There is no way to wade into the history of any idea without finding yourself drowning in the history of all ideas. If the humanities are no longer the study of humanity – all of it – then the war on the humanities has won.
Animals and humans howl, chant, and form circles; clumsy attempts to mirror What Is and know themselves, briefly, as ongoing manifestations of God. Singing, clapping, spinning, healing, falling back to ground and limitations. This sort of thing has been happening since at least the late Neolithic.
Solitaries. Madness. And now the fairies depart. I’ve always been fascinated by art that emerges from insanity, and what better example of same than Richard Dadd’s famous painting. Whether he was in communication with Osiris, as he claimed, or suffered from schizophrenia, is perhaps a question of culture and consensus reality.
We are the universe experiencing a mystic entanglement with itself.
Apparently it does that sometimes.
What would happen if we got through the plague by experiencing how to live fully human lives again? And how to be fully human with each other again? We might decide that it suits us so well that we’re going to stay home and keep doing it. We might even keep doing it in public, and at work. It might become corporate America’s worst nightmare.
I don’t write poetry. Well, not really, but a poem did show up around last Easter and another one showed up now, referencing the myth of Leda and the swan. It’s the damnedest thing. About Leda Leda went ‘round the world at large In her cottage by the sea And heard three Fates with a […]
