Cities and Thrones And Powers

Cities and Thrones and Powers,

Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth,

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth, The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,

She never hears

What change, what chance, what chill,

Cut down last year’s:

But with bold countenance,

And knowledge small,

Esteems her seven days’ continuance

To be perpetual.

So time that is o’er kind,

To all that be,

Ordains us e’en as blind,

As bold as she:

That in our very death,

And burial sure,

Shadow to shadow, well-persuaded, saith, “See how our works endure!”

(Rudyard Kipling)

In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves

reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life

and, yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through rages of fog

where we stood, saying I

(Adrienne Rich)

When I shall sleep

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep

Without identity,

And never care how rain may steep,

Or snow may cover me!

No promised heaven these wild desires

Could all, or half, fulful;

No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,

Subdue this quenchless will!

So said I, and still say the same;

Still, to my death, will say—

Three gods within this little frame

Are warring night and day:

Heaven could not hold them all, and yet

They all are held in me;

And must be mine till I forget

My present entity!

Oh, for the time when in my breast

Their struggles will be o’er!

Oh, for the day when I shall rest,

And never suffer more!

(Emily Bronte)

M!rage

The hope I dreamed of was a dream,

Was but a dream; and now I wake

Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,

For a dream’s sake.

I hang my harp upon a tree,

A weeping willow in a lake;

I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt

For a dream’s sake.

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;

My silent heart, lie still and break:

Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed

For a dream’s sake.

(Christina Rossetti)

The !shade

He speaks truly who speaks the shade. (Paul Celan)
Tragedy is restful because you know that there is no more hope, dirty sneaking hope; that you are caught, caught at last like a rat in a trap. (Jean Anouilh)

W!ttgenstein’s Beetle

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein uses an analogy in an attempt to clarify some of the problems involved in thinking of the mind as something over and above behaviour. Imagine, he says, that everyone has a small box in which they keep a beetle. However, no one is allowed to look in anyone else’s box, only in their own. Over time, people talk about what is in their boxes and the word “beetle” comes to stand for what is in everyone’s box.

Through this curious analogy, Wittgenstein is trying to point out that the beetle is very much like like an individual’s mind. No one can know exactly what it is like to be another person or experience things from another’s perspective (look in someone else’s box), but it is generally assumed that the mental workings of other people’s mind are very similar to our own (everyone has a beetle which is more or less similar to everyone else’s). However, it does not really matter – he argues – what is in the box, or whether everyone has a beetle, since there is no way of checking or comparing. In a sense, the word “beetle” – if it is to have any sense or meaning – simply means “what is in the box”. From this point of view, the mind is simply “what is in the box” – or rather “what is in your head”.

Wittgenstein aruges that although we cannot know what it is like to be someone else, to say there must be special mental entity called a mind that makes our experiences private is wrong. Part of the reason he thinks this way is because he considers language to have meaning through public usage. In other words, when we talk of having a mind (or a beetle), we are using a term that we have learnt through conversation and public discourse. Furthermore, the word we have learnt can only ever mean “whatever is in your box” – i.e. your mind – and should not therefore be used to refer to some entity or special mental substance since no one can know that such a thing exists (we cannot see into other people’s boxes).

You can’t study the darkness by flooding !t with l!ght.

Cats are known to see within the dark. Yet, if you had sight like a cat, even for one day, would you really want to see what’s in the dark?

Proserp!na

Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, – one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar how far away,
The nights that shall become the days that were.

Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listenfor a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
O, Whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring -
‘Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine’.
(D. G. Rossetti)

The Meaning of N!ght

For Death is the meaning of night

The eternal shadow

Into which all lives must fall

All hopes expire

(P. Rainsford Daunt, ‘From the Persian’)

Now Sleeps the Cr!mson Petal

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson)