Difference between revisions of "Alma/Humanities Apophenia"

Revision as of 06:02, 1 July 2018

Alma often reads meaning in to things that don't actually relate as a common mistake in her practice. She often carries books with her in her duffel bag or pockets. the books have bookmarks, paper inserts with notes, and underlining with annotations. (This makes her player cringe). She has confirmation bias when she finds snippets and meaning in things that fit with what she imagines to be better than the doctrine of her tradition.

but I'm sure sometimes she accidentally stumbles on a real truth, but who knows, really? I mean, really?

The below authors are in reverse chronological order.

William Stafford

Vocation
William Stafford

This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.

I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
But then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid; she always blamed the place,
the time, anything my father planned.

Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless both of them part of me:
"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."

This guy might be a wanker about women. whatev, dude. or parents. or kids. something. but drop his whatever baggage, and he has some interesting things he's working through. I don't think he was his true self when he wrote this.

Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Robinson Jeffers

In pencil under his name: called an occidental? pantheist.

Flight of Swans
Robinson Jeffers

One who sees giant Orion, the torches of winter midnight,
Enormously walking above the ocean in the west of heaven;
And watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight
Waver like a spent rocket, wavering towards new discoveries,
Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;
And watches the long coast mountain vibrate from bronze to green,
Bronze to green, year after year, and all the streams
Dry and flooded, dry and flooded, in the racing seasons;
And knows that exactly this and not another is the world,
The ideal is phantoms for bait, the spirit is a flicker on a grave;--
May serve, with a certain detachment, the fugitive human race,
Or his own people, or his own household; but hardly himself;
And will not wind himself into hopes nor sicken with despairs.
He has found the peace and adored the God; he handles in autumn
The germs of far-future spring.
                                                            Sad sons of the stormy fall,
No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you
To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside,
Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds,
Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain,
But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

• interspersed throughout this page are underlines and arrows to notes and comments, for examples
  • Swans, like what you really see in nature not what stories say
  • which age? time parabola! not just circles. all the cycles and shapes and paths? WHY CIRCLES
  • inflict and endure - does this mean no escape and no choice for death. is it just?
  • diamond sutra?
  • no escape from jhor? NO maybe we are saved with nature and swans and the living world

There are more notes but the player doesn't want to go on and on here. Imagine a kid who missed a well rounded humanities education cramming for a very final exam and not applying a sophisticated well-informed sensibility to things due to a lack of grounding.

Rilke

Imagine a kid who reads the bible over and over and finds meaning retroactively, over and over throughout the years. layering meanings based on life experience. Take that flavor and then translate it to an adult who got gobsmacked by woo. Random shit is her bible. She comes back and forth to a poem over and over. adding notes when something happens that seems to apply. Sometimes she knows it's a mistake but can't help it.

Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke from _Sonnets to Orpheus_ translated by M. D. Herter Norton

12

Will transformation. O be enraptured with flame,
wherein a thing eludes you that is boastful with changes;
that projecting spirit, which masters the earthly,
loves in the swing of the figure nothing so much as the point of inflection.

What shuts itself into remaining already IS starkness;
does it think itself safe in the shelter of inconspicuous gray?
Beware, from afar a hardest comes warning the hard.
Woe--,an absent hammer lifts!

Who pours himself forth as a spring, him Cognizance knows;
and she leads him enchanted through the realm of serene creation,
that often ends with beginning and with ending begins.

Every happy space they wander wondering through
is child or grandchild of parting. And the transformed Daphne, since feeling
laurel-like, wants you to change yourself into wind.

16

You, my friend, are lonely, because...
WE, with words and finger-pointings,
gradually make the world our own,
perhaps its weakest, most precarious part.

Who points with fingers to a smell? --
Yet of the powers that threaten us
you feel many .... You know the dead,
and you shrink away from the magic spell.

See, now we two together must bear
piece-work and parts as though it were the whole.
Helping you will be hard. Above all, do not

plant me in your heart. I should grow too fast.
But I will guide MY master's hand and say:
here. This is Esau in his pelt.

maybe these are warnings and but exhortations. maybe I'm supposed to see both at the same time. (refer to Icelandic spar. it diffracts words into multiple paths. does this mean I need to learn QM?) Does this mean I need to learn German?

am I shrinking away when I shouldn't?

wtf does Esau even mean? deception or inheritance? which is it.

wtf these whatever poets. what kind was Rilke?

fuck, do I have to be lonely and keep people from planting me in their heart?

do not mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon (from some dude somewhere in some koan?)

what does one do with the weakest parts? break them or strengthen them?

omg it's coming true. This guy really was a prophet. Smell? that happened weeks after and I didn't even realize it until now.