Light and Shadows in Three Hours

Pablo Neruda, Morse Peckham, Jose Saramago

Keeping Quiet    Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let's not speak any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I'll go.

-from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon
Translated by Stephen MitchellWho else reads him?

Morse Pweckham  Man’s Rage for Chaos: Behavior and Art (1965)

“An ideology is always out of phase with the situation in which it is employed, for an ideology has always emerged as a response to a preceding situation, the attributes of which are different from the current situation.” 


















Art and Pornography (1971)

He's saying that a society needs trivial areas for policing--like pornography--to establish its power over the rest of the structure.

Just Discovering José Saramago! Where have I been for 65 years?

“We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.”
― José Saramago

“Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.”
― José Saramago, Seeing

What Becomes of a Broken Heart?

Last Night As I Was Sleeping  
Antonio Marcado

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

The Song

Grasshopper Mind

Grasshopper Mind is related to what artists do:
Five goals of artists and art, particularly Land Art, in the health of a technological society: 
Creating a Sense of Place
Linking to our hunter/gatherer history,
Witnessing to Other,
Building the capacity for ambiguity,
Testifying to the Organic.

Grasshopper Mind is quite related to the mind of the Hunter Gatherer.  I've just read Hugh Brody's book, The Other Side of Eden.   a few quotes:

 There are eruptions of the hunter-gatherer in the [modern] urban setting… arenas in which a rival mind seeks expression and longs for its particular forms of freedom […] The hunter-gatherers in the heartland of the exiles… are opponents of the dominant order. They oppose hierarchy and challenge the need to control other people and the land itself. Consciously or not, they are radicals in their lives.
At the least, they experience the tension in themselves that comes from a longing not to plan and not to acquiesce in plans; at most they use a mixture of knowledge and dreams to express their vision. It is artists, speculative scientists and those whose journeys in life depend on not quite knowing their destination who are close to hunter-gatherers; who rely upon the hunter gatherer-mind.

The distinction between respect and control is of immense importance to an understanding of how agriculturalists approach hunter-gatherers. The skills of farmers are centred not on their inner relationship to the world but their ability to change it. Technical and intellectual systems are developed to achieve and maintain this as completely as possible. Farmers carry with them systems of control as well as crucial seeds and livestock. These systems constitute ways of thinking as well as bodies of information. .. the achievement of abstraction and the project of control are related.

Grasshopper Mind is related to Metaxy  in-between-ness

IMAGES ONLY nature and culture

References, Links, Bibliography

Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky
A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly  
Iron John by Robert Bly
Queen Maeve and Her Lovers: A Celtic Archetype of Ecstacy, Addiction, and Healing by Sylvia Brinton Perera

Working from the margins, the edges

Archetypal Time waits on the edges

and irrupts, leaks, sneaks, seeps, gurgles, burbles into historical time

via Shadow holes and cracks : sorrow, trauma, surprise, coincidence, shock, ferality,

carnality, pornography… It’s the destination of the surrealists; mystics, runners, The Zone

It’s remembered and honored on irreligious altars: the backs and bottoms of drawers


2. Archetypal Time and ther Bitten Finger.

3. The wonder of the world;
    the beauty and power; the shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades;
    These I saw;   Look ye also while life lasts                         Gravestone epitaph

4. Stevie Nicks getting ready, 1981

5. Animals, insects and birds are Guides to and from Archetypal time.Working from the margins allows Others their moments Center stage, their Solos... their chance to sparkle, discover, feel  and be essential to the meandering, unexpected  organic growth of the group.

This has something to do with my favorite shape: the Sensitive Chaos... where there a many little epicenters.  At out Seligmann Committee meeting today there were often three or four conversations going on at once.    Quite Tribal!  How Beautiful!