We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

—Henry Beston

We must go higher- if it were only for the reason that the maker of all must have a self-sufficing existence outside of all things- since all the rest is patently indigent- and that everything has participated in The One and, as drawing on unity, is itself not unity.

What then is this in which each particular entity participates, the author of being to the universe and to each item of the total?

Since it is the author of all that exists, and since the multiplicity in each thing is converted into a self-sufficing existence by this presence of The One, so that even the particular itself becomes self-sufficing, then clearly this principle, author at once of Being and of self-sufficingness, is not itself a Being but is above Being and above even self-sufficing.

May we stop, content, with that? No: the Soul is yet, and even more, in pain. Is she ripe, perhaps, to bring forth, now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? No: we must call upon yet another spell if anywhere the assuagement is to be found. Perhaps in what has already been uttered, there lies the charm if only we tell it over often? No: we need a new, a further, incantation. All our effort may well skim over every truth and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm, to understand: for the understanding, in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item; only so does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety?

All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus, the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle- to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun.

But how is this to be accomplished?

Cut away everything.

There is a setting in Outlook that can prevent so many embarrassments. You can create a rule that defers the delivery of messages by any number of minutes. The mail just sits in your Outbox, and if you remember/realize something after you hit send, you can then open and edit it before it actually goes. It’s kept me from the silly mistakes like forgotten attachments, belated realizations about the cc: list, and awkward spellcheck corrections. Just now, it saved me from calling someone “Kuntz,” which I imagine would not have been appreciated.

Unrelated, why would Outlook make that change? I know it’s a real last name, but come on…

Sorry for the unusually pragmatic post. No worries—I’ll now return to exhortatoria, cryptica, apocrypha, pseudepigraha, and my typical trick-box of loveable philological arcana.

The attentional dynamics of US responses to Egypt, to Tunisia, and to Iran in 2009.

First, there is the political calculus: ambiguous words that support no one, near silence, or hollow cheering from the sidelines. True, it must be challenging for the Obama administration to formulate a response without having defined set of clear foreign policy goals. But I also doubt any other recent presidents would have done anything saner or more coherent.

Second, there is the media reaction. I guess it’s down to which one is more entertaining. In Iran, despite all the attention, there was no realistic prospect for change. Yet the Green protests were treated as the coming of a new regime. It was all about the projection of US hopes. In Tunisia, it took at least three weeks for coverage to rise above the threshold of what the US media considered to be sufficiently entertaining. Besides, events there fit none of the current available narratives about the undifferentiated mass of countries known as “The Middle East.” Now Egypt, front page news and live coverage. Maybe because more people have heard of it? We’ll see how it plays out, unless some new attention fodder pops up first.

I suppose my only real point is that, in media and in politics, in the US, these events are simply channels. For the one, they serve as a means for gathering our attention and reselling it to advertisers, but that particular form of produce rots quickly and needs to be refreshed. For the other, they are just part of the show, another chance to spin some plates and juggle some balls, moves in a game of mimed responses designed to deflect attention from ”unsolvable” challenges that continue to degrade. Both are built from an elaborate architecture of “Look here, not there.”

And somewhere, behind, or inside, or totally apart, are the day-to-day struggles of people’s actual lives, the context of these actual places, the swirl of conflicting interests, the pressures of needing to eat and sleep and make, the injustices of those who by whatever means have found ways convert the human into a commodity…

May all peoples find ways forward to better days!

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

– J.M. Keynes (via @tnSPOKES)

We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has planned well or ill…… like our souls, which it may be, are such that governing their inferior, the body, they must sink deeper and deeper into it if they are to control it.

No doubt the individual body- though in all cases appropriately placed within the universe- is of itself in a state of dissolution, always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty: but the body inhabited by the World-Soul- complete, competent, self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature- this needs no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress.

This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest.

Plotinus, The Enneads, IV, 8