[Video: a little about the Silbo Gomero whistled language of the Canary Islands *.]
From whiskey river (somewhat continuing last week’s theme):
When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is — that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense — even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren’t there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you’re in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you’re supposed to do something you have to think.
It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you’re advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts — it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words.
(Alan Watts [source])
…and:
Naming the Stars
This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.
(Joyce Sutphen [source])
