THREE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM JEREMY NAYDLER'S BOOK TEMPLE OF THE COSMOS
My heart
to be balanced against
a feather -
the judgment then
is of lightness, an
impossible lightness?
Lightness of heart is,
one might suppose,
childishness, and childishness,
one might imagine, is
not knowing.
Can we have a heart
light as a feather
if we know more than
sky
tree
butterfly
mother
friend?
How can the heart that knows
the roaring of the sea,
the sea of shed blood
be light? But Yeats
would have it that the warrior
can rejoice in war,
and so, we may suppose, Pharaoh
in governance.
And so we may ask if sorrow
is heaviness -
the sorrowful heart,
the anxious heart,
the fearful heart,
so that to be worried is
to be swallowed up
and isn't it just -
isn't that just -
the way it feels? But here
is another image -
the whole of me - everything
that isn't the heart -
weighed
against the heart,
the heart in a stone jar.
I would not want the heart,
light as a feather, to fly
up in the air while I
sink
down.
Surely a little
ballast is required - a little
heaviness
of the heart.
But what does it mean that Thoth
paints the feather, meaning
he paints the feather or that he paints
a painting of a feather?
But how can the heart be weighed against
a painting? Maybe the heart too
is a painting. Never the heart,
never the feather, always
an idea, like the
Last Judgment paintings in the Transcarpathian mountains - the demons, the river of fire, Christ on His throne, all of them
painted images, the painted
image of our internal life,
image of what we
don't see. No.
The Platonic Idea is not
sky
tree
butterfly
mother
friend, but
Christ,
river,
demons,
feather,
heart.
