I really like the thought you are attempting to express. And I kinda like that you had the courage to express it without having it figured out yet. That says something...
And maybe we won't ever have it figured out.
In the Hebrew story there's a wonderful phrase that pops up no later than the 2nd verse of Genesis... it's tohu wa bohu. It's a strange, somewhat enigmatic rhyming phrase connoting chaos and potential. Unfortuantley unimaginiative western Christianity took the story to mean that the divine had to step in and destroy, overpower, do away with the chaos in order to get anything done. Turns out, chaos (e.g., randomness, indeterminacy, etc) is at the heart of everything. And my take, though of course I could be wrong, is that the divine is in the middle of the chaos. So, yes, keep "messing up" the "construction of order from chaos." It's already messed up! And maybe there's something or someone in the middle of all of that.
My grandmother, a widower, lived in her home until her mid-90s. I lived nearby and helped her with many interactions with the outside world — paying bills, sending emails, negotiating with unintelligible telco support personnel or health care admin. These things bewildered and flustered her, sometimes bringing her to tears.
But there were some things she wouldn’t give up, and even though she struggled with them physically, they brought her peace and contentment. The upkeep of the flower garden, the preparation of meals and washing of dishes, the morning hobble down the garden path to the letterbox — these gave her a sense of durability and a rootedness, even as her body and mind were starting to let go.
Dang Sam, another awesome piece. That passage from Conrad was stunning, and I always feel a nagging need to write a very long paper on Frye: he was a genius. I'm also taken by James Hillman, who I was not familiar with, and like that distinction between ways of thinking.
'I think that there is something uncanny to endless rows of cubicles, to blank faces of glass towers, to the emergence of forms called ‘screens’ (so unlike it’s probable antecedent, the veil), that builds anti-worlds which resound back to our subjectivities as detachment'--Excellent writing, Sam, excellent.
Isn’t there a distinction between the true wilderness Conrad is describing and the already domesticated wilderness of your gran’s garden? Every summer I spend time some time alone in remote Swedish forests, which exhibit their own rhizomatic order, but it’s an order impenetrable and terrifying to a tame animal like myself (I’d be terrified to be stranded there alone). Much of what we consider to be ‘nature’ are landscapes very much altered and cultivated by humans for millennia. If there is an outside, I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘what’s outside the window’ but something which appears occasionally in fragments where we don’t expect it – and yes fear is how we grasp it intuitively.
I really like the thought you are attempting to express. And I kinda like that you had the courage to express it without having it figured out yet. That says something...
And maybe we won't ever have it figured out.
In the Hebrew story there's a wonderful phrase that pops up no later than the 2nd verse of Genesis... it's tohu wa bohu. It's a strange, somewhat enigmatic rhyming phrase connoting chaos and potential. Unfortuantley unimaginiative western Christianity took the story to mean that the divine had to step in and destroy, overpower, do away with the chaos in order to get anything done. Turns out, chaos (e.g., randomness, indeterminacy, etc) is at the heart of everything. And my take, though of course I could be wrong, is that the divine is in the middle of the chaos. So, yes, keep "messing up" the "construction of order from chaos." It's already messed up! And maybe there's something or someone in the middle of all of that.
Or, ha, maybe it's meaningless.
My grandmother, a widower, lived in her home until her mid-90s. I lived nearby and helped her with many interactions with the outside world — paying bills, sending emails, negotiating with unintelligible telco support personnel or health care admin. These things bewildered and flustered her, sometimes bringing her to tears.
But there were some things she wouldn’t give up, and even though she struggled with them physically, they brought her peace and contentment. The upkeep of the flower garden, the preparation of meals and washing of dishes, the morning hobble down the garden path to the letterbox — these gave her a sense of durability and a rootedness, even as her body and mind were starting to let go.
Dang Sam, another awesome piece. That passage from Conrad was stunning, and I always feel a nagging need to write a very long paper on Frye: he was a genius. I'm also taken by James Hillman, who I was not familiar with, and like that distinction between ways of thinking.
'I think that there is something uncanny to endless rows of cubicles, to blank faces of glass towers, to the emergence of forms called ‘screens’ (so unlike it’s probable antecedent, the veil), that builds anti-worlds which resound back to our subjectivities as detachment'--Excellent writing, Sam, excellent.
Isn’t there a distinction between the true wilderness Conrad is describing and the already domesticated wilderness of your gran’s garden? Every summer I spend time some time alone in remote Swedish forests, which exhibit their own rhizomatic order, but it’s an order impenetrable and terrifying to a tame animal like myself (I’d be terrified to be stranded there alone). Much of what we consider to be ‘nature’ are landscapes very much altered and cultivated by humans for millennia. If there is an outside, I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘what’s outside the window’ but something which appears occasionally in fragments where we don’t expect it – and yes fear is how we grasp it intuitively.