Winged Horses & Fiery Dragons
We require just a little order
to protect us from chaos.
Nothing is more distressing
than a thought that escapes itself,
than ideas that fly off,
that disappear hardly formed,
already eroded by forgetfulness
or precipitated into others
that we no longer master.
These are infinite variabilities,
the appearing of which coincide.
They are infinite speeds
that blend into immobility
of the colorless and silent nothingness
they traverse,
without nature or thought.
This is the instant of which we do not know
whether it is too long or too short for time.
We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries.
We constantly lose our ideas.
This is why we want to hang on
to fixed opinions so much.
We ask only that our ideas
are linked together according
to a minimum of constant rules.
All that the association of ideas
has ever meant
is providing us with these protective rules
—resemblance, contiguity, causality—-
which enable us to put some order into ideas,
preventing our “fantasy”
(delirium, madness)
from crossing the universe in an instant,
producing winged horses
and dragons breathing fire.
–excerpt from What Is Philosophy
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari page 201
And more lines from the poem, Burnt Norton, the first of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
V
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
