Neither Here Nor There

[Image: a frame from Between Two Worlds, the 2009 film by director
Vimukthi Jayasundara. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.

We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

(Abraham Joshua Heschel [source])

…and:

Social Security
(excerpt)

Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of winged dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

(Terence Winch [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Non-Possession Is One-Tenth of the Law

Do not travel over vast distances.
Stay home and contemplate your neighbor,
the old woman who roams up and down the street.
She can never remember who you are
or who she is, for that matter.
This way, you will protect
your precarious sense of self.
Ruin your appetite before dinner.
This will ensure that you’ll never feel hunger.
Play the same tune over and over,
driving everyone else crazy.
This protects you from unpredictability.
Find large articles of clothing
and wrap them around the trees,
so you will be as one with nature.
Fill your shoes with rocks
to ensure a suitable measure of gravitas.
Hide precious items from yourself,
then forget where you have hidden them.
This will promote non-attachment to things.
Make yourself dizzy by spinning around
so that the world will seem more steady.
Put all of your chairs in one room.
Sleep standing up. Move the refrigerator
into the bedroom and at night read
by its light. Rub with things,
not against them. Use pain to distract
a sore spirit. You will then be dreamier,
full of strength, able to bark at stars.

(Terence Winch [source])

…and:

There is no doubt that [my] mixed heredity contained extraordinary possibilities — and extraordinary dangers. Its result was a bourgeois who went astray into art, a bohemian homesick for his decent background, an artist with a bad conscience…

I stand between two worlds, I am at home in neither, and this makes things a little difficult for me. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois feel they ought to arrest me… I don’t know which of the two hurts me more bitterly. The bourgeois are fools; but you worshipers of beauty, you who say I am phlegmatic and have no longing in my soul, you should remember that there is a kind of artist so profoundly, so primordially fated to be an artist that no longing seems sweeter and more precious to him than his longing for the bliss of the commonplace.

…if there is anything that can turn a littérateur into a true writer, then it is this bourgeois love of mine for the human and the living and the ordinary.

(Thomas Mann [source])

…and:

Becoming a Redwood

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,

And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.

Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.

And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.

Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.

The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.

Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.

You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,

Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.

(Dana Gioia [source])

…and:

Deep within every life, no matter how dull or ineffectual it may seem from the outside, there is something eternal happening. This is the secret way that change and possibility conspire with growth. john Henry Newman summed this up beautifully when he said, “To grow is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Change, therefore, need not be threatening; it can in fact bring our lives to perfection. Perfection is not cold completion. Nor is it avoidance of risk and danger in order to keep the soul pure or the conscience unclouded. When you are faithful to the risk and ambivalence of growth, you are engaging your life. The soul loves risk; it is only through the door of risk that growth can enter.

(John O’Donohue, Anam Cara)

______________________

About the image: Between Two Worlds won or was nominated for numerous international awards in 2009, including the Best Asian Film Award from the 2010 Barcelona (Spain) Asian film festival. Its program notes for the South Asian International Film Festival apparently read, enigmatically:

The young man has fallen from the sky. The lines of communication are burned. To flee the city and its tumult, get back to nature. Enter into another story. Of the legend of the prince. In the hope of a love. To hide in the hollow of the tree. Nothing magical is improbable. What happened yesterday can reoccur tomorrow.

Nothing magical is improbable: I like that.