The Human dress is forged Iron
Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face:
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And secrecy the Human Dress.
The Human dress is forged Iron
The Human form a fiery Forge,
The Human face a furnace seal’d,
The Human heart its Hungry Gorge.
( William Blake. A Divine Image. 1789)
A hurling; throwing; contorting; roaring. and then a peace, to let it pass and to breathe and to focus on some clarity, even if such clarity is a light moving over a rock which has been displaced.
To ask a question; simply to appreciate complexity, and then to allow freedom from it. To cling to the precious in suffocation, to let it go.
How do we know another? How do we communicate the knowledge which besieges the mind upon the human form into some movement? what can be concealed and what cannot help but be revealed.
Catharsis; perhaps, ritual, trance, movements which, stepped in tradition allow us to make sense of the passages and journeys of human life. And such life, in all its glory, ugliness, unrest and
To appreciate the impossible science of the uniqueness of being. That one does not need to even fully know the self, and perhaps if one did, such temporality would have to soon shift in order that consciousness continue to develop and evolve.
‘the last resonance of youthful laughter fade into silence.’
But some other laughter will form. for such road is long and our shoes can be fixed.
Often when I walk the forest, even the city forest, I can find a peace, some place in which to exercise reflection as to the entire city means, to be alone in a forest in a city, is something most strange. To stand, seeking silence from the urban drone and to wait to hear something of how the earth speaks. As if somehow I might learn such a language even now after such years have past.
When thinking of Blake’s Divine Image, I am struck again by the relationship between innocence and childhood, and least when childhood should fade that we must employ the power of the imagination often above the power of rationality and order. This can not be seen as a moral platitude as some suggest, rather a deep founded hope, grounded in a deep mistrust of authority; that seeks the individual alone to know that he or she has the power to change. Yet, today, how does such power manifest? Back to the city and the endless drone and the monotony and futility of the political specter; and how do we change? Can we simply hide in the forest and will our imagination to take us some place of softness? Surely this is not change?
Moving with such sensations of the cyclical and the cynical, moving with some sensations of the personal and the self in relation to the political, this is not change, perhaps simply an awareness, a daily meditative practice; that instills some functionality into the ultimate disfunctionality.
‘Youth of delight, come hither,
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled, & clouds of reason,
Dark disputes & artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways.
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead,
And feel they know not what but care,
And wish to lead others, when they should be led.’
( William Blake. The Voice of the Ancient Bard. 1794)
Urban re:passages 