by RobertAllen » Fri Aug 12, 2011 8:05 am
3. Yea, cried the Holy One, and from Thy spark will I the Lord kindle a great light; I will burn through the great city in the old and desolate land; I will cleanse it from its great impurity.
4. And thou, O prophet, shalt see these things, and thou shalt heed them not.
So, here is a difficult thought. It was a bit of a sticking point for me at the end of the last chapter. It's this correspondence between the desolate and the spiritual. It's related to the notion of cleansing fire as a spiritual impulse. I have always thought that Dresden after the allied induced fire storm, or Hiroshima after the use of the A-bomb must have been the most sublime and spiritual places on the planet. I say this for poetic reasons, not as an advocate for laying waste to the world—I'm a big fan of musky smelling, orchid dominated, river valleys in tropical climates.
I think of traditional spiritual landscapes, like deserts, high mountainous places where much of the detail of worldly things, like you might find in a great city, are non-existent.
This line of thought also bring me to a strange place in regard to the last clause: O prophet, shalt see these things, and thou shalt heed them not.
I will dote on the nature of spirit, and be reminded that this is actually about an initiation into Tiphareth. Still, the spirit as an all consuming flame, in all of it's poetic starkness, looms large in my imagination.
Love and Will
"I remember seeing Atlas looking at a world whose hoops and rings had been broken by Copernicus, where Tycho Brahe placed his back beneath the globe, and a shouting Ptolemy tried to support the round lump, to stop it from falling into the void. In the mean time Copernicus was breaking many crystal spheres that were placed around the globe and was stamping out the little lights that flickered in the crystal jars." (de Hooghe, Hieroglyphica, Amsterdam, 1744)