It is no coincidence that you drove in silence and felt especially receptive to the beauty and splendor of the natural world. There is something special -- dare I say, divine -- about silence itself; it is pregnant in its absence of sound, in a strange and fascinating way.
Your apparent delight in the coming of morning, so characteristically thoughtfully considered in this piece, almost necessarily evokes the last lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poem:
Your last paragraph, particularly the lines "Night buried yesterday. Now we rise to something new." got me to thinking about the tradition that many churches have of holding a sunrise Easter service. I can't say I've ever attended one, or for that matter wanted to (I'm just as likely to suggest that He will still be risen at 9am). Like you said earlier, it's easy to assent to the thing - I can appreciate the metaphor - but I may not be programmed to receive it on those terms (and depending on the service and the preparation to get there, who knows if I would be by the time I got there).
Though I'm not a morning person, and the dark, cold mornings are difficult to get up and go for a run, I love the feeling of going from darkness to sunrise while I run. It's just this gradual awakening that's simply wonderful.
Slow rhythm, analog world, enter poetry, Eos in the Greek and other cautionary tales. 'I do not know much about gods', and it is still pretty 'sempiternal' this morning suspended up here a little further north than 55 deg. Smile. And I read that Samuel Palmer painted 'The Eastern Gate' after Milton's L'Allegro, but I suspect also had in mind Blake's co-ordinates for 'London' / 'Jerusalem' and the emanations of metaphor. I think.
I rather like the biology of our beginnings. As I think you suggest, we are offered something more than an explanation. And there is an old interpretation of 'intelligible light'. Jeremy Naydler like Lewis looks to old models. Having heads-up from others I attempted reviews of a couple of Naydler's books and picked up some references on dawning light, waking up from 'techie' dreams.
This is my first post on this stack. Glad I found my way here.
One thing in particular stuck out to me:
"So much of the way we carry on each day, empowered by our technological array, encourages us to presume an extraordinary degree of control and power over the world. [Warning: sweeping claim incoming.] Indeed, the project of technological modernity was explicitly pursued under the banner of just such mastery over nature.5 And, by and large, its achievements have been real and substantial, if perhaps also precarious, unevenly distributed, and freighted with costs that are becoming increasingly evident."
All jesting aside, while the first sentence conveys a sweeping claim, it's a substantiated claim. And while I appreciate what digital technology brings to my life, I can also see that a concomitant sensation appears: that more control over certain things makes many of us feel the illusion that we are "in control" in a general sense. And the natural world constantly reminds us that there are many things we do not control, and we just have to "sit" with them. Sometimes the "sitting" is painful, like the death of a loved one; other times, the "sitting" is of a more enjoyable nature, such as the one explained here of driving in a car as sunrise nears. But sit we must, and we can be grateful for the sitting we have to do, for it's part of what makes us fuller human beings. And this is increasingly a challenge, as the attention merchants vie with each other to see who can distract us enough, and inherently we become at least a bit distracted from our own selves while we are distracted with the next Prime Deal.
I'm reading 'An episode in the life of a landscape painter' by Cesar Aira at the moment and your post primed me to notice his (very beautiful) descriptions of dawn and dusk which, in his writing, are also tethered to a sort of vast terrestrial silence:
'Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.'
Also...
'In the glorious evening light of the 20th of January, they wondered at the assembly of silences and air. A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridgetop path, moving at a star's pace.'
"Indeed, the project of technological modernity was explicitly pursued under the banner of just such mastery over nature." Michelle Kaika called this "Modernity's Promethean project" in the context of "environmental infrastructure" (City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City). Through the 20th century, people like me set about the task not just of restraining and mastering natural systems, but pulling apart human and natural systems. The river floods, so it is dammed and channeled - the wild and scenic river must be lawfully designated as such but left to the headwaters and wildlands; the tame river diverted to the irrigation districts and taps of civilization. The forest is cut, or burns, as so must be set aside - _this_ is the National Forest, to be re-imagined "untrammeled by man".
Of course, in neither case can we actually separate what-is-now-popular-to-call these "coupled human and natural systems". Western American forests are suffering without human stewardship (and we could not bring ourselves not cease meddling and commit our wild places to "wilderness" anyway!).
Re: footnote 2. Fear not. Technology operates under the sun and the moon, not beside or above them.
It is no coincidence that you drove in silence and felt especially receptive to the beauty and splendor of the natural world. There is something special -- dare I say, divine -- about silence itself; it is pregnant in its absence of sound, in a strange and fascinating way.
Your apparent delight in the coming of morning, so characteristically thoughtfully considered in this piece, almost necessarily evokes the last lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur
“Oh, morning, at the brown brink, eastward springs”
Your last paragraph, particularly the lines "Night buried yesterday. Now we rise to something new." got me to thinking about the tradition that many churches have of holding a sunrise Easter service. I can't say I've ever attended one, or for that matter wanted to (I'm just as likely to suggest that He will still be risen at 9am). Like you said earlier, it's easy to assent to the thing - I can appreciate the metaphor - but I may not be programmed to receive it on those terms (and depending on the service and the preparation to get there, who knows if I would be by the time I got there).
Though I'm not a morning person, and the dark, cold mornings are difficult to get up and go for a run, I love the feeling of going from darkness to sunrise while I run. It's just this gradual awakening that's simply wonderful.
Echoing Richard Kurth re: footnote 2., you can't write too much on how to live well. Give me excess of it!
Slow rhythm, analog world, enter poetry, Eos in the Greek and other cautionary tales. 'I do not know much about gods', and it is still pretty 'sempiternal' this morning suspended up here a little further north than 55 deg. Smile. And I read that Samuel Palmer painted 'The Eastern Gate' after Milton's L'Allegro, but I suspect also had in mind Blake's co-ordinates for 'London' / 'Jerusalem' and the emanations of metaphor. I think.
I rather like the biology of our beginnings. As I think you suggest, we are offered something more than an explanation. And there is an old interpretation of 'intelligible light'. Jeremy Naydler like Lewis looks to old models. Having heads-up from others I attempted reviews of a couple of Naydler's books and picked up some references on dawning light, waking up from 'techie' dreams.
This is my first post on this stack. Glad I found my way here.
One thing in particular stuck out to me:
"So much of the way we carry on each day, empowered by our technological array, encourages us to presume an extraordinary degree of control and power over the world. [Warning: sweeping claim incoming.] Indeed, the project of technological modernity was explicitly pursued under the banner of just such mastery over nature.5 And, by and large, its achievements have been real and substantial, if perhaps also precarious, unevenly distributed, and freighted with costs that are becoming increasingly evident."
All jesting aside, while the first sentence conveys a sweeping claim, it's a substantiated claim. And while I appreciate what digital technology brings to my life, I can also see that a concomitant sensation appears: that more control over certain things makes many of us feel the illusion that we are "in control" in a general sense. And the natural world constantly reminds us that there are many things we do not control, and we just have to "sit" with them. Sometimes the "sitting" is painful, like the death of a loved one; other times, the "sitting" is of a more enjoyable nature, such as the one explained here of driving in a car as sunrise nears. But sit we must, and we can be grateful for the sitting we have to do, for it's part of what makes us fuller human beings. And this is increasingly a challenge, as the attention merchants vie with each other to see who can distract us enough, and inherently we become at least a bit distracted from our own selves while we are distracted with the next Prime Deal.
Thanks for this essay. I can't wait for the next.
I'm reading 'An episode in the life of a landscape painter' by Cesar Aira at the moment and your post primed me to notice his (very beautiful) descriptions of dawn and dusk which, in his writing, are also tethered to a sort of vast terrestrial silence:
'Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; airshafts voluminous as oceans.'
Also...
'In the glorious evening light of the 20th of January, they wondered at the assembly of silences and air. A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridgetop path, moving at a star's pace.'
I loved this - 'assembly of silences and air.'
"Indeed, the project of technological modernity was explicitly pursued under the banner of just such mastery over nature." Michelle Kaika called this "Modernity's Promethean project" in the context of "environmental infrastructure" (City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City). Through the 20th century, people like me set about the task not just of restraining and mastering natural systems, but pulling apart human and natural systems. The river floods, so it is dammed and channeled - the wild and scenic river must be lawfully designated as such but left to the headwaters and wildlands; the tame river diverted to the irrigation districts and taps of civilization. The forest is cut, or burns, as so must be set aside - _this_ is the National Forest, to be re-imagined "untrammeled by man".
Of course, in neither case can we actually separate what-is-now-popular-to-call these "coupled human and natural systems". Western American forests are suffering without human stewardship (and we could not bring ourselves not cease meddling and commit our wild places to "wilderness" anyway!).