Final Paper

Paper Topic Idea:
In order to write the best thing I've ever written
I must go through the way in which I do not write.

Class Notes 3/29

Avatara, The Humanization of Philosophy Through the Bhagavad-Gita, was one of the books passed around in class.
here are two quotes I picked out of it while flipping through:
pg 175 "Arjuna, however, collapses in the battlefield unable to balance the terror of being a man with the decision to being a man."
pg 174 "To be a warrior in this tradition is the ability to act without attachment to the fruits of action."

theophany, Job, God speaks out of the whirlwind because Job is not ready for, or could not handle the true form of God. As Actaeon is turned into a stag and sporagmosed by his own dogs, or the girl blown up by making Zeus promise to reveal his true form to her.

Arjuna is coming to realize more than Krishna as a divinity, he also realizes that he is a part of that divinity.....

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (Translation of Bhagavad-Gita by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.) by Aldous Huxley.

"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness--the world of things and animals and men and even gods--is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
In Hinduism the first of these four doctrines is stated in the most categorical terms. The Divine Ground is Brahman, whose creative, sustaining and transforming aspects are manifested the Hindu trinity. A hierarchy of manifestations connects inanimate matter with man, gods, High Gods, and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond."

spark of divinity in the soul......sounds like gnosticism

all roads lead to Rome, symbolizes the place we need to get to...where atman and brahman meet....where the rose and fire are one.....

way of devotion....different ways/paths getting to the same place...

reality = battlefield of life

Dr. Sexson likes Tai ties and Taylor tailors because the action is the basic activity of textualization

The function of the poet, the literate person, the English Major is to record what is seen as the kind of music appropriate to vision... singing the songs of what happens

Kari's final paper topic - anxiety of influence, War and Peace, epiphanic experiences in literature, epiphanies about nature of history.

Act I Scene V of Hamlet
ghost informing Hamlet of his duty...'what have you been doing??'....'get on with it'

distracted from distraction by distraction

ln. 87 in Hamlet, page 32 in my edition: "The glowworm shows the matin to be near, And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me."

last lines of Finnegans Wake "mememormee"

being remembered is how we can allow our bodies to die

alchemy: transmutation of base matter into purified being...

pg. 78 of Hamlet directly connects with Dry Salvages...should thinking about God at all times...move and measure like a dancer, remember constantly the divinity, time of death at every moment...

"need to have the brick fall on our head and have a good death"

rather than saying "Have a good day!" try "Have a good death!" see how that goes over....

Blog Homework, blog about other blogs, and about the last scene in Hamlet.

Class Notes 3/26

NOTES:

April 9th: finish Hamlet and The Bhagavad-Gita
April 26th: Final Group presentations
April 28th: Recitation begins....

HOMEWORK
Blog about a blog (most important to you) what you have learned, what difference does it make......blog about the blog/person who taught you something....

Hamlet relevant to Bhagavad-Gita.....pay special attention to Act V Scene II......not the whiny Hamlet, very last scene, Hamlet back from England....religious theme, no pontificating....Hamlet must be detactched....secular kind of work, but religious themes...

Abby's blog, the real hero of the play, Horation, becomes the poet that tells the story....
Tai, pun on Jung
Pat is Patting
Kary is Kari-ing or Bowle-ing
Ron, existential....profound inspirational book he will carry with him....
Kevin.....discovered something....about time in Amlet and The Bhagavad-Gita, instances so quick......you can only remember them...read his blog.
'Nicks Notes' to the Bhagavad-Gita

We watched a brief clip from The Mahabharata, victory & defeat are the same....in the blink of an eye, augenblick, time should come to a stop.........
in the clip Sanjaya speaking when Krishna's lips are moving
Kevin would freeze the battlefield during conversation......
"how long will they be talking" ruins the notion of frozen time
Kevin......point of action within inaction

cannot act in the face of consequences of that action.....if you hadn't done something....a catastrophe wouldn't have happened....
one thing to do...nothing.......if I hadn't decided to go to my friends Christmas Party over winter break I would never have run over my cat.......

get to place where Hamlet and Arjuna are...

Hamlet, runs the sword through the curtains, kills girlfriend's dad....Polonius.
entire day a battlefield
everyday you come to class, another battlefield..........raise intensity to get to Hamlet and Arjuna

Kari's blog....read about Job....rather never been born
Doug - seems everything is pushing toward action

Oedipus....acted....

**Krishna remembers his previous reincarnations.......we do not
doesn't matter what Arjuna saw.....
dark epiphany......

HOMEWORK, explain how Hamlet became different in the last scene....

Class Notes 3/24

Why are we reading Hamlet & the Bhagavad-Gita in tendem?
...hesitation to act...
niether Hamlet or Arjuna can do anything because of an epiphanic revelation...

something rotten in the state of Denmark....Denmark stands for the world...something wrong with the very soul of the world......ontoligical difficulty

traumatic loss of Hamlet's father leads to a dark epiphany...

Hamlet imagines his mother and Uncle in the wedding bed....it is all too much for Hamlet.

Arjuna doesn't want to go to war and kill his kinfolk and teachers....Krishna, avatar, ........divinity that appears to humans, adopts human form as charioteer.

Hamlet and father's ghost

Kernel of wisdom in Hindu thought...Ajuna/Hamlet, ontologically problematic.

Dhritarashtra - Blind King...
Sanjaya....is the poet, the teller of the story...

opening lines, very important......Kuru, name of the Battlefield....metaphor for the inner sturggle.....Kuru is THE battlefield.....not only people are in battle here.........battlefield of life......becomes dharma........sacred duty.

- on average, how many books have people in America read this year......ZERO! shocked?

Bhagavad-Gita....reminds some reader of the Bible.....Sanjaya starts listing off warrior names....like in the Bible, so and so begat so and so.......

The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco......cool book. If anyone wants to see it I will bring my copy in to class.

But why all these boring lists??
perhaps a way of getting into the endless story...you have to train yourself.....the mysterious mental maneuver to read the entire list, aware,
*allows us to understand that the long boring list is not boring..........we are..............
Nick, list some birds......purple finch, magpie...

after the list, get back to the story itself.

battle is a metaphor.....

Krishna's first advice to Arjuna....go kill people....

Why in the world would Ghandi use the Bhagavad-Gita where a god incites Arjuna to kill people?
because he understood, the violence Krishna is inciting, is to engage the metaphorical violence.

action as sacrifice...to make sacred.

Hamlet can't act.....whining. Break through seeming into being. life is a stage.
Arjuna can't act....

one thing that must happen i nlife? death.
(taking off in an airplane is usually optional, but landing is never optional. That plane is coming down one way or another.)

"old men look like babies, bald, mewling and puking again." thank you Dr. Sexson

is this all just a game? rhetorical question.
of course it's a game
have to play the game....

what is this hour? the entire human life.

Arjuna and Hamlet cut out of the same fabric.

do what you are supposed to do.
What am I supposed to do?
warrior thing

Rian
learn by going where you have to go,,,,

March 31!! DUE
thesis statement.....put it on your blog!
also: see Jennie Lynn's blog with paper requirements.....

epiphany of the class.

A short thought.....

As I was reading through the blogs, something caught my eye in Kevin Luby's blog, (good post, by the way), I just noticed a small connection to the Highbrow/Lowbrow Class that I thought I would mention. Kevin lists, in his blog, these Practical Lessons for Lily from To The Lighthouse:

First Practical lesson: To find our inscape, our uniqueness, our god given
cosmic purpose, we must take a risk and begin looking.

Second Practical
Lesson: Finding personal inscape is difficult. Sometimes the struggles will fill
the soul with such emptiness and despair that quitting feels like the only
option. But quitting is not an option. As an old football coach once told me,
“if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Third Practical Lesson:
Little things are Very Very Big Things

Fourth Practical Lesson: Our
personal Inscape exists and though difficult, it is attainable.

all of which sounded to me like Santiago's Personal Legend (from The Alchemist).....(read more about The Alchemist at my other Highbrow/Lowbrow Blog), and Arjuna's dharma (Bhagavad-Gita)........I just really enjoy the link of the Personal Legend and dharma to inscape. It is as if fate is involved, or rather a supreme meaning or path to life that you can choose to follow or not. Just as for an epiphany perhaps. Eliot echoes in my mind, "we had the experience, but missed the meaning". Can have the epiphanic experience, but to notice it or discover the meaning is optional. Annie could have just seen the total eclipse and driven off to have breakfast and had the feelings the she expressed in Total Eclipse, but not developed the meaning. What is the meaning? Tough question. I don't know. But Santiago did not know the meaning of his own personal legend at the beginning, he needed the King in the gold breastplate, and the alchemist from the oasis, and more. And Arjuna needed Krishna. Ratty and Mole needed the River God Pan.

(Bhagavad-Gita..... a side note to my 'short thought', I like the way that Arjuna's experience is not simulated, because he has a physical reation to it. As I was reading Arjuna's hairs kept bristling, perhaps like the way mine do when my neck is lightly touched.....or maybe that is entirely something else. In the Miller's introduction she says, "The representation of Arjuna's involuntary physical responses, such as his trembling body and bristling hair, dramatizes the pity he feels before the specter of disorder and impending slaughter. In Hindu aesthetic theory such responses are considered highly significant because they arise from inner feeling and cannot be simulated." :
"My limbs sink,
my mouth is parched,
my body trembles,
the hair bristles on my flesh."
This also reminds me of the screams that came from people as the moment of totality was upon them from Annie Dillard's Total Eclipse piece.)

So now I've sort of turned myself about, because in some ways it seems epiphanies can happen at any moment, unsolicited and unmediated like Proust and the Cookie......the whole world in a cup of tea.....OR......a little help is needed, as in the case of Santiago, Arjuna, Ratty and Mole....I could go on. But I did title this 'A short thought.....' perhaps more appropriately, 'A rambling thought.....'

The Bhagavad-Gita, initial thoughts

As I was reading the recent blogs and preparing to blog about The Bhagavad-Gita, I read Nick San Souci's blog... and I feel the familiar anxiety of influence and performance anxiety that often comes with reading Nick's blogs before I blog. But here it goes anyway:

I'm sure others noticed this too, but in The Bhagavad-Gita translation by Barbara Stoler Miller, after the introduction and translator's note is a quote from T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" III, The Four Quartets:

"This is the use of memory:
For liberation-not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past."

In the Tenth Teaching of Krishna, Lord Krishna says the following, and i interpret this as Krishna is Brahman, and thus everywhere and everything.....he is infinite. and when he says he is "the beginning, the middle and the end of creations" it reminds me of The Four Quartets, "In my beginning is my end...":

"I am the thunderbolt among weapons,

among cattle, the magical wish-granting cow;
I am the procreative god of love,

the king of the snakes.

I am the endless cosmic serpent,
the lord of all sea creatures;
I am chief of the ancestral fathers;
of restraints, I am death.

I am the pious son of demons;
of measures, I am times;
I am the lion among wild animals,
the eagle among birds.

I am the purifying wind,
the warrior Rama bearing arms,
the sea-monster crocodile,
the flowing river Ganges.

I am the beginning, the middle,
and the end of creations, Arjuna;
of sciences, I am the science of the self;
I am the dispute of orators.

...

I am Krishna among my mighty kinsmen;
I am Arjuna amon the Pandava princes;
i am the epic poet Vyasa among sages,
the inspired singer among bards."

Thus again I am reminded of, Atman is Brahman. The self is the divine, the Absolute. Ajuna is Krishna.

The Eleventh Teaching, The Vision of Krishna's Totality, Lord Krishna reveals himself, his true image to Arjuna,
"It was a multiform, wonderous vision,
with countless mouths and eyes
and celestial ornaments,
brandishing many divine weapons.

...

Arjuna saw all the universe
in its many ways and parts,
standing as one in the body

of the god of gods.

Then filled with amazment,

his hair bristling on his flesh,

Arjuna bowed his head to the god,
joined his hands in homage, and spoke."

Then towards the end of the 11th Teaching Arjuna says:
"Seeing your gentle human form,
Krishna, I recover
my own nature,
and my reason is restored."

The terrified Arjuna must regain his breath. This theophany and epiphany are nearly too much for the warrior to handle. The introductions says that the sight of Krishna's horrific power is too much for Arjuna to bear, Arjuna begs to see him in his calmer aspect. This is where Arjua has his realization, epiphany: "Overwhelmed by the vision of time's inexorable violence embodied in his charioteer, Arjuna sees the inevitablility of his actions. He realizes that by performing his warrior duty with absolute devotion to Krishna, he can unite with Krishna's cosmic purpose and free himself from the crippling attatchments that bind mortals to eternal suffering." I couldn't help think of maya, cosmic illusion on account of which the One appears as many, the Absolute as the relative world. Arjuna realizes that everything is maya. And, if I understand this correctly, it is his dharma to be a warrior.

Class Notes 3/10

***EXTRA CREDIT***
People in class Friday, 3/12 before spring break will be given extra credit.

after looking at art.....everything is changed, the world changes, or strange coincidences happen

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." - Meister Eckhart

Hindu philosophy,Advaita Vedanta philosophy, it is all an illusion. Everything is Maya. Since Brahman is the only truth, Maya cannot be true. Imaginary man running up an imaginary tree from an imaginary Elephant.

Dr. Sexson's epiphany: Houston Smith, Dr. Sexson's Capstone teacher, focusing on the Advaita Vedanta, Dr. Sexson got nostalgic for the class and looked up Houston Smith, friends with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert(Ram Dass), wrote The Only Dance There Is......rearrange the words, There is only the dance, see T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton:
"There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

Movie, Run Lola Run

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
can be described as a book one has difficulty with, boring....
Kevin: find something your interested to follow, like the tide epiphanies
Rian: novel underscoring the transition to Hamlet and the Bhagavad Gita

Wallace Stevens, How To Live, What To Do

McNabb & Kafka's Metamorphoses - sweeping it all away

Mrs. Ramsey, knitting stocking, never get it done.....mythical......Penelope, wife of Odysseus, in Ithaca, to delay suitors....weaving & never fitting...(also reminded me a bit of Arachne)
activity of weaving
tides - eternal rhythm of filling up and emptying out

Taylor: Nancy at the tide pool, page 75, humans and the divine....blurring the line, metamorphosing between Gods and humans....

Robert: Neptune, read his blog

How to live, what to do
answer is becoming clear...
become gods, try to become gods, or be aware of the ways...

SEE! page 112, Mrs. Ramsay

Taylor, Orpheus myth, highly functional in To The Lighthouse, condition of the artist, enchantment by art, scopophilia (love of looking), through art get intimations of immortality.

Lily, artist, get painting just right...the lighthouse...., Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay...

Matrix, uterus, womb, like a book embedded with epiphanies, a ground mass embedded with fossils.....
Mick: page fallen out of his book happens to be page 285-6, (in my book it's 192)
Lily going to the lighthouse in her own way...not literally
needs to hear primal sounds

Odysseus and the Sirens

Central myth in To The Lighthouse, from page 1 to the end. The relationship between mothers and daughters, Demeter and Persephone

as dead, Mrs. Ramsay is more powerful to Lily

Class Notes 3/5

Vico ------- Dante -------Frye ------Language
Gods ------Anagogic-----Anagogic---hieroglyphic---indivisible unity
Heroes------Moral--------Mythical---aristocratic----archetype
Men-------Allegorical----Formal-----pragmatic-----image
Chaos------Literal-------Literal------demotic-------sign


Frye 121
microcosom of all literature united in infinite symbol
123, the point of epiphany: a mountain top(Kevin), an island(The Tempest), the tower(rest of the world chopped away), the lighthouse(To the Lighthouse), the ladder(Jacobs ladder, The Dead)


no language that isn't poetry
fiction and nonfiction are created


Corona, been around since 1979
the corona......suggesting that interesting things happen on the edge

Essay, William Thompson, myth......made up, myth....where we are....where we are going...what we are...

myth is the history of the soul....performance of reality it seeks to describe...experience of illumination...

Over the weekend we were supposed to read To The Lighthouse.....blog passages that are epiphanic.....read on archetypal, anagogical, mystical, and mythical level...

Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard....reactions...see Abby and Kari's blogs....

Nick's blog, very articulate must read

also read Helena's blog

Montana Death Trip - Dr. Sexson
gift of death, gives us the gift of seeing things as they really are, as if for the first time...

Dillard, working her way up in recollection

Dr. Sexson's experience at the Museum of the Rockies 1979 solar eclipse, about 200 people there...Shaman Woodenlegs, large cloud started to move to cover the eclipse & parked itself over the sun, the Shaman was saying some words, and looked at the cloud...then the cloud parted in the middle to allow viewing of the elclipse......then....totality....

Annie Dillard - Total Eclipse

I read Total Eclipse last night at my kitchen table. American Idol songs were static in the background, I never watch the show, but it had been turned on and then abandoned by Sutter, and failed to be turned off. The whole time while I was reading Total Eclipse I was a little sceptical of the profound impact Annie Dillard was trying to explain. I finished the short chapter as the last girl of American Idol was eliminated and she had to sing a goodbye song.

I put the book down and decided to watch this poor girl. And she was really not very good, in fact I don't know how she got so far in the competition, I wouldn't know, but she sang a Miley Cyrus song. (The only Miley Cyrus song I like is a mashup with Biggie Smalls, Party and Bullshit in the USA.) As she sang, not very well, about having to move another mountain I couldn't help thinking about the Total Eclipse, and the corona, and little specs of featureless people standing atop hillsides, enduring the moments of totality. I don't remember really thinking about it, just little images in my head....and as this girl sang I teared up, and when her voice caught a little, I wailed. I was choking on my sobs and wiping tears on my scandia down blanket. I had never seen the show, had no attachment to her, but watching her devastated me. I hope this doesn't say too much about me because while Taylor is so moved by a great poem, I am shattered by American Idol......I am not worthy.


Is there a correlation between my sobbing and Total Eclipse? Maybe not. or maybe. Either way, the part of Total Eclipse that seemed like the dark epiphany moment, the horror, the terror, the end all, the still point, the nothing, the empty........

"The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding
at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the
valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was a monstrous swift shadow
cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles
an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed- 1,800 miles an hour.
It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight- you only saw the edge.......We saw
the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit." page 25

Two things we very interesting to me, besides the sinking feeling that formed in my throat and the imagined tunnel vision I might have, as I imagined witnessing such a thing, the two things...."language can give no sense" and "you only saw the edge." The ineffable experience of watching darkness sweep over daylight and wipe out existence is something Annie Dillard did so well. I wanted to be sceptical, but she explains her experience in so many directions that I get a sense, but I still just don't get it. I can only imagine. I probably imagine wrong.

"No end was in sight - you only saw the edge." (page 25 from the above passage) - In class we talked about the corona, the edge is the interesting part, and I think this edge of darkness sweeping the sky is interesting. What is the difference between "No end in sight" and "you only saw the edge"? Normally I think the edge indicates an end, but not in this case.

Although I have many passages that I love from Total Eclipse (starred and/or underlined) that spoke more to me than the words, I will shorten this and tell you the last thing I underlined,
"One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief." (page 28). Epiphanic moments are too much to endure for so long. It would be too exhausting to be a person who is optimally aware of the world all the time. We have to process the experience, so to do that we must turn away, and let it soak in for however long it takes to understand the moments.....hours, days, or 2 years. As Dante washes in the River Lethe, after his journey through hell.

Class Notes 3/3

Notes:

Homework, required for the class, August 1st, 2017 in Casper, WY be there to watch the total eclipse!!

Homework, read Helena's blog & do her one better

Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse, written two years after the event

Nick's blog, recollected in tranquility
Kevin's blog, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, greatest title of any poem ever

Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, revisited
Wordsworth is a benign, and one of the most sentimental of poets, but he still includes the dark..."still, sad music of humanity"
We learn something about epiphany...

aesthetic hero...go back in search of things lost but not forgotten....an awakening to recollection, anemnesis (which reminds me of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan)

epiphanic message of literature, "remember me" the Bible, Finnegans Wake, Bhagavad Gita, Hamlet

BLOG about the overlap of your classes

psychoanalysis - go back to when you were a child...

Summer Homework: Proust's novel...Dr. Sexson asks, "Have you got something better to do?" the novel is incredibly boring, we have to do the mysterious mental maneuver to get it....potentially epiphanic.....
Virginia Woolf, also boring......but in the tedium is the epiphanic......like Proust found more than a cup of tea in a cup of tea......

We read through Proust, The Cookie....petite madeleines
secular mystical experience......
final enlightenment

btw.....FINAL PAPER: must be our best piece of work ever! otherwise it will not be accepted.

in the last paragraph of The Cookie, memory never lost, just hiding....
Lisa Little Legs, playing with Katey Crystal in her backyard. Katey wearing a grass skirt and sunflower shirt? Lisa may never have thought of this memory in the day, but Dr. Sexson acted as the agent of remembering.....

art of tea - done aesthetically....(ever seen the flowering teas? tasty and beautiful, but there is more to the art of tea....)

The Letter to Can Grande by Dante, how we read, literally, allegorically, morally, and anagogically (mystical). The last is the highest level of interpretation....

anagogical and Frye

HW blog about Annie Dillard and Total Eclipse

Class Notes 3/1

Notes:
Dr. Sexson needed to add something to our discussion of the aesthetic hero and that is James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...Stephen Hero (aptly named) with a single minded devotion to the aesthetic

Walter Pater, at Oxford, trained Oscar Wilde, a pagan, and Hopkins, a deeply religious writer. But both Wilde and Hopkins were trained at the feet of aesthetic hero....

Hopkins, Jesuit priest wrote poem, Link here: Windhover. Inscape, seeing the bird as in itself as it really is...Transparent Things by Nabokov....the pencil scene.

ice skating...ever seen a proficient ice skater?
last 6 lines: the meaning of the experience dawns on him

the falcon eviscerates a small mammal - brutal, terror, horror

Kevin.......sublime.......Tai

= Pain

Epiphanic part of the poem:

"Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!"

buckle: collapse, knock down, connect, fasten, link.... paradox within one word.....the word is doing two things...

What is the point of this poem?? the act of the bird, the dive bomb, the eviscerating......Hopkins dedicates poem To Christ Our Lord, wants God to do to his soul as the falcon does to its prey....eviscerate it.

( I suppose this fits nicely with the idea that one must go down the ladder before coming back up. Go into the dark place before coming into the light. Dante has to go through Hell to get up to Heaven and his Beatrice. The idea though is that the dark, broken, creepy, scary place changes us. Sometimes you have to reach a breaking point before things start to get better. As Eliot takes us to the dark places of the epiphany, so does Hopkins in a way. Like St. John of the Cross.)


See Lisa Little Legs blog: As Kingfishers Catch Fire.....Lisa says, it's all coming together, Dr. Sexson says when your life comes together, it's also coming apart........buckle....


Google: 'fisher king'

-"The Fisher King, or the Wounded King, figures in Arthurian legend as the
latest in a line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Confusingly, many
works have two wounded Grail Kings who live in the same castle, a father and son
(or grandfather and grandson). The more seriously wounded father stays in the
castle, sustained by the Grail alone, while the more active son can meet with
guests and go fishing. For clarity, the father will be called the Wounded King,
the son the Fisher King where both appear in the remainder of this article."

This is from Wikipedia......but as I looked around on other sites about the Fisher King in relation to the Holy Grail I found that the story was hard to pin down. See this site for details: http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/grail/fisher/



-The Fisher King is also a comedy-drama film made in 1991, written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam. - Wikipedia


from As Kingfishers Catch Fire
"the just man justices" as in the story from the Bhagavad Gita or Krishna and Arjuna, it is his dharma, his duty to be a warrior.....

To the Light House, 50 eyes

Nature is a Heraclitean fire & of the comfort of resurrection

See Robert's blog
See Kari's blog, "We see into the life of things"
See Nick's blog, Kierkegaard......

Not so much to visit a place, but to revisit the place. To know the place for the first time.

transcendentalism

recollection, ancient Greek term, anamnesis, loss of forgetfulness...
Socrates conversation with Meno

gnosticism.