foul weather

The headache clears but the weather is not good, though for all that a busy day, on parade for various events. Comparative philosophy though. Wouldn't you say that philosophy just was in itself comparative, involved in the critical comparison of ideas. So what is the point of this new adjective. It seems to me to be evidence of dissatisfaction, the sense that the dominant forms are inadequate, in a way that now has to be spelled out: a sense that it sees nothing but what it does see, that there are things it fails to see, that remain hidden. And what are those things? And who provides the answer? How can those who fail to do justice to some aspect of reality recognise that fact? And what is implied in the phrase, 'aspect of reality'? Meanwhile, I have to do the dishes, which reminds me of the image of the light on the kitchen table which shows the marmalade you missed when you wiped it.

These three look like sentinels at the gates of hell:

but these look more benign, and it looks like I was wrong about the murdered chicks, though chicks were murdered: A migraine today so no progress on Corbin and comparative philosophy, but a luminously beautiful day, the horizon clear, the sea still, dark green and turquoise, the singing of the seals ...

When one writes philosophy, and not just then, of course, but philosophy has its peculiar poignancy, one shows what one understands but also, and unawares, what one has so far failed to understand. Unfortunately, as one grows older a certain complacency sets in as one repeats one's settled insights and gives less attention even to the possibility that there might be things beyond one's reach ... of course one would acknowledge that no doubt there are such things, if the question was raised, but it is not active in one's thoughts, because one has lost the sense of being at the dangerous edge of sense and comprehension.

Inside the burial chamber

I find these markings disturbing because I feel I should understand them and I don't. It would be easier to think of them as decorative markings rather than symbols, because symbols have a meaning and if they are symbols then they are closed to me. If they are merely decorative then perhaps they are no more significant than wall paper that looks 'nice'. But this chambered tomb should also be a place of strong emotion, reverence, grief, ritual, the placing of a fresh corpse among the stones, to lie in darkness on a shelf of stone and turn to dust. We deal with death in the same way, or Death deals with us in the same way, and we respond as ceremonial animals. At least I understand that death was a significant event for these people, for a family, a community, a tribe, so we have that in common, unlike the curlews, who, for all I know, grieve, for a lost mate, perhaps, but with no conception of death, no reverence, no expressive acts of grief, a marshy, uninhabited island, great gulls and fulmars, seals on the shore, burial chambers, sheep and the lapping then the lashing of the waves, and inlets to hide a boat in ... and being always on the qui vive, alert for danger and enemies is not so remote from us as we should like to think, but we see the evidence of the attitude all around us, it is instinct in us but instinct can atrophy, until our middle class apartment block is shelled ... again.

The curlew and the fulmar

A couple of curlews were hanging around the garden yesterday, strange creatures, our only point of common experience the sharp pangs of desire, but even stranger was visiting the smaller of the two main burial chambers on the Papay Holm, small standing stones, roughly landscaped as it seems, and the inevitable fulmar sitting enigmatically among them:

I'm slowly getting back into a pattern of work, starting with a piece on 'comparative philosophy' that derives from a paper at Calgary a couple of years ago. What is 'comparative philosophy'?

finis terrae

I didn't set out to photograph this fulmar chick but I accidentally disturbed the parent bird which started up more or less under my feet and left this vulnerable and slightly anxious being exposed. I did move rapidly on ... But there is something eerie about the landscape here on this northern edge, 'petrified mudflats' seems to do it as an expression:
and at Leaper's Geo I found two corpses on a ledge above the sea, and only one chick with its mother, instead of three:

Birth, copulation, death, finding food and shelter, and the sensations that attach to these, but pure immediacy. nor hope nor dread, and yet on that hill, on this coastline, that is what experience amounts to, the air, the wind, the waves, the diving into the sea, and one human being walks slowly around the edge of this fierce vitality, this utter urgency of desire.

Die Ferien

Two weeks of visits from friends, walking along the beaches and onto the cliffs, talking about metaphor, Coleridge, humanism, old teachers, philosophy, theology, children, old age, death, and then the feasting, the dining out ... and now back to work and focussing on writing, particularly on themes in the philosophy of religion, and the nature of religious language and its relation to reality. I've been asked for a title for a paper to be given in February: 'Spirituality for the godless' may do it ... Yesterday I walked alone and slowly up the cliffs and around the edge of the north east of the island in an eerie mist that covered land and sea, though not enough to conceal the puffins sitting watchful among the thrift:

Charming and peaceable, as it appears, but always watchful, on the qui vive, anxiously alert, which is not surprising when one sees the languid flight of the great skua, whose picture I snatched (I think) as I turned south (a large bird that eats puffins for breakfast and seizes gulls and drowns them under the waves), turned south

this time with a stranger from distant shores who was as surprised by me as I was by him as we both appeared in the mist, and continued then, together, as far as St Boniface Kirk. That was strange: in such a deserted place one hardly nods briefly at a passing stranger: at the edge of the world one pools ones resources. Not at the edge of the world, perhaps, but it felt like that, until the mist started to lift and burn away in the sun which came out brilliantly as we walked south across the petrified mudflats and saw the hills of Westray still half covered in mist