Thought-Struck

[Image: “Twinned meerkats,” by user amndw2 (Amanda L. Watson, whom I do not know) on Flickr. She received these small toys (only about an inch high) as gifts, independently, within months of each other. She does not know what, if anything, the coincidence might mean. I believe they’ve just twigged to the same idea, at the same time.]

From whiskey river:

Dangerous Considerations
(excerpt)

In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.

But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.

In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say — theologians know a thing or two about this — what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.

These are difficult and dangerous considerations.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

(Robert Musil [source])

Not from whiskey river:

All large thoughts are reluctant. I don’t think this is intentional on their part. It follows from the unhasty, liquid pace of human thinking. As an experiment, overturn half a glass of wine onto a newly starched tablecloth. Watch, wholly absorbed, as the borders of the stain search their way outward, plumping up each parched capillary of cotton, threadlet by threadlet, and then traveling on — a soundless, happy explosion, with no moving parts. Thought moves at the velocity of that stain.

(Nicholson Baker [source])

…and:

Like Gods
(excerpt)

The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand “totality of facts, not things.” Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them, all the “things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history — the backfiring of a bus/In a Paris street in 1932,” as well as all the things that history distorts or just can’t see, like the thought that must have flashed across Patroklos’s mind (if he’d existed and had had a mind — the middle knowledge of the schoolmen) when Hektor split his stomach with a spear (if he’d existed too). Each one looks on, as though through ordinary eyes, as “Mme Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over the ground,” and sees “the gray ‘toppers’ of old” the gentlemen strolling with her wore, the little “woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers” that she wore (or would have worn if they and she’d been real). Each monitors the photons through the slits, the slow decay of radium, and knows the ratio of vermouth to gin in someone’s first martini at Larre’s. Each knows what Darragh, Geoff and Willy knew before the bullet or the pavement killed their worlds, and where the shots came from in Dallas. Each knows precisely what the other knows, in all the senses of those words, and if a question has a factual answer, each can answer it. Yet there’s a question neither can resolve: which god am I?

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

When the idea came, it came like a train to a station. From some distance away, the locomotive’s whistle hooted: Move! Mooooove! Get off the track! Moooo-oooove! Pigeons poured in thunderflapping tumult from the windows and entranceways. The train pulled up to the platform where passengers stood waiting, some bored by a daily commute and others’ hearts pounding with the prospect of arrival at a place they’d once never even imagined, let alone visited before, let alone daily. Doors hissed open; conductors stepped onto the platform. Most of the conductors went about their work briskly, efficiently, waving travelers aboard with one hand while collecting tickets with the other. A few of the conductors were having bad days, and they scowled as they demanded and perused arbitrary travel papers (visas, passports) from the most unsophisticated and least experienced passengers.

One conductor, though — he’d emerged from the last car — something wonderful must have happened to him earlier this morning, or last night (a lottery ticket, a compliment, sudden surprising laughter, a kiss from the right girl at the right moment): with a grin, he summoned passengers with open arms, making big scooping synchronized sweeps of both arms as though conducting an orchestra through a grand passage, or directing traffic generously across the heart of a parade. His welcome met almost no one. Most passengers had already boarded earlier cars — indeed, most were already seated (looking out the windows at nothing in particular, already imagining arrival, anticipating a nap). Only one passenger, in fact  — I, in fact — had not yet entered the train, and I all too eagerly took those last steps towards and past his greeting smile. He didn’t even ask for my ticket. I had the distinct sense that he nearly patted me on the shoulder as I passed through the door onto the little stair. At the top of the steps I turned and looked down. The smiling conductor was gone.

The doors of the train hissed shut. The whistle hooted once, twice. With me alone in the last car, catching my balance as we lurched away from the platform, destination unknown, finally the idea headed on its way.

(JES)