Aphorism 18

There are, relative to the 8 billion humans, an extremely small number of humans that define, control, and direct the human outward.  This small number of human beings continue to feed and perpetuate an inherited momentum from which they themselves gain unfathomable wealth, power and influence.  Through this process that has repeated itself from generation to generation, the few with wealth and power have defined and set the course of the human outward.

Unfortunately, these few men that feed and perpetuate the momentum from one generation to the next devote all focus and energy to the human outward and have lost sight of both their human inward and the non-human outward.  As such, the gap between the human inward/non-human outward relative to the human outward increases generation after generation.  

Man is drifting farther and farther out to sea in a vessel with limited provisions and no inward compass.  One day he will meet the unforgiving and absolute power of the non-human outward.  Only then will he recall his human inward, but it will be just a distant memory and will be of no use to him as the non-human outward terminates the failed experiment and recycles bone, flesh, the extraordinary thumb and relatively large brain for the next experiment.

 

Aphorism 13

The human outward has created so many “isms” that don’t have any connection to the human inward or non-human outward.  Man created communism, socialism, capitalism.  Man created taoism, buddhism, and judaism.  But the most misleading of all isms was that called humanism.  As such, the best rebuttal to this folly of isms was a term created by the great poet and philosopher Robinson Jeffers — “In-humanism”.

Look up

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Rock And Hawk Here is a symbol in which Many high tragic thoughts Watch their own eyes. This gray rock, standing tall On the headland, where the seawind Lets no tree grow, Earthquake-proved, and signatured By ages of storms: on … Continue reading →

Clouds

Life From The Lifeless

Spirits and illusions have died,
The naked mind lives
In the beauty of inanimate things.

Flowers wither, grass fades, trees wilt,
The forest is burnt;
The rock is not burnt.

The deer starve, the winter birds
Die on their twigs and lie
In the blue dawns in the snow.

Men suffer want and become
Curiously ignoble; as prosperity
Made them curiously vile.

But look how noble the world is,
The lonely-flowing waters, the secret-
Keeping stones, the flowing sky.

By Robinson Jeffers

Between Storms

Sign-Posts

Civilized, crying how to be human again: this will tell you how. Turn outward, love things, not men,
turn right away from humanity, Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes Climb the great ladder out of the pit of
yourself and man. Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes; Things are the God, you
will love God, and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length You will look back along the stars’
rays and see that even The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength And sickness; but now you are free,
even to become human, But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

Robinson Jeffers — “Sign-Post”

 

I flew out of the Northwest a few days ago with my son to visit my parents.  One of the only things I enjoy about flying these days is the view out the window.  Every now and then, I can catch sight of a Cascade volcano…one of my favorite photographic subjects in the Northwest.  I asked my son to take this picture of Mt. Adams since I gave him the window seat!  Isn’t this an ominous and beautiful looking land form?  There are so many powerful processes involved in such a formation.

I was also shocked to see that my parents (found out it was my mom) had actually hung up some of the black and white prints I developed eight or nine years ago.  I didn’t even know my mom had these prints.  These prints are really sign-posts for me.  They are also points of awkwardness — my parents didn’t support my desire to dedicate myself and energy to landscape photography.  But, this will be covered in some upcoming journal posts.  I had to take pictures of these framed pictures (would never pick black matt for framing!!!) so there is some glare that distorts the black and white shades.  The images are much clearer and better contrast when viewing in person…but oh well.  These photos were taken with my 4×5 Arca Swiss and I processed the prints at a community dark room.

 

Piece Four

I have included two more poems composed by Robinson Jeffers below as I couldn’t decide which one I liked better.  Besides, the two pieces fit well together.  He has had a big influence on me…in that he confirmed my intuition and expressed himself, of course, with more eloquence, wisdom and force.  I have begun writing my journal-like entries, that by their very nature reveal the positive aspect of critical thinking.   I will begin to post after Piece 5 and as various sections are completed.  I don’t know where these journal-like entries will take me or this blog…perhaps somewhere else…or perhaps in a circular loop.  My hope is that it takes the form of the former…rather than the later.

————————————————————————————————-

The Purse-Seine

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, 
unable to see the phosphorescence of the 
shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting 
Santa Cruz; off New Year’s Point or off 
Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color 
light on the sea’s night-purple; he points, 
and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the 
gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net. 
They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great 
labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, 
then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall 
to the other of their closing destiny the 
phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body 
sheeted with flame, like a live rocket
A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside 
the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up 
to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls 
of night
Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: 
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how 
beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together 
into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable 
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all 
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet 
they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we 
and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all 
powers–or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy, 
the mass-disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps 
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, 
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are 
quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew 
that cultures decay, and life’s end is death. 

Hooded Night

At night, toward dawn, all the lights of the shore have died,

And a wind moves. Moves in the dark

The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than manlike,

Not to be compared; itself and itself.

Its breath blown shoreward huddles the world with a fog; no stars

Dance in heaven; no ship’s light glances.

I see the heavy granite bodies of the rocks of the headland,

That were ancient here before Egypt had pyramids,

Bulk on the gray of the sky, and beyond them the jets of young trees

I planted the year of the Versailles peace.

But here is the final unridiculous peace. Before the first man

Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses,

And the pallid region in the stone-rough dome of fog where the moon

Falls on the west. Here is reality.

The other is a spectral episode; after the inquisitive animal’s

Amusements are quiet: the dark glory.

Piece Three

(Context of quote on picture…Hurt Hawks)

Robinson Jeffers is a poet I discovered in my twenties.  His poetry is tough, hard, philosophical, and he takes on the big issues that I struggled with as a young man in my late teens and twenties…and still do today in the first half of my 40’s.  He wrote much of his works while living in Carmel…a place I know well…I have frequently observed and admired the same natural beauty he alludes to in his poetry.  Here is a generic biography of Jeffers….(Background on Robinson Jeffers), but the core philosophical connection I share with this very intelligent and artistic man can be summarized by the below paragraph taken from the above link….

Jeffers coined the phrase inhumanism, the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the “astonishing beauty of things.” Jeffers articulated that inhumanism symbolized humans’ inability to “uncenter” themselves.  In “The Double Axe,” Jeffers explicitly described inhumanism as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the trans-human magnificence… This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist… It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy… it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.”

————————————————————————————————-

Theory Of Truth

(Reference to The Women at Point Sur)
I stand near Soberanes Creek, on the knoll over the sea, west of
the road. I remember
This is the very place where Arthur Barclay, a priest in revolt,
proposed three questions to himself:
First, is there a God and of what nature? Second, whether there’s
anything after we die but worm’s meat?
Third, how should men live? Large time-worn questions no
doubt; yet he touched his answers, they are not unattainable;
But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.

How
many minds have worn these questions; old coins
Rubbed faceless, dateless. The most have despaired and accepted
doctrine; the greatest have achieved answers, but always
With aching strands of insanity in them.
I think of Lao-tze; and the dear beauty of the Jew whom they
crucified but he lived, he was greater than Rome;
And godless Buddha under the boh-tree, straining through his
mind the delusions and miseries of human life.

Why does insanity always twist the great answers?
Because only
tormented persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and
women, not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,
And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private
agony that made the search
Muddles the finding.
Here was a man who envied the chiefs of
the provinces of China their power and pride,
And envied Confucius his fame for wisdom. Tortured by hardly
conscious envy he hunted the truth of things,
Caught it, and stained it through with his private impurity. He
praised inaction, silence, vacancy: why?
Because the princes and officers were full of business, and wise
Confucius of words.

Here was a man who was born a bastard, and among the people
That more than any in the world valued race-purity, chastity, the
prophetic splendors of the race of David.
Oh intolerable wound, dimly perceived. Too loving to curse his
mother, desert-driven, devil-haunted,
The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also
Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish. The carpenter was not his
father? Because God was his father,
Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of God.
His personal anguish and insane solution
Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem
drunk with the wine of his blood.

And here was another Saviour, a prince in India,
A man who loved and pitied with such intense comprehension of
pain that he was willing to annihilate
Nature and the earth and stars, life and mankind, to annul the
suffering. He also sought and found truth,
And mixed it with his private impurity, the pity, the denials.
Then
search for truth is foredoomed and frustrate?
Only stained fragments?

Until the mind has turned its love from
itself and man, from parts to the whole. 

Robinson Jeffers

The Purse Seine

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;
      daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the
      phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off
      New Year's Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the
      sea's night-purple; he points and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal
      and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

                                              I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the
      crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the
      other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted
      with flame, like a live rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the
      narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,
      sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.

            Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could
      I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful
      the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
      into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
      of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
      dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
      shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our
      children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers
      -or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls- or anarchy,
      the mass-disasters.

                       These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
      its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splin-
      tered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that
      cultures decay, and life's end is death.

-- Robinson Jeffers --

Hooded Night

At night, toward dawn, all the lights of the shore have died,
And the wind moves. Moves in the dark
The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than manlike,
Not to be compared; itself and itself.
Its breath blown shoreward huddles the world with a fog; no stars
Dance in heaven; no ship’s light glances.
I see the heavy granite bodies of the rocks of the headland,
That were ancient here before Egypt had pyramids,
Bulk on the gray of the sky, and beyond them the jets of young trees
I planted the year of the Versailles peace.
But here is the final unridiculous peace. Before the first man
Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses,
And the pallid region in the stone-rough dome of fog where the moon
Falls on the west. Here is reality.
The other is a spectral episode: after the inquisitive animal’s
Amusements are quiet: the dark glory. 

–By Robinson Jeffers–

Ever run across a person that is no longer alive that wrote poems or literature or philosophy that hits home?  I have had such experience several times…wish they occured more frequently…but most of those dead authors are from long long ago.  This guy Jeffers…lived and observed his surrounding not too far in the distant past…in fact he saw much of what we see today…except he was alive during the peak of our Empire. His life and poetry really hits home with me.  Perhaps because I spent much time on the California coast…in particular Pebble Beach and Carmel…where he built his own house with his own hands…and wrote much of his powerful poetry.  Perhaps because he was molded…like me to a lesser and more vague sense…by Ancient Greek and Roman thought.  Perhaps…because I believe like he did there is so much we can learn from nature and the inanimate…the immense concept of geological time…the “Inhumane” aspect of the entire vast and infinite universe around us.  I do rebel against this very very intelligent man and still hold out hope for mankind…but I fully disclose that I am both ignorant and naive.  Most of my senses say we aren’t going to make it.  I hope you enjoyed this short poem…he has lots more:)