I wonder if it's something like this that Eric Gill, David Jones and others were trying to build in the 1920s with their artistic retreat centre at Capel-y-ffin?
Pope Benedict was thinking along analogous lines, I feel, in his 1969 prophecy of a Church grown small and purified due to persecution and neglect: 'Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.'
Eventually the tide will turn. And that's when Rananim comes into its own.
Certainly, Capel-y-ffin is one of the inspirations for my conception of Rananim. It is no coincidence that one of the very last things DHL was working on before he died was a review of Gill's essays.
Thanks, Farasha. Your post reminded me of Richard Gregg, the American Gandhian whose biography I reviewed recently. In the 1920's, he spent several years with Gandhi at his ashram, which was an intentional community of sorts. Out of that experience, he wrote several books, including The Value of Voluntary Simplicity, the idea of which is implicit in Lawrence's and your description, it seems to me. In the past, you told me that DHL referred to Gandhi, and so I was wondering if the ashram idea had contributed to his thinking. That aside, but in a similar vein, I've just visited a beautiful 'chiesa rupestra' in a gravina in Mottola, Puglia, where a tiny community of early Christians hid from the Moors. DHL would surely have seen similar things during his time in Italy, no? (P.S. It appears that I can no longer 'like' your posts, but rest assured that I do).
DHL referred to Gandhi in some of his letters, late essays, and poems. He always spoke positively of Gandhi and his work. Two of his dearest friends were the artists (and Buddhist converts) Earl and Achsah Brewster, who also relate Lawrence's high regard for Gandhi. Interestingly, DHL had little positive to say about Tolstoy, but I think the differentiating factor is that Gandhi put those ideas into practice in a life affirming manner. DHL was quite fond of the life-affirming strains of Hinduism, but almost entirely negative regarding Buddhism, which he only knew in its southern Theravadan form. I think that he would have had a much higher opinion of Tibetan Buddhism, and certainly one of the gaps in his knowledge was Chinese and Japanese religion, which is a shame, since some of his thought verges on mystical Confucianism.
Have you read DHL's "Memoir of Maurice Magnus"? It has been described as his best piece of pure prose writing, is a pleasure to read, and a good chunk of it is taken up with his visit to Montecassino monastery.
Regarding "liking", one good comment is worth a thousand likes. I don't care if anybody likes what I write: I want them to read, ponder, engage, then move on and be stimulated to do. FYI, I never see like buttons anywhere, because I use strict ad blocking, which blocks all trackers, etc.
P. S. and completely off-topic, I have recently been devouring all the prose and verse works of Kathleen Raine's friend and Pound's protege Peter Russell, and it is all fantastic. He lived much of his later life in rural Tuscany and was something of a court poet at S.H. Nasr's Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in the late 70s.
And as a final aside, I was browsing in an antique bookstore the other day and purchased a signed copy, hand printed, of a first edition of one of Raine's early chapbooks for only $5, from a proprietor who had no idea who she was. If that doesn't comment on how far down we have descended as a species, nothing else will.
Russell was a man profoundly in tune with the Mysteries - a shaman and priest of those Mysteries, and though the world marginalised and ignored him, the luminous Word spoke through him time and time again. I think of him as a one man Rananim, living and working in that disused Tuscan mill in the '90s, without many of the 'essentials' of life yet incalculably rich in his reading and writing and thinking, drinking in and imbibing the deep silence around him. He was a champion of the Logos and a witness to the Spirit. Vale!
Kathleen Raine wrote a preface to his 'Visions and Ruins' sequence, which after many years I'm yet to track down.
I wonder if it's something like this that Eric Gill, David Jones and others were trying to build in the 1920s with their artistic retreat centre at Capel-y-ffin?
Pope Benedict was thinking along analogous lines, I feel, in his 1969 prophecy of a Church grown small and purified due to persecution and neglect: 'Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.'
Eventually the tide will turn. And that's when Rananim comes into its own.
Certainly, Capel-y-ffin is one of the inspirations for my conception of Rananim. It is no coincidence that one of the very last things DHL was working on before he died was a review of Gill's essays.
Thanks, Farasha. Your post reminded me of Richard Gregg, the American Gandhian whose biography I reviewed recently. In the 1920's, he spent several years with Gandhi at his ashram, which was an intentional community of sorts. Out of that experience, he wrote several books, including The Value of Voluntary Simplicity, the idea of which is implicit in Lawrence's and your description, it seems to me. In the past, you told me that DHL referred to Gandhi, and so I was wondering if the ashram idea had contributed to his thinking. That aside, but in a similar vein, I've just visited a beautiful 'chiesa rupestra' in a gravina in Mottola, Puglia, where a tiny community of early Christians hid from the Moors. DHL would surely have seen similar things during his time in Italy, no? (P.S. It appears that I can no longer 'like' your posts, but rest assured that I do).
DHL referred to Gandhi in some of his letters, late essays, and poems. He always spoke positively of Gandhi and his work. Two of his dearest friends were the artists (and Buddhist converts) Earl and Achsah Brewster, who also relate Lawrence's high regard for Gandhi. Interestingly, DHL had little positive to say about Tolstoy, but I think the differentiating factor is that Gandhi put those ideas into practice in a life affirming manner. DHL was quite fond of the life-affirming strains of Hinduism, but almost entirely negative regarding Buddhism, which he only knew in its southern Theravadan form. I think that he would have had a much higher opinion of Tibetan Buddhism, and certainly one of the gaps in his knowledge was Chinese and Japanese religion, which is a shame, since some of his thought verges on mystical Confucianism.
Have you read DHL's "Memoir of Maurice Magnus"? It has been described as his best piece of pure prose writing, is a pleasure to read, and a good chunk of it is taken up with his visit to Montecassino monastery.
Regarding "liking", one good comment is worth a thousand likes. I don't care if anybody likes what I write: I want them to read, ponder, engage, then move on and be stimulated to do. FYI, I never see like buttons anywhere, because I use strict ad blocking, which blocks all trackers, etc.
P. S. and completely off-topic, I have recently been devouring all the prose and verse works of Kathleen Raine's friend and Pound's protege Peter Russell, and it is all fantastic. He lived much of his later life in rural Tuscany and was something of a court poet at S.H. Nasr's Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in the late 70s.
And as a final aside, I was browsing in an antique bookstore the other day and purchased a signed copy, hand printed, of a first edition of one of Raine's early chapbooks for only $5, from a proprietor who had no idea who she was. If that doesn't comment on how far down we have descended as a species, nothing else will.
Russell was a man profoundly in tune with the Mysteries - a shaman and priest of those Mysteries, and though the world marginalised and ignored him, the luminous Word spoke through him time and time again. I think of him as a one man Rananim, living and working in that disused Tuscan mill in the '90s, without many of the 'essentials' of life yet incalculably rich in his reading and writing and thinking, drinking in and imbibing the deep silence around him. He was a champion of the Logos and a witness to the Spirit. Vale!
Kathleen Raine wrote a preface to his 'Visions and Ruins' sequence, which after many years I'm yet to track down.
Thank you. I have nothing to add, as you stated that perfectly and beautifully.
See here for Raine's preface: https://archive.org/details/omenselegiesdesc0000russ/page/49/mode/1up?q=Raine
See also: https://archive.org/details/paysageslegendai0000russ/page/94/mode/1up?q=Raine for a longer and more interesting piece by Raine on one of Russell's best pre-1980 poems.
That's outstanding Farasha. Thank you so much. May the light of Divinity shine on you today.