Black Sun

All truth is on the boundaries
---Tillich

'If ouch is the complaint of the ego, och is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, and on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.'
-----Seamus Heaney

Threshold:our love of boundaries and escape, of coming home and of not coming home, our thirst for strange lands, otherness, of coming up against a limit, of recognising a familiar face. Culture is nothing but a wall around nature; rituals invite and ward off the strange. Threshold: something one "treads" over but also "to rub, to turn" so that the essence is released..a turning point. Like the solstice: the highest point but also the axis around which our lives revolve, the limit or the nadir , the lowest point which at least if it points to zero, and therefore an end point, offers the hope of a return, an imminent or delayed redress of the balance, but a distinct possibility nevertheless.

As long as we can imagine the opposite shore then grief can be borne. If we see the point of it then we see that it is not the point of no return.The zero of existence is what Jonah would call the dark night of the soul. One must be able to shine through this nothingness. But is this ability ultimately ours or is it given to us and what of grief that seems endless, out of bounds?

I wonder how pervasive the idea of the frontier, the boundary is in Europe? The forest, the moors which are lawless, chaotic,spirit-infested, the wilderness and trolls..Fear, but also the lure of the transcendent is a spur to creativity: death is the point of all points, and our first glance with mortality impels us to think.

Within these phantasmal boundaries each lord's hall is a place of refuge. within: warmth and light; human solidarity and culture;rank and ceremony. a solidification of time. Outside: unredeemed time.

Perhaps we humans
have wanted God most as witness
to acts of choice made in solitude.
Acts of memory,of sacrifice.
Wanted that great single eye to see us,
steadfast as we flowed by.
Yet there are other acts
not even vanity
or anxious hope to please, knows of-bone doings,
leaps of nerves, heart-cries of communion: if there is bliss
it has been already
and will be; out-reaching, utterly.
Blind to itself, flooded
with otherness.
----Denise Levertov