Alma/Humanities Apophenia
Alma often reads meaning in to things that don't actually relate as a common mistake in her practice. She often carries books with her in her duffel bag or pockets. the books have bookmarks, paper inserts with notes, and underlining with annotations. (This makes her player cringe). She has confirmation bias when she finds snippets and meaning in things that fit with what she imagines to be better than the doctrine of her tradition.
but I'm sure sometimes she accidentally stumbles on a real truth, but who knows, really? I mean, really?
The below author encounters are in reverse chronological order.
Contents
William Blake
After the lack of success at a bookstore to find a book by William Blake, she googles him and finds a web page about his life and work and it has this excerpt.
Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of 18th-century neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Works such as “The French Revolution” (1791), “America, a Prophecy” (1793), “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793), and “Europe, a Prophecy” (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to 18th-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he satirized oppressive authority in church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest.[1]
Then she looked for that quote, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. to see which poem it comes from and found it online[2]. holy amazetrippinballs does that look really complicated what is this I don't even[3] okay books of the dead here we go again
From intro, Blake writes,
"Again he [God] speaks in thunder and in fire!
Thunder of Thought, & flames of fierce desire:
Even from the depths of Hell his voice I hear,
Within the unfathomd caverns of my Ear.
Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall be:
Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth shall live in harmony"
"Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race! Nations are Destroy'd, or Flourish,
in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music, are Destroy'd or Flourish!
The Primeval State of Man, was Wisdom, Art, and Science"
Chapter 1
Of the Sleep of Urlo! and the passage through
Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life.
This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev'ry morn
Awakes me at sun-rise, then I see the Saviour over me
Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song.
Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
Fibres of love from man to man thro Albians pleasant land.
In all the dark Atlantic vale down from the hills of Surrey
A black water accumulates, return Albion! return!
They brethen call thee, and thy fathers, and thy sons,
They nurses and they mothers, thy sisters and thy daughters
Weep at thy souls disease, and the Divine Vision is darkened:
They Emanation that was wont to play before they face,
Beaming forth with her daughters into the Divine bosom (Where!!)
Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem
From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and a friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!
Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!
...the next parts talk about a perturbed Man who tries to build his own Laws of Moral Virtue! speaking in jealous fears, hiding his Emanation.
Luis Alberto Urrea
Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
She's currently in the first few chapters of this book and has paused because there was a quote by William Blake in it. Whereupon she went to a book store and searched for the book the quote is from. She didn't find any books by William Blake in that store, but saw a book of poetry called The Tijuana Book of the Dead.
William Stafford
Vocation
William Stafford
This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.
I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
But then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid; she always blamed the place,
the time, anything my father planned.
Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless both of them part of me:
"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."
This guy might be a wanker about women. whatev, dude. or parents. or kids. something. but drop his whatever baggage, and he has some interesting things he's working through. I don't think he was his true self when he wrote this.
Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Robinson Jeffers
In pencil under his name: called an occidental? pantheist.
Flight of Swans
Robinson Jeffers
One who sees giant Orion, the torches of winter midnight,
Enormously walking above the ocean in the west of heaven;
And watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight
Waver like a spent rocket, wavering towards new discoveries,
Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;
And watches the long coast mountain vibrate from bronze to green,
Bronze to green, year after year, and all the streams
Dry and flooded, dry and flooded, in the racing seasons;
And knows that exactly this and not another is the world,
The ideal is phantoms for bait, the spirit is a flicker on a grave;--
May serve, with a certain detachment, the fugitive human race,
Or his own people, or his own household; but hardly himself;
And will not wind himself into hopes nor sicken with despairs.
He has found the peace and adored the God; he handles in autumn
The germs of far-future spring.
Sad sons of the stormy fall,
No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you
To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside,
Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds,
Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain,
But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.
- interspersed throughout this page are underlines and arrows to notes and comments, for examples
- Swans, like what you really see in nature not what stories say
- which age? time parabola! not just circles. all the cycles and shapes and paths? WHY CIRCLES
- inflict and endure - does this mean no escape and no choice for death. is it just?
- diamond sutra?
- no escape from jhor? NO maybe we are saved with nature and swans and the living world
There are more notes but the player doesn't want to go on and on here. Imagine a kid who missed a well rounded humanities education cramming for a very final exam and not applying a sophisticated well-informed sensibility to things due to a lack of grounding.
Rilke
Imagine a kid who reads the bible over and over and finds meaning retroactively, over and over throughout the years. layering meanings based on life experience. Take that flavor and then translate it to an adult who got gobsmacked by woo. Random shit is her bible. She comes back and forth to a poem over and over. adding notes when something happens that seems to apply. Sometimes she knows it's a mistake but can't help it.
Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke from _Sonnets to Orpheus_ translated by M. D. Herter Norton
12
Will transformation. O be enraptured with flame,
wherein a thing eludes you that is boastful with changes;
that projecting spirit, which masters the earthly,
loves in the swing of the figure nothing so much as the point of inflection.
What shuts itself into remaining already IS starkness;
does it think itself safe in the shelter of inconspicuous gray?
Beware, from afar a hardest comes warning the hard.
Woe--,an absent hammer lifts!
Who pours himself forth as a spring, him Cognizance knows;
and she leads him enchanted through the realm of serene creation,
that often ends with beginning and with ending begins.
Every happy space they wander wondering through
is child or grandchild of parting. And the transformed Daphne, since feeling
laurel-like, wants you to change yourself into wind.
16
You, my friend, are lonely, because...
WE, with words and finger-pointings,
gradually make the world our own,
perhaps its weakest, most precarious part.
Who points with fingers to a smell? --
Yet of the powers that threaten us
you feel many .... You know the dead,
and you shrink away from the magic spell.
See, now we two together must bear
piece-work and parts as though it were the whole.
Helping you will be hard. Above all, do not
plant me in your heart. I should grow too fast.
But I will guide MY master's hand and say:
here. This is Esau in his pelt.
maybe these are warnings and but exhortations. maybe I'm supposed to see both at the same time. (refer to Icelandic spar. it diffracts words into multiple paths. does this mean I need to learn QM?) Does this mean I need to learn German?
am I shrinking away when I shouldn't?
wtf does Esau even mean? deception or inheritance? which is it.
wtf these whatever poets. what kind was Rilke?
fuck, do I have to be lonely and keep people from planting me in their heart?
do not mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon (from some dude somewhere in some koan?)
what does one do with the weakest parts? break them or strengthen them?
omg it's coming true. This guy really was a prophet. Smell? that happened weeks after and I didn't even realize it until now.
