One Thing at a Time
Crones at Moy Mell, New Invisible Constellations, Orphic Hymn to Heaven
Hello dear friends,
I’ve been away from this newsletter for a bit. I’m writing this on Day 51 of the Israel-Hamas war. And while working on bringing out a new viewpoint, I wait, flattened, while words hide away from me for a while. Writing the same old ideas, dolling them up, seemed like a big “so what else is new?” I could see past the glamour of those fancy seasonal outfits, just the same old stuff, boring, irrelevant. Time to restart, again. I discovered that first I needed to do some rewiring.
Still in the hermit mode I entered last November, I’m keeping up a regular writing practice combined with Platonic study, even with all the renovations. I’m doing my darndest to express something my mind doesn’t understand yet, but I know is mythopoetically in there. I’m assembling all the dada bits into one new whole. Tossing out what I don’t need, organizing what I think I may use after all.
With my pen, I probe, poke and play to bring this unknown into my line of sight. I see the tip of the iceberg, the top of the pyramid, a peek over the arch before the inevitable return to the “chop wood carry water” balance of daily life.
You might recall that I started some writing from an idealized Moy Mell cottage - here are a few pix I made with AI of magical wise crones all studying in those same coordinates.
I’m still at Moy Mell sometimes, seriously making imagined connections. Still going from dot to dot, hopping from star to star in the mind, along those straight lines that reveal the beings of the constellations. But some of these are not recognizable to me, and don’t seem to jibe with our inherited ideas of what each of the constellations in our winter night sky mean for those of us on earth in this first quarter of the 21st century.
It is not that we have new constellations, it may instead be that other, older, previously unseen constellations are being uncovered, as if the veils of past knowledge were being lifted. It could be said that in the last few centuries we were operating under other constellations, slightly blurred perhaps or no longer really visible, simply projected by the eyes of all that saw them. Status quo, or illusion.
Not that the new invisible constellations are not also illusion, but another one, and one that is more appropriate to our oncoming future. I want to pattern there, see more clearly, meet the previously hidden beams from those stars. So I imagine a new sky.
The idea of being like-minded and community-building has at its root a shared mythology and version of reality, and also a shared aspiration for the future. And ideas of the future are more elusive than they were when Pete Seeger quoted Paul Valery, saying, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Last fall, I felt so relieved to find this clue from Bruno Latour to the malaise of disconnection: “The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy." To each their own, as they say. Could the sharp differentiations in world view actually be creating mutually-existing different worlds? A world of Rashomon writ large? I’m becoming concerned that we may not all be living beneath the same star configurations, and are each participating in a varied version of some sort of reality distortion field.
I want to believe that we all fundamentally share the great work of the expansion of human understanding. Each in our own way, and our own language, with variations and immediate differences to be overlooked, overcome, dialogued, discussed and critiqued, made new, made old again, all to be worked over and worked up again and again. It is a balance of metaphysics and participation in reality. It never stops. That’s what I’m doing now, on the inside.
Valery also said, “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
1+2+3+4=10
Tetractys - the sacred decad
Abe Burnstick often told of a prophecy of “Ten Things”. In a 20th century probe, Marshall McLuhan took James Joyce’s list of ten thunders and named them for technologies and their effects on human life. He stops with television as his last thunder, but we’re now living way past those effects. This entry from an unknown author in Wikipedia tells us:
War and Peace in the Global Village is a 1968 book by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. It contains a collage of images and text that illustrates the effects of electronic media and new technology on man. Marshall McLuhan used James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a major inspiration for this study of war throughout history as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.
Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. …Here’s the list of Joyce’s thunders at wikipedia
Orphic Hymn to Heaven
Last issue I shared a video To Night, from the Thomas Taylor translation of the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus. These hymns are more like prayers or contemplations. Here’s one To Heaven:
Everything is always connected, beyond time, and somehow right on time, let’s decode it.
(Kitchen photo and AI pix are from me; Myths of Orpheus pix and sound from Canva)
If you like this post, click on the heart - and even better, add a comment! I’d love to hear from you.
Carol. I may have done this comment to someone else I dont know by accident. Perhaps that is part of the new. We were out in the full moon last night, glowing through mist as it was.. Where had Jupiter gone? The constellations were shrouded.
that sky, which we mostly ignore indoors, constantly changes, our lives too brief to comprehend and each night a revelation as we spin through space.
This is a good searching you are on, at the edge of perception and understanding. What new worlds are you imagining? I too love the crones and the lady with plates.
Carol, I love the velour texture of your writing...rich, pulling me into its patterns and depth. It has a effect on me than most of what I read does not... It penetrates somewhere old and new at once.