Tag Archives: giggling in the gutter

Dry Salvages

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“The river is within us, the sea is all about us” Dry Salvages TS Eliot

“The distant rote in the granite teeth, and the wailing warning from the approaching headland are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner rounded Howard’s, and the seagull; And under the oppression of the silent fog the tolling bell measures time, not our time, rung by the unhurried ground swell” Dry Salvages TS Eliot

“No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” For Whom the Bell Tolls John Donne

“Time and the bell have buried the day, the black cloud carries the sun away…After the kingfisher’s wing has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still at the still point of the turning world” Burnt Norton TS Eliot

East Coker

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In my end is my beginning.

East Coker Church
“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning” TS Eliot

Burnt Norton

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“The still point of the turning world. That is where the dance is..” TS Eliot

“what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous”

Parmenides

Thou, my love

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The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber said “To man the world is two-fold .. the attitude of man is two-fold .. the one primary word is the combination I-Thou, the other is the combination I-It”.

I-thou is a relationship of inner to inner, an authentic encounter that is the touchstone of existence. (I-thou creating “our”).

Of course, Buber wrote in German and Du has currency in contrast to Sie or Es, whereas in English we now reserve intimate addressing for our relationship with God. How ironic!

In our English language how can we now mark the transition in relationships between the formality of “you are” and the caress of “thou art”? And when and why did we lose the rich language of intimacy?

Surely thou-ness was clear in the minds of the scholars constructing the King James Bible in 1611. Perhaps the slow death of this way of celebrating friendship is linked to the four hundred year rise of materialism since the reformation?

Perhaps as the smoke clears and we see the I-It debris left by capitalism and atheism a new expression of thou-ness will appear.

Let us pray so.

Collective Unconsciousness

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Carl Jung first wrote about the “collective unconscious”. This lies below and as a foundation of our own individual unconscious. It is a pooling between us, now and in the past. It is also one gateway (I believe) to the shared life beyond the fragility of our mind in the life – our material consciousness – the Brahman of Hinduism or Nirvana of Buddhism, that can be glimpsed through meditation.


The collective unconscious speaks in a language both of archetypes and mandalas. Archetypes are the powerful shared images which make so many movies effective for instance the monster in the dark of horror films and the ecstasy of union and community of Avatar. Mandalas reflect perfection in images and seem, at least to me to be linked to the beautiful fractals of chaos theory that underlay existence. (look at free fractal apps on your iPhone for a direct view of reality!).

It is only our mind, this particular consciousness that dies, this is anyway an illusion. If we can connect to the shared stream of unconsciousness now , then we already experience our immortality. Through prayer, meditation, connection with our loved ones or nature – even the cinema. After all, the movies are right, forget what people call it.

May the Force be with us.

Conjugating Being

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Yin, Yang – or Jung’s concept of Anima and Animus – striving for dynamic balance. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world. There the dance is..”

I like the concept of conjugation in relation to establishing this balance, as in Buber’s “I & Thou” – moving onward to an existential “We”.

Animus .. the male aspect of the female psyche, as the Anima is the female aspect of male psyche. Hence:

Animo, Animas.. Animamus.

Feminism is one of the phrases of conjugation; rebalancing centuries of dominance of male. Perhaps though the intense work is inside each of us, balancing our Anima and Animus to release our emergent self?

I’m never no thing

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David Bohm proposes (“Wholeness and the Implicate Order”) that language is reshaped to focus on verbs, rather than nouns (subjects & objects). He calls this a “rheomode”, reflecting a reality of flow, of movement.

No no I’m never no thing

The bumble of bee or its sting

Flight of the gull not its wing

Not noun or thing-y at all

‘Cos I’m the bounce of a ball

Hop of a bird and its call

The verb, I am is to be

Wyrd. Ancestral knowledge

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The druids and those before them believed in Wyrd. Fate, spinning and spun eternally by the three sisters sitting at the base of the tree of life. World interwoven and changing with tides and currents rippling through it. Reality as flow, connection, relation, context, love).

New facets of our connected reality constantly emerging. The same truths at the base of Hinduism – and in Quantum Mechanics ( and Buddhism and Christianity).


Metamorphosis. Water becoming ice. Caterpillars pupating, emerging into butterflies. We journey together into wondrous new states. Society has a reality separate from the individuals that it is made from. And we as individuals in turn have emerged as something new, from the molecules that constitute us now. We are co-evolving in a phase of emergence from one state to quite another.


Yet; mostly we think of the material world as static and secure. How strange. We manage that by focussing on short time segments. Thus we ignore the riverine flow of rocks, the evolution from raw plasma to chemicals to biology to ideas; and we are also blind to “now”, the window to eternity.


Why? Fear, I suspect, is to blame. The terror, the existential angst that is located in our ego – which of course is definitely an ephemera. This is just a trick of light. Look past the surface of the pool with its (reversed) image where we see our “self” reflected. There, within the water, is the flow of life which is our home. We let our egos rule over us, when – just here, just now (always here, now), in the flow of the universe is our real deathless self. As Rupert Brookes puts it “.. a pulse in the eternal mind, no less”. Like Narcissus, we are transfixed by inner absorption rather than an awareness of all-that-is.

Reality and Joy

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All is not as it seems; in fact – better than we fear or even hope. Much. All the world’s a stage; a set to hold and enable connection. Reality is not within us – our self – but in relation. Which is itself movement, whence relationship arises.

It is our attachment to our unfertilised ego that binds and imprisons us. Sentenced thus to solitary confinement. Magic shimmers when synapses between us crackle with the vibrancy of what lies beyond.

Relation to, with, through. Nature, others, creativity, ideas. Anything in fact except the non-existent “I” (Ich-Es) and its bedfellow materialism; which is literally stuff and nonsense.

The language of love is movement and acceleration. Relationship is evanescent motion, choreographed by joy. The word existing beyond time.

Experience deceives. It is built from the the rubble of the dry concretised and digital past. It is history, always outmoded. As Eliot and Buber put it:

“In the act of experience Thou is far away” (Buber)

“In the knowledge derived from experience, the knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” (Eliot)

“just as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish reality.. I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him .. No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life” (Buber).

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” (Eliot)