sexta-feira, junho 16, 2006

What has truth?

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Next, Back, Thread Ahead: Climbing down Pisgah, Thread Back: No Man is an Island.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarI found this picture among many taken last year at the Indigenous Games in Altamira, Brazil. I put it as my desktop background and I have looked at her and wondered what question is in her mind for a long time now. She is my 'Altimira Anima', that is what I call her.

Words like 'troth' have a certain richness that appeals to me. Looks like 'truth' but means 'good faith' or 'fidelity'.

Creating meaning out of the helter skelter of experience is the job of poets says Northrop Frye. The only work worth doing I think he means.

This post today also comes from thinking about Kant's "the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will" a few days ago.

But the kicker is this little story by Paulo Sicsu which came to me from the Amazônia branch of Friends of the Earth. I have tried to translate it, not very well I am afraid, but here it is: Amazônia: Mãos que benzem e curam / Hands that bless and heal, Source.

Through a mysterious tide of strictly personal events certain things come to have meaning. All the daemonic language of bureaucrats and politicians and lawyers can never reduplicate the process much as they would like it to; although some of them do occasionally speak from the heart - at which time the effects are obvious to all. Judges too sometimes get there through the reality they impose.

I will leave the rest of it to you for now.

Click to Enlarge / Click para Aumentar

A photograph by Chor Sokunthea of a Buddhist monk blessing a turtle, whose touch is believed to cure rheumatism and other bodily ailments, as a nun holds the turtle on the head of a villager in Kandal province 20km / 12 miles west of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Not related strictly speaking, but I didn't want to lose it; Ricardo Sternberg remembering the first Brazil World Cup in 1958: Cheering for Pele and his pals, "Gilmar, De Sordi, Bellini, Zito, Orlando, Nilton Santos, Garrincha, Didi, Vava, Pele e Zagalo", (Archive).

Wallace Stevens
Which is real-
This bottle of indigo glass in the grass,
Or the bench with the pot of geraniums, the stained mattress and the
Washed overalls drying in the sun?
Which of these truly contains the world?

Neither one, nor the two together.