Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: poetry

  • “Hymn to the Sacred Body of the Universe” by Drew Dellinger

    Drew Dellinger.

  • Coleridge and Barfield on Life, Imagination, and Reality

    Continuing with Barfield’s (I think masterful) attempt (What Coleridge Thought, 1971) to give the definitive philosophical statement of a thinker who never seems to have gotten around to doing the same for himself, here are a few more reflections… Barfield judges Coleridge a genius. Perhaps so, but the latter said of his own existant philosophical…

  • Imagining the Future with Owen Barfield: Towards a Participatory Turn

    I’ve been reading Owen Barfield‘s recently republished philosophical novella Unancestral Voice (1967, 2010). Like many of his books, its aim is to make the esotericism of Rudolf Steiner more digestible to a 20th century audience. Barfield begins by setting the late industrial scene ~1967, situating us within the toxic detritus of a decaying civilization we…

  • God and the Chaosmos: Thinking with Catherine Keller

    Several months ago, a discussion erupted across the SR/OOO blogosphere concerning the implications of various forms of nihilistic and theistic realism. Some of my critiques have since ended up in a Wikipedia article. In one of my responses to Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, I toyed with the idea of Whitehead’s panentheism as a kind…

  • The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism

    The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism Introduction In the preface of his magisterial account of the evolution of consciousness, The Ever-Present Origin (1985), Jean Gebser warns of a crisis “of decisive finality for life on earth and for humanity,” a spiritual crisis heralding the end of the deficient mentality of the…

  • Notes on imagination, Poetry as Soul-making

    Poetry as soul-making Strictly speaking, what I want to talk about today does not exist, or at least if it does, remains for the most part unconscious to the rational, waking ego’s daylight gaze. Nonetheless, I’m forced to call this unknown phantasm something, and the name ‘imagination’ seems to suit it fine. Imagination is that…

  • Taste the Sky, Swallow the Horizon

      I screamed so loud, I could taste the sky. The stars became buds of light on my tongue, And the clusters of galaxies Poured into the tangled sinews of my brain. I became one of billions of sons, All circling the heavens In praise of our life. And yet, I was alone; My father…

  • Follow me to the desert, my soul.

    Follow me to the desert, My soul.   Sing with me Until I lose my mind; Dance with me, Until my body unwinds, And my feet no longer touch the ground, And all that’s left of time Is the sound of wind shaping sand.   Build with me a temple, My soul.   Share with…

  • The Feat of Human Flight

    Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, and now Icarus is closing in on the Sun. Daedalus reverse engineered the technology of angels and made man into bird. Will our wax wings melt in the light of space, or has the fire of spirit burst free of heavier elements? With each invention, are we more upright, or…

  • I am Time

    I am Time Time is unwinding through its eternal hour and life is heading always toward the grave. The sun is being born and dying every day as the earth rolls across the sky. Toward the Origin all creation flows, though once upon a time, the destiny of this world was written with words. History:…

  • Buddhist and Christian Soul-Making

    So far as I know, John Keats coined the phrase “soul-making” in a letter to his brother and sister in May of 1819. He writes: “…suppose a rose to have sensation. It blooms on a beautiful morning. It enjoys itself–but there comes a cold wind, a hot sun–it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its…

  • Visual Philosophy: Life Divine

    music “Spirits” by Ty Burhoe

  • Three Stanzas Remembered

    I remember more With each passing glance, With every standing trance That stalls me on my way. I am moved by that which gives All faces their romance, And frozen by the stare That makes me stay. But time cannot stand The memory of more Than what it makes unpleasant For me to understand.

  • Divine Imagination

    I’ve been having a very stimulating discussion with a Christian theologian named Jason Michael McCann. He has held up a mirror to my ideas and allowed me to see them in a new light. His criticisms are fair and I hope we will each benefit from continued exposure to what may turn out to be…

  • Knowing and Being: philosophy as poetry, learning through expressing

    To know the world, the mouth must first make words. I speak, therefore I am and can know the world. Being conscious is a poetic act, a participatory co-creation of life and all that is. That it is co-creationary also makes being conscious a process of discovery. The human universe is populated by countless centers…

  • Soul-making

    “Poetry is soul-making,” says Keats. Mere words make only sound, but poetry makes worlds, unwinding the coiled creativity of God’s voluminous loom to weave again the stories of angels and earthlings. Like lightning, ideas are made that strike the ground of our corporeal being, and from the tired dust of ages sprouts new life, awash…

  • The short story of a sophianic moonlight friend.

    There is one who kneels me, who pulls me to the Sky beneath the Earth. Around her, my heart is heavy with the gravity of love. Love, like a wound that needs forever to bleed in order to heal; a union of suffering and bliss that asks for no more than a brief kiss. In…

  • Hearing the Earth

    Eternity is easy. God is self-evidently so. You are God. Who else could you be? And so, as Krishna said,you were never born, and you are already dead. But then again, it seems like we are still alive… and still just human–but in our finitude, we rise morally above any completely transcendent God when we…

  • The Whole of Life

    For all we who still pass our days on earth left behind by those now beyond us. The world not only is, but is for we who care, and we care because we know it will not exist. We care because we die, and because we leave others behind. The self and the world, the…

  • Before the Body Knows It’s Gone

    The last breath of a once living time moves the whole of heaven to mourning, while the days of earth grow shorter to keep the Soul of the World turning. The past pursues the future faster than the sun can dawn; eternity eclipses death before the body knows it’s gone. Reminded of its destiny, the…

  • God is a Word

    God is a word laughed at by many, worshiped in fear by others, and understood by just a few. You may find this a presumptive thing to say, but save your suspicions for what I next submit to you: it is not the human animal that is in need of God, but God who is…