This morning I revisited the final few pages of The Sovereignty of the Good.  It was this a sentence on impermanence that caught my eye:

“Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like.”

I don’t claim to have mastered that psychological challenge. Here, though, is a short miscellany on acceptance of death, chance and real transience.

The mystery of impermanence is caught visually in Paula Rego’s The Dance.

The Dance 1988 by Paula Rego, Tate

This poem echoes Rego’s painting:

These are each of my selves
dancing.  Time passes and those
we are now will be gone
and those not yet here will arrive
dancing another self.
And all along the moon pulses
fat, and disappears.

The mystery of time and identity in Rego’s painting calls to mind T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  Here’s the opening from Burnt Norton:

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.”

And of course dance was a metaphor that Eliot, too, used to communicate the paradoxes of permanence and change, stillness and movement:

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

Transience, death, the good life: all classic poetic topics.  And the master of flux and transformation is Ovid.  In The Master and His Emissary, his absorbing and profound exposition of the influence of the divided brain on Western culture, Iain McGilchrist quotes this passage. It’s from the Metamorphoses, where else?

“…Full sail, I voyage
Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you
Nothing is permanent in all the world.
All things are fluid; every image forms,
Wandering through change.  Time is itself a river
In constant movement, and the hours flow by
Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing,
Forever fugitive, forever new.
That which has been, is not; that which was not, begins to be; motion and moment always
In process of renewal…

Not even the so-called elements are constant…

Nothing remains the same: the great renewer,
Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me
That nothing ever dies.”

On metamorphosis, how “the great renewer, Nature, makes form from form”, and the brain seeks pattern amid the random, I spotted a turbaned figure in the sinuous trunk of a tree on Bristol’s Downs :

Figure in tree, Bristol Downs, 2012.

This is a miscellany, a collection is all, of short thoughts forming, not yet taken shape, metamorphosing.  But there seems hardly more apt a subject than transience for the first post of a new blog, that most transient of media.