Stanton and Jung

[e_compass_rosa]

In the bit of reading time that I've been able to carve out for myself I've been working my way through a book on alchemical symbolism and Jungian thought, as well as one on Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Although I've only just begun The Solitude of Self, I'm finding that the two texts wrap around each other in my mind in fascinating ways.  I'm going to

Comments

[dabroots]

It's truly exciting to have writings by two very different authors inerweave themsselves inside your head.

[e_compass_rosa]

Yes it is, especially when it happens in serendipitous ways. A friend gave me the book on Elizabeth Cady Stanton more than a year ago and I hadn't read it. Yesterday I randomly pulled it off the shelf and started reading.

Infinities - without and within

[ankh156]

I sometimes feel I (the sense of my own 'being') am nothing more than a thin, almost immaterial membrane between two infinites spaces : that without, vast, cold and limitless, and that darker interior space which lacks the openness and distant light of the other, but one senses is equally unbounded and unknowable.

Re: Infinities - without and within

[e_compass_rosa]

I've decided that I don't trust people who are not able to recognize the infinity that is within.

[randy_byers]

Something of Lovecraft's cosmic horror in that first quote: "a little speck of life shut in by a tremendous darkness." But sometimes it's in solitude that I feel the greatest connection with the cosmos, including (paradoxically?) other human souls.

[e_compass_rosa]

Yes. This is one of Rilke's Sonnets (A. has translated several volumes & this is one her her translations). I thought of it when I read your comment -- that understanding of your own solitude, so to speak, as also a form of connection to the world.

Part Two, Sonnet XIII

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened.
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praying as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
The non-being inside you allows you to vibrate
in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

[randy_byers]

Beautiful. Here's a pretty confused attempt of my own to capture a related idea.

[maryread]

Hey.

Wow. Thanks. That Jung. Always popping up for me at the right moment with the right reading material, in this case yours. I might have to carry this over to my LJ for further consideration:

If you will contemplate your lack of fantasy, of inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness if only you will allow it to penetrate into you.

Cause that was just like today.

Hey.

[e_compass_rosa]

Yup. Me too today. Feel free to carry it wherever you want.