Walking this evening after classes were over but with more work to do once I got home, I looked up at the sun, lowering in the sky, and I looked down at the sun, reflected in the puddles. A multi-sun world. Light from above and below. Mine eyes dazzled.
When I closed them, the after images shot across my visual field. When I opened them an echo of the after images, in violet and green, darted across the track. They looked just like spilled petrol, which shimmers like a grounded iridescent rainbow.
Then I saw a man with four wildly wagging spaniels. He whistled and all four sat in a line ten feet away watching him attentively. He whistled and all four came and sat around his wellington boot clad feet.
Later, a robin on a hawthorn bush eyed me before flying out as though toward me and then circling back to land on another branch. This he did four times, coming closer, then back away and calling each time he landed. A territorial display?
The world dances.
In class I had circled back to my starting point, like the robin, darting out and returning. In speaking with one of the teachers I had expressed that what he was saying struck me as stressing the importance of attention and how I had become interested in that when reading Iris Murdoch last year. 'Wow,' he said, 'I wrote my PhD. thesis on attention.' He says he'll dig it out so I can read it.
I have decided that philosophy can be like walking on a treadmill. It's all flat and perfectly sprung and the speed is controlled. But what we need to do is learn how to walk on the fields and hills, and for that we need to attend to the world. It's my view that the world plays a part, pulling out the appropriate response. We can't dictate it.
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