Leave words

[sus]

It's fun being around couples/colleagues that are really good at unspoken communication they're so seamless and coordinated, a glancing look and suddenly they're doing somersaults in sync


8:40

 

[sus]

Emotions are something that contemporary culture thinks we should talk much more about. They need verbal processing. Experience must be converted into language for analysis.

One of my favorite texts ever, "On Charon's Wharf" by Andre Dubus, takes the side of "words distort, don't trust them, they get us away from truth." Really beautiful essay on love:

These are the nights when we sit in that kitchen and talk too long and too much, so that the words multiply each other, and what they express — pain, doubt, anxiousness, dread — become emotions which are not rooted in our true (or better) selves, which exist apart from those two gentle people who shared eggs at this same table which now is soiled with ashes and glass-rings.

These nights can destroy us. With words we create genies which rise on the table between us, and fearfully we watch them hurt each other; they look like us, they sound like us, but they are not us, and we want to call them back, see them disappear like shriveling clouds back into our throats, down into our hearts where they can join our other selves and be forced again into their true size: a small I among many other I‘s. We try this with more words and too often the words are the wrong ones, the genies grow, and we are approaching those hours after midnight when lovers should never quarrel, for the night has its mystery too and will not be denied, it loves to distort the way we feel and if we let it, it will. We say: But wait a minute … But you said … But I always thought that …Well how do you think I feel, who do you think you are anyway? Just who in the hell do you think you are?

There are no answers, at least not at that table. Each day she is several women, and I am several men. We must try to know each other, understand each other, and love each other as best we can. But we cannot know and understand all of each other. This is a time in our land when lovers talk to each other, and talk to counselors about each other, and talk to counselors in front of each other. We have to do this. Many of us grew up in homes whose table and living room conversations could have been recorded in the daily newspaper without embarrassing anyone, and now we want very much to explore each other, and to be explored. We are like children in peril, though, when we believe this exploring can be done with words alone, and that the exploring must always give answers, and that the exploring is love itself rather than a way to deepen it. For then we kill our hearts with talk, we place knowing and understanding higher than love, and failing at the first two, as we sometimes must, we believe we have failed at the third. Perhaps we have not. But when you believe you no longer love, you no longer do.

I need and want to give the intimacy we achieve with words. But words are complex: at times too powerful or fragile or simply wrong; and they are affected by a tone of voice, a gesture of a hand, a light in the eyes. And words are sometimes autonomous little demons who like to form their own parade and march away, leaving us behind. Once in a good counselor’s office I realized I was not telling the truth. She was asking me questions and I was trying to answer them, and I was indeed answering them. But I left out maybe, perhaps, I wonder. … Within minutes I was telling her about emotions I had not felt. But by then I was feeling what I was telling her, and that is the explosive nitroglycerin seeping through the hearts of lovers.

 

[sus]

I think realizing that all your forms of expression, verbal or nonverbal, are all geared around controlling others. It makes you shirk back a little, if you're not a sociopath.

 

[catalog]

Late Wittgenstein v archetypal of this whole 'leave unspoken' things: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Sontag has the essay on silence that brings up Wittgenstein but also Duchamp quitting art to make chess, and the actress in Bergman's Persona.

They all go back to speaking sooner or later. It's a phase a refusal a shunning a seclusion a retreat. Zarathustra in the cave. This whole tradition of prophets.

Was it George Steiner who said that after the Holocaust, we could no longer have art? Slightly different thing I know but same sentiment ie that for certain tasks, as you say, or let's say, certain modes of creation are no longer suitable

 

[catalog]

And then there's nonverbal communication stuff. Which became a cliche (all the "95% of communication is nonverbal" garbage). But obviously there's a substantial array of biological reading and writing tools that're always firing when you're in the world, and especially when you're with other people. Body face eyes mouth. Are the muscles tight or loose.

But there is some truth to this no? 90% of communication is body language I mean?

I guess you are saying it's garbage cos it effectively means that what we largely do here on dissensus is 10% communicate...

Which I'll leave hanging.

Cos is it not interesting how several of us have now met irl?

And even tho u & I only zoomed, was not a new landscaoe opened up?

I was having a conversation with someone at work who said he really thought, when he was in his 20s, that he thought the next gen would be not so arsed about how they looked, that beauty could he something more than skin deep.

But it's not happened has it. As tech and verbal/chat only communication has proliferated, so too we've seen proportional rise in beauty modding etc

 

[sus]

I just don't think assigning percentages to meaning that way is useful. The 95 number comes from a single study performed half a century ago on undergraduates measuring a specific kind of task in and response. The generalized principle it has become has no basis in fact or science, it's pseudo science regurgitated by the business school class

 

[sus]

Definitely nonverbal communication and body language is very important. But I think putting an imaginary number on things is more mystification. Not clarifying the situation. The false impression that we understand

 

[mixed_biscuits]

that're

Non-verbal communication can't come up with that beauty!

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Emotions are something that contemporary culture thinks we should talk much more about. They need verbal processing. Experience must be converted into language for analysis.

One of my favorite texts ever, "On Charon's Wharf" by Andre Dubus, takes the side of "words distort, don't trust them, they get us away from truth." Really beautiful essay on love:

Explain yourself!

 

[mixed_biscuits]

shirk back

shrink back

 

[sus]

Ok boomer

 

[mixed_biscuits]

I just don't think assigning percentages to meaning that way is useful. The 95 number comes from a single study performed half a century ago on undergraduates measuring a specific kind of task in and response. The generalized principle it has become has no basis in fact or science, it's pseudo science regurgitated by the business school class

When new hires at work were invited to interview - ostensibly a primarily verbal event - I could predict very accurately what their important personality characteristics were and what hazards and difficulties they would present from just seeing them walk around for 5 seconds i.e. I was gleaning more of the information the interview was intended for than the interview did...when they would go on to behave as expected I would say to the interviewer 'what the hell did you expect?!'...in other words, the interview's also importantly a chance to get a handle on them as people through the way they couch those words, but it seems that the words actually would disrupt that process.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Ok boomer

You're the one relying solely on words apparently.

 

[blissblogger]

The last chapter of Love's Body by Freudian-mystic Norman O. Brown is titled "Nothing" and is about leaving behind language. The chapter, like the preceding ones, is in large part a sample-text woven of quotes from poets, philosophers, religious thinkers, on the subject of silence. Either that or it is Norm's annotations of earlier other's thoughts.

NOTHING

The rest is silence; after the last judgment, the silence.

Cf. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 242.

How to be silent. In a dialectical view: silence and
speech, these two, are one. Apollonius of Tyana said silence also is a logos. And words do not spoil the silence
for those who have ears to hear what is left unsaid. That is, there is the possibility of speaking with tongues. Apollonius
said, do not wonder that I know all languages since
I know what men do not say. And Freud says, "He that
has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself
that no mortal man can keep a secret. If his lips are silent,
he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him
at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the
most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite
possible to accomplish."
Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," 94.
Cf. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, I, i, 19. *5<*257

The fall is into language.

For, nothing spake to me but the fair Face
Of Hev'n and Earth, when yet I could not speak:
I did my Bliss, when I did Silence, break.

And overcoming the consequences of the fall is speaking
with tongues. Language carried to the extreme, to the end:
a. lapse into pre-lapsarian language; eating again of the
tree of knowledge, a second fall into the second innocence;
verbum infans, the infant or ineffable word.

Traherne, "Dumness."'

Cf. Richard, Mallarme, 576.

Verbum infans, the infant or ineffable word, is speech
and silence reconciled; is symbolism. "In a symbol there is
concealment and yet revelation: hence, therefore, by
silence and by speech acting together, comes a double
significance."

Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book III, ch. Ill, "Symbols."
Cf. Sharpe, "Psycho-Physical Problems Revealed in Language: an Examination of Metaphor," 201.

Freud knows that even if there were no censor, we
would still have symbolism. The doctrine of the unconscious, properly understood, is a doctrine of the falseness
of all words, taken literally, at their face value, at the level
of consciousness. The true psychic reality, which is the
unconscious, cannot ever be put into words, cannot ever
be translated from the silence into words. The unconscious
is and will remain forever ineffable: therein, precisely, lies
the distinction between unconscious and pre-conscious.
The too that can be told is not the eternal tao;
The name that can be named is not a permanent name.

Nai-Tung Ting, "Laotzu's Critique of Language," 8.
Cf. Freud, General Introduction, 156; The Ego and the Id, 12, 21-23;
"The Unconscious," 134; "Interpretation of Dreams," 54 in., 544.


To reconnect consciousness with the unconscious, to
make consciousness symbolical, is to reconnect words with
silence; to let the silence in. If consciousness is all words
and no silence, the unconscious remains unconscious.
To redeem words, out of the market place, out of the
barking, into the silence; instead of commodities, symbols.

When silence
Blooms in the house, all the paraphernalia of our existence
Shed the twitterings of value and reappear as heraldic devices.

Duncan, Letters, XVII.

Speech, as symbolism, points beyond itself to the
silence, to the word within the word, the language buried
in language; the universal language or Catholic religion,
quod semper quod ubique quod db omnibus; the true
Esperanto or speaking with tongues; the primordial lan
guage, from before the Flood or the Tower of Babel; lost
yet ready to hand, perfect for all time; present in all our
words, unspoken. To hear again the primordial language
is to restore to words their full significance. As dreams do
—"The dream has only to restore to these words their full
significance." The full significance, the etymology, the subterranean original meaning.

Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," 399,
Cf. Freud, General Introduction, 171-176, 189; Moses and Monotheism,
157-159. Barfield, Poetic Diction.

To restore to words their full significance, as in
dreams, as in Finnegans Wake, is to reduce them to non
sense, to get the nonsense or nothingness or silence back
into words; to transcend the antinomy of sense and non
sense, silence and speech. It is a destruction of ordinary
language, a victory over the reality-principle; a victory
for the god Dionysus; playing with fire, or madness; or
speaking with tongues; the dialect of God is solecism.
The word within the word, the unheard melody, the
spirit ditties of no tone. The spiritualization of the senses,
a restoration of the unsullied sense-activity of man in
paradise. Remain faithful to the earth; but the earth has
no other refuge except to become invisible: in us.

Cf. Dani61ou, Origen, 307. Rilke cited in Heller, Disinherited Mind, 169.

Get the nothingness back into words. The aim is
words with nothing to them; words that point beyond
themselves rather than to themselves; transparencies,
empty words. Empty words, corresponding to the void
in things.

Transparency. To let the light not on but in or
through. To look not at the text but through it; to see
between the lines; to see language as lace, black on white;
or white on black, as in the sky at night, or in the space
on which our dreams are traced.

Cf. Richard, Mallarm6, 388, 484. McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 106-107.

A play of light, an iridescence, in the empty air.
Against, gravity; against the gravity of literalism, which
keeps our feet on the ground. Against weighty words,
the baggage of traditional meaning and the burden of the
law; travel light. Gravity is from the fall, and is to be
deJBed; deliver us from the pull of the fundamental. Practice levity, and levitation. Oh for the wings of a dove, the
spirit; the winged words that soar, the hyperbole or
ascension.

Cf. Lubac, Histoire et esprit, 335. Richard, Mallarme, 298-299, 382.

 

[blissblogger]

part 2 of "Nothing", final chapter of Love's Body


Feet off the ground. Freedom is instability; the destruction of attachments; the ropes, the fixtures, fixations,
that tie us down. Empty words; dissolve the solid meanings. To dissipate the gravity, the darkness of matter, let the light in.
To illuminate and ventilate, let words be filled with light
and air: spirit. Let there be light. Love without attachment is light. Consciousness penetrates the darkness;
consciousness is an opening or void.

Admit the void; accept loss forever. Not to admit the
void is the trouble with those schizophrenics who treat
words as real things. Schizophrenic literalism equates
symbol and original object so as to retain the original
object, to avoid object-loss. Freedom in the use of symbol
ism comes from the capacity to experience loss. Wisdom
is mourning; blessed are they that mourn.

Kerouac, "Belief and Techniques for Modern Prose," 57.
Cf. Segal, "Symbol Formation," 395. Roheim, Origin and Function of
Culture, 93.

The absence, the empty grave. The work of the spirit
is deliverance, volatilization. The spiritual, pneumatic, airy
body, filled with nothing; takes flight, for heaven.

Cf. Richard, MallarmS, 379, 390-391, 398-399. Govinda, Foundations of
Tibetan Mysticism, 263-264.
261

Mourning the absence. Symbolism conveys both
absence and presence. To see three truths with the same
mind: tilings are real, unreal, and neither real nor unreal.

Cf. Pascal, Pens6es, no. 676. "A Glossary of Japanese Buddhism for Ad
vanced Students," 32,

The absence, the void. On the other side of the veil
is nothing; utopia; the kingdom not of this world. The
Utopia of nihilism, the negation of the negation; the world
annihilated. "Verily, there is a realm, where there is
neither the solid nor the fluid, neither heat nor motion,
neither this world nor any other world, neither sun nor
moon. . . . There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated,
Uncreated, Unformed. If there were not this Unborn,
this Unoriginated, this Uncreated, this Unformed, escape
from the world of the born, the originated, the created, the
formed, would not be possible."

Buddha in Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 58.

The world annihilated, the destruction of illusion.
The world is the veil we spin to hide the void. The destruction of what never existed. The day breaks, and the
shadows flee away.
The absence; a withdrawal, leaving vacant space, ov void, to avoid the plenum of omnipresence. The god whoa
mercifully, does not exist.

Cf. Machado, "Siesta: En Memoria de Abel Martin." Weil, La Pesantew
et la Grace, 37.

A void, an opening for us, to leave the place where
we belong; a road, into the wilderness; for exodus, exile.

The proletariat has no fatherland, and the son of man no
place to lay his head. Be at home nowhere.
Accept loss forever. To lose one's own soul. "Satori,
when the ego is broken, is not final victory but final defeat,
the becoming like nothing." Or no one; I'm a noun.
Powell, Zen and Reality, 72.

The obstacle to incarnation is our horror of the void.
Instead of vanity, emptiness. Being found in the shape
of a human being, he emptied himself.
Philippians II, 7.

Cf. Weil, La Pesanteur et la grace, 62.

A pregnant emptiness. Object-loss, world-loss, is the
precondition for all creation. Creation is in or out of the
void; ex nihilo.
Cf. Stokes, Greek Culture, 76.

Creation is out of nothing: the unreal awakens us out
of the sleep of reality. Imagination is a better artist than
imitation; for where one carves only what she has seen,
the other carves what she has not seen; that never was on
sea or land.

Cf. Philostratus in Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 128.

Creation out of nothing. Time and space are integrated into that ultimate pointlike unity, bindu: point, dot,
zero, drop, germ, seed, semen. The primal oudad.

Cf. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 116. Jones, Occult
Philosophy, 140.

It is made out of nothing. If matter is nothing, we are
materialists. Else matter is mother; but there is no Nature.
Or fecal, the mere excretion.

"If this feeling of emptiness, of something 'without
form, and void,' can be deliberately accepted, not denied,
then the sequel can be an intense richness and fullness of
perception, a sense of the world re-born."

Psychotherapy is rebirth; and to be reborn, we have to pass through the
grave. Crucified, dead, and buried—the analysand on the
couch.

Milner, "Psychoanalysis and Art," 97.

The analysand on the couch. Deeper than the analytic
rule of free speech is silence. That peculiar attitude, so
different from ordinary thinking, which is necessary for
free association, "a kind of absent-minded watchfulness,"
or wise blindness; to let the silence in, or darkness at noon.

Cf. Freud, General Introduction, 112. Milaer, "Psychoanalysis and Art,"
81.

In psychotherapy nothing happens but an exchange
of words. New words for old; a stylistic reformation, renaissance. To be reborn, words have to pass through death,
the silence of the grave. Freud, on the theme of the Three
Caskets, of the third one, Cordelia, who is silent: "dumb
ness is in dreams a familiar representation of death."

Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," 248; cf. General Introduction,
21.

Not: "controlled regression in the service of the ego,"
but "an active surrender of the controlling and deliberative mind." The ego is loquacity, the interior monologue,
the soliloquy which isolates. The way of silence leads to
the extinction of the ego, mortification. To become empty,
to become nothing; to be free from the constrictions of the
self, to have no self, to be of no mind, to be a dead man.

While alive
Be a dead man,
Thoroughly dead;
And act as you will,
And all is good.

Suzuki in Fromm et al., Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 16.
Cf. Milner, "Psychoanalysis and Art," 89. Picard, World of Silence, 48.
Williams, Radical Reformation, 133, 157.

The way of silence is not only death but incest. Paracelsus says, "He who enters the kingdom of God must first
enter his mother and die." The silence which is death is also our mother. Freud in the Three Caskets showed the
identity of bride and mother and death. The matrix in
which the word is sown is silence. Silence is the mother
tongue.

Paracelsus in Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 57-58.

In the resurrection, in the life after death, life has
still one foot in the grave, and words remain wedded to
the silence. A reticent style; elliptical expression; that
hearing they may hear, and not understand. The meaning
is not in the words but between the words, in the silence;
forever beyond the reach, the rape, of literal-minded
explication; forever inviolate, forever new; the still un
ravished bride of quietness. The virgin womb of the im
agination in which the word becomes flesh is silence; and
she remains a virgin.


The word is made flesh. To recover the world of
silence, of symbolism, is to recover the human body. "A
subterranean passage between mind and body underlies
all analogy." The true meanings of words are bodily meanings, carnal knowledge; and the bodily meanings are the
unspoken meanings. What is always speaking silently is
the body.

Shaipe, "Psycho-Physical Problems revealed in Language: an Examina
tion of Metaphor," 202.

The unspoken meaning is always sexual. Of sexuality
we can have only symbolical knowledge, because sexual
is carnal. Death and love are altogether carnal; hence their
great magic and their great terror. Love that never told
can be. It is the fool king Lear who asks his daughters to
tell how much they love him. And it is the one who loves
him who is silent.

It cannot be put into words because it does not consist of things. Literal words always define properties.
Beyond the reality-principle and reification is silence, the
flesh. Freud said, Our god Logos; but refrain from uniting
with words, in order to unite with the word made flesh.
Cf. Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, 61.

Coitus is fallen, unconscious fallen poetry; the sexual
organizations (all of them) are metaphors; a play or inter
play of organs (Ferenczi's amphimixis) a play upon mean
ings; a play upon words. In Lifu, one of the Loyalty
Islands, the sexual organ is known as "his word." The
spermatic word. The sower soweth the word. In the begining was the word, in the beginning was the deed; in the
resurrection, in the awakening, these two are one: poetry,

Cf. Neumann, The Great Mother, 170. Pedersen, Israel I, 107-108.

The antinomy between mind and body, word and
deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only
a metaphor; there is only poetry.
Hereby the duality, the discrepancy between mind and
body, mundane form and supramundane formlessness, is an
nihilated. Then the body of the Enlightened One becomes
luminous in appearance, convincing and inspiring by its mere
presence, while every word and every gesture, and even his
silence, communicate the overwhelming reality of the Dharma.
It is not the audible word through which people are converted
and transformed in their innermost being, but through that
which goes beyond words and flows directly from the presence
of the saint: the inaudible mantric sound that emanates from
his heart. Therefore the perfect saint is called "Muni," the
"Silent One."

Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 226.

 

[blissblogger]

Couple of other Norman O. Brown thoughts in the vicinity of this subject, I think from his previous book Life Against Death:The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, an unexpected campus / counterculture era best-seller (Jim Morrison was a fan)

“I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.”

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.”

 

[blissblogger]

Thomas Traherne, "Dumbness"


SURE Man was born to meditate on things,
And to contemplate the eternal springs
Of God and Nature, glory, bliss, and pleasure ;
That life and love might be his Heavenly treasure ;
And therefore speechless made at first, that He
Might in himself profoundly busied be :
And not vent out, before he hath ta'en in
Those antidotes that guard his soul from sin.

Wise Nature made him deaf, too, that He might
Not be disturbed, while he doth take delight
In inward things, nor be deprav'd with tongues,
Nor injured by the errors and the wrongs
That mortal words convey.
For sin and death
Are most infused by accursed breath,
That flowing from corrupted entrails, bear
Those hidden plagues which souls may justly fear.

This, my dear friends, this was my blessed case ;
For nothing spoke to me but the fair face
Of Heaven and Earth, before myself could speak,
I then my Bliss did, when my silence, break.

My non-intelligence of human words
Ten thousand pleasures unto me affords ;
For while I knew not what they to me said,
Before their souls were into mine convey'd,
Before that living vehicle of wind
Could breathe into me their infected mind,
Before my thoughts were leaven'd with theirs, before
There any mixture was ; the Holy Door,
Or gate of souls was close, and mine being one
Within itself to me alone was known.
Then did I dwell within a world of light,
Distinct and separate from all men's sight,
Where I did feel strange thoughts, and such things see
That were, or seem'd, only reveal'd to me,
There I saw all the world enjoyed by one ;
There I was in the world myself alone ;
No business serious seemed but one ; no work
But one was found ; and that did in me lurk.

D'ye ask me what ?
It was with clearer eyes
To see all creatures full of Deities ;
Especially one's self : And to admire
The satisfaction of all true desire :
'Twas to be pleased with all that God hath done ;
'Twas to enjoy even all beneath the sun :
'Twas with a steady and immediate sense
To feel and measure all the excellence
Of things ; 'twas to inherit endless treasure,
And to be filled with everlasting pleasure :
To reign in silence, and to sing alone,
see, love, covet, have, enjoy and praise, in one
prize and to be ravish'd ; to be true,
Sincere and single in a blessed view
Of all His gifts.

Thus was I pent within
A fort, impregnable to any sin :
Until the avenues being open laid
Whole legions entered, and the forts betrayed :
Before which time a pulpit in my mind,
A temple and a teacher I did find,
With a large text to comment on. No ear
But eyes themselves were all the hearers there,
And every stone, and every star a tongue,
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spake
Divinity : the Earth did undertake
The office of a priest ; and I being dumb
(Nothing besides was dumb), all things did come
With voices and instructions ; but when I
Had gained a tongue, their power began to die.
Mine ears let other noises in, not theirs,
A noise disturbing all my songs and prayers.
My foes pulled down the temple to the ground ;
They my adoring soul did deeply wound
And casting that into a swoon, destroyed
The Oracle, and all I there enjoyed :
And having once inspired me with a sense
Of foreign vanities, they march out thence
In troops that cover and despoil my coasts,
Being the invisible, most hurtful hosts.

Yet the first words mine infancy did hear
The things which in my dumbness did appear,
Preventing all the rest, got such a root
Within my heart, and stick so close unto 't,
It may be trampled on, but still will grow
And nutriment to soil itself will owe.
The first Impressions are Immortal all
And let mine enemies hoop, cry, roar, or call,
Yet these will whisper if I will but hear,
And penetrate the heart, if not the ear.

 

[blissblogger]

Thomas Traherne, "Silence"

A QUIET silent person may possess
All that is great or high in Blessedness.
The inward work is the supreme : for all
The other were occasioned by the fall.
A man that seemeth idle to the view
Of others, may the greatest business do.
Those acts which Adam in his innocence
Performed, carry all the excellence.
Those outward busy acts he knew not, were
But meaner matters of a lower sphere.
Building of churches, giving to the poor,
In dust and ashes lying on the floor,
Administering of justice, preaching peace,
Ploughing and toiling for a forct increase,
With visiting the sick, or governing
The rude and ignorant : this was a thing
As then unknown.
For neither ignorance
Nor poverty, nor sickness did advance
Their banner in the world, till sin came in.
Those therefore were occasioned all by sin.
The first and only work he had to do,
Was in himself to feel his bliss, to view
His sacred treasures, to admire, rejoice,
Sing praises with a sweet and heavenly voice,
See, prize, give hourly thanks within, and love,
Which is the high and only work above
Them all.

And this at first was mine ; these were
My exercises of the highest sphere.
To see, approve, take pleasure, and rejoice
Within, is better than an empty voice.
No melody in words can equal that ;
The sweetest organ, lute, or harp is flat
And dull, compared thereto.
And O that still I might admire my Father's love and skill !
This is to honour, worship, and adore,
This is to love Him : nay, it is far more,
It is to enjoy Him, and to imitate
The life and glory of His high Estate.
'Tis to receive with holy reverence,
To understand His gifts, and with a sense
Of pure devotion and humility,
O to prize His works, His Love to magnify.
happy ignorance of other things
Which made me present with that King of Kings !
And like Him too !
All spirit, life, and power,
All love and joy, in His Eternal Bower,

A world of innocence as then was mine,
In which the joys of Paradise did shine :
And while I was not here I was in Heaven,
Not resting one, but every, day in seven,
For ever minding with a lively sense,
The universe in all its excellence.
No other thoughts did intervene, to cloy,
Divert, extinguish, or eclipse my joy,
No other customs, new-found wants, or dreams
Invented here polluted my pure streams,
No aloes or drugs, no wormwood star
Was seen to fall into the sea from far ;
No rotten soul, did like an apple near
My soul approach.

There's no contagion here.
An unperceived donor gave all pleasures,
There nothing was but I, and all my treasures.
In that fair world, one only was the Friend,
One golden stream, one spring, one only end.
There only one did sacrifice and sing
To only one Eternal Heavenly King.
The union was so strait between them two,
That all was cither's which my soul could view :
His gifts and my possessions, both our treasures ;
He mine, and I the ocean of His pleasures.
He was an ocean of delights from Whom
The living springs and golden streams did come :
My bosom was an ocean into which
They all did run.
And me they did enrich.
A vast and infinite capacity,
Did make my bosom like the Deity,
In whose mysterious and celestial mind
All ages and all worlds together shin'd,
Who tho' He nothing said did always reign,
And in Himself Eternity contain.
The world was more in me, than I in it.
The King of Glory in my soul did sit,
And to Himself in me he always gave
All that He takes delight to see me have,
For so my spirit was an endless Sphere,
Like God Himself, and Heaven, and Earth was there.

 

[sus]

Couple of other Norman O. Brown thoughts in the vicinity of this subject, I think from his previous book Life Against Death:The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, an unexpected campus / counterculture era best-seller (Jim Morrison was a fan)

“I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.”

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.”

Sentenced by one's own sentences! That's brilliant.

 

[0bleak]

I'm reminded of this.

DEATH IN CONVERSATION
words is no longer grasped. An isolated word, a detail of a plan can
be understood, but the meaning of the whole escapes. Once you know the number 0, you believe you know the number 1, because 0 plus 1 equals 1. But 1 is not 0 plus 1 in everlasting union unless you understand
the meaning of plus. One word cannot hurt. In the Kinderreich mankind
adds words together to make a sentence. As they learn the sentence,
they learn order. Undo the sentence and you undo order. The sentence
is a cell, the word a padlock on meaning. Warning! Every sentence is
for life without parole. Meaning has become entirely a shared
pleasure, shared and passed on like a message between prisoners.
People think reality is another word for chaos. But in reality it is
more complex. Legend embodies it in a sound that enables it to
spread all over the world.