Exploration

From T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Santiago - by David Whyte

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding
then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall, and the way forward
always in the end the way that you came, the way
that you followed, the way that carried you into your future,
that brought you to this place, no matter that it sometimes
took your promise from you, no matter that it always
had to break your heart along the way, the sense
of having walked from far inside yourself out into the revelation,
to have risked yourself for something that seemed
to stand both inside you and far beyond you,
that called you back in the end to the only road
you could follow, walking as you did, in your
rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night, became a prayer for safe arrival…

McGilchrist on right left right

At the first level, it tells us something about the constant, relatively stable, inter relation of the hemispheres at their best. In a way it is Nietzsche’s point about the fruitful relation of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Within the realm of the left hemisphere (‘where there is danger’) there is also the possibility of an ‘unfolding’ of what is implicit, which, if returned to the right hemisphere, will lead to something greater and better coming forward (‘that which will save us’). This sounds very abstract, but I think it can be made clearer by an example. If we subject a work of art, say, or even the human body, to detached, analytic attention, we lose the sense of the thing itself, and its being in all its wholeness and otherness recedes. But the result of such attention, provided it is then relinquished, so that we stand in a state of openness and receptivity before the thing once again, may be a deeper and richer ‘presencing’. The work of the left hemisphere done, the thing ‘returns’ to the right hemisphere positively enriched. The best criticism of works of art produces just this result, and the study of medicine at its best achieves it, too, in relation to the human body. Again it is the analogy of the necessary analysis carried out by the pianist in learning a piece, an analysis that must be forgotten during performance. The ‘danger’ inherent in the process is the potential arrogance of the left hemisphere, which may not allow the return: it may come to think of itself as all in all.

The Swan, by Rainer Maria Rilke

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.

Abstraction is taking examples and then crystallizing them into something that is indissoluble into the parts that composed it.