By Stu Whitley
Bio
This post is the fourth in a four-part series.
It
may be that memory is the Well of Wisdom: this idea is central to
Celtic mythology. In Celtic lore, the well is situated at the centre of
the Otherworld, the spiritual source, the land of the dead. Where it
gushes up, pilgrims drink from it using a skull as a vessel, thereby
creating a direct link with the dead. At the well of Llandeilo in
Dyfed, Wales, this practice continued into the twentieth century. The
skull was said to be that of St. Teilo, the ruins of whose church
loomed over the well itself.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
intuition
memory
poetry
wisdom
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the third post in a four-part series.
What may be demonstrated as a biological truth is intuitively
understood as we grow older. We become less egocentric, more aware that
the world has many centres of the universe besides our own, and that in
some mysterious way, these centres are all linked. In the mature adult,
we recognize as poets have before us, that we are round people on a
round earth, cognizant of being interwoven in a circular web of
connection with all human beings, which is among other things to
understand interdependency, forgiveness and the nature of healing. Hugo
wrote: “We are never done with conscience. Choose your course by it…it
is bottomless, being God.” And what is conscience if not memory?
Memory, that is, linked to consequences. No one can divine the future
with any exactitude. Yet we are capable of discerning the truths that
help guide us to it; I believe that those truths are at least in part
found in our collective memory.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
lessons
love
memory
truth
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the second post in a four-part series.
Poetry is sometimes the casualty of an age where rational clarity is
considered supreme. If the message of the poet is not apparent at the
first go, chuck the damn thing. This, of course, ignores the obvious
reality that to try and capture all that reposes within our innermost
thoughts on a particular matter may not be easily condensed and
dispensed as received wisdom. I think our ability to speak clearly on
important things is seriously exaggerated. Kant observed that there’s
no great art in being generally comprehensible if one renounces
insight. He thought that the result was a bunch of patched up
observations and half-reasoned principles, which he considered to be
the enjoyment of “shallowpates” in “everyday chitchat”. Jacques
Maritain wrote in Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry:
The law of intelligible clarity imposed by the classical tradition has…been an occasion for innumerable mediocre poems… [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
biology
memory
poetry
By Stu Whitley
Bio
I’ve been thinking lately about the poetry I write; the poetry I write for you
while joyful, is more than chirrup (I hope), with only a touch of elegy
more, it tries to plumb the mystery of apperception, and
the discernment of the uncommon qualities in the common things
that mark our quotidian ways: an arm-linked walk
a mug of hot tea at day’s end—these are the liturgies that shore
what always needs reinforcing; love cannot survive unilaterally
[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
love
memory
poetry
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the second in a four-part series.
There is no country more
tragically concerned with war, oppression and the visitation of death
than Poland. This is saying something for a continent riven by ethnic
and political conflict for millennia. It is my impression that war—and
in particular, the Second World War—casts a long shadow there, for the
occupation by the Soviet Union that followed for nearly half a century
afterward had its bitter roots in that conflict. The scars are yet
there, literally. In the large block in Lublin where my father lived as
a boy, a line of machine gun bullets fired 67 years ago is neatly
stitched across the stone façade.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
memory
poland
war
By Stu WhitleyBio
It is inevitable that the pressures of the past that are felt by the
present have to be contained in some sort of manageable context. Life
must be worth living. Gazing upward to the crumbling decks of
those forlorn leviathans from my canoe on the Yukon River, I wondered
about the men who worked those paddlewheel steamers. Back-breaking work
it must have been to feed those enormous furnaces. Even the ship’s
wheel needed to be six feet across to achieve the mechanical advantage
necessary to turn the fat twin rudders under the paddlewheel. It must
have required Herculean effort to avoid the snags and bars of the Yukon
River. Did these men too end their hard lives as empty relics, used up,
discarded on the strand as life’s indifferent perpetual current
continued to flow by?[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
aging
experience
memory
past
process
soul
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is second in a five-part series.
Those paddlewheel steamers on the Yukon keenly awakened my sensibility
that all things—regardless of how grand or wonderfully complex at the
time—have their time. If we are lucky, they, like us, will live on in a
sweet memory, rife with nostalgic editing that carves away the worst.
Like
a distant love affair that once seemed to have held the very purpose of
life in its hands, it is possible to be reminded of happier moments
that, for reasons not quite understandable now, at a far remove were
incapable of sustaining themselves. There’s a mystic contemplation that
surrounds something we do not want to end.
[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
good-old-days
love
memory
timelessness
|
RSS Feeds
