Beautiful. I’ve a mention regarding how a chance encounter with polyphony broke my world open in an upcoming essay. I’ll definitely reference this piece in mine.
Ha, wonderful! There wasn't room for it in this piece, in the end, but another thread that led me back to this experience was your recent dialogue with Paul K, and especially his comment that using the same word to talk about 'gods' (in a pagan understanding) and 'God' (in a monotheistic understanding) is a source of confusion, since they refer to different 'orders of being'. Without trying to push this to some neat "we all believe the same thing really" synthesis, I have a sense that the medieval world-picture was far more accommodating of the coexistence of these orders of being than the five centuries of post-Reformation culture that you, Paul and I are all trying to get out from under. William Dalrymple made a wonderful radio series on Western Mysticism in the early 2000s and one of the many thoughts I took from it was his observation that Medieval Christianity looked a lot more like Hinduism than anything, Protestant or Catholic, that emerged from the Reformation.
Polyphony also broke my world open aged 13. Specifically - Bulgarian folk (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares), the music of Thomas Tallis, and the experience of singing in a choir, standing like young birches in a spinney with all the other girls, moved by the same force. The physical experience of embedded-ness is undervalued; and creating or being surrounded by unamplified
co-created sound with others, as it vibrates us all evenly, is a vital yet mostly absent part of modernity. I have a feeling with both your and Dougald's writing, that you at times create a word-woven analogue to this haptic web. Strands do not pull too tight, the intended pattern is apparent, there is a sense of both strength but also 'give' in the fabric of your thoughts, with room for us to be there too, as contrasting threads. I appreciate this very much.
Bless you, Caro! This comment was good to read – and took me back to a conversation we were part of last year, about the sense that music is something quite different and more powerful than the language we have as 'children of a failing modernity' (Chris Smaje's expression) allows us to recognise. I may try to write that up as a future post here.
In the meantime, I am finally reading The Master and His Emissary, which I've heard you enthuse about, and Iain McGilchrist's discussion of music and language in the brain offers another route into making sense of music as something far bigger and more powerful, not to mention older than words.
I remember the last time I visited Iain on Skye, we were belting out harmonies found within the incomparably rich composition Kalimankou Denkou (The Gathering Evening) in the kitchen! If you only do one thing as a treat today, go listen to that. You have a treat ahead with the book. Many years after 'The Master and His Emissary' radically deepened the way in which we could talk about embodied experiences that decades of T'ai Chi uncovered, and profoundly changed my understanding of my own life, I still regularly come back to the notions of 'semi-permeability' and Right Hemisphere open attentive awareness, which can be experienced in the flow of Form or Pushing Hands. Good writing and teaching can also function within the body of the culture as a semi permeable membrane, allowing light and new images through, and filtering out or transforming poison, (when one's own opinions don't act as a deadening overlay, or impermeable barrier). I find more and more I am drawn towards the spaciousness of particular writers such as you and Rhyd who do not peddle opinion, but tease apart the fibres of things with care, without a forceful mind, rather than just ripping holes in anything they find.
Lovely, cohesive, thought provoking. I particularly love your own "doubts." There's a key there which you seem to hold naturally. Negative capability comes to mind. To be able to doubt your writing as you write it. It implies an open, organic stance very rare today. I'll be digesting this for a while.
Glad to be settled onto a mossy rock alongside your stream once again, stirred by the polyphony of your words and following the glinting droplets of the links and commenters!
One nit to pick (with either you or Henryson?): as someone for whom “the living cosmos” is taking shape as an expansive physicality, adding layers/scale to our bodily-experienced sense of place, it grates when otherwise attuned writers and artists glitch their imagery of the sky (eg crescent moons facing the wrong direction, or too high).... Venus at sunset is always on the way to setting, rather than rising!
Though: when setting in the evening sky, it’s also always approaching closer day by day....emerging from behind the sun, swinging wide to the left of it (seen higher and later in the evening...so yes, rising, higher day by day while still close to setting on any given night...), then, as it arcs between us and our star, lower each night once again, growing brighter most of the way, until its (relatively) huge crescent passes into the glare once again. So in that way, perhaps, it is indeed rising in our felt awareness and in proximity! (So also: Venus as the harbinger of dawn is indeed rising ahead of the sun, while always moving away from us, emerging bright and close from between us and the sun and disappearing distant and faint behind the rising sun a few months later.)
This is a glimpse of reciprocity and communion within the Solar Body, as experienced from this earthly vantage.
Well, Jim, I could wish that all corrections were as pleasant to be on the receiving end of as your comment. The error is mine, not Henryson's - and had I stopped to think more carefully, I would have seen it. How good to have such attentive readers!
I have been on quite a Tallis kick in the last several months, and particularly “Spem in Alium,” or “my hope is in none but god.” The medieval world, with its layers of order and being that intersect in multiple colluding and counteracting ways makes much more sense of the way I have always experienced things. It can be overwhelming to have this perception in a world that demands straightforward causal analyses and narratives and demands action based on them; how can you know which of the multitudinous intersecting threads to pick out and tug on?
Which is where the hope in none but god comes from, which from my perspective is the unifying consciousness holding it all together, not in a flattening, homogenizing way; but rather like the painter holding the vision of the masterpiece he is creating; except the painter is the masterpiece. And from that understanding, I can go to the source and ask, “which thread do I need to follow?”
As for progress in medicine, it’s interesting to me that in our antibiotic age, having assumed bacteria were something to be exterminated mercilessly, we are now dealing with the consequences of drug-resistant bacteria, the destruction of our microbiome, and its myriad and only dimly understood effects on our overall health and well-being, and that health is something like a balancing of multiple factors that foster well-being and right functioning, not simply an absence of an offending agent. Not the four humors, exactly, but there may be more wisdom in the past than we realize.
Anyway, I am overwhelmed with things in my inbox and news feed and have been attempting to focus my attention more recently, but something told me to follow this particular thread when I saw it this morning, glad I did.
You wrote, "lectures ... often felt like standing on a railway platform while the train you want to board speeds through the station without slowing down." These days, it's often podcasts that feel this way to me. I am grateful for transcripts and 15-second rewind buttons that give me opportunity (when in position to do so) to have visual access to a thought so I can absorb it at the pace I need (which, like you, requires reining in a "mind wandering off, mid-paragraph, chasing spiralling patterns of connection, struggling to stick with the line of someone else’s thoughts").
"Later, it struck me that something else was lacking ... I had not yet found any questions of my own; questions of the kind that would light a deeper curiosity and provide a sense of direction." I have never forgotten the instruction given by a priest upon assigning the first essay I wrote at the Jesuit University I attended, to always begin a writing project not with an answer or preconceived conclusion but rather with a question -- guidance contrary to all the instruction I had previously received from teachers.
I don't recall ever reading Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, but I do know that in my youth I read many a tale composed in the "long and ugly tradition of stories about how women are punished for their sinfulness." These threads got woven into my own psyche so early and repeatedly that it took decades to recognize and unravel them, and I continue to work at mending the holes left behind, or patiently allowing them to be mended by serendipity, or simply learning to live with them.
I so appreciate your introduction to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World that I have ordered a copy. "What Tsing is looking for is a way of staying with the ruins and noticing how life goes on and new possibilities emerge, after the failure of modernity’s promises." In the middle of my 7th decade on this planet, I have just recently begun working with a "life coach" for support in doing exactly this. I am intrigued by the idea of reviewing/noticing my own life and identity as an "assemblage" of "multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories" rather than as a single story line of either success or failure. And I will keep in mind the words of the leper, "Why do you dash yourself against the wall, / To slay yourself and mend nothing at all?"
I keep several books on my shelves that I read decades ago and was deeply yet mysteriously affected by and have longed to read again, hoping both to rediscover what treasure (emotional connection) I found there before and to discover what I assume I missed the first time. Yet year after year I avoid going there. These include Homer's The Odyssey (I even purchased Emily Wilson's recent translation after hearing her speak about and read from it at a nearby bookstore) and Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev (which moved me so strongly as an artsy teen with Anabaptist roots that I even wrote a letter to the author, though I never received a reply). Perhaps I will let go of my fear of disappointment and make reading at least one of these a thread in my "coaching" adventure.
Part of the draw of reading for me has always been to find connections between my little self and the Big World "out there." Thank you, Dougald, for all the connections I found here.
Beautiful. I’ve a mention regarding how a chance encounter with polyphony broke my world open in an upcoming essay. I’ll definitely reference this piece in mine.
Glad you’re writing here!!!
Ha, wonderful! There wasn't room for it in this piece, in the end, but another thread that led me back to this experience was your recent dialogue with Paul K, and especially his comment that using the same word to talk about 'gods' (in a pagan understanding) and 'God' (in a monotheistic understanding) is a source of confusion, since they refer to different 'orders of being'. Without trying to push this to some neat "we all believe the same thing really" synthesis, I have a sense that the medieval world-picture was far more accommodating of the coexistence of these orders of being than the five centuries of post-Reformation culture that you, Paul and I are all trying to get out from under. William Dalrymple made a wonderful radio series on Western Mysticism in the early 2000s and one of the many thoughts I took from it was his observation that Medieval Christianity looked a lot more like Hinduism than anything, Protestant or Catholic, that emerged from the Reformation.
Polyphony also broke my world open aged 13. Specifically - Bulgarian folk (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares), the music of Thomas Tallis, and the experience of singing in a choir, standing like young birches in a spinney with all the other girls, moved by the same force. The physical experience of embedded-ness is undervalued; and creating or being surrounded by unamplified
co-created sound with others, as it vibrates us all evenly, is a vital yet mostly absent part of modernity. I have a feeling with both your and Dougald's writing, that you at times create a word-woven analogue to this haptic web. Strands do not pull too tight, the intended pattern is apparent, there is a sense of both strength but also 'give' in the fabric of your thoughts, with room for us to be there too, as contrasting threads. I appreciate this very much.
Bless you, Caro! This comment was good to read – and took me back to a conversation we were part of last year, about the sense that music is something quite different and more powerful than the language we have as 'children of a failing modernity' (Chris Smaje's expression) allows us to recognise. I may try to write that up as a future post here.
In the meantime, I am finally reading The Master and His Emissary, which I've heard you enthuse about, and Iain McGilchrist's discussion of music and language in the brain offers another route into making sense of music as something far bigger and more powerful, not to mention older than words.
I remember the last time I visited Iain on Skye, we were belting out harmonies found within the incomparably rich composition Kalimankou Denkou (The Gathering Evening) in the kitchen! If you only do one thing as a treat today, go listen to that. You have a treat ahead with the book. Many years after 'The Master and His Emissary' radically deepened the way in which we could talk about embodied experiences that decades of T'ai Chi uncovered, and profoundly changed my understanding of my own life, I still regularly come back to the notions of 'semi-permeability' and Right Hemisphere open attentive awareness, which can be experienced in the flow of Form or Pushing Hands. Good writing and teaching can also function within the body of the culture as a semi permeable membrane, allowing light and new images through, and filtering out or transforming poison, (when one's own opinions don't act as a deadening overlay, or impermeable barrier). I find more and more I am drawn towards the spaciousness of particular writers such as you and Rhyd who do not peddle opinion, but tease apart the fibres of things with care, without a forceful mind, rather than just ripping holes in anything they find.
Lovely, cohesive, thought provoking. I particularly love your own "doubts." There's a key there which you seem to hold naturally. Negative capability comes to mind. To be able to doubt your writing as you write it. It implies an open, organic stance very rare today. I'll be digesting this for a while.
Glad to be settled onto a mossy rock alongside your stream once again, stirred by the polyphony of your words and following the glinting droplets of the links and commenters!
One nit to pick (with either you or Henryson?): as someone for whom “the living cosmos” is taking shape as an expansive physicality, adding layers/scale to our bodily-experienced sense of place, it grates when otherwise attuned writers and artists glitch their imagery of the sky (eg crescent moons facing the wrong direction, or too high).... Venus at sunset is always on the way to setting, rather than rising!
Though: when setting in the evening sky, it’s also always approaching closer day by day....emerging from behind the sun, swinging wide to the left of it (seen higher and later in the evening...so yes, rising, higher day by day while still close to setting on any given night...), then, as it arcs between us and our star, lower each night once again, growing brighter most of the way, until its (relatively) huge crescent passes into the glare once again. So in that way, perhaps, it is indeed rising in our felt awareness and in proximity! (So also: Venus as the harbinger of dawn is indeed rising ahead of the sun, while always moving away from us, emerging bright and close from between us and the sun and disappearing distant and faint behind the rising sun a few months later.)
This is a glimpse of reciprocity and communion within the Solar Body, as experienced from this earthly vantage.
Well, Jim, I could wish that all corrections were as pleasant to be on the receiving end of as your comment. The error is mine, not Henryson's - and had I stopped to think more carefully, I would have seen it. How good to have such attentive readers!
I have been on quite a Tallis kick in the last several months, and particularly “Spem in Alium,” or “my hope is in none but god.” The medieval world, with its layers of order and being that intersect in multiple colluding and counteracting ways makes much more sense of the way I have always experienced things. It can be overwhelming to have this perception in a world that demands straightforward causal analyses and narratives and demands action based on them; how can you know which of the multitudinous intersecting threads to pick out and tug on?
Which is where the hope in none but god comes from, which from my perspective is the unifying consciousness holding it all together, not in a flattening, homogenizing way; but rather like the painter holding the vision of the masterpiece he is creating; except the painter is the masterpiece. And from that understanding, I can go to the source and ask, “which thread do I need to follow?”
As for progress in medicine, it’s interesting to me that in our antibiotic age, having assumed bacteria were something to be exterminated mercilessly, we are now dealing with the consequences of drug-resistant bacteria, the destruction of our microbiome, and its myriad and only dimly understood effects on our overall health and well-being, and that health is something like a balancing of multiple factors that foster well-being and right functioning, not simply an absence of an offending agent. Not the four humors, exactly, but there may be more wisdom in the past than we realize.
Anyway, I am overwhelmed with things in my inbox and news feed and have been attempting to focus my attention more recently, but something told me to follow this particular thread when I saw it this morning, glad I did.
Apologies in advance for the ramble.
You wrote, "lectures ... often felt like standing on a railway platform while the train you want to board speeds through the station without slowing down." These days, it's often podcasts that feel this way to me. I am grateful for transcripts and 15-second rewind buttons that give me opportunity (when in position to do so) to have visual access to a thought so I can absorb it at the pace I need (which, like you, requires reining in a "mind wandering off, mid-paragraph, chasing spiralling patterns of connection, struggling to stick with the line of someone else’s thoughts").
"Later, it struck me that something else was lacking ... I had not yet found any questions of my own; questions of the kind that would light a deeper curiosity and provide a sense of direction." I have never forgotten the instruction given by a priest upon assigning the first essay I wrote at the Jesuit University I attended, to always begin a writing project not with an answer or preconceived conclusion but rather with a question -- guidance contrary to all the instruction I had previously received from teachers.
I don't recall ever reading Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, but I do know that in my youth I read many a tale composed in the "long and ugly tradition of stories about how women are punished for their sinfulness." These threads got woven into my own psyche so early and repeatedly that it took decades to recognize and unravel them, and I continue to work at mending the holes left behind, or patiently allowing them to be mended by serendipity, or simply learning to live with them.
I so appreciate your introduction to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World that I have ordered a copy. "What Tsing is looking for is a way of staying with the ruins and noticing how life goes on and new possibilities emerge, after the failure of modernity’s promises." In the middle of my 7th decade on this planet, I have just recently begun working with a "life coach" for support in doing exactly this. I am intrigued by the idea of reviewing/noticing my own life and identity as an "assemblage" of "multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories" rather than as a single story line of either success or failure. And I will keep in mind the words of the leper, "Why do you dash yourself against the wall, / To slay yourself and mend nothing at all?"
I keep several books on my shelves that I read decades ago and was deeply yet mysteriously affected by and have longed to read again, hoping both to rediscover what treasure (emotional connection) I found there before and to discover what I assume I missed the first time. Yet year after year I avoid going there. These include Homer's The Odyssey (I even purchased Emily Wilson's recent translation after hearing her speak about and read from it at a nearby bookstore) and Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev (which moved me so strongly as an artsy teen with Anabaptist roots that I even wrote a letter to the author, though I never received a reply). Perhaps I will let go of my fear of disappointment and make reading at least one of these a thread in my "coaching" adventure.
Part of the draw of reading for me has always been to find connections between my little self and the Big World "out there." Thank you, Dougald, for all the connections I found here.