DUST AND ASHES
“There is a worm hidden in the Cosmos”
( Constantin Noica )
even though things are stained
in wonder I notice:
they are still getting further stained
no one ever stops,
no one ever advances.
once
very closely
a pure sound passed
those that can still hear it
hasten to forget it
Constantin Noica (was a 20th century Romanian philosopher, essayist, and poet whose doctoral dissertation was a "Sketch on the history of How is it that there is anything new." He opposed "the logic of Ares" (the Greek god of war) with "the logic of Hermes" (the divine patron of herdsmen, thieves, oratory and wit, literature and poetry, athletics and sports, invention and trade, roads, boundaries and travelers; the gods' emissary to mankind, the conductor of souls into the afterlife). In other words, he opposes the scientific model -- describing reality as formal, abstract concepts in which the individual is a mere variable in the Whole -- with a way of thinking which considers the individual as a reflection of the Whole. The logic of Ares views existence as a statistical fact. The logic of Hermes understands the Whole through the part, it identifies the general principles of reality through the facts of a single existence.
ReplyDeleteIn 1949 the Romanian Communists sentenced Noica to 10 years of forced residence in Câmpulung-Muscel and then to 25 years of forced labor in the prison in Jilava (literally, "humid place") where the Iron Guard of the National Legionary State (a Fascist movement which Noica had supported) had killed 64 inmates in revenge for the murder of their leader in 1940, and where Romania's dictator Ion Antonescu had been executed in 1946. However, as part of a general amnesty, he was released in 1964. At his trial he said, "I am a merchant of ideas" -- various philosophical/mystical aphorisms, including the following:
ReplyDelete"The maladies of being, in other words of the spiritual being, have or can have something of a human positive in their deregulation. Man’s disorder is his source of creation."
"The real separation ― not the logical one, obtained by the razor-sharpness of the mind ― occurs inside the inseparable. Something comes unstuck from the environment in which it is caught, bringing it all along, or it turns against the environment in which it was caught in order to adhere better. The only 'possible separation' is that which takes over the exterior environment and turns it into an interior environment or one active from within."
"The more we explore and learn, the more our ignorance grows instead of diminishing."
"Where is not even a trace of a general sense, everything succumbs to the bad infinity of particular cases."
"Only the traveler, he who has the way from the very beginning, can seek."
"As far as we go, that much road we cover; we have the freedom to start on a journey or not, that is to engage in a philosophical quest or not; but once we started, the road is necessary. Human freedom consists in making emerge in the world what should be."
"The wave crosses all the categories penetrated: it is state and movement and identity and otherness, just as it is at the same time unity, plurality, totality. It is true that all real embodiment pertained implicitly to all the categories put together. But the wave unfolds them explicitly and goes beyond them. It is what it is distributed without being divided; it is concentration in expansion; it is the being that becomes; it is One and Multiple alike; it is a way of being and of not being, genesis and extinction, transmission of something else which is but transmission of itself; it is the vehicle and the road included."
"You will sometime remember it, you will return over it and you will be able to say amidst another world and full of so many other deeds: here is where I started from, this is what made this journey possible ... but you no longer recognize yourself in it and it no longer recognizes itself in you."
"The substance and manifestation of the world is given by the wave."
"What the wave brings more than movement is the return of the movement on itself in reflexiveness and thus the transmission little by little not only of a content but also of a form of movement. At the level of matter, the wave does not convey anything further: what it achieves is a displacement of displacement, a rolling of the rolling, a pure form."
"In binding things and thought there crops up a 'situation' that ties both things, in their states and process, and the thoughts over them."
"Man is a being that cannot obtain the good, knowledge, the beautiful all at once. He gets them at a second try. Man is an indirect, reflected being, lacking spontaneity. He must be reset. And with his resetting, things will get better reset too."
"From the vantage of philosophy, the truth is infinity."
"But the entire is just the essence that is completed through its unfolding."
"I dream of a school where they really teach nothing."
"...what is not yet, what was, what was not, but was about to be, what would be, what makes it be, what will have been, and even what will be."