Voluntaries from the Invisibles
Douglas Milburn
Seize light from the shadows.
--Caravaggio.
Part the First.
Aleph
Quomodo seder sola
civitas plena populo.
(How solitary sits the city
that was full of people.)
--Jeremiah.
1. The best thing about life (not to
mention death) is how humbling it is,
since there are few of us who don’t need taking down a notch or two. Or three. Or
more.
2. Cosmic scents. It’s possible
there are attractants of which we know
nothing and which act over great distances.
For example, a planet that reaches a certain balanced complexity
may exert a remote pull (of a kind unknown to us) on distant energies
or even life-forms that need what the planet now offers.
3. Creatures of modest abilities should
strive for modest goals.
Otherwise they wind up making a real mess of their planet.
4. Still unaware, for all our progress,
of the ocean in which we live,
we don’t even think of crawling out.
5. We need constant reminders, not of
wholly misunderstood pasts
but of present, vaster realities which we all by night glimpse
but which by day we forget so completely that we act as if they don’t exist.
6. The young are right in their wispier
visions but wrong in treating them as toys.
Or, on rare occasion, poems.
7. At least this side of Lethe, we are to
decrease absent-mindedness in All That Is.
Every human does this. Art does it more. Great art is that which does it most of all.
8. Illusions of linearity, coherence,
compactness, and completion:
the profound consolations and seductive weaknesses of art.
9. The foveal point of attention the
prison.
Expansion of the point to a two-dimensional field
and then a three-dimensional matrix the key that unlocks the prison.
10. Like animals unaware of any but the
most immediate effects
of geophysical weather, we scurry about in our self-involved business,
equally unaware of any but the most immediate effects of other, vaster weathers.
11. To unite the universe of dreams with
the universe of waking.
12. The anonymous watcher in dreams. The
ego is gone but the watcher is present,
even if the ego should happen to awake.
13. Three forebears: Novalis,
Kraus, and Passoa, none of whom had China,
which after all put the necessary finishing touches on me.
14. Odd that the Spanish, for all their
loquaciousness,
got it down to four words: La vida es sueño.
15. Timing is critical in both comedy and
tragedy.
Much distress comes from our destructive impatience arising
out of our failure to act on this fact.
16. Every object, properly considered, is
a door to the past and to the future.
17. Pop art strives for fun, high art for
truth.
Only idiots claim either is more important.
18. Through fogged or frosted windows
lies any vista you want or need.
19. We call that art great which offers
best support
for our illusions of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
20. To the patient, attentive observer,
every job reveals wisdom.
Whatever the job, the revealed wisdom ultimately is the same.
21. It’s fun, worthwhile, useful
even, to try to figure out
what’s wrong with the world.
Far less fun and certainly much less publicly profitable
is figuring out what’s right with it.
22. Wisdom is available and accessible
constantly,
by day and by night.
The bo-tree is everywhere.
Constant attention is not necessary.
Occasional self-reminders are.
Otherwise even as the mind thrives,
the heart starves.
23. Beware hasty interpretations
of large estuaries in Brazil,
big footprints in Patagonia,
and distant fires on the dark and stormy cliffs
of Tierra del Fuego.
24. Like it or not and no matter what
pretty stories we construct
to indicate otherwise, we are earth spirits.
As the earth goes, so go we.
25. Is it not sufficient recompense for
any wrong, any slight, to know that
everybody, however great their works,
will lose them perfectly?
26. The acculturated mind is so deeply
paradox-resistant
that it has almost no access to the worlds
which lie and thrive beyond paradox.
27. The health of a society may be judged
by the ratio of trips
with unknown destinations to trips with known destinations.
28. Naturally prisoners unaware of their
imprisonment most praise
the works of other unaware prisoners.
Works created outside the prison are dismissed
as at best not specious but childish
and at worst not derivative but womany.
29. The Bible is the world's most
successful
metaphysical fast food.
30. Epigones try their best and then
blame
the resultant half-successes on their society.
31. Great art is where you find it.
The two pinnacles of American verbal, visual and musical art
occur in television, in the commercial, and the sitcom.
32. One lesson of the American space
program is that
with sufficient telemetry
the control room for great undertakings, including art,
can be anywhere.
You don't even need windows.
33. Beware the discoveries of those who
speed-read the book of nature.
34. We keep erecting bigger and more
complex jungle gyms,
which we then forgetfully try to use them as something more
than the playground equipment that they are,
with often fatal results.
35. There a few writers, composers, and
artists the approach to whose works
requires a high degree of purity in both mind and heart.
Yet with what polluted abandon the deists approach and comment on their god,
supposedly the greatest creator of all.
36. The present is not the power but a
power point.
With effort and re-education, others are discernible and accessible.
37. All explorers, but especially
metaphysical ones, would do well
to keep in mind Magellan's mistake. When, after much difficulty, he finally
emerged from the treacherous straits that now bear his name
into the Pacific Ocean, he thought he was only days from home.
38. Recognize and use these little
pensées for what they are:
tiny islands in the vast sea of unknowing
where you can rest and take on supplies.
39. Pity the Christians. As if twoness
itself were not seductive illusion enough,
they tried mightily to turn duality into triality.
40. Life is rarely more than the acting
out of a series
of vain, bias-confirming self-assignations.
41. Those who believe they have
experienced hell
have no patience finally for those who, they believe, haven't.
Which accounts for the universally botched job of parenting.
42. Weak of tooth and lacking claws,
we turn out to be by far the bloodiest of all.
43. We want, we demand complexity and
completion
on our own blindered terms.
44. Flattering illusions writ large: most
novels, much poetry and painting,
even some music.
45. Forster's greatness lies in his
humility: he praises nature only in snatches,
in the most respectful, subordinate clauses.
46. These DIY syllabi are crazy-making.
47. Though I still write for a human
audience,
for some time I have also written
with kindergarten perception for another,
invisible audience.What and to what extent
that audience can be discerned remains to be seen.
48. Babies can conquer Everests only with
baby steps.
49. In the most challenging expeditions
are those in which, like this one,
turning back is not an option
and healing must occur while underway.
50. Saying "The sun rises in the
west" doesn't make it so.
No more does saying "All paths lead to my god."
51. Contending with believers,
like contending with non-believers,
is the business of fools.
52. I know of no human worthy
of doing more than counting
the pebbles around
the base of Olympus.
53. Among many mistakes in our primitive
pursuit of materialism
with its myriad myopic sciences and fairy-tale religions,
one of the most serious is forgetting that gods exist for all occasions
but are most accessible in those situations with which they are most attuned.
Given the abundance of more responsive life and life-forms,
this neglect on the part of humans, for all the harm it does us,
is of little or no interest to them.
54. So desperately do we want the dead
to make themselves known to us
that we are willing to condemn them
to an eternity of remembering.
55. History has taught metaphysical Einsteins the
danger
of proclaiming their discoveries
naked from the housetops.
(Encrypt and camouflage.)
56. The world wants
to have its ascetics
and eat them too.
57. No wonder we're
confused. For higher explorations
we have only spinning compasses, bent sextants, and false maps.
58. If the compass is not
set before sleep,
the nightly voyage of the HMS Flibbertigibbet continues
on its meandering way.
59. People think America
is the land of wannabes.
Actually it's filled with hadn't-oughta-have-beens.
60. To talk our way out of
the reality talking got us into:
that's the challenge.
61. Critics and
tastemakers are as susceptive to incestuous fornication
and the concomitant malaises of the age
as artists are.
62. Emulate emergence.
63. A quick guide to
ethics: Whether the deafening clank
of box car wheels at Auschwitz, the screeching
false humility of those who preach, or the piercing
squeals of greedy pigs at trough,
the squishing delight from unwrapped new gadgets,
whatever makes hearing
the music of the spheres harder is bad.
The rest is good.
64. Radical questionings
to be undertaken:
1) the possibly illusory nature of the separation of individuals;
2) the possibly illusory nature of seeming continuity
(of life, thought, time).
65. Breadcrumbs. Dropped
not for me to find my way back
but for others to find their way farther forward.
66. Imitating our sweeping
glimpses of nature,
we so love, encourage, and are then misled by,
larger visions
concocted in some serenity
and presented convincingly as coherent wholes.
67. Twoness.
The perception is more powerful than the explosive energy of 10,000 supernovas,
more seductive that the such of 10,000 black holes.
68. The only thing rarer
than true faith is true doubt.
69. Religions are our cave
paintings,
science being the latest version.
70. Heed but keep at a
distance that which impinges on the sleeping self.
Ponder but doubt that which impinges on the waking self.
71. Like other empires
before us,
we've got ourselves to the point
where every conceivable situation is a cliché,
including the situation
where every conceivable situation is a cliché.
72. The accumulated
momentum of past choices obscures in two ways:
the astonishing freedom that is constantly ours:
outer circumstance, and inner habits of thought.
Some call the resultant stasis maturity. I call it sloth.
73. The mind irrupts from
and returns to some unguessed-at common ground.
74. How different the West
would be if for all these years
we hadn't capitalized references to the deity and his alleged son.
75. Farce is the only cure
for the excruciating bends
one endures when emerging too fast from the depths of empire.
America now is beyond tragedy, beyond comedy,
and has taken the whole world with it.
76. Dreams are merely less
well-wrought scrims.
77. The amount of naive
solace humans
derive from cloaking uncertainty in the flimsiest of disguises
cannot be overestimated.
78. To speak of, much less
pursue, the unknowable
as if it were knowable
results in equals parts comedy and tragedy.
79. The gates of heaven
(yes, they exist) are impervious to storming.
Parnassus (yes, it exists), like Everest, can be mounted
by only the most careful, patient, and skilled climber
using only reliable guidebooks (yes, they exist).
80. Only in the most
narrow-minded schemes of things
is either fame or infamy the point.
81. Only the invisible,
weightless acquisitions
of the mind and structures of the heart
have permanence.
82. Without exception,
the degree of debasement of a talent
by the bitch goddesses fame and wealth
varies directly with the size of the talent.
83. To the wakeful any
point on the continuum of consciousness
is all points. Such prettiness.
84. If someone carrying a
lantern enters a city of the blind,
who among them cares?
85. Distant visions. I
have the words
but not the wisdom to write about them.
86. The first step toward
seeing the unseen is to unsee.
Diligent practice and extreme patience are required.
87. Early pages of
explorers' logs
are filled with confusion, misplaced enthusiasm, exaggeration, irreverence.
Clarity, if it comes, comes late.
88. Simultaneity in its
far-reaching complexity
and then its utter, all-encompassing simplicity
exceeds
our wildest philosophical, religious, scientific, or sci-fi imaginings.
89. Teachers appear, but
in the most unlikely places, words, gestures, guises, and garb.
90. The medium is not the
message. It is a message, one among many.
91. Only in declining
societies does form trump content.
92. Acton was half right.
Greed too corrupts,
and unrestrained greed corrupts absolutely.
93. Open your parched
mouth and mind:
you find that all really is water and that the idols of the ages
are so many grains of sand in a wee desert that is not all.
94. Fame confirms one of
our deepest delusions
and at the same time erects barriers against the continuing search.
95. An emergent thinking
race whose members cannot be humbled by having
to wipe their own ass once a day
is head for countless millennia of trouble.
96. There is more cultural
truth and wisdom, explicit and implicit,
in five minutes of Will and Grace than
in a thousand pages of the best current European fiction.
97. We box up our limited
view of the possible
and the probable and call it "culture."
98. What different lives
are given
those born in the right place
and those born in the wrong place.
99. Wee minds such as
ours,
faced with the apparent improbability of it all,
snuggle contentedly up to even more improbable beliefs.
100. Beware the vision
that mistakes
light for darkness and darkness for all.
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
Second >>
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
First
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Second
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Third
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fourth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fifth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Sixth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Seventh
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Eighth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Ninth
Send this page to a friend.
Magellan's Log Front Page  |
