Helen in Egypt, by H.D. (Book 5:8)

...we are children of Zeus;
I must wait, I must wonder again
at the fate that has brought me here;

surely, she must forget,
she must forget the past,
and I must forget Achilles....

------

... but never the ember
born of his strange attack,
never his anger,

never the fire,
never the brazier,
never the Star in the night.

So many things, however, are a genuine heartbalm like the prickles of the Pleides rising on the night. Piers tells me that the local patois image for stars in their first state (like an etching) is "flour sprinklings". (211, Monsieur, L. Durrell)

You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.

(Brihadaranyaka iv.4.5)

Sagesse, by H.D. (10)

Or is it the great tide that covers the rock-pool
so that it and the rock-pool are indistinguishable

from the sea-shelf and are part of the sea-floor,
though the sea-anemone may quiver apprehensively

and the dried weed uncurl painfully
and the salt-sediment rebel, "I was salt,

a substance, concentrated, self-contained,
am I to be dissolved and lost?"

"it is fearful, I was a mirror, an individual,"
cries the shallow rock-pool, "now infinity

claims me; I am everything? But nothing";
peace, salt, you were never useful as all that,

peace, flower, you are one of a thousand-thousand others,
peace, shallow pool, be lost.

projections

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or
four hills and a cloud.

(wallace stevens, CP, 57)

chang chung-yuan:

It is traditionally said by Ch'annists that before one is enlightened one sees a mountain as a mountain and a river as a river; in the process of attaining enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains, rivers no longer rivers; but when one has finally achieved enlightenment, mountains are once more mountains, rivers once more rivers.

This creates a third world without knowledge,/In which no one peers, in which the will makes no/ Demands. It accepts whatever is as true,/ Including pain, which, otherwise, is false./ In the third world, then, there is no pain. Yes, but/ What lover has one in such rocks, what woman,/ However known, at the centre of the heart? ("Esthetique du Mal")

This, then, is not all. It's not enough, I know.
At least I'm still alive, as you may see.
I'm like the man who took a brick to show
How beautiful his house used once to be.
Bertolt Brecht

notes I took while working.... (wine bible)

champagne soils, white chalk soils; "chalk crescent, the area that spans from the British cliffs to Champagne was the basin of a vast prehistoric sea some 65 million years ago. When the water receded, it left behind minerals like quartz and zircon, fossils and sea urchins, sea sponges and other sea animals,"---producing vast quantities of(CHALK).