Hi Alison, a revealing text on you and sure I am pleased to meet you,
" These sorts of experiences for me have always been
so intensely about the present; in a way, the total reverse of
transcendent (I am open to the idea that might end up being the same
thing)..."
yes, I always meet duality, the thing and its opposite, an interesting tao.
Have a nice day, Anny
> Yes...
>
> Coincidentally, I am rereading AL Rowse's _A Cornish Childhood_,
> which I haven't read since I was about 15. Tregonissy is where I
> lived as a child between four and six years old (and was the name of
> our house), and my first school was Carclaze primary school, so it's
> all very evocative for me; and more, it's forcing me to reflect what
> a typically Cornish life pattern I have had, being the daughter of a
> miner, born when he was working on the gold mines in South Africa,
> and how even born as late as I was, I am a displaced and forgetful
> member of that diaspora of Cousin Jacks, as my father, good graduate
> of the Camborne School of Mines as he is, still calls his Cornish
> mining friends. But to return to the point, I like Rowse's
> description of his first sense of aesthetic experience as a child:
>
> "I remember well the peculiar purity of the blue sky seen through the
> white clusters of apple-blossom in spring. I remember being
> moon-struck looking at it one morning early on my way to school. It
> meant something for me; what, I couldn't say. It gave me an unease
> of heart...
>
> "In that very moment it seemed that time stood still, that for a
> moment time was held up and one saw experience as through a rift
> across the flow of it, a shaft into the universe. But what gave such
> poignancy to the experience was that, in the very same moment as one
> felt time standing still, one knew at the back of one's mind, or with
> another part of it, that it was moving inexorably on, carrying onself
> and life with it. So that the acuity of the experience, the reason
> why it moved one so profoundly, was that at bottom it was a protest
> of the personality against the realisation of its final extinction."
>
> I guess the sentimentality occurs when this acute sense of mortality
> blurs into mere nostalgia. I agree with Nietzsche that nostalgia is
> a deathly thing. These sorts of experiences for me have always been
> so intensely about the present; in a way, the total reverse of
> transcendent (I am open to the idea that might end up being the same
> thing): a realisation of my physical actuality in time and place; and
> they have so often occurred to me in unlikely places. The glitter of
> moonlight on a most unromantic tarmacadam bridge across the Merri
> Creek, where the trees trail plastic bags as souvenirs from the
> previous winter's floodline, is one; or the view across the
> industrial Western suburbs from its few vantage points in certain
> light (it is always about light for me) have done that. And art that
> does it for me has often been attacked by others for its ugliness.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
> --
>
> "The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
> Albert Camus
>
> Alison Croggon
> Home page
> http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>
> Masthead Online
> http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
>
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