The reduction of the past to dry facts yields the salt of wisdom.

• +..antifolk


• +..more than a few bits Neu :-)


• +.. psychedelic motorik

---

+

+

---

---

up? Late in the night, we realize that the acts of our lives have not been shadow-free, that we are shadowed by curses and sins—not because we are cursed and sinful by nature, but because with the very origin of the world, one half of which belongs to Night, come fearful figures who demand we know them. All you know of the day world is only half-knowledge. Character asks for a larger truth, a richer understanding, and the beginning of this wisdom is imparted by these dreadful visitations. How does this wisdom bear on character? First, you learn that your emotions are not quite yours; they are not so much to be controlled as to be reckoned with. Fatalistic anxieties, recriminations, and vengeful afterthoughts that come in the night come from the night. They derive neither from your brain and its processes nor from your personality and its behaviors. They belong instead to the dark, impersonal underside of the world, which becomes personally available to you through the ordeal of nighttime awakenings. Second, because your heart turns so cold and beats so wildly, you have to take to heart old lessons that once seemed only Sunday sermons and philosophical theories, such as Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s primacy of dread, such as the biblical God’s insistence that fear is the beginning of wisdom, such as that God’s terrifying wrath against peoples, cities, and nations and his persecutory manipulation of even his good servant Job. Third, you grasp something of the hellish reality of the realm of shades, an underworld essential to so many mythologies, religions, and rituals of initiation, and to the making of art. The dreadful masks of ancestors and tribal spirits exhibited in exotic anthropological collections become actual dark angels inhabiting your own room. Enduring their attacks takes character.
Hillman, James.