A new series of three essays and one poem from Alan Rayner, each describing his transfigural, inclusional “new way of thinking” … one which emphasizes neighbourhood over self & other, natural inclusion over natural selection, co-creation over winning & losing, love over conflict … using many of Alan’s established metaphors and quotations.
This quote from Wordsworth recurs “in Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent, singleness.” I often use “we murder to dissect” from Table’s Turn’d, but Alan’s quote is from this Wordsworth passage:
Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous Country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the World under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature every thing is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson’s work it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened–yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things.
When words are substituted for things. Every word is a gravestone.