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Monday, October 31, 2005
Monday October 31, 2005
Halloween
Meditations
"They don't understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once."
— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion
"Multispeech is
a mode of communication…
which facilitates
direct idea transference
at high speed
and with 'multiple channels'
like a kind of
multidimensional speech –
described in contrast to
normal language
which is, of course, strictly
linear and one-dimensional."
— langmaker.com on
The Gameplayers of Zan
"Examples are the
stained-glass windows
of knowledge."
"necess yet again from bridge of brainbow oyotecraven stare decesis
on landaway necessity timeslast the arnings ent and tided turn yet
beastfall nor mindstorms neither in their canceling sarved cut the line
that binds ecessity towarn and findaway twill open pandorapack
wishdearth amen amenusensis opend the mand of min apend the pain
of durthwursht vernichtung desiree tolight and eadly dth cessity sesame
We are the key."
— Roger Zelazny,
Eye of Cat
See also Finnegans Wake.
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Monday October 31, 2005
Balance
"An asymmetrical balance is sought since it possesses more movement. This is achieved by the imaginary plotting of the character upon a nine-fold square, invented by some ingenious writer of the Tang dynasty. If the square were divided in half or in four, the result would be symmetrical, but the nine-fold square permits balanced asymmetry."
— Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, quoted in Aspen no. 10, item 8
"'Burnt Norton' opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views are introduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus' fragments on flux and movement…. the chief contrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as a mere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both 'in and out of time,' how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal by apprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian the moments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem the sad wastage of otherwise unillumined existence. Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiar poignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden– a symbol he has previously used, in many variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous, since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision and mere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are more directly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up an image he had used in 'Triumphal March': 'at the still point of the turning world.' This notion of 'a mathematically pure point' (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to be Eliot's poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dante's 'unmoved Mover,' another way of symbolising a timeless release from the 'outer compulsions' of the world. Still another variation is the passage on the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in a conception comparable to Wallace Stevens' 'Anecdote of the Jar,' has suggested how art conquers time:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot,
Oxford University Press, 1958, as quoted in On "Burnt Norton"
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