Denise Levertov:

CONTRABAND

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it 
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder 
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later 
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again 
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes 
swirled in our heads and around us 
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel, 
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable-but reason 
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell 
reflecting our own faces. God lives 
on the other side of that mirror, 
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t 
quite touch ground, manages still 
to squeeze in—as filtered light, 
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard 
then lost, then heard again.

---

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. 

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”

“And he has Brain.”

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”

There was a long silence.

“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”

---

Jef Sewell, on why Ernest Becker’s ideas are more relevant than ever:

I think that … human denial has never been greater. A pattern of denial of reality itself has just grown.

Iain McGilchrist:

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation — one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life — the re-presentation is simply what one might call the limit case of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

Ernest Becket:

It’s the lie about the world that is killing the world. Everyone’s lie about how the world is that they are using as a defense against reality and the crazy games they play as they lie to defend themselves against the world.

(I’ll happily say again: if you haven’t seen the film All Illusions Must Be Broken, you should.

Life seems a funny thing when reading Winnie the Pooh makes you want to pick up James C. Scott’s latest…

Milne:

BY THE TIME it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.

Scott:

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they teem (usually) with life.… Each river, though subject to the same hydraulic laws, has its own unique personality and history. It makes abundant sense, then, to speak of the life history of a particular river, of its eco-biography. The biography of any river—the Orinoco, the Zambesi, the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Danube, the Ayeyarwady—would be every bit as distinctive as the personal biographies of the various shamans, sages, fishers, philosophers, tyrants, rebels, and saints who lived along their banks.

[…]

The term meander comes to us from an actual river in west central Turkey, the Büyük Menderes, which follows a winding course over a flat plain before entering the Aegean. The Menderes appears in Homer’s Iliad. As a verb in English, the word has come to mean aimless wandering in walking, speaking, or writing. As a technical geological and hydrological term, however, it denotes a distinct nonrandom and rather systematic pattern of movement.

Source

Wendell Berry in 1990:

It would be uncharitable and foolish of me to suggest that nothing good will ever be written on a computer. Some of my best friends have computers. I have only said that a computer cannot help you to write better, and I stand by that. But I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of thebody from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factorymade look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.

But writing is of the body in yet another way. It is preeminently a walker’s art. It can be done on foot and at large. The beauty of its traditional equipment is simplicity. And cheapness. Going off to the woods, I take a pencil and some paper (any paper—a small notebook, an old envelope, a piece of a feed sack), and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM. I am also free, for the time being at least, of everything that IBM is hooked to. My thoughts will not be coming to me from the power structure or the power grid, but from another direction and way entirely. My mind is free to go with my feet. I know that there are some people, perhaps many, to whom you cannot appeal on behalf of the body. To them, disembodiment is a goal, and they long for the realm of pure mind—or pure machine; the difference is negligible. Their departure from their bodies, obviously, is much to be desired, but the rest of us had better be warned: they are going to cause a lot of dangerous commotion on their way out.

Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography

The U.S. is not only “upside down” from the traditional forms of world map, but compressed into a narrow area near the top margin. The promotional text for this map urge the viewer to “See the World From Another Perspective.” […]

At an international conference in 2001, Hao presented a paper describing the projection eventually used to produce this world map, the “Generalized Equivalent-Difference Latitude Parallel Polyconic Projection.” […]

This map has been employed since 2004 by China’s Oceanic Administration and since 2006 as an official military map of the People’s Liberation Army, used in establishing and maintaining the nation’s strategic navigation system. This topographic version of the map was first released to the public in 2014.

A sympathetic theme threaded throughout…

Romano Guardini:

Indeed man has always known anxiety, and even if science and technology succeed in giving him the appearance of security he will continue to know anxiety. But the causes and the nature of anxiety differ with differing times.… Modern anxiety … arises from man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a “real” or a symbolic place in reality. In spite of his actual position on earth he is a being without security. The very needs of man’s senses are left unsatisfied, since he has ceased to experience a world which guarantees him a place in the total scheme of existence.

____

Most intensely modern man sought for answers within his own soul. The loss of the old, accepted vision of the world denied to man his chance of coming to terms with himself, of answering the questions posed by existence. He was shaken, insecure, exposed to the mystery of limitless realities. As occurs during all crises the depths of human nature were excited. Anguish, violence, greed, rebellion against order—more compellingly than ever these primitive drives stirred the soul of man. Both word and deed had been stripped bare by the new vision of man, shaking his deepest-held convictions. Enigmatic powers awoke out of the religious spirit; the force of the numinous impinged itself directly upon the human spirit, either from within the spirit itself or from the world at large. Not only was the numinous beneficent now but also bewildering, even destructive in its impact. Every fundamental question shook man with a new intensity: salvation and damnation, man’s just relation to God, the true ordering for human life. As time passed the tensions within man’s soul between the will to truth and the drive toward error, between good and evil, increased and weighed down his spirit. As the age moved on even the probity of human existence itself struck against the oppressed soul of man.

____

Assuredly the world as a whole no longer encompasses and shelters man as once it did; it has become a far different thing. And it has gained thereby new significances for the religious life of man. […]

The modern era was fond of justifying technology and rested its defense upon the argument that technology promoted the well-being of man. In doing so it masked the destructive effects of a ruthless system. I do not believe that the age to come will rest with such an argument. The man engaged today in the labor of “technics” knows full well that technology moves forward in final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the race. He knows in the most radical sense of the term that power is its motive—a lordship of all; that man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature. His action bespeaks immense possibilities not only for “creation” but also for destruction, especially for the destruction of humanity itself. Man as a human being is far less rooted and fixed within his own essence than is commonly accepted. And the terrible dangers grow day by day. Once the “autonomous” state has broken all bonds, it will be able to deliver the last coup de grâce to human nature itself. …

Within this area of choice an emotion partaking of the religious seems to penetrate again. This religious feeling has no link with the natural piety of Giordano Bruno or of Goethe; rather, it is bound up intrinsically with the dangers for himself and for his earth which man has found locked up with his technological power. The new religious emotion wells up from a sense of the profound loneliness which man knows in the midst of all that is now summed up by the term “the World”; man’s emotion grows out of the realization that he approaches his ultimate decision, that he must face it with responsibility, with resolution and with bravery.

____

If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding “Christian” culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said: “it will, if possible, deceive even the elect” (Matthew xxiv, 24).

Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why? …

These eschatological conditions will show themselves, it seems to me, in the religious temper of the future. With these words I proclaim no facile apocalyptic. No man has the right to say that the End is here … If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potentiality and the most extreme danger.

---

And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

---

Romano Guardini:

Those who maintain that these values and cultural attitudes are simply one with the autonomous development of human nature misunderstand the essential role of a Christian economy of Revelation, Faith and Grace. In fact the misunderstanding leads—permit me to speak plainly—to a kind of dishonesty which, as anyone who takes a clear-eyed view can see, is integral to the contemporary world itself.

… This truth becomes clear, however, and can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation … When man fails to ground his personal perfection in Divine Revelation, he still retains an awareness of the individual as a rounded, dignified and creative human being. He can have no consciousness, however, of the real person who is the absolute ground of each man, an absolute ground superior to every psychological or cultural advantage or achievement.

Robert Inchausti:

The incarnation, like the resurrection, and like the very notion of divinity itself, cannot be reduced to a precept, fact, or theory; nor is it even, strictly speaking, a doctrine. It is, rather, a revelation that must be experienced in order to be understood, a reality wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, miniaturized into a narrative that proves itself apodictically true by the realities it reveals.

______

More from Guardini:

No man truly aware of his own human nature will admit that he can discover himself in the theories of modern anthropology—be they biological, psychological, sociological or any other. Only the accidents of man—his attributes, his relations, his forms—make up these theories; they never take man simply as he is. They speak about man, but they never really see man. They approach him, but they never truly find him. They handle him, but they never grip him as he actually is. They take hold of him by statistics; they integrate him into organizations; they put him into use. Forever they play out the same grotesque and fearful comedy, but its incidents strike always upon a phantom. Even when man is subjected to forces which misuse him or mutilate or destroy him, he is not the creature at all which those forces aim to subject.

As seen by the contemporary mind man does not exist. The mind of today attempts continually to lock man into categories where he will not fit. Mechanical, biological, psychological or sociological abstractions are all variations of [the same] basic urge…

The threefold result is evident. Insofar as modern man saw the world simply as “nature,” he absorbed it into himself. Insofar as he understood himself as a “personality,” he made himself the Lord of his being, and insofar as he conceived a will for “culture,” he strove to make of existence the creation of his own hands.

… Culture arose before the vision of modern man and took its stance opposite God and His Revelation.

It is cheap and false to condemn the medieval use of authority as “slavery.” Modern man makes this judgment not merely because he enjoys the discovery of autonomous investigation but because he resents the Middle Ages. His resentment is born of the realization that his own age has made revolution a perpetual institution. But authority is needed not only by the childish but also in the life of every man, even the most mature. Integral to the full grandeur of human dignity, authority is not merely the refuge of the weak; its destruction always breeds its burlesque—force.

Again we must insist that the utterly crucial truth for medieval man was the fact of Divine Revelation. Above and beyond everything given man in this world Revelation was the absolute fulcrum. Set forth within the dogma of the Church, Revelation was accepted upon faith by the individual. From one point of view the Church bound and limited man by its authority; from another point of view the Church made it possible for man to surmount his world. She gave a vision which of itself was vast and liberating in scope. Revealed truth was conceptualized by means of a delicate logic which distinguished and then united all of reality. The theological system erected upon these foundations unfolded itself as a great synthesis. In the modern sense of the term, however, scientific explanation was almost unknown.

As usual, the poem is superior …

Romano Guardini:

One readily sees how little man today is prepared to take charge of this awful inheritance of power acquired up to the present moment, when one adds to these dangers the lulling sense of security for all with which man now accepts the current power culture. […]

Nature is rising up in that very form which subdued the wilderness—in the form of power itself. All the abysses of primeval ages yawn before man, all the wild choking growth of the long-dead forests press forward from this second wilderness, all the monsters of the desert wastes, all the horrors of darkness are once more upon man. He stands again before chaos, a chaos more dreadful than the first because most men go their own complacent ways without seeing, because scientifically-educated gentlemen everywhere deliver their speeches as always, because the machines are running on schedule and because the authorities function as usual.

Jean Follain:

FACE THE ANIMAL

It’s not always easy 
to face the animal 
even if it looks at you 
without fear or hate 
it does so fixedly 
and seems to disdain 
the subtle secret it carries 
it seems better to feel 
the obviousness of the world 
that noisily day and night 
drills and damages 
the silence of the soul.

Translated from the French by Heather McHugh