Psychogeography

Has it ever been your fortune, courteous reader, to rise in the earliest dawning of a summer day, ere yet the radiant beams of the sun have done more than touch with light the domes and spires of the great city? . . . If this has been your lot, have you not observed that magic powers have apparently been at work? The accustomed scene has lost its familiar appearance. The houses which you have passed daily, it may be for years, as you have issued forth on your business or on your pleasure, now seem as if you beheld them for the first time. They have suffered a mysterious change, into something rich and strange. Though they may have been designed with no extraordinary exertion of the art of architecture . . . yet you have been ready to admit that they now “stand in glory, shine like stars, apparelled in a light serene.” They have become magical habitations, supernal dwellings, more desirable to the eye than the fabled pleasure dome of the Eastern potentate, or the bejewelled hall built by the Genie for Aladdin in the Arabian tale.

                                                                                                 --Arthur Machen “N”

Philipp Otto Runge

I was thinking today about Philipp Otto Runge, the great Romantic artist.  Like Novalis, he died young, and also like Novalis, of tuberculosis.  He also shared with Novalis a deep religious and mystical faith, which inspired his highly personal and original (one might even say idiosyncratic) forms of art.  His paintings and etchings move me tremendously, especially his allegorical compositions like “Night” and “Dawn.”  Like Novalis, he left us only a few years of work, but in that work there is something truly invaluable, something that is eternally evocative and fresh.  I find his work, like that of Novalis, so consoling; such an overwhelming reminder that our strivings truly matter and endure.

There Is No Finer Example of Inescapability . . .

I think of Robert Musil’s wisdom, his insight into the human condition, or perhaps, it would be better to say, the human “game.”  His wisdom is worldly wisdom, certainly, not Godly (re: the quote in the previous post), but, in many ways, Musil is the most unworldly of writers.  No one else writes as ably on the theme of “vanity of vanities.  All is vanity.”  At the heart of his work is the search for mystical truth--even though most of his characters squander their chances of ever finding it.  Instead, they find the decay, the vacancy, that all worldly pursuit eventually results in; the accumulation of experience without meaning.  I think of the passage from Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften:

Es gibt kein zweites solches Beispiel der Unentrinnbarkeit wie das, das ein begabter junger Mensch bietet, wenn er sich zu einem gewöhnlichen alten Menschen einengt; ohne Schlag des Schicksals, nur durch die Einschrumpfung, die ihm vorher bestimmt war!

and I need only look around me, or at myself, to know how true this is.  The only remedy is to stay spiritually youthful, or, as Musil would say, to stay always in love; to stay on the journey to the East . . .

Sanskrit Grammar

Thinking about Sanskrit grammar, and about the beauty and musicality of the desiderative verb forms.  And the wonderful line from the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad, profound and direct, like something from Novalis: 

If people thought of God as much as they think of the world,

who would not attain liberation?

December 12, 2015 Virgen de Guadalupe

Madre benefactora

Madre venturosa

Señora del Tepeyac

Dueña del agua

Xinola achaneh

        --Natalio Hernández, ‘Madre amorosa”

Stanzas on Editing a Novel

Editing the same piece over and over again

is like trying to break through a brick wall using your head.*

“I spent the morning putting in a comma

and the afternoon removing it.” ― Gustave Flaubert

Misery is still finding typos

in a passage you’ve already edited fifteen times.

To “that” or not to “that,”

that is the question.

  *No wonder Bertrand Russell said that writing the Principia Mathematica “had actually damaged his brain.”

Clarence Rivers

Today is the birthday of Clarence Rivers, who passed away a few years back.  He was one of the angels of my youth, with his joyful religion, his belief that music was the soul of worship, and his wonderful voice.  Pastor, liturgist, a composer who combined traditional Western church music with the African-American Spiritual tradition, writer and teacher.  I first read his Reflections when I was very young.  He is perhaps best remembered for his hymn, "God is Love."

Here is a link to that song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXqfh5KxqYs