Grounding

That on the front page is a picture of the ground. So is this.

Strangely alluring.

Anyway, today I choose to share a quote from Tolkien and some from Édouard Glissant. Tolkien first.

… it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. - Gandalf, The Return of the King

Now Glissant.

...thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought.

Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth-–mine. But thought of the Other can dwell within me without making me alter course, without "prizing me open," without changing me within myse1f. An ethical principle, it is enough that l not violate it.

The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then l have to act. That is the moment 1 change my thought, without renouncing its contribution. l change, and l exchange.

He is saying, 'Yep, it's great to realise that there are other people who live in different ways and think different things. Great. But what really matters is when you allow that to change you.' Instead of seeing the other from the outside, as a specimen, you inhabit the world with them and adjust to them, as they do to you. You don't become the same; no. In fact it's vital that you preserve your opacity, your right not to be known inside and out.

Another gem from Glissant: he advocates an 'Aesthetics of rupture and connection.' Not rupture or connection, or the connection that heals rupture, but both. You stay with the damage, which cannot be erased, and connect nonetheless. He also writes of an 'Aesthetics of a variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.' This sounds contradictory, and it is. What he means is that everything is connected, but the form of connection keeps changing, while, at the same time, breaks, ruptures, differences never disappear.

He's amazing.