Mountains and Seas

I'm partial to both of them -

"Seen from the shore the sea is very beautiful - streaked with brilliant colors.  It is opaque at the edges, mingling the blue of the sky with the shining green of the coco and palm trees on the shore, and fringed with foam - a rainbow fringe.  Farther out, it has a pearly lustre.  The islands of coco trees, which float in the distance, in a slightly misted, vaporous radiance, have such fresh, delicate shades that one is enchanted by the sight.  A slight breeze from the open sea tempers the heat of the town."

.........................................

"I was enchanted with the succession of peaks and precipices, torrents and cascades of water, wooded slopes and deep valleys.  Water gushed and flowed everywhere, animating everything.  It was a wonderful spectacle.  A little terrifying too, whenever the train seemed to get close to the edge of the precipice."

Camara Laye
The Dark Child

The Sea

"Suddenly at the end of the avenue, I saw it.  I stood a long time observing its vastness, watching the waves roll in, one after another, to break against the red rocks of the shore.  In the distance, despite the mist around them, I saw some very green islands.  It was the most astonishing spectacle that had ever confronted me.  At night, from the train, I had only glimpsed the sea.  I had formed no real idea of its size, nor even less of its movement, of the kind of fascination one feels towards its endless movement.  Now that the whole spectacle lay before me I could scarcely come away."

Camara Laye
The Dark Child

Those of us who grew up far from shore understand the emotions of catching sight of the sea for the first time.  Laye evokes those feelings eloquently.

Satori and Insight

"Its [Satori's] semblance or analogy in a more or less feeble and fragmentary way is gained when a difficult mathematical problem is solved, or when a great discovery is made, or when a sudden means of escape is realized in the midst of most desperate complications; in short, when one exclaims 'Eureka! Eureka!'  But this refers only to the intellectual aspect of satori, which is therefore necessarily partial and incomplete and does not touch the very foundation of life considered one indivisible whole.  Satori as the Zen experience must be concerned with the entirety of life.  For what Zen proposes to do is the revolution, and the revaluation as well, of oneself as a spiritual unity.  The solving of a mathematical problem ends with the solution, it does not affect one's whole life.  So with all other particular questions, practical or scientific, they do not enter the basic life-tone of the individual concerned.  But the opening of satori is the remaking of life itself.  When it is genuine - for there are many simulacra of it - it's effects on ones moral and spiritual life are revolutionary, and they are so enhancing, purifying as well as exacting.  When a master was asked what constituted Buddhahood, he answered, "The bottom of a pail is broken through."  From this we see what a complete revolution is produced by this spiritual experience.  The birth of a new man is really cataclysmic."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Language and Spiritual Experience

"You mustn't take these and similar meditations too literally; they are only attempts to capture something from the flow of my feelings and inner thought processes; sometimes I map it out with these formulations, at other times I may use completely different ones.  I'm no philosopher and it is not my ambition to create a conceptually fixed system; anyone who tries to understand it that way will soon discover that I am perpetually contradicting myself, that I leave many things unexplained or explain them differently each time, etc."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel is doing the same thing that believers have had to do since the beginning, using the language and concepts at hand to try to express our noetic experiences.  However unsatisfactory this process is, I'm glad Havel did not settle for the other alternative, staying silent.  I take strength from the words of others who have trod this path before me.

Havel - Responsibility and Identity 2

"For me the fundamental flaw in the many different positivistic 'explanations' lies in the fact that it reduces human responsibility - as it does everything else - to a mere relationship of something relative, transitory, and finite to something else relative, transitory, and finite (for example, the relationship of a citizen to the legal code, or of the unconscious to the 'superego').  By its very nature, however, such an understanding hides, and must hide, what is most important and, in my opinion, as clear as day: what we have here is not the mutual relationship of two relativities to each other, but the relationship of relativity to 'non-relativity,' the relationship of finiteness to 'infinity,' of a unique existence to the totality of Being.  It is true that responsibility usually finds expression as the relationship of something in us to something around us or something else in us, but essentially it is always a relationship between us, as 'relativity' - and our only genuine antithesis, that which alone permits us to experience our relativity as relativity; that is to an omnipresent, absolute horizon as the 'final instance' that lies behind everything and above everything, which as it were provides everything with a framework, a measure and a background and which ultimately qualifies and defines everything relative.  This superabstract and superimaginary horizon is, at the same time, something confoundedly concrete - for do we not experience it today and every day, through all our particular experiences of the world of relativities, as a constantly present limiting element, and in fact as a dimension that touches us most compellingly?"

"In other words, as an ability or a determination or a perceived duty of man to vouch for himself completely, absolutely, and in all circumstances (in other words, as the only true creator of freedom), human responsibility is precisely the agent by which one first defines oneself as a person vis-à-vis the universe, that is, as a miracle of Being that one is.  On the one hand, it is only thus that one defines and so infuses meaning into one's dependency on the world; on the other hand, it is only thus that one definitively separates oneself from the world as a sovereign and independent being; it is only thus that one, as it were, stands on one's own two feet.  I would say that responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is."

"In short, it seems to me that just as there can be no matter without space, and no space without matter, their can be no transitory human existence without the horizon of permanence against which it develops and to which - whether it knows it or not - it constantly relates."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

The Gentle Heart

II - Initiation
     2 - The Meeting with the Goddess

"The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well...requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the 'gentle heart.'  Not by the animal desires of an Actaeon, nor by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth-to-twelfth-century Japan."

"....The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal.  Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no.  And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes;  if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

A thought provoking question

"Now tell me, O human:  What do you think you were when you were not yet in soul and body?"

Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias

Our Mortal Test

This is a passage from one of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century Benedictine Nun and Abbess.  The "I" in this passage is God.  Hildegard has been shown images and the voice of God is explaining their meaning to her.

"Therefore listen and understand me, you who say in your hearts 'what are these things and why?'  Oh, why are you so foolish in your hearts, you who have been made in the image and likeness of God?  How can such great glory and honor, which is given to you, exist without testing, as if it were an empty case of nothing?  Gold must be tested in the fire, and precious stones to smooth them, must be polished, and all things of this kind must be diligently scrutinized.  Hence, O foolish humans, how can that which was made in the image and likeness of God exist without testing?  For Man must be examined more than any other creature, and therefore he must be tested through every other creature.  How?"

"Spirit is to be tested by spirit, flesh by flesh, earth by water, fire by cold, fight by resistance, good by evil, beauty by deformity, poverty by riches, sweetness by bitterness, health by sickness, long by short, hard by soft, height by depth, light by darkness, life by death, Paradise by punishments, the Heavenly Kingdom by Gehenna, earthly things by earthly things and heavenly things by heavenly things.  Hence man is tested by every creature in Paradise, on earth and in Hell; and then he is placed in Heaven."

Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias

compare with 2nd Nephi 2:10 - 25
The complex imagery, the divine voice explaining them and answering questions, even the harsh seeming directness of the voice at times remind me a little of Nephi.

But a small moment...

"And consider this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the future in which all things disappear.  How then is he not a fool who is puffed up with such things or plagued about them and makes himself miserable?  for they vex him only for a time, and a short time."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

Woman, in the picture language of mythology...

II - Initiation
     2 - The Meeting with the Goddess

"Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known.  The hero is the one who comes to know.  As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending.  She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters.  And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation.  Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure.  By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness.  But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding.  The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Havel's critique of modern attempts to explain the concept of Responsibility

"But what, in fact, is human responsibility?  And what does it relate to?  It is, after all, a relationship and thus assumes the existence of two poles: a person who is responsible, and someone, or something for whom or for which he is responsible."

"Modern man, to the extent that he is not a believer and does not understand responsibility as a relationship to God, has many more or less concrete answers to this question.  For some, responsibility is a relationship man has with other people, and with society, and they seek its roots (with varying degrees of emphasis) in education, in the social order, in subconscious calculation, or, on the contrary, in love and sacrifice, that is, in the various psychological potentialities of man.  For some, the source of responsibility is simply conscience, a part of the biological equipment of our species (something like Freud's 'superego').  For others, it is ultimately a chimera left over from the times when people still feared the gods."

"Responsibility is certainly all of these things, or rather, they are particular expressions of it, or ways in which it might be described.  But is that the end of it?  Do these answers really answer the question?"

"I'm convinced they do not.  At least I am not at all satisfied by these answers because I don't believe they touch at the heart of the matter.  They tell us as much about responsibility as the model of an atom tells us about the essence of matter, or a tachometer about the essence of motion."

"This opinion of mine, however, is more than just an opinion: it is directly rooted in my 'experience of the world,' that is, in the experience I, as an actual person, have had over the years.  All attempts to brush aside the mystery by localizing it in a particular region of the scientifically described world (ore more precisely, of the world as reconstructed by science) go directly against the grain of that experience.  Such attempts, it seems to me, are self-deceiving and lazy, nothing more than one of the 'ideological' manifestations of the crisis of human identity: man surrenders his humanity by turning it over to the offices of an expert."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

The ruminations on responsibility are far less abstract here than they sound.  They are the attempts of a dissident in a communist prison to make sense of the moral imperative that has pushed him into what rationally looks like a quixotic confrontation with remorseless, naked power.  Why in heaven's name do we do it?

Satori defined and contrasted

"Satori may be defined as an intuitive looking into the nature of things in contradistinction to the analytical or logical understanding of it.  Practically, it means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistically-trained mind.  Or we may say that with satori our entire surroundings are viewed from quite an unexpected angle of perception.  Whatever this is, the world for those who have gained a satori is no more the old world as it used to be; even with all its flowing streams and burning fires, it is never the same one again.  Logically stated, all its opposites and contradictions are united and harmonized into a consistent organic whole.  This is a mystery and a miracle, but according to the Zen masters such is being performed every day.  Satori can thus be had only through our once personally experiencing it."

"....In the psychology of religion this spiritual enhancement of one's whole life is called 'conversion.'  But as the term is generally used by Christian converts, it cannot be applied in its strict sense to the Buddhist experience, especially to that of the Zen followers; the term has too affective or emotional a shade to take the place of satori, which is above all noetic.  The general tendency of Buddhism is, as we know, more intellectual than emotional, and its doctrine of Enlightenment distinguishes it sharply from the Christian view of Salvation.  Zen, as one of the Mahayana schools naturally shares a large amount of what we may call transcendental intellectualism...."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Both his recognition of some commonality with Christian 'conversion' and his emphasis on its differences puts me in mind of Thomas Merton's engagement with Buddhism - Zen in particular.  Merton was struck by so much that seemed common between the monastic disciplines and experiences of the two traditions, but also wondered about the differences.  One tool he used to explore that difference was reading and thinking about the experiences of Buddhist converts to Christianity.  He concluded that they were seeking a "personal element," the "personal revelation of God" that was "in Buddhism, but it was not explicit."

For those who need a definition of the term noetic:

"no•et•ic: From the Greek noēsis / noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding"

"For centuries, philosophers from Plato forward have used the term noetic to refer to experiences that pioneering psychologist William James (1902) described as:

…states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority."

This from the following website:
http://noetic.org/about/what-are-noetic-sciences

The website is owned by the Institute of Noetic Sciences,
founded by Astronaut Edgar Mitchell
who does not hesitate to describe his own experience during his return from the Moon by the Buddhist term Samadhi, though it includes feelings and insights that would be more at home in Merton's world than Suzuki's -

“The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . .The knowledge came to me directly.”

As A Man Thinketh...

"Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.  Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts as these:"

Marcus Aurelius then goes on to give a list of the kind of thoughts he wanted to dye his mind with.  What thoughts would you like to dye with?  What tinge has my own soul taken, and how would I like to change it?

The Meeting With the Goddess

II - Initiation
     2 - The Meeting with the Goddess

"The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage (ἱερὸς γάμος) of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World.  This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Satori as a Baptism of Fire

"The essence of Zen Buddhism consists in acquiring a new viewpoint on life and things generally.  By this I mean that if we want to get into the inmost life of Zen, we must forgo all our ordinary habits of thinking which control our everyday life, we must try to see if there is any other way of judging things, or rather if our ordinary way is always sufficient to give us the ultimate satisfaction of our spiritual needs.  If we feel dissatisfied somehow with this life, if there is something in our ordinary way of living that deprives us of freedom in the most sanctified sense, we must endeavor to find a way somewhere which gives us a sense of finality and contentment.  Zen proposes to do this for us and assures us of the acquirement of a new point of view in which life assumes a fresher, deeper and more satisfying  aspect.  This acquirement, however, is really and naturally the greatest mental cataclysm one can through with in life.  It is no easy task, it is a kind of fiery baptism, and one has to go through the storm, the earthquake, the overthrowing of mountains, and the breaking in pieces of rocks."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Havel - Responsibility and Identity

"The problem of human identity remains at the center of my thinking about human affairs.  If I use the word 'identity,' it is not because I believe it explains anything about the secret of human existence; I began using it when I was developing my plays, or thinking about them later, because it helped me clarify the ramifications of the theme that most attracted me: 'the crisis of human identity.'  All my plays in fact are variations on this theme, the disintegration of man's oneness with himself and the loss of everything that gives human existence a meaningful order, continuity and its unique outline."

"At the same time, as you must have noticed from my letters, the importance of the notion of human responsibility has grown in my meditations.  It has begun to appear, with increasing clarity, as that fundamental point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity, something like the 'idea' that determines its degree and type.  It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dries out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart.  (That is why I wrote you that the secret of man is the secret of his responsibility)."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Spiritual Reticence in the Modern/Postmodern Era's

Havel's description of a belief in the survival of human personality is thought provoking and suggestive, but certainly isn't really a logically reasoned philosophical "proof" of immortality.  Nor is it really the foundation of his own certainty.  He admits as much to his wife at the end of the passage we quoted in the last post -

"You have often wondered where I, such a rational man, come by my conviction that the human soul is immortal.  In time, I'll try to write something longer and more fundamental about it; but if you like, you may take what I've written today as a small contribution to the subject.  I haven't explained the real root of my faith in immortality, I've merely indicated a way in which modern man can conceive of immortality or how he might include it in his picture of his world."

The mystic vision is no less present in our modern age of unbelief, but it has a harder time giving voice to its insights, because, for far too many, there no longer exists a commonly accepted language in which to express the experience.  They, like Wittgenstein, find themselves simply saying - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Havel - Life after Death

He's not Christian.  His belief system and philosophical vocabulary are heavily shaped by Phenomenology and Existentialism.  And yet, similar to his belief in "something" transcendent that gives meaning to existence which he hesitates to call God, Havel also voices a conviction in the survival of "what matters" in a person beyond that end we call death --


 "....human existence not only extends beyond the physical existence of its bearer, it clearly goes even beyond the physical existence of the experience of it by others.  Nothing that has once happened can un-happen; everything that once was, in whatever form, still is - forever lodged in the "memory of Being."  And everything we consider real, actual, present, is only a small and vaguely defined island in the ocean of 'imaginary,' 'potential,' or 'past' Being.  It is from this matrix alone that it draws its substance and its meaning; only against this background can we experience it in the way we do.  Along with everything that ever happened in whatever way (or could or should have happened) and what can now no longer un-happen, human personality, human existence too will endure, once and for all, in the 'memory of Being.'  In other words, not only will it not cease to exist when its 'owner' goes into another room, or is imprisoned, or when everyone else has forgotten about him, but it will not cease to exist even when he dies, nor even when the last man who ever knew him or knew that someone like him ever existed, forgets about him or dies.  Nothing can ever erase from the history of Being a human personality that once was; it exists in that history forever."

"But it exists there - and this is the most important aspect of the whole matter - in a radically different way from everything else, from my Parma cutlet in the Rotisserie, for example, which is indubitably a part of that history as well.  The point is that human existence, as I have tried to indicate, is not just something that has simply happened; it is an 'image of the world,' an 'aspect of the world's Being,' a 'challenge to the world,' and as such - it seems to me - it necessarily forms a very special node in the tissue of Being.  It is not simply something separate and individual, enclosed within itself and limited to itself, but it is, repeatedly, the whole world.  It is as if it were a light constantly reilluminating the world; a crystal in which the world is constantly being reflected; a point upon which all of Being's lines of force constantly appear to converge, centripetally, as it were.  Human existence, I would say, is not just a particular fact or datum, but a kind of gospel as well, pointing to the absolute and, in a way that has no precedent, manifesting the mystery of the world and the question of its meaning."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Ondra Lysohorsky on Poetry

 I'm having trouble finding anything by Lysohorsky in print in Northern Utah's libraries - either college or public, so I'm beginning to mine the internet.

"My poetry is humanist poetry. It speaks up for the best in people.
At my age, I’ve had enough of politics. I’ve been a victim of
brown fascism and for years I’ve been muzzled by red fascism.
But a poet has a duty to speak up for humanity and the lasting
verities. That’s why I never give up. That’s why I’m delighted
when some man or woman in France or Greece or Japan or in any
other corner of the world reads my poems in translation. It’s a
minor victory!"

 

Óndra Łysohorsky

Gill, David
1978-1979 ‘Ondra Lysohorsky – poet of Lachia (1978/9)’. Cine film (Super 8).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYjI9cPCd20

(English translation presumably by David Gill; accessed 17 November 2014).

 

Quote and citation from

SUSANNA WITT
PASTERNAK, ŁYSOHORSKY AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF “UNHEROIC” TRANSLATION

Russian Literature LXXVIII (2015) III/IV

 

The Moment of Temptation

Shakespeare's genius often shows in his apt characterization of situations we all face.  Who, in the moment when temptation seems to be gaining the upper hand hasn't faced the question of identity that Angelo poses -

"What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?"

Isabella's arguments for mercy

Measure for Measure is a play where Virtue and Mercy win.  I'm finding it interesting to watch Shakespeare work with his themes: virtue and vice, justice and mercy.  Today I focus on Isabella's arguments for clemency, some of which are quite powerful and moving:

"No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does."

........................................

"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,    
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made."

.........................................

"O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."

.........................................

"Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;  
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,  
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep;"

.........................................

"Go to your bosom;    
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault: if it confess
A natural guiltiness such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life."


William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure

Trials, continued

II - Initiation
     1 - The Road of Trials

"The ordeal is a deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death?  For many-headed is this surrounding Hydra; one head cut off, two more appear - unless the right caustic is applied to the mutilated stump.  The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination.  Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed - again, again, and again.  Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Road of Trials

II - Initiation
     1 - The Road of Trials

"Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.  This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure.  It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals.  The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region.  Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage."

"....And so it happens that anyone - in whatever society - undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolic figures (an one of which may swallow him) .... In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the 'purification of the self,' where the senses are 'cleansed and humbled,' and the energies and interests 'concentrated upon transcendental things";  or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past.  In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

His quotes in this passage are from
Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism, A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness

Let not your left hand know....

"One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account as a favor conferred.  Another is not ready to do this, but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he has done.  A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks nothing more after it has once produced his proper fruit....so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

He who hesitates....

"Our doubts are traitors
  And make us lose the good we oft might win
  By fearing to attempt."

Shakespeare
Measure for Measure

The Test

"Lord Angelo is precise;
 Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
 That his blood flows, or that his appetite
 Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
 If power change purpose, what our seemers be."

Shakespeare
Measure for Measure

The test Vincentio proposes for Angelo (leaving him in charge of the government of the city in his absence) is a close parallel to the test we all face in leaving the pre-existence for mortality.  What will we do, given the power to do as we please, out of the restraining presence and oversight of God?

Gifts and Purposes

"Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
  Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
  Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike     [35]
  As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd
  But to fine issues..."

Shakespeare
Measure for Measure

Reverie

"It is easy for men who work in the fields all day long to fall into the habit of silence as the mull endlessly over one thing and another.  The mystery of things, their how and why, conduces to silence.  It is enough for such men to observe things and recognize their impenetrability.  You can see this state of mind reflected in their eyes.  My uncle Lansana's glance was astonishingly sharp when it lighted on something.  But this rarely occurred.  he remained entirely preoccupied, still in that reverie which he indulged in endlessly in the fields."

Camara Laye
The Dark Child

Writing While "in the Groove"

"I enjoy writing only when I know its just right, when it flows, when I have a decent idea (which seldom happens in my case, because very little seems to suit my rather special approach), when the thing 'writes itself,' as they say.  At such times I enjoy writing perhaps more than anything else.  When it doesn't flow, or when I feel it isn't exactly right - that is, when it doesn't precisely fit my poetics - then not only do I not enjoy writing, it actually repels me."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel and Jan Werich

In letter 53, Havel responds to news of the death of Jan Werich.  Werich was an early mentor of Havel's -

"...he took me on at Theater ABC at a time when I had no prospects whatsoever....He had one exceptionally important influence on me: he helped me realize...that theater can be something incomparably more than just a play, a director, actors, audience and an auditorium: it is a special focus of social and intellectual life, helping to crate the 'spirit of the times' and embodying and manifesting its fantasy and humor; it is a living instrument of social self-awareness, one that is, in an unrepeatable way, lodged in its own time."

Werich was a much older man, who's roots went firmly back to the time of Capek and Masaryk.  He belonged to an "avant-garde, with its wonderfully brash self-confidence and messianism" that arose in the "humanistic traditions of the First Republic."  The years seem to have left Werich disillusioned however -

"From several recent conversations with him, I gathered he was afflicted by a deep skepticism and resignation, an isolated, sad, bitter and disaffected man, without faith and without hope.  For someone who loved living so much and who in a way was the embodiment of love for the world and everything good in it, this development must have radically (though perhaps subconsciously) undermined his zest for living - and this, as we know, is one of the most destructive of diseases."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel and Kafka

"I'm reading Brod's biography of Kafka....I'm delighted by each new thing I learn about Kafka because of how precisely it corresponds to what I have assumed and imagined to be true.  I've always harbored a feeling...that I somehow understand Kafka better than others, not because I can claim a deeper intellectual insight into his work, but because of an intensely personal and existential understanding of experience that borders on spiritual kinship."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

There is a scene in the movie Invictus where Rugby captain Pienaar wonders (thinking about Nelson Mandela) what kind of man "could spend thirty years in a tiny cell, and come out ready to forgive the people who put [him] there?"  I have my own wonder about Havel.  Out of the debris of communism after the Prague Spring, with only Heidegger, Camus, Kafka, the theater of the absurd (Ionesco and Becket of all people) and a little Frank Zappa to inspire him, how does he emerge as a major moral and spiritual force within East Europe's dissident movement?  A champion of meaning in a world where so many believed it had ceased to exist?

The Threshold and the "Belly of the Whale" - temple parallels

I - Departure
     5 - The Belly of the Whale

"The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.  The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed in the unknown, and would appear to have died."

"....This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation...here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward to be born again.  The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple - where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal.  The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same.  That is why the approaches to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls.  These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within.  They are the preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale.  They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis.  His secular character remains without; as a snake its slough.  Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise.  The mere fact that anyone can physically walk past the temple guardians does not invalidate their significance; for if the intruder is incapable of encompassing the sanctuary, then he has effectively remained without....Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces

The Threshold and its Guardians

I - Departure
     4 - The Crossing of the First Threshold

"With the personification of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.  Such custodians bound the world...standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon.  Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger."

"....This brings out the sense of the first, or protective aspect of the threshold guardian.  One had better not challenge the watcher of the established bounds.  And yet - it is only by advancing beyond those same bounds, provoking the destructive other aspect of the same power, that the individual passes, either alive or in death, into a new zone of experience....The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Central and Eastern European Literature

I'm leaving Daniel Alarcon's list for a while, but taking just a moment to consider the books I completed -

1. Nowhere Man / Aleksandar Hemon  
2. Flight Without End / Joseph Roth  
3. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski 
4. Ours / Sergei Dovlatov 
5. The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat / Ryszard Kapuściński 

 In addition, last year I read some early plays and the corresponding parts of a few biographies of Vaclav Havel, a collection of writings by Karel Capek, and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.  At present I am still making my slow way through Havel's Letters to Olga.  Together these readings cover the period from the interwar period (and retrospectively, WWI itself), through the fall of the Soviet Union and into the post Soviet era.  Geographically the authors are from Germany, Austria, the former Yugoslavia, former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia.

I'm grateful for the chance to have some concrete glimpses of the intellectual currents, histories and attitudes of a part of the world and a period of time I have mostly known from summary and encapsulation.