Circles

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> It is rather grandiose, the way he puts himself at the center, isn't it.
> It's a recurring theme for Mr T.

Saturday it was hot and humid here. Chance of thunderstorms. Same as
today. 
Was doing my circles in Central Park NYC when the sky opened and it
rained pigs and elephants. I took shelter beneath a tree outside the
park and across from the American Museum of Natural History. I was
looking at Teddy Roosevelt on his horse. There is Teddy, his jaw
sticking out, rough, riding confidently West in bronze. On his Left is
an African-American and on his right a Native American.   Looking up,
there are Lewis and Clark, Audubon, Boone. I didn't wait for the rain to
stop. I went back to my circles. 



Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts,
and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the
same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,
whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but
yesterday
I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and
a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so
many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not
strenuous,
this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the
wall. 

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
_termini_ which bound the common of silence on every side. The
parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express
under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this
high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old
pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our
walls. 

When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from
the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and
exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer,
we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound
and executable only in ages and orbs are supposed in the announcement
of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We
all stand waiting, empty, --knowing, possibly, that we can be full,
surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose
and trivial toys. Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into
fiery
men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all
things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of
chair
and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in
the
fogs of yesterday, -- property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and
the like, have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned
settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates,
religions, leave
their foundations, and dance before our eyes. And yet here again see
the swift circumspection! Good as is discourse, silence is better, and
shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought
betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect
understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at
one in all parts, no words would be suffered. 

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and
throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the
nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its
circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious
sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in
considering the circular or compensatory character of every human
action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of
being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around
every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but
every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on
mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws
after it this train of cities and institutions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law
only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose
itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us.
The
man finishes his story, -- how good! how final! how it puts a new face
on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man,
and
draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of
the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first
speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his
antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which
haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a
word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be
included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of
to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all
the literatures, of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no
epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in
the world, as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as
prophecies of the next age. 


There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man
supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth
in
him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be
otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never
opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is,
every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle, through which a
new
one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform
whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by
which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning, install
ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that
we may wiselier see French, English, and American houses and modes
of living. In like manner, we see literature best from the midst of wild
nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field
cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his
diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to find the parallax of any
star. 

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not
in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of
Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.

Next, Aristotle, Cowart, History as Play & Poetry

"It's not easy being gray." 

	--  Otto &  German's Kermits