online: 12 november 2002
modified: 14 november 2002

10 november 2002 a new beginning of the world

a 'prepared page' with seven fragments of my journal - and a new fragment of the digital diary - between which I intend to improvise a connecting text




from the world of everyone:
...but in this world,
no longer protected by professionals,
we still fear and fight
the mechanical world we created as specialists,
blind to everything else...
yes we fight our former selves,
we/they are the enemy,
unfallen and unrisen
the people of moral flatland.
that is both our weakness and our strength.

but now we move beyond our former selves!
this is our opportunity

4th october 20002
...a satisfying feeling
of having stumbled on
a very simple and integral way of writing the social fiction
as a second view of what exists.
I sigh contentedly-
not too worriedby these cliches.

we pause to think
before we act or speak or write
to undo the old compromises
and to support what is new


30th october 2002
...So somehow aim to do what is new and connective
and do it only for those
who can respond constructively.
So: ceasing to compromise, or to try for popularity,
is an essential.
Let us hope this will be enough
to show us the true direction
and energise us to go in it!

this is a call for action, thoughtful action,
and a new beginning of the world



2nd november 2002
"Rhythm musthave meaning,"
Ezra Pound insisted in 1915.
And he is right.
...the opening words
of Poetic Meter and Poetic Formby Paul Fussell
(revised edition, McGraw Hill, New York 1987)
which someone had left on the table
where I sat in the Poetry Library
when seeking books by Ezra Pound.

left-right, left-right, left-right
we marched in military blindness
but our justification is gone



4th november 2002 16:55
sitting at the edge of the Bragg seat
looking over the wooded valley.

A still afternoon.
Most of the leaves have turned brown
and many were blown off in the storm.

a man and a woman in colourful clothes
walk by hand in hand.
each carries a stick or pole bound in coloured ribbons.
he sees me and waves
as if we are still in the sixties.
and a church clock strikes four
as if in an earlier century.

I spoke to an Irish man
who was gazing at the swans.
We talked about them.
I mentioned W B Yeats' poem
The White Swans of Coole.
He said that he didn't have any of the words.
I said that I remember only the title*
but that is enough.
You are easily pleased he said...
I suppose he is right.

(*but I remembered it inaccurately:
it's The Wild Swans at Coole
which is also the title
of one of W B Yeats' collections of poems.)

Thin grey clouds are moving slowly to the south
beneath a pale blue sky..
Now they turn pink
in reflected light of a pink sunset.
At ground level it is getting dark.
Time to go.

when acting in the present,
to change it,
do so in ways that assist the new to be born and to grow
and that enable what exists
to support it, not oppose.



5th november 2002
...a new kind of solution to such conflicts
(of which I've experienced and been upset by so many,
hundreds):
the new solution is to not to keep promises to ...
those exerting a narrowing pressure
(for reasons of their own roles?)
and instead to keep promise to higher and wider aims...
and to do this without need for such struggles
to compromise or resist it...

and be sure to get the scale and timing right
to suit the capabilities of the situation



5th november 2002
...the next question:
how or if to proceed with the large work
I'm not able to take beyond countless 'page ones' ...
or else to be content with the digital diary
as my only work now
(and to cease striving for a greater work
that 'integrates everything')

let accurate perception
and well-informed imagination,
not ambition or defeat,
decide the way



5th november 2002
...oracles tell me to hold to higher aims
but through modest means,
being extra conscientious
while limiting actions
to what is within my small powers.

so this entry to the digital diary
can be my new beginning



6th november 2002
...going to bookshops
through city traffic sculpture
to seek a new edition of Ezra Pound's Cantos
(my first 'visit to the world' for the digital diary
now that I've decided
to make it into a more connective work)
I accidentally found Towards Democracy
by Edward Carpenter
(first published 1883,
fifth edition, 17th impression 1949)
an inspiring Whitman-like writer
whose books I've never read

and also
The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man,
Som Raj Gupta's interpretation of
Sankara's interpretation of
The Chandogya Upanishad
(Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi 2001)
...in which those interpreters explain and extend
the non-dualism of Vedanta Hinduism
and reveal its relevance to modern and post-modern thought.



Edward Carpenter
(from page 411, chosen deliberately):

...it has been so necessary to write in the open air.
This fact (of the necessity of the open air)
is very curious,
and I cannot really explain it...
Always especially the sky
seemed to contain for me the key,
the inspiration;
the sight of it more than anything else
gave what I wanted
(sometimes like a veritable lightning-flash
coming down from it onto my paper
I a mere witness,
but agitated with strange transports).



Som Raj Gupta
(from page 717, chosen by chance):

...we need the eye of the other to be ourselves...
The other
my mother, my father, my friends or my enemies
may make a human person of me
through their looks and the expressions in their eyes
but they cannot do so unless there is already a seer in me
to notice that reflection...
...of my physical and human self.



(and from page 597, chosen intentionally):

Thinkers like Foucault have to realise
that when they live as mere interpretations...
...they will cease to be interpretations.
If ... they realise that language too is an ambiguity,
depending for its being
on its other that it is not,
as much as that other depends on it...
...they will find themselves unable to speak or to listen...
...when language too will become that vibrant silence.



My copy of The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man
is stamped with the words
'FOR FAVOUR OF REVIEW'
so I hope that this small notice of the book
is nevertheless a help
in bringing to the attention of others
what I think is a great new writing.

I hope to write more of it later.



what we call the world
can begin anew at any moment
but it can't be fixed

viva!





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© 2002 john chris jones

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