Monsters (De)Forming at Dusk/Half-Way

This post has been in various states of incompleteness for several weeks, so I shall use it as a half-way, formative-assessment-directed reflection. 

 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.
   (T. S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding', Four Quartets)

How do I articulate what can seem so... fragile, flickering, intangible, un-graspable by a fist made of flesh or law? In infinite and shifting shades of graphite, it finds some degree of expression (there/not-there), ambiguous, delicate (or uncertain), blurred, smudged, indeterminate. In words, though, it's too clean, too up front. This, a fragment from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is some kind of approximation:

A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.

Approximations, like perception at twilight. No clean, cold, bright (illusory) knowing designed to warp the (self-)perception of the viewing subject. Not surveillance, surveys, clinical or legal judgements, objective evaluations, all tending towards suasion, herding the masses through inculcation, internalisation (no big sticks required).

It's not dawn (O brave new world...). It's crepuscular.

Eleanore Mikus, Tablet Litho #3 1968

'The worst/Are full of passionate intensity'. 'Look', say all the authoritarian politicians, when interviewed and challenged. Never 'Listen', always 'Look'. At what?

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
 
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~W. B. Yeats

This comes closest (linguistically):

I see well what limits my gaze; and it is precisely there, against those high insurmountable walls, that I like to get lost…

To give a name to this joy would be to mislay it … These are approximations because the mystery remains whole …

Writing. By tiny brushstrokes, tiny hard brushstrokes. Brevity, from the heart…

Shadows that arise and lie down as evening comes on, lengthening shadows that cross the hills and that I watch until they disappear, with a final leap, beyond the last ridge where I know that they will continue to break up and fade yet where also, it seems to me, inexplicably, a kind of speech gathers them together...

The wound at the edge of the heart, the tireless night cricket, and the sculpting of the sky amid the crackling of the solar grass are all nourished by the same hope…
(Poem Fragments by Pierre-Albert Jourdan)

  Or, more/most briefly, in Jourdan's words:

The abyss is likeable when you can find lodgings in it.

The slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was 'Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato' (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). Soon even this tiny nook in Blogland is likely to be drawn inside the state should I persist in mentioning contemporary news events. I shan't be seeking lodgings.