Hopper

Hopper

[to Kristen] 

What is adulthood?

It is many things, but not

knee scrapes, shoe strings,

not paper crown kings,

not stone flinging shot-slings.

And slippery! Hands are troubled to cling 

to objects enduring,

(save, maybe to worrying

for what sunrise could bring.) 

Moreover, it gives so many once-held things

wings,

In pairs!

And dares it to pare 

bonded things

together once weld' 

in rings. 

Others, still, it weds.

No matter how foe-like,

it beds 

them,

No matter how it stings.

[It is when the having of an ordinary joy

becomes a skill,

even an art of the mind]

Joy?

My present joy,

Like a winged grasshopper 

in a July day field.

Hopper,

To you the tall grasses are grossly tall.

I see you leap, span wings, and fall

haphazardly to ground below.

Everything is large to you and up and close.

When the wind blows, it blows;

the sun almost too greatly shines;

the dew drop really glows.

Hopper!

The black bird can snatch you up in a blink!

How fast the link

to life is cut.

Your little life is spent looking, is it not? 

You have a season

to befriend the trees once,

maybe for a mate to hunt

a victory to flaunt,

defy an ought,

But you’ve not 

the reason.

For you, to live is to see- to search

to keep the mouth full- to chirp

into the wind.

I watch from afar,

aware of all the out-about dangers that befall

your kind.

I can not help.

Come I near

your wings’ll span with fear

and you’ll flutter away.

I’ll have to turn my back

til you come back.

(I hope you do.)

You will.

jordan dejonge

On the Death of God

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed.
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or, as when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between
stations...
[East Coker]

On Holy Saturday, God lies dead in the tomb. Exposed and weak, he had cried out on the cross with a cry of abandonment, maybe even despair. With most of his friends having forsaken him, he gave up his spirit. 

Yes, it is true, in John's Gospel he more soberly states, "it is finished".But what is finished is the humiliation of God and therefore the transformation of the very idea of God. The curtain has been rent in two. In a sense, God has profaned Himself, because He is pushed outside the centrality which we  claim for him and is identified with the peripheral. All can be included in Jesus because Jesus does not stand as king at the centre, on the Throne in the Hall, but wades through the spiralled throngs of hierarchy until he  stands at the outermost edge where he is made a thing despised, rejected and stricken. This is the scandal that other Abrahamic traditions have never understood, unable as they are to see the divinity in the symmetry between the God above our heads in unimaginable glory and the God crushed under the Roman boot; the God of the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah on the moving chariot-throne, radiating a holiness that forces even the Seraphim to close their eyes, and the God whose bloodied and observable countenance forces the women to close their eyes in grief. The exalted and the despised are, together, one God. The centre is equivocated with the edge.  Those who can not see the beauty in this, or are not even moved by the faintest stir of curiosity, are lacking in a creative appreciation of thought. 

In considering this symmetry, the  highest point of heaven is drawn into one single shape with the lowest point of Hades, and precisely from the equivocation of these two is the outpouring of Spirit, if I understand this correctly. The old image of the Holy Mass comes to mind. The Father-king  holding the outstretched arms of the Crucified dead son beneath him; the small Dove hovering over this scene as a kind of perplexing extra-- far more obscure as signifier. 

Jesus, a historical man, in secular time is killed by the powers of the saeculum. And this event within the saeculum is lifted up like the serpent in the desert, raised above as the  "time of origins"- yet now founded within profane time itself rather than its cause. 

This gives Christianity its dynamism and, for me, its irrestible appeal. 

II

In the course of readings that I've been pursuing lately, much is being made or has been made of the death of God. And I have to admit that these theories interest me and have some clout. 

A number of weeks ago, wandering the streets of Toronto late at night, there was a middle aged, very obese man in a motor wheel chair crossing the street. From his voice, he was a bit of a flaming queen. He ran into someone with his wheel chair, and said, "Oh, sorry honey, God bless you", then quickly added with shrill laughter "What am I saying, there's no God!" [hand flick]. (Think in the vein of Roger the alien from American Dad.)

I can't tell you how disturbing this moment was for me. I was raised to look at handicapped people through the lens of the "preferential option". God's love was always more intense for the disadvantaged. Naturally, one thinks of the disadvantaged as the most in need of the feeling of God's love (though people like Jean Vanier have well testified that they are so often our teachers). So to have someone not privileged, someone not evidently well off or on the top of the social ladder proclaim God's death with such coldness felt incredibly dark.  But it continues to spur my thinking. 

As perhaps some of you know, I've come to the conviction that belief is shared, that it, along with the holy, is a category of social experience. Not simply the doubting of the neighbour, but his refusal to inhabit the world in which doubt and faith interact, is a disbelieving presence that neuters the power of my own prayer [as per the opening of Tarkovsky's Nostalgia] . We will either condemn him with rage in order to re-animate our prayer, or separate ourselves from him (which perhaps amounts to the same thing). But both of these options seem untenable today. 

As I see it, Christianity in the West is at a cross roads that is unlike any previous stage of its history. Yes, the Christian Church was at one time a sect in a pagan world. It is quickly on its way to becoming sectarian once more. But the conditions for belief are not at all the same. Whereas the early Christians could appeal to the Greek cosmos and the imagination of the Roman world, Christians today are often dealing with a different imaginary in a society of very different political and social relationships. Belief is, in many cases, impossible in the sense of how it came naturally to our ancestors, or even my grandparents and parents. In my opinion, it is quite often feigned or, at least, consistently haunted by a dissonance generated  by daily participation in a dis-embeded, uprooted and disenchanted world. There is really no hope for Christianity in the West unless it is willing to look at the conditions of belief itself, which I believe will inevitably turn us toward the dynamics of the community and our experience of "the other" within it. As scary as this may be, life for the community is the basic command of the Christian religion. Mandatum novum do vobis…

All of this is illustrated best in behaviours associated with the concept of the holy. As I know it, the holy is never more real than when I experience it in the throng of a crowd. Walking solemnly towards the altar of sacrifice, with the looming Cross laid out for veneration and Allegri's "Miserere Mei" - this is the summation image of everything ever entrusted to me from birth as holy- I am filled with something that is beyond words, because I am participating in something that is beyond time and beyond fragile individualities.  But how much the more when, upon returning to the pew, I can see the hundreds of people walking in their own silence, in the middle of their own prayer, with some of their own faces streaked with tears. Without them, without the crowd, the Catholic holy becomes its own desperate parody. This is why I do believe the pressing onwards to "full inward participation", in both the liberal and conservative sense, is ultimately destructive to traditional Catholicism because it is, in effect, a dis-embedding force. The usages of religion have proved to a great many that the Church and formal religion are not necessary to accomplish the goals they lay out. That is to say, the well ordered life. The irrelevance of religion to many today is actually a sign of its own success, internalized to the point of disappearance.  The Right argues less and less for the existence of God directly, and more and more for Him on the basis of the supposed necessity of the idea for the sake of the well-ordered society. But this just proves what has happened by the very terms of the debate, and constitutes a dare to the secular world to prove that we can have morality, beauty and meaning without religion. 

Should it really be taken as tangential that here, today, we can not really parade the Blessed Sacrament through the street? Or a statue of Mary? Or, that when such things are done and we can see crowds busily moving like a fish feeding frenzy- just to get a piece of contact with God-  these crowds are generally not white Westerners? (And if they are, they are young (gay?) men with half-a foot in seminary?). Doesn't this tell us that "the holy", as Catholics have traditionally experienced it, is completely tied to the operation of a logic found within the community life, and so does not live and work independently from it? 

Though I believe He is still heard in the corners, there is a great silence of God in these times. This is expressed in the utter incomprehension of the majority of members of my generation to see the relevance of the concept of God for their lives. On the other hand, I am convinced reactionary fundamentalisms aimed at recovering the old world of belief only deepens this incomprehension. 

If it appears God has left us, if it appears God has broken with us, I think it must be because we have broken our communion with one another in some sense. Perhaps this is the darker side of the gains of political life in the last centuries. 

Each like a sheep has gone astray
Each has gone his own way...

Yet we know that the world is groaning to be repaired, and so the work of religion can not be over, if the purpose of religion is indeed to hold us together, lifting us into what is beyond our own selves, and not just an individual path for a life lived rightly. 

God is in the tomb. He is dead, but death can not keep him. He will rise, transfigured, changed. Isn't faith following this path, even if we don't know in advance what his rising will be like? 

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed.
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or, as when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between
stations...

Holy Wound

O tenderly worded palm inscribed;

the hand that bleeds is the hand that guides;

crushed, the finger pointing to hallowed skies;

from none, 

from one, 

from her, from all derived           tenderly;

O wounded palm, I'll touch Thy blood to doubt.

skin tethered, en-skinned text;

the word spoken speaks, blesses, is blest;

presses palm to heart, prays, is prayed, is pressed;

laments, is lamented, suffers, comes to rest.

from above

comes,

from blood,

for blood;

from flesh 

to flesh to give;

Life taking up life, 

to die to live.

came,

to wound the Wound 

to mend It;

forsaken of grace 

to send it;

deprived of aid 

to lend it;

succumbed to sorrow

to fend it

at last away and forever. 

O tenderly worded palm inscribed

by Adam's deed,

by Eve's vale-low cries;

Thou,

from love, for love

from the Father,

with the Dove,

Take my palm in thine 

and glove 

it with thine own.

jordan dejonge

Some Verses for Lent

This year I didn't give up anything for Lent beyond the meagre demands of canon law. I didn't have the energy anymore to pretend with myself that I would do these things, or that I'm living in a world where they make sense and come naturally, where people around me are doing this too, or that my spiritual life has the vitality, and I the sheer power of will for it.  This is not to disparage those who can keep their Lenten commitments. Mine have been a consistent failure year after year since my parents stopped mandating its observance. It's come time to think about the "why" of this before I fix on externalities. 

It's nonetheless been Lent for me, in its own faint way. A kind of desert season where I see purple cloth when I close my eyes at night. And it's been a time of thirsting, questioning, receiving answers and also stark realizations about myself. 

"the desert is not remote in southern tropics,
the desert is not only around the corner,
the desert is squeezed in the tube train next to you,
the desert is in the heart of your brother"
[The Eagle Soars in the Summit of Heaven] 

The desert is not just in me. The world is not just in me. The first realization has been sin as something other than an abstract category, something more than the purely (seemingly) personal, like looking at pornography or entertaining a lustful thought, where the harm is never really manifest in the disappointed face of the other. 

Rather, now a confrontation with the real harm caused to relationships on account of wrongful patterns of thinking, tendencies towards self involvement, the poison of pride in the "thoughts of the heart". I do hope, with the ongoing stress of Lent as a season for awareness of social justice, that it's real penitential nature is not lost, though neither falsified through a pharisaical repentance that says "I am better because I acknowledge sin, whereas this hopeless secular world does not".

Stand in awe, and sin not; commune with your heart upoon your bed, and be still.
(Psalm 4:4)

We need to be able acknowledge our sins and ask for forgiveness, and to be able to do this together. So I am thankful for this season, its themes and scripture readings. It is an important structure for us, I think, that we should work to keep vital.

In the end, we all have to confront God-as-Judge. Whether wholly secular or not, properly theistic or not, some form of the belief in final judgement is the only way to live a human life, as I see it; meaning a human life responsible to the good of the community. For there is no other way to be, to feel full but to be beating alongside the community's pulse.

This, I think, will have to be the fundamental lesson learned by my generation (and myself). Individualism has taken a wrong turn and there is no sphere of the purely personal, the purely private on this side of the grave, so that we are always in charge of absolving ourselves because we can create the terms. A sheer positvist contract mentality is at work in many social relationships today, but, in the end, it seems to hurt us. We don't work this way, Love does not.

We can not write the rules of engagement according to our own constitution, but must also adapt to the constitutions and needs of others. In that sense, Pope Benedict is perfectly correct when he writes we need something like "an ecology of man", though I think its naive to think that this necessarily requires dogmatic obedience to Catholic Natural Law. In fact, we are already learning this lesson, though not on the terms of the Christian Right who want the recovery of community to be a nostalgic recreation of a moment impossibly retrieved, and who often do not really care if their prescriptions for the community are workable;  being, in truth, more concerned about the appearance of having answers because therein lies their source of power. This is why they watch the unfolding of decadence and disorder with a certain veiled glee, and hope for the failure of the noble ambitions of their secular contemporaries for a better world.

But we are increasingly more willing to acknowledge, for example in the spheres of the environment and economics, that our interrelation requires some imposition on us for the sake of others and our mutual good. It seems to me religion continues to be very relevant to this point. Though the demand that religion take certain highly specific forms  often obscures it and makes people suspicious of its adherents intentions, it is also at base a call to responsibility towards one another. In the Christian case, it is a summons towards a life lived under the light of the eventual "calling to account" that ought to drive our actions. The genius of the Christian doctrine is to proclaim individual responsibility in the midst of the fact of communal culpability. 

"For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands alone on the other side of death,
But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was
done by those who have gone before you ."
[Thus Your Fathers Were Made] 

The private sphere, where God is Judge, can not really be known now, though it nonetheless means we must strive towards our full development as individuals. T.S Eliot writes "make perfect your will".  I think this is reasonable to all, once we acknowledge that our individuality is totally embedded in social relations. 

There is, in our culture, a real rot of nihilism and shirking of all obligations for ambition and self-pursuit. I admit that this sometimes has its appeal to me. But there are also powerful secular voices for responsibility, a global minded ethic, and real passion for the common good. I think this is no less true of religious culture. There is a potential for Christianity to be a nihilism in disguise, a perverse desire to make the world seem as dark as possible so as to make the Christian "light" more palpable by contrast. I admit that this sometimes has its appeal to me too. Yet, here, the opposite is also true. There are and have been religious voices that are truly concerned about our human future, for whom caring is not hostility in disguise. Often these two camps, really on the same side, are both at odds- Matthew Arnold's "ignorant armies that clash by night".  

And if we acknowledge that we are in that night, standing "as though on a darkling plain", should there not be a certain humility of blindness? 

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of
Possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
[East Coker]

It is my hope for myself that I can carry on in this way, conscious of sin and self enclosure, and the needs of others, with a humble hope. 

The Steadfast Changeless Shore

"But I'll not fear. I will not weep

For those whose bodies rest in sleep,-

I know there is a blessed shore,

Opening its ports for me and mine

And, gazing Time's wide waters o'ver,

I weary for that land divine,

Where we were born, where you and I

Shall meet our dearest, when we die

From suffering and corruption free,

Restored into the Deity."

"Well hast thou spoken, sweet, trustful child!

And wiser than thy sire:

And worldly tempests, raging wild,

Shall strengthen thy desire-

Thy fervent hope, through storm and foam.

Through wind and ocean's roar,

To reach, at last, the eternal home,

The steadfast changeless shore!" 

(from "Faith and Despondency", Charlotte Bronte) 

The Poet is...

 “The poet is, must be, for the moment at least, a man so intensely aware of some Thing in his universe- Frost’s tuft of flowers deliberately spared by the mower- that he is driven to inventing an arrangement of words that makes others aware this Thing may exist in their universe too.” [Earle Birney] 

Readers, what is your favourite poem? What does it make you aware of?

Screens and Dilemmas

Last week I did something I swore I would never do, I bought a Kobo e-reader. 

Knee Jerk Conservative Fears

I had been resistant to this change for several reasons. The first was a conservative knee-jerk reaction against the seeming hubris of it all. The steady movement towards the digitalization of our works of literature seems to make their preservation all the more precarious. We sacrifice their  tangibility for levity. For the sake of convenience and succinctness, from the human urge to constantly unify and bring together the many, so that everything is increasingly only at a finger touch away or-intellectually-the whole of thought contained in a single over-arching concept: 

How many stores have to offer more and more variety, so that one can do more and more in a single location? Tim Horton's is now offering lattes, along with the McCafe, Wal-Mart is also a grocery store, other grocery stores are now featuring affordable clothing lines, and so on, while strip malls spring up everywhere. Even new condos in Toronto are featuring built in cafes, gyms and merchandize. There is, it seems, almost a crass materialization of the Platonic movement towards "the One" as the diversity of objects and options increasingly pool together into a single point. 

The idea of a personal library accessible on-the-go is in this vein.  

I remember, when I was 19, I became aware of a tendency to isolate myself in a room I was renting at an acquaintance's house. In this room, I had my shrine with its link to God, small library with its link to our cultural forbears, internet connection with its link to people, coffee maker so that I could brew coffee without having to leave the room and, after I begrudging cooked my meals downstairs,  would always eat them alone upstairs. I wanted a small fridge so that I didn't have to store my groceries in the common one. It struck me that I didn't want to leave my things downstairs, I didn't want to share or be shared, but desired all the constituents of life localized for me, not merely in the house, but in my absolutely private sphere.

This might seem tangential, but I think its an urge, perhaps shared by most to varying degrees, that is exploited or further developed by our technological situation today. With the rise of unlimited personal choice we can live alone in the midst of people in a false manner: individuals seated side by side on the subway each listening to the music of his choosing; through cellphones, we have private conversations with our absent friends while we wait in a line up  for our morning coffee, families don't have to fight over the remote because each has a tablet or a computer screen;  we don't have to show up at the TV for the right time because TIVO has recorded it and so I can choose my own television schedule, and on and on… reality itself is increasingly manipulatable towards our convenience, and is less and less burdened by having to be shared with the inconvenient wishes of another. 

He's got the whole world in His hands

He's got the whole wide world in his hands...


The world today is actually in our palm. This inevitably blunts the perception of the need for God, or the need to throw ourselves down and weep and plead at the feet of fate. I used to scoff at the saying of Rudolph Bultmann that 

“it is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles” (New Testament and Mythology, 5). 

Now it gives me more pause. 

E-books, E-missals, E-Bibles, E-Sacraments? 

Perhaps it has something to do with my Catholic upbringing, but the written word has always felt sacred. I think of the Missal on the altar, flanked by two candles; its weight when I had to carry it for the priest to pray the collect, which he prayed with his hands outstretched. Further, the family Bible, or the sense from my English teachers that literature disclosed the profound or sublime- a perception not very distant from that of "the holy". Books always felt like sacramentals. Holding a book in my hand felt/ feels like a sacred act, and I would sometimes just hold the Bible or a prayer book while kneeling, with the feeling, perhaps, that the profundity of truth was therein contained. Simply holding it felt prayerful. This continues/ continued, though somewhat more palely,  with texts like "The Odyssey", a Shakespeare play, or anything from the the venerable canon of Western culture. There is therefore something wrong about the E-reader, it seems. Can you imagine a priest praying the collect from an I-pad? (Though from an appropriately liturgically coloured binder is nearly as bad). The idea is very off-putting to me. But all of this can be considered,  I think, with reference to certain points of ideological fixture.  In a time increasingly characterized by fluidity, rootlessness, freedom of movement and choice, one of the primary concerns of my life, as I reflect, has been to find that "still point of the turning world".  

One reason I returned to Catholicism was because it is the only cultural form that has pervaded and characterized my family life and that of my relatives before me and, further, whose rituals and symbols seem certain to remain even after our unity dissolves, my grandparents die, the farm is sold, we disperse, and so on (its still a good reason, in my book). But is this really possible today? The cleaving of Christian faith from cultural inheritance and externalities began long before I was born, with a church composed of "true believers" offering "internal assent" and "witness", acting with "full conscious participation"-- all symptomatic of the dissolution of the link between religion and society, where religion ceases to be religio in the sense of "to-bind".

In his "Introduction to Christianity" Ratzinger observes of the early modern period that 

“the world finally appeared no longer as the firm housing of being but as a process whose continual expansion is the movement of being itself.”

And we are still there today, suspicious of every "firm house". Even though various forms of Christianity promise to offer the believer that fixed dwelling within which to abide, the very effort is constantly contradicted by the currents of culture itself, which most of these religions embrace, including Catholicism.  Catholic spirituality today is like a tumblr blog, where the art enthusiast can instantly pull up works from across the entire historical spectrum to decorate his new Facebook "time line".  One can "resource from the past", choose "baroque-retro", "patristic- chic" or go "relevant-contemporary". We can mix and match rites not just across cultural/ national boundaries, but across time: the EF, the OF, the up-and-coming "hybrid"; all of which are brought under the so called "big tent":  the great tarp over the flea market. 

Process theology continues to have its strong appeal for this reason: the entire world of culture and politics today, with the reign of pluralism and technological saturation, urges us on to reject any "hard kernel" to reality, as  the manner in which we live in order to actualize our sense of freedom, our constant striving towards defining (and redefining) the loose parameters of fragile identity, comes at the consequence of any such still-standing point. Conversely, the uncertainty and fear brought about by the endless fluidity can urge us on to find something- in some cases, anything- to anchor ourselves and escape the anxiety of permanent change. Is this the battle between progress and conservation?

In this sense, the fixed written page and the screen are a world apart. The missal on the altar or Shakespeare in the hand really do speak to truth as a fixed thing attainable within the world. Our world, "coloured and frail, with fleeting change on change", is more and more characterized by mutability, all the while the variety of options converge into a localized point. What reflects this better than the screen? To pick up a book is difficult, often boring for the fragmented attention span that increasingly characterizes today's generation. What is behind the preference of the screen over the page? Is it mere convenience?

While the book held gently in the hand might radiate with a sacred sense of cradling a fixed and profound truth (like the Blessed Sacrament shinning from the monstrance), the screen has a very different kind of magic. The screen, like the mutable, metamorphosing identity of postmodernism, is perennially "open". It can always, at any moment, become something else. It is the localized point into a all localities and none. With a book, we can turn a page; what was written and what was read remains materially. With the screen, what was read vanishes, sublated by the next series of text…

The physical Kobo or Kindle or Ipad can have none of the sacredness of a material text because it just plays host to the idea that temporarily inhabits it. 

El Pelon brought some important insights to my attention recently, when he contrasted the ideological implications of the Lutheran and Catholic doctrines of the Eucharist. Readers should be familiar with this controversy, understood as consubstantiation and transubstantiation respectively. He writes: 

The Lutheran just median, however, has spirit dwelling in the substance only to surpass it in its change into something else. In and of itself, the host is nothing; only in the process of being destroyed does it embody spirit. The truth is in the eating and not in the bread itself. One could thus say that Hegel’s entire philosophy is Lutheran par excellence: the truth only exists insofar as it is being immolated, consumed, and destroyed, to bring about a higher state of truth, ad infinitum. This is the “absolute negativity”, the “tarrying with the negative”, so often discussed in Hegel.

and then he writes of the doctrine of transubstantiation: 

Would not the feudal doctrine described above be all too convenient for these interests: the truth is a hard thing one could taste and touch, and which can be maintained by one particular group to the detriment of another? Does not the stability of the embodied host give a sort of moral and philosophical anchor to thought in the face of an ever-changing world dominated by the “anarchic” needs of the market (basically, the “Calvinist menace” that has been condemned since the Romantics and Marx)?

There is no need, of course, to stop with the Eucharist. To the extent that books were ever emblems of the truth- unquestionably so in Western culture- the e-book supplants the hard truth of the hard cover, "spiritualizes" it into the digital realm. We continue to abstract the tangible sign of the real, as into an I-Cloud. If the Protestant revolution was greatly aided- even made possible- by the printing press and the spread of information through books that helped to the draw the boundaries of the newly minted modern subject, what spiritual revolution exactly does the e-book contribute to? 

Is there good reason, beyond my own personal idiosyncrasies, to think that the sacred can not emit from an e-book like it can a physical text? I think so.


Is there any use looking for the still-point? Do fundamentalisms vulgarize this innate human urge and render it violent? Can the human need for rootedness ultimately be denied? Or is it an illusion, impossible to swallow given modern conditions? 

This is what troubles me lately, at any rate. Is there a grounding Absolute to be found beyond the confines of bitter, anti-modern fundamentalisms? What is "the absolute"? 

Do not call it fixity…

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

[T.S. Eliot]