Gregory Palamas, Cioran, language, definition, words, verse, beauty, and mystery

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“No language can hope for anything but its own defeat.”

Gregory Palamas

Which is to say- what happens to ‘what is’, when we tangle our multifarious verse into the uni-verse, creating a multi-verse, and then attempt to collate our manifold symbols (which are not reality) into a ‘way’ of seeing- what happens is that we end up with a vision of life ‘veiled’ through lifeless symbols; life becomes a collage of dead, separate ‘things’, instead of a singular, flowing, living, wholeness. This is why our term ‘cata-logue’ (‘cata-’: destruction, and ‘logos’: the ‘word’) literally refers to the disaster that arises from collecting and organizing symbols, which is what happens when we compart-mentalize our understandings, and make closed, separate boxes, and so destroy the natural whole.

            Concurring with this, Cioran injects: “Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing- each of them detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture- pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.”

          Words and facts are naught but veils over the wholeness and beauty of the mystery of ourselves, and of life.

excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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Mystical books, visionary art, and fine art photography by Jack Haas