On 10/3/04 9:22 PM, "Peter Larkin" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Just one little comment on belief/unbelief: noone seems to have taken up (did
> they?) that I was setting those two terms against "faith". Faith might be able
> to be (at times, visitationally) more than the sum of discrete rejected
> presences or summoned absences.
Nobody dared mention faith, Peter. I think writing is all about faith,
though in what is obviously a moot point.
> I think a lot of religious approaches have to be Wittgensteinian, ie having
> ladders and then being able to let them go.
Is this linked with what Rilke says in the Fifth Elegy?
Angel: therešs a place that we donšt know, and there
on some unsayable carpet, lovers display what now
they can never bring up to knowing - their bold
high figures of heartplay, their towers of pleasure, their
long-since groundless ladders, leaning
on only each other, tremulously, - and understand
before the surrounding onlookers, the innumerable soundless
dead:
Only Rilke is speaking of lovers. Which makes me think of a quote I read
coincidentally this week of Simone Weill's to the effect that "sexual energy
constitutes the physiological foundation" of mystical experience, since "we
haven't anything else with which to love". Though I realise you weren't
talking of mystical experience. Or are these merely dragging the divine
back to the libidinous?
Not at all sure this constitutes an argument, but anyway.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Editor, Masthead
http://www.masthead.net.au
Home page
http://www.alisoncroggon.com
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
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