Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that thou art good,
And that myself am blind;
Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And, binding nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will:
What conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than hell to shun,
That, more than heaven pursue.
What blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives,
To enjoy is to obey.
—Alexander Pope, from “The Universal Prayer”
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
—Wm. Shakespeare, Sonnet 33
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”
***
’T is you that are the music, not your song.
The song is but a door which, opening wide,
Lets forth the pent-up melody inside,
Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong
Sing but of you. Throughout your whole life long
Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide
This perfect beauty; waves within a tide,
Or single notes amid a glorious throng.
The song of earth has many different chords;
Ocean has many moods and many tones
Yet always ocean. In the damp Spring woods
The painted trillium smiles, while crisp pine cones
Autumn alone can ripen. So is this
One music with a thousand cadences.
—Amy Lowell, “Listening”
***
Once upon a time, way back in the 1990s, I studied journalism and media, and the famous saying of Marshall McLuhan, that “the medium is the message,” which I didn't entirely comprehend at the time, has since proved to be, in my view, an immensely important, fundamental truth, especially as it concerns young, developing human beings.
In other words, when considering the impact of media, the primary influence is not the "content" so much as the means of communication, be it a book, a radio program, television, film, or . . . the internet, which, in a way, combines, or mimics, all previously-known media in a new form.
(Around here, you may have guessed, we quite like books, the best and most durable of mediums, of which we have several new, or new-again, featured this week.)
With McLuhan in mind, I have been somewhat ambivalent about “broadcasting” human voices over the internet—call it a podcast—and thus entering even more deeply into a relationship with an increasingly ubiquitous medium that seems to desire an ever-more complete integration with human consciousness. . . .
However, always aiming for a balanced view of things, and as people here and there continued to suggest that we do something along these lines, I considered the possibility, aware also of the more positive aspects of the medium, the reality of its current presence in the cultural sphere, and the need for its ultimate redemption. Eventually, with the help of a trusted producer-collaborator, I decided to do it; to make a podcasted audio “show,” but based on certain self-imposed conditions and intentions:
in-person human conversations only (no “zoom” calls; conversants meet face-to-face)
audio only, and of the highest quality, given our recording circumstances (at our offices, not a studio)
we “wing it”: any questions or prompts on my part, are born out of a genuine human interest in my "guest" and what they know, feel, or believe to be true (no pre-conceived formulae or agendas, ideally)
We call it “Aleatory Encounters,” even though, just as Mr. Dylan sings, “I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice.”
You can expect a new episode every three weeks for the rest of the year.
This first episode, the human-machine interface w/ Joe Allen, appropriately enough, deals quite directly with these and many more questions, challenges, and possibilities of our human-technological age. Let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading, always, and this time, if you like, thanks for listening.
Keep in touch, John-Scott
He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!
—Emily Dickinson, " He ate and drank the precious words (1587)"
I've found my bonny babe a nest
On Slumber Tree,
I'll rock you there to rosy rest,
Asthore Machree!
Oh, lulla lo! sing all the leaves
On Slumber Tree,
Till everything that hurts or grieves
Afar must flee.
I've put my pretty child to float
Away from me,
Within the new moon's silver boat
On Slumber Sea.
And when your starry sail is o'er
From Slumber Sea,
My precious one, you'll step to shore
On Mother's knee.
—A. P. Graves, “An Irish Lullaby”
8 lectures in Germany and Switzerland, February 16 – December 3, 1916 (CW 168)
(CW 168)
“What may be seen in the thoughts and memories left behind in the souls of those who love the dead is certainly added to the world that the dead need directly, but it also elevates, improves the existence of the dead. We could compare this to art in the physical world, but there is no comparison, because it is uplifting for the dead, an improvement, in a sense far superior to the way in which art improves the physical world for us. Thus, it has a deep meaning when we unite our thoughts with those of the dead.” (from the first lecture)
The year is 1916. Europe is entering the third year of the most devastatingly brutal war yet known. The high hopes and idealistic expectations for the newly dawned twentieth century have been very quickly met with the murderous visage of modern warfare. (The death toll would eventually reach 35 million souls.) Such is the context and ever-present background to these presentations, informing both their mood and content.
Rudolf Steiner gave these eight lectures to the members of the Anthroposophical Society in various European cities throughout 1916, and they are all heartfelt attempts to address—practically—some of the fundamental questions living strongly in his listeners, who must be always be considered, to some degree, as co-creators of the content:
Given the fundamental reality of reincarnation, how do the so-called dead remain connected to us? What meaning do these countless sacrificial deaths have? What are the immediate experiences of those who have died?
These are a few of the burning questions addressed. The answers given are anything but theoretical. But there is something else here, as well. It could be summed up by the title of the lecture given in Zürich on October 10, 1916, that forms the heart of this collection: “How Can Today’s Poverty of Soul be Overcome?” “Today” refers not just that early-twentieth-century today; rather, it means the epoch in which we are now living, and overcoming our “poverty of soul”—and Steiner's wholeheartedly human advice for doing so—becomes increasingly valid and more urgent with each passing moment.
Rudolf Steiner, Zürich, October 10, 1916
What we seek as spiritual-scientific truths should not be just a dead knowledge for us, but a living one. It should be knowledge that can really find its way into our life, into all aspects of our life, and at the most important points in our life. Spiritual science today is often taken in quite abstractly. And people—especially those who have little understanding of spiritual science—may even come to a sort of detached knowledge that initially proves to be unfruitful for life, and they then have the following impression: “What does it matter that we know human beings are made of so-and-so many parts or members, and that humanity has evolved through different cultural epochs and will continue to evolve, and so on?” For those who believe, according to today’s demands, that people should be completely present in practical life, spiritual science often seems quite unproductive. And it is often conveyed as being unproductive, even by those who already have some heart and feeling for it.
Nevertheless, spiritual science itself, as it is, is something infinitely full of life; it can come alive even in the most exoteric practices in life; and it also must come alive for the sake of the future. Today I would like to make this clear with a particular example by choosing something from our spiritual science that we all presumably know, that is well known to us, and to show how it will gradually become even more enlivened by our looking at it as being full of life.
Most of you will have heard before that our time was preceded by the so-called fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, in which the Greeks and Romans were the most important peoples. The impulses of this fourth post-Atlantean cultural period influenced the following centuries into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We have been Lecture 4 How Can Today’s Poverty of Soul be Overcome? Zürich, October 10, 1916 How Can Today’s Poverty of Soul be Overcome? h 71 in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period since the fifteenth century. We have been born into this period in our current incarnation, and human beings will live in this fifth cultural period for many centuries to come. We know, furthermore, and have often let it flow through our souls (at least, most of us have) that humanity particularly advanced outer culture and outer work during the fourth post-Atlantean—the Greco-Roman—cultural period, which developed the so-called intellectual- or mind-soul at that time. Our task now is to develop the consciousness soul.
© SteinerBooks 2024
