online: 11 august 2017
modified: 11 august 2017
11 august 2017 in a northerly
wind
...it's a long time since i felt a northerly wind on the heath...
possibly i referred to it 20 or 30 years ago in writing here of George Borrow's talk*
with a famous Gypsy who spoke of the value of life... despite sickness
or death or other seeming disasters... 'for there's the wind on the
heath brother'...
...at which i listen to the chirrup of bird i don't recognise... and now
it's ceased and i hear the thunder of distant aircraft... and road
traffic... and the continuous shhhhhh sound in my hearing (normally not
noticed by me and inaudible to others)... or the so quiet sound of one's
breath (i can't hear it now as i sit here at the highest seat in this
city forest... as it's quieter than all other sounds... or perhaps it's
not actual sound but sound imagined... ?)...
...at which someone phones... and kindly listens to these thoughts...
before mentioning the purpose of the call... (sent invisibly by
electronics through the ionosphere... and pertaining to life and death
and everyday matters... money work and joy and sadness... all
equally important though it may not seem so... and to this spot where Mr
Petrulengro may well have been attracted if there was a Gypsy camp here in the
Vale of Health (as well as being a meeting place of romantic poets... likely
to attract George Borrow also?)...
...the conjunction of these seemingly separate things seems very real
to me just now... and i hope to all of us... in time... in timeliness to
self-and-other... both... outside the reach of clocktime and its
supposed reality... as money... as diminishing measure... of
everything... whereas there are many other times in each of us... those
of the bodymind:
heart beat and breath... eye motion... brain rhythms... speech and
writing... music... running /walking... etc
let alone the cosmic and earthly rhythms of years and days and suns and
moons and tides and weather (and earthquakes too)... and far far too
many to even think of here... how can we tolerate subjecting all these to
tick and tock of seconds minutes hours... and hence of dollars euros pounds etc
...yet as i write this i'm conscious that there may be errors in this
Cartesian argument... (if such is what it is)
...and then with hope i recall Immanuel Kant's view of time not as a
dimension of space-time but as:
'the form of the internal sense' **
*discussion between George Borrow and Gypsy Petrulengro
in this diary
**Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, page 52 of the 1787
translation by J M D Meiklejohn, London and New York 1969... and page
88 of the 1996 Indianopolis/Cambridge translation
by Werner S Pluhar.
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