The Roma,
“who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads’ fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of rough-hewn wood like a child’s laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer’s eye and soul.”
Bohumil Hrabal. Too Loud a Solitude (Příliš hlučná samota) 1976. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. Abacus (Little, Brown Book Group), 1990. p. 42.
“In his 1967 article ‘Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,’ a central source for the McKennas… Silverman then outlines a multi-phase model of pathologic experience that, up to a certain point, characterizes both schizophrenics and shamans. Drawing from the hero’s journey structure popularly articulated by Joseph Campbell, Silverman describes the earlier stages of this process as a descent into psychological chaos, a regressive state characterized by automatisms, archaic ideation, and encounters with transpersonal forces. This descent is then followed, most of the time, by a ‘cognitive reorganization.’ * * * Here [at the sealed Institute on the Big Sur coast] Silverman worked on one of Esalen’s main agendas: to rewrite insanity as an episodic process of psychic reorganization that follows the same death-and-rebirth model found, it was believed, in both esoteric initiations and deep psychedelic experience.”
Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019.
“Newness...is precisely the return from left-hemisphere familiarity to right-hemisphere familiarity, from inauthenticity to authenticity. It cannot be willed, though it might be much desired; it requires an (apparently passive) patient openness to whatever is, which allows us to see it as if for the very first time, and leads to what Heidegger called radical “astonishment” before the world. That concept is also related to Jan Patocka’s shakiness: a sort of elemental driving out of the complacency of our customary modes of seeing the world. … It involves reconnection with the world which familiarity had veiled. It is at the furthest remove from the need to shock: it requires looking more carefully at what seems only too familiar, and seeing it perhaps for the very first time.”
And, in a footnote:
"Jan Patocka (1907–77) was an important Czech phenomenological philosopher, active in the Charter 77 human rights movement. He spoke of the “solidarity of the shaken”, at one level an affirmation of the power and determination of those who have suffered political oppression, but at another a recognition of the resolve born of a different kind of suffering, in those for whom the comfortable familiarity of the apparently known no longer disguises the sheer “awe-full-ness” of Being — what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto, 1923). Thus Andrew Shanks writes of “those who have been shaken, especially by the experience of great historic trauma, out of lie “within a lie” — or, in general, out of the unquestioned prejudices of their culture — into a genuinely open-minded thoughtfulness. This is not the thoughtfulness of scholarly expertise; but, rather, that other sort of thoughtfulness (to be found at all different levels of scholarly sophistication or articulacy) which may also be described as a fundamental openness to transcendence” (Shanks, 2000, p. 5)."
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.
"Regret for the past is not the same as nostalgia. Pretending it is [the same] has always been the first and cheapest move of the present’s apologists. Regretting the past is...a way of steeling oneself for the fact that the past really is lost, and therefore maybe having a chance of looking the future accurately in the face."
— T. J. Clark, quoted on Twitter by Jared Marcel Pollen
https://twitter.com/JaredMPollen/status/1670417226489315331
"Time is like an eternal burning bush. Though each instant must vanish to open the way to the next one, time itself is not consumed."
— Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath (1951). Prologue. Reprint: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
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