Eschaton

See the Light

Lucky Finds

In Midlife: A Jungian Perspective by Murray Stein
pages 49-53

“At midlife a person runs into a period when the liminality that is produced by external facts such as aging, loss of loved ones, or the failure to attain a dream of youthful ambition combines with the liminality that is generated internally by independently shifting intrapsychic structures, and the result is an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, one that often endures for years. At this point diachronic and synchronic liminality come together synchronistically. "Synchronism" is defined in Webster’s Third International Dictionary with an image that aptly portrays this kind of cooperation of forces: it is ''the condition of excessive rolling obtaining where a ship's rolling period is equal to the wave period or to one hall the wave period." When these two motions collide in this pattern of cooperation, the ship's natural roll becomes excessive. This is midlife liminality. Always the ship is rolling, and always some liminality is present within the psyche. Always, too, the sea is rolling: life throws up crises and failures that prove our limitations all the time. But when these two motions get together, and the force of each is great enough, they produce a degree of rolling that can reach excessive proportions. In this excessive rolling, through an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, the Hermetic attitude and the presence of Hermes are particularly welcome and valuable...

Like the unconscious itself, which in part resists being boxed into fixed temporal contexts and causal sequences but always keeps to itself a measure of freedom to float and to drift, to pass though the keyholes of the psychological shelters we construct' Hermes and liminality appear surprisingly and unexpectedly in the forms of dreams, fantasies, and synchronistic events. While Chronos-controlled consciousness seeks to fix these and box them in, Hermes and the world of liminality slip past its control Points and hasten away, remaining elusive.

Is there a more Hermetic method, then, that might be up to the job of elucidating midlife liminality, and conveying its quality and meaning? Perhaps we should free our method, like liminality frees the soul, from the strictures of systematic order and diachronic progression and move Hermetically instead by floating freely, by associative wandering, by apercu, by backtracking and rhetorical repetition, by stealth add thievery. Brainstorms, insights, lucky finds, intuitions, the play of dreams – if these are threaded together and held somewhat loosely in hand, will we not have a style that belongs to Hermes rather then to grandfather Chronos (or to brother Apollo)? But will this method 'produce,' or will it like Hermes who ''beguiles endlessly the tribes of mortal men throughout the night” (Hymn 577-78) deceive us into thinking we have a result, some thing to hold on to, to take away and apply, when in fact the gain is liable to evaporate with the turning of a page or the closing of this book, leaving us empty-handed and confused? If we are deceived in this way, however, it is a taste of liminality itself and also authentically Hermetic. To be beguiled into thinking there is something solid where there are actually only mirages and insubstantial vapors resembles the experience we are trying to explore and depict. So if this is the result, it will be a true picture of liminality. When people come out of midlife liminality and think back on it, they may not believe it really happened. It has the quality of dreams.”

Angels Appear

 My mother loved these two poems.

 

Abou Ben Adhem 

~ by Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. 
                                                      

Little Boy Blue

~ by Eugene Field 

 

The little toy dog is covered with dust,   
    But sturdy and staunch he stands;   
The little toy soldier is red with rust,   
    And his musket moulds in his hands.   
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
    And the soldier was passing fair;   
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue   
    Kissed them and put them there.   
     
"Now don't you go till I come," he said,   
    "And don't you make any noise!"
So, toddling off to his trundle bed,   
    He dreamt of the pretty toys;   
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song   
    Awakened our Little Boy Blue—   
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
    But the little toy friends are true!   
     
Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,   
    Each in the same old place,   
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,   
    The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through   
    In the dust of that little chair,   
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,   
    Since he kissed them and put them there.   

                                               

Indoor Flowers

 

 

Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. 2017 

Things that Matter

The Dangling Conversation

~ by Simon & Garfunkel 

It's a still life water color,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtain lace
And shadows wash the room.
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
The borders of our lives.

And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert Frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we've lost.
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.
            

 
Frederick Wiseman - High School (1968) Extract : Simon and Garfunkel : The Dangling Conversation

Her Own Society

The Soul Selects Her Own Society (303)

~ by Emily Dickinson

 

 
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—

Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—
At her low Gate—
Unmoved—an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat—

I've known her—from an ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of her attention—
Like Stone—


                                 

Unaswerable Questions

Under the Harvest Moon

~ by Carl Sandburg

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
                            

Whatever's Offered

To a Child Dancing in the Wind

~ by W.B. Yeats 

 
I

Dance there upon the shore;   
What need have you to care   
For wind or water’s roar?   
And tumble out your hair   
That the salt drops have wet;            
Being young you have not known   
The fool’s triumph, nor yet   
Love lost as soon as won,   
Nor the best labourer dead   
And all the sheaves to bind.     
What need have you to dread   
The monstrous crying of wind?   
  

II

Has no one said those daring   
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?   
Or warned you how despairing     
The moths are when they are burned,   
I could have warned you, but you are young,   
So we speak a different tongue.   
 
O you will take whatever’s offered   
And dream that all the world’s a friend,     
Suffer as your mother suffered,   
Be as broken in the end.   
But I am old and you are young,   
And I speak a barbarous tongue.
                           

The Old Sun

Meditation

~ by Charles Baudelaire
    translated by Barbara Gibbs

 

Be tranquil, O my Sorrow, and be wise.
The Evening comes, is here, for which you sought:
The Dusk, wrapping the city in disguise,
Care unto some, to others peace has brought.

Now while the sordid multitude with shame
Obeying Pleasure's whip and merciless sway,
Go gathering remorse in servile game,
Give me your hand, my Sorrow, come this way,

Far from them. See the years in ancient dress
Along the balconies of heaven press,
Smiling Regret from deepest waters rise;

Beneath an arch the old Sun goes to bed,
And like a winding-sheet across the skies,
Hear, my Beloved, hear the sweet Night tread.

                                  

The Professors of Water

Whenever I Go There 

~ by W.S. Merwin 

 

Whenever I go there everything is changed

The stamps on the bandages the titles
Of the professors of water

The portrait of Glare the reasons for
The white mourning

In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning

Is broken

No wonder the addresses are torn

To which I make my way eating the silence of animals
Offering snow to the darkness

Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one