Dear Learners,
Where are we heading;-)
November 1997 over 600 contributions
November 2001 just over 100 contributions
- The ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of
unknowing. Contrary to appearances and beliefs, science like art and
poetry or architecture, has its genres, 'movements', schools, theories
which it pursues with increasing perfection until the level of saturation
is reached where all is done and said - and then embarks upon a new
approach, based on a different kind of curiosity, a different scale of
values. Newton as well as Leonardo, Mozart, and Flaubert saw further
because they too stood on the shoulders of giants. And Einstein's space is
no closer to reality than van Gogh's sky. The truth of science is not in a
truth more absolute than the truth of art, but in the act of creation
itself.
Book XII IMAGINATION
The Story: Imagination reminds the poet how he has wasted his life, and
he, after trying to excuse himself, asks what Do well, Do better and Do
best are. In his answer, Imagination corrects the dreamer's previous
errors and answers he had asked long before.-
I am Imagination," he said. " I am never idle, although I sit and brood by
myself, both in health and sickness. I have followed you now for five and
forty years, and stirred you many times to remember your end, and all the
years that have vanished away, and the few that are to come.-" " So mend
your ways now, while you still have time."
" There are plenty who SPEAK WELL of virtue." - The wind bloweth where it
listeth..." Intelligence and Learning, spring from sight and teaching, "
We speak of that which we know, and testify of that which we have seen."
For from that which we know Learning arises and the knowledge of things
Divine, and from that which we have seen in other words from the
observations of many different men, springs intelligence. But Grace, Grace
is a gift of God, and it springs from great Love; and neither Learning nor
Intelligence could explain its ways or tell how it came into being, '
Thou knowest not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth."
- "Whatsoever the Lord pleased that He did " And so I say to you, when
you ask the whys and wherefores of things.' For you cavilled at Reason,
and questioned him about the 'flowers in the wood and their rich colours,
and the birds and beasts, and their different habits of breeding. "Where,"
you said, "did the flowers receive their hues, so fresh and bright? Why do
some birds breed on the ground and some in the trees?" And you puzzled
over the stones and over the stars and questioned how the birds and beasts
could show such sagacity.
'The cause is known only to Nature himself, and was never perceived by
Learning or Intelligence. For Nature, as the magpie's guide, who whispers
in his ear, telling him to build where the thorn is thickest. And it was
he that taught the peacock its way of breeding, and caused Adam and, Eve
to know their privy members and cover them, with leaves.
'Laymen often ask men of learning why Adam did not first cover his mouth,
the part that had eaten the apple.' rather than his loins - so simple folk
question the theologians. But only Nature knows why he did so; no other
scholar can tell you.
'Yet the men of old, as we read, used to take birds and beasts as examples
and use them as parables. They said, for instance, that, 'the most
beautiful birds breed in the foulest manner, and that they are the
feeblest in flight of all that fly and swim. These are the peacocks and
peahens, which represent the rich and proud. For the peacock is easy to
pursue, as he cannot fly high, and is soon captured, because he trails his
tail on the ground. His flesh, moreover, is repulsive to eat, his feet are
ugly, and his cry is harsh and grating to the ear. And like the peacocks,
-the wealthy trail their riches behind them, refusing to share them until
they are overtaken by death, which is truly the tail-end of all their
sorrow. And just as the wings of the peacock encumber his flight, so the
weight of so many shillings and pence is a plague to all who possess them
- until death plucks off their tails. And then, though the rich man
repent, and bewail that ever he hoarded so much and gave so little, and
though he cry to Christ with the bitterest longing, 'his voice will sound
in our Lord's ears like the chattering of a magpie. And when his carcass
is cast in the pit for burial, its foul stench will spread through the
soil around, and poison the others that lie in the graveyard. 'The
peacocks' feet, according to the Fables, signify the rich man's executors,
the false friends who ignore the terms of his will though they witnessed
it and promised to carry it out to the letter.
'Thus the writer shows that as the peacock is praised for his feathers
alone, so the rich are honoured only for their goods. The lark, a tiny
bird compared with the peacock, has a far sweeter voice, is much swifter
in flight, and its flesh is many times richer and sweeter to eat; and so
the lark is likened to men of humble life. Aristotle, the great scholar
made some of these comparisons, and thus, in his Logic, he finds a meaning
in the smallest of birds.
'And as to whether Aristotle is saved, Learning, with all his books, can
give you no answer;...."
I am now in real time, now-time... walking down the thousand year sunken
lane... This evening we come upon this tiny nest and within it and most
unusually an unbroken egg. (Pristine) You will see it there, shining out.
'But the work shall not be lost'
"I must, before I die, find some means of saying the essential thing which
is in me, which I have not yet said, a thing which is neither love nor
hate nor pity nor scorn but the very breath of life, shining and coming
from afar, which will link into human life the immensity, the frightening,
wondrous and implacable forces of the non-human."
"The night before we met, comet Hyakutake had passed overhead, the
brightest to zoom past Earth in 20 years. Dawkins watched it and the
following day was still excited by the experience. Comets are the very
stuff of his world, visible proof of an extraterrestrial power that can be
plotted and predicted, but which remains without our grasp. In his latest
book, Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins describes how, when
Halley's comet last passed in the Eighties, he took his two-year-old
daughter Juliet out in the midnight dark to point her face at the comet's
dim glow. Into the bundle's baby-soft ear, still warm from the cot, the
doting father whispered, on a ``quixotic whim'', what it was that Juliet
saw. A comet that would next sweep past in the middle of the 21st century,
when he (and we) would be long dead but when she might still be alive, an
old woman, to view it a second time and thus continue the - line. In that
one moment, for all his clinical analysis, an avowed heathen showed that
at heart he is really a big old softie."
Like some itinerant 'ragbag' seller's basket of hand-made lace doilies at
each door presented, each one seen and taken changes the pictures future
within<>without and so, to be sure just as all rivers flow to the ocean it
is not filled up, and nor does the river called Love ever run dry.
"Andrew, - Now, go get yourself a rock!"
What is a comet?
Love,
Andrew
(Passages from Koestler, Langland, Bertrand Russell (at 89) Richard Dawkins
and Miriam;-) and Nature.)
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