I
perched on a couch in the SU
the setting sun
leaving gleaming fingerprints on the warm grid-of-windows-wall,
reaching like a sheet across wood-paneled floors
listening
to the figure at the piano fill the room with
notes like
rain falling through fog, as seen from below and slowly turning.
Intently Attentive to
enjoying the physical processes and perceptions of my
environment and very temporary body
before moving on.
This was a well-timed post relative to my general condition.
- more factors to add to the equilibrium process.
I went to the Special Collections office today to scan copies of this beautiful work of reproduced 18th-century English publishing:
"Lexicon Technicum. Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts
and Sciences." By John Harris. Volume 2 (London 1710).
Article: "Curves, by Sir Isaac Newton."
as printed in
The Mathematical Works of Isaac Newton,
Volume 2
Assembled with an Introduction by
Dr. Derek T. Whiteside,
Research Assistant,
Whipple Science Museum,
Cambridge, England
The Sources of Science
1967
Johnson Reprint Corporation
New York and London
This book isn't kept in the Special Collections. I just wanted to use their scanner.
While we were waiting for files to download though, I was talking with the Special Collections Manager about my thesis and he mentioned that, on an unrelated topic, there happened to be an original copy of Newton's Opticks in the Rare Book Collection.
Holy Cow.
It was a much more related topic than he expected. I happened to know that the article I'd just been scanning was an Appendix to Newton's publication of Opticks
Old Books are so beautiful,
perhaps because publishing was a much greater feat.
...Though it was typeset,
I think I found on the titles for pages of figures the horizontal pencil lines I'd expect to see under handwritten calligraphy...
One of the figures pages from an original, First-Edition printing of
Enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis,
the first Appendix to
Opticks
Every year, I've submitted writing and photography to my school's Creative Review. Every year, none of my writing gets in, but photos do. This year breaks my 2-photos record though.
Just this one got in:
I'll have to track down the others that have gotten in over the years and put them here, too.
He told me about how
the ground was covered in shells.
they volunteered in
A section of the city which,
after 3 years of natural growth looked like broad farmland
but
smack in the middle of
the should-be city, there was just
something wrong about
the emptiness
And the houses, each remaining set of roof and walls marked
with the date it was searched
and the number of bodies removed
Brand-new houses and condominiums,
destroyed by flooding from the
inside out,
the watermark on the walls,
evidence of the flood levels;
boarded-up, useless
shells
You'd only get the ground covered in shells like that he said
from being under so much water for so long,
He told me about a man
walking into a bar in a deserted sector to find
others, company, and music inside
proving that
even if you kill New Orleans,
You haven't killed New Orleans.
(Have you ever considered that your physical shape is the result of an incredible magnitude of gas molecules bouncing against you and holding you in your usual mold of air?)
A younger version of myself poked through my dad's old bookcases, reading snippets and stories of Greek myth and history. Milo, I read, was a man of immense strength and size. He would entirely conceal a pomegranate in one fist and dare others to retrieve it. No matter how many pushed or pried at his fingers, not only did they never extract the pomegranate, but after all had given up, Milo would unroll his fist and reveal the pomegranate, not even bruised.
Whether pushing or pulling, he met strength with equal strength and held his ground precisely.
I found and read Heart of Darkness sometime during my high school years because it was a book that everyone spoke highly and mysteriously of. It may have been a bit above my level, but, especially when I left for college, I took the image with me of one man, left to his own devices, in an environment with none of his familiar external controls or pressures. Embedded in an unfamiliar (or lack of) external structure, how does one choose to conduct oneself?
Not only what is chosen, but how?
Recently, I found a comic book in the MLLL called Mouse Guard. In a Winter issue, the most senior guard is talking with the newest guard recruit. He describes two of their fellow guardsmice (I think the names are Saxon and Kenzie), a great pair since in handling situations, Saxon's aggressive and impulsive nature is balanced by Kenzie's more wise and reserved intellectual assessment. This is not ideal, says the Old Guard, -- Saxon lets himself go since he trusts that Kenzie will delay or correct him if he acts too rashly. And, Kenzie dwells and deliberates too reservedly because he knows that Saxon will spur him on.
They each depend on the other, but, the Old Guard recommends, be self-contained, and cultivate balanced aspects within yourself.
These days always seem to be heavy with other events.
It so happens that today is also Good Friday
and has the descending integer date 3.21
Also, Vernal Equinox
a year ago today
It occurs to me that perhaps I should not push a summary posting tonight, since unsettled waters aren't so good for reflection, and I haven't given myself the leisure to let myself settle and wade slowly through past stories/posts. But, what's attempted discipline without a little pushing?
Cultivation is a chronic practice"
At the time of this posting, a huge proportion of recent posts are still in draft mode - titles or ideas jotted down where I hope to go back and fill in.
some of this material comes from those yet-absent posts.
The title comes partly from a line ...I think I found in a thesis in NCNM's library. It was written on the topic of depression from a classical Chinese medicine approach. One of the interpretations of depression I remember as the inability of the heart to accurately reflect external reality.
At that same school, a posted quote:
...For this is wrong, if anything is wrong: not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon. We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it....
But I take some issue from this since it sometimes seems that the art of losing just takes a little practice while the art of holding on may be difficult to realize. But, perhaps the art of losing and the art of holding are not so different in their pure and mastered forms. I imagine they meet on some level like holding a small bird freely in your hand.
other things...
love, growth, change, death
I must remember that I have a person to be
If any of you sees an evil, let him change it by his hand, and if he is unable to do that, then let him change it by his words, and if he is still unable to do that, then let him denounce it in his heart, but this is the weakest form of belief.
And yet, I think it's only belief once its worked its way into the heart, the overflow of which brings words and actions consistent with their source.
And, the heart must be carefully allowed to reflect internal reality as well,
and is a good indicator, but can also be guided.
Sometimes the best way to help things is to just not interfere too much. A relax of focus can bring into view all of the flowers coming up all over.
Serene Open Awareness
The Perennial Pedagogy
Sunlight under dark soil comes up dandelions
'Flower' can be a verb.... Flower!
-Lloyd J Reynolds
And I feel like I ought to say something for Good Friday,
but I'm afraid I'm rather empty on the subject.
***
This has been another installment in the continuing but oft-forgotten project of letting my heart reflect both internal and external realities, ... and hopefully this makes them the same.
Stopping by The National College of Natural Medicine, I found a locker with the following notes attached -
I know what the great cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.
-Henry Miller
Love and death are the greatest gifts given to us, but mostly they are passed on unopened.
...For this is wrong, if anything is wrong: not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon. We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it....
-Rainer Maria Rilke
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
-William Blake
Men are admitted to Heaven not because they have curbed and govern'd their passions or have no passions but because they have cultivated their understandings
- William Blake
(to Edit:
include:
2/24
special archives
LJR)
"Flower can be a verb - Flower!"
I have just been trying to look in the mirror as though I were not myself, and trying to understand what I would see.
***
He told us about how,
himself 19,
he'd cleaned house for the Master in his last year of life,
and listened to one who'd ever-pondered consciousness
confounded:
"I just don't get it!" He would say, "the light comes in through my eyes, and it goes out! ...I just don't get it!"
and thought, if after so long this man doesn't, how can I ever expect to?
***
He was so glad to find out it was me who'd put up the Olde LJR around Reed
so that he could ask for the copy of the Perennial Pedagogy and Macbeth's Give sorrow words/ the grief that does not speak/ whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” that he'd nearly taken off the wall before.
***
He told us how,
at the Master's memorial service, Macbeth's 'Give Sorrow Words' was displayed, and
Calligraphers came from all over the Northwest to pay their respects and to write a weathergram. The quadrangle was feathered with hundreds of fluttering weathergrams.
***
Weathergrams are meant to be transient and brief,
meant to leave the artists hands
meant to be a fleeting thought, attracted into words for a time,
not belabored in the writing
hung in kraft paper and twine from trees
part of the scene
submitted for revision by the elements of nature.
You can read the poem
But that is not the poem.
Watch the white paper
Between the lines.
Look through that white
As through white snow
To see what buttercups and lilies
Are pushing up from below.
from “How to Read a Poem”
by Lloyd Reynolds
***
At lunch with Zeb Raft during his candidacy visit for tenure track in the Chinese Department, we'd asked him a number of tough questions including expectations for students, plans for classes, opinions of the Humanities program,... his answers to all of which I thought demonstrated his being made of the right material. After finishing his answers however, he turned a question around to us:
What is your ideal class?
stunned, it occurred to me I'd never thought of the question before. Here I am, claiming to be a student, and I've never formed a picture of what I think the ideal class ought to look like.
After some thought, I responded something to the effect of,
"I suppose I would want to find someone doing something I respected, and follow them."
"Like Jesus!" a friend piped up
Yeah. I guess so.
"Well, Confucius says wherever you find 3 men walking, one of them can teach you something," said Zeb.
***
A student, writing about Lloyd J Reynolds, said that he was born at just the right time.
Too early for me, I thought. Or perhaps I was born too late.
My timing trades the man himself for the benefit of reflections and biographies, able to see his life by looking down from the end, the time between making effects of his life on this world more visible. Then again, would I have thought a yet-living Master fit to follow?
