It's really cold here right now, the temperature today is below freezing now. We have lit the coal fire though so hopefully things will at least warm up a bit inside! I'm doing my usual study and reading. I have been given two packages of books from my wishlist lately and I still don't know who they are from. Thank you so much to my kind benefactors, whoever you may be! I've already finished the letters by Rilke and the Leonora Carrington novel and I've been dipping into the Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin poetry books. I'm also half way through the conversations with Beuys. It's all so wonderful! I hadn't had any new books for a long time so you don't know how happy it made me. I don't know where I would be without books. The letters of Rilke were so beautiful, I didn't know he was also interested in science and I thought it was interesting the way the editor explained this in the chronicle at the end. He said that his interest in this area was based not so much on the desire to pursue any special branch of knowledge but as on a craving for the knowable as a hold on life. He said -
There are the starry skies, and I do not know what mankind has already learned about them, not even the order of the stars do I know. And so it is with flowers, with animals, with the simplest laws, that function here and there and go through the world in a few strides from beginning to end. How life occurs, how it operates in ordinary animals, how it ramifies and spreads, how life blossoms, how it bears: all that I long to learn. Through participation in it all to bind myself more firmly to reality - which so often denies me - to be of it , not only in feeling but also by knowledge, always and always; that I believe is what I need, to become more sure and not so homeless.
I also really enjoyed something in the foreward to the conversations with Beuys where the writer talks about a different formulation of 'the aesthetic' which goes back to its origins as the opposite of 'anaesthetic' or numbness. From this perspective, aesthetic comes to mean 'enlivened being'. This not only turns the contemporary usage of 'aesthetic', as something rather cosmetic and superficial, on its head, but links such 'enlivened being' to responsibility, not as a moral imperitive, but to response-ability or the ability to respond! So this overcoming of numbness and enlivening of being can engage one, make one internally active, mobilize people's imagination.
Anyway, maybe one day I will have something to say myself rather than just regurgitating bits and pieces from all the writings I like.
Continuing on the subject of mortality from last time I wrote here, I went to my first funeral last week. It was an interesting experience. I do not feel a personal loss as I didn't know him well, I had only met him a few times but watching his wife and his children and grandchildren was really sad. It was my mothers uncle and he had reached the amazing age of 91 so it was of course inevitable and he had lived a great and long life. It's always sad watching the family who have been left behind though and I am very sensitive I know but contemplating on someones life and all the precious things that have passed always makes me cry. My mum said he was a really good person and she had spent lots of wonderful summers at his and her aunts house when she was a child. When they were carrying the coffin down it was a very strange feeling, to think of the corpse lying inside there. I felt sad watching my grandmother too, he was her brother. There used to be seven brothers and sisters and now there is only two left, my grandmother and her sister.
It's must be very odd watching your big family slowly depleting. I suppose that is why new generations are so important, you see that at times like these when people need help or looked after and when someone dies and the family becomes smaller. I cannot imagine making a new generation myself though and sometimes that scares me, I guess time will tell. His son made a beautiful eulogy for him, talking about all the things he had taught him in his life. He talked about how his mother and father had met. It really tore at my heart. I honestly don't know how I will handle a funeral of someone I am really close to though. I had to work really hard not to start sobbing. It's strange that we have to try so hard to keep our emotions so under wraps here though, I've read about other cultures who will let all the grief come out with sound. I think it seems more natural. I don't think we could handle the noise of hundreds of crying people though as the way we deal with such things is so ingrained. Anyway, that is life and death and so it goes.
There are the starry skies, and I do not know what mankind has already learned about them, not even the order of the stars do I know. And so it is with flowers, with animals, with the simplest laws, that function here and there and go through the world in a few strides from beginning to end. How life occurs, how it operates in ordinary animals, how it ramifies and spreads, how life blossoms, how it bears: all that I long to learn. Through participation in it all to bind myself more firmly to reality - which so often denies me - to be of it , not only in feeling but also by knowledge, always and always; that I believe is what I need, to become more sure and not so homeless.
I also really enjoyed something in the foreward to the conversations with Beuys where the writer talks about a different formulation of 'the aesthetic' which goes back to its origins as the opposite of 'anaesthetic' or numbness. From this perspective, aesthetic comes to mean 'enlivened being'. This not only turns the contemporary usage of 'aesthetic', as something rather cosmetic and superficial, on its head, but links such 'enlivened being' to responsibility, not as a moral imperitive, but to response-ability or the ability to respond! So this overcoming of numbness and enlivening of being can engage one, make one internally active, mobilize people's imagination.
Anyway, maybe one day I will have something to say myself rather than just regurgitating bits and pieces from all the writings I like.
Continuing on the subject of mortality from last time I wrote here, I went to my first funeral last week. It was an interesting experience. I do not feel a personal loss as I didn't know him well, I had only met him a few times but watching his wife and his children and grandchildren was really sad. It was my mothers uncle and he had reached the amazing age of 91 so it was of course inevitable and he had lived a great and long life. It's always sad watching the family who have been left behind though and I am very sensitive I know but contemplating on someones life and all the precious things that have passed always makes me cry. My mum said he was a really good person and she had spent lots of wonderful summers at his and her aunts house when she was a child. When they were carrying the coffin down it was a very strange feeling, to think of the corpse lying inside there. I felt sad watching my grandmother too, he was her brother. There used to be seven brothers and sisters and now there is only two left, my grandmother and her sister.
It's must be very odd watching your big family slowly depleting. I suppose that is why new generations are so important, you see that at times like these when people need help or looked after and when someone dies and the family becomes smaller. I cannot imagine making a new generation myself though and sometimes that scares me, I guess time will tell. His son made a beautiful eulogy for him, talking about all the things he had taught him in his life. He talked about how his mother and father had met. It really tore at my heart. I honestly don't know how I will handle a funeral of someone I am really close to though. I had to work really hard not to start sobbing. It's strange that we have to try so hard to keep our emotions so under wraps here though, I've read about other cultures who will let all the grief come out with sound. I think it seems more natural. I don't think we could handle the noise of hundreds of crying people though as the way we deal with such things is so ingrained. Anyway, that is life and death and so it goes.
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you have such natural beauty!