Enchantment

The Song of Wandering Aengus

 

 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.



W. B. Yeats
The Wind Among the Reeds

The Power of a Faith

Baldwin, who was deeply disturbed by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, still gives a glowing description of its effects on its converts-

"Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what a generation of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light."

Patientia vinco

"Patientia vinco"

By patience I conquer.

I am by nature impatient and flighty.  Like Laman and Lemuel, it is not that I do not ever repent and do well, it is that I do not persist in my efforts.  This proverb is a reminder to me of how all things, both temporal and spiritual, are made permanent in the human soul.

Havel on Western Politics

An interesting look at ourselves from the outside.

"It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it.  People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.  But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion;  the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information; all of it...can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself."

The Power of the Powerless

Baldwin - Sensuality, Self, and the Fountain of Life

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread....Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.  It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult.  The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself.  Such a person interposes between himself  and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, thought eh person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!) are historical and political attitudes.  They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person."

Baldwin - the culture of Harlem and community

In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare.  Perhaps we were, all of us - pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children - bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.  I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about "the man."  We had the liquor, the chicken, the music and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not.  This is the freedom one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz.

The Fire Next Time

The Sense of Self

"I had another experience at about this time [my twelfth year].  I was taking the long road to school from Klein-Huningen, where we lived, to Basel, when suddenly for a single moment I had the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud.  I knew all at once: now I am myself!  It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I."  But at this moment I came upon myself.  Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me.  Now I happened to myself.  Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist.  Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.  This experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there was "authority" in me."

Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Walcott on Focus

Measure the days you have left.  Do just that labor
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbor

and a sail coming in.

Derek Walcott
Omeros

Yeats on Modernity - II

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.




W. B. Yeats
To Rose

Yeats on Modernity

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey truth is now her painted toy;


W. B. Yeats
"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
Crossways

Yeats on Modernity

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey truth is now her painted toy;


W. B. Yeats
"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
Crossways

A Storm Scene

Then, soaked like paper, the hills were a Chinese scroll

and she saw a subtlety where none was before.
Bamboo strokes.  Wet cloud.  Peasant with straw hat and pole.
Fern spray.  White mist. Heron crossing fresh waterfall.

Omeros

Havel - The Phenomenology of Responsibility

"Patocka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere.  That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else..."

The Power of the Powerless

[Jan Patocka was a Czech Philosopher of Phenomenology, banned from teaching by the Communists, and a signer of Charter 77]

Havel - limitations of legislation

"The key to a humane, dignified, rich and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the criminal code.  These merely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they can make life easier or more difficult.  They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning.  The struggle for what is called "legality" must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is.  Without keeping one's eyes open to the real dimensions of life's beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics."

The Power of the Powerless

The Ideological Fallacy - Havel

"Every Society, of course, requires some degree of organization.  Yet if that organization is to serve people and not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways.  The depravity of the opposite approach, in which people are first organized in some way or another (by someone who always knows best "what people need") so they may then allegedly be liberated, is something we have known on our own skins only too well."

Power of the Powerless