Saturday, March 20, 2021

time, thy appetite is timely

Winter’s bones blanch under morning’s cheering birdsong.

Harken!

The Latin phrase “tempus edax rerum” means “time, devourer of all things.” 

And Shakespeare’s inspiration, it comes to be revealed, was Sir Thomas North.

Alas, poor Yorick, now winter shares your grave, and sunny slant of light draws us hence into morning’s pleasant obsequies.

it’s

    s

        p

              r

                    i

                           n

                                    g

it is

it is


       thank you

       very much!


                                      you’re 

                                       well

                                       

                                                          come . . .


                                                                             walk

                                                                                with

                                                                                    me

Friday, March 19, 2021

untranslatable intimacies

One thing is not another.

We engage in translation. 

Definition of translation 

: an act, process, or instance of translating: such as

a

: a rendering from one language into another

also  : the product of such a rendering

b

: a change to a different substance, form, or appearance : CONVERSION

c

(1) : a transformation of coordinates in which the new axes are parallel to the old ones

(2) : uniform motion of a body in a straight line     (Merriam Webster)

We are constantly in the process of changing "to a different substance, form, or appearance."

Not only is form emptiness and emptiness form, but the more a thing changes the more it becomes itself.

This is a form of hospitality. We practice translation with languages, while navigating a more existential or ontological translation of not-self through no-self into self-itself. 

We long to be home. 

In On Translation, Ricoeur spells out the various implications of this paradigm of linguistic hospitality.

Translation sets us not only intellectual work .... but also an ethical prob- lem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practice what I like to call linguistic hospitality. It is this which serves as a model for other forms of hospitality that I think resemble it: confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their stylistic which we must learn in order to make our way into them? And is Eucharistic hospitality not to be taken up with the same risks of translation-betrayal, but also with the same renunciation of the perfect translation.1

1 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 23.

A crucial step in resisting the lure of the Perfect Translation is to honor a dialectical balance between proximity (welcoming the stranger into our midst) and distance (acknowledging that something is always lost in translation: the other’s meanings can never be completely mine). A ‘hospitable’ translator is one who aims at approximate correspondences between two tongues without ever assuming these to be final or adequate. Which is why translation is always an endless task. It is work which is also a working through, in the psycho- analytic sense of Durcharbeitung—a difficult and demanding labor of mediation between one linguistic mind/culture/world and another. Such mediation involves a process of mourning and letting go—and in particular the renunciation of the egocentric or tribalist drive to reduce the alterities of the guest to one’s own will for total adequation. As if, in translation, there were only one true language: my own. Our own. But that is not so. As Ricoeur insists, there is no such thing as language, only languages. Traditore, tradutore: to translate is always in some sense to betray; for one can never do one’s guest true justice. And this means accepting that we all live east of Eden and after Babel—and that this is a good thing. Our linguistic fallenness is also our linguistic finitude: a reminder of human limits which saves us from the delusion of sufficiency, the fantasy of restoring some prelapsarian logos (where we play God speaking a single divine language with a perfect word for each perfect thing). We also need to abandon the illusion of a perfect logos of the future— such as the enlightenment dream of a caracteristica universalis or the more recent delusion of a pan-European Esperanto. Indeed the translation model of hospitality stands, politically, as an indictment of all historical attempts to impose a single language on diverse peoples—Greek, Latin, French, Spanish or today English (sometimes known as ‘Globish’). Imperial campaigns have always sought to impose a normative lingua franca on the multiplicity of vernaculars. But it is the right of every living tongue to speak itself and be translated into other tongues while retaining a certain reservoir of irreducible, untranslatable intimacies and secrets. Whence the legitimate double injunction of every guest language when faced with its host: ‘Translate me! Don’t translate me!’ Take me but not all of me. Take me in, incorporate me, but leave something of me to myself. Good translation is transfusion not fusion. It signals a mutual transaction between two worlds, never a subsuming of their differences into one.

(--Double Hospitality. Between Word and Touch, by Richard Kearney, Boston College, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1 (2019) 71–89, brill.com/jcpr) 

We like the idea that we are on our way to some place that will be a form of translation from this physical place to that spiritual place. 

And yet, we pause and ponder whether there is an untranslatable intimacy that dwells between these imagined concretions of our traveling.

At the end of meditation practice at meetingbrook, a part of our metta is: "May we come to dwell in our true home." 

Our true home?

Perhaps we long to be what is lost in translation.

Thursday, March 18, 2021

but through matter

 In an article in Center for Christogenesis focusing on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Understanding the Christic in an Open Universe, by ILIA DELIO | AUG 15, 2020the author writes:

If we want to understand Teilhard’s Christology, then it is best to place everything we learned in a drawer and focus on two essential ideas: first, the incarnation (which is the doctrine of Jesus Christ) means that God has entered into materiality, and, second, we are in evolution in which change and complexity are accompanied by a rise of consciousness.  

For Teilhard, God and world form a natural pair. He called this the principle of complementarity. He insisted that a genuine “complementarity” exists between God and the world; that is, God and world form a mutually affirming union. What makes the God-world antimony insoluble is that we first split up a natural pair and then persist in considering the two terms in succession.The optimal way to understand God and world is to perceive God as different from the world in nature but personally linked to it in a relationship of mutual complementarity. Teilhard’s God-world relationship could be described as “cosmotheandric,” that is, cosmic, human and divine all at once. God is completely other than the world and yet unable to dispense with it. It is not the complete dependence of the world upon God (as in Thomistic metaphysics) but the “complementarity” of God and world in such a way that one cannot adequately exist without the other.  Reflecting on Teilhard’s doctrine, Thomas King wrote: 

Matter is the principle of otherness. In matter God and man can become other than what they are.  Through matter God and man can meet. God is not found through opposition to matter (anti-matter) or independent of matter (extra-matter) but through matter (trans-matter).[i]

 https://christogenesis.org/understanding-the-christic-in-an-open-universe/

...   ...   ...


We begin to think about the “thoroughness” of existence.


I hold the thought: transmitting through matter.


A transmission trans-matter.


Without words, without dogma, without authoritative control.


Like sniffing the ground during late winter rain.


Or listening to the Ensō doggy snore in afternoon nap.


Maybe, seeing cat in wicker basket licking her shoulder then looking up through skylight window.


Or abandoning hope and residing in the gift of present presence. 

form is emptiness, emptiness is form

From Greek/English Interlinear ABARIM  Publications online:


PHILIPPIANS 2:5
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
τουτο
this
dem pron
nom-si-neu
γαρ
for
conjunction
φρονεισθω
he be verbalized
verb
pres-pas-imp
3rd-p si
εν
in(to)
preposition
υμιν
to you
2nd pers pron
dat-pl
ο
which
rel pron
nom-si-neu
και
and
conjunction
εν
in(to)
preposition
χριστω
to Christ
noun (name)
dat-si-mas
ιησου
to Jesus
noun (name)
dat-si-mas
PHILIPPIANS 2:6
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
ος
who
rel pron
nom-si-mas
εν
in(to)
preposition
μορφη
[see note]
θεου
of God
noun
gen-si-mas
υπαρχων
being
participle
pres-act-par
nom-si-mas
ουχ
not
conjunction
αρπαγμον
[see note]
ηγησατο
he was of the opinion
verb
aor-mDe-ind
3rd-p si
το
the
def art
acc-si-neu
ειναι
to be
verb
pres-act-inf
ισα
equal
adjective
acc-pl-neu
θεω
to God
noun
dat-si-mas
PHILIPPIANS 2:7
But made himself of no reputation*, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
αλλ
but
conjunction
εαυτον
himself
3rd-p refl pron
acc-si-mas
εκενωσεν
[see note]
*

μορφην
[see note]
δουλου
of worker
noun
gen-si-mas
λαβων
taking
participle
2aor-act-par
nom-si-mas
εν
in(to)
preposition
ομοιωματι
to similitude
noun
dat-si-neu
ανθρωπων
of men
noun
gen-pl-mas
γενομενος
the becoming
participle
2aor-mDe-par
nom-si-mas   
PHILIPPIANS 2:8
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
και
and
conjunction
σχηματι
to semblance
noun
dat-si-neu
ευρεθεις
being found
participle
aor-pas-par
nom-si-mas
ως
as
adverb
ανθρωπος
man
noun
nom-si-mas
εταπεινωσεν
[see note]
εαυτον
himself
3rd-p refl pron
acc-si-mas
γενομενος
the becoming
participle
2aor-mDe-par
nom-si-mas
υπηκοος
obedient
adjective
nom-si-mas
μεχρι
[see note]
θανατου
of death
noun
gen-si-mas
θανατου
of death
noun
gen-si-mas
δε
conjunction
σταυρου
of public display
noun
gen-si-mas

(--ABARIM )
...   ...   ...

meetingbrook Note:
[or, he emptied himself]

NASB ©
GreekStrong'sOrigin
but emptied
ἐκένωσεν
(ekenōsen)
2758: to empty
from kenos

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

mutual dependence

One, alone, is nothing.

“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.” (– Nagarjuna)

And yet, The Lord is One.

a shift

 It occurred during walk around waterfront in Rockland near Coast Guard station that it is not about Christ consciousness.

Rather, what it is about is Christ is consciousness.

Let see where this goes.

covering consciousness

Friend sends article from The Atlantic: 

A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved, A neuroscientist on how we came to be aware of ourselves. by MICHAEL GRAZIANO, JUNE 6, 2016


And it occurs to me:


Domine, non sum dignus

ut intres sub tectum meum,

sed tantum dic verbum,

et sanabitur anima mea.

 It has the tectum, the verbum, and the sanabitur. (The roof, language, & the healing inclusion.). If we interpret ‘domine’ as ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness,’ we have it covered.

tá go cinnte

Irish?

Yeah.

Green?

Uh huh.

A good day for it.

Sea mo ghrá.

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

ridding off into sunset

Tough guys spurn vaccines

I get it. They don’t. It is

Theater unto grave

o lord, open these doors

 Downstairs, at ready,

Two sticks of firewood give them-

Selves to Irish stove

Monday, March 15, 2021

middle march, middle way

 Cold air blows through Maine

Iron wood stove heats wohnkuche

Where cat sits rafter

looking out winter's small window

Broken cedar limb

leans on frozen ground, soldier

for whom war is done

if you hear the voice of the lord, harden not your hearts

Wind outside barn door

Log in wood stove falls to edge

Night listens, whispers

Sunday, March 14, 2021

et tu

 Beware the

Idea

Of

Marching —

Amble slowly,

Saunter

unum solum

Reading New York Times,

Washington Post, I see why

Eremites stay cloaked