John Dunn

My infinite responsibility

Sunday, 17 March 2024 at 18:36

My infinite responsibility

To be a reality is essential, for I am not the passive receiver of earthly experience, but rather the only way to its fulfilment. I have changed from being a nature-dependent creature to being a free being whose moods are no longer the play of nature within me but rather the stirring presence of my spirit. I realise within nature my true state - the supernatural state.



Before the Beginning I saw the face of nature from without, as a thing before me, a pure abstract object, and my mind was limited by it and ruled by it. I conceived myself mechanically, in space, in time, without freedom, without value, mortal.But I found the other face of nature when, awaking from my idolatrous dream of a distanced materiality, I found nature itself within my own mind as the non-being which is life, the eternal life, which is the real opposite of immortal death.



Nature now is the eternal past of my eternal present, the iron necessity of the past in the absolute freedom of the present. Embracing nature in this non-idolatrous way, I recovered the whole power of my mind and recognised the infinite responsibility which lies in the use I make of it, rising above the mindless chatter of insects who are happy to live as though on the back of an unfeeling Earth. This had to be so, for each creature bound to earthly conditions waits for me to liberate it.

© John Dunn.

Littleport

Saturday, 16 March 2024 at 21:04

Harley Monument

Continuing my road trip along the A1101 (See also Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike in the Blog)

Littleport

Approaching Littleport, I’m climbing above the sea level of the fens up onto the Isle Of Ely.

The Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike ends at the bridge. The next stage of my journey follows the route of the Littleport to Welney Turnpike of 1824, again a late arrival in turnpike history.

After crossing the bridge over the River Great Ouse, I left the modern A1101 which continues as a bypass around Littleport, to follow the old A1101, along Wisbech Road, through the heart of the village.

At its heart is the church of St George. Fine and lofty, the 15th century tower can be seen from miles around. Around the top is a brick parapet, and there aregood large Perpendicular bell-openings. At the base, on the south side,there is a mysterious doorway: a large arch is set into the outer edge of the tower, within which is a section of wall containing a much smaller door. It is rather odd – one suggestion I’ve seen is that there was originally a walkway through the tower which was subsequently walled in.

The legendary founder of Littleport was King Canute. A fisherman gave the king shelter one night, after drunken monks had denied him hospitality. After punishing the monks, he made his host the mayor of a newly founded village.

William Harley, father of the William Sylvester Harley who founded Harley-Davidson motorcycles in 1903, was born in Littleport in 1835: the connection is commemorated with a sculpture of a motorbike to the south of the churchyard. This monument was commissioned to celebrate the 100th birthday of the company in 2003.

Continuing through the village, I rejoined the A1101 where the bypass reconnects with the old turnpike route at a roundabout.

© John Dunn.

Taking my soul by surprise

Friday, 15 March 2024 at 22:07

The art of living is the art of exploration, beyond reality, beyond dreams

Taking my soul by surprise


The object of my thinking is always abstractness in need of reanimation - that is, what I have already thought must no longer be understood as a dead presupposition, something which can self-exude an existence apart from me, and without me, as if by magic. 



However, the reanimation I attempt each time, is never carried through, because abstractness is normally thought by my thinking activity, but not resolved. It seems always to be led back to the moment of its becoming abstractness but not to its pre-abstract, pure and unadulterated origin,the Logos, where true thinking arises.



I must descend into my soul and take it by surprise in its art of living, in the quivering of my spiritual life, where my thinking lives and grows so formidable as the vastness of time and of space. What is the limit of my living thinking? It is the obscure limit of my mind beyond which my spirit is ever exploring, beyond reality, beyond dreams, and to which it is ever returning.

 Seen from within my soul, this obscure limit demarcates my own non-being, the non-being of my own inward commotion, of the act by which I am to myself. It is not my non-being as something existing for others to recognise. It is the non-being which belongs to my thinking only; what I am not and must become, and which I bring into being. Any object of my thinking whatsoever can be no other than my own thinking; it is what I am thinking and is the object in my consciousness. My own non-being is the object to which I must counter-pose myself in order to be myself a reality.

© John Dunn.

Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike

Thursday, 14 March 2024 at 20:21

The old turnpike crosses the railway at Shippea Hill Station

Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike

Starting from Mildenhall, I followed the route of the Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike. Opened in 1828, this must have been one of the last turnpike trusts to be established. The trustees must have wanted a connection to Littleport and roads leading on to the ports of Wisbech and Kings Lynn, for exporting agricultural produce and importing raw materials of various sorts.

It was possibly so late because of the problems posed by constructing a road across the wide stretch of fenland to Littleport.

Dropping off the higher ground at the exaggeratedly named Kenny Hill (hardly a hill), the road is banked up for much of the way in an effort to keep it level and above shrunken fenland to either side.

From Kenny Hill the road follows the course of the Mildenhall Drain as far as the countyboundary with Cambridgeshire and Shippea Hill Station (named after nearby Shipea Hill, which rises to the dizzying heights of 0, yes, sea level!

From here the road to Littleport is dead straight, as the crow flies, but it undulates and bucks up and down over the shifting peat of the fens, following a narrow serpent-like contour, which winds form one side of the road to the other, each time lifting the road above sea level, before allowing it to sink again, up and down along it goes.

The rich agricultural land of Burnt Fen only exists because of the constant pumping of water into the drainage ditches and on to wider water-courses, such as the River Great Ouse which passes by Littleport.

The old Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike is now the A1101, and has the honour of being the lowest A road in the UK.

© John Dunn.

Resolution of nature in mind



Wednesday, 13 March 2024 at 22:38

“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” [Gen 1:26–28].








Resolution of nature in mind



If mind is the defining and differentiating factor of humanness, then who are the anti-humanists? They are the ones who would retreat before the forces of nature, who regard nature as an entity apart from mind with a magical self-expressed existence of its own. These are the idolators of our times and all times, and nature is the Urizen to whom they scrape and worship and sacrifice their children.



And yet… what is the historically ever more complete harnessing of the forces of nature by man, this progress and increase of the life of mind triumphing ever more surely over the adverse environment, conquering and subduing it; what is this but the empirical and external representation of the immanent eternal victory, the full and absolute victory, of mind over nature, of the immanent resolution of nature in mind? The spiritualisation of the world no less.


© John Dunn.

Fallen Angel

Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at 20:08

Fallen Angels, Anselm Kiefer

Fallen Angel

Beginning is a constant, now, in active thinking.



We are all born fallen (Fallen angel tempted Adam and Eve).



Death, comes before life

.

The cosmic Beginning is the metaphor for man’s own Beginning.



The fall away from active thinking is that of the fallen angel, the Devil and the Devil’s children who live amongst us today. Adam and Eve were tempted to fall too, with the result that we are all born fallen.



What are all these falling metaphors driving at? The answer is that to exist outside of the constant, active, creative, Beginning, is to be subsumed into the one, i.e. the interminable equilibrium of Ananke that comes before the Beginning, the state of objectified ‘reality’, the ready-made nature into which we are seemingly dropped.



The saving grace is that this state of subsumption, this death, comes before the awakening, this life. The cosmic Beginning is the metaphor for man’s own Beginning.

© John Dunn.

Spiritualisation of the world



Monday, 11 March 2024 at 22:26

Spiritualisation of the world



My thinking would be inconceivable if I as the subject were not at the same time my object, and vice versa. The opposition is inherent to my self-concept. It is between me and myself. My difference and otherness belong wholly to me. I cannot express the opposition in any other way. My own identity is my own difference.



Both my being as subject and not-being as object are a synthesis, but the synthesis is not subject and object, but only subject. The synthesis is the REAL subject, which trumps the falsity of the pure abstract subject and the pure abstract object. I think of me and am thought of by me. The thought of me cannot escape from the thinking me. The synthesis is the concrete reality of my self-consciousness, which is not fact but being, living and eternal being, simply just being.



Past,present and future are realised in my living thinking. It is here that the path to freedom lies, in the reign of mind over nature and the progressive spiritualisation of the world.


© John Dunn.