:when the river runs ice:

Sometime when the river runs ice, ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt -- ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

~William Stafford, "Ask Me"

The whole of silence is filled, even though
sounds can be heard, with a dense silence
which is not an absence of sound but is a
positive object of sensation; it is the secret
word, the word of love, who holds us
in his arms from the beginning. ~Letter

  95 Poems, 77


i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

:growing pains:

impaled
on the sword of truth
how would you
fare?
cleaves soul from
flesh, flesh from
lie when lost to
truth it pierces
red, beating hearts,
iron tip tinged with
sweetness unbearable.

Desiring Peace

even the lilies of the field
have growth pains,
burst,
desire the touch
of sunlight, the nearness of neighbor
the feel of whisping grasses
the bells, like ears,
Listening to the music of their home.

slowly,
quietly content;
unfurl, reach out,
not anxious yet
Desiring:
the lilies of the field.

(Remember
videos of growing, opening flowers,
slow, gracious: Time-wise...
but sometimes bits are
stucktogetherand S t r e c h i n g
means separating things that are tangled,
detatching what has grown
from the many places where it meets itself.
and only One remains: Source.
(must be fed)

date? 2005 sometime...

1 john 4: 16-17

i am wanting courage to move again.

Stanley Kunitz

In honor of Stanley Kunitz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pulitzer Prize-winner Stanley Kunitz, a former U.S. poet laureate remembered as a mentor to young writers and a devoted gardener, has died [Sunday May 14th, 2006] at the age of 100 in New York, his publisher said on Tuesday.... "You see that ability to make an experience so vivid and it translates somehow into the same capacity for understanding people's lives," Tree Swensen said....
~Claudia Parsons

hm. poets are fascinating people. yep... need to read more poetry. don't know enough. could learn so much from them...

"Touch Me"

Summer is late, my heart.

Words plucked out of the air

some forty years ago

when I was wild with love

and torn almost in two

scatter like leaves this night

of whistling wind and rain.

It is my heart that's late,

it is my song that's flown.

Outdoors all afternoon

under a gunmetal sky

staking my garden down,

I kneeled to the crickets trilling

underfoot as if about

to burst from their crusty shells;

and like a child again

marveled to hear so clear

and brave a music pour

from such a small machine.

What makes the engine go?

Desire, desire, desire.

The longing for the dance

stirs in the buried life.

One season only,

and it's done.

So let the battered old willow

thrash against the windowpanes

and the house timbers creak.

Darling, do you remember

the man you married? Touch me,

remind me who I am.

Former US poet laureate Stanley Kunitz dies at age 100

:ill matched threads:

ill-matched threads indeed. . . may i be blessed with the gift of weaving. and the ability to be grateful for these (terribly) raw materials. . . i wish i could be like this. ~me


She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth--
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.

~R.M. Rilke

V a s t, this)night

==================
my ink Grows
greenly
in the deep blue Sea of
(V a s t, this)night.
sending roots
down deep, tendrils
up and out
-- a r OUnD
in anticipation of the break
(ing of soil,) of dawn and
s w e e t a i r ---|

but for now, Rest
satisfied in soily blackness; Rest
swept by weeping curtains of
Rain this night in the resorvoir.


you see,
you must understand: a river
runs, maze-like
within my flesh-- R - u - S - h
- e - S in, between,
t Hhr OU gH, over and
around my Veins
(--sTrAinIng--(but
not to bReAk; capillaries
coping, coping,
coping)with aged, Sorrowing Salt

...vein-deep blue
is my color yet.
and black, like the night of a
sightless embryo,
adrift in a windless sea.
==============
my ink Grows
with an Invisible
hue; its living color
fades into nightly
black-and-blue
Pain.

...feels like all the
growth is in
Vain.

3/2/05 1.52 pm
edit: 5.13.06 10.36 am london
edit: 5.13.06 5.39 pm london
===================

Every once in a while, life feels like you've been moon-walking to nowhere.
Sometimes seasons of our lives are like that. But turning the other side of the coin is possible-- and fatalism is such folly!

~*~**~*~

:Scarred Sky Weeping:

this cool breeze reaches me through crAcked
this window, freshly filled
my lungs, with oxgyen-laden
truths. my ears taste
tiny drops of rain, so many
millions hit smooth decking at
Once: jump,
lay still.
my senses are soothed, surrounded
by the joining of guitar chords dancing
heart-to-mind-to-fingers and the sound of
rain-drip-droping, pat-a-rat-tatting, sky
rushing grey, rolling clouds; the breeze
follows me, filling the vacuum left
by my leaving, slowly waving
branchedly knobbled arms
goodbye ~

somehow knowing
i cannot
stay.

~*~**~*~

God plants raindrops for me whenever I leave
a place, and one day
wild roses will rise, full of
color and life, and someone
else will enjoy
the smiling face of the sun, sharing a
hope in which I have(Here)
no deep-seated belief.

While I (irrevocably, irretreivably Here),
solidly set upon this aching earth(for what
i hardly yet know),
I often embrace this darkened sky's tears,
clouds veiling its face from cruelty,
from injustice: the lack-of-love this world
exudes. And yet
I dance also, dance among
drops of an annointing I have a whole Life yet
to understand in full.

)Grace and life are just around the corner, always,
in our pockets, in the eyes of the homeless,
the abused, the lost and weary -- if we could just
See the chemical change from death to life
occuring all around us
in every heart,
it would begin in our own...(

crAcked, they call me.
i feel Open, Open to join this wind, covering
the sky's scarred face
from further marring.

my love rests with the heart of this sorrowing sky; vast
compassion, she Understands, waits on the workings of
Salvation (which we insist
is already here, Universal.)Not true! Redemption is so
personal, so
unique and 'lone-- gloriously so-- and yet
Here i find the universe
is honest enough to Mourn
for the Broken. . .

{They Shall Be Comforted.}

11/03/05 12.01 pm
3/30/06 11.32 am London
5.13.06 6.36 pm London

.:Nereid:.

:Rhode, long lost, reaches open Ocean:

rocks roaring on the rough-beaten coast,
and i, atop the highest possible point
--- gazing down.

the low, roiling roll drags
at my ears, my mind my
throat --- over
and over and over and over
and over; the silence rings
audibly, my gut stretched taut
as the substance of which I'm made
plucks at me, softly
lapping, saying 'Come',
then ---
backing away, slowly
~beckoning~
as it washes out (wave by wave) the defined feet
of criss-crossing birds and beasts --- ]hu[man's best friend,
four-legged, and the rays of He]lios[
who ought to have been my own companion... now
Obliterated:
smoothed.

Peace in my troubled mind.

...and then, again his long, low voice
crashes round me, plays
my heart strings with
Unutterably deep knowledge,

saying 'Come,
you belong here...

Creature of the Sea.'

10/27/05 5.02 pm
edit: 2/14/06 12.40 pm
edit: 5/11/06 3.22 pm london

~*~~**~~*~

Pablo Neruda

Poetry


And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

The Transcendental Deduction

3/9/04
Kant Journal 3

The Transcendental Deduction:
A Defense of the Objective Validity of the Categories of the Understanding

Kant takes up the defense of the objective validity of his 'categories of the understanding' in the very beginning of The Transcendental Analytic, laying out a ground for his thesis to stand on by shaping a kind of 'transcendental self-consciousness'. This transcendental self-consciousness is a consciousness that is able to look down from above in self-reflection, a capability that allows it the creative spontaneity needed to synthesize its apprehensions and all the separate, jumbled sense data it receives. His argument actually centers around the fact that these apprehensions are initially separate, jumbled, and in need of an ordering framework of rules if they are to have any meaning at all in my experience. A priori concepts provide that framework, allowing for all the separate data to become intelligible parts of my experience. As he states, “The transcendental deduction of all a priori concepts therefore has a principle toward which the entire investigation must be directed, namely this: that they must be recognized as a priori conditions of the possibility of experiences (whether of the intuition that is encountered in them, or of the thinking)." (p.224-225).
Kant says that any object, if it is to be an object of my experience, must conform to the conditions of my experience, my knowledge-gaining capacities and limitations—and further, that these conditions are themselves pure, a priori concepts. In first setting out to show that there is a pure synthesis of apprehension, one that originates in the subject, Kant introduces the transcendental faculty of the imagination. He shows how it functions and why it is necessary as a bridge between sensory perception and the understanding, explaining its place within the original, transcendental unity of apperception. This transcendental unity is able to make a whole out of what the imagination reproduces, each piece being referenced back and gathered to a single entity.
Kant holds that cognition is impossible without the spontaneous reproductions of representations by the imagination, or (in other words) knowledge can't come into being unless the imagination reconstructs for itself the manifold of available bits and pieces of raw sensory information it has received over time. We gather this information bit by bit as each present moment full of its own data passes into the next, becoming the past; without this faculty of the imagination allowing us to reproduce representations, the past sensory data we received would be lost to us and it wouldn’t be there for the transcendental self-consciousness (or ‘one’ consciousness) to incorporate into our present understanding, thus synthesizing a whole intelligible experience within the subject.
This transcendental faculty of the imagination is necessary for "even the purest and most fundamental representations of space and time [to] ever arise" (p.230). Take the example of a musical score. As it is played, we hear each note over a stretch of time, and each phrase over an even longer stretch of time. If we were only able to hold a single point of the music in our minds at any one point time however, lacking the imaginative faculty to reconstruct what had already gone by in order that they might be grouped together and connected into a whole, we would have no experience of music as we know it. No one momentary point of experience would ever remain with me to be made an intelligible part of my experience. Kant says that if,
“in counting, I forget that the units that now hover before my senses were successively added to each other by me, then I would not cognize the generation of a multitude through this successive addition of one to the other, and consequently I would not cognize the number; for this concept consists solely in the consciousness of this unity of the synthesis. The word "concept" itself could already lead us to this remark. For it is this one consciousness that unifies the manifold that has been successively intuited, and then also reproduced, into one representation” (p.230-231).

In examining the word concept and Kant’s use of it here, it becomes clear that it is a very important part of the deduction. Up to now he has been expounding on the necessity of the faculty of the imagination in order to pave the way to describe the transcendental self-consciousness and show that only with the collected data the imagination provides is it able to generate whole, understandable, and meaningful experience. He spends some time describing this ‘one consciousness’, and then grounds its ability to function in a priori concepts, showing that they are essential and absolutely necessary for the unification process to take place, and therefore for the fashioning of meaningful experience/ knowledge within the human mind.
In the end of the above quotation, he transitions into this description, saying “it is this one consciousness that unifies the manifold that has been successively intuited, and then also reproduced, into one representation” (p.231). And again, later on, it is
“that unity of consciousness that precedes all data of the intuitions, and in relation to which all representation of objects is alone possible. This pure, unchanging consciousness I will now name transcendental apperception… thus the original and necessary consciousness of the identity of oneself is at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances in accordance with concepts” (p.233, emphasis added).

The objects of my experience, as stated previously, in order to be such at all, must conform to the conditions inherent in the structure of my mind. "The unifying connection stems not from the object but from the subject, and (1) from a source of knowledge distinct from sensibility, which (2) is not receptive but itself active" (Höffe, p.76). This is classically Copernican— my experience originates within me, is shaped to my previous Being, and is created actively, rather than passively. This is achieved by making use of concepts as rules with which to unify and sculpt the gathered data into coherent wholes, the product of which action is the object of our experience. And hence, says Kant,

“concepts of objects in general lie at the ground of all experiential cognition as a priori conditions; consequently the objective validity of the categories, as a priori concepts, rests on the fact that through them alone is experience possible (as far as the form of thinking is concerned). For they then are related necessarily and a priori to objects of experience, since only by means of them can any object of experience be thought at all.” (p.224).

However, these concepts must be a priori in order to be used in this way, arising prior to experience. Otherwise they would have no authority from out of which to order experience. In this way it is made clear that Kant’s previously outlined ‘pure concepts of the understanding’ are necessary, bringing our everyday concepts into their most general, universal, and pure form: the categories of the understanding which make thought itself possible.
The categories make thought possible just as the pure concepts of space and time make intelligible experience (givenness) possible for me. Once one sees that the faculty of human understanding is essentially the same as the faculty of judgment, it becomes clearer why this is the case. With the pure concepts, we are able to have an initial grasp of certain properties and then move on to make judgments of the relationships existing between those properties ("the copula "is," which combines subject and predicate into the unity of a judgement" (Höffe, p.79)), i.e., thinking. And the making of inferences comes naturally right behind that, and thus the development of knowledge.
Kant says that the categories necessarily apply and has proceeded, in this objective deduction, to defend his position. The central piece that one finds oneself returning to again and again to explain why the categories do necessarily apply, is that we only experience representations of things, not things-in-themselves, and therefore experience is self-referential. We actively experience by reproducing the representations that appear to us with the imagination, then unifying those collected representations in our transcendental self-consciousness. The central piece is clearly revolutionary in the Copernican sense: that the experience is to be mine. The fact that we must use the already-existing (pure) concepts of the understanding as a rule by which to extract meaning from (and, might I say, inflict order on?) that which we observe is due to this. The understanding is, according to Kant,
"not merely a faculty for making rules through the comparison of appearances; it is itself the legislation for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all, i.e. synthetic unity of the manifold of appearances, as such, cannot occur outside us, but exist only in our sensbility" (p.242).
Once again, in order for any object to be an object of my experience, it must conform to the conditions of my experience, my knowledge-gaining capacities and limitations—and further, these conditions are themselves pure, a priori concepts .

Arg. for the Subjectivity of Space

2/27/04
Kant Journal 2

The Argument for the Subjectivity of Space

Kant believes that space, as we conceive of it, does not exist outside of our own minds. The shape of perceptions in the human mind are determined by the shape or constitution of that mind. Objects in the world appear to our minds as existing in the context of space simply because the human mind fixes on what is presented to it based on its own form, and one of the forms of human sensibility is space. This creates the 'illusion' of space existing externally in the objective world when really, according to Kant, it is an already-existing pure intuition of the mind which shapes our experience of sensory perception. Kant's most recognized argument for the subjectivity of space, the one that is most nearly acceptable to commentators, is the so-called argument from geometry. In the beginning of The Transcendental Aesthetic, he lays out the defining boundaries of the argument and explains the terms he will be using and exactly what space is and is not in his estimation of things. He then moves on to the structure of the argument itself.
Kant explains that 'space' is "to be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, not as a determination dependent on them, and is an a priori representation that necessarily grounds outer appearances" (B 39, emphasis added). He focuses on geometric principles in particular, explaining that they would be impossible if they were not "grounded in this a priori necessity. For if this representation of space were a concept acquired a posteriori which was drawn out of general outer experience, the first principles of mathematical determination would be nothing but perceptions" (B39). Once this is clearly seen, it makes perfect sense that Kant wants to make "the possibility of geometry as a synthetic a priori cognition comprehensible" in this argument; doing so will have the very implications he wishes to prove for space itself (p.176 emphasis added).
Kant begins by positing geometry as an existing and valid science-- a move no one would dare dispute or even hold a hope of disproving. However in the same breath he describes it as "a science that determines the properties of space synthetically and yet a priori," and though most scholars of his day would have allowed that it did so a priori, most would have denied its synthetic nature (p.176, emphasis added). We can tell that geometrical propositions are gleaned a priori and therefore originate in intuition, Kant says, because they are all "apodictic, i.e. combined with consciousness of their necessity" (B41).
Geometry's synthetic nature is shown in that its principles go beyond the intitial, analytic concepts they begin with in a way that understanding simply cannot achieve singlehandedly (although it certainly plays a part in bringing together the manifold and exposing the relations geometry explores). This going beyond of geometrical judgments can only be achieved through the intuition of space as an infinite individual. Kant holds that space is apprehended through intuition and not through concepts. This is because in the formation of concepts we go from individual instances to universals; this is how we apprehend properties. In pure intuitions, however, we go from an immediate grasp of a universal whole to particular instances. This is how we apprehend individuals. We apprehend space in this way: as a huge, infinite, whole (or individual) of which we grasp only certain faces at any given time. In order to place any of these particular faces, a context must first be given, because without a context they could not exist in our minds at all. Therefore space is an infinite individual.
According to Kant then, geometrical propositions, or judgements, cannot be gained only through concepts. And because such propositions come a priori from out of intuition we see that-- necessarily-- our cognition of space must stem from pure intuition as well. This now more clearly synthetic yet a priori gathering of geometrical knowledge is therefore accomplished by drawing upon and combining both pure sensibility and understanding.
Space is, according to Kant, "merely the form of all appearances of outer sense, i.e., the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us" (p.177). There are two parts to sensibility: matter and form. Form can be separated from experience because, although it relies upon experience in terms of original source (i.e. we can only imagine combinations of things which we have had some experience with before), "that within which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation" (p. 173). Thus we see that matter is "only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation" (p.173). The idea is that pure sensibility, stripped of its experiential trappings is pure intuition, and that it is through this intuition that (as our formal constitution dictates) we are affected by objects. Sensibility, as a part of this formal constitution, "is a necessary condition of all the relations within which objects can be intuited as outside us" (p.177). Sourced in sensibility, this outer intuition 'has its seat in the subject', 'inhabiting [its] mind' (p.176) and enabling it to bring an immediate representation to the subject's understanding of the form of the outer objects (p.177). Sensibility being a necessary condition of all relations simply refers to Kant's original thesis, that without sensibility (the existence of which rests in the human and its subjective standpoint), space would be meaningless. Objects in the world appear to our minds as existing in the context of space simply because the human mind fixes on what is presented to it based on its own form; the shape of perceptions in the human mind are determined by the shape or constitution of that mind. This creates the illusion of space existing externally in the objective world when Kant would say it is an already-existing pure intuition of the mind which shapes our experience of sensory perception. In other words, space is subjective.

I think that the argument Kant makes here for the subjectivity of space is very good, as far as such an argument goes. Yet there are several particularly weak points-- for example, his assumption of Euclidean geometry and his position regarding the necessity of intuition. They seem to sort of sneak in, unproven, taken for granted. I don't believe these weak points are simply weak arguments: I think they are pure assumption. I do, however, feel very daunted by the task of trying to explain something which I found lacking (me!) in the amazing work of such a great mind. Since you ask it, I will attempt it-- and also try to construct possible solutions, given the pieces Kant has provided, to the holes I percieve in my reading of the text. But... please don't expect too much! I am truly embarrassed by this part of the assignment...
I was left rather unsatisfied with his use of geometry as an example of mathematics. The secondary text by Ottfried Höffe helped me incredibly with its explanation about the difference between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. Kant seemed to waver between these though, not making consistent use of them even within the structure of his argument. The distinction proposed by Höffe (62) between the three levels of spatiality (transcendental spatiality, mathematical space, and physical space) was also quite useful in understanding the level where Kant felt himself to be working. "Each of the succeeding levels depends upon the preceding without being derivable from it," Höffe says, further stating that in any case, "mere spatiality is not yet the object of geometry.
This object comes to be only by means of the objectification of spatiality; through imagination and by declaration the mathematician conceives the mere form of intuition as an obejct in its own right with certain structural characteristics, which he studies free from experience in the context of pure geometry. An unbridgeable difference exists between space as a transcendental condition and space as an object of geometry... Mathematical and physical propositions do not have transcendental significance, but only-- on a deeper level-- their conditions, which according to the Copernican revolution lie in the "constitution" of the knowing subject free of all experience" (p.61)
I don't know. I need to think about this more to really have an idea about it. I don't know how to talk about it. But that passage really helped me sort some things out, at least.
Kant's terse proof left me wondering as to other things as well, such as what the reason was for his seeming ignorance of non-Euclidean geometry. It had been discovered already by the time he wrote The Critique of Pure Reason, and I cannot believe that he didn't know about it. In fact Höffe states that he acknowledged it in his treatise Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Höffe, 61). So why did he purposively limit his work in this way? It would seem (on sixth or seventh glance, if one tries to reconcile it with his philosophy as a whole), that Kant believes the human mind to have the form of Euclidean geometry and to be unable, therefore, to comprehend in full or make use of any other kind of geometry. If our minds are 'shaped' like Euclidean geometry, so to speak, then we can only pick up, synthesize, and understand that which fits the mold. This sounds somewhat like wishful thinking, but at least it makes the limitation cohere with the rest of his thought.
We theorize a lot about non-Euclidean geometries; mathematicians have explored the idea for years that perhaps we are not limited to Euclid's geometry. I don't know much about the higher levels of mathematics (though they have always fascinated me), but aren't we finding that non-Euclidean geometries do, in fact, have physical applications? This would be a problem, since Kant made no allowances for this in his philosophy. There's no room for it. He admitted that he was not ignorant of the idea, he simply felt that the human mind held the form of Euclidean geometry only, and that it dictated what we were capable of seeing as real. Kant was sort of gnostic about what was 'out there' apart and away from the human standpoint, stating that "since we cannot make the special conditions of sensibility into conditions of the possibility of things, but only of their appearances, we can well say that space comprehends all things that may appear to us externally, but not all things in themselves" (p.177). The only relevant thing to him was what we experience, or intuit directly. But the question now is whether we can really say any longer that the only perceived space is Euclidean space? .... (concl. cut)

Toni Morrison ~ Beloved

~Free-Write Response to Morrison's Beloved~

Red. The Hated. Manifestation of Desire. Passion which pulls so many into its pool: helpless, raging, drowning, dying. . . Rememory refusing its offering again and again, finding healing in grey, in brown, in blue, and black, black-and-blue--- Pain: my salvation (long, dark corridor to ressurrection!).
Our every carmine heart is hidden. Hidden for a reason. You can't put your finger on it, can't but wave with absent conviction at a swirl of smoke, of dust, and say there, there it lies. Beneath, around, *within*. . . Substance barely there. But there, nonetheless. . . What hides it, I wonder? Could we be thwarting ourselves?


When I was a teenager, my mother tried to bring me out of my shell by dressing me in beautiful, rich folds of Red fabric. She loved the way it looked against my pale skin and golden hair, the way it made my eyes (with their deeply blue rootedness-- in something, somewhere back behind me, maybe it was my past) jump out and bite you. She had a dress made of this soft, dewy, carmine velvet, a dress most girls would have killed for, and people who saw it said most guys would have killed to see me in it. But it hung in my closet for years, learning the shape of its thin, hard, bare hanger, abandoned and lonely-- and I know my mother shed tears over the waste. Over the rejection-- the split she saw happening within me.

I walked through Junior High and High School, proudly, invisibly-- velvet myself, such that people's vision blurred when they looked at me, and their memories covered over the blurs or ignored them. I made them work *hard* to rememory me. Faded, I wore tan, brown, grey, blues-- and on bold days, black. Unobtrusive and obscure, I made myself scarce, and lived in an inner world haunted by my past and my pain. No one else need know about my struggle. I walked about, proudly. Invisibly. Separate.

I did not know the color Green, did not understand growing things, or why one drinks water.


You cannot truly appreciate Green until you know Red, in all its glory, power, and love. Until you learn to love your heart: glory and power-- manifest the hands and feet of the Son of Man on Earth. Love in the Flesh: Divine Truth. You cannot effectively, knowingly foster the tendriling vines in your life until you've grown to be old friends with Red: red of the heart, of the blood, and of the rose, of the desire for Life that keeps us beating, beating at the obstacles in our path and at the unform-ed-ness of our Selves. At the Hated: the Hate that beats us back and swallows us up. In loneliness. In self-contempt.

It took me a long long while, most of my life, to realize that all the helpless, raging, drowning, dying happens in the echo-empty un-self *around* the carmine borders of the heart, as we try (and die like flies) to reach it. I find I must tell myself every day that the answer to all our fears is Red, slick and juicy-cunning: full-of-Life. Do we dare embrace such a bold and daring color? Such a color as anyone, improperly informed, can slip from, off the wrong side, into an abyss of Nothingnes, no-self? Do we dare risk drowning to learn our Selves and thereby reach and grasp again to claim our Red, Red Hearts?

For it is only after we have made this journey,
and staked our claim,
that we can give
Red we know is truly
ours.

10/27/05 2.20 am

picture: PS edit of stock photo at deviantart website: deviant *Harpiai

:snow poems:

: snow on tree trunks :

light laces, sharply
curving-- splits,
forks
through dark trees,
lances upward, lightning-like
into inky blackness,
numerical arms
branching, breaking earth
Open and
arcing out into
Air. a stag

lifts his stately head.

2/22/05 4.06 am
edit: 9/12/05 1.44 pm`

:transience of vision:
my wealth comes from above

diamonds sparkling, condensed and
swirling: a Universe is falling from
fathomless skies tonight. Innumerable
stars eddy, like snowflakes
on the ground, cluster in drifts and
repose, web-like, on tree branches,
clinging to brown bark and
coating every bush like black ice.
it is only when the night's light
hits its slick surface --- suddenly,
sideways --- only then does it
brEAk
its crystalline
silence;

glorified tears betray
Contentment.

3/3/02 edit 2/23/06 7.51 pm
edit 4/6/06 3.22 am london

:conservation:

woke this morning, lifted salty
eyes to a small window frosted with chill.

condensed upon the pane: night's dew
from my cheeks and shining eyes, transformed.

outside, dark-needled giants bow, scrape
Earth, weighed down with the
weight of my
heart;
white as snow.

a cardinal wreaks havoc.

11/9/05 11.53 am
(about 11/7/05,
unexpected snow)

Vaclav Havel: Morality in Politics

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ~ Nobel Lecture ~ quote on art...
Just as the savage in bewilderment picks up... a strange object cast up by the sea?... something long buried in the sand?... a baffling object fallen from the sky? -- intricately shaped, now glistening dully, now reflecting a brilliant flash of light -- just as he turns it this way and that, twirls it, searches for a way to utilize it, seeks to find for it a suitable lowly application, all the while not guessing its higher function...
So we also, holding Art in our hands, confidently deem ourselves its masters; we boldly give it direction, bring it up to date, reform it, proclaim it, sell it for money, use it to pleasethe powerful, divert it for amusement -- all the way down to vaudeville songs and night-club acts -- or else adapt it (with a muzzle or stick, whatever is handy) towards transient potitical or limited social needs. But art remains undefiled by our endeavors and the stamp of its origin remains unaffected: each time and in every usage it bestows upon us a portion of its mysterious inner light (557-558)


Art, Culture, and the Autonomous, Free Humanity of Man;
The Universal Applicability of Living in Truth and Accepting Responsibility as Destiny


“The essence of the conflict…
is not a confrontation between two ideologies
(for instance a socialist with a liberal one) but a clash between
an anonymous, soulless, immobile and paralyzing… power,
and life, humanity, being and its mystery.

The counterpart of power in this conflict is not an alternative political idea
but the autonomous, free humanity of man
and with it necessarily also art -- precisely as art!--
as one of the most important expressions of this autonomous humanity”
(LIT, 133).

Project #1
Vaclav Havel: Morality in Politics


Czechoslovakia was at one time the seventh most industrialized state in the world; between World War II and the 1980s it fell to seventieth. Under Soviet Communist control for only forty years, it developed one of the worst pollution problems in Europe; television advertised gas masks for children to wear on their way to school, natural resources were heavily taxed, water was murky and unusable, and one could almost say that toxic chemicals were a main export of the country (AtVR, 46). Many obvious tragedies in the physical standards of living could be named, but there was a deeper problem underlying all those surface effects — something on the level of the human soul. The rigid control placed on people’s lives deadened them to themselves, estranged them from their true spirit, for “while life ever strives to create new and ‘improbable’ structures, the post-totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states” (PotP, 30). The ideology held forth by the communist regime, “in creating a bridge between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality” (PotP, 30). Thus accustoming the citizen to living within layers of deceptive appearances, the ideology bridge assimilates them as part of the system itself, because “the moment he or she steps onto this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual and the individual as a component of the system” (PotP, 31, emph add.). The Czech people became both victims and instruments (PotP, 36). This was seen vividly in censorship, which occurred in many forms. The quality of much art changed, for example, because of artists’ desire to make a living. The effects of such Foucault-like oppression in particular are simply not measurable, because while robbing the artist's life of “some of its naturalness and authenticity and turning it into a kind of endless dissimulation,” it also robbed culture and the entire community of innumerable sparks of life and creative inspiration (LtDGH, 8). The true enemy of the communist power structure was not another political ideology, but rather the power of art and its ability to uncover the truth. Yet the only way to live in this truth, to maintain “the autonomous, free humanity of man” that was able to challenge the system, was to accept a higher sense of responsibility than is naturally conceived of as desirable — to shoulder responsibility as destiny.
Czech playwrite and intellectual, Vaclav Havel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1936, close to the time the communists took control. Consequently he spent much of his life watching his country devolve and unravel and watching his people become demoralized. He wrote plays, was involved in absurdist theatre, and expressed his political views in endless criticisms of the communist government in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s and 70s. In 1989, an incredible bloodless revolution caused the communists to step down from power after four decades, allowing widespread systemic change throughout the country. The government was reshaped and turned over to serve the people in a democratic fashion, and Havel, ever an inspiration to his people, was caught up in the whirlwind, becoming the country's fast-learning new president.
Havel's literary career and experience as a dissident shaped him into a shepherd figure that his people looked up to — according to some, he was something like a cross between Mother Theresa and George Washington (AtVR, 37). Maintaining that systemic change was not a guarantee of improvement, Havel said that the main thing the revolution proved was that people have a basic openness to truth, touched upon by art and the development of culture. He remained an intellectual and a creative thinker and writer, stirring in people a desire for truth and, from his new platform, calling them to a life of conscience and responsibility.
Havel wanted to see his country remoralized, and reminded his people constantly that they must breathe spirit into the systemic changes that were occurring. He emphasized over and over again the importance of developing culture in the form of truth-revealing art, literature, and theater in order to accomplish this because such cultural art encourages authentic living in community, allowing groups to face problems, identify them, and deal with them honestly and creatively. His personal goal is to keep striving in a good cause, no matter the outlook, with as much sensitivity to his conscience as possible, recognizing that if one is committed to life, accepting responsibility is one’s destiny.

The mistake many people make when thinking of the baffling power of the communist regime lies in overestimating the importance of the individual leader, not realizing that “the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system” (PotP, 30). Founded upon lies and hypocrisy as it is, the system finds it must rely on lie after lie after lie in order to preserve itself, building an unbelievably empty structure in which every citizen is expected to accept his or her place, and even the leaders become slaves to save face. Havel writes, “They must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their place within it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system” (PotP, 31).
As a dissident, Vaclav Havel spoke truth as he saw it and refused to live the lie presented to him. He saw integrity, wholeness, and self-consciousness as virtues that ought to be preserved in the interest of life itself — at all costs. He tried to remain sensitive to his conscience and sought to prevent the regime from alienating him from himself by witnessing to the truth everywhere he could. This led him to criticize the government’s treatment of humanity almost constantly, for which he spent at least five years in prison. He asks:
.. What is the effect on people of a system based on fear and apathy, a system that drives each man into a foxhole of purely material existence and offers him deceit as the main form of communication with society?.... Think what you like in private, as long as you agree in public, refrain from making difficulties, suppress your interest in truth and silence your conscience– and the doors will be wide open to you. If the principle of outward adaptation is made the keystone to success in society, what sort of human qualities will be encouraged and what sort of people, one may ask, will come to the fore? (LtDGH, 14, 9).
In upholding his own human dignity through living in truth to the best of his ability, he hoped to contribute some small bit to the survival of life. His was a life constantly accepting a higher responsibility than mere support of a material subsistence– rather his was the life-long promotion of a living, breathing social organism — able to organize itself for the addressing of its internal problems rather than relying on a leader who grovels before an ideology that purports to know the aims of life better than those who live it.
Even the systemic change which occurred in 1989 is an aside when compared to the point Havel wants to make, and some of the people involved missed that point in the end as well, calling for communists to be punished, kicked out, and banned from every place of influence. And yet, even in spite of these sentiments, the Velvet Revolution was a miraculously peaceful revolution in which an entire country banded together to protest an oppressive government that had abused them for decades. Millions of people gathered for demonstrations, and more than 80% of the work force went on strike until finally the Communist party
... held an extraordinary congress at which it change[d] its structure, abolishing the position of general secretary and replacing it with two positions, Party chairman and first chairman.... It declare[d] its support for a multi-party system and promise[d] democratization of its internal affairs. It also disband[ed] the People’s Militia, its paramilitary arm, and apologize[d] to the Czechoslovak people for events following 1968 (AtVR, 20).
By the end of December, 1989, Havel-- just two months out of prison– had been unanimously elected by the newly formed Federal Assembly as the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic (AtVR, 20).
Many people called for Havel to ban communists from every position of government influence, but Havel felt a danger in that, saying that when “respect for a theoretical concept... outweighs respect for human life... this is precisely what threatens to enslave humanity all over again” (PotP, 71). Dissident movements, he explained, “understand systemic change as superficial, something secondary, something that in itself can guarantee nothing. Thus an attitude that turns away from abstract political visions of the future towards concrete human beings and ways of defending them effectively in the here and now is quite naturally accompanied by an intensified antipathy to all forms of violence carried out in the name of ‘a better future’”(PotP, 71). From the dissident perspective, violent political overthrow is not too radical a response — it is not radical enough; the problem lies too deep for any systemic change to touch – because it is a human problem, and must be met as such if we are ever to get anywhere at solving it. It is the problem of being alienated from our selves, of being too familiar with lies and hypocritical facades, and being out of touch with the substance of what makes us human. Any system worth anything must grow out of that substance, working to keep its constitution and criminal code “in perspective against the background of life as it really is. [For w]ithout keeping one's eyes open to the real dimensions of life's beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics.... [a system] can never give life substance or meaning” (PotP, 77, emph. add.). There was something though that, as exemplified in his own and others’ experience during the decades of oppression and stagnation, Havel felt did characteristically give life substance and meaning: art.

Art’s little sparks and flares during the years of communist rule were found to be threatening simply in virtue of their existence, for the blind automatism that wielded power was not unintelligent. It knew instinctually that where there was substance and meaning, its own substancelessness and meaninglessness — its own falsity — would be uncovered. As Havel says, it knew that it would be pronounced naked, like the Emperor in his new “clothes”, by the mere existence of — not a new dogma or political cry, but the simple, penetrating truth of art which never ceases to confront the human being with its self. Art has a powerful way of drawing out truth in the lives of individuals by allowing them to identify actively with who they really are, what they really think, and where they are at — compelling them to look straight into the face of their humanity and at what is inescapably essential to their being. “If we start,” Havel says, “with the presupposition that art constitutes a distinctive way of seeking truth — truth in the broadest sense of the word, that is, chiefly the truth of the artist's inner experience — then there is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth, or perhaps the urgency and profundity of this truth.” (LIT, 131) It is because of this that when the communist regime looks at art, literature, and theater, it finds that
... the degree to which politics is present or absent has no connection with the power of artistic truth... Hundreds of examples testify that the regime prosecutes most vigorously not what threatens it overtly but has little artistic power, but whatever is artistically most penetrating, even though it does not seem all that overtly 'political’ (LIT,133).
Havel speaks of an index of names of censored works and authors, but also of a “blank index” as being “an open warrant for the arrest of anything inwardly free and, therefore, in the deepest sense, ‘cultural’”(LtDGH, 20). The arrest of culture in effect removed the societal apparatus by which people helped each other find themselves and by which they joined together to search for the best way to do things. He likens cultural works in society to vitamins in a human body, noting that fractional deficiencies in either can have far-ranging and unforeseeable results (LtDGH, 21). Because of the threat of its lie being unveiled, the regime sought to silence and placate authors by suppressing original works while at the same time handing out prizes, money, and awards. In this way it hoped to materially imprison creative souls in apathy and the desire to protect the enjoyable lifestyle offered them at the hands of their oppressors. By immobilizing culture, the regime paralyzed society’s ability to know its soul. Society, self-less then and enshrouded in lies, was easy to maneuver into the fold of falsity that supported the order and calm communism so idolized. As a result, the society was described by some as metaphorically dead, in a way: “Calm as a morgue or a grave” (LtDGH, 25).
Underneath that, however, Havel explains in an essay entitled Six Asides About Culture, he saw life struggling to surface for sustenance wherever it could be found– that there was nothing the people of Czechoslovakia wouldn’t do for a taste of culture. Young people traveled half-way across the entire country for a concert that might not happen at all. People stood in line all night for tickets to the plays for that month, and when they came the theaters were “crammed full of people grateful for every nuance of meaning, frantically applauding every knowing smile from the stage” such that it was almost a struggle to keep moving and complete the plays (SAAC, 125).
Seeing this, Havel felt, was testament to the fact that people are fundamentally open to truth. According to him:
... Individuals can be alienated from themselves because there is something there to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence...living a lie [on the one hand]... is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies... there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth... living in the truth [on the other hand] takes individuals back to the solid ground of their own identities (PotP, 41, 44).
Any legitimate system ought to encourage the individual citizen’s groundedness in his or her own identity. It is only from this ground that any healthy, self-organizing principle will spring.

Vaclav Havel had been released from jail, due to serious illness, only two months before his election as president on December 29, 1989. Between World War I and World War II Czechoslovakia was lucky enough to have a president named Masaryk, “an intellectual and liberal statesman” who tended to try to “remain above the din of party politics,” and worked to keep the country out of communist hands for years (AtVR, 37). Havel has followed in his footsteps in a variety of ways, from his refusal to identify in name with either left or right party politics (he says that over-emphasis on parties... “displaces a responsible interest in the prosperity and success of the broader community”) to his mottos : “Truth prevails.” and “Do not be afraid and don’t steal”(AtVR, 42, SM, 55, AtVR, 88-89). “If we teach ourselves not to lie and steal,” he told his people in one of his first speeches as president, “things will turn out alright” (AtVR, 88-89). Such a statement may sound simple and even juvenile to us, but the experience of the Czech and Slovak people in past decades has given such advice more depth and relevance than we could perhaps imagine.
Havel tried to make it clear that he was only accepting the job of president for a time, and that he was “looking forward to returning to his writing,” but some speculated that he had found his proper profession in politics (AtVR, 42). One commentator, for example, asked whether “it [could]
be that the author, who was always as much a moral philosopher and social commentator as a playwrite, has found his true vocation?” (AtVR, 42-43). A fellow writer, Ivan Klima, expressed the sentiment that Havel’s essays were better than his plays, and it was true as well that although he’d never been trained to give speeches, when life called upon him to do the unfamiliar work, he took to it like a fish to water.
Initially, he was to be President only in the interim while the country prepared itself for its first free election; he was to help organize the new structure of the government and begin the process of addressing the many wrongs that had been done to the land and its people during the decades of communist rule. But come election time, the job was offered him again, and although he craved a different life he also expressed a strong belief that he should not abandon the battlefield. He felt a keen responsibility to finish the thing he had started. As such a prominent figure in the fight, his conscience would not allow him to step down and wait for someone else to finish the job, and in any case, it would be a demoralizing thing for the people if he retreated to the comfortable routine of his own life. He needed to be faithful to the task and see it through until circumstances made it clear that his time was done. So he accepted the responsibility.
One summer toward the end of his time in office, he wrote a compilation of thoughts entitled Summer Meditations in which he reflects on his years as president, on politics and his own involvement in it. Many people are of either the active or passive opinion that politics is a disreputable business, through and through, but Havel says that it isn’t, in essence, and that that fact ought to be remembered (SM, 10). What it is in essence is service, and that is a good thing, when carried out with spirit and in good conscience. “Those who claim that politics is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion, and that morality has no place in it, are just wrong,” he says emphatically (SM, 5-6). He states further that
... naturally, if you understand decency as a mere “superstructure” of the forces of production, then you can never understand political power in terms of decency...[but] Political intrigue is not really politics, and, although you can get away with superficial politics for a time, it does not bring much hope of lasting success... one can hardly improve the world that way (SM, 5-6).
Genuine politics is equated in his mind with serving the community and those who will come after us (SM, 5-6).
In his own political work, in addition to pragmatically attempting to address the problems inherited from the previous regime, Havel works to do exactly what he did as a playwrite, which is something he feels is part of the job of a politician as well. It is his identity as a writer and as a politician to attempt to wake up his people, to give them the food their souls need in order to keep living authentically, with spirit, ingenuity and a sense of meaning in the midst of life. What he’s doing amounts to more than just wrapping problems prettily and attempting to address them practically at the same time.
One could look at his idealism and his speeches and decide that he’s offering a new ideology — but he’s not. That is precisely what he is not doing. What he’s offering is much more than an ideology in that it frees people, making them ever-more aware of their autonomy and their human possibilities. He is still offering art, but art that is meant to confront his society with its very self, and to ask it to fill the emptinesses it finds there itself– “you have what it takes!” he wants to tell them. He knows his own prescriptions will fall woefully short of the vitality and complexity needed to respond to the problems in his country and around the world; he is simply pointing his finger at the way we are living, confronting us with ourselves, and asking us to take responsibility for the way life is authored. Far from offering a new ideology, an inert lie to cling to like dogma, Havel is challenging his people to walk a path fraught with demons of their own making, to look into their own souls and learn to live authentically and humanly and creatively enough to heal themselves. He is challenging them to live in truth, not another lie. And the truth makes us free.
Havel asks provocatively in a collection of writings entitled Living in Truth, “Can we separate the awakening human soul from what it always, already is — an awakening human community?” (LIT, 135). The fulfillment of community must happen in a grounded, honest way, breathing spirit and the true substance of humanity back into the way we do everything. And if the meaning of the state is human, then “it must be intellectual, spiritual, and moral,” and “in the somewhat chaotic provisional activity around the technical aspects of building the state, it will do us no harm occasionally to remind ourselves of [that]” (SM, 19). There is too much reliance on the technical as an answer, and not enough relying on — or searching in — ourselves.

It is because of this human soul, this human element to community that "no state... [is] the clever technical invention of a team of experts, like a computer or a telephone. Every state, on the contrary, grows out of specific intellectual, spiritual, and cultural traditions that breathe substance into it and give it meaning"(SM, 18-19). In the post-totalitarian system, ideology attempts to take the place of the human spirit and the result is a dead thing perpetuating itself by eating people alive, making them a part of its subsistence structure. Instead of serving them as it ought, it forces them to serve it — leaders and citizens, all become victims and instruments (PotP, 36).
According to Havel, the answer to this situation is a moral reconstitution of society, a spiritual revival in which we bring soul back into society’s technical order (PotP, 92). What needs to occur is “a reintroduction of the human order which cannot be replaced by any political order” (PotP, 92). And he says the political consequences of this reintroduction will be
... a new spirit... [the] rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, solidarity, love... [and] structures aimed not at ‘technical’ aspect of the execution of power, but at the significance of that execution... aris[ing] from below as a consequence of authentic ‘self-organization’; they should derive vital energy from a living dialogue with the genuine needs from which they arise, and when these needs are gone, the structures should also disappear (PotP, 93).
Politics is not a technical structure, at core. It is and ought to be an organism, a social organism in which free-thinking and acting individuals work to create groups — free-radical groups, if you will — that are constantly in flux in order for the needs of the whole to be met. The peaceful events of the Velvet Revolution should make it obvious that this continually changing, organic self-organization is possible. Why can it not be sustained, its varying state and content a reflection of the aims of the creative, diversifying force of life?

What compelled Havel to change his life so dramatically? He expresses doubt in himself often, that he is not as fit for the job as he would like to be. He admits that the enjoyable parts of having power have a real draw for him as well. But he sees that danger, admits to it, and is properly afraid of it. Refusing to make excuses for himself, he tries his utmost always to separate what is really necessary for his position from what is simple luxury. Despite the dangers and difficulties involved in keeping his aim true and his motives pure, Havel feels that “guided as president by conscience, [he] cannot go far wrong,” and also calls for those alive to their consciences everywhere to participate in politics (AtVR, 79). It is not an imperative: “every moral person should be in politics because they are needed — so get out there and run for office!” No, Havel understands that people have different tasks and destiny calls to everyone in different ways and at different times. But he defines politics broadly, including all grass roots groups and political criticism. There are many ways to be involved. His plea is only stating the truth he sees: that conscience-stricken people are the very ones who are needed, for they are the ones who will do what needs to be done with real, human spirit and honesty and a true desire to serve others. It is clear to him “that intellectuals cannot forever avoid their share of responsibility in the world, hiding their distaste for politics under a supposed need for independence” (AtVR, 79). Havel is not stating an imperative that all morally awake people should be politicians; it is simply a plea that we no longer refuse to dirty our hands with something base and useless, because politics’ identity is not founded on baseness, nor is it fundamentally useless. The reason the political realm has become such a morally degenerate place is because spiritless people make it so. Who will re-infuse spirit if not the people who are aware of it? The people who see it and value it? “Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough,” Havel proclaims. “Something more is necessary… It is a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things" (SM, 20). We all must listen more to our conscience in order to bring this “order of humanity” back to the political organism. Havel couldn’t be more right — no political order can ever replace the human spirit.

For all his idealism and the vitality of the hopeful pictures he paints for us, Havel recognizes utopian thinking as a danger, stating that it is important to know that one can make no promises. "Evil will remain with us,” he admits sadly (SM, 16).
...No one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop destroying the world. In this regard, I have no illusions. Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. . .Yet I still think it makes sense to wage this war persistently. It is an eternal, never-ending struggle waged not just by good people against evil people, by honourable people against dishonorable people, by people who think about the world and eternity against people who think only of themselves and the moment. It takes place inside of everyone. It is what makes a person a person, and life, life... There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause (SM, 16).
There is nowhere he has made this belief more clear than in his acceptance of the role of president; he met a particularly earth-shattering instance of destiny handing him unexpectedly weighty responsibility that startling December. If “responsibility as destiny” is a good motto for Havel’s life, as Jan Vladislav says in concluding his introduction to Living in Truth, nowhere is it made manifest more boldly than in his resounding “Yes!” to the responsibility placed before him that day. He would have been happy voicing his truth anywhere, he says — had been, in fact — in prison, in theaters, in his marriage, in school, as an intellectual, in his writings, and would have gone on living in truth wherever he found himself. When faced with a new and unfamiliar — but important — arena in which to learn to do so, he did not back down, but chose to live in that new sphere with as much awareness and conscience as he was able, to do his utmost there with sincerity, integrity and vision, as who he was. He chose to shoulder the responsibility and conscientiously lived as honestly as he could, face-to-face with himself, in the place where he was put.
Responsibility as destiny is a good motto, and the amazing web-like connectedness of everything in the universe makes acknowledging our responsibility look like a wise choice. The more we know about how interconnected things are, the wiser it looks. And yet, somehow, we still manage to avoid looking straight at the truth that we have a responsibility to that world, and for it– not just a responsibility to and for ourselves (PotP, 80).
One can only hope that we will not grow callous to the ability of art and culture to uncover truth and give us reason to accept it. It is the only hope for the continuance of this amazing power Havel calls “the autonomous, free humanity of man” which so recently faced down and overthrew a totalitarian government without shedding a drop of blood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Havel, Vaclav, et al. The Power of the Powerless; Citizens Against the State in Central Europe. Armonk, New York. M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 1990. (PotP)
Havel, Vaclav. The Art of the Impossible; Politics as Morality in Practice. New York. Fromm International Publishing Corporation. 1998. (TAotI)
Havel, Vaclav.“Six Asides About Culture.” Jan Vladislav, ed. Living in Truth. England. Clays Ltd, St Ives plc. 1990. (LIT)
Havel, Vaclav.“Letter to Dr. Gustav Husak.” Jan Vladislav, ed. Living in Truth. England. Clays Ltd, St Ives plc. 1990. (LtDGH)
Havel, Vaclav, et al., Tim D. Whipple, ed. After the Velvet Revolution; Vaclav Havel & the New Leaders of Czechoslovakia Speak Out. New York. Freedom House. 1991. (AtVR)
Havel, Vaclav. Tom Stoppard, ed. Largo Desolato. New York. Grove Press. 1987. (LD)
Havel, Vaclav. Open Letters; Selected Writings, 1965-1990. New York. Vintage Books. 1991. (OL)
Havel, Vaclav., Paul Wilson, trans. Summer Meditations. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 1992. (SM)
Havel, Vaclav., Paul Wilson, trans. Disturbing the Peace; A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 1990. (DtP)
Lukes, Igor. Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler; The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes in the 1930’s. New York. Oxford University Press. 1996. (CBSaH)
Weber, Eugen. A Modern History of Europe; Men, Cultures, and Societies from the Renaissance to the Present. New York. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.1970. (p. 751-1106). (AMHoE)

Sickness Unto Death, Part I

notes for a talk I gave on Kiergegaard's Sickness Unto Death once.

Despair

Self: "The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God... the progress of becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. But if the self does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows that or not" (30).
Definition: "Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself" (15).
Universality: "Just as a physician might say that very likely there is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows [hu]mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself..." (22).
Types of Despair

Defined by Consciousness: "The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair" (42)
Spiritlessness: in despair, not to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strictest sense)
This is "the despair that is ignorant of being despair, or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self" (42)
"If a man is presumably happy, imagines himself to be happy, although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as it is said, it murders his happiness... he is too sensate to have to courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (43).
"Every human existence that is not conscious of itself... before God as spirit... that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests and merges in some abstract universality... or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source... is... despair" (46).
Weakness: in despair, not to will to be oneself, or the will to do away with oneself: typical (though not definitive) feminine despair
immediacy/despairing over the earthly: "He turns away completely from the inward way along which he should have advanced in order to truly become a self. In a deeper sense, the whole question of the self becomes a kind of false door with nothing behind it in the background of his soul. He appropriates what he in his language calls his self, that is, whatever capacities, talents, etc he may have; all these he appropriates but in an outward-bound direction, toward life, as they say, toward the real, the active life" (55-56).
despairing over the eternal or himself: a man who wishes to be Caesar cannot bear to be himself (ex), yet he cannot get rid of himself; he despairs over himself. he "becomes more clearly conscious of his despair, that he despairs of the eternal that he despairs over himself, over being so weak that he attributes such great significance to the earthly, which now becomes for him the despairing sign that he has lost the eternal and himself" (61). this creates inclosing reserve, and can lead to suicide.
Defiance: in despair, to will to be oneself, : typical (though not definitive) masculine despair
"Here the despair is conscious of itself as an act" (67).
"The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair wills to be himself, the more his despair intensifies and becomes demonic" (71-72).
"And this is the self that a person in despair wills to be, severing the self from any relation to a power that has established it, or severing it from the idea that there is such a power...instead, the self in despair is satisfied with paying attention to itself, which is supposed to bestow infinite interest and significance upon his enterprises..." (68-69).
"The devil's despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse. Therefore, his despair is the most absolute defiance" (42).
"Rather than to seek help, he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell" (71).
"In so far as the self in its despairing striving to be itself works itself into the very opposite, it really becomes no self... at no moment is it... eternally steadfast" (69).
The Remedy?
Despair as a state of perpetuated continuity: "If a person is truly not to be in despair, he must at every moment destroy the possibility" (15), for "[our despair] does not continue as a matter of course; if the misrelation continues, it is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself" (16). the continuity of sin vs "the essential continuity of the eternal through being before God in faith" (105)
Solution: "The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it." (14)
Inwardness: resting transparently in the power that established you. "If there is, then, something eternal in a man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change... the time never comes when a man has grown away from it, or has become older -- than the Eternal. If there is, then, something eternal in a man the discussion of it must have a different ring. It must be said that there is something that shall always have its time, something that a man shall always do, just as one Apostle says that we should always give thanks to God... The Eternal will not have its time, but will fashion time to its own desire, and then give its consent that the temporal should also be given its time" (36-37).
The Unspeakable in Nature: "And the sea, like a wise man, is sufficient unto itself. Whether it lies like a child and amuses itself with its soft ripples as a child that plays with its mouth, or at noon lies like a drowsy thinker in carefree enjoyment and allows its gaze to wander over all, or in the night ponders deeply over its own being; whether in order to see what is going on, it cunningly conceals itself as though it no longer existed, or whether it rages in its own passion: the sea has a deep ground, it knows well enough what it knows. That which has a deep ground always knows this; but there is no sharing of this knowledge." (48-49) This description of the unspeakable-- it is different with 'one who confesses' -- or who is before God, transparent, who prays ---
The Unspeakable in Man: "For when hate, and anger, and revenge, and despondency, and melancholy, and despair, and fear of the future, and reliance on the world, and trust in oneself, and pride that infuses itself even into sympathy, and envy that even mingles itself with friendship, and that inclination that may have changed but not for the better: when these dwell in a man --- when was it without the deceptive excuse of ignorance? And when a man remained ignorant of them, was it not precisely because he at the same time remained ignorant of the fact that there is an all-knowing One." (51-52)
The way inward, into transparency and rest is silence.

When You Can Endure ~Hafiz
When
The words stop
And you can endure the silence
That reveals your heart's
Pain Of emptiness
Or that great wrenching sweet longing,
That is the time to try and listen
To what the Beloved's
Eyes
Most want
To Say.

A Still Cup ~Hafiz
For
God
To make love,
For the divine alchemy to work,
The Pitcher needs a still cup.
Why
Ask Hafiz to say
Anything more about
Your most
Vital
Requirement?

*All Quotes from Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death, except those noted 'POH', from Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing


The Diary of an Old Soul (excerpts),

by George MacDonald

Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot,
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity:
Oh, thou who knowest! save thy child forlorn.

...Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll;
Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea;
My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think,--O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.