I’m a big fan of Quasha’s work, his poetry is strange, his work with stones is even more strange. And this little piece which you have posted, Doug, captures the contemporariness of Goethe’s Way.
As we start to notice who else is thinking this way we can notice that lots of us are, and some of us, without knowing anything about Goethe directly. We can go in many directions. I read the book you recommended Evolutionary Metaphors. I am thinking about all of these thinkers and how the pandemic amplifies this work.
This is suggestive of an underground movement that is starting to come to the surface, to touch the daylit, rigid, mindsets of most of us, who in the midst of the pandemic, can no longer pretend the deficient mental structure reigns supreme. That is why it is important to give our meta-attentions to our metaviews.
" The boundary between word and thing is getting thin." - Quasha
From my journal dated July 25, 2019 after a talk with Jeremy Johnson on his book, I made some notes. I got obsessed with boundary conditions and phase spaces.
The Boundaries of Civilizations in Space/Time
The boundary of a text?
The boundary of a sentence?
The boundary of a symbol?
The boundary of a song?
The boundary of vowel?
The boundary of a soul?
And when a sound is imagined or a sound is produced by the vocal cords, what is the relationship between the actual and the possible?
As every blade of grass is a different shade of green, so is it true that every time a word is spoken it is spoken differently. You can’t step into the same river twice nor can you say the same word the same way. It is always pronounced slightly different. It is impossible to pronounce a word exactly the same way every time.
I am trying in the above quote to do a meta-journal, a journal about a journal, and a reflection upon the 'I" that is ‘we’. I think that what I thought in the summer of 2019 is different from what I think now in the spring of 2021. A lot has been happening, lots of strange loops, lots of catastrophes. Not all of this is random, however. I sense that there are meta-patterns all over the place.
Quasha notices that the word and the object don’t sit still and we language users are constantly having to break frame and trans-frame. This is not always pleasant and sometimes we pretend the anomalies that are happening all around us, just don’t matter. That is until we hit an impasse and we start to recognize these patterns which we ignored are suddenly giving rise to storms, famines, nightmares, illnesses and strange contacts with other than human agencies. Even the Pentagon is taking notice.
I would invite us to consider another Goethean inflected scholar, Sean Esborn-Hargens, who takes Faerie, Galactic, and Celestial Intelligences seriously. This video is lively and the paper he has written, which is in the notes of the show, is even more of a deep dive. Our theory of the Imaginal is just starting to get off the ground. And is there a relationship between the Imaginal and the Supramental as Sri Aurobindo concieves of? We are, perhaps, through poetry, reading, writing, talking, during these turbulent years, creating conditions for that imagined development? And after the ecstasy, I have to wash the dishes and have another cup of coffee.