Tag: decreation

At Least | Raymond Carver

exceptindreams:

“At Least”
Raymond Carver

I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, from Glass, Irony and God

Ana Mendieta, Anima (Alma/Soul), 1976, armature of bamboo and rope with fireworks, Oaxaca, Mexico, c-print on paper mounted on paperboard and printed, 1977

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 179

We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a man rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes of him a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about him. His voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all the great works of arr or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then true in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that he is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation. To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us-such is the creative and ruling principle of the universe-such is the fullness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes man a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce men to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away.

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, pg. 64

It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be
looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being
appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of
detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated
is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or
a sound. Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same
quality of detachment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except
the things which are seen. Beauty is that which attracts this particular
sort of unselfish attention. It is obvious here what is the role,
for the artist or spectator, of exactness and objective vision: unsentimental,
detached, unselfish objective attention. It is also clear that
in moral situations a similar exactness is called for.