White though simple carries every colour. Glory – small word – is manifold. Break apart light and find prismatic wonder. None of this has words. What then? What sounds can be made to stir hearts? The Word – singular yet many pleats, Many rooms – beams and breathes from beginning. How can we reveal? WeContinue reading “Doxa”
Category Archives: Philosophy
Speech
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. – Ludwig Wittgenstein If poets and statisticians ate together, would their talk make sense? What figures and what facts could they summon up then as they spoke? What heart would lie within each number? How might every number lie? The trends we graph are true,Continue reading “Speech”
Sonnet
Your mind’s a rhizome and your head’s at sea. Stray flotsam, jetsam drift in it; its roots Run deeper than the ocean bed and shoots Burst out of it, this way and that. The key To tracing thoughts back to their unity Lies not in system or in sticking boots Into the wildness of yourContinue reading “Sonnet”
Imago: For David Malouf
Who knows by what mysterious means the body moves to its ends? (David Malouf, An Imaginary Life) Half right, Ovid: we metamorphose, yet Not so wildly. There are leaps which we may Never take, gates which bar the backwards way. Infinitesimal, our movements, but breath Charges with possibility each step. We perish like beasts, toContinue reading “Imago: For David Malouf”
From Ashes 12: Metamorphosis and Sophronismos – Neuroplasticity and the Renewed Mind
As I approach my 30th birthday, which brings with it much reflection on all that God has done in my life so far, I have found myself drawn again to one of the most well-worn parts of my the Bible – Psalm 139. For many, this is their favourite psalm, and it is certainly oneContinue reading “From Ashes 12: Metamorphosis and Sophronismos – Neuroplasticity and the Renewed Mind”
From Ashes 10: Søren Kierkegaard – Original Sin and the Fear of Possibility
“When you’re absolute beginners,” folk singer M. Ward tells us, “it’s a panoramic view, from her majesty Mount Zion, and the kingdom is for you.” What he seems to suggest here is that, at any beginning point, there appears an infinite potentiality to life, stretching out like a majestic panorama before us. W.H. Auden, in hisContinue reading “From Ashes 10: Søren Kierkegaard – Original Sin and the Fear of Possibility”
From Ashes Part 9: The Philosopher’s Wretchedness
When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after…the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know thing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself hereContinue reading “From Ashes Part 9: The Philosopher’s Wretchedness”
Philosophy is poetry if true
For truth is found in perfect, measured rhyme: The dance between the mystery and clue, The hint of infinite contained in time. Philosophy is true if it is said In words of simple honesty which ring With cosmic shimmers, and the truth is dead If language must obscure idea from thing. Plato’s only truth wasContinue reading “Philosophy is poetry if true”
The Jolt, the Life
Having been looked at by God, I had to and have to look at God. (Søren Kierkegaard, Journal) You – how can I call you by familiar names? Only Thou seems fitting; yet You invade Space, time, as though next to me, as though plain. Yet You are not plain: You assault, You raidContinue reading “The Jolt, the Life”
Søren (After Rowan Williams’ “Rublev”)
The Messiah came one day, tattered in Adam’s rags, ragged and anxious from the moment of sin, sick nearly to death. I said, My father has betrayed you and I have chased dead beauty. Sit ragged with me by my hearth. I too wear scars: do you know them? These the contours that choice hasContinue reading “Søren (After Rowan Williams’ “Rublev”)”
The Consolations of Writing 