{"id":11512,"date":"2012-07-27T14:34:25","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T18:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=11512"},"modified":"2012-07-27T14:34:25","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T18:34:25","slug":"in-the-large-dark-and-the-long-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/in-the-large-dark-and-the-long-light\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Large Dark and the Long Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From\u00a0whiskey river<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different.<\/p>\n

Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Am\u00e9lie Nothomb,\u00a0Les Catilinaires<\/em>)<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Annie Dillard [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Marilynne Robinson [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me make this perfectly clear.
\nI have never written anything because it is a Poem.
\nThis is a mistake you always make about me,
\nA dangerous mistake. I promise you
\nI am not writing this because it is a Poem.<\/p>\n

You suspect this is a posture or an act
\nI am sorry to tell you it is not an act.<\/p>\n

You actually think I care if this
\nPoem gets off the ground or not. Well
\nI don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
\nAnd neither should you.
\nAll I have ever cared about
\nAnd all you should ever care about
\nIs what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.<\/p>\n

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
\nIt is not the Poem that matters.
\nYou can shove the Poem.
\nWhat matters is what is out there in the large dark
\nand in the long light,
\nBreathing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from\u00a0whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages. There is no English word for a type of feeling which the Japanese call yugen<\/em>, and we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which Japanese people use the word.[1] …<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n[1] “To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.” (Seami<\/span>) All these are yugen<\/em>, but what have they in common?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Alan Watts [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

I posted last Friday without mentioning the Aurora, Colorado\u00a0Dark Knight<\/em> shooting, which I learned about too late to somehow shoehorn in. Not that I wanted to make the post about<\/em> it, as such, but it felt a little weird not to at least allude to it. The whiskey river<\/em><\/a> blog helped out this week with a number of good quotes which “feel right” in that context for this week, though…<\/p>\n

People say there’s a fine line between good and evil, but that doesn’t quite make sense to me. The landscape between good and evil isn’t a plateau. It’s a shallowly inclined plain, and the plain slopes alternately up and down in a welter of confused geography of natural and human infrastructure. We may trip over a pothole or pebble, puncture a tire or the sole of our foot on the way from one to the other. But almost nothing (and I want to strike that “almost”) suddenly<\/em> goes from good to evil, or vice-versa. There is no suddenly<\/em>. Suddenly<\/em> is a lie, or rather a convenient, casually lazy self-deception — shorthand for We weren’t giving the world our full attention, but then we woke up<\/em>. If you’re a subatomic particle, you may know all about jumping from one state to another (from good to evil, say)\u00a0in a micromicromicrosecond. But changes at the cellular level and above? They happen gradually, almost imperceptibly, in response to other gradual changes in other organisms.<\/p>\n

Which is why so many comments about news events like last week’s feel unsatisfactory to me. They focus on the suddenness — the moment when the ordinary “turns” extraordinary — partly because the shock of jumping from one state to the next (from fun to disaster, light to dark, life to death) makes a better story than the looooong process which led to that moment, that shock. People also have an easier time suggesting solutions to stark choices between one thing and another. (Problem: Crazy people sometimes have guns, and use them in crazy ways<\/em>. Solution A: Take away the guns!<\/em>\u00a0Solution B: Arm everybody!<\/em>\u00a0Solution C: Death to all crazy people!<\/em> And so on.)<\/p>\n

But reacting to sudden changes in state guarantees us no better than an endless cycle of back-and-forth. I don’t think we have any choice, ultimately: the odds that we’ll somehow make our entire species non-violent, intelligent,\u00a0sane<\/em> don’t strike me as especially good ones. I’m just saying that if we as a species can’t meet big, systemic, longitudinal problems with big, systemic, longitudinal solutions… well, we’ll probably<\/del> see many more Auroras: evermore close-up, evermore ghastly, evermore shocking and — yes — always, unchangeably “sudden.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From\u00a0whiskey river: It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,247,1393,94,251],"tags":[295,1211,1447,1476,3120,3121,3122,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-11512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-02_in-the-news","10":"category-poetry-writing_cat","11":"tag-annie-dillard","12":"tag-alan-watts","13":"tag-marilynne-robinson","14":"tag-gwendolyn-macewen","15":"tag-yin-and-yang","16":"tag-amelie-nothomb","17":"tag-aurora","18":"tag-problems-with-no-easy-solutions","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-2ZG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11512"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11535,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11512\/revisions\/11535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}