still more on the way:
"...he [Grieve/MacDiarmid] was led to read, among others, Nietzsche and Bergson and found himself as deeply susceptible to the Nietzschean injunction 'Become what thou art' as he was to Bergson's claim that it was the creative urge rather than natural selection that promoted the evolutionary process.from Seamus Heaney Finders Keepers A Torchlight Procession of One
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This is getting nearer to what makes Bowden's assertions and rejections important and true, yet confirms as well Keats' championing of ecological balance. What seems incompatible and separating between them is one more example of the reductive frame excluding the game-winning truth - that being the purpose of the frame to start.
Like the insistence on codifiable rules that can be abstracted and transported across time and geography, so that anything else is marginal and can be trivialized and left behind.
There seems to be, in my light reading of it anyway, an insistence in the Sufi tradition on the particularity of teaching, the immediacy of it, and the importance of it being alive and thoroughly in its moment. That's part of that.
The pigs want rules that can be written across the sky so they can be proprietized, trademarked, copyrighted, and owned, and also worked around. Because that's how they've come to own most everything else, including the Official Rule book, while avoiding anything like observant and ethically precise behavior.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill" except bad people, and as collateral damage etc.
Simple versions of the scam abound, not the least heart-tugging being the cliched response of American indigenous to the idea of ownership and salesmanship regarding land and water. As absurd as selling or buying the sky. And they meant that. Which meant they had no standing in a court adjudicating property rights.
Suffusing Bergson's "creative urge" is the assertive presence, the "I'm here" not so much as the cosmic mumbo-jumboish "I AM" as the open, possibly humorous, definitely humble, "I'm here" meaning "yes", meaning "life and me, we're happening", meaning the shark eating the sea lion can be all abstract and have null content of moral parameter and yet the human presence has its valence, rationality can be used to define any moral question down into the sub-atomic, unless that assertion steps in and halts the process.
Sooner or later this runs up against the need for a Higher Authority on the part of those who can't hold that without quaking. This is not to say, or even hint at the idea that there is no Higher Authority.
Whether or not that Authority has any substance isn't germane, it's the configuration of the dynamic that works.
And it's one big reason why we're in this spot.
Death is what's missing from the discourse, among other scary terms.
...more to come...
