Hierarchy Index Cards - F
Reading Joanna Field: Experiment in Leisure.
Findlay
Card-F-07-03
Awareness of Being Alive. Wonder —> 8
JF: It seemed then, that all these years I had apparently been trying to reach after, grasp, comprehend, this mysterious & astonishing fact of simply being alive.”
DH: Is this the ultimate ’naughting’ the centring? Is the sense of complete & utter astonishment really the key? Is it at centre? Is the wonder that anything exists a Whole-s/e-level experience & the key (if one could hold it) to the dying-to-self theme which is J.F’s? I think it is. In which case we have now related WONDER, which was Mabel’s father, to the 8.
Card-F-07-05. Reading Field. DH: The only way to go on knowing a truth is by forgetting and then re-knowing it. For the realisation is never in knowing as a state, but in getting to know as a process.
Card-F-07-07 Field: W. James: the men he might have been: bon viveur, etc. etc. DEH: These men W.J. might have been he is & must learn to face up to the fact. Dixon realises this. Christian sense of original sin has same notion. You contain it all, good & bad. Realise this. Accept it gladly. And in doing so you draw its sting.
Card-F-07-09. Reading Joanna Field: Experiment in Leisure. June ’46 — the decision to use the first person. See this card and following card.
Mabel’s Format June 46 To be in 1st person.
DH: This book suggests (a) The power of frankness, admitting the lacunae, the baffling, treating the whole enterprise as a personal adventure which is provisional. (b) She says at the end that all is undone and she is where she started, in the sense that you always have to start again from scratch. (c) The book is in the first person. I think Mabel after all must be in 1st person. (d) Mabel should also take the form of “being-my-own-attempt-to-solve-problem-what-am-I” — this problem being central for me. (e) Not only will other people probably get other answers, but they must. This may help them to work out their own salvation. (f) Because Mabel is primarily a Salvation. (g) The “I” form will allow personal note re “wonder”, re doubts & baffling (eg Earth strata), admitting inconsistencies. It will not be so pretentious, not even philosophical in name. (h) The diags will be put forward as mine, right for me. (i) Title: New Portrait of Man or similar. Intro quite different. (j) At end of Mabel say: all I have said must be doubted, undone, ignorance again & again.
Card-F-07-18. November 1945 Bury. Reading J.N.Findlay: On Mind and our Knowledge of it. “Mabel’s chief rule is that our actual everyday experience is the key to the world, continuous with the world, nothing is indifferent to it, all is of the same nature. Nothing in our life is common or unclean, but the most trivial problem of everyday behaviour is relevant to the remotest mystery of nebulae & atoms & philosophic categories.”
Card-F-07-19 DEH Stars are small for us & could not for us be large because we could not as men travel near to them. They are thin small things. The Celestial observer in the air doesn’t exist. Expected future experience could only mean as Earth, sun, univ.—therefore when we say the stars are big we are postulating our future experience as stars!
Card-F-07-20 DEH But the distinction between the thought & the deed is vital to morality. C. My doctrine of moral recapitulation.
Index Card F-07
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