Voluntaries from the Invisibles
Douglas Milburn
Part the Fourth
Plorans ploravit in nocte
et lachrymae ejus in maxillis ejus.
(She has wept bitterly in the
night
and her tears are on her cheeks..)
--Jeremiah.
1. Metamonism.
2. The benefits of off-the-leash walks for the mind cannot be
overestimated.
3. We are taught to think of rest
as a scheduled (night) place-bound (bed) states,
not allowing for the possibility that it is an attainable durative condition.
4. Is Beethoven possible without Wagner?
5. We forget that the freedom to believe implies the freedom to
not believe.
Shakespeare was apparently the first to not believe everything
and live to tell about it.
6. Early conscious species are for a time well-served
by an ability to either deny or ignore the larger experienced reality.
Eventually, when challenged by a species that assess threats more frankly,
they are doomed by such narrow-sighted vision.
7. You can learn much about what kind of death you have
by deciding who you think is wider:
those who cleverly pursue fame,
or those who carefully pursue hermitage.
8. The sins of the short story writers are visited on the
novelists
unto the nth generation.
9. If youre going to do religion,
theres a lot to be said for heliotropism.
10. The clever efforts of surface-dwellers
nurture, sustain, and entertain--
benefits that are necessary but not sufficient.
11. Human cross-fertilization is pervasive and constant.
Art is only a small and visible component.
12. Occam's Razor doesn't rust from lack of use.
You do.
13. Step 1: to see what is before you.
Step 2: to simultaneously see what is before you and what is known but not before you.
Step 3: To see what is not before you and not known.
14. Only fools, geniuses, and madmen--which is to say, the truly
wise--
seek serenity in a world of want perturbation.
15. Sons of sons of Marines are the ones who should get medals.
16. Beguiled by toys, beholden to banks,
we think the future is better toys and bigger banks.
17. Faith is essential.
Not faith in man-made, time-bound gods and godlets,
but the faith of the flower, of the tree,
of the tiger, of the atom, of the galaxy (and, pace, the mustard seed).
Not faith in three, or two, or one,
but faith in the unspeakable, the unseeable, the untouchable
that lies just here, beyond three, or two, or--hardest of all--one.
Without that faith, nothing is necessary, nothing is sufficient.
With it, everything is both necessary and sufficient.
18. Those who attempt to shout out the noise,
calm the tempest, stop the lighting,
only encapsulate it and themselves.
Result: fake lives of suspended animation,
each mind a sealed Hollywood soundstage
complete with blinking red light warning:
Keep Out.
19. Pixelglyphs. Breadcrumbs.
20. How do you say "Land ho!" in Portuguese?
21. The danger of thinking toward the edge
is believing gullibly that the part of the edge youre thinking toward
is the most important.
22. DNA is only a small (but fascinating) component
of a large (and largely non-material) picture.
23. If distance and time exist only
as aspects of the material world,
what use would those with practiced access to the non-material world have
for communication via material vibrations of particle trapped in space and time?
Hence the SETI silence.
24. Since we awoke 5,000 years ago,
our progress has been sideways,
nuturant to both body and mind,
enabling now billions to survive long enough to think.
Still, we've produced only one Lao-Tze, one Newton, one Mozart.
How many more billions to produce the next awakener?
25. It is our tragedy to be part
singers.
It is our hope to be the best part singers ever.
26. Any unified field that can be
expressed
in numbers, words, symbols, or pictures is not a unified field.
27. A few minutes above the swamp
in the morning does wonders for the day.
28. Sparks. Tinder.
29. It is difficult to say which is
the bigger fake, the hour glass or the ruler.
30. Pygmies standing on the
shoulders of pygmies (including you, Isaac),
so small the seen and so vast the still unseen.
31. Taken together Magellan's Log
is just fragmentary reports
of conversations with tiny verbal extensions of that which is beyond language.
32. The countries and cultures
creating see-through faux Manhattan skylines
everywhere fail to realize the the New York skyscrapers were and are
only the outward and visible sign of a dense, rich, variegated, old culture,
itself the essential foundation on which
present creativity (commercial, artistic, scientific, religious) and future hope rest.
33. How to become the next
Shakespeare:
1. Practice imagining the unimaginable.
2. Create proofs in whatever medium is at hand.
3. Sally forth fruitfully.
34. Gold, titles, beauty even.
Some, called artists, see the wrong-way signposts
for what they are but can't resist rushing home to capture illusion as truth
and await our fevered applause.
35. This lens, this window, body as
stocks, in which this eye is born can,
through shock, stress, pain, or practice be briefly escaped,
but, turning away, don't expect to wander this world better
when forgotten root worlds open and enthrall.
36. The singularity will come not
from clever symbol-manipulating contrivances
but from metalogical sources of infinite energy and metarational vistas of infinite hope.
Not the goofy grasping at straws of the religiously flighty,
nor the elaborately embroidered arguments of the scientific ouroborists,
but glimpses of the rock-solid foundation of new and to all of them unimaginable truth.
37. The gentlest teacher is the
sternest taskmaster.
38. The real long-term
troublemakers are not the Great Unwashed
but the Lesser Washed.
39. The 20th Century, 1890-2008.
R.I.P.
40. I dont know how much you paid
to get to these pages,
and you dont know how much I paid to make them,
but I suspect parity.
41. Only those focused firmly on
the past
speak clearly and unambiguously.
42. We are here, though we have no
idea what "we" is, "what "are" is, or what "here" is.
It is possible to leave temporarily (meditation, drugs, sleep) or permanently (suicide).
Temporary leavings can be entertaining, relaxing, or educational.
Permanent leaving, except in cases of extreme duress or intractable pain,
denies immanent wisdom,
as the minute tyrant ego usurps hope and crowns itself absolute ruler
of its tiny kingdom, which it thinks is all.
43. I woke up and there
in the bed across from me
was Alkan, looking a little pekid.
Bright blue robe, yellow ascot.
In his declining years, I gathered
from the wrinkles and wisps.
Very dark brown or black eyes
followed me as I got out
of my chair to find a cigarette.
From his music I knew the man
had a sense of humor almost
as
44. Pigeonhole poets.
Who trains them
to avoid all but
posthumous prose?
45. More accurately:
Only re-connect.
46. The Amazon of words flows on,
and we, thinking ourselves its source,
applaud and reward
those who best ride its rapids.
47. For the skilled reader,
any visual field is adequate to the moment.
48. Beware the human unwilling or
unable
to let the mind lie fallow.
49. The actor who doesnt perform
attracts no audience (visible or otherwise),
hones no skills, expands no mind.
50. Pain impinges on a carapace
that is not you.
51. The modern piano (ca 1820
onward)
gave unprecedented expressive potential to performers
and unprecedented creative potential to composer.
The explosion of serious music since then
is the result of several factors--
economic,, social, political.
The easy availability of the piano alone
expanded the numbers of composers at work by orders of magnitude.
Result? More good music (and one percent) than ever,
and far, far more mediocre-to-bad music (the 99 percent).
So too with writers and the Internet.
52. Non-belief: the flight from
metaphor into the arms of paradox.
Belief: the embrace of precisely nothing
while calling it not merely something but everything.
53. As within so without.
Reverse engineering (from the physical to the metaphysical)
is a useful source of clues.
For example, what does the omnipresence of frequent cuts
in theater(between acts) and movies (between takes)
indicate about the relationship between inner reality and outer?
Most intriguing are those areas of inner reality that we havent yet externalized.
54. How long we refuse to look for, much less visit, oases
has no effect on the continuing reality of our thirst.
55. If science and religion and art enrich life,
how is it that scientists and religionists and artists continue to be so poor in spirit?
56. Does the any hill conceal transcendent secrets?
Maybe.
But only if the stone, the star, and the sty do too.
57. For a long time money has been the measure of all things.
With the arrival of the Internet,
that begins to cease to be the case (to everybody's confusion).
58. The very cleverest critics (who havent appeared yet)
will realize first that writers dont write everything,
that artists dont paint everything, etc.,
and then by contemplating and commenting on those withheld works,
help us to move toward a fuller appreciation of the non-visible.
59. Like those Victorian travel writers
who did surface so thoroughly while ignoring what lay beneath,
I write only obliquely about my metaphysical wanderings and adventures
whose nurturing reality fuels all this.
60. Only by figuring out how to free the children
will we finally figure out how to free ourselves.
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fifth >>
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
First
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Second
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Third
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fourth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fifth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Sixth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Seventh
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Eighth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Ninth
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