I just wanted to post here a link to an entry in Matt Cardin's excellent blog, as well as embed a song that's been around for a few years now. No commentary from me, as I'm not in the Carrie Bradshaw mood at present, and haven't the time anyway:
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Karl writes:Hasn’t the world been collapsing since the very first day?
Apparently.
Karl writes:”I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where the light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night.” – Samuel Beckett, ‘Molloy’.
That reminds me of a poem I read in this:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Japanese-Death-Poems-Yoel-Hoffman/dp/0804831793/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338466122&sr=1-1Highly recommended, incidentally.The poem goes something like:Suddenly I realiseEverything rests upon Pillars of ice.The “pillars of ice” in question, are actually these:http://nekobiyori.cocolog-nifty.com/days/images/d050108-shimobashira.jpgThey're called ‘shimobashira’, and they are a moss-like frost. I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite like them anywhere except in Japan.Anyway, the meaning seems clear – existence itself is slouching upon melting supports of ice.
That does look interesting.I’ve just been on my lunch break (should be working really, so will be brief), and bought two books on impulse. The first was Secretum by Petrarch, because I opened it at a point where it talks about the need to meditate on death (a theme much in my life at present, it seems), and the second was A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille, because I opened it on a strangely complementary/contrasting passage about Buddhism, Sophocles and so on.
Karl writes:Looking at those shimobashira is quite calming. I had that poetry anthology out from the library once, funnily enough, and remember enjoying it. On the topic of death and Japan I picked up this book in a secondhand shop recently: http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Pain-God-First-Original/dp/1597522562 ‘Theology of the Pain of God’ by Kazoh Kitamori. Apparently, he was the first non-westerner to have a work of Christian theology translated into English. Haven’t started it yet, but he has an interesting appendix on the issue of translating Biblical Hebrew into Japanese! Looks like a comforting bedtime read:-)
Karl writes:De Mille, yes, the happy utopia in the ice; hopefully they never ventured near Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness:-)
Matt Cardin writes:Glad you found my post valuable, Quentin, and thank you for the video.The world has indeed collapsing from the beginning. Sometimes it just becomes more starkly and/or insidiously evident in a given socio-spiritual-psychological circumstance. As in ours, now.
Originally posted by anonymous:De Mille, yes, the happy utopia in the ice; hopefully they never ventured near Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness:-)Many years ago, a friend of mine did his university dissertation on the works of Lovecraft. At the beginning of it was a map of Lovecraftian New England and beyond, with all the various happenings on it marked. It was quite surprisingly to see just how many cosmic events had been going on cheek-by-jowl in such a small area. Most of the inhabitants of New England apparently hadn’t noticed, so perhaps De Mille’s Utopians can also safeguard their peace.Originally posted by anonymous:Glad you found my post valuable, Quentin, and thank you for the video.The world has indeed collapsing from the beginning. Sometimes it just becomes more starkly and/or insidiously evident in a given socio-spiritual-psychological circumstance. As in ours, now.Thank you. I always find your blog posts interesting. I’m afraid I lack the energy and/or thoroughness myself for a really informative and thought-provoking blog. But at least I link to good stuff.Regarding collapses, perpetual or otherwise, I seem to be very much preoccupied with the end of civilisation. Granted that there’s little I can do about it, the task seems to be – since I can’t ignore it – somehow to achieve the right attitude towards it.It struck me reading Kafka lately that this is really what he’s writing about. How do you really know that you’re not evading things inwardly? On the one hand, many of his main characters are, by normal standards, guiltless. On the other hand, the nagging guilt just won’t go away. To transpose the problem to Cocker’s language, somehow they know they’re “not living right”. Kafka’s work is certainly ambiguous, and my own feelings about this are not uniquivocal. Maybe more later, either here on in a separate post…