L'autre monde

My recent Camino continues to reverberate: my song 'A Bus Stop in Galicia' was one effort at making sense of it, trying to make sense of the 'spiritual' element. Though I was scoffing at superficial new-agery there, I was trying to also give a sense of the elusive positivity that seems to have flowed from it, but one shouldn't try to explain these things too much.

Then unexpectedly (the way the best things always happen) a contact who has an automatic quotation generator on his email sent me this. Which seems to sum it up perfectly:

Il y a un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci," says Paul Eluard. To speak of another world has, historically, been to commit to a mystical or religious agenda, and to a province of wishful thinking normally inhabited by children and the simpleminded, as opposed to the real, factual, less deceived world of grown-up rationalists. A good deal of argument has gone into defining terms such as "mystical," "religious," and "rational," but Eluard's remark points us in another direction altogether: the other world is here, now, but we miss it every day: we see what we expect to see and we think as we (are) expect(ed) to think. Eluard's secular program was to uncover the autremonde—the nonfactual truth of being: the missed world and, by extension, the missed self who sees and imagines outside the bounds of socially engineered expectations—not by a rational process, as the term is usually understood, but by a reattunement to the continuum of objects, weather, and the other lives that we inhabit.
— John Burnside
(from the Summer 2005 issue of Poetry Review and the May 2006 issue of Harper's)

I wouldn't describe my re-attunement to things in precisely those terms, but something of that nature is certainly happening.

Going deeper....

(Photo of Eluard and some of his surrealist pals by the incredible Lee Miller)