Part 3. Chrestomathy (continued)
Consonance-prisms to the 54 episodes of the Literary Book and the Manual
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Consonance: “If the sun should suddenly decide to take a rest”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The dynamics of cosmic energies
Yin and Yang.
Prism II: The path of service
The Bodhisattva.
Prism III: Energy and solitude
The psychology of the introvert.
Consonance: “Here is my mirror, it is almost cut out. Without the burden of the creaturely world”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: Overcoming the human
The Übermensch — Nietzsche.
Prism II: The projection of the Self
The Self — Jung.
Prism III: The friend of the soul
Anam Cara
∞⩂ English Mirror“What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960).
Friendship as recognition rather than confession — the unspoken bond of this episode, in the words of an Oxford don.
Consonance: “To wear one single pair of shoes, without a spare in the wardrobe”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The ethics of pure duty
The categorical imperative — Kant.
Prism II: Wisdom in madness
The holy fool (yurodivy ).
Prism III: The simplicity of service
The legend of Our Lady’s Juggler.
Consonance: “Happiness — an inborn error or…? I go to watch earthly life from above”
Weight of the episode: Key.
Prism I: Natural happiness
Sat-Chit-Ānanda
Prism II: The philosophy of suffering
“There is but one inborn error – the conviction that we are born for happiness.”— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , II, ch. 49.
Prism III: The philosophy of calm
Ataraxia
Consonance: “There are two of me. Intimising”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: Meeting the Double
The Doppelgänger — Dostoevsky, The Double (1846).
Prism II: Integrating the Shadow
Jung.
Prism III: Witness consciousness
Sākṣī
∞⩂ English Mirror“…man is not truly one, but truly two.”— Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
The great Victorian parable of the divided self — the dark British twin of this episode’s playful “intimising”.
Consonance: “November frustrations”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The destructive face of Time
Kronos.
Prism II: The creative face of Time
Cosmos versus Chaos.
Prism III: The engine of melancholy
Aristotle on melancholics (Problemata XXX, 1).
Consonance: “To decide the destinies of the world”
Weight of the episode: Key.
Prism I: The engine of progress
World Spirit — Hegel.
Prism II: Man as Universe
Puruṣa — the Rigveda (X, 90).
Prism III: Poetic all-embracement
“I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, 21.
Consonance: “I do not take the air from people”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The imperative of self-sufficiency
“The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841).
Prism II: The principle of non-harm
Ahiṃsā
Prism III: Universal responsibility
The Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva.
Consonance: “One thousand strokes of my own balls”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: Sexuality as a path
Tantra.
Prism II: Union as knowledge
Syzygy — Gnosticism, the Gospel of Philip.
Prism III: The birth of the new
Coniunctio
∞⩂ English MirrorD. H. Lawrence , Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The English novel that made bodily love a way of knowing — and was banned for three decades, until the obscenity trial of 1960. The British precedent for this episode’s frankness.
Consonance: “This song will be heard by children not yet born of your love and mine”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: Care for the future
Generativity versus stagnation — Erik Erikson.
Prism II: Acting for the future
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”— Traditional saying, often called a Greek proverb.
Prism III: Art against Time
“Non omnis moriar ” — “I shall not wholly die.”— Horace, Odes , III, 30.
Consonance: “The highest ecstasy — ears and eyes at one point”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The fusion of the senses
« A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles »— Arthur Rimbaud, “Voyelles” (1871).
Prism II: A synthesis for the soul
Wassily Kandinsky , Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).
Prism III: Creative destruction
The Dance of Shiva (Naṭarāja).
∞⩂ English MirrorAlexander Wallace Rimington , Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Colour (1912). The English painter who built a colour organ in the 1890s and dreamt of bringing eye and ear to a single point — the British prehistory of LightSound.
Consonance: “Emptily charged nights”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: Transformation through falling
Gaston Bachelard , Air and Dreams (1943) — the dream of falling and flying as an experience of the imagination’s verticality.
Prism II: Emptiness full of potential
Śūnyatā
Prism III: The fusion of dream and reality
“…a kind of absolute reality, a surreality …”— André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).
Consonance: “Burrowed between her legs. The epicentre of the world”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The sacred gate
Yoni.
Prism II: The origin of the world
Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du monde (1866).
Prism III: Fusion and transcendence
Octavio Paz, Sunstone (1957).
Consonance: “The search for splashes. The difficulties of connect”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The search for divine sparks
Gnosticism.
Prism II: The world as radiation
Emanation — Plotinus.
Prism III: The denial of fate
“…man is responsible for all men.”— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).
Consonance: “The brief instant of millennial histories. Role-play in a pair with the mirror”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The formation of the “I” through the Mirror
The mirror stage — Jacques Lacan.
Prism II: Contemporary identity
The Protean Self — Robert Jay Lifton.
Prism III: Multiplicity within
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, 51.
∞⩂ English MirrorD. W. Winnicott , “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development” (1967). The British psychoanalyst’s answer to Lacan: the first mirror is the mother’s face — we see ourselves because someone first looked at us.
Consonance: “Having breathed in the fragrance of a woman. Without boredom... alone”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The gift and burden of sensitivity
The Highly Sensitive Person — Elaine Aron.
Prism II: The guide to the soul
The Anima.
Prism III: The project of a total work
Scriabin’s Mysterium
Consonance: “Half an hour before sunrise. Spirit — the finest of building materials”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: Purification for the sake of insight
The asceticism of the Desert Fathers.
Prism II: Reality as perception
“Esse est percipi ” — “To be is to be perceived.”— George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).
Prism III: Consciousness as prime matter
The Yogācāra school.
Consonance: “We turned into fools. At the universal concert. Shattered self-imagination. When I was born, the world was divided into light and sound. I wish to die having joined them into LightSound”
Weight of the episode: Key.
Prism I: Transformation through dissolution
Ego death.
Prism II: The wisdom of innocence
The Fool (Tarot).
Prism III: The universal dance
“l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle ” — “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”— Dante Alighieri, Paradiso , XXXIII, 145.
∞⩂ English Mirror“There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an angel sings”— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , V, 1.
The music of the spheres in Shakespeare’s English — the universal concert at which this episode’s fools find themselves.
Consonance: “Untroubledness. The pranks of a simple-hearted little fish”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The illusion of control
The parable of the lost axe (Liezi ).
Prism II: The disturber of order
The Trickster.
Prism III: The art of acceptance
The parable of Master Hakuin (“Is that so?”).
∞⩂ English Mirror“Curiouser and curiouser!”— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
English nonsense as a philosophy of the unforeseen: a little fish that runs off with your nose belongs squarely in Wonderland.
Consonance: “Having pulled the centre of the Universe somewhere further. The vanished burden”
Weight of the episode: Key.
Prism I: The change of epochs
The Age of Pisces → the Age of Aquarius.
Prism II: Integration and wisdom
Eve → Helen → Mary → Sophia — Jung’s four stages of the Anima.
Prism III: The dance of Consciousness and Energy
Shiva and Shakti.
Consonance: “The air was magnetised to red, the highest science — love. Short circuit. The lost dividing footlights”
Weight of the episode: Key.
Prism I: The principle of resonance
Sympathetic resonance.
Prism II: The practice of LightSound
Scriabin, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire luce part for colour.
Prism III: The disappearance of the observer
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”— Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980).
∞⩂ English MirrorDaphne Oram and Oramics (1960s). The British pioneer of electronic music who drew sound directly onto film strips — music made visible, and the visible made sound: “I saw music” in the language of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s co-founder.
Consonance: “Universal meditation. The choir of the enlightened”
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Prism I: The memory of the soul
Reincarnation.
Prism II: Universal roles
Archetypes — Jung.
Prism III: Recollecting perfection
Anamnesis — Plato.
Consonance: “Planting. I cross the threshold”
Weight of the episode: Final chord.
Prism I: Reality as Mind
The Yogācāra school , the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra .
Prism II: The purity of the Mirror
Zen: Shenxiu versus Huineng — the verses on the mirror-stand.
Prism III: Crossing the threshold
“And the fire and the rose are one.”— T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942).
Consonance: “Closing word. To the sharp cry of a bird”
Weight of the episode: Final chord.
Prism I: Accepting the natural cycle
Stoicism — Marcus Aurelius.
Prism II: The beauty of the ephemeral
Kobayashi Issa.
Prism III: Merging with nature
“He is made one with Nature”— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821), XLII.
Consonance: “Makeweight-void. I heard the absence of myself”
Weight of the episode: Final chord.
Prism I: The completion of the path
The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures.
Prism II: Action without effort
Wu wei
Prism III: The original face
“What was your original face before your parents were born?”— Zen kōan (Mumonkan , case 23).
Consonance: “Stage finale. Only night. There is no day at all”
Weight of the episode: Final chord.
Prism I: Return to the source
The metaphor of the drop returning to the ocean.
Prism II: The state beyond limits
Nirvāṇa.
Prism III: Crossing the boundary
Alfred Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar” (1889).
Consonance: “Final part. For interdisciplinary research”
Weight of the episode: Final chord / Satirical postscript.
Prism I: The primary source of the symbol
“The square is a living, regal infant.”— Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (1915).
Prism II: A critique of narrow-mindedness
“…a learned ignoramus…”— José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), ch. XII.
Prism III: The academy of the absurd
The Grand Academy of Lagado — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
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