2013-10-22



In the introduction to Robert Bly's 1979 collection, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, Bly advises of an experiential concept concerning "The Two Presences":

Many people who think about it believe that the desire to weep comes entirely from inside us. Conservatives in these matters declare that human intelligence stands alone facing a world that appears sometimes hostile, sometimes inviting, but that actually possesses neither intelligence nor consciousness. Many ancient Greek poems, on the other hand, suggest that human beings and the "green world" share a consciousness. Each of the poems... contains an instant.... when I was aware of two separate energies: my own consciousness, which is insecure, anxious, massive, earthbound, persistent, cunning, hopeful; and a second consciousness which is none of these things. The second consciousness has a melancholy tone, the tear inside the stone, what Lucretius calls "the tears of things", an energy circling downward, felt often in autumn, or moving slowly around apple trees and stars.





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