a measured voice, an immeasurable truth

Amid the noise, a calm wisdom, with a perfect name, Jane Goodall:

https://bsky.app/profile/cajunblue.bsky.social/post/3mbck5q65qs2s

cheers!

we want to know what love is

 Walking harbor

After hugging man 

whose wife just died

Brings me to Quaker sitting

Hands gassho and clap 

Enfolding obscurity

mise en scene

A play in four lines: 

 Let’s pretend god exists.

     Pretend?

Yeah, pretend.

     Who do you think you're talking to?

[long pause]

[nothing else is heard]

Critics will love this work. They’ll compare it to Sartre and Ionesco. It will probably have only a brief run off-broadway, then on to the college theatre circuit. The costs these days are staggering.

It’s the final stage direction that will fill columns in daily newspapers. They’ll ask — how is it possible to hear nothing else?

You, you in your 3rd floor walk-up in Chicago— you tell them!

fixated

 Too cold

Ice, snow in dooryard

Too cold

Body, heart, mind

energy transferred

Doris, our elder, sent this Merwin poem yesterday: 

To the New Year 

With what stillness at last 

you appear in the valley 

your first sunlight reaching down 

to touch the tips of a few 

high leaves that do not stir 

as though they had not noticed 

and did not know you at all 

then the voice of a dove calls 

from far away in itself 

to the hush of the morning 

so this is the sound of you 

here and now whether or not 

anyone hears it this is 

where we have come with our age 

our knowledge such as it is 

and our hopes such as they are 

invisible before us 

untouched and still possible                              

 —W.S. Merwin

He might be writing about the new year, his true self, or, perhaps, God. Poems are like that. Once they leave home, they are both homeless and belong to everyone.

I ask God:

    Who do people say you are?

        You talking to me? 

    Yeah, you.

        People think the damnedist things. 

    Like?

        Like I'm breath.

    Are you, breath?

        Yeah, I am.

    What else?

        Some say I'm everything.

    Are you?

        Yeah, I am.

    What else?

        Nothing.

    Are you?

        Yeah.

Talking to God is awkward. I know God doesn't talk out loud, that I make it up, phrase whatever comes to mind. I know that I'm probably just having an inner dialogue with myself. 

Merwin wrote 

from far away in itself 

to the hush of the morning 

so this is the sound of you 

I like that.

God and my self and the new year -- each sounds that way.

Saying nothing other than distant hush, stillness, sunlight reaching down.

In 1957, as I entered high school, I read Allen Ginsberg in a poem saying "Poet is Priest." It was a line in his "Death to Van Goth's Ear".

It caught my attention. I'd just turned twelve. It's when I began my love of poetry. It had a sacramental implimentation.  The implication for me was an exclaustrated creativity that cycled through my years, then decades, into a lifetime of being just outside the monastic cell of religious horarium, just outside the monastic enclosure whose signage seemed to say -- "stay away, but stay close."

Consecration is an inner act of reverence to all that belongs.

When the priest at mass echoing Jesus used to say "Hoc est corpus meum" (This is my body) -- I heard also "per omnia secular secularum" (through all ages of ages, now is forever, all is what is here). My bastardized translation and odd understanding threw me into the scripture of prophecy, poetry, and projective verse.

In developing his poetics, [Charles] Olson drew from a wide array of influences, including mythology, the history and geography of Gloucester, and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Olson believed that the act of poetic creation should be connected to a primordial dimension of human existence. He wrote in his landmark essay “Projective Verse” (1950) that poetry was a form of “energy transferred from where the poet got it” to the reader. In distinction from the “closed form” of conventional poetic meter, Olson proposed an “open field” that “projects” organically from the poem’s content—i.e., the perception of the poet who interacts with and yet is an integral part of the poet’s immediate environment. Olson used the duration of a human breath, a basic human function that conveyed a poet’s vital energy, as the measure of a poetic line.  

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Olson#ref1106576

I would read Olson, Creeley, Williams, Merwin, Ginsberg, Rich, Snyder, Antoninus, Kinnell, Eliot, Pound, Duncan, Empson, Edson, Harjo, Hirshfield, Paston, Basho, Issa, Buson, Takahashi, Sakaki --among many others.

Poet was priest for me.

Poems, scripture.

The poetic, my monastery.

Today, in this cell, this poetic -- i.e. "an imaginative sensitive emotional thoughtful expression" (dictionary) of what is revealing itself -- is the muted vocation that cloisters me in daily practice.

This by Takahashi:

Destruction

by Shinkichi Takahashi

        English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

            Original Language Japanese

The universe is forever falling apart --

No need to push the button,

It collapses at a finger's touch:

Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,

Hordes leap from the tips

Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:

It's in your palm. There's room enough

On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:

Here is all the strength, here the greatest strength.

You and the sparrow are one

And, should he wish, he can crush you.

The universe trembles before him.

giaccio, il gelo non umano

 Sander-plow slowly

Passes toward town

Icy road

Not even deer

Chance

The footing

Wind

Blows hard

Ice clenches

Itself

As prayer

Might hope

Year slides

To end

Dont break

Bones or heart

splendore del cuore

 Heartshine

Let’s call it

That, or

Heart-hue

When inner

Feeling embraces

Outer appearance

With emotion

These rare

Times you

Are not there

But love is

arrenditi e vomita, mettila fine ora

some think

the oddity

of current

presidency

will have to

come crashing

down under

weight of

criminality

cruelty, and 

crushing lies --

but not me

I think it

will continue

until the end

of my time, that

liminal passage

from awfulness

to absolute abuse.

Absolve us our

awful thoughts

the pessimism

after watching

the cutting gutting

no, it will continue

and I will capitulate

join the crazies

praising the grand

mufti of mayhem --

all hail to himself!

monday afternoon

 not having

to go anywhere

or do

anything

my life 

becomes wide

with silence

stillness

the way water

leaks through

roof into

front room

collected in 

buckets on bed

behind swivel

chair, my life

amid and within all creation

Mostly I remember Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole on horseback (Thomas à Beckett and King Henry II) on a beach discussing the absurd fate landing on them and their friendship in a political time.

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain: 
Temptation shall not come in this kind again. 
The last temptation is the greatest treason: 
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

(--T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral)

The awkward calculus of ethical and moral clarity in a troubled time weighs on the human heart. Every assassin somewhere believes that are doing the right thing. The world is shocked at their action. Commentators endlessly discuss the rationale, the mental illness, the antagonistic motivations for their murderous act. Sides are taken. If he is handsome, a mythology forms. If foreign, a renewed hatred arises.

Beckett is murdered in the cathedral. The troublesome priest has been rid. Henry submits his back for the lash. He is penitent. But he is king. He rules on.

Human history is an unsatisfactory thing. Justice is seldom the outcome of dispute and political maneuvering. The cunning and clever, i.e. the rich and powerful, seldom are held accountable for despicable acts and cruel behavior.

It seems to go that way.

Our fate, if you will.

If you are a fatalist.

I prefer to think of it as simple, uncomplicated ignorance. Side-skirting the clamor to label bad behavior “evil,” I prefer to see it as a deficient heart and a disinterested mind.

 I begin to sense that the inner creates the outer. Then, if maturation continues, the inner becomes the outer. (Our mythology of the christian incarnation follows this process.)

To give the benefit of the doubt, I imagine when our evangelical fundamentalist friends blithely ask if I’ve accepted Christ as my personal lord and savior, they are asking from a deep unconscious place whether I understand that unless the clear and undivided inner wholeness that centers all of creation is seen and accepted, the outer expression of the world will remain and be the chaotic divisive confusion of ego-fractured separation and unfeeling dominance it is and has been since its origin.

“Christ,” in this mythology, is that which ‘saves’ us from the delusion of hostile difference and cruel indifference. Christ is the manifestation (some say in human form) of what might be called loving wholeness in particular expression purposed to heal the illusion of fragmentation and to assist in effectuating harmonious peace and attentive presence encouraging meaningful interconnection and compassion amid and within all creation.

The shorthand for this might be -- to take away sin.

If we were to take away institutional hubris and political machination, is “Christ” that which is meant to guide humanity (vide all creation) through chaos and despair into harmony, stability, and peace?

The christ reality, rather than being the proprietory patent of institution and church management, is open source  intercommunion of all being, all beings, seeking nourishing existence and loving service one unto the other.

The wrong reason is to have everyone join your belief system. The right deed is to allow love to appear in the inner and outer world on its own, in its own way.

what spirituality is

For Sunday Evening Practice: 

As year ends, I revisit my roots and invite you to look in.

I am enthused that genuine spirituality is everyday life, everyday encounters, everyday things. 

 

"The greatest discovery was that the heart of Celtic spirituality was simply living the life, following the Way, traveling the journey in the everyday ordinariness of life –the pain and the pleasure, the heartaches and the hopes, the disappointment and the dreams. This is of great importance because this is essentially what spirituality is.” (—Trevor Miller)

It intrigues me that (it is soberingly possible) what we’ve seen as our need of scriptures, gurus, clergy, shamans, masters, or the panoply of spiritual teachers, is a fading and diminishing need, giving way to an associative inner self-reflection and community intercommunication as our exploration and supportive correctivity/connectivity.

Are we (mercifully) being thrown back to ordinary experience and conversational intuition with all beings and things, here and now, to reveal our shared worth and our material/spiritual direction?

Cheers,

s&b

1.

Celtic Spirituality – A Beginner’s Guide

Trevor Miller reflects on Celtic Spirituality.

https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/articles/celtic-spirituality-a-beginners-guide/

...   ...   ...

Here is One-
Another Itself
             
meetingbrook 
      hermitage

  בס”ד   (With the help of heaven)  bəsiyyaʿtāʾ dišmayyāʾ

  إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ    (God willing) 'iin sha' ٱllah

saluer la dignité, χαιρετίζω την αξιοπρέπεια, rendere omaggio alla dignità, saluting dignity

to them that serve

who pledge to protect

from foreign and 

domestic enemies

with gratitude and

respect for what you do

for your country

above board and unshy --

you know your duty

you know what honor is

legitimate and courageous --

be faithful and respected

pas de tout

 Why sit

Why be still

Why not know

Silly questions 

Silly unmoving 

Silly awareness

I once wanted

Something, anything —

Now, nothing, suffices

I’m amazed

To be alone

With nothing else

summa teleologica

 The end of things

Driven by some intelligence

Beyond our ken

Proves, says Thomas

There is an intelligence

Beyond our grasping 

The fifth proof of

An existing God

That tumbersault mind

Happily lands on two feet —

Taking applause

Arms outstretched 

Bowing from waist

Bouquet arriving at stage —

Design, the end

Precedes beginning 

You are because what

You are doing adds up.

Go ahead, factor origin

Divided by duration

Equaling destination halved

And how’d by quotient 

Division without a divide

Positing a whole over parts

I was never good at math

Nor logic, the good is

Only only as good as the

Included bad, embracing

Choicelessness, unknown

Whims, necessary faults

All (it is said) of a piece

(Pieces broken on ground)

God, they say, will reconstruct 

Refashioning integrity despite

Shards and pieces and debris.

The compute, the calculation

Factors back within the scattered

Pieces— all of them, regathered.

The ergo, as Cummings wrote,

“All lose,whole find”

claustrated

 From barn door

Starlight

From bed,

End-light

anachronistic fidelity

 what do you mean

you are different

not the same

different

day is cold

eight bells

snow tightens

light darkens

perhaps we should

abandon who we think 

we are, the purity of

our preferences, let

what is passing

pass, without comment

the way the thought 

of peace is not peace

and a prayer is just 

a preference thrown like dice

mes défauts et mes péchés ne définissent pas qui je suis.

   'Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.' (Confucius)

Of course John Prine wrote

a song called “Christmas in Prison”

the day comes, the day goes 

people start talking about new year’s

no wrapping paper, no candles

just wary greetings from second tier.

and it's over, same old same old

voices loud and Christ got born and all

back in his home with steel door closed

night does its job putting day to sleep

like this

 Yes

One day follows

Another

Three hundred

Sixty three days

Until Christmas

It’s beginning

To look

A lot like this

recollecting

 Zen is the practice

Of no barriers;

Contemplation the practice

Of no boundaries.

May we (mais oui)

Practice well!

last leafs

 there are a few of them on the mountain

hangers-on, shimmying in brutal cold

staying put, watching friends fall away

willy nelson has his say, says it just right

hunkering down

 7 degrees

frigid morning

this Stephen’s Day

any day now, any day, now, we shall be . . .

 No prison conversation today

Education department closed

Just well-wishes

To all of us

In our prisons —

May we be released

Soon

pourquoi, parce que

78  “,,, because of the tender mercy of our God,

    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven 

79 to shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.”

—Luke 1 

summa catholica

Think about

Solitude

You’re

Alone

Thing about

Prayer

You’re

In God

Thing about

Being human

You’re alone

With God

λόγος, logos, reasoning, intuiting, energy of creating word

 “The eternal birth of the word takes place in the ground of the soul.”

                (--Meister Eckhart)

“It is the awakening of the pure I am in each of us as each of us.”

              (--Rupert Spira) 

https://youtu.be/oUVQBuEtrM8?si=f2pZoiqX3iI6L69H

Prosit!

cat in meditative communion this christmas morning

 

cheers!

peace, and all, good

 It is

Good to be

Human

This is

What Christmas

Holds

One day

I hope we

Become human

comes midnight

 Squeaking snow 

underfoot

Bright stars 

overhead—

Just that

Night

and so it is

(they tell me)

Christmas

so it is

what it is

each one within

nearing birth without

accept as true

 To believe is not a belief, it is an act of faith

It is not to understand, but to affirm, to consent

If I believe in God, I can say yes. Saying yes does

not mean I comprehend what yes implies, only 

that I step forward, or sit on cushion, or look in eye

while unable to say anything but please and thank you

to live deliberately

 shovel a bit

snow light and deep --

not going anywhere

of the whole rather than just fragmented parts

Putting my solitude into perspective, coming off Tuesday Evening Conversation about the good and the not-good, about cruelty and diseased self-aggrandizement, this from Edward R. Murrow on Buchenwald, April 15, 1945. I was eight months old.

https://youtu.be/YlhQvPfYSXk?si=6o2PIBnFLBdRWhb-

Robert Lowell wrote in his poem “Epilogue” -- 

All’s misalliance,

Yet why not say what happened?

It seems to me, today, that remembering the suffering of others is suitable impetus to long for the awakening in oneself and others (both of whom, obtuse and cruel), which awakening is the coming to earth of a new vision, a new expression, and a new embodiment of what it could mean to be human.

The Jesus story, now subsumed under Christmas lights and tinsel, gets pushed into the corner of living rooms and church carols. Instead of being seen as a radical invitation to love and transform the very nature of personal self into an interpersonal and inter-cosmic re-evaluation of existence itself, we have continued on our familiar holiday routines of gifts, goodies, and grousing.  

(Remember, these words from someone solitary and reclusive during these days of culmination of a calendar year and the festivities of theological sensationalism. These words are suspect and aperspectival.)

The cats have been fed and there’s more coffee in the kitchen

I’ve begun to consider the incarnation as the revelation of things as they are.

When we abstract all the folklore, myth, and metaphor, we look at desert people under the thumb of formidable and merciless rulers.

These rulers have replicated this impulse to dominate and control those living within the ambiance of their authority throughout history. 

This is the way things are. The question is -- is there something afoot, something not-yet, that pierces the facts of human existence as it is and has been -- so that a transformation, a going beyond how things have been, a devastating realization/penetration into a new reality, a new character, a new revelation is available and presenting itself?

I don’t know.

Are we so damaged by narcissistic self-absorption that the invitation to incarnate a new aseity, auto-generative, wholistic, autodidactic -- the unfiltered inchoate creative imagination of that-which-we-have-called-God? 

I don’t think I have fully understood this “story” this offering of incarnation and its universal imagination infusing all of creation and each being therein.

I don’t think we have understood this.

But the invitation to sit inside it, to contemplate it from within, and to empty out what no longer serves us toward some sort of moksha, some variant understanding of redemption...

Some arrival that recognizes both those who knew Buchenwald and those willing to embody the transforming ecstatic liberation remembering who we really are, who we are not-yet, becoming.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

                (--Robert Lowell, ibid)

Hashem (הַשֵּׁם)

(Or, as it might have played out in the neighborhood where I grew up:

    What’s your name? 

 

Don’t worry about my name. 

 

    What’ll I call you? 

 

Don’t call me anything. 

 

    How will I know it’s you? 

 

You won’t.  

 

    [silence] 

 

    What should I say? 

 

Say thank you, then shut up and go away! 

 [exeunt] 

 When you can’t grasp something, don’t. When you can’t hear something, stay silent. When you have no idea what to say or do, practice MU!

I’ll be on my cushion if you want me. 

it’s beginning, to look

 Plow passes

Quiet

Bald and Ragged

Stillness, mountains

Look out

As I do

At what is

Coming to be

and peace

 All good

I wish you

All good

huh . . . what trouble

Cuppa chai tea.

Waiting on snow.

Bread order picked up from Rockland.

Provisions stocked.

Dog and his mistress packed up and drove off.

Bird feeders filled. 

Till now you seriously

Considered yourself

To be the body and to have a form.

That is the primal ignorance

Which is the root cause of all trouble.

--Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

My primal ignorance turns to look at me.

My body sits in chair by window.

Banana bread.

Coffee milk.

“Huh...What trouble?” Jeremiah Johnson answered the old trapper who asked him if it all was worth the trouble.

Depends how you look at things.

Body just goes on doing what it does.

Ignorance or not, one step at a time.

Moving through.

let, instead, love

 The vitriol

Against this president

Becomes unproductive 

Let him go

He is meant to go

Let, instead, love

Pray to become

A better person

In his absence

at the brink

you can just tell when

a fool has stepped too far to

the edge of high drop

and it’s right there

Faggin says he will soon be able to prove that a tree has consciousness, that it has no need of a brain, but has consciousness. 

Entanglement took over thirty years to prove that entanglement exists after the first experiment showed that it exists because scientists didn’t want entanglement. ...It connects everything from the inside. It’s what allows the world to be holistic. (--Frederico Faggin)

In prison today we looked at Joseph Brodsky’s poem:

December 24, 1971

BY JOSEPH BRODSKY

For V.S.

 

When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.

At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.

Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,

is the cause of a human assault-wave

by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:

each one his own king, his own camel.

 

Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones,

caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.

Reek of vodka and resin and cod,

orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.

Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway

toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.

 

And the bearers of moderate gifts

leap on buses and jam all the doorways,

disappear into courtyards that gape,

though they know that there’s nothing inside there:

not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her,

round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

 

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that

brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.

Herod reigns but the stronger he is,

the more sure, the more certain the wonder.

In the constancy of this relation

is the basic mechanics of Christmas.

 

That’s what they celebrate everywhere,

for its coming push tables together.

No demand for a star for a while,

but a sort of good will touched with grace

can be seen in all men from afar,

and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

 

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding

chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.

Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.

He who comes is a mystery: features

are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may

not be quick to distinguish the stranger.

 

But when drafts through the doorway disperse

the thick mist of the hours of darkness

and a shape in a shawl stands revealed,

both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy

in your self you discover; you stare

skyward, and it’s right there:

                                                    a star.

 

Copyright Credit: Joseph Brodsky, "December 24, 1971" from Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999. Copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. 

One of the men wanted to be sure I made a note of what he was about to say in final circle: “Love is the action of removing within for the sake of without.”

Earlier a staff member engaged in playful banter with three of the men and said to one of them a sentence that also bears some thought: “They’re always together and I’m not.”

This notion of disappearing into the reality at hand resonates the holiday called Christmas coming up in three days.

One says the ‘why’ of incarnation and crucifixion has to do with love, “not to be devoid of his presence.”

An entering and an absenting?

I wondered if the “inside/outside” should be switched in his words on love. “No,” he said. 

And I take it to my meditation seat.

the essence of tyranny is predetermined answers to unasked questions

 "There are no questions to a machine. There are only answers to a machine."  (---Federico Faggin) 

Trumpism is a machine.

It has only its own answers

unhearing any questions asked 

affirming participation, what no longs to show

 Yes

If what is

Real and true

Whispers in darkness

So too the holy

Like morning mist

In spray of trees on mountain

Yes

If pale blue light

Brushstrokes upper left

Of northeast window pane

Yes

I say yes, this spiritual life

Of noticing and listening to

What longs to appear and sound

Yes

Let me out

I will go

Into emptiness there —

Yes

falling back on that which is in and of itself

 It is consciousness that creates mathematics, not mathematics that creates consciousness.  (---Federico Faggin) 

there it is

beyond mathematics

consciousness itself

options

 if you love me

become flesh

if you love what-is

become human

otherwise,

remain invisible

otherwise

utter no sound

in kitchen

I stand and stare at her

not saying anything -- dementia

practiced and revealed

how we appear

 darkness and silence, 

she said, the feminine --

light and logos shine through,

he said, nothing

pride of working class

Cat occupies swivel chair

Curls in corner of it by window

She thinks catching mouse in

Middle of night gives privileges,

Bah, phooey, I toss it from window

Sit in another chair

this sweet strong animal will bring us back

 Whoa, (pulling on reins) 

Good gal, ease up, (comes to stop)

Good goin’, my dark beauty

.(snorts, scrapes ground, stands still)

Far enough, steady girl, rest a beat

We’ll be turning back, (stands unmoving)

Wintah' balances on front legs,

Darkness at its end, beginning, still,

It is time to turn, (gently pulls 

head to left) looks down moonless trail

Starts ahead, slowly, easy, carrying

Light in saddlebag, as tired darkness,

Dismounted, on solid ground, is left behind—

Now each step inch by inch urges toward light

Winter’s cold rehab through stasis looks ahead

Each step inch by inch getting lighter

Deep darkness changed us, pausing, lets up, 

Look inside, we hear from little way, do you feel it?

Yes, yes (we think) we do. (Turning, turning), 

new dawn, new light. Right here, just now, turning

bird feeders are filled and hung

 I attended a Christmas party tonight

The place was green and red

All the people that were there

We’re sweet and kind and dead

I didn’t attend a party

Only headlights on the road

I’m told soon it will be Christmas

I’ll wander this abode

eyes, ears, mind

God and body from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Western Concept of God:

Incorporeality. 

 God has no body (from Latin, incorporale), or is non-physical. This is a central tenet of monotheistic religions, which insist that any references to God’s eyes, ears, mind, and the like are anthropomorphic. Christian belief in the incarnation is a unique case in which God takes on human form in Christ. 

While some regard God’s incorporeality as true analytically (that is, true by the very definition of the word “God”), others derive it from one or more other attributes. Accordingly, God cannot be corporeal because that would preclude his being eternal, immutable, and simple, for example. Furthermore, if God were corporeal and omnipresent, it would seem that all physical things would be part of God. Others derive divine incorporeality from an apparent incorporeal element of human nature, termed the soul or spirit.

So, what do you think about this?

       Me? I dunno.

It’s early yet. Take your time.

       Ok. Thanks. I will.

[end scene. lights dim. curtain falls. audience leaves]

One small boy looks at his mother and asks “What does it mean?”

She smiles at him, takes his hand, and, immediately, they disappear with whatever meaning they might have found.

Camera centers in to volunteer usher off to left who says: “Don't let the uncertainty turn you around. Go on and make a joyful sound.” (Quoting For a Dancer, from Late for the Sky, by Jackson Browne)

Or, perhaps, if something further is necessitated, Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

Poems, and corporeal beings, don’t just appear and disappear, you know! There’s more to it than meets the eye or is contained in our philosophy,

Act 1 Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, Hamlet says to his friend: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

Sigh!

[Exeunt omnes]