“The Archtypes and the Splendors” — 11 months behind schedule, but another newsletter is in the archives.
This 2009 post from Dave Winer is good. “It’s so incredibly complicated. Mostly because there are so many observers all in one body.”
And it brings to mind two things:
- Czeslaw Milosz’s Ars Poetica:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
- A quote from Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Ordinary Life. Under the subheading “Reality and Contrivance”(emphasis added):
It does take a deep skill, long training, and psychological capacity to become a good stage actor. But this fact should not blind us to another one: that almost anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a charitable audience some sense of realness in what is being contrived before them. And it seems this is so because ordinary social intercourse is itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies. Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.
…people are
curiously soluble
in starlight.
Bathed in its
absence of insistence
their substance
loosens willingly,
their bright
designs dissolve.
Not proximity
but distance
burns us with love.
—Kay Ryan
Connection favors ragged edges where you can connect on a bigger surface. If you’re all tight and straight and hiding and perfect and wrapped up in your little packaging, then there’s nothing to hold on to.
Opening my eyes and crouching with one knee in the damp earth, I place the flat of my palm on the ground, feeling the tangled web of corded roots. It’s just a fraction of what’s down there. The merest glimpse of the forest’s dynamic internal system. Like the few visible veins on the back of your hand. “A tree is a passage between earth and sky,” as Richard Powers has written. But much of it is well hidden. Hard to believe that, even now, moisture and nutrients from the soil are silently traveling along not so very far beneath my fingers, inching up toward the foliage high above. Making their own climb through the forest as we make ours. That the leaves and needles are cooking them up, concocting the sugars and sap they need to survive. That much of the oxygen we’re breathing is simply a by-product—an airy sizzle in the pan.
This is what you call an awsome gift from a sibling who knows you well.
Kitchen Chalk Talk • This is Ursula Le Guin’s translation. The last two lines in this chapter read, “No competition,/so no blame.” Red Pine translates those lines “and because they don’t compete/they aren’t maligned.” I think Pines’s translation makes more sense, but Le Guin’s is certainly more abrupt and ethos-challenging.
And so [Weil’s] vision of God is different, her imagination of God is different, from how a lot of contemporary western people think about an all-powerful, all-knowing God. Weil thinks about God as having done exactly what she’s asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power.