How very acute--and imaginative--these connections are, Martin! A timely
reminder that in addition to Lawrence's wise prescription of respect, truth,
and generosity, we absolutely must be more imaginative if we're to overcome
these reflexive binary polarities (left/right, Koran/Bible, us/them) that
are so "side"-creating at every level. It's hard to see how we'll be able to
stop waging war until we can stop making and taking sides--speaking in a
planetary "we" here.
And the Gnostics were, among other things, the first environmentalists of
record in the West, not (co)incidentally.
Someone posted this poem by Whitman--another alienated citizen--to the
WOM-Po list, and I found it very bracing in its steely irony, its harsh
refusal of sentimentality:
Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Candice
> Reading your words about weeping, Candice (27.9. 4:25), the following sprang
> to mind:
> "But man, proud man,/ Drest in a little briefe authoritie,/
> Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,/ (His glassie Essence) like an
> angry Ape/Plaies such phantastique tricks before high heauen,/
> As makes the Angels weepe: who with our spleenes,
> Would all themselves laugh mortal."
>
> Martin
> PC (Post-Cryptic) Interesting, isn't it, that _Revelations_ was kept in the
> canon, but the other more or less Gnostic texts, much less violent, were
> not. _The Thunder, Perfect Mind_ , for instance. is recommended to all Bible
> & Koran readers. "And I am an alien and a citizen".
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