Abgeschiedenheit: a terce^[1]

‘E’ is a structure in space, setting off a word like ‘ephemeral’, which is dominated by 3’e’s. I have been wondering about this awkward little number. And now I come upon the endearing James Hillman and Mundus Imaginalis, arrived at before Rob Burbea, but after Henry Corbin, Carl Jung, and Ibn Arabi, in reverse historical order. Such sense of order I will return to, given it’s where we all want to end up, if we are not there already. It goes deeper than enlightenment (another 3’e’ word pair). ‘Salvation’ too, despite an ‘a’-‘io’ diphthong ring, requires the perennial overhead to fall within our easy reach, rendering us a kind of lopsided species, upended, which means terce. That is to say, our own internal dimensionality is given a number, which is odd. I reckon this is the case with poet Leigh Davis, of whom I explain, ‘each object is as much what is “between” it and all else as it is in itself—if not more so. Leigh’s “third”, or “new one”, suggests a vastness of belonging that resides in the particularities of objects and utterance (“eternity comes in time”)’:

               And the perception of a change in aspect
               is the expression of a new grasp
               and, at the same time, of a grasp unchanged and
               for that reason like seeing and again not like. 
                                                                                (Stunning Debut)

There are the usual associations of the ternion either beneficial or nefarious, ranging from Christian and Classical trinities of gods, the sexually produced birth of a third as offspring, and other playthings, like libidinous threesomes, whether male female or they/thems, threes through and through. I guess it’s the same when Leigh breaks things apart as he does, the thing doing the connecting, the thing connected to, and the wrought space between, which is the field of alignment. And here, to be honest, I am stuck. Everything, but everything, seeks release—think only of Dylan’s track ‘I Shall be Released’. I speak to you from the heart. And then I realise we live within a metaphor, or at least perception and the perception of change require a bridge between the two which is one, a metaphor I mean. And nor is a bridge the thing we cross as such, because neither end is an end without the other: we just dangle in the crossing between, until we drop. Hillman is not the exception, placing his entire faith in the veracity of apparition, images piled upon images, as if figuration presented to the mind is a spur and sacrosanct: it teaches itself. And here I am. My big discovery of the day is that human existence is an ongoing misalignment yearning for alignment, which is the ‘lure’ (Whitehead’s term). Hillman and those on whose shoulders he stands conjure up the imaginal, the nexus of ‘erotic intensification’, for Whitehead the beautified. I am convinced that human being amounts to not much more than that beauty, and yet of all the creatures, vegetables and rocks, only it is able to complete itself in an alignment without hold. Of course, the meaning of a sentence depends entirely on the sentence.

note

[1] Abgeschiedenheit is a feminine noun. Remember that in German, both the word's spelling and the article preceding it can change depending on whether it is in the nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative case. Tenary refers to threeness, suggesting found balance, difference within sameness, suspended angularity, compassion. That’s four.