many a mile

If I have made, my lady, intricate by e.e. cummings

If I have made, my lady, intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind - if I have failed to snare
the glance too shy - if through my singing slips
the very skillful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

- let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death” -
you will only create
(who are so perfectly alive) my shame:
lady whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

‘Where do we find ourselves? In a series, of which we don’t know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noon-day . . Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.’

R.W. Emerson

“Over against the polymorphism of the primitive’s instinctual nature there stands the regulating principle of individuation… Together they form a pair of opposites… often spoken of as nature and spirit… This opposition is the expression, and perhaps also the basis, of the tension we call psychic energy.”
C.G. Jung

Incompatibility by Charles Baudelaire

Higher there, higher, far from the ways,
from the farms and the valleys, beyond the trees,
beyond the hills and the grasses’ haze,
far from the herd-trampled tapestries,
you discover a sombre pool in the deep
that a few bare snow-covered mountains form.
The lake, in light’s, and night’s, sublime sleep,
is never disturbed in its silent storm.
In that mournful waste, to the unsure ear,
come faint drawn-out sounds, more dead than the bell,
of some far-off cow, the echoes unclear,
as it grazes the slope, of a distant dell.
On those hills where the wind effaces all signs,
on those glaciers, fired by the sun’s pure light,
on those rocks, where dizziness threatens the mind,
in that lake’s vermilion presage of night,
under my feet, and above my head,
silence, that makes you wish to escape;
that eternal silence, of the mountainous bed
of motionless air, where everything waits.
You would say that the sky, in its loneliness,
gazed at itself in the glass, and, up there,
the mountains listened, in grave watchfulness
to the mystery nothing that’s human can hear.
And when, by chance, a wandering cloud
darkens the silent lake, moving by,
you might think that you saw some spirit’s robe,
or else its clear shadow, travelling, over the sky.

“Iranian theosophers usually distinguish four or five ‘worlds’ subject to an ontological hierarchy. This cosmological plurality symbolizes the different levels of the universe of being. The hierarchy of worlds is as follows: 1) the ‘world of divine reality’ or ‘world of secrets’ (lahut, ‘alam al-asrar); 2) the ‘world of the luminaries or pure intelligences’ (‘alam al-anwar, jabarut); 3) the ‘world of spirits (‘alam al-arwah) or higher malakut(spiritual world); 4) the ‘imaginal interworld of ideas’ (‘alam al-mithal) or lower malakut; and 5) the ‘world of material bodies and perceptible phenomena,’ or nature (molk, nasus)..

.. For theosophical mystics like Shabestari (12th century), the human being is the microcosm (‘alam-e aspar) in which the macrocosm (‘alam-e akbar) deploys itself. Thus, it contains virtually all of the universes. The perception of these ‘worlds’ by the gnostic presupposes within him an interior metamorphosis that, by liberating his psychospiritual organs, gives him access to universes situated in other times and space.”

Henry Corbin and the Imaginal, Ali Shariat.