If you can see it, it can see you. That’s true of just about anything. —Margaret Atwood

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All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.


—Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Narcissus and Goldmund

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According to whether we are in the same place or separated one from the other, I know you twice. There are two of you. When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me.

This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons.

I live in you then like living in a country.

You are everywhere.


—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?


—John Berger

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shanti, shanti, shanti

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All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. 

They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. 

Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

 

—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
wait - what ?

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hold everything dear

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The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. 

It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.


—William James
The Principles of Psychology

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A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. 

A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. 

It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

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Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead

  

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1. The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In that core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness.

2. Between the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer. The credibility of religion depends on the clarity of certain unusual exchanges. The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to systematically produce such exchanges.

3. The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.

4. To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature. Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do collectively. The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time. It would include all those who have ever lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

5.The dead inhabited a timeless moment of construction continuously rebegun. The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.

6. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse. Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

7. If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory? They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.

8. The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory. As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.

9. The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible. This imagination is close to (resides in) God; but I do not know how.

10. In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon. The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself. During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

11. What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their "imagination" is engaged.

12. How do the living live with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus, living and dead were interdependent. Always. 

Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear

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questions

  

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A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales

[...] A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.

—John Berger
Into the Woods

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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?


—Richard Dawkins

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I've no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am by outliving me.  

And what's it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.


—Li-Young Lee
The Hammock, excerpt
Book of My Nights

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