tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post7334378330783864290..comments2024-02-15T23:43:42.179+11:00Comments on poetry & ideas: THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #10, March/April 2009collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-74558328886164390262009-04-12T10:47:00.000+10:002009-04-12T10:47:00.000+10:00Hi Kris!Enjoyed reading your long piece on the blo...Hi Kris!<BR/><BR/>Enjoyed reading your long piece on the blog, ruminating about 60s poet friends and spirituality, etc links. Up here in the 'Gong, I continue to unpack boxes and build bookshelves (we had to move in early Feb when our ex-landlady went broke and had to sell her properties - we found a much better place, fortunately, so maybe the 2 months lost in moving, setting up, etc will be worth it. For now though, we're subjected to one of the horror-phrases of suburbia - "some assembly required!!!!!!"), but between all that, continue my sporadic explorations of Hindu mythology and writing. We're very near the Sri Venkataswara Temple in Helensburgh (biggest Hindu temple in the Southern Hemisphere) and culinary interests (the cook in the temple canteen is definitely an avatar, if not a deity in training) and art history interests (what a collection of statues!) aside, I keep being curious as to who all these characters ARE. I mean, 32 manifestations of Ganesha? Details details! We've been to a number of ceremonies - and I especially find those which feature Sahasranama (recitations of the 1000 names of the particular deity in question) in Sanskrit quite engaging. I think it's probably affected my music - "Proliferating Infinities" (2006) (13 hours of music for sampled harp to be mounted as an installation), "Mantrae" (2007) (flutist whose movement between music stands controls the electronic modification of the flute), and others. All this while enjoying immensely the current crop of pop-philopsophy atheism - Dawkins, Hitchens, etc....no contradiction there, I think.<BR/>I think I expressed it nicely to someone a while ago - when asked about theology and atheism and mysticism, etc. I said something like "Oh, I'm sure there is no God. There is SO MUCH no God that a great cozmik void is continually set up. Such a strong void of SO MUCH NO GOD that in reaction to it, deities explode into the universe all over the place! There are so many Gods in the universe that there are enough for each atheist to not believe in each of them!" Or something like that. Negative theology ala the Cloud of Unknowing as expressed by Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead.....and throw in the influence of my quantum physicist father-in-law, whose just published book on Quantum Non-Linear Dynamics has a last chapter on the physics of Black Holes which a) seems like the next stage in the understanding of that topic, and b) reads like latter day mysticism....Warren Burthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06503461309132044322noreply@blogger.com