>i spend a lot of time here looking at free running water and listening to
wind and shall be sleeping rough in its sound when the weather warms up<
Interesting, Lawrence, but pastoral. Sleeping rough, as it were, in say
Bradford or Leicester or Burnley, would not be a matter of free running
water, except in that one might want to throw oneself into it for
termination. No coasts, no illusory vistas of calm sea, no comforts of
family, or friends, no nice dinners, no anything at all, except blank
mindlost despair, speechtornaway.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 6:59 PM
Subject: Re: god, religion etc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer Compton <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 07 March 2004 17:05
Subject: god, religion etc.
> I do not feel the living presence of God, god, or gods or anything like
that.
> I do not live in that country.
Well, I doubt that anyone does. Those who think they do feel it, would tell
you that it is unmistakeable once you hear it, but so do those who hear
voices telling them to do this and that.
At lunch today friends and I fell to speaking of E M Forster - it started
badly enough with Kenneth Graham and Pan appearing near the end of the wind
in the willows and went on to _the story of a panic_ and _the road from
colonus_
in the latter the character whose name I have forgotten again has a pretty
overpowering experience in a plane tree and then meets people who forster
tells us were _ecstatic_, but finds their state merely _commonplace_
and though the stories are a little contrived and certainly now of another
country in the sense of unavailable as dead, they still speak to me in a way
which makes the graham drab and contrived and worse -
or there's the unbeliever who goes to heaven in the celestial omnibus and
panics and leaps out on the bridge shouting _i see london_ and falls through
it to his death
all this by a doubter
sometimes, often, i stand in front of the sea and i feel something i dont
feel elsewhere apart from cold and wet
it is outside the window now and i am glad it's there
i miss it elsewhere
in the years when i didnt go near it i missed it
i'm sure if i got my wordsworth out i'd find words for it
not coleridge, i think; not clare, not dh lawrence or thoreau
i could sit and watch the architecture of a bird for hours, nasty seagulls
being things of great beauty
i do not for a moment say i feel any sense of presence when i look at the
intricacy evolution has produced - i'll take the blind watchmaker whole
but trying, only ever trying, to look out of the human and into the avian or
whatever, then sometimes, illusory as I am sure it is, I have an experience
of seeing myself in a space with a dimension i do not normally perceive
i am not sure what that dimension is but it's to do with where i might
stand, an awareness that there is a depth which is not to do with distance
but only to do with accepting that it is possible to see from somewhere that
isnt mine; and therefore from before me and from after me
i spend a lot of time here looking at free running water and listening to
wind and shall be sleeping rough in its sound when the weather warms up
and i will not say that there are spirits in them; i dont feel that; but i
listen to their utterance and the sound sustains me and reorients me so that
i know where some things are better than i did before... until the memory of
the sounds fades
L
|