Beyond The City

"We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish."

— John Culkin, quoted in They Became What They Beheld

"In the beginning was the Word, a spoken word, not the visual one of literate man, but a word which, when spoken, imposed form. This is true, as well, of the Eskimo, but with one significant difference: the Eskimo poet doesn't impose form, so much as reveal it. He transfigures and clarifies, and thus, sanctifies. As he speaks, form emerges, temporarily but clearly, ´on the threshold of my tongue.´ When he ceases to speak, form merges once more with unbounded reality." — Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities

200. The great weakness of this age is that a man can speak of ¨picking¨ a religion; that he chooses to believe.

201. Mythology chooses men, not the other way around. Men are born into myth as they are born into a world. Myth lives on in the lives of men in how they comport themselves in the world. As men act, myth acts through them. It cannot be spoken of as something believed.

211. In a world torn apart by naming the gods are reduced and relegated, but so in equal measure are men.

 

227. Science is not the opposite of myth. As anything else it is nourished by its own mythical bed.

240. The great task awaiting men who have left the cities is to restore a world broken  apart through naming and categories: to see again as an illiterate child; to forget the accountant´s and scientist´s names for things; to see the world whole, where animals and humans, forests and rivers, gods and earth and sky dwell together.

246. If there is any such thing as freedom, it is that which a State cannot make an accounting of.

247. What appears to a citizen as irrefutable and unremarkable is likely what is most necessary to the sustenance of the city and the State.