At the seed stage, I’ve merely collected words and ideas along the way. The seeds are other people’s words and ideas in their original format; in other words, raw data. They are planted but in their original form.
An objective perspective might be thought of as looking at reality as made up of solid objects that can be measured and tested, and which exist even when we are not directly perceiving or experiencing them. In particular, an objective perspective would allow that something as simple as measuring your height would result in the same answer, regardless of who does the measuring. In more complex settings, we might aspire that our objectivity allows us to make the judgements necessary to decide upon the guilt of a defendant in a court of law. In contrast, a subjective perspective looks at reality as made up of the perceptions and interactions of living subjects. For instance, our response to a particular piece of music varies such that we might find something delightful whilst our friends find the same piece entirely unlistenable. Source
“Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke famously wrote, “So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
Rilke
“The creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn,” wrote Cyril Connelly in An Unquiet Grave. “The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year.” (View Highlight)
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You survive what happened to you, then you survive your survival, and then the gift you’re given is that you fall in love with your whole life, inextricable from the bad thing that happened to you.
The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Potts’ notion of forgiveness as mourning, which is struggling “with and through and in a loss we cannot redeem” and showing us how to live in the wake of that loss.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
I read “Facing Apocalypse” by theologian Catherine Keller. In it, she notes the meaning of the word apocalypsos as “unveiling, thus revelation.” For Keller, apocalypse is “disclosure, not closure. Not a closing down of the world, but an opening up.”
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Facing Apocalypse” by theologian Catherine Keller
In accepting “that what has been lost cannot be restored,” forgiveness “aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong.”
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
For Potts, forgiveness is “paradoxically forward facing” in that it both “addresses the past so unflinchingly” and “sets itself honestly toward whatever future can actually come to be in the wake of that past.” Rather than ease or peace or closure, the promise of forgiveness may be that it makes livable what can’t be undone.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
Theologian Matthew Ichihashi Potts has called forgiveness more akin to “mourning than miracle.¹” Forgiveness is not about feelings. But if it were, it might be more closely related to lament than relief.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
To the degree that forgiveness means finding closure or redemption or a way to feel better about this reality it is not just a pointless, but a violent idea. If, on the other hand, forgiveness involves looking unflinchingly at the harms done and imagining “what a wronged life lived well might be,” it comes with clear work to do and an invitation to make life otherwise. It comes with practices and habits and ways to take up, alongside pain that will not go away.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024
Counter-apocalyptic thinking is a reminder that endings are both inherent to reality and “the only thing in this world that is worth beginning.” And for Savransky, “to suggest that the end of the world must be begun is to affirm that the otherwise must be made, and to proffer an invitation…for an ongoing and unfinished experimentation with divergent modes of inhabiting the Earth.”
Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024, quoting Savransky