IMAGO

The imago of the insect emerges from the carcase of its former self.

Monday, May 01, 2006

News of the World


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Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not...
(Shakespeare: The Tempest)

The sounds of wild geese woke me from my sleep and I rushed out (tangled bedcovers trailing behind me) to see them from the garden. It was barely dawn. The long lonely calling of the geese filled the air with a poignant, mournful quality. I watched them for some time, long chains waving and flowing, breaking and reforming again high above my head. Then, with the slow momentum of a dream, they passed away into the distance, shedding snatches of song like petals. Long after they were gone I was still listening for them; and the silence ached with the hollowness of their absence.

All things, even the (apparently) inanimate, have voices if we only care to listen. Language is not some exclusive human ability denied to the rest of Nature. It is a vast field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit and reflect. Our human language grows out of the world of which we are a part. We speak because the world speaks. All things around us clamor to be heard.
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In order to be able to hear them properly, however, we must first make room for them. A kind of mental ascesis is required, a preparatory emptying of all our expectations and preconceptions. Knowledge of “the other” should not be limited to pre-digested images and concepts; it cannot be made to reflect my mind, or my demands and expectations.

To listen (really listen) to another person, is to allow them to live and breathe for a brief moment in us. Listening is not really “doing”, but “being”. All true listening is a kind of “loving”.

Our distant ancestors were more attentive to the voices of Nature than their descendants are. We are too preoccupied with all the voices inside our heads to have much time for those outside.

Whenever natural scientists have attempted to read nature, they have done so in an abstract language whose purpose has been manipulation and control. They have plastered it with labels and conceptual filters which have prevented us from knowing it directly. Instead of thinking about what we see and hear, we need the innocence to experience it at first hand.

To lie in a dark room beside the body of the one you love, listening to the rhythms of her breathing, can be a great revelation. But the knowledge we gain from the encounter comes to us through channels that elude intelligence: through the pores of the skin, the touch of a thigh or the magic that is tangled in a woman’s hair. Although it cannot be adequately rationalized or verbally expressed, is no less enlightening for that. Medieval Persian philosophers called it “Ilm Hozoum” or “Presential Knowledge”, a process by which the knower’s soul illuminates the object of its attention, empowering it to reveal its true face. So close is the interaction between subject and object, that it should be impossible to distinguish between the two. “One reaches perfection only when cognition is lost in the object of cognition,” wrote the philosopher Suhrawardi.

To truly meet another person, (or another thing) I have to break out of my totality and open out to the unknown. One of the necessities of Love is that it gives the beloved room to be himself/herself (and does not make him/her exist only within the limits of the lover’s personal universe). What is true of persons is also true of objects: I must try to meet them on their own terms.

An aesthetic sensibility is called for if we are to reclaim the world from the corrupting powers of abstraction and universalization. Art can make sense of the world, but only if the object of its attention is experienced as a real presence and not an abstraction or a concept. Aesthesis refers to a perception of the universe we have not made.

The aesthetic experience is concerned with the indistinct, hazy area just before rational understanding occurs, just before verbal revelation takes place. Keats called it “Negative Capability”:
"...that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
(Keats Dec 1817)

As we begin to re-learn the intimate, aesthetic way of listening, we may once again begin to hear news from a Living World, (of which no trace can be found in history because it is not yet dead). We may begin to catch glimpses of a Reality so alive and present to us it has not had time to accumulate a past, and for that reason is still elusive and slippery, unwilling to be named, unpredictable, wild and full of incomparable wonder and bright magic.

© Ryszard Antolak