April 30, 2008

• Alien Knowledge and Mirrors

  My anam cara claims I’m “damn irritating,” and says she thinks I derive a sense of accomplishment if what I say, “hurts, annoys or promotes some
  reaction,” in those who read or hear it.  Don’t be misled by that.  She loves me, and I love her.

  Her daughter told her, “Kathy’s full of alien knowledge from
  galaxies far far away.  You just don’t speak her language.  She speaks
  XYZ and you speak ABC.“

  I suppose that some of what I know, and many ideas about which I think, speak and write, do come from places and planes outside the ordinary, but the language I speak and write is English, even though English is too limiting for me to be able entirely to think in it.  But even so, I don’t think in some alien language from off-planet.  I think in a mishmash of terrestrial tongues as well as in pictures and nonverbal memes. 

  English lacks any word for वैराग्य.  The best we can do to express वैराग्य is to negate its opposite.  It takes a paragraph to express 侘寂 in English, and even then one is likely to face blank incomprehension from American Anglophones whose aesthetic has been molded by Hallmark cards and TV commercials.  I find it unhelpful for purposes of intercultural understanding that many people are content to translate, “saudade,” as νοσταλγία, and thus miss its subtle essence.  Don’t even get me started on the many ways Anglophones mangle the pronunciation of the Portuguese, “saudade.”

  My soul sister Sydney/Sarah also thinks that I “hold up a mirror,” and when others accuse me, or perceive me as
  being something or some way (such as irritating), they are in reality, looking at themselves.  I’ve heard that idea before, about people seeing in others the things they don’t see or don’t want to see in themselves.  I’m not sure if it applies more to me than to anyone else.

  If I hold up any mirrors, the damn things are double-sided.  I spend much time looking deeply into my own eyes and soul.  The great writer, poet, and astrologer Linda Goodman said that a Virgo in a room with someone else and a mirror is more likely to look in the mirror than at the other person.  I’m sort of a Virgo, but not just a Sun Sign Virgo.  In my natal chart, Sun, Mercury (Virgo’s “ruler” in the old system in place at the time of my birth), Jupiter, Chiron (Virgo’s ruler now, since its discovery), and the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, are all in Virgo. 

  I know a little bit about a lot of things and a lot about me.  I have a black belt in socially inept introspection.  Wait a minute.  I think that was supposed to be “socially inept introversion.”  Whatever.  If I have to hold up something, heaven forbid it should be a bank or a liquor store.  A mirror is fine by me.

  “The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.”

  
  William Godwin
  

  
  

  “Introspective observation is what we must rely on first, and foremost, and always.”

  William James
  The Principles of Psychology,1890

  “We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world – INTROSPECTION.  We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably – that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbours is to know ourselves.”

  Walter Lippmann
   American Journalist,
  1889-1974

  “But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world — a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”

  Virginia Woolf

  

  • 4:14 pm
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