind soaked in worldliness may be compared to a wet match-stick. You won't get a spark, however much you may rub it. Ekalavya placed the clay image of Drona, his teacher, in front of him and thus learnt archery.
Go forward. The wood-cutter, following the instructions of the holy man, went forward and found in the forest sandalwood and mines of silver and gold; and going still farther, he found diamonds and other precious stones.
1.11 - Woolly Pomposities of the Pious Teacher, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Well, now, before going further into this, I must behave like an utter cad, and disgrace my family tree, and blot my 'scutcheon and my copybook by confusing you about "realism." Excuse: not my muddle; it was made centuries ago by a gang of cursd monks, headed by one Duns Scotus so-called because he was Irish or if not by somebody else equally objectionable. They held to the Platonic dogma of archetypes. They maintained that there was an original (divine) idea such as "greenness" or a "pig," and that a green pig, as observed in nature, was just one example of these two ideal essences. They were opposed by the "nominalists," who said, to the contrary, that "greenness" or "a pig" were nothing in themselves; they were mere names (nominalism from Lat. nomen, a name) invented for convenience of grouping. This doctrine is plain commonsense, and I shall waste no time in demolishing the realists.
All priori thinking, the worst kind of thinking, goes with "realism" in this sense.
1.12 - The Herds of the Dawn, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
is only in the arctic regions that the attitude of the Rishis towards these natural circumstances and the statements about the
Angirases become at all intelligible. But though it is extremely probable that the memories of the arctic home enter into the external sense of the Veda, the arctic theory does not exclude an inner sense behind the ancient images drawn from Nature nor does it dispense with the necessity for a more coherent and straightforward explanation of the hymns to the Dawn.
We have, for instance, the hymn of Praskanwa Kanwa to the Ashwins (I.46) in which there is the reference to the luminous impulsion that carries us through to the other shore of the darkness. This hymn is intimately connected with the Vedic idea of the Dawn and the Night. It contains references to many of the fixed Vedic images, to the path of the Truth, the crossing of the rivers, the rising of the Sun, the connection between the
1.12 - The Left-Hand Path - The Black Brothers, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
And for this is BABALON under the power of the Magician, that she hath submitted herself unto the work; and she guardeth the Abyss. And in her is a perfect purity of that which is above, yet she is sent as the Redeemer to them that are below. For there is no other way into the Supernal mystery but through her and the Beast on which she rideth; and the Magician is set beyond her to deceive the brothers of blackness, lest they should make unto themselves a crown; for it there were two crowns, then should Ygdrasil, that ancient tree, be cast out into the Abyss, uprooted and cast down into the Outermost Abyss, and the arcanum which is in the Adytum should be profaned; and the Ark should be touched, and the Lodge spied upon by them that are not masters, and the bread of the Sacrament should be the dung of Choronzon; and the wine of the Sacrament should be the water of Choronzon; and the incense should be dispersion; and the fire upon the Altar should be hate. But lift up thyself; stand, play the man, for behold! there shall be revealed unto thee the Great Terror, the thing of awe that hath no name.
(Ibid. 3rd thyr)
1.12 - The Sacred Marriage, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the Mediterranean to the arctic Ocean. But if these old spells and
enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and
1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Constantly and unknowingly, we receive influences and inspirations from these higher, superconscious regions, which express themselves inside us as ideas, ideals, aspirations, or works of art; they secretly mold our life, our future. Similarly, we constantly and unknowingly receive vital and subtle-physical vibrations, which determine our emotional life and relationship with the world every moment of the day. We are enclosed in an individual, personal body only through a stubborn visual delusion; in fact, we are porous throughout and ba the in universal forces, like an anemone in the sea: Man twitters intellectually (=foolishly) about the surface results and attributes them all to his "noble self," ignoring the fact that his noble self is hidden far away from his own vision behind the veil of his dimly sparkling intellect and the reeking fog of his vital feelings, emotions, impulses, sensations and impressions.183 Our sole freedom is to lift ourselves to higher planes through individual evolution. Our only role is to transcribe and materially embody the truths of the plane we belong to. Two important points, which apply to every plane of consciousness, from the highest to the lowest, deserve to be underscored in order for us better to understand the mechanism of the universe. First, these planes do not depend upon us or upon what we think of them any more than the sea depends on the anemone; they exist independently of man. Modern psychology, for which all the levels of being are mixed together in a so-called collective unconscious, like some big magician's hat from which to draw archetypes and neuroses at random, betrays in this respect a serious lack of vision: first, because the forces of these planes are not at all unconscious (except to us), but very conscious, definitely more so than we are; and secondly, because these forces are not "collective," in the sense that they are no more a human product than the sea is the product of the anemone; it is rather the frontal man who is the product of that Immensity behind. The gradations of consciousness are universal states not dependent on the outlook of the subjective personality; rather the outlook of the subjective personality is determined by the grade of consciousness in which it is organized according to its typal nature or its evolutionary stage.184 Naturally, it is only human to reverse the order of things and put ourselves in the center of the world. But this is not a matter of theory, always debatable, but of experience, which everyone can have. If we go out of our body and consciously enter these planes, we realize that they exist outside us, just as the entire world exists outside Manhattan, with forces and beings and even places that have nothing in common with our earthly world; entire civilizations have attested to this, stating it, engraving it, or painting it on their walls or in their temples, civilizations that were perhaps less ingenious than ours, but certainly not less intelligent.
The second important point concerns the conscious forces and beings that occupy these planes. Here we must clearly draw a line between the superstition, or even hoax, arising from our "collective" contri bution, and the truth. As usual, the two are closely intermingled.
--
This luminous flood will translate differently in different people (one is always too quick to give it a form instead of letting it quietly permeate the being and do its work of clarification). For some, there will be a sudden poetic blossoming, others will see new architectural forms, others will pursue new scientific discoveries, while still others will worship their God. Generally, the access to this new consciousness is accompanied by a spontaneous flowering of creative energies, particularly in the poetic field. It is interesting to note the number of poets of all languages Chinese, Indian, English, etc. among Sri Aurobindo's disciples, as if poetry and art were the first practical result of his yoga: I have seen both in myself and others a sudden flowering of capacities in every kind of activity come by the opening of consciousness, so that one who laboured long without the least success to express himself in rhythm becomes a master of poetic language and cadences in a day. It is a question of the right silence in the mind and the right openness to the Word that is trying to express itself for the Word is there ready formed in those inner planes where all artistic forms take birth, but it is the transmitting mind that must change and become a perfect channel and not an obstacle.192
Poetry is the most convenient means of conveying what these higher planes of consciousness are. In a poem's rhythm one can easily perceive vibrations. We will therefore use poetry to convey a sense of what these higher planes are, even though the Superconscient is not the sole privilege of poets. In his vast correspondence on poetry and in his Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo has given numerous instances of poetry issuing from the illumined mind. It is naturally Shakespeare who would give us the most abundant examples, provided we let go of the external meaning and listen to what vibrates behind the words; for poetry and all the arts are ultimately a means of capturing a tiny ineffable note, a mere nothing, a "nothing" that still constitutes life's very essence: . . . that his virtues
1.13 - And Then?, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The superman has lost his small self, lost his small ideas of family and country, good and evil he has in effect no more ideas, or has them all, exactly when needed. And when one comes, it is carried out, very simply, because its time and moment have come. For him, ideas and feelings are simply the imperative translation of a movement of force a will-idea or force-idea which is expressed here by this gesture, there by that action or plan, this poem, that architecture or cantata. But it is one and the same Force in different languages pictorial, musical, material or economic. He is tuned in to the Rhythm, and he translates according to his particular talent and place in the whole. He is a translator of the Rhythm.
There every thought and feeling is an act,
1.13 - BOOK THE THIRTEENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
My sire Laertes was arcesius' heir,
arcesius was the son of Jupiter:
1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
synchronicity of the archetype. 1
288 in the Elenchos of Hippolytus the attraction between the
--
Since the archetypes usually have a certain numinosity, they can arouse just that
fascination which is accompanied by synchronistic phenomena. These consist in
--
VII, 24, 6f.). There it refers to the son of the highest archon, who comprehends
the vo-qfiara airb rijs fiaKaplas v ISttjtos (idea of the blessed sonship). Hippolytus'
--
aureae mensae, 1617, p. 377). The arcane substance is extracted from the ray, and
constitutes its "shadow" (umbra), as the "Tractatus aureus" says (Ars chemica,
--
the archon of the Ogdoad, the demiurge, and- paradoxically
enough- as the son of the demiurge acted towards his father.
--
They indicate the presence of an archetype of like nature, one
of whose derivates would seem to be the quaternity of functions
--
hence the totality of all archetypes. But the archetypes are com-
plementary equivalents of the "outside world" and therefore
--
Father, the archanthropos, who is without qualities and is called
the higher Adam. In various systems Sophia takes the place of
--
57 rrjv apxeyopwvarchegonos is the tribal
father.
--
was a visualization of God as the archanthropos (Original Man
= Adam), and therefore the epitome of man as such: "Man
--
the most important archetype and, as judge of the living and
the dead and king of glory, to the real organizing principle of the
--
back on the one hand to archaic forms of religion whose ideas
and modes of expression had long since been superseded, but
--
that was just beginning to assimilate the archetype of man. This
attempt continued right up to the seventeenth century, when
--
archetypal foundations of Kepler's astronomy. Cf. his "The Influence of arche-
typal Ideas" etc.
--
were "brought down from the blessed Man on high, the arch-
man Adamas, . . . into the form of clay, that they might serve
--
from Adamas the arch-man on high." 86 The alchemists said
their stone was "cut from the mountain without hands," 87 and
--
mountain is the archanthropos Christ, from whom the stone or
inner man was cut. As Epiphanius interprets it, this means that
--
The archanthropos is the Logos, whom the souls follow
"twittering," as the bats follow Hermes in the nekyia. He leads
--
95 The marriage quaternio is the archetype to which the cross-cousin marriage
corresponds on a primitive level. I have given a detailed account of it in "The
--
the Adech, archeus, Protothoma, Ides, Idechtrum, etc. He is the
110 Elenchos, V, 8, 21 (Legge trans., I, p. 134). Cramer (Bibl.-theol. Worterbuch
--
stands for the arcane substance; in Michael Maier 148 it signifies
"the purity or homogeneity of the essence." It is the "punctum
--
"Novum lumen" it is spirit and fire, the life of the arcane sub-
stance, similar to the spark. 158 This conception of the point is
1.13 - The Kings of Rome and Alba, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
ruined aqueducts, like the broken arches of the bridge in the vision
of Mirza, the eye must have ranged over woodlands that stretched
1.13 - THE MASTER AND M., #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "It is Satchidananda that comes to us in the form of the guru. If a man is initiated by a human guru, he will not achieve anything if he regards his guru as a mere man. The guru should be regarded as the direct manifestation of God. Only then can the disciple have faith in the mantra given by the guru. Once a man has faith he, achieves all. The sudra Ekalavya learnt archery in the forest before a clay image of Drona; He worshipped the image as the living Drona; that by itself enabled him to attain mastery in archery.
"Don't mix intimately with brahmin pundits. Their only concern is to earn money. I have seen brahmin priests reciting the Chandi while performing the swastyayana. It is hard to tell whether they are reading the sacred book or something else. They turn half the pages without reading them. (All laugh.)
1.14 - Bibliography, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
xxiv Grasseus: Area arcani artificiosissimi de summis naturae
mysteriis [pp. 294-381]
--
Grasseus, Johannes. "Area arcani artificiosissimi de summis naturae
mysteriis." See (A) Theatrum chemicum, xxiv.
--
. archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected
Works,* Vol. 9, Part I. New York and London; 2nd edn., 1968.
--
-. "Concerning Mandala Symbolism." In: archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious, q.v.
-. "Concerning Rebirth." In: archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, q.v.
--
-. "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales." In: arche-
types and the Collective Unconscious, q.v.
--
. "The Psychology of the Child archetype." In: The arche-
types and the Collective Unconscious, q.v.
--
. "The Psychology of the Trickster Figure." In: The arche-
types and the Collective Unconscious, q.v.
--
. "A Study in the Process of Individuation." In: archetypes
and the Collective Unconscious, q.v.
--
Layard, John. "The Incest Taboo and the Virgin archetype,"
Eranos-Jahrbuch (Zurich), XII (1945). (Volume for C. G. Jung on
--
Pauli, W. "The Influence of archetypal Ideas on the Scientific
Theories of Kepler." Translated by Priscilla Silz. In: C. G. Jung
--
tum," archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft (Leipzig), XIV (1911),
i-53 321-92-
--
Spiegelberg, W. "Der Fisch als Symbol der Seele," archiv fiir Re-
ligionswissenschaft (Leipzig), XII (1909), 574-75.
--
Vollers, Karl. "Chidher," archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft (Leip-
zig), XII (1909), 234-84.
1.14 - BOOK THE FOURTEENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
N.B. All electronic versions end here. The Internet Classics archive
will soon feature the remainder of Book 14 and all of Book 15 from
--
The Internet Classics archive by Daniel C. Stevenson, Web Atomics.
World Wide Web presentation is copyright (C) 1994-2000, Daniel
1.14 - The Secret, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Here we touch upon the fundamental error of our modern psychology: it fails to understand anything because it se arches below, in our evolutionary past. True, half the Secret may be there, but we still need the force above to open the door below. We were never meant to look behind, but ahead and above in the superconscious light, because it is our future, and only the future can explain and heal the past: I find it difficult, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple, to take these psychoanalysts at all seriously yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. . . . They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analyzing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above.
We appear to progress from below upward, from past to future, from night to conscious light, but this is just our small momentary understanding that obscures the whole, for otherwise we would see that it is not the past that impels us, but the future that draws us and the light above that gradually pervades our darkness for how could darkness ever have created all that light? If we had been born out of darkness, we would end up only in darkness. "This is the eternal Tree with its roots above and its branches downward," says the Katha Upanishad. (VI.I) We feel we are making great efforts to progress toward more understanding and greater knowledge; we have a sense of tension toward the future. But this is still our limited perspective. If we had a different perspective, we might see the superconscious Future trying to enter our present. And we would realize that our sense of effort is just the resistance put up by our denseness and darkness.
1.14 - The Structure and Dynamics of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
tion of the archetype that underlies ego-consciousness. Rather
than add to their number unnecessarily, I will try to summarize
--
all review the facts that led psychologists to conjecture an arche-
type of wholeness, i.e., the self. These are in the first place
--
despicable and an object of fear. Like all archetypes, the self has
a paradoxical, antinomial character. It is male and female, old
--
with the archetypal history of the mind in the Christian aeon.
359 The quaternity in the Moses Quaternio 17 is evidently con-
--
sonality, the embodiment of an archetype, obviously that of the
"wise old man" who personifies the spirit in myth and folklore.
--
demiurge. There were archontic Powers that gave to mankind
a corrupt "chirographum" (handwriting) from which Christ
--
as its initial material. This arcane substance was also called lapis
by the alchemists. The symbolism here described can be repre-
--
the prima materia, the arcanum, the primary substance, which
in Paracelsus and his followers is called the increatum and is
--
tary building-stone in the architecture of matter, the atom,
which is an intellectual model. The alchemists describe the
--
in other words, it is the same arcanum. 53 According to the old
view the soul is round 54 and the vessel must be round too, like
--
Malekula, chs. 5 and 6, and "The Incest Taboo and the Virgin archetype," pp.
266ff.- Editors.]
--
The space-time quaternio is the archetypal sine qua non for
any apprehension of the physical world- indeed, the very pos-
--
deemer, who broke the gates of hell and deceived the archons;
but he was bound to the kingdom of heaven in exactly the
--
latter comes into the category of archetypal quaternities and
proves, like these, to be an indispensable principle for organiz-
--
aspect of the archetypal quaternity which is altogether indis-
pensable for acquiring knowledge of physical processes.
--
on the fact that the rotundum coincides with the archetype of
the Anthropos.
--
the classical Chinese commentators. Every archetypal arrange-
ment has its own numinosity, as is apparent from the very
--
the archetypes.
4>2 I am fully aware of the extremely hypothetical nature of this
--
other with that of the archetype.
4!3 The analogy with physics is not a digression since the sym-
1.14 - The Suprarational Beauty, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is especially evident in the two realms which in the ordinary scale of our powers stand nearest to the reason and on either side of it, the aesthetic and the ethical being, the se arch for Beauty and the se arch for Good. Mans seeking after beauty reaches its most intense and satisfying expression in the great creative arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, but in its full extension there is no activity of his nature or his life from which it need or ought to be excluded,provided we understand beauty both in its widest and its truest sense. A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making entirely beautiful our whole life and being must surely be a necessary character of the perfect individual and the perfect society. But in its origin this seeking for beauty is not rational; it springs from the roots of our life, it is an instinct and an impulse, an instinct of aesthetic satisfaction and an impulse of aesthetic creation and enjoyment. Starting from the infrarational parts of our being, this instinct and impulse begin with much imperfection and impurity and with great crudities both in creation and in appreciation. It is here that the reason comes in to distinguish, to enlighten, to correct, to point out the deficiencies and the crudities, to lay down laws of aesthetics and to purify our appreciation and our creation by improved taste and right knowledge. While we are thus striving to learn and correct ourselves, it may seem to be the true law-giver both for the artist and the admirer and, though not the creator of our aesthetic instinct and impulse, yet the creator in us of an aesthetic conscience and its vigilant judge and guide. That which was an obscure and erratic activity, it makes self-conscious and rationally discriminative in its work and enjoyment.
But again this is true only in restricted bounds or, if anywhere entirely true, then only on a middle plane of our aesthetic seeking and activity. Where the greatest and most powerful creation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed and left behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the reason. The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us; creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power which must work always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration. It may use the intellect for certain of its operations, but in proportion as it subjects itself to the intellect, it loses in power and force of vision and diminishes the splendour and truth of the beauty it creates. The intellect may take hold of the influx, moderate and repress the divine enthusiasm of creation and force it to obey the prudence of its dictates, but in doing so it brings down the work to its own inferior level, and the lowering is in proportion to the intellectual interference. For by itself the intelligence can only achieve talent, though it may be a high and even, if sufficiently helped from above, a surpassing talent. Genius, the true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and its instrumentation even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of the mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical process of intellectual construction. Art-creation which accepts the canons of the reason and works within the limits laid down by it, may be great, beautiful and powerful; for genius can preserve its power even when it labours in shackles and refuses to put forth all its resources: but when it proceeds by means of the intellect, it constructs, but does not create. It may construct well and with a good and faultless workmanship, but its success is formal and not of the spirit, a success of technique and not the embodiment of the imperishable truth of beauty seized in its inner reality, its divine delight, its appeal to a supreme source of ecstasy, Ananda.
1.14 - The Victory Over Death, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
At first it is just a little flame in the mind, something groping about in se arch of a vaster inspiration, a greater truth, a purer knowledge, which soars, soars, and would as soon cut away all the weight of the world, the hindrances, the bonds and tangles of the earth. It soars and sometimes emerges, pure, sharp, upon summits of white light where everything is forever known and true but the earth, meanwhile, remains false; life and body remain in the dark conflict, and die and decay. So this white little flame begins to take in the heart. It yearns to love, to heal, to save. It gropes about in the dark, helps a fellowman, gives assistance, offers itself and sings a song that would like to embrace all, contain all, take all life into its heart. It is already a warmer and denser flame, but its minutes of illumination are like a pale and fragile firefly on an ocean of obscure life. It is constantly quenched, engulfed, swept under the wave and under our own waves of obscurity nothing is changed and life continues in its rut. So the seeker decides to drive this fire, this ardent truth, into his every moment and gesture, into his sleep and into his days, into his good and into his evil, into his whole life, so that everything may be purified, consumed by that fire so that something else may be born at last, a truer life, a truer being. He enters upon the path of the superman. And the fire continues to grow. It goes down and down the degrees of the being, plunges into the subconscious caves, dislodges the gray elf, dislodges the misery within, and burns more and more continuously, powerfully, as if stoked by the obscure pressure. It is already a body almost in our likeness, vermillion-red in color, already verging on gold. But it is still fluctuating and precarious; it lacks a fundamental base, a permanent foundation. So the seeker decides to drive this fire into his substance and body. He wants his own matter to reflect the Truth, to incarnate the Truth; he wants the outside to radiate as the inside. He enters upon the path of the supramental being. For, in truth, this growing self of fire, this ardent body which bears more and more resemblance to our divine archetype, our brother of light up above, and which seems to exceed us on all sides and even to radiate all around with an already orange vibration, is the very body that will form the supramental being. It is the next earthly substance, harder than the diamond and yet more fluid than the gas, said Sri Aurobindo.44 It is the spiritual condensation of the great Energy before it becomes matter.
But how to induce this fire into our matter, how to effect the passage, or transfusion, of this dark and mortal body to that ardent and immortal one? The work is in progress; it is difficult to talk about. We will not really know how it is done until it is done. No one knows the country or the way to it since no one has ever gotten there. No one has ever made a supramental body! But it will be made, as inevitably as man and the ape and the millipede were already made in the great golden Seed of the world. This is the last adventure of the earth, or maybe the first of a more marvelous series on a new earth of truth. We do not know the secret; we only know in what direction to walk though knowing the direction is perhaps already knowing the secret, since it unfolds under our steps and is formed by walking it.
1.15 - Conclusion, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
ous aspects of the archetype which it is most important for mod-
ern man to understand- namely, the archetype of the self. By way
of introduction, I described those concepts and archetypes which
manifest themselves in the course of any psychological treat-
--
this realization, for it turns out that all archetypes spontaneously
develop favourable and unfavourable, light and dark, good and
--
gestive power they have formed since olden times the archetypal
basis of all masculine and feminine divinities and therefore
--
self with monotheism. 3 The natural archetypal symbolism, de-
scribing a totality that includes light and dark, contradicts in
1.15 - Index, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
of, 242; see also Adam; archan-
thropos; Man, original; Protan-
--
art, history of, archetype in, 68
Artefius, 13272
--
of archetypes, 21; of character-
istics of shadow, 8
--
Antichrist, 61, 115; archetype of
self, 37; - of wholeness, x, 40;
--
God, 57, 147; see also Adam; 234; archetypes and, 8; autonomy
androgyny; Ichthys
--
dualism: in archetypal self, 42; in
Christ-figure, 111; God's human-
--
God-man, archetype, 181-82
"gods": anima/animus as, 21; ithy-
--
179, 234; archetype image of, 179;
individual and common, 7; snake
--
Anthropos, archanthropos, Pro-
tanthropos; perfect, 212/; pneu-
--
ogdoad, 110, 196, 19771, 226; archon
of the, 190
--
opinions, 21: archetypes and, 17;
Logos and, 15
--
Man, original; archanthropos
Protestantism/Protestants, 150, 178
--
Redeemer: archetype of, 183; as
fish and serpent, 186; Gnostic/
--
shapes, 226; as archetype, 167; as
brahman and atman, 222; Christ
as archetype /symbol of, 36/f, 6272,
182; Christ's correspondence to,
--
of arcane substance, 18772; as-
similation into conscious person-
--
temperature, arctic, 52
tension: conscious/ unconscious, 20;
--
wholeness, 169, 183; archetype of,
40; in Christ, 41, 6272; empirical,
--
* 9 . part 1. THE arcHETYPES AND THE
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
--
Concerning the archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima
Concept (1936/1954)
Psychological Aspects of the Mother archetype (1938/1954)
Concerning Rebirth (1940/1950)
The Psychology of the Child archetype (1940)
The Psychological Aspects of the Kore (1941)
--
9. part I. The archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious (7 959; 2nd edn., 1968)
1.15 - In the Domain of the Spirit Beings, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
The magician will realize that these names for ranks and titles symbolise the degree of maturity of a being and certainly will not regard them as earthly ranks. Therefore, only the leaders, the initiates of the individual zones, are able to influence, with their causes and effects, our spheres, no matter whether mental, astral or physical. The way in which each individual being may in89 fluence our world will be dealt with analogously step by step in a further chapter on the hier archy of the beings. Just the same as, in our opinion, there exist in the earth-zone positive and negative, that is good and evil beings, so is the situation the same in all other zones. The good or positive powers and beings are generally called angels or archangels, the negative ones demons or archdemons. The same kind of hier archy is to be found with the negative beings: there are common demons, barons, counts, etc.
The average person will have a conception of these beings corresponding to his power of understanding. In his imagination angels and archangels will have wings, demons and archdemons will have horns. But the person well acquainted with the symbolism will be able to interpret this conception according to true hermetics. A magician knows that an angel has no wings in the literal sense of the word and will see the analogy in these wings: the wings are an analogy to the birds who move about freely in the air above us. The wings are the symbol of what is superior to us, the symbol of agility, liberty, freedom and at the same time the principle of floating above us in the air, the element which is lightest and penetrates everything. The negative beings or demons are usually symbolized by animals with horns and tails, or by creatures that are half human and half animal. Their symbolism, on the contrary, stands for the opposite of what is good: the inferior, incomplete, defective, etc. The question of whether these beings, positive or negative, in their own spheres actually have the shapes attri buted to them by men, and meet each other in these shapes, may be left undecided to the non-initiate. The magician who is capable of visiting these zones by mental and astral travelling and who is able to influence himself with the vibration of these zones so that for the time of his stay he is like an inhabitant of the respective sphere, will have found out that this is not so. Without losing his individuality, he will find quite different .shapes there, which cannot be expressed by words. He will not find personified beings and their leaders there, but powers and vibrations that are analogous to the names and qualities. If he tried to concretise, from his individual point of view, one of these powers, or give it a shape according to his power of understanding, that power would appear in to him in a shape equivalent to his power of symbolic comprehension, no matter whether positive power, alias angel, or negative power, alias demon. A magician working with beings will make the beings perform the causes in that zone in which he exercises his influence. The work of a quabbalist is different. The latter places himself, with his spirit, into the zone in which a certain cause and effect is intended. Though he, too, masters the laws of the zone, he does not need the interposition of the beings for his purposes, but does everything by himself with the help of the quabbalistic word. There will be more about in my next work "The Key to the True Quabbalah".
The principles of the quabbalist's work are quite different. The magician, however, in his present state of development, cannot, for the time being, do otherwise than go on making use of beings up to the point where he has reached a higher degree of development. Each quabbalist must first have become a magician, in order to be able to work differently and more advantageous by later.
--
Each being, whether good or evil, whether angel or archangel, demon or archdemon, from whatever zone it may come, has certain restrictions in its qualities, caused and controlled by Divine
Providence, and depends on these qualities in its zone. A magician will therefore do well in asking beings to fulfill only tasks which they are able to fulfill due to their qualities and which lie within the range of their zone. The magician must then know well all qualities, faculties, causes and effects, powers and influences of each individual zone, and have them under his control in order to avoid making the mistake of asking a being to do something outside of the range of its zone. If the magician does not take this into consideration and if, in consequence, he asks a being for something not lying iri its power, then the best such a being can do is to place itself in another zone and there to cause another being to fulfill the magician's will and desire. The actual effect is, in this case, not brought about by the being evoked by the magician, but by another being. The absolute will of the magician is thus not directly expressed, as the effect takes place without his knowledge. I shall give some more details on the various shapes in which beings normally appear etc. in the chapter on hier archy.
1.15 - The Transformed Being, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The architects of immortality....
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
1.15 - The world overrun with trees; they are destroyed by the Pracetasas, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
kalpa, Muhūrttā, Sādhyā, and Viśvā were the ten wives of Dharma[12], and bore him the following progeny. The sons of Viśvā were the Viśvādevas[13]; and the Sādhyas[14], those of Sādhyā. The Māruts, or winds, were the children of Marutvatī; the Vasus, of Vasu. The Bhānus (or suns) of Bhānu; and the deities presiding over moments, of Muhūrttā. Ghoṣa was the son of Lambā (an arc of the heavens); Nāgavīthī (the milky way), the daughter of Yāmī (night). The divisions of the earth were born of Arundhaṭi; and Sa
kalpa (pious purpose), the soul of all, was the son of Sa
--
[26]: The Śastra devatas, 'gods of the divine weapons;' a hundred are enumerated in the Rāmāyaṇa, and they are there termed the sons of Kriśāśva by Jayā and Vijayā, daughters of the Prajāpati; that is, of Dakṣa. The Bhāgavata terms the two wives of Kriśāśva, archish (flame) and Dhiṣaṇā; the former is the mother of Dhūmaketu (comet); the latter, of four sages, Devala, Vedaśiras, Vayuṇa, and Manu. The allegorical origin of the weapons is undoubtedly the more ancient.
[27]: This number is founded upon a text of the Vedas, which to the eight Vasus, eleven Rudras, and twelve Ādityas, adds Prajāpati, either Brahmā or Dakṣa, and Vashatkāra, 'deified oblation.' They have the epithet Chandajā, as born in different Manvantaras, of their own will.
1.15 - The Worship of the Oak, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
states. And on Mount Lycaeus in arcadia the character of Zeus as god
both of the oak and of the rain comes out clearly in the rain charm
1.16 - THE ESSENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
mit the architects of the New Earth to make use of them, are also
strong enough to disrupt any attempted arrangement that does not
1.17 - The Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Truth, that the Light which is won by the Truth and by the force of true thought is not merely a physical light, the cows which Sarama finds on the path of the Truth not merely physical herds, the Horses not merely the wealth of the Dravidians conquered by invading Aryan tribes, nor even merely images of the physical Dawn, its light and its swiftly moving rays and the darkness of which the Panis and Vritra are the defenders not merely the darkness of the Indian or the arctic night. We have even been able to hazard a reasonable hypothesis by which we can disentangle the real sense of this imagery and discover the
174
--
Tradition asserts the separate existence of two classes of Angiras Rishis, the one Navagwas who sacrificed for nine months, the other Dashagwas whose sessions of sacrifice endured for ten. According to this interpretation we must take Navagwa and Dashagwa as "nine-cowed" and "ten-cowed", each cow representing collectively the thirty Dawns which constitute one month of the sacrificial year. But there is at least one passage of the Rig Veda which on its surface is in direct conflict with the traditional interpretation. For in the seventh verse of V.45 and again in the eleventh we are told that it was the Navagwas, not the Dashagwas, who sacrificed or chanted the hymn for ten months. This seventh verse runs, Anunod atra hastayato adrir, arcan yena dasa maso navagvah.; r.tam yat sarama ga avindad, visvani satya angiras cakara, "Here cried (or, moved) the stone impelled by the hand, whereby the Navagwas chanted for ten months the hymn; Sarama travelling to the Truth found the cows; all things the Angiras made true." And in verse 11 we have the assertion repeated; Dhiyam vo apsu dadhis.e svars.am, yayataran dasa maso navagvah.; aya dhiya syama devagopa, aya dhiya tuturyama ati amhah.. "I hold for you in the waters (i.e. the seven Rivers) the thought that wins possession of heaven2
(this is once more the seven-headed thought born from the Truth and found by Ayasya), by which the Navagwas passed through the ten months; by this thought may we have the gods for protectors, by this thought may we pass through beyond the evil."
--
This passage certainly goes far to support the arctic theory, for it speaks of a yearly and not a daily return of the Sun. But we are not concerned with the external figure, nor does its validity in any way affect our own theory; for it may very well be that the striking arctic experience of the long night, the annual
Observe that in the Puranas the Yugas, moments, months, etc. are all symbolic and it is stated that the body of man is the year.
--
It is when enriched in light and force of thought by the Angirases that Indra completes his victorious journey and reaches the goal on the mountain; "In him our primal fathers, the seven seers, the Navagwas, increase their plenty, him victorious on his m arch and breaking through (to the goal), standing on the mountain, inviolate in speech, most luminous-forceful by his thinkings," naks.ad-dabham taturim parvates.t.ham, adroghavacam matibhih. savis.t.ham (VI.22.2). It is by singing the Rik, the hymn of illumination, that they find the solar illuminations in the cave of our being, arcanto7 ga avindan (I.62.2). It is by the stubh, the all-supporting rhythm of the hymn of the seven seers, by the vibrating voice of the Navagwas that Indra becomes full of the power of Swar, svaren.a svaryah. and by the cry of the Dashagwas that he rends Vala in pieces (I.62.4). For this cry is the voice of the higher heaven, the thunder that cries in the lightning-flash of Indra, and the advance of the Angirases on their path is the forward movement of this cry of the heavens, pra brahman.o angiraso naks.anta, pra krandanur nabhanyasya vetu (VII.42.1); for we are told that the voice of Brihaspati the Angirasa discovering the Sun and the Dawn and the Cow and the light of the Word is the thunder of Heaven, br.haspatir us.asam suryam gam, arkam viveda stanayann iva dyauh. (X.67.5). It is by the satya mantra, the true thought expressed in the rhythm of the truth, that the hidden light is found and the Dawn brought to birth, gud.ham jyotih. pitaro anvavindan, satyamantra ajanayann us.asam (VII.76.4). For these are the Angirases who speak aright, ittha vadadbhih. angirobhih. (VI.18.5), masters of the Rik who place perfectly their thought, svadhbhir r.kvabhih. (VI.32.2); they are the sons of heaven, heroes of the Mighty Lord who speak the truth and think the straightness and therefore they are able to hold the seat of illumined knowledge, to mentalise the supreme abode of the sacrifice, r.tam samsanta r.ju ddhyana, divas putraso asurasya vrah.; vipram padam angiraso dadhana, yajnasya dhama prathamam mananta (X.67.2).
arcati (r.c) in the Veda means to shine and to sing the Rik; arka means sun, light and the Vedic hymn.
--
The wonders of the arctic dawn themselves are insufficient to explain the association of images and the persistent stress on the idea of the Word, the Thought, the Truth, the journey and the conquest of the falsehood which meets us always in these hymns.
Only the theory we are enouncing, a theory not brought in from outside but arising straight from the language and the suggestions of the hymns themselves, can unite this varied imagery and bring an easy lucidity and coherence into this apparent tangle of incongruities. In fact, once the central idea is grasped and the mentality of the Vedic Rishis and the principle of their symbolism are understood, no incongruity and no disorder remain. There is a fixed system of symbols which, except in some of the later hymns, does not admit of any important variations and in the light of which the inner sense of the Veda everywhere yields itself up readily enough. There is indeed a certain restricted freedom in the combination of the symbols, as in those of any fixed poetical imagery, - for instance, the sacred poems of the Vaishnavas; but the substance of thought behind is constant, coherent and does not vary.
1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The architects of immortality. . .
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
1.18 - The Eighth Circle, Malebolge The Fraudulent and the Malicious. The First Bolgia Seducers and Panders. Venedico Caccianimico. Jason. The Second Bolgia Flatterers. Allessio Interminelli. Thais., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Of that a buttress for another arch.
Thence we heard people, who are making moan
--
The arch's back, where most the crag impends.
Thither we came, and thence down in the moat
1.18 - The Human Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the gods (devayanah.) which lead to the infinite wideness of the divine existence. "Before me the paths of the journeyings of the gods have become visible, journeyings that violate not, whose movement was formed by the Vasus. The eye of Dawn has come into being in front and she has come towards us (arriving) over our houses." The house in the Veda is the constant image for the bodies that are dwelling-places of the soul, just as the field or habitation means the planes to which it mounts and in which it rests. The path of man is that of his journey to the supreme plane and that which the journeyings of the gods do not violate is, as we see, in the fifth verse where the phrase is repeated, the workings of the gods, the divine law of life into which the soul has to grow. We have then a curious image which seems to support the arctic theory. "Many were those days which were before the rising of the Sun (or which were of old by the rising of the Sun), in which thou, O Dawn, wert seen as if moving about thy lover and not coming again." This is certainly a picture of continual dawns, not interrupted by Night, such as are visible in the arctic regions. The psychological sense which arises out of the verse, is obvious.
What were these dawns? They were those created by the actions of the Fathers, the ancient Angirases. "They indeed had the joy (of the Soma) along with the gods,5 the ancient seers who possessed the truth; the fathers found the hidden Light; they, having the true thought (satyamantrah., the true thought expressed in the inspired Word), brought into being the Dawn."
1.18 - The Perils of the Soul, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
whose business it was to provide architects with the shadows
necessary for securing their walls. In these cases the measure of
1.19 - The Third Bolgia Simoniacs. Pope Nicholas III. Dante's Reproof of corrupt Prelates., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
But bore me to the summit of the arch
Which from the fourth dike to the fifth is passage.
12.01 - The Return to Earth, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
1.20 - CATHEDRAL, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
The vaulted arches
Crush me!Air!
1.20 - Talismans - The Lamen - The Pantacle, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
But you will object why be silly at all? Why not say simply that the Lamen, stating as it does the Character and Powers of he wearer, is a dynamic portrait of the individual, while the Pantacle, his Universe, is a static portrait of him? And that, you pursue flattering, is why you preferred to call the Weapon of Earth (in the Tarot) the Disk, emphasizing its continual whirling movement rather than the Pantacle of Coin, as is more usual. Once again, exquisite child of our Father the archer of Light and of seaborn Aphrodite, your well-known acumen has "nicked the ninety and nine and one over" as Browning says when he (he too!) alludes to the Tarot.
As you will have gathered from the above, a Talisman is a much more restricted idea; it is no more than one of the objects in his Pantacle, one of the arrows in the quiver of his Lamen. As, then, you would expect, it is very little trouble to design. All that you need is to "make considerations" about your proposed operation, decide which planet, sign, element or sub-element or what not you need to accomplish your miracle.
1.21 - Tabooed Things, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
ill, and nobody knows what might have happened if the archangel
Gabriel had not opportunely revealed to the holy man the place where
--
people to wear rings. Nobody might enter the ancient arcadian
sanctuary of the Mistress at Lycosura with a ring on his or her
1.21 - The Fifth Bolgia Peculators. The Elder of Santa Zita. Malacoda and other Devils., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
All shattered, at the bottom, the sixth arch.
And if it still doth please you to go onward,
1.22 - Ciampolo, Friar Gomita, and Michael Zanche. The Malabranche quarrel., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
To mariners by arching of the back,
That they should counsel take to save their vessel,
1.22 - EMOTIONALISM, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
A LETTER from the archbishop of Cambraiwhat an event, what a signal honourl And yet it must have been with a certain trepidation that one broke the emblazoned seal. To ask for advice and a frank opinion of oneself from a man, who combines the character of a saint with the talents of a M arcel Proust, is to ask for the severest kind of shock to ones self-esteem. And duly, in the most exquisitely lucid prose, the shock would be administeredand, along with the shock, the spiritual antidote to its excruciating consequences. Fnelon never hesitated to disintegrate a correspondents complacent ego; but the disintegration was always performed with a view to reintegration on a higher, non-egotistic level.
This particular letter is not only an admirable piece of character analysis; it also contains some very interesting remarks on the subject of emotional excitement in its relation to the life of the spirit.
1.22 - How to Learn the Practice of Astrology, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Sometimes, even now, you may assign the figure of the archbishop of York to Jabez Balfour or Catherine de Medici; or mix up Moody and Sankey with Brown and Kennedy; don't be discouraged; perhaps there may be something to be said for you after all!
I believe, as I hope, that you will be surprised at the speed with which you acquire proficiency.
1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
without hesitation." In the whole of the East Indian archipelago the
etiquette is the same. As a general rule no one will utter his own
--
the Bism arck archipelago. Among many tribes of South Africa men and
women never mention their names if they can get any one else to do
1.22 - The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Life cannot be entirely rational, cannot conform entirely to the ethical or the aesthetic or the scientific and philosophic mentality; mind is not the destined archangel of the transformation. All appearances to the contrary are always a trompe loeil, an intellectual, aesthetic or ethical illusion. Dominated, repressed life may be, but it reserves its right; and though individuals or a class may establish this domination for a time and impose some simulacrum of it upon the society, Life in the end circumvents the intelligence; it gets strong elements in it for always there are traitor elements at workto come over to its side and reestablishes its instincts, recovers its field; or if it fails in this, it has its revenge in its own decay which brings about the decay of the society, the disappointment of the perennial hope. So much so, that there are times when mankind perceives this fact and, renouncing the attempt to dominate the life-instinct, determines to use the intelligence for its service and to give it light in its own field instead of enslaving it to a higher but chimerical ideal.
Such a period was the recent materialistic age, when the intellect of man seemed decided to study thoroughly Life and Matter, to admit only that, to recognise mind only as an instrument of Life and Matter, and to devote all its knowledge to a tremendous expansion of the vital and physical life, its practicality, its efficiency, its comfort and the splendid ordering of its instincts of production, possession and enjoyment. That was the character of the materialistic, commercial, economic age of mankind, a period in which the ethical mind persisted painfully, but with decreasing self-confidence, an increasing self-questioning and a tendency to yield up the fortress of the moral law to the life-instinct, the aesthetic instinct and intelligence flourished as a rather glaring exotic ornament, a sort of rare orchid in the button-hole of the vital man, and reason became the magnificent servant of Life and Matter. The titanic development of the vital Life which followed, is ending as the Titans always end; it lit its own funeral pyre in the conflagration of a world-war, its natural upshot, a struggle between the most efficient and civilised nations for the possession and enjoyment of the world, of its wealth, its markets, its available spaces, an inflated and plethoric commercial expansion, largeness of imperial size and rule. For that is what the great war signified and was in its real origin, because that was the secret or the open intention of all pre-war diplomacy and international politics; and if a nobler idea was awakened at least for a time, it was only under the scourge of Death and before the terrifying spectre of a gigantic mutual destruction. Even so the awakening was by no means complete, nor everywhere quite sincere, but it was there and it was struggling towards birth even in Germany, once the great protagonist of the vitalistic philosophy of life. In that awakening lay some hope of better things. But for the moment at least the vitalistic aim has once more raised its head in a new form and the hope has dimmed in a darkness and welter in which only the eye of faith can see chaos preparing a new cosmos.
1.24 - RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
But for all their inadequacy and their radical unlikeness to the facts to which they refer, words remain the most reliable and accurate of our symbols. Whenever we want to have a precise report of facts or ideas, we must resort to words. A ceremony, a carved or painted image, may convey more meanings and overtones of meaning in a smaller compass and with greater vividness than can a verbal formula; but it is liable to convey them in a form that is much more vague and indefinite. One often meets, in modern literature, with the notion that mediaeval churches were the architectural, sculptural and pictorial equivalents of a theological summa, and that mediaeval worshippers who admired the works of art around them were thereby enlightened on the subject of doctrine. This view was evidently not shared by the more earnest churchmen of the Middle Ages. Coulton cites the utterances of preachers who complained that congregations were getting entirely false ideas of Catholicism by looking at the pictures in the churches instead of listening to sermons. (Similarly, in our own day the Catholic Indians of Central America have evolved the wildest heresies by brooding on the carved and painted symbols with which the Conquistadors filled their churches.) St. Bernards objection to the richness of Cluniac architecture, sculpture and ceremonial was motivated by intellectual as well as strictly moral considerations. So great and marvellous a variety of divers forms meets the eye that one is tempted to read in the marbles rather than in the books, to pass the whole day looking at these carvings one after another rather than in meditating on the law of God. It is in imageless contemplation that the soul comes to the unitive knowledge of Reality; consequently, for those who, like St. Bernard and his Cistercians, are really concerned to achieve mans final end, the fewer distracting symbols the better.
Most men worship the gods because they want success in their worldly undertakings. This kind of material success can be gained very quickly (by such worship), here on earth.
1.24 - The Killing of the Divine King, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
preserved in the archives of the royal family at Calicut. In the
latter part of the nineteenth century they were examined by Mr. W.
--
glittering arch of steel. All was now ready. The king waved his
sword. At the same moment a great chain of massy gold, enriched with
1.24 - The Seventh Bolgia - Thieves. Vanni Fucci. Serpents., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
I now was of the arch that passes there;
But he seemed moved to anger who was speaking.
1.25 - ADVICE TO PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
PUNDIT: "But one can hurt a crocodile by throwing a spear into its belly." (All laugh.) MASTER (smiling): "What good is there in reading a whole lot of scriptures? What good is there in the study of philosophy? What is the use of talking big? In order to learn archery one should first aim at a banana tree, then at a reed, then at a wick, and last at a flying bird. At the beginning one should concentrate on God with form.
"Then there are devotees who are beyond the three gunas. They are eternally devoted to God, like Nrada. These devotees behold Krishna as Chinmaya, all Spirit, His Abode as Chinmaya, His devotee as Chinmaya. To them God is eternal, His Abode is eternal, His devotee is eternal.
1.25 - Fascinations, Invisibility, Levitation, Transmutations, Kinks in Time, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"Must, my foot!" He persisted: "You have published the secret of the 9th degree of O.T.O., and you must take the corresponding oaths." "I have done nothing of the sort. I don't know the secret. I don't want to know it. I don't . . ." He interrupted me; he strode across the room; he plucked a book from the shelves; he opened it; he thrust it under my nose; he pointed out a passage with a minatory index. I began to stammer. "Yes, I wrote that. I don't know what it means; I don't like it; I only put it in because it was written in rather curious circumstances, and I was too lazy or perhaps a little afraid to reject it and write what I wanted." He fastened on one point: "You don't know what it means?" I repeated that I did not, even now that he had claimed it as important. He explained it to me, as to a child. I was merely surprised; it didn't sound possible. (Sister, all this while I've been lying to you like an archbishop; it is connected with fascinations; indeed, it has very little to do with anything else!)
Finally, he won me over, I went down to his G.H.Q., took the Oaths, was installed in the Throne of the X of O.T.O. as National Sovereign Grand Master General, and began to establish the Order as a going concern.
1.26 - FESTIVAL AT ADHARS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Fill the arching heavens with your deep lion roar, Singing Hari's sweet name! With both your arms upraised, Dance in the name of Hari and give His name to all.
Swim by day and by night in the b1iss of Hari's love; Slay desire with His name, and blessed be your life!
1.27 - Guido da Montefeltro. His deception by Pope Boniface VIII., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Up o'er the crag above another arch,
Which the moat covers, where is paid the fee
1.27 - On holy solitude of body and soul., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
30. As far as my meagre knowledge permits (for I am like an unskilled architect) I have constructed a ladder of ascent. Let each look to see on which step he is standing: Is it self-will, or human glory, or weakness of tongue, or hot temper, or too great attachment? Is it to atone for faults, or to grow more
zealous, or to add fire to fire? The last shall be first, and the first last. The first seven are the activities of this worlds week, some acceptable, and some unacceptable. But the eighth clearly bears the seal of the world to come.
1.27 - Structure of Mind Based on that of Body, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Brought from the forenoon's archipelago,
Her brows bound bright with many a scarlet blossom
1.28 - The Killing of the Tree-Spirit, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the flash of a meteor, or the whole expanse of the celestial arch
glows with the fitful light of the Northern Streamers. Even
13.03 - A Programme for the Second Century of the Divine Manifestation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Supermind is of Course the last and ultimate or other wise the first and original Support and inspiration of all other levels of being and living. Apart from this fundamental, this one source of sustenance, each intermediary level depends directly and leans upon the one that lies just above it, over arches it as it were. Thus speaking of the major intermediaries, the Overmind is under the direct control and guidance of the over- arching Supermind. And Overmind itself over- arches, broods over the mind and from behind guides and controls it. The Mind has evolved primarily because of the pressure of the Overmind standing immediately above it in the hier archy of the grades of existence. And because of this constant ruling presence of the Overmind, the mind in man is a progressive entity unveiling powers lent or delegated to it, sent down into it from the Overmind. The animal, on the contrary, is not a progressive being like man, for the Overmind does not reach it. The animal is not in contact with the Overmind. It is in contact, a somewhat precarious contact, with the Mind. Something of the Mental has made an inroad into him, into his vital texture. It is to be noted that the mind in the animal is of a different kind from the human mind: it is only in the domesticated animals, the animals living in the neighbourhood of man, having contact with him, that something of the human mind percolates Or is imbibed. As I have said, the human mind has developed and is developing fast, specially in recent years, to an extraordinary degree, in the domain of physical science leading to discoveries that appear so subtle and distant, far off as almost to be out of reach of his normal means of experience. Discoveries of other kinds, hints and intimations with regard to other forms and fields of knowledge and experience are explained most logically and adequately by the fact of an interruption or intervention of another type of consciousness into the present constitution of the human mind. We are referring to the influence of the Overmind, gradually becoming more and more explicit, extensive and effective, the immediately directing power, the guide of the new age. And this naturally because of the operative presence, in and through the Overmind, of the Supramental upon earth and in earth.
***
1.31 - Adonis in Cyprus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image
as by the licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and
1.32 - The Ritual of Adonis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the arctic Circle, where the sun annually disappears for a
continuous period which varies from twenty-four hours to six months
--
the arctic regions. On the other hand, the annual death and revival
of vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men
1.33 - Count Ugolino and the Archbishop Ruggieri. The Death of Count Ugolino's Sons., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
object:1.33 - Count Ugolino and the archbishop Ruggieri. The Death of Count Ugolino's Sons.
Ninth Circle, Ptolomaea: Traitors to their Friends. Friar
--
And this one was Ruggieri the archbishop;
Now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbour.
1.34 - The Myth and Ritual of Attis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of M arch, was known as the Day of Blood: the archigallus or
highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering.
1.35 - Attis as a God of Vegetation, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
urn, which contained the ashes of an archigallus or high-priest of
Attis, the same idea is expressed in a slightly different way. The
1.39 - Prophecy, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
1. The prophecy must announce itself as such. We cannot have people picking up odds and ends which may be perfectly irrelevant, and insisting that they conceal forecasts. This excludes Great Pyramid lunatics; it would be quite simple to do the same sham calculations with the Empire State Building; when the architects protested, it is simple to reply: why, but of course! God was most careful not to let them know what they were really doing, or they would have died of fright!
This argument was actually put forward by the Spiritists when Zancig confessed that his music-hall exploits*[AC38] were accomplished by means of a code. It is quite useless to get any sense whatever into the heads of these bigoted imbeciles. Here, A.C! don't forget your best-beloved Browning! In Mr. Sludge the Medium, the detected cheat it was D.D. Home in real life offers this silly subterfuge:
14.04 - More of Yajnavalkya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Last time I told you the story of the great Rishi Yajnavalkya. But that was about the later Yajnavalkya when he had become a full-fledged rishi, a guru with an Ashram and disciples. Today I will tell you something of the earlier Yajnavalkya, the beginning of his rishihood, the start of his spiritual life. You know the structure of the old Indian society, it consisted of four castes, varnas, and four stages, ramas. I shall speak of the ramas now. Each individual person had to follow a definite course of life through developing stages. First of all, naturally, when you are a baby, in your early childhood, you belong to the family and remain with your parents. As soon as you grow up and the time for your education arrives, you are initiated into a stage called brahmacarya; you may generally call it as the stage of self-discipline, you go to a guru and pursue your studies through a disciplined life, something like the life of the children who are here like you. In those days a student's life did not mean merely studies, that is to say, reading and writing, book knowledge, but as here a very active life. The physical education in the old time ramas in certain ways was even more complete than what is given here, for it included the art of warfare also, combatives like serious archery and many other items of physical training. When you have terminated this discipline or brahmacarya, when you have become an accomplished young man you are allowed to return to the world, and take to the worldly life, enrich yourself with all experiences of that life, that is to say, you marry and become a family man. It is the second stage called grhashtya. Next when you have fully enjoyed or fulfilled the duty of the worldly life, you pass on to the next stage that is called the vnaprastha . That is the hermit life, the beginning of the true spiritual life. Finally at the end of the vnaprastha, you pass still beyond and adopt the life of the sannyasi, abandoning everything, concentrating wholly on the Supreme Truth and merging into it.
Now our Yajnavalkya in the normal course of things has passed through the stage of brahmacarya, he has also pursued the stage of domestic life and is now at the end of it. He thinks the time has now come to him to take to spiritual life and enter into vnaprastha. He had married and had two wives. So one day he called the first wife, Katyayani, and said to her: "Katyayani, I am now leaving this life and entering the spiritual life. You have given me comfort and happiness. I am thankful to you for that. Whatever I have, my possessions, movable and immovable, I have divided into two. This is your portion." Katyayani accepted the decision without a murmur. She answered: "Since you are my lord and husband, as you ask me so I shall do." Then Yajnavalkya went to his second wife, Maitreyee; to Maitreyee too he said the same thing as he had said to Katyayani: "Maitreyee, I am leaving this life, I am taking to the spiritual life. I have given to Katyayani her share of my possessions. This is your share." But Maitreyee answered: "Wherever you go, I will follow you, I will also give up the world and its life." Yajnavalkya said: "No Maitreyee, it is a very hard, very difficult life, particularly for a woman. Follow the life to which you have been accustomed. Enjoy freely the possessions I leave you." Then Maitreyee uttered those famous words which you must have heard and which have been ringing through the centuries down to us also, even today: "All these possessions, will they give me immortality?" Yajnavalkya answered: "No, Maitreyee, that they will not give you, it is quite another matter." Maitreyee answered uttering a mantra as it were "What am I to do with that which does not give me immortality?" So Yajnavalkya had to accept her and allow her to accompany him. Now Yajnavalkya gives his first lesson of spiritual life to Maitreyee: "Maitreyee, you love me, so you are coming with me. But do you know the real truth of the matter? The real truth is that you do not love me, but you love the soul that is in you, which is also in me: you love your own self in me. Therefore you love me. And I love you, I love you not for your sake but for the sake of the self in you which is the self in me. All love is like that. A husb and loves his wife, the wife loves her husband, the brother loves his brother or sister, a sister loves her sister or brother, it is not for the sake of the person or the relation but for the sake of the self-one's own self which is in everybody. That is the first lesson which you have to learn. Forget the outer person, your own person or another's person, find the self that is in you and everybody else. That is the basis of the spiritual life."
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Charita. One of the archakas of the temple had it with him and showed it to Sri Bhagavan on the occasion of the temple suit within the last few months. Sri Bhagavan copied the slokas.
Talk 530.
1.43 - The Holy Guardian Angel is not the Higher Self but an Objective Individual, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Now, some angels are actually emanations of the elements, planets, or signs to which they are attributed. They are partial beings in very much the same way as are animals. They are not microcosms as are men and women. They are almost entirely composed of the planet (or what- ever it is) to which they are attri buted. The other components of their being I take to be almost accidental. For example, the archangel Ratziel is lord of a company of angels called Auphanim; and one must not imagine that all these angels are identical with one another, or there would not seem to be much sense in it. They have some sort of composition, some sort of individuality; and the character and appearance of the Angel can be determined by its name.
I do not think that I have anywhere mentioned how this is done. To take an example, let us have Qedemel the Hebrew letters as Q.D.M.A.L, and the numeration is 175, which is that of the sum of the 1st 49 numbers, as is proper to Venus.[82] We may then expect the head or head-dress of the spirit to be in some way characteristic of the Sign of Pisces. The general form of the body will be indicated by the Daleth, the letter of Venus, and the lower part (or perhaps the quality) will be determined by the watery Mem The termination Aleph Lamed is usually taken to indicate appropriate symbols. For instance, the Aleph might show a golden aura, and the Lamed a pair of balances. Some further detail might be indicated by taking the letters Daleth and Mem together, for Dam is the Hebrew word for blood. From such considerations one can build up a pictorial representation in one's mind which may serve as a standard to which any appearance of him should more or less conform.[83] The question then takes the form of inquiry into how far such beings are immortal or eternal.
1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Thus, Pan was called by the arcadians the Lord of the Wood. The
Silenuses kept company with the tree-nymphs. The Fauns are expressly
--
not far from Phigalia in the highlands of Western arcadia. There,
robed in black, she tarried so long that the fruits of the earth
15.01 - The Mother, Human and Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet she is the mother in being the Divine. She is divine not in the sense that she is afar and aloof, cold and indifferent like the transcendent Brahman. Indeed, the Divine Mother is more motherly than the human mother can be. The human mother is only a faint echo, a far-off shadow, at times a travesty of the true Mother in the archetypal world.
The Divine Mother even in being transcendent leans down to our human dimensions, becomes one of us, is within us as our own self and with us as comrade and guide. She takes us by the hand, and if we only allow it, teaches us how to transcend the little humanity we are made of and grow into her own nature and substance through the miracle of her loveif our love responds to it adequately.
1.50 - A.C. and the Masters; Why they Chose him, etc., #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The idea of 4 was due to my observation of St. Peter's in Rome; it is built with an eye unwavering from the number, as you will see when next you go there, aware of the fact. Also, 4 means, on the political plane, Temporal Power. (The Qabalistic architect of St. Peter's knew that, and designed his talisman ad hoc.) This book was then, according to Ab-Ul-Diz,*[AC44] to achieve worldly success. It is my fault if it did not; still, these are early days to judge of that.
Soror Virakam[96] insisted that I should write this in such language that the charwoman and the chimney-sweeper could understand it easily. She pulled me up at the first hint of obscurity.
1.52 - Killing the Divine Animal, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
rising sun light up the scene, an archer speeds an arrow to his
heart. No sooner has he done so, than the marksman throws away his
1.53 - The Propitation of Wild Animals By Hunters, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
In the Timor-laut islands of the Indian archipelago the skulls of
all the turtles which a fisherman has caught are hung up under his
1.56 - The Public Expulsion of Evils, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
their last stronghold in the sky, whose blue arch no longer passes,
except with children, for the screen that hides from mortal eyes the
--
occurs towards the close of an arctic winter, when the sun reappears
on the horizon after an absence of weeks or months. Accordingly, at
1.57 - Public Scapegoats, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
islands of the Indian archipelago, send away all their diseases to
sea. They make a proa about six feet long, rig it with sails, oars,
--
season, such as the beginning or end of winter in the arctic and
temperate zones, and the beginning or end of the rainy season in the
--
they are banished at the approach of the bitter arctic winter. When
a tribe has taken to husbandry, the time for the general expulsion
--- Overview of noun arc
The noun arc has 3 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (37) discharge, spark, arc, electric arc, electric discharge ::: (electrical conduction through a gas in an applied electric field)
2. (6) arc ::: (a continuous portion of a circle)
3. bow, arc ::: (something curved in shape)
--- Overview of verb arc
The verb arc has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. arch, curve, arc ::: (form an arch or curve; "her back arches"; "her hips curve nicely")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun arc
3 senses of arc
Sense 1
discharge, spark, arc, electric arc, electric discharge
=> electrical conduction
=> conduction, conductivity
=> physical phenomenon
=> natural phenomenon
=> phenomenon
=> process, physical process
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 2
arc
=> curve, curved shape
=> line
=> shape, form
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
bow, arc
=> curve, curved shape
=> line
=> shape, form
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun arc
3 senses of arc
Sense 1
discharge, spark, arc, electric arc, electric discharge
=> brush discharge
=> corona discharge, corona, corposant, St. Elmo's fire, Saint Elmo's fire, Saint Elmo's light, Saint Ulmo's fire, Saint Ulmo's light, electric glow
=> flashover
Sense 2
arc
=> limb
Sense 3
bow, arc
=> rainbow
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun arc
3 senses of arc
Sense 1
discharge, spark, arc, electric arc, electric discharge
=> electrical conduction
Sense 2
arc
=> curve, curved shape
Sense 3
bow, arc
=> curve, curved shape
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun arc
3 senses of arc
Sense 1
discharge, spark, arc, electric arc, electric discharge
-> electrical conduction
=> photoconductivity, photoconduction
=> superconductivity
=> discharge, spark, arc, electric arc, electric discharge
Sense 2
arc
-> curve, curved shape
=> normal curve, bell-shaped curve, Gaussian curve, Gaussian shape
=> meander
=> closed curve
=> S-shape
=> catenary
=> Cupid's bow
=> wave, undulation
=> extrados
=> gooseneck
=> intrados
=> bend, crook, twist, turn
=> hook, crotchet
=> envelope
=> arc
=> scallop, crenation, crenature, crenel, crenelle
=> spiral
=> helix, spiral
=> perversion
=> sinuosity, sinuousness
=> arch
=> bell, bell shape, campana
=> bow, arc
=> crescent
=> quadric, quadric surface
=> roulette, line roulette
Sense 3
bow, arc
-> curve, curved shape
=> normal curve, bell-shaped curve, Gaussian curve, Gaussian shape
=> meander
=> closed curve
=> S-shape
=> catenary
=> Cupid's bow
=> wave, undulation
=> extrados
=> gooseneck
=> intrados
=> bend, crook, twist, turn
=> hook, crotchet
=> envelope
=> arc
=> scallop, crenation, crenature, crenel, crenelle
=> spiral
=> helix, spiral
=> perversion
=> sinuosity, sinuousness
=> arch
=> bell, bell shape, campana
=> bow, arc
=> crescent
=> quadric, quadric surface
=> roulette, line roulette
--- Grep of noun arc
arc
arc-boutant
arc cosecant
arc cosine
arc cotangent
arc lamp
arc light
arc secant
arc sine
arc tangent
arca
arcade
arcadia
arcadian
arcadic
arcadic dialect
arcado-cyprians
arcangelo corelli
arcanum
arccos
arccosecant
arccosine
arccotangent
arcdegree
arcella
arcellidae
arceuthobium
arceuthobium pusillum
arch
arch support
archaebacteria
archaebacterium
archaeobacteria
archaeologist
archaeology
archaeopteryx
archaeopteryx lithographica
archaeornis
archaeornithes
archaeozoic
archaeozoic aeon
archaicism
archaism
archaist
archangel
archbishop
archbishopric
archdeacon
archdeaconry
archdiocese
archduchess
archduchy
archduke
archean
archean aeon
archean eon
archegonium
archenteron
archeobacteria
archeological remains
archeological site
archeologist
archeology
archeopteryx
archeozoic
archeozoic eon
archer
archerfish
archery
arches national park
archespore
archesporium
archetype
archiannelid
archiannelida
archibald macleish
archibald percival wavell
archidiaconate
archidiskidon
archidiskidon imperator
archil
archilochus
archilochus colubris
archimandrite
archimedes
archimedes' principle
archine
archipallium
archipelago
architect
architectonics
architectural engineering
architectural ornament
architectural plan
architectural style
architecture
architeuthis
architrave
archive
archives
archivist
archness
archosargus
archosargus probatocephalus
archosargus rhomboidalis
archosaur
archosauria
archosaurian
archosaurian reptile
archpriest
archway
arcidae
arcminute
arcsec
arcsecant
arcsecond
arcsin
arcsine
arctan
arctangent
arctic
arctic archipelago
arctic char
arctic circle
arctic fox
arctic ground squirrel
arctic hare
arctic moss
arctic mouse-ear
arctic ocean
arctic poppy
arctic skua
arctic willow
arctic wolf
arctic zone
arctictis
arctictis bintourong
arctiid
arctiid moth
arctiidae
arctium
arctium lappa
arctium minus
arctocebus
arctocebus calabarensis
arctocephalus
arctocephalus philippi
arctonyx
arctonyx collaris
arctostaphylos
arctostaphylos alpina
arctostaphylos andersonii
arctostaphylos manzanita
arctostaphylos tomentosa
arctostaphylos uva-ursi
arctotis
arctotis stoechadifolia
arctotis venusta
arcturus
arcuate artery
arcuate artery of the kidney
arcuate vein of the kidney
arcus
arcus senilis
arcus zygomaticus
carbon arc
carbon arc lamp
electric-arc furnace
electric arc
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