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| Dark Materials Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise
Thir embryon Atoms....
... Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage....
-- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II | | |
| Apocatastasis Now
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
-- WILLIAM BLAKE
"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (JBSSJ [Journal of the Blake Society at St James's] 6 [2001] 18–25), Susanne Sklar argues that Blake is not apocalyptic but apocatastatic, that is (following a doctrine of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) he believes that all free creatures will be redeemed by God's universal love."
-- The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547
Related material:From the website of Philip Pullman, president of The Blake Society:
"I must create a System…" The Blake Society, 25 October 2005: St James’s Church, Piccadilly I see that the title of this lecture is given as BLAKE'S DARK MATERIALS. Now in the lecturer's handbook, the second rule says "You need take no obsessive notice of the title that has been announced in advance." Whether Blake's materials are dark or not I couldn't really say, but I am going to talk about Blake, partly, and partly about religion. Appropriate, perhaps, in a place like this, but you might think not appropriate from someone whose reputation is that of a scoffer or mocker or critic of religion; but I haven't come here to scoff or mock. Nor have I come here to recant, as a matter of fact. I'm profoundly interested in religion, and I think it's extremely important to understand it. I've been trying to understand it all my life, and every so often it's useful to put one's thoughts in order; but I shall never like God.
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For more dark materials from the Halloween season of 2005 -- in fact, from the very date of Pullman's lecture-- see Darkness Doubled. | | |
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"... T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land." -- " Beauty and Desecration," Roger Scruton (link at aldaily.com today)
"The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness...."
-- Carl G. Jung in Aion |
Related material:
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| Picture This
The death of the character Mary O'Brien in the 2002 film "Equilibrium," broadcast in the U.S.A. Saturday evening, paralleled the reported death of Iran's Neda Soltan on the same day (June 20). The reported last words of Soltan would also have been fitting for O'Brien. (Any such resemblance between a fictional character and a real person is, of course, purely coincidental.)
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