Antonius

Antonius den Store (251-356)

I dag mindes vi st. Antonius den Store, en foregangsmand for de kristne eneboere, der omkring 300-tallet flygtede ud i ørkenen fra den spirende romersk-kristne kultur. Her ville han søge Guds ansigt i ydmyghed og selvforglemmelse, fri fra fristelsen til at finde sig en behagelig position i et samfund, hvor man nu kunne høste ære fra mennesker ved at følge Kristus. Midt i sin ihærdige bøn og faste, modtog Antonius dog følgende åbenbaring:

 I byen er der én, som ligner dig. Af profession er han læge, og han giver alt, hvad han har tilovers, til dem, der har brug for det. Og hele dagen synger han “Hellig, hellig, hellig, er Gud den almægtige” sammen med englene.

 Nok er Antonius et strålende og inspirerende eksempel for os, hvad angår fokus på det væsentlige og vilje til at give afkald på sine behov. Men selv midt i denne radikalitet kunne han blive fristet til at sammenligne sig med andre mennesker og rose sig af den måde, hvorpå han skilte sig ud.

 Er den guddommelige irettesættelse, Antonius modtog, ikke en slående manifestation af både Treenighedens og inkarnationens principper?

 Uanset hvor helhjertet, jeg følger og stræber efter det guddommelige væsen, må jeg samtidig vide, at dette væsen kan vise sig i en helt anden skikkelse — en helt anden person — end jeg havde forestillet mig. På samme måde som Faderen, Sønnen og Ånden er forskellige personer, der deler det samme væsen. Jeg kan kun sammenligne mig med selve Guds væsen (og derved få min egen utilstrækkelighed at se), ikke med nogen anden person, for det er altid muligt, at denne anden person reflekterer Guds væsen meget bedre end jeg, men på en måde, jeg ikke forstår.

Eller ud fra inkarnationens princip: Jeg skal altid søge at lade Ordet blive kød i mit liv. Men som det viste sig ved Jesus, som var én bestemt person med én bestemt familiebaggrund i én bestemt kultur, bliver Ordet til kød på meget specifikke (og derfor meget forskellige) måder. På én måde hos den asketiske eneboer i hans fattigdom og isolation; på en anden måde hos den gudfrygtige erhvervsdrivende med hans rigdom og anseelse.

Dada! Abba!

Hugo Ball reciting at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, 1917.

I’ll begin this post by quting at length an English translation of Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto, written and read aloud in 1916 Zurich, meant to initiate or consolidate the Dada movement — a movement in European art during the First World War:

  “Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means “hobby horse”. In German it means “good-bye”, “Get off my back”, “Be seeing you sometime”. In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right”. And so forth.

…

I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da. It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz’s words are only two and a half centimetres long. It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.”

Dada. A sequence of four sounds. The same two sounds repeated twice over. A consonant and a vowel. Dada is a simple repeated alternation between a consonant and a vowel. Dada is meant to ” serve to show how articulated language comes into being”. Indeed, every human child, prior to learning the use of particular syllables in the appropriate situation, passes through the stage of babbling, where all sorts of consonant-vowel sequences are endlessly tested and played with. Babababa, Dadadada, Mamamama, Wawawawa.

The dadaists wanted to escape from the systems of conventional language, systems which force us so make use of particular sounds, syllables, words, and sentences, if we want to make ourselves unterstood, to communicate. They wanted to go back to “the heart of words”, somehow imagining, it seems, that they could truly express the individual self and its feelings by spontaneously combining random consonant and vowel sounds – i.e. by babbling. By making language up on the spot, they wanted to set free the spontaneity of the self, which they felt was always betrayed by the (linguistic) conventions of civilisation (a civilisation which was, to be fair, not proving itself worthy of that much confidence at the time).

Needless to say, wanting to have language without conventions is like wanting to both keep and eat the proverbial cake at the same time. Language is social, it requires that the same sound mean the same thing for two or more people. And the question is whether such a thing as the self, which the dadaists want to express immediately, can exist at all without language and sociality – and conventions.

Michael Kvium: So Simple

But about Dada being the heart of words, the movement may have had a point. The consonant-vowel babbling of babies seems to have prompted eager parents all over the world, all through history, to ascribe approximately the same meaning to these sound-combinations: Mama, Papa, Adda, Baba, Dada, Daddy, Mommy, Mami, Papi, Anna…

Why do the words for mother and father sound similar in so many, and such different, languages? Because they’re based on the first word-like sounds that babies come up with. Are we then wrong in thinking that babies are trying to address their parents, calling them by name, with their babbling? Of course not. The babbling itself, which imitates the language sounds the child hears from the parents, expresses the fact that the child-parent relation forms the child’s entire horizon, its life-world. The child was saying “mother”, “father”, way before consonants entered the picture. And it’s definitely appropriate that children come to know these words way before they master the words “I” or “Me”.

So in this sense, yes, Dada is the heart of words. On this the entire system or chain of words and meanings hinges. The question is, then, whether Dada, the pre-linguistic babbling of the parent-focused infant, may truly serve as a heart of all words. At the seemingly empty centre of language and sociality, where I am truly and terribly alone, because some things just cannot be communicated (or simply because I may, in spite of all efforts, become a social outcast), is there still a primary Word by which I may escape the void of the self? Or am I, as the Dadaists thought in appropriate despair, forced to be only that which I can acceptably communicate to others, with all their expectations, prejudices, moral requirements etc.?

I think this is probably the most important question I know how to ask. In response, for now, I’ll end with another quote:

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Paul’s epistle to the Romans, ch. 8, v. 14-15)

In Terra Pax.

Justice and Confession

In book one of Plato’s dialogue The Republic, Socrates the philosopher discusses justice with a character named Trasymachos. Trasymachos starts out by defining justice as that which is to the advantage of the strongest. His line of thought is that, since the just have principles that keep them from taking what they want, the strong will always be able to take advantage of the just — all they have to do is disregard the principles of justice. Therefore, in Trasymachos’ opinion, the unjust will also always be happier than the just.

Socrates of course, by his ironic use of questions asked out of feigned ignorance, brings Trasymachos around to see that justice is really the same as the good exercise of leadership. Therefore, he argues, any group or individual not adhering to justice will ultimately fail in achieving their goals, since they will be completely disorganised in their bad leadership.

This seems strange to me, since I’d be inclined to say that skillful leadership doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with justice. While I’m Platonic enough to believe that there are ultimate standards for good, and that a society organised according to these standards will be good, I don’t see what’s to stop any group or society from aiming at an unjust, bad, goal and getting organised so as to reach it. And they may very well reach it.

Of course, global capitalism is still organised according to this conception of justice. As long as one group or segment (nation, corporation, family, individual) is organised well enough to achieve their goals, economic forces should automatically take care of things so that the result will be a just and affluent society for all other groups as well. Clever organisation equals just organisation. Skill equals goodness. Is this really so? I don’t see how.

But perhaps Platonic justice still has an ace to play in this game. Perhaps we’re wrong in thinking that any group may truly reach the goals they aim for if they disregard justice for other groups.

Perhaps it’s a matter of more deeply examining the goals that groups may be aiming at. What if the immediate goals of any one individual or group really reflect some deeper longing, and what if the fulfillment of this longing depends on a universal fulfillment — one that includes all other individuals and groups as well?

This seems to be implied by Platonic justice. If my immediate goal may be achieved regardless of justice for all, then I must examine my heart and see that this immediate goal is not my true goal. I must see that my attempt at segregating myself and my own happiness from universal happiness is really bound to fail. Why? Because the split I’m making really runs, internally, through the very person that I am. Not only am I separating myself from global community, I’m separating myself from my own true goals, thus splitting myself apart. And yes, I do confess that I am.

 Indeed, Plato’s conception of justice bears within it the seeds of the spiritual practice called confession. A practice formalised some centuries later by the Church. It’s a subjective practice meant to reconnect the confessing sinner with objective reality. It’s the practice of laying bare the bad organisation of the fragments of self, so that healing (i.e. “making whole”) may take place and restore a true longing for justice.

On openness

If there was ever an instance where it was appropriate
to say “it’s funny because it’s true”, this is it. So,
without further ado:

It’s funny because it’s true.

John Cleese here adresses a certain feeling which many of us have in common. It’s a feeling of resentment towards persons and discourses that reduce complex or wondrous phenomena to something limited and thus manageable. It’s quite common to be irked or annoyed with, as Cleese puts it, reductionist views of the universe. Now, Cleese chooses to set up fundamentalist religion as a parallel to reductionism. I’d say, rather, that fundamentalist religion as well as fundamentalist scientism – the raising up of the natural sciences to an absolute – are reductionist views of the universe.

Concerning our resentment of such talk, I’ll say that I think it’s the equivalent of being lectured to on some issue of morality, and then retorting: “but you’re doing it yourself!”. We feel that the reductionist person’s closed-mindedness is an offence to us, because if they would only face up to what they don’t know, even about themselves, they’d be forced to be open to the unexpected. It would be possible to have dialogue or discussion with them, because they’d be consciously exposed to the fundamental conditions that we all have in common, even if we think we’ve explained them away –  conditions such as limited knowledge, inadequate understanding, terrifying uncertainty etc. It’s a widely experienced longing and a frequently expressed wish that people be open to opinions, to other people and to the universe as such. But how does one in fact, generally, retain such an open attitude?

Where openness specifically concerns other people — as opposed to mere objects, mental or physical — the answer seems simple enough (even if its actual application is painstaking and impossible to master perfectly). A human person is an unfathomable abyss of depth and complexity. One retains an open attitude towards a human person by admitting that one has always only understood a fraction of what constitutes that person. And, more importantly, one must also always bear in mind and respect the fact that one can only truly get to know a person better if that person freely chooses to reveal more about themselves. A person, as opposed to a thing, a concept or an object, is something that must reveal himself or herself in order to be known. In human relationships, the power and necessity of revelation is plain as daylight. If we try to forcefully extract knowledge of a person, we lose sight of their personhood. The person is then no longer known as a person, but only as a mere object. (I won’t go into all the instances in which this actually happens in modern society).

But then what about openness to the universe as such? Is it possible to take a genuine interest in the really existing world around us — in which we live, move, and have our being — without reducing it so that it fits the limited concepts of our human minds? If we have nothing but human concepts with which to know the universe, can our knowledge be anything but a human reduction of the universe? Can our human view of the universe be anything but reductionist? How is it possible, from whithin the human mind, to remain open to what the human mind cannot grasp?

Well, first of all I’ll say that what we call the universe must be thought of as an aspect of something larger. This something I call reality. So the universe is an aspect of reality — namely exactly the aspect made up by our orderly and unified knowledge of reality. The universe is reality in as far as human knowledge can order and unify it.

A non-reductionist view of the universe, then, must be a non-reductionist view of reality. As such, it must assume that the known universe is not all there is of reality. And it must also assume that not all of reality will necessarily conform to human knowledge at all. As far as I can see, the only way to consistently hold this assumption is to think of reality as ultimately personal. To think of reality as something which, in analogy with the human person, can be known only in as far as it reveals itself to us.

Either there is an ultimate personhood before which we can humble ourselves and assume that there is always more to the mystery, more to be discovered as it is revealed to our open and curious minds — or else we have left only the choice of either abandoning all knowledge or becoming self-possessed, uptight reductionists (both options being elegantly illustrated by Cleese’s boxing glove).

The garden where all loves end

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

wrote T. S. Eliot in 1930, accurately capturing the essence of private life in our modern western societies. At some point we seem to have decided that any dream of accomplishing something great together, in community, is in vain, and that the best we can do is to set up the conditions for each individual or family to most effectively mind their own business.

Sometime during the general process that we might call modernisation, there was,
according to Hannah Arendt, (see my previous post) a general rebellion against the idea that any aspect of human existence should be considered crude and unimportant to the eyes of the public. It was no longer enough that the activities necessary for upholding our bodily existence would be carried out in the smaller communities called homes or households. The fact that working to support human life was at the same time an immediately communal activity was no longer enough to make it meaningful. Instead, even the basic bodily labour, human life itself as an activity, demanded a visible presence on the public stage which  had previously been reserved for heroic or artistic deeds of excellence. The recognition previously reserved for the excellence of unique personalities was being claimed for the very activities that made man man.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Thus arose what Arendt terms the social or society. A new realm where the basic concerns of every household and, increasingly, every individual, were a matter of universal interest and responsibility. The socialisation of man came about, only not in the form intended by Karl Marx. Marx used this very term, the socialisation of man, to lay out his vision of a society where the aforementioned survival labour would determine not only the organisation of households, but the organisation of society as a whole. Living the active life of labour together was what made human existence meaningful, Marx reasoned, and, therefore, global human community could be given meaning by arranging it according to this aspect of life, instead of orienting everything towards the extraordinary deeds of unique individuals.

Instead of this Marxian form of the socialisation of man, we got a society where both the former excellence of the public realm and the immediate community of the private realm are gone. The basic bodily concerns of the individual are now national political matters, but they are no longer a basis for community. The production of food, for instance, no longer serves as the hub of any meaningful social interaction, because we strive to maintain a system where any individual can be sufficiently fed without necessarily coming into contact with any other human being. Pushed to the extreme, the current situation is one where anyone has (or ought, politically speaking, to have) the opportunity to realise any conceivable dream, but where there is no longer any social scene upon which the realisation of that dream will have any significance. No lasting significance, at least. Whatever I
accomplish will be noticed briefly by friends, but forgotten by the next generation.

Society zealously guards  the rights of the individual, and these rights generally have to do with individual life not being determined or conditioned in any way by anything larger than the individual. Society takes great care to defend the individual against society. We fight and die for the right of anybody to be left alone.

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek has said that the most precise image of global society today is that of the so-called masturbatorium (which, apparently, is a real phenomenon), where numerous people gather in great big halls to have sexual “intercourse” each with him- or herself only, all the while being visible to everyone else. The most extreme sense of privacy, the inviolability of the individual body, is secured by turning the public into an omnipresent, passive, asocial gaze.

Or, in the words of Eliot:

Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
[...]
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Racism – the way of rationality

This clip is (hopefully) not very interesting for you non-speakers of Danish. Around 1.20, popular TV hostess Line Baun Danielsen (I think, isn’t it?), confronted with a photo of a Caribbean gentleman in a boat, blurts out: “Is it a monkey/ape?” A clear-cut fail at political correctness. Not much more than that, though, if you ask me.

Here’s a question:
What is it that makes political correctness seem so hypocritical?

If I’m not much mistaken, political correctness attempts to adress prejudice. It’s not politically correct to express prejudice concerning any group of people — especially not if the group (not) in question is defined by race, religion, gender, physical or mental capacities, or sexual orientation.

And of course we should do what we can to protect people from opposition, aggression, or limitation of opportunities due to such prejudice.

The trouble is that many of us can’t stop at not treating others in a prejudiced manner. We very quickly move on to the next stage, namely that of pretending not to harbour any prejudice at all — not even at a purely mental or emotional level. It becomes respectable, and indeed crucial for social acceptability, to be politically correct through and through, and, consequently, it would be catastrophic to ever be caught unawares and accidentally have one’s latent racism (for example) exposed in some sort of Freudian slip.

I think we’d do well to remember that politically uncorrect prejudice is often not without a rational basis. Or, to put it more bluntly, and in all political uncorrectness: racism, for instance, is a rational attitude. In many contexts, racial prejudice is an intuitive internalisation of statistic realities concerning race. So, as an example, racial prejudice might prompt me to avoid a group of young somali men in a Copenhagen street late at night — perhaps even if this would mean passing close by an equally large group of men with their ethnic roots in Denmark. Why? Because I, as well as the statistics, know that I am more likely to be assaulted by somebody whose ethnic roots are not in Denmark. This is racial prejudice. Most of us have it, we have it for a reason, and if we act upon it, it will (statistically speaking) protect us from unpleasant experiences. Racism is rational.

Does this mean that racism is also right? If rationality is an ethical stamp of approval, then the answer is yes.

Personally, I believe that racism and racial prejudice are wrong, even if they are factually accurate. The fundamental problem problem about prejudice is not whether or not it fits the facts of the world — i.e. the way people are. It often does, and too much time is spent running from the disillusionment of realising this. The problem, rather, is that whenever a particular person is treated according to prejudice against, for instance, the race to which he belongs, he is denied status as a free and responsible agent. In other words, if I treat someone from an arabic country according to my preconceptions concerning arabs in general (God knows I have them), I effectively deny him the option of acting in a different way than the one stipulated by my prejudiced viewpoint. For example, it is difficult to not assault someone in the street, if you are never effectively given the choice, because they assume that you are going to assault them and thus never come near you. It is also diffucult to prove the statistics wrong by not stealing from an employer who chooses, on account of statistics, not to employ you. At a more general level, the motivation is not strong to behave well towards someone who never believes in one’s capacity to do so.

The bottom line is that fighting racism means acting against one’s better judgment and assuming, in every particular case, that the statistics do not apply in this particular case. It means trusting someone who is statistically unworthy of trust. When statistics and personal experience combine to form one big slap on the cheek, we are still called to turn the other cheek. At bottom level, it means not treating human persons like dice which, if rolled a large enough number of times, will yield a predictable, even predetermined, outcome — or, in other words, it means treating persons as human.

(Of course, aspiring to this true anti-racist behaviour also has to imply training ourselves in an anti-racist mindset, but, again, at the level of political correctness, this type of training seems to take place at a petty level, far from the confrontations where it becomes relevant — and also at the impossible level of bidding the mind to create a non-racist attitude out of nothing. The question is whether non-racist thinking mustn’t simply come as an effect of the hard work of non-racist action).

In this case, I don’t know what to say:

No longer I

Thanks to Zach Weiner for yet another high-quality piece of humouristic cleverness posted at his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal site. I’m not quite sure how he comes up with one of these every day, unless he’s more than one person, which may, of course, be the case.

It was one particular Jewish atheist who made me think of this cartoon, namely the 20th century German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose work I’m looking at these days. Like so many other atheists, Arendt has done me the favour of pointing out certain peculiarities of the particular theism I subscribe to, namely Christianity. Atheism often fulfills this function, because things tend to stand out more readily as peculiar when viewed from the outside.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

I’m going to quote Arendt at length. The following is taken out of the context of a longer discourse, in her book The Human Condition, on the historical relationship between the public and the private. She looks at the Christian idea of goodness as an extreme example of something that does not belong in the public sphere.

The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be understood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works, independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake.

When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity. Therefore: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them”. Goodness can exist only when it is not percieved, not even by its author; whoever sees himself performing a good work is no longer good, but at best a useful member of society or a dutiful member of a church. Therefore: “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”

It may be this curious negative quality of goodness, the lack of outward phenomenal manifestation, that makes Jesus of Nazareth’s appearance in history such a profoundly paradoxical event; it certainly seems to be the reason why he thought and taught that no man can be good: “Why callest thou me good? none is good save one; that is, God.” [...T]he whole life story of Jesus seems to testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man can be good. (The Human Condition, pp. 74-75)

One of my true teachers (as opposed to professors and supervisors and other such menaces), Andrew Fellows, says that the main characteristic of the fallen state of mankind is self-awareness. In the Genesis account, Adam and Eve, after disconnecting from goodness as flowing directly from divine intention, become aware that they are naked. They choose to make use of their capacity for independent action to gain knowledge of evil as well as of good, and thus their relationship to the good becomes complex. Why? Because it becomes also a relationship with themselves, or with the self. It becomes something they must face, as in a mirror, as opposed to simply working it out in blissful reliance on the pure intention of God Himself.

The biggest problem is that reflecting upon one’s own goodness is like looking at the back of one’s neck. It’s gone as soon as you look — by the very motion of turning to look. When looking for the realisation of goodness in our own behaviour, we are bound to either watch ourselves fail or start distorting the mirror. The range of distortions in human culture and history is beyond measure.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's illustrations for 'The Little Prince'

In Christianity we are called to choosing the former option: that of watching ourselves fail. Last week, at my friend Simon’s ecumenical project, the “Desert Eucharist“, we read from the third chapter of the Gospel according to John. Here, Jesus explains the significance of his own death at Calvary by pointing back to the Old Testament story where God unleashes a great number of snakes on the Israelites as punishment for their disobedience. The people beg Moses to take the snakes away, and God instructs Moses to fashion a large image of a snake from copper and raise it up on a pole. Whoever looks upon the copper snake is not killed by the snakes’ venom.

After the reading, somebody pointed out that, according to this story, it is the very image of the self-inflicted troubles of mankind that becomes the means for our liberation. We must look squarely at our failures and shortcomings, and their consequences (the snakes we bring upon ourselves), and realise fully that we cannot overcome them. As Arendt says, the Christian may realise what is good, but he cannot be good.

One of the paradoxes of God becoming flesh is the fact that the clearest image of our sin, the image that was raised up for all the world to behold and despise, was also the One that was without sin. None is good save One, and only One makes it perfectly clear to us how perfectly incapable we are of being good.

Because self-awareness has made it impossible for us to be good, we have instead been given the opportunity to look away from ourselves, not at goodnes, but at evil. Instead of the vicious circle of wathcing ourselves failing to be good, and thus becoming more miserably self-absorbed, which in turn makes us fail even more thoroughly, the very image of our failures is raised up in full view, in the same motion that destroys them for good.

We must let ourselves be drawn to Him, the true image of our sin (Him who became sin for us) and follow him into death — that is, death to ourselves. We look at Him and see the evil that we must utterly be to our own eyes, and we watch it perish with him in His death. Thus, to our own eyes, we no longer live. Self-awareness is obsolete, because the self is dead to the self. And then He rises again, so that He may live in us. To our eyes, then, it is no longer us, but Him, the only one who is good, who lives.

Self-awareness, then, should become Christ-awareness, that is, awareness of sin, of death, and of resurrection.

A poem in Danish

(sorry to you English speakers, but I don’t really think it translates)

Javier García Ureña: "Marine Warhammer 40000".

 

Her Bor Ingen

Til sidst steg jeg ind i en elevator
holdt i mat rustfrit stål,
med skjulte lysstofrør
og spejl i begge sider,
så jeg kunne se mig
se mig selv i nakken.
“Og hvad så hvis det er løgn”,
tænkte jeg,
mens døren gled i bag mig,
og gulvet sank.

A creed

Michael Kvium: "Naturkreds".

I believe that the impersonal appearance of the universe results from the failed attempt at placing human personhood at the center of it.

Michael Kvium: "Kulturkreds".

And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands…

I love trees.