connectivity

online: 17 may 2002 modified: 23 may 2002
17 may 2002 connective steps

10:51 As I continue to sample, to read, and to underline, parts of Stuart Hampshire's Spinoza I keep thinking that much or even all of his theory is compatible with the ideas of afternature, creative democracy, systems thinking, and much else of what seems to me right theory/practice of this modern or post-modern world... (His theory) is more than compatible - it may well be the missing or necessary basis, or guiding idea!

Yes, I believe it is, at least for me in my predicament - of trying to hold on to and to connect my lifelong thoughts and actions (afternature, etc etc etc) while almost no one seems to know and understand them 'as a whole'...

Perhaps Spinoza's theory IS the glue, or the landscape, or the nourishment, that can enable me to take my next and most connective step? If it is - then this is the time to take it! ...

So what now (for this is the moment!)?

18:30 Pausing to write a note as I walk the path to the west of pond three.

The sun, dim enough to look at directly, through soft-grey clouds that move past it and some of which hide it. Just after reading of Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler, and of the Platonic circles, and other pure geometries, in which the sun and moon and planets and stars were thought to move despite small irregularities of motion which Plato, Ptolemy, and these three astronomers tried to 'save' (or to account for) by assuming additional epicycles etc. ... But, as observations became more accurate, these pure geometries and their saving assumptions were disproved.

And now, looking directly at the sun, through clouds, there is, between my eye, and brain, and all that, and my feet, and the path on which I am standing, the whole mystery, or should I say the whole reality, including all astronomy, all geophysics, all human life, and much else as yet unnamed and unperceived... in this paragraph

...and now, in the wind, and the dull light, and on this Friday evening when there are very few people on the heath, I pause to note my wonder (at all this) and to note that I did not mention 'art'. Neither does Spinoza.

Vale of Health Pond. I came to see if the irises that grow in the water have bloomed. They have. They are yellow. As I look at them I notice that there is a dog in the water and that the swan is flapping its wings to chase both the dog and the goose. The water surface, ruffled by the swan, shimmers and reflects a broken picture of the trees. And now a coot approaches, and turns away, while another coot comes closer.

These namings - they seem poetic, they seem to comprise an object in itself, apart from everything, though of it.

19:10 Back at the first pond. I didn't sit anywhere until now - I just kept walking for an hour. And now I have 12 minutes or so if I am to catch the 19.28.

Yes, I feel I am recovering from feeling low and unenergetic, and from being surrounded by trivial but impossible obstacles, now overcome, and with the comfort, the inspiration, of Spinoza's theory, his most singular and most comprehensive of ideas.

All this will connect. It already does, informally.

Reminder: get a new suitcase, with wheels, and small enough go as cabin luggage.

All these things are one! We need reminders.

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