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Many folk express the longing to be able to draw or paint some-thing. They long to faithfully render a beloved face, or a favorite object, or the marvel of a landscape. Or, with the plethora of photographic devices now available, they eagerly capture moments both miraculous and mundane.
Might this have something to do with our innate longing for seamless intimacy with that apparent object or experience, with longing to know it, to be it, on the other side of conceptualization, categorizing, labeling?
.
unknowable knowingness
nothing that can be contained, it flows and ebbs;
calls itself perception or consciousness or awareness
or life or grace or destiny or God
the ‘ten thousand things’ are its toys –
its appearances rising and falling
wherever It casts its sensory antennae
is it not the ultimate
seamless intimacy?
~
echoes from emptiness 
“conceptualization, categorizing, labeling”… intellectualizing, in other words
Yes, some of us may have been led more by the intellect than by the heart or the senses, though there needn’t be a quarrel between them. How about marriage (with or without quarrels or arguments)? – a difficult, unstable balance herein. I would willingly rest with ‘the Heart-Intellect’, a symbol which signifies something.
.Alluding to the American philosopher William James, one of my favorite writers, K.A. Krishnaswamy Iyer, wrote this:
“For him the perceptual flux bears a clearer impress of reality on it than the dead concept. He is right in claiming superior consideration for the movement, change and novelty of concrete life over the concepts; for the former are the direct manifestations of Life, while the concepts are the manufacture of the intellect with which Life has provided itself as the organ merely of the understanding. Life supplies the gold, the material; and the concepts are the intellectual moulds in which it is cast, so as to assume the shape of the manifold percepts of the concrete world. But, even so, the dumb percepts cannot do without concepts which serve as the tongue of Reality.” Hmmm! …dead concepts and dumb percepts…
(ml, I think you too like verbalizaing reality – what is experienced; what, if not, is poetry?)
Oh yes, dear AM – “…the dumb percepts cannot do without concepts which serve as the tongue of Reality.” What a lovely turn of phrase.
Thanks for contributing this quote. I adore spinning the word-webs which might serve as the tongue of Reality. If they come out as *poetry* I’m astonished. What fun!
Love
~ ml