| (no subject) |
[Aug. 31st, 2009|03:22 pm] |
|
For my birthday I want a chess set and some polaroid film. I want to be able to buy myself a camera with my own money, saved. And by then I hope to be a little bit closer to balance. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 10th, 2009|02:17 am] |
The Man of the Forest
“In the beginning of the Age of Man, even before the human race had spread over the face of the earth, there were the men of the forest. They lived, timid and confined, in the twilight of the tropical primeval forests, perpetually in battle with their relatives the apes, while over them stood the one godhead and the one law that governed them in all their actions: the Forest. It was their homeland, refuge, cradle, nest, and grave, and life outside its boundaries was unthinkable. Even approaching its borders was to be avoided, and whosoever - through some strange turn of Fate - was forced toward them, in hunting or fleeing, told in fear and trembling of the white Void beyond, where one could see the fearful Nothingness glistening in the deadly burning rays of the sun. An old man of the forest, who decades before had fled from wild beasts beyond the forest’s outermost rim, still lived, blind from that day. He was now a kind of priest and holy man and was called mata dalam (he whose eye is turned inward). It was he who has composed the sacred Song of the Forest, which was sung whenever there was a great storm, and the forest people listened to him. That he had seen the sun with his own eyes and survived was his glory and the secret of his power.
The forest people were small and brown and very hairy; their posture was hunched, and they all had timid, wild eyes. Like men and like apes, they could walk, and they felt just as secure high in the branches as they did on the ground. As yet they had no knowledge of building houses and huts, but they used various weapons and tools, and they made jewelry. Out of hardwoods they made bows, arrows, lances, and clubs. From bast fiber they made necklaces, hung with dried berries or nuts, and around their necks or in their hair they also wore other objects of value: boars’ teeth, tigers’ claws, parrots’ feathers, the shells of freshwater mussels. Through the middle of the immense forest flowed the great river; the men of the forest, however, dared to walk along its bank only in the darkness of night, and many of them had never seen it. Sometimes the more courageous crept out of the thicket at night, shy and wary, and in the shimmering darkness they would see the elephants bathing, and when they looked up through the overhanging treetops, with terror they beheld the radiant stars hanging in the network of the many-armed mangroves. They had never seen the sun, and it was considered extremely dangerous even to glimpse its reflection in the summer.
In that clan of forest people over which the blind mata dalam presided there was also a youth named Kubu; he was leader and spokesman for the young and discontented. Since the mata dalam had grown older and more tyrannical, the ranks of the discontented grew. Until now, it had been the blind one’s special right to have his food provided for him by the others; they also looked to him for advice, and they sang his Forest Song. But gradually he began to introduce all sorts of burdensome new customs, which, he claimed, the God of the Forest had revealed to him in dreams. But a few young skeptics maintained that the old man was an imposter, who had only his own best interest in mind.
The most recent custom the mata dalam had instituted was a celebration of the new moon. Beating on a bark drum, he sat in the center of a circle while the other forest people danced around him in a ring, singing golo elah until they dropped, dead-tired, to their knees. At this point, each male had to pierce his left ear with a thorn, and the young women were brought before the priest, who pierced each one’s ear with a thorn. Kubu and a few of his companions had avoided this ceremony, and they were set on persuading the girls to offer resistance too.
One time they had a chance to put an end to the priest’s power and to triumph over him. The old man was again holding the celebration of the new moon, piercing the left ears of the young females. As he did this, a strong young woman stood up and began to scream terribly; and so it happened that the blind one pierced her eye with the thorn, and blood poured from the eye. Now she screamed so desperately that everyone came running, and when they saw what had happened, they fell into a dazed and angry silence. Exultant now, the boys intervened and Kubu even dared to grab hold of the priest’s shoulder. But the old man stood up by his drum and crowed into a scornful voice so ghastly a curse that everyone drew back in fear, and Kubu’s own heart froze. No one could understand the precise meaning of the old priest’s words, but the manner and sound of his utterances wildly and terribly recalled to them the awesome words of the divine service. And he laid a curse on the youth’s eyes, which commended to the hawk for food; and he cursed the youths entrails, prophesying that one day they would broil in the sun in the open field. But then the priest, whose power was greater now than at any time, ordered the young woman to come back to him, and he plunged the thorn through her other eye. And everyone looked on, horrified, and no one dared to breathe.
“You will die Outside,” was the curse the old one had put on Kubu, and from then on everyone avoided the youth as one beyond all hope. “Outside” - that meant outside the bounds of their homeland, outside the bounds of the darkening forest! “Outside,” that meant terror, scorching sun, and the glowing, fatal Void.
Terrified, Kubu fled, and when he saw everyone who encountered him shrink back, he hid in a hollow tree trunk and admitted defeat. For days and nights he lay there, vacillating between fear of death and defiance, uncertain now whether the people of his clan would come to strike him down or whether the sun itself would break through the forest, besiege and hunt him down, take him captive, and slay him. But neither arrow nor lance, neither sun nor bolt of lightning came to Kubu, nothing came but extreme weariness and the bellowing voice of hunger.
Then Kubu got back on his feet and crawled out of the tree, sober and with a feeling that bordered on disappointment.
“The curse of the priest is powerless,” he thought in amazement. Then he went out searching for food, and after he had eaten and could again feel life coursing through his limbs, pride and hatred returned to his soul. He no longer wanted to go back among his people. He wanted to be a loner and an outcast, one whom the people despised, one upon whom the priest - that blind animal - called down impotent curses. He wanted to be alone and remain alone. But first he would take his revenge.
He went off to think. He contemplated all those things which had never sowed doubt in his mind, things which appeared to be deceit, and foremost he contemplated the priest’s drum and his ceremonies; and the more he thought and the longer he was alone, the more clearly he could see: yes, it was deceit, all of it was nothing but deceit and lying. And since he had already come so far, he thought further and aimed all his now vigilant suspiciousness directly at all that was held to be sacred and true. What, for example, was the truth about the God of the Forest, and the sacred Song of the Forest? Oh, these too were nothing but sheer duplicity! And overcoming a secret terror, he began to sing the Song of the Forest with scorn and contempt in his voice, twisting all its words, and three times he called upon the God of the Forest, whose name it was forbidden to utter - to all but the priest - on pain of death; yet everything remained peaceful and calm, no storm rent the heavens, no lightning bolt fell from the blue.
For many days and weeks the solitary wandered, with furrow brow and penetrating gaze. He did something else no one had ever dared: he went to the bank of the river on the night of the full moon. Firsts he looked at the moon’s reflection, then at the moon itself; then he gazed into the eyes of all the stars, long and boldly, and nothing untoward befell him. Whole moonlit nights he sat on the riverbank, cherishing his thoughts and reveling in the forbidden delirium of light. Many bold and terrible schemes rose in his soul. The moon is my friend, he thought, and the star is my friend, but the old blind man is my enemy. Thus, the Outside may be better than our Inside, and perhaps the sanctitude of the forest itself is empty talk! And one night, many generations before any human being did, he hit upon a daring and fabulous idea. In all probability, one could bind together some branches with bast fiber, set oneself on them, and float downstream. His eyes sparkled and his heart beat faster, but he did not act on this idea; the river was full of crocodiles.
There was but one way into the future: to go through the forest until he reached its end - if it really had an end - and there to leave it, and put his faith into the glowing Void, the evil outside. He had to go in search of that monster the sun and endure it. Because - who could say? - in the end maybe even the ancient taboo on the sun was nothing but another lie!
This thought, the last in a bold, feverish sequence, made Kubu tremble. This was something that no man of the forest before him had ever dared: voluntarily to leave the forest and expose himself to the terrifying light of the sun. And from day to day he went about bearing his thought in mind. At last he took courage. Trembling, he crept toward the river in the glare of midday, warily he neared its glittering bank, and with timid eyes he sought out the image of the sun in the water. The radiance pained and dazzled his eyes; he had to close them quickly, but after a while he dared to open them again, and then one more time, and he succeeded. It was possible, it was to be borne; moreover, it mad one spirited and brave. Kubu put his faith in the sun. He loved it, even if it should kill him; and he hated the old, dark, putrid forest, where the priests shrilled, and from which he, the young valiant, had been outlawed and outcast.
Now his resolve had grown ripe, and he plucked the dead like a sweet fruit. He made a fine, new hammer of ironwood and equipped it with a very thin, light handle. Early the next morning, he went after the mata dalam, tracked him down and found him, hit him on the head with the hammer and watched his soul escape through the crooked mouth. Kubu laid down his weapon on the old man’s breast, so that people would know how the old man had met his end; on the hammer’s smooth surface, with the shell of a muscle, he had painstakingly scratched a sign, a circle out of which radiated several straight lines; the image of the sun.
Courageously, he set out on his journey to the distant Outside, and from morning to night he walked in one direction, and at night he slept in the tree branches and continued on his way in the early morning, all day long for several days, crossing over streams and black swamps, and over rising land and mossy banks of stone, the likes of which he had never seen before, and finally upward more steeply, stopped by ravines, farther on into the mountains, and always through the eternal forests, so that in the end he became doubtful and sad, pondering the possibility that perhaps some god really did forbid the creatures of the forest to leave their homeland.
Then one evening, after he had long been climbing and climbing in ever-higher, drier, and thinner air, he came, unrepentantly, to the end. But the end of the forest came the end of the earth as well; here the forest plummeted down into the emptiness of air, as if here the world had been broken in two. There was nothing to see but a distant, feeble redness, and above, a few stars, for night had already begun to fall.
Kubu sat down at the edge of the world and bound himself fast with vines so as not to fall off. He spent the night crouching in horror and wild agitation, his eyes wide open, and in the first gray of morning he impatiently jumped to his feet and waited, vent over the Void, for the day to come.
Lovely yellow strips of light glimmered in the distance, and the sky seemed to tremble in expectation, just as Kubu trembled, never before having seen the coming of day in the broad expanse of the atmosphere. Yellow bundles of light flared up, and on the other side of the monstrous abyss, the sun sprang, huge and red, into the sky. It leapt up out of endless, gray nothingness, which soon became blue-black: the sea.
Before the trembling man of the forest, the Outside lay unveiled. At his feet, the mountain plunged down into unknowable, smoking depths; opposite him, a craggy mountain chain sprang up, glittering like rosy jewels. To his side, the dark sea lay distant and immense; it’s coast was white and frothy, and the tiny trees that lined it nodded toward him. And over all this, over these thousand, strange, new, powerful forms, the sun rose and poured a glowing stream of light on the world, which took fire in laughing colors.
Kubu was not able to look the sun in the face. But he saw its light streaming in colorful torrents around the mountains and cliffs and coasts and distant blue isles. And he sank to his knees, bent his face to the earth, bowing down to the gods of this radiant world. Who was he, Kubu?! Only a small, dirty animal who had spent his whole musty life in a darkening bog hole deep in the forest, timid and gloomy, paying homage to obscure gods. But here was the world, and its supreme god was the sun. The long, ignominious dream of his forest life was behind him; now it began - like the sallow image of the dead priest - to be extinguished in his soul. On hands and feet, Kubu clambered down the steep abyss, toward the light and the sea. And his soul trembled in a fleeting transport of joy with the dreamlike surmise of a bright earth - an earth ruled by the sun, where bright, free beings lived in light, subject to no one but the sun. “
Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies by Hermann Hesse |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|12:09 pm] |
At the Dining Table
"There's an old story about the difference between heaven and hell. The hell realms are filled with people who sit at long banquet tables piled high with all sorts of delicious foods and dinks. But everyone is completely miserable and hungry, because the utensils are too long to maneuver. No matter how hard they try, they can't put the food into their mouths. The nourishment is there, but nobody can get to it. The heavenly realm is the same: the tables are laden with the same delicious food and with the identical utensils that look impossible to maneuver. But the people are happy and bright because they are using the utensils to feed one another. There is no hunger or frustration, only fullness and well-being, within the identical conditions."
Ajahn Pasanno |
|
|
| "All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home." |
[May. 16th, 2009|02:30 pm] |
The Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets, Chapter 5
The evening came down on us and as it did the wind dropped but the tall waves remained, not topped with white caps any more. A few porpoises swam near and looked at us and swam away. The watches changed and we ate our first meal aboard, the cold wreckage of farewell snacks, and when our watch was done we were reluctant to go down to the bunks. We put on our heavier coats and hung about the long bench where the helmsmen sat. The little light on the compass card and the port and starboard lights were our outmost boundaries. Then we passes Point Sur and the waves flattened out into a ground-swell and increased in speed. Tony the master said, “Of course, it’s always that way. The point draws the waves.” Another might say, “The waves come greatly to the point,” and in both statements there would be a good primitive exposition of the relationship between giver and receiver. This relation would be through waves; wave to wave to wave, each of which is connected by torsion to it’s inshore fellow and touches it enough, although it has gone before, to be effected by it’s torsion. And so on and on to the shore, and to the point where the last wave, if you think from the sea, and the first if you think from the shore, touches and breaks. And it is important where you are thinking from.
The sharp, painful stars were out and bright enough to make the few whitecaps gleam against the dark surrounding water. From the wheel the little flag-jack on the peak stood against the course and swung back and forth over the horizon stars, blotting out each one as it passed. We tried to cover a star with the flag-jack and keep it covered, but this was impossible; no one could do that, not even Tony. But Tony, who knew his boat so well, could feel the yaw before it happened, could correct an error before it occurred. This is no longer reason or thought. One achieves the same feeling on a horse he knows well; one almost feels the horses impulse in one’s knees, and knows, but does not know, not only when the horse will shy, but the direction of his jump. The landsman, or the man who has been long ashore, is clumsy with the wheel, and his steering in a heavy sea is difficult. One grows tense on the wheel, particularly if someone like Tony is watching sardonically. Then keeping the compass card steady becomes impossible and the swing, a variable arc from two to ten degrees. And as weariness creeps up it is not uncommon to forget which way to turn the wheel to make the compass card swing back to where you want it. The wheel turns only two ways, left or right. The fact of the lag, and the boat swinging rapidly so that a slow correcting allows it to pass the course and err on the other side, becomes a maddening thing when Tony the magnificent sits beside you. He does not correct you, he doesn’t even speak. But Tony loves the truth, and the course is the truth. If the helmsmen is off course he is telling a lie to Tony. And as the course projects, hypothetically, straight off the bow and around the world, so the wake drags out behind, a tattler on the conduct of the steersmen. If one should steer mathematically perfect, which is of course impossible, the wake will be a straight line; but even if, when drawn, it may have been straight, it bends to currents and to waves, and your true effort is whipped out. There is probably a unified field hypothesis available in navigation as in all things. The internal factors would be the boat, the controls, the engine, and the crew, but chiefly the will and intent of the master, sub-headed with his conditioning experience, his sadness and ambitions and pleasures. The external factors would be the oceans with it’s bordering land, the waves and currents and the winds with their constant and varying effect in modifying the influence of the rudder against the changing tensions exerted on it.
If you steer toward an object, you cannot perfectly and indefinitely steer directly at it. You must steer to one side, or run it down; but you can steer exactly at a compass point, indefinitely. That does not change. Objects achieved are merely it’s fulfillment. In going toward a headland, for example, you can steer directly for it while you are at a distance, only changing course as you approach. Or you may set your compass for the point and correct it by vision when you approach. The working out of the ideal into the real is here - the relationship between inward and outward, microcosm to macrocosm. The compass simply represents the ideal, present but unachievable, and sight-steering a compromise with perfection which allows your boat to exist at all.
In the development of navigation as thought and emotion - and it must have been a slow, stumbling process frightening to its innovators and horrible to the fearful - how often must the questing mind have wished for a constant and unvarying point on the horizon to steer by. How simple if a star floated unchangeably to measure by. On clear nights such a star is there, but it is not trustworthy and the course of it is an arc. And the happy discovery of Stella Polaris - which, although it too shifts very minutely in an arc, is constant relatively - was encouraging. Stella Polaris will get you there. And so to the crawling minds Stella Polaris must have been like a very goddess of constancy, a star to love and trust.
What we have wanted always is an unchangeable, and we have found that only a compass point, a thought, an individual ideal, does not change - Schiller’s and Goethe’s Ideal to be worked out in terms of reality. And from such a thing as this, Beethoven writes a Ninth Symphony to Schiller’s Ode to Joy.
A tide pool has been called a world under a rock, and so it might be said of navigation, “It is the world within the horizon.”
Of steering, the external influences to be overcome are in the nature of oscillations; they are of short or long periods or both. The mean levels of the extreme ups and downs of the oscillations symbolize opposites in a Hegelian sense. No wonder, then, that in physics the symbol of oscillation, 1i, is fundamental and primitive and ubiquitous, turning up in every equation. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
