I have really got to read The Matter with Things. There's a lot I've really got to read. Something strikes me about that picture that I hadn't noticed before. Two figures coming down from heaven, looking at those going up, seem to have a certain expression. In one you can see the expression. In another you can just see her posture but it looks like she might well have the same expression on her face. It seems to me that it's a slightly shocked expression as if the angel coming up from the earth had said something that the one out of heaven thought a little inappropriate. I don't know if others can see it. It isn't true of the pairs higher up who are embracing. That seems like Blake. I think he'd say we ought to listen to angels but that also they ought sometimes to listen to us. Isn't that right?
The story of the supernovae seems so mythic. I have trouble hearing from people on either side (and I do think there are sides) that it isn't really a myth. I can't understand the story as a physicist could, there's so much depth and weirdness there but - well -
They undergo endless transformations, each one yielding power, each one yielding life until their alchemical journey reaches iron. *And there is no way on from iron.* That's what really gets me in the story. No way that can give them power, that can keep them alive. Iron builds up in their hearts. They fall against their own hearts and then burst in ludicrous, incomprehensible rages, blazing through a scale of elements with no hope of life in any of them, screaming all the notes at once.
Now we, way below maggot-size, wander around in the dust that blew from their corpses, iron rolling round red in our bloodstreams, believing ourselves the next chapter and perhaps we are right. From the places they went to, no news can return. Seriously, isn't that a good story?
So yeah, I think science has divine links somehow. I guess I don't like the idea that there's a vertical direction. But that's how I was raised.
I have really got to read The Matter with Things. There's a lot I've really got to read. Something strikes me about that picture that I hadn't noticed before. Two figures coming down from heaven, looking at those going up, seem to have a certain expression. In one you can see the expression. In another you can just see her posture but it looks like she might well have the same expression on her face. It seems to me that it's a slightly shocked expression as if the angel coming up from the earth had said something that the one out of heaven thought a little inappropriate. I don't know if others can see it. It isn't true of the pairs higher up who are embracing. That seems like Blake. I think he'd say we ought to listen to angels but that also they ought sometimes to listen to us. Isn't that right?
The story of the supernovae seems so mythic. I have trouble hearing from people on either side (and I do think there are sides) that it isn't really a myth. I can't understand the story as a physicist could, there's so much depth and weirdness there but - well -
They undergo endless transformations, each one yielding power, each one yielding life until their alchemical journey reaches iron. *And there is no way on from iron.* That's what really gets me in the story. No way that can give them power, that can keep them alive. Iron builds up in their hearts. They fall against their own hearts and then burst in ludicrous, incomprehensible rages, blazing through a scale of elements with no hope of life in any of them, screaming all the notes at once.
Now we, way below maggot-size, wander around in the dust that blew from their corpses, iron rolling round red in our bloodstreams, believing ourselves the next chapter and perhaps we are right. From the places they went to, no news can return. Seriously, isn't that a good story?
So yeah, I think science has divine links somehow. I guess I don't like the idea that there's a vertical direction. But that's how I was raised.