Noumenal Nominations

Michel Serres. Variations on the Body.

Metamorphoses of the enamoured body: universal love passes through sand, floral games and animal races; those in love begin this way, with the desire for things and the world, before crowning one another in corporal ecstasy in God. We will only understand one another when we join together in the round or in the dance of all these melanges.

God. It sticks. I can appreciate the quasi-pantheistic relation with the materiality of the world — those melanges. How then do we go from mixture and multitude to a crowning in God? Got to reread carefully. The mystical ecstasy is but one moment in a surge of games and races. A crest of a wave as ephemeral as the peak of a mountain. It is part of the mix.

The weight of the preposition is unbearable. How can this all be contained in God? How vast that absolute must be.

Odd as an atheist I still want the poetry of the mystics to inform my world and I a grateful for the glimpses that come my way such as this from Simone Weil "Chance" in Gravity and Grace, nicely quoted in a card received from a friend.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

The permanence of a cycle of flowering and fruition set beside the churn of explosions millions of light-years away. The turbulent and the fragile and the leap to eternity. There is a gulf here.

How difficult it is to think the limit beyond the limitless. How easy to imagine all the carrying on beyond one's finite being. How well can the imagination serve the thinking?

And so for day 1151
06.02.2010