online: 8 october 2011 modified: 28 september, 6, 7, 8 october 2011 28 september 2011 totality in a village
by day and night
...while visiting a village... looking at trees beneath the pale blue sky of an indian summer in progress... resting and walking... and now writing.... walking along curved roads between cottages and along straight lanes between and across fields.... until we reached a sixteenth century church... made of flint and a chalky stone.... built straight on the ground without deep foundations though the bell tower and arches are several times the height of the houses, old or new... and new foundations are presently being dug below the tower... while a white interior (with flowers) speaks of high aspirations... and stability... without fanaticism...
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect*
....the light begins to fade... soon we shall eat... perhaps without thought of the many who starve in less fortunate villages... (informal settlements or shanty towns)... in this calm life of peace and security and common sense... for that's what it looked like here... this afternoon...
...now in the earth's shadow (which has been called the cone of night**) we progress with the rest of the cosmos in many related directions... and at many velocities... as the universe is imagined to be... not withstanding village churches... or relativity... or the breaking of commandments... as we seek ways to progress with command shared by everyone... not imposed by a few...
(fragments of a recurring hope... or vision... today, outside the city... and perhaps outside the church...)
*first lines of The Fall of Hyperion: a dream
(an abandoned epic poem by John Keats, 1819)
**because the sun is bigger than the earth, light from its edges converges at a point beyond a cone of night** that projects into space on the dark side of the earth... the term appears in the 8th verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem The Triumph of Life (1822)... outside such small cones there is continuous sunlight in a sky that appears black, not blue...
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