| in america volume 25 part 4 - 2012 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
September 15 I lie down in the outside bed padded in flannel and look up at those intense white points through the massive black branches of the oak - three of them, one reaching forward above me. Last night there were quite strong blasts of wind. The openness seems lively to me. Is there any other way to say it. I love lying in the lively openness of moving air, at the bottom of a black sea. Fade out but don't sleep well. Don't want to go in. Wake at 2:30, wide awake. Am still awake at 4:30. Making tea, thinking about a workshop on plants and the senses. Physics, physiology and psychology Chloroform anesthetizes plants. Any vegetable protoplasm gives electrical response. Mineral-plant-animal, respiration-digestion-motion. the skins of lizards, tortoises, and frogs as well as those of grapes, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables At death the plant threw off a huge electrical force ... 500 green peas fulminate a cook Plants became intoxicated when given shots of whiskey or gin ... swayed ... passed out. Growth in pulses with partial recoil. Smell and taste in sex behavior of plants. The soul receives sensations in a manner analogous to that of a spider alerted to outside influences by its web. By altering the flow resistance of fluids electricity could change their growth. Wild paeony root for belly pain. "In the steam off these leaves all pain and sorrow melted away" - white sage. Thrasher announces rain. Rattlesnake oil for rheumatism. Saturday - satisfaction of washed floor in two rooms - clean sheets - smell of apples and washed mat in the kitchen. I'm up to DR5-3, catching a few mistakes, adding a few links. When I'm done all of DR once through I want to write the intros. What we were reading, what I understood of what they were trying for, what I was reading, what I was trying for that was maybe different. What Vancouver was like. What feminism was like. How all of it fit together, the culture shock, sense of the arc past DR through to the end of Edged out, mainly what it was for, what I wanted, and what happened. There's a lot too much froth but is there a different kind of grasp at moments. It's a welter of broken bits - I noticed the photo of the small mirror squares - that was right. It's oscillation between kinds of presence - more than two - two former ones, pleasurable appreciation, romantic anxiety, poetic attraction notes, science notes, and the new one - stoned and unstoned self-consciousness. What was admirable about the effort, in what way was it going for broke.
an observation of Goethe's that the flowers of oriental poppies could be seen flashing at dusk The soil of the earth continually emits electrically charged particles into the air. On a clear day in good weather the earth has a negative electrical charge while the atmosphere is positive. Electrons stream skyward from the soil and plants. During storms the earth becomes positive and the base of the cloud layer negative. Voltage or electrical pressure increases at high altitudes. Annual growth fully correlated with periods of high aurora and sunspot activity, the effects being most pronounced as one traveled north. suggested that the basis of life was not matter but immaterial vibrations associated with it. - But matter is also immaterial vibrations so what is this distinction - what do they want it for - organizing field medium by which 'mind' can influence "matter with which it is associated". Theory that cells are oscillating circuits - capacitator stored charge plus a coil - flow back and forth in the coil creates an oscillating magnetic field - nuclei. Disease a matter of losing correct vibe. Enhance the normal oscillation. Georges Lakhovsky - "the ether was a synthesis of all wavelengths" - multi-wave oscillator - Paris 1020. Sensitive to ultraviolet, TV and x-rays. Waves at the ultraviolet end thought to communicate. Dangerous for healthy cells to be exposed to wavelengths of dying. Fine sheaths of some kind of energy. Photographed in high-frequency electrical fields. Whatever it is instantly reacts to changes on the surface of the sun though particles take 2 days. - Mosquitoes here are different from the mosquitoes I knew. They are silent and their bite stings like fire but doesn't itch long. Sunday. I don't know what to do with myself. 17 Then a flabby vacant day, helplessly craving love or pleasure. It's cold this morning. Dark when I wake at 5:30. Woke thinking of the community garden, that whole time, the strong burst, forward strength, and then how all of it was gobbled up by Tom. And then that it was karmic rebalance for the way I got velocity by gobbling up Michael.
18 I've been grabbed by the story of Romney being outed by a video captured in secret, sneering that the 47% who don't pay federal taxes all vote for Obama because they think of themselves as victims and want to be dependent, and the Democrats cynically create dependency because that is their voting base. He says he can't make them care about their lives. There's nothing ambiguous: that's what he says. Why am I so grabbed. Last night I was awake until two reading all 1000 comments posted under the NYT story. This afternoon three hours reading the 800 and some comments under David Brooks' column. It's not just the story, it's the buzz. Tom said it's seeing someone unmasked, and I suppose seeing others seeing him unmasked. This election is so clearly a choice between fundamentally different ways of being a person that I'm in high tension about it. Is the world going to go backward? Will intelligence win, or will dissociation? Will people prefer to be represented by someone like them, or by someone better than them? Will their desire not to feel their insufficiency be stronger than their desire to feel their possibility? Is the election really about intelligence and embodiment? Which means patriarchy and trauma. - The quiet sound of running water is bringing birds. Sleek brown one with black-striped bib and russet under the tail. [California towhee] Brown with a smooth black head, white belly, bit of pale red cape. [male Oregon junco] Small grey with black head and white around the eyes. [mountain chickadee] Small grey with a crest. [oak titmouse] Aggressive with black and white back, large russet eye, sleek russet sides. [spotted towhee] - There a gang of young turkeys hurried nervously past - pale blue heads with red spots. When they stand mouth open listening they can have quite a gormless look. Haven't said that yesterday I arranged the pots on a corner of the steps, right at last, and put the bench next to them. It's pretty. Swept up the leaves. Cleaned out the fountain. The woodpeckers play overhead all day. At night when I put my head out the treeroom window I see bats swerving past through the patch of light outside the livingroom. Always two, maybe more. They beat through the light in one direction and then come back the other way. I never see them turn, they do that in the dark. September 19 There are names for every part of the bird. Having seen them labeled helps me see the whole subtle fit of their costume and for instance that because throat stripes are darker this California towhee is not the one that was splashing yesterday. House of spiders, terrace of birds. This bed makes a lot of difference. Quiet ticking of water. The complex grey sound of sudden flight. Grey because it's feathers beating air. They have the cover of the toyon above their little spring. Slim little mountain chickadee jumping down from a branch. I dreamed Louie knocked urgently and said Paul had come. I found him in bed in the guestroom. There was brocade wallpaper with yellow roses next to his head. I saw the pattern clearly in detail. It's clearly the woodpeckers' desmesne, so well laid out for their pleasure. This oak, the oaks across the road, the locusts. They are back and forth, with a stop balancing on the wire to survey in the clear. Oh hawk circling and swooping are you why the woodpecker is yelling. I'm sweet on the oak titmouse because of her little crest and the subtle evenness of her grey. The woodpeckers are so fast and flashy with their white and black opening and closing. I was up till 3 and slept till almost 9, and loud knocking woke me, that seemed to be in the room. Three of them close together in the crotch of a split of a branch squawking. Another station of the woodpecker, its highest, the leader of the tallest windbreak cedar. What does their red cap remind me of - the cap-shaped velvet of a thimbleberry. They are great fussers. Their squawk is a grating sound, I mean the sound of something run over a grater, like the doorbell grater of 824. And then a loud single note. Tiny lizard running up the handle of the shovel. This oak is younger than the one at the southwest corner of the house, tall and rangy. It branches quite high up. When the wind comes up the clustered seed pod husks on the locusts clack together dryly. Talking to L last night he crying because I said he was a catch. The towhee seems possessive of the water. Something about the movement of air, just that. It somehow thrills me, at night when I'm lying here, and now in dry daylight too. There's the hawk yelling. The water has brought what has turned out to be a California sister. -
- Rabbit on the rock rim same color as the stones taking a long drink. I so dislike the squirrels though their tails are pretty. I don't like the way they move. They are craven little hustlers. Finally a western scrub jay come to drink. September 20 I learned yesterday: That I arrived in a mast year and this isn't going to be one. That acorn woodpeckers are communal breeders, live in groups of maybe 3 females and 7 males, with other years' juveniles. A female's eggs will be fathered by different males and all the females lay in the same nest. They have to tend their granaries, move acorns around. That the California sister likes to cruise oak tops and comes down to sip at mud mid-morning. That plants can transmute elements by summing protons in the nucleus - what would that means in terms of pattern? - by means of enzymes. That caterpillar stages are called instars and the CA sister has 5 of them, each differently colored. L. form, likeness. Any stage during metamorphosis between successive molts.
Dowsers react with varying degrees of sensitivity to polarized electromagnetic radiation, artificial alternating magnetic fields in a frequency range from one to one million cycles per second, and to DC magnetic fields. Magnetic field gradients, field dowsing Map dowsing - "Some overall force exists in the universe which is itself intelligent and provides answers" - they want to say it that way out of habit? Some dowsers say that the prime sensor in the human body may be located in the area of the solar plexus. Fruit, vegetables, nuts and fresh fish. Microbes only affect bodies whose radiance has been reduced to lower than theirs.
- Two of what may have been Mexican jays? Long blue birds, almost pure blue, lit at the driveway tap but didn't drink. There's a new one - black head, white throat, white breast, long bill. [white-breasted nuthatch] Dreamed long stalks of rhubarb standing out of snow. Sister midmorning as described - then two. I've hung a feeding platform. Titmouse was the first to find it. nervous. First tries it didn't peck. Then did. Chickadee next but titmouse always has precedence. Nuthatch once briefly. California towhees stay around. A couple of them now foraging on the ground. I can now tell male and female woodpeckers apart. Hummingbird, probably Anna's. Was that a dove at the tap - rosy breast. Didn't seem big enough. The woodpeckers seem to squabble when there are several in a tree even though they are spread out - five above me at the moment. A lot of mourning doves on the wires above the road but they don't seem to come up here.
Black stripes on head, grey breast, striped brown wings. [white crowned sparrow] A yellow butterfly goes back and forth above the road, too fast to see with binocs. There 15 turkeys, 13 of which must be young. They look like scrawny adults now. I look around on this sort of afternoon and say there'll be a day when I'm not here anymore and am remembering it. - flood the body with beautiful vibrations Bach held the plant petal on his palm or tongue and could feel its effects. Put the plant in water and left them standing in the sun. potencies Each plant or person modifies with its own wavelengths the energies radiated through. Everything radiates wavelengths, which can be identified as sound, color, form, movement, perfume, temperature and intelligence. The water can actually be seen to change. Potency transferred to water - Alick McInnes - Homeopathic dilution "frees the spirit from the clutches of the body"! What can that mean - Something about pattern - patterns particular to individuals and transmittable - tunings at distance - photo somehow also takes it and can bridge - 'radionics' You could send the pattern to a field instead of the substance because the substance IS a pattern. - But it was actually telepathic rather than mechanical. If he traces a line with pencil on paper, thinking strongly that his mark will represent a certain metal, his pendulum will react to the drawn line as if it were the metal. Feel in her own body where the patient had trouble. Relation with geomagnetic field from germination's orientation. Pattern around a tree, with nodes detectable with dowsing. Around a large oak 20'. Energy coming out of a large oak can temporarily increase the strength of a human aura. Hugging a large oak for two minutes. The basic idea is that each individual, organism, or material radiates and absorbs energy via a unique wave field which exhibits certain geometrical, frequency and radiation-type characteristics. The more complex the material, the more complex the wave form. Radiating from a pattern in the body a love energy that can be reradiated from another body. Edred Jon Henry Corner 1906-1996, John Corner tropical botany, charming, irascible, married twice. September 21
Mysterious anguish waiting for this visit. Something I'm afraid of. It feels like fear of constricted energy, which I name as fear of having to be insincere. I don't know how to handle it so it's not that. It's like a fear of death in a way. Fear of tight heart - is it hers? And also I'm supposing she wants what I could give her in letters, which I can't give when I'm in the presence of her polite manner and mousey look. It's going to be hard. It's a quandary of complete strangeness at the same time as established admiration and mentorship - it's as if I can only pretend to know the social person. 24 Am left with a very icky feeling. Icky and indignant, hateful even. Fat white grub. Small prim featues on a swollen blimp face. Sloppy shapeless grey or brown clothes. Life completely boxed in with mortgage payments, child support payments, student loan payments, prescription co-pays. Never an interesting word, never a flash of whole energy. Continuous thanking and apologizing in a mousey little voice. No sort of verve of response to the desert or to the view here or the beautiful room I made her, even.
I just blabbed away staying in myself because I didn't want to hear about Bob and Allie and her Republican boss. She doesn't talk - it's just that grey flat American personal information junk without energy or wit. I'm shaking my pelt trying to get it off me. Thinking of bad Susan with longing because she would have stirred the air and forced me to admiration. I did not have one instant of admiration, and all the while feeling like a bad person because I didn't.
I've had that in my head I suppose as a wish. [Welch and Rawlings]
25
It's been Tuesday, have 2 packets done, 4 not in. Greg wrote about the last Europe vol so we're now at the beginning of the time we first knew each other. I began RF6-1 and then kept going all day, was in Kingston with Greg, Olivia and Don as if the place and time were still there. Came back when I'd got to the end and it was dark. Stood at the mudroom door looking out into the black - oak trunks, bushes, dim, stone steps - and felt the unreality of this here now. Is that what I mean. I'd been with Greg all day, I'd been what I was then, ardent, twenty two years old, in loving company and class expansion, headlong adventure. I love the hitchhiking stories. 26 But last night after RF6-3, letters to Mary protesting her protests about sex, and then RF6-4 the terrible summer visit, I was in distress again, dim distress, feeling how I'd carried on in dim pain over the great loss of my mother's blessing. I'd lived from the age of 2 without touch and now she was wanting to keep it away from me still unless I somehow consented to the catastrophe she had consented to. From that young woman's point of view it's hideous of my mother, blind, blank and in a way hateful. I was claiming my sexual well-being, which was a larger well-being because it ended other kinds of desperation - eating binges, random lonely efforts with men, diffidence, clumsiness, kinds of manic falsity - and she in whatever unconscious rivalry it was - was it that? - wanted to deny me it. Refused to go on admiring me, showed that she didn't care about me really. And my dad, was he so nuts that visit because he was lusting for me? Was that why he shot the puppy? My patched bluejeans signified my nonvirginity? All of it subliminal? His worry about the neighbours what they might guess about him? Did she have a sense of that? Did I have a sexual shine? So my family shut me out for being sexual and I didn't exactly understand what had happened. I had crossed the line and I kept going, but I had lost something, had I, that I didn't know was gone.
27 There is a kind of compact black spider that shoots across the floor. It seems malevolent. I kill it when I see it but wondering whether its kind will take revenge. EB was in the shower shrinking with fear because above the tile and on the ceiling where I didn't see them are ten medium-to-large spiders, though the almost immobile kind. It's a house of spiders. Some very little ones and a lot of those long-legged ones. I haven't minded them but my mysterious bites have made me wonder whether they creep up my sleeves when I'm asleep. The bites are very itchy and they last for a week. The one with the black spot at its center scared me. Was it a hobo spider's bite starting into necrosis? A tick buried under the skin? When I woke this morning I wanted to say something about the heat in Borrego. I stood against the wall of Kendall's after breakfast waiting for Em feeling the thickness of the air, a weight of light, an actual pressure. September eleven o'clock. Meantime birds at the little rock bowl all day long and sometimes at the feeder I've stabilized with a stone. Towhees always, standing on the overspill rock on their little twig legs, dipping their heads, tilting up the rusty spot under their tails. Couple of new ones - house finch at the feeder; stripy one with a spot of pink on his back, yellowish; slender grey stripy one with a yellow cast and pale breast, might have been a king bird. In my dream I was driving a bus. It was held up for some reason and someone said I should move it? And I just got up onto the seat and put my feet on the pedals and drove it. Slowly. 28
Beyond that I'm not well. Very bad black arms woke me and kept me awake and the pain didn't go away until I drank some willow bark tincture. It's back now halfway through the afternoon, burning skin on my face, especially lips, and eye surfaces, and arms. I'm thinking maybe it's the laptop. Hours on packets and I'm only half done. Notes from Peter Dyck and Jam, Jam pathologically cryptic in her way, which feels as though her willed stylishness is more important to her than meeting me in language that knows me. That seems miserly of her but she did say two generous things. I sent Peter the Here site and he thanked me for once more sharing my poetic aura, which made me feel he hasn't had good talk. Two of his brothers have died in the past 6 months, one of them Fred. What it is to have known people when they were vital. We've banked our young selves in their memory. Who we chose unwittingly to do that. It's as if there's a stretch of time in which people are their best, or real, and only in that stretch of time are they worth knowing. My students find me worth knowing only insofar as I am serving them, for instance, but any of my friends was intrinsically worth knowing when they were, what, 25-45? I was still worth knowing to early 50s? Olivia was done by 35? September 29 It was the universe of power. It was the network, field, and lines of the energies of all beings, stars and galaxies of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust. The lace and foam of vibration that is being itself, all interconnected, every part part of another part and the whole part of each part, and so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed. The lines that jump me unexpected into sharp tears, This is an old soul and a young one, stretching each other too hard. He stayed in Sinshan and our people sang the Wedding Song for us on the second night of the World that year. Foam, and the scintillation of mica in rock, the flicker and sparkle of waves and dust, the working of the great broadcloth looms, and all dancing, have reflected the hawk's vision for a moment to my mind; and indeed everything would do so, if my mind were clear and strong enough. Vision is transgression! The vision is to be shared, the transgression cannot be. The house stands. You can live in a corner of it, or all of it, or go outside it, as you choose. I was in my vision. It was not in me. Such visions are not for us, or about us, any more than the world is. We are part of them. My heart ached the whole time and I kept saying silently, inside myself, goodbye, goodbye! Once I spoke of it, saying, "Your daughter". Milk looked at me with that whipping look in her one good eye. She said, "Not my daughter. Yours". So I keep that house now with the daughter I never bore, the child of my first love, and with others of my family. In the ceremonies of the Sun at the solstice of winter the most arcane, intense and dangerous of dances attractive to people of introverted or mystical temperament. 21 days before the solstice, the Twenty-Once Days. gift trees decorated with oakgalls and nutshells ... feathers bringing the Left Hand and the Right Hand closer together The dead and the unborn ... the images of dream and vision, all wild creatures, the waves of the sea, the sun, and all the other stars, were to be part of that dancing. So the earthly, mortal, human dancers invited that part of their own being which was before and would be after their earthly life; their soul, or their souls. Not the spirit, the essence of individuality, or not only the spirit, for individuality is mortality; but also the breath soul, that which is shared with, takes form, gives back to the wholeness of being; and the self that is beyond the self. practices and exercises of the Inner Sun involved breathing, quests into the wilderness in winter silence Fasting, trance, long singing of matrix syllables. No light should be relighted that night. The longest night of the year was the darkest. A pit into which on the eve of the turn some little thing was dropped. "They are put there to be forgotten. They are sacrificed." The Winter Carol sung by adolescent girls from a roof or tower at dawn. Four days of feasting in the presence of Sky people. seeing the world as they see it, with the sun's eyes, that see only light Along in November when the hills begin to turn green the Red Adobe dances the Grass. At the autumnal equinox the Yellow Adobe dances Getting Drunk. I'm a member of the Serpentine it seems - the house of wild plants and of the book art, N-S-E-W and green, stones. Again of the Serpentine. This morning Long Snout the coyote loped across the lower yard east to west toward the pines, hesitating at the compost ground. Then came another, larger, in the long grass beyond the fence moving by a parallel track. When both were gone another, younger, running where the first had been. During the night a mosquito bit the inside of my left forearm and I felt/saw the sensation spread, fiery, complex, with sharper lines inside it. They had no god; they had no gods; they had no faith. What they appear to have had is a working metaphor. A slender pale brown bird with finely striped head and brown streaked white breast. Very small grey bird with yellow cast. [lesser goldfinch] Very small all grey, half a dozen, flighty. Quiet stretches when the woodpeckers are somewhere else. September 30 It's near full moon. I went to bed too early and woke at 2. Went out to sit in the chair. Pulled it forward out of the oak's shadow. Great pale sky with a few bright points, Orion lying on its left side in the east. Crickets banked along the western windbreak edge. The stand of three younger pines a harp sounding continuously. Behind me the warm wide house gently alit. Is it bad of me to say I haven't been worth knowing since my early 50s. Do I mean it hasn't been worth being me since then. This time of life is and will be so much about registering failure. And yet there is the lamp and here is this floating music. The metal lamp base lit downward under its brown-paper shade, Space hotel's soft drum beats in which I can hear a palm. Its ripples and long-standing dissolving drones. It's been worth knowing what I know, would be for anyone, there's that. I've made that of myself but I don't have much presence. My young self would be disappointed. There I look up and see the lines made by my little notebooks' elastic and its shadow. It goes like this: [sketch]. It means that when I was young my conscious self departed from its unconscious companion and then the unconscious self crossed into consciousness and now lies parallel and a bit forward. I like the way the two lines begin together and then disappear together into a little hole in the cover. - I'm working on the outside bed - something caught my eye - a long, thin, ragged, eccentric-looking individual in grey clothes - hello! - it's half a moment before I remember his name - there's a long tail he keeps lifting and setting down alertly, as if it's a sensing apparatus, and a ragged crest fallen to one side. Road runner. Tom and I were here on the bed in fading light when a rabbit came hesitating down the steps. Crossed to the fountain. Jumped onto the rim. Bent stone-colored in the notch between stones and drank. We watched in silence. We felt moved to be giving hospitality. The air is active today. Hot wind from the east knocking acorn caps and failed acorns onto my legs. Obsequious little nuthatch so clean-looking in its blue-ish white and black. Towhees head-on look quite fierce. There's that tiny yellow-washed thing, cream rump, white bars on its wings, big eyes. Lesser goldfinch, yes. Little thing all grey tail up bit pink. 1st October Bite with a raw red center in my belly button! Cold sore. Was the aching day on Friday because of it, and did it come on because EB drained me? My disgust drained me? My skin is very irritable - little itches and prickles. - Walter Kaufmann 1965 Hegel: a reinterpretation Anchor Doubleday his whole conception of philosophy and his own mission 1770 Romanticism the work of young men his own age. Tried to integrate Kant and Romanticism. Hölderlin was his best friend. His hero was Rousseau. special pleasure in the Book of Job on account of its unruly natural language its ills patently influenced by Latin inclined toward Greek much more than toward Latin Antigone represented the beauty and profundity of the Greek spirit most perfectly. Kant was triumph of reason and duty over inclination. harmonious ethical personality Goethe bringing the Greeks to life. Iphigenia love and humanity. What is truly divine and has the power to purify is not a statue or anything supernatural but a harmonious ethical personality whose pride does not preclude humility and whose outstanding courage and honesty are employed in the service of love. H says "Iphigenia trusts the truth in herself, in the human heart." - Sister as feeling self. Could I translate Geist as the immaterial material base? - You write that one evening you were sitting in my chair reading Descartes, and I asked you if you would like to stay for the night, and you decided you would. This would have been my absolute peak fantasy in the preceding years: to find a smart girl who read philosophy and who wanted to spend the night. [Greg] A commotion of turkeys on the terrace, some drinking, some digging energetically in deep leaves. I could creep up to the window and stare at their extraordinary tarnished bronze attire - layered, shingled, folded, banded, spotted, iridescent, more elegantly detailed and fitted than any human-made thing can be. [I had written Peter Dyck a letter]
He said:
- And some other things that were very general. We both took it back to high school though we knew each other later, because that was when it mattered. His reply said he had a tear, and I'd had one as I scribbled the last two lines. It had come to me to tell him how I remember him and there it all was as if woven into my floor - I mean part of my core, which is the self I was then, sweet and eager. I was naïve and not well educated when I came to La Glace. I wasn't even much older than some of my students, hence terrified of showing my lack of knowledge. When I was 14 I didn't know that he was young, that he was one young creature looking at another, and that I was company to him too, in his own lonely oddity. There's no way I can show him as I saw him, an electric redhead, a body, though we never really saw the bodies of men in suits and ties - he wore a cream-colored sports jacket that smelled of cigarettes and some kind of baggy grey slacks - but he moved with energy, he was real in the classroom, he felt and cared, and he liked me. He was sarcastic, touchy sometimes, funny - I can see, can almost see, his amusement, the way it widened his upper lip so his tongue showed a bit voluptuously. Spiders - Dr Merrick - Keith Merrick at the Julian clinic - said there are very small spiders whose bites look like my last bad two. A woman in the waiting room said spiders come inside this time of year. Old Barbara when I met her at the gate showed me a wide rash on her back like the one on my arm but worse. 3 How did a little spider get into my belly button? The ants of later summer are much smaller - tiny - and there are fewer of them though they swarm the flowerpots from their little caravans. individuality in which reason has organized a form for itself out of the materials of a particular age - A philosophy as a personality. When we consider more closely the particular form that a philosophy bears, we see how it springs on the one hand from the living originality of the spirit who in it has restored through himself the rent harmony and given form to it through his own deed; on the other hand, from the particular form of the bifurcation from which the system issues. Bifurcation is the source of the need for philosophy. Totality is possible in the highest liveliness only through restoration out of the highest separation. - Bifurcation a good word for dissociation. 1. the absolute itself; this is the goal that is sought. It is already there; how else could it be sought? 2. the emergence of consciousness out of totality [in bifurcated forms] He had always maintained a keen interest in the sciences. the reality of the outside world as well as its ideality polemical spirit of uninhibited sharpness who employed with mastery the whole scale of literary weapons from rough Swabian rudeness to cutting scorn and cold contempt No great modern philosopher before Hegel had ever shown any comparable knowledge of his predecessors. There are, strictly speaking, no branches; philosophy is a totality nourished as much by man's thinking about ethics and his study of art and literature as it is by reading epistemology and metaphysics. - The underlining in this book is from 1967? illusion in scientific materialism that it uses the metaphysical categories of matter, force [etc] and all the while it does not know what it thus contains. - Puzzled what's meant by reason, infinite, eternal. Hegel, like Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Leibnitz, insists that precisely the divine and eternal is the proper subject of philosophical inquiry. fatal strain between his gifts and his intentions Greece ... the fusion there accomplished of art and religion with the ethical life of citizens. In the Phenomenology, which Hegel himself compares to a ladder, art and religion, which are treated together, and philosophy, which is treated next and last, occupy the top rungs. the ethical life and the state matrix in which art, religion, and philosophy develop Phenomenology 1807 when he was 37. "It is, I say, the presentation of the universe as a beautiful living cosmos." [Somebody else of the P] Logic and metaphysics, philosophy of nature, philosophy of the spirit. He wrote a book that invites comparison with Dante's Divine comedy and Goethe's Faust. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Ask in every instance what kind of spirit would entertain such propositions and have such a consciousness. Suffer through each position and be changed. a cosmos of the totality of his cultural experience ... allusiveness ... the mutual affinity and enjoyment of those members of the invisible church. - I wdn't be interested at all in allusions, but in his visuality. like Plato - and to a lesser extent, Spinoza Assumes an organic necessity [in the development of styles] Often thinks in pictures. Anschauung. in effect referring to the book as a realm of spirits The goal of spirit knowing itself as spirit, has for its way the recollection of spirits. usually by carrying over into their technical use something of their sensuous core Greek root [of phenomenon] also means to shine, become visible. Does not have its later sense of contrast between descriptions of experience and explanation. wild, bold, unprecedented book a vision of the world which emphasizes development through conflict.
- Seven years before Kaufmann was born. The secret comes to light that very common thoughts conceal themselves behind such expressions. The book created no stir whatever. Two years a newspaper editor, 8 as headmaster. Married after 40. Philosophy requires no particular terminology at all. appeal to the intuition that is <embedded> in the language needed is a comprehensive review and analysis of our categories ... the point is to comprehend the concepts ... we shall see that they are all one-sided abstractions from a concreteness of which they are merely partial aspects. The realm of shadows, the world of the simple essences The sojourn and the work in this realm of shadows is the education and discipline of consciousness. Here it pursues tasks remote from sensuous intuitions and aims the exclusions of the accidental nature of argumentative thinking and the arbitrary business of allowing these or rather the opposite reasons to occur to one and prevail. - But what he makes of this - I'd take it as psychological but he as metaphysical, it seems - "account of God, as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and any finite spirit." It's from Kant - If these categories have applications only to the objects of experience then we have no grounds whatsoever for assuming anything beyond experience. But in that case we also have no grounds for considering the categories merely subjective. So far from merely telling us something about the structure of the human mind, they are part of the structure of all knowledge and of discourse on any subject whatsoever - Therefore, the system of science should begin with the Logic. central purpose is to demonstrate the inadequacy, the one-sidedness, the abstractness of our categories. I finally remark that this science, like grammar, appears in two different perspectives or values. It is one thing for those who first approach it and the sciences, and quite another for those who return to it from them. Whoever, on the other hand, masters a language, and at the same time knows other languages with which to compare it, will find that the spirit and culture of a people reveal themselves to him in the grammar of its language. Through the grammar he can recognize the expression of the spirit, the logic. It is only out of the deeper knowledge of the other sciences that logic rises for the subjective spirit as something that is not merely general in an abstract way but as the general which includes the riches of the particular ... between the ages of 35 and 45 when he was lonely and far from successful. "He read the Edda and Nibelungen, and to be able to enjoy them he translated them, as he was reading, into Greek." [K quoting somebody else] an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise Consecutively numbered paragraphs. Nobody speaks of him, for he is quiet and industrious. quiet but profound minds who absorbed the new philosophy with lasting seriousness and then proceeded from it gradually to cultivate particular fields of scholarship. 4 Reading Kaufmann on Hegel absorbed. Some vague idea of a Hegel movie. Continuation of a long-ago thought to come back to Hegel. Recognition of Wittgenstein threads. Company of what feels like a kindred being. Liking for Kaufmann's clarity. Exercise of feeling same from different. Pleasure in his sometimes elegant simplicity. Recognition of thoughts about what it's like to think in philosophy - I mean the sorts of subtle insights that well up in the midst. Interest in his life story alongside mine. Sweet sense of contact with someone who worked 200 years ago. Reanimating him. Reverence for his multifarious labour and formation. - All day long a quiet tapping - sometimes very quiet - as if of elvish repairs. Many tones. History as the story of the development of human freedom. history as this slaughter bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed. The organic individual produces himself: it makes of itself what it is implicitly; thus the spirit, too, is only that which it makes of itself, and it makes of itself what it is implicitly. "For the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art." - Is Sartre. - Later life he talked about G - a "justification of G". This ethical whole ... all great men have formed themselves in solitude, but only by working for themselves upon what the state has already created. What was he to call the force whose manifestations he wished to trace mainly in the ethical sphere, in history, in art, in religion, and in philosophy, but of which it would also make sense to speak when discussing nature? Connected H's thought not only with the Christian tradition but also with the decidedly un-Christian, humanistic poetry of Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin ... retained the meaning of the etymologically related gist ... breath and wind, is essentially a moving force also related to yeast and geyser only interested in what they have done right. the locked essence of the universe has no strength to resist the courage to know gallery of noble spirits philosophy is system in the process of development. Dewey began as a Hegelian! Beginning about 14 years before his death, Hegel dared no more. 1831, fall of, cholera. - Debate last night, guest in a living room beyond the golf course, alarm from the first moment because Romney is speaking into the camera and he has begun with two stories of poor folk asking him for help. Enumerates a five-point plan. Sounds plausible. Then Obama sounding tight, not looking into the camera, not talking about individuals. Whenever Obama is speaking Romney is looking at him with a sick little grin - completely fixed and actually pained-seeming because his eyes look hurt, but Obama when he is listening is as bad or worse because he is usually looking down, which makes him seem chastened or beaten. He has a small head and so looks young next to Romney, who is as tall as he and a bit broader.
- Flocks of tiny grey birds, paler chest. [bushtits - adult interior] 5 5:30 in the dark - not a crack of dawn yet - Yo Yo Ma playing Bach. House at the top of the hill. [sketch of a house plan] Odd photo from this morning. Early light was white on the oak trunk. I went in for the camera. So here is the oak trunk with white light on grey heavily cracked bark, black shadow behind, a curved edge, but the black also is a screen showing through to bright blue. The odd thing is my little shadow standing in the corner as if on a separate layer, with a branchy oval shadow floating above my head - happening to be there - I didn't see it, but it's like a branching cloud of thought or blessing - it belongs with the triangularity of the robe - was wearing the black dress because it was cold. So the little foreground figure stands outside the frame taking the picture, and has spread above her an ambiguous form that seems part of her outside space and also a shadow thrown by the oak. - And then high above both figure and halo, just at the top of the frame there are fresh oak leaves in close foreground, part of the tree though we don't see the branch that bears them. There is even a green acorn. On the ground next to the little figure a dead stick that is in a completely different scale. The cloud-thought-halo-shadow too is in exact position to diagram the roots of the pine tree above it. altogether it seems mysteriously to signify more than I know,. The whiteness of the trunk struck side-on. Then later but still early I took my green stick and walked up the hill, past the cabin, past the old man's camper, past the grand house, and cautiously further along the track as it rounded onto a bare yellow hillside and there curved up steeply to a small white house faced with many windows. The track didn't look as if it had been recently used so I laboured up and found someone's pretty summer house. Looked in the windows. Then later Angelo looking dishy in his coverall talking beside his garbage trailor. Standards for photos - coherent complexity. I looked at photoblog winners and found them vapid. 6 On the higher road: Mountain mahogany with its sickle-shaped feather seeds Whipple yucca Towhees good in chaparral because they are ground foragers. In the chaparral community, the primary flowering and growing season occurs between March and May, and this season may be likened to summer elsewhere. June and July can be considered as autumn in the chaparral. The hot dry months of August, September and October when no new growth occurs is essentially like winter elsewhere. Spring really commences with the first rains of November or early December and continues until the end of the rainy season in early April. Savannah inhabited by some birds of both adjacent grasslands and the oak woodlands. Primary oak woodland species titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, western bluebirds, mountain chickadees, bushtits, acorn woodpeckers, common ravens, scrub jays. Turkey vultures, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, use the big oaks for roosting, nesting and scanning. field marks Elna Bakker 1971 An island called California University of California Press
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