Have I been so long with you,
And yet you do not know me? If not now, when? If not here, where? Have you been so long with me, And yet I have not known you? Did you hear me knocking? Have you heard me calling? If not I, then what was it you heard? Was it the wind that knocked on my door, Or gently rocked my heart? Was it the call of a lonesome bird I heard, Or the whisper of a soundless voice? If it is you yourself, then tell me to come. If it is not you but another, please do not bother, Do not disturb the dust, or brush off the rust. If you are not here, then where? If you are not here now, then when? Dawn is breaking, night is fading. What else is breaking, what is fading? When no one spoke, it just happened. When nothing happened, it was. You are as you are, And still the eye of my I. —Wm. P. McKane 26 May 2019 You yourself must find the way.
No one can do it for you, No one can describe it to you, No one can show it to you. You yourself must find the way. You yourself must hear the word. No one can hear it to you, No one can tell it to you, No one can explain it to you. You yourself must hear the word. You have a task that you must find, You have tasks which you must do. You have your own proper work, Which no one else can do for you, Or find for you, but you yourself. You have a burden that you must carry, No one else can carry it for you, No one else can relieve you of your burden. You yourself must bear your burden, You are your own burden: carry it. You must be true to your truest self, Not to the whims and wishes of passing self. You must be true to yourself at your best-- The good that you have been, and better, The better that you shall be, and best. Do not place your trust in passing human beings, Do not place your trust in institutions. Do not place your trust in laws, or in books. Place in your trust in that which alone endures, As each and all else is passing away. You have now to become what you truly are, To let go of what you might have been, To let go of dreams of what you may be. You have now to become who you truly are, Beneath the transitory pulls and dreams. Now is the time to be awake, Now is the time to be alive. Those who dwell in the past, And those who dwell in the future, Are all passing away. The one who loves is true to the beloved, The one who loves is one with the beloved. Truly to love costs oneself everything, Truly to love transforms you into You, And all else passes away. —Wm. P McKane 26 May 2019 16 May 2019
Dear friend, I’ve made slow progress on Hesiod (Theogony and Works and Days) ever since leaving for Oregon. Barely back into reading him. Returned to read again some very dense pages on Hegel and Hesiod in Voegelin’s last book, In Search of Order, published posthumously (1987), which he wrote in his 80’s. This short passage, lifted out of its theoretical context, explains far better than I could why am I attracted to turn to Hesiod again. It is so refreshing for a mind steeped, as we all are, in what I call “Cartesian thingism,” which was highly beneficial for the development of modern natural science, but detrimental to more human, whole-aware consciousness. Here is the lifted passage: “Hesiod’s mythospeculation makes us aware of fundamental experiences of reality that require for their expression the language of the gods even when, in the process of differentiation, the many gods are superseded by the One God. The past of experience will not die with differentiation; it is part of the Whole of reality, of 'the things that are, that shall be, and that were before' [Theogony].” You may or may not have a clear understanding of what Voegelin is saying; I think I do, but then, I’ve been reading him for about 45 years; and I study the context. If you think back to some of the poems I’ve been dabbling with in the past number of months, you will see some of my concrete attempts to rediscover my own experiences that engendered speech about “the gods” in the first place. I have no difficulty experiencing the moon as “a goddess,” as Siléne. And what you may not understand or appreciate in my approach to reality is that for me, sensing the divine aura in the moon is far more real than all the scientific talk I’ve heard about the moon. I do not reject the scientific talk, but it has never really engaged my imagination or mind. It is abstract, and for me, beyond experience and internally unknowable; however useful, science is a secondary kind of knowledge. But to experience the earth, sky, ocean, moon, sun, stars as gods is directly experienced, as one can remember from childhood, before oblivion set in. I think that if teachers and professors had sought to preserve the fundamental experience, and also explored the physical world scientifically, I would have been far more interested. (I do not fault them; it would take a philosopher to be able to experience the Whole and engage in science at the same time.) As it was, I preferred the mysterious Whole to the analyzed part, although I probably could not have explained it as clearly when I was 20 as I can now. That is why I so strongly reacted against Descartes when I began to study him, with his conception of human being as a “res cogitans,” “a thinking thing.” Reading him made me feel imprisoned in his flattened consciousness things. (Even his “god” is a thing, of whose “existence” Descartes can “prove.” Makes no sense to me at all.) Knowing of what the moon is made, and when, surely has its own beauty and wonder, but it remains quite alien to immediate consciousness. But to feel awed at the feminine beauty of the moon is surely part of my (and I presume, everyone’s) concrete experience. The experience of the oneness of each and of all precedes naming and analyzing; this context for human consciousness is what is absent in Descartes and his descendants. Who was the philosopher who bemoaned how scientific consciousness had taken the mystery out of the world? Was it Nietzsche? Whoever it was, I agree, even as I appreciate the usefulness gained by science and its offspring, technology. The mystery is not out of the world for Plato and Aristotle. Recall that not long before he died (about age 62, as I recall), Aristotle wrote in a letter, “The older I grow, and the more I am alone, the more I love myth.” Why? I would say that it reconnected him to the Whole, which philosophical-scientific analysis in themselves cannot do. And myth for Aristotle would surely have meant, above all, Hesiod and Homer, perhaps also Aeschylus. I read Hesiod to help reground me in fundamental experiences that precede analysis and even to an extent, speech (logos) itself. Yours, Wm. Paul |
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