at the source, nothingness

 Today, Mary Magdalene.

Way to go, ma chérie!

stat virtus

 It is not pessimistic to say that half the population is bad.

It is not optimistic to say half the population is good.

Everything is halved. Yin and Yang. Angelic and devilish.

No one is all good. No one all evil.

It is all a balancing fulcrum, a middle point, comme ci comme ça.

That’s where we meet.

It’s where we begin. 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

sitting while chopin op.20 in b-minor is played on violin

 She has no recall

Memoryless with good smile

She does not eat meal

a comment on this morning’s post

  Comment on the fragment approaching nearness of poetry:

Is

     There

A 

     Poem

               Here

It occurs to me that the world of “there” is where we put “other.” It satisfies the penchant to distance and objectify, to “they” and “them.” It is a world of category and concept, of statistics and trends, of the foreign and stranger.

The world of “here” is that of no-other. Here evokes the close, the intimate, the non-differentiated. Here emerges presence. Here suggests embodiment, incarnated self-sameness, a divine realization of Itself. Here is where One dwells — (the mysteriously unfathomable, that which is beyond understanding, the nameless that we have called so many names.)

Poetry occurs, rarely and blessedly so, when something, some place, some intuition, some engagement — speaks or expresses itself (Itself) on its own without interference or contrivance or clever manipulation.

Hence, poetry is Being-written. Being-danced. Being-played. Being-sounded. 

Being-there-as-here. Being-here-as-there.

Cheslaw Milosz wrote in his poem Ars Poetica? —

The purpose of poetry is to remind us   

how difficult it is to remain just one person,   

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,   

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

If he is on target with this stanza, it might explain the reluctance to encounter or embrace poetry. (That, and poor pedagogy surrounding our early exposure to experiencing poetry in the academic classroom.)

Milosz gives us a good reminder of what is here. 

approaching nearness of poetry

1.

Is

     There

A 

     Poem

               Here

2.

Ταυ

      Crosses

                Distance 

Presencing

       What is

                 Revealing

3.

Itself

for hearing only -- ἀκροαματικός

Can't learn all words. Maybe some. Here's one: acroamatic  

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin acroamaticus, acroaticus (“esoteric”), at first chiefly in reference to the “esoteric” and originally oral teachings of Aristotle, from Ancient Greek ἀκροαματικός (akroamatikós, “for hearing only; esoteric”), from ἀκροάομαι (akroáomai, “to listen”).

Adjective

acroamatic (comparative more acroamatic, superlative most acroamatic)

1. (rare, chiefly archaic) Of or pertaining to hearing. quotations ▼
2. Esoteric, abstruse; (in particular) taught orally to select students and not disseminated. quotations ▼
3. (education) Based on lectures or exposition by monologue. quotations ▼coordinate term ▼

Wiktionary 

The word appears in "On Distinguishing the Acroamatic from the Dogmatic", by Babette Babich, 2023, Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education.

To be a student, according to Nietzsche. is not as easy as many blithely identify themselves.

To be a student, Nietzsche argues in his lectures on the ‘future of our educational institutions,’ is to be a listener. To this same extent, Nietzsche (1980) emphasizes that attending university is about ‘hearing’ lectures: thus “all education toward culture is, as said, ‘acroamatic’” (p. 740).

At issue is Nietzsche’s emphasis on hearing, and above all on what it takes to be able to hear. Heidegger’s student, Gnther Anders, focuses on what he calls “listening” and the active role required of the listener (listening is not passive), and in the case of Nietzsche’s lecture series, this is complicated, since for Nietzsche, a Classicist, a Graecist, as at the time of his speaking everyone who had enjoyed a university education would and could be expected to understand Greek, as a facility with Greek (and of course Latin) was to be assumed, it was then a prerequisite for matriculating and thus for hearing university classes as well as for taking a degree. (Ibid xvi)

My early years, six decades ago, of studying Greek and Latin have not yielded a facility and proficiency, merely an appreciation and affection. My native language, English, has benefitted by the classical exposure of an Associate's Degree in Classical Languages, something which, at the time, seemed more a chore than a delight.

 The acroamatic, as Nietzsche emphasizes, is derived from the Greek ἀκροαματικός—“for hearing only”—and ἀκροάομαι—concerning listening—referring to ‘things heard,’ teachings communicated not in writing (think of Plato’s famous caution in the Phaedrus) but orally, just and only to and for those who have met the prerequisites for understanding and who are thus capable of hearing what is communicated. 

In the same way, Nietzsche’s provocative book subtitled ‘for all and none,” his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, emphasizes speaking, recounting the different “ways” Zarathustra “speaks” to his followers or disciples, to his animals, to the old saint he meets in the forest as recounted at the start of his Vorrede or Prologue, or to the crowd in the marketplace that hears him proclaim his conception of the “overhuman” and who, listening with their own convictions and expectations, take him not to be speaking of the human that is to be ‘overcome,’ whatever that might mean, but as the equivalent of an opening act for the tightrope entertainment they had all come to see. Esoteric as such, the ‘acroamatic’ method of instruction is traditionally contrasted with the erotematic, that is the dialogical method of teaching that is a matter of persuasion, i.e., belief and conviction, and dogma. The dialogical method has clear and convicted appeal; thus Nietzsche often invokes our ‘convictions’ as a word for our persuasions or prejudices, as these have faith on their side. The acroamatic is more challenging, relevant to the extent that one needs an account of a culture, of expert knowledge; thus Nietzsche’s reference to the epopts, and to the Platonic doctrine of the unwritten teaching, crucial to reflections on education, using the distinction between insiders and outsiders, esoteric and exoteric.8  (Ibid)

 Dialogical is a worthy method of entering into and moving through expressions of thought. Usually associated with communicating and learning, to dialogue has an implication of transparent interpenetration wherein one person lets go of the firm ground they imagine they occupy, and traverses through the interpositional-between, that fixed space or distance separating two beings, their opinions, their beliefs, their ruminations. This type of travel, one might even suppose, is a mystical or subatomic interchange of logos/mythos through the no-longer-defined-as-objects participants. 

  Old English dialogas (plural), from Latin from Greek dialogos, from dia ‘through’ + logos ‘word’; compare with Greek dialegesthai ‘converse with’; subsequently reinforced by Old French dialoge.    --cf online etymological dictionary 

The "through-ness" of our wording activity must be reconsidered. There is a neutrino-like behavior that experiences a no-barrier movement into and through whatever it encounters. Word is, if you will, a spiritual act in a world that seldom sees or experiences anything that does not fit the category of mass, material, or solidity. We have become estranged from the actual activity we engage in when we purport to converse, to dialogue, to speak the world into being with our articulation of what-is-real into reality.

The appreciation of reality is a gift of listening.

Authentic listening is not a ping-pong back and forth of lobbing language at an opponent during concept-combat, argumentation, or debate.

Listening is a spiritual practice of contemplative interpositional-betweenness wherein a new being, a third manifestation, arises in the open horizon diaphanously emerging as a numinous transcendence into a new way of thinking, feeling, and living in presence and manifesting wholeness.

Becoming a beholder.

The unforeseen occurrence of --

Beholding One Beholding.

if you are doing something, nothing is hidden

what will happen when 

formal practice disappears —

nothing will be seen

when box score listed at bottom shows free throws missed in n.i.t. championship

 new york times one jan

nineteen sixty one -- Buckeyes

beat Bonnies by two --

my former teammate, right guard 

missed five free throws, (sigh)

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1961/01/01/98430353.html?pageNumber=127

opposent

                   (For RJK, d. 17july2019)

 not a misspelling

just a word for a once friend

there are no mistakes

tutti quanti, tutto il 

tempo — uncertain friendship

fog not fog

Maine is humid fog and rain.

Flowers not flowers, fog not fog;
It comes at midnight, goes at dawn.
Arriving like a spring dream,
Leaving like the morning clouds-
No way to hold it.

— Pai Chu-I (772-846) dailyzen

There are no parts to reality. 

The probability of reality is that reality is possibly the only true phenomenon.

Start here.

There’s no hope anywhere else.

et ipse te enútriet

Finnegans Wake might sound like nonsense, but sometimes nonsense has lovely lilt and pleasing echo. Not unlike history, “never get stuck in another man’s fight” (James Joyce, in FW)

July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage.  . —Heather Cox Richardson

Sides swing back and forth. Republicans, Democrats; Left, Right;  You, Me.

We desire God; we are repulsed by the idea of a God.

You love life; you loathe it.

        jacta cogitátum tuum in Dómino,

cast your care upon the Lord,  

        et ipse te enútriet. 

           and He will support you

— Missa — Introitus, 16july2023

Curiously, we forget history. 

Incuriously, we slide through invisible time as though immaterial neutrinos suddenly taking a right turn heading into barber shop for a not-there cut.

Tread lightly, downpours in hiatus will reconvene in thirty minutes. Rhubarb will be picked, dog walked in the breach. I’ll wait for the exhalation of nature to inhale what next breath might be offered this Sunday morning.

The events of daily occurrence linger lost in potential until, when suddenness shrugs and matters materialize, voila, men act and bizarre thoughts find arms and legs to set out to streets and wells of deliberative bodies to writhe in the agony of human opinion enacting the deranged madness of senility pretending to be courage and pro patria engagement with the enemy du jour.

Pour me a double orange juice. Kill the fatted English muffin. Roast the day old coffee. I am ready for battle. 

I am ready to give my life for a parchment commendation and an inch of eschatology in the nonlocal newspaper.

do you have a view with no room

 Someone always wants you dead. Watching CIA drama. All about secrets. And money. Who’s got power. Who wants it.

That, and the annoying possibility there might be life after death (thanks Raymond Moody) makes a person wonder how you get out of life dead?

It’s too much to think about.

So, don’t.

if anything was wrong we’d have heard

 It doesn’t matter

If you live you die

One breath leads to another

Until it doesn’t

It all disappears into God

Who is lost, nowhere to be found