The Inner Journey: The Exploration of the Inscape -- Seeking Resources, Choosing Directions
December 18, 2003
Blue Ridge Mountain of Maryland
In another essay in this series, I reflected on the outward aspect of The Mythic
Quest, the landscape of action.
This time I want to explore after -- or before -- such times of great external tumult and change: a re-focusing
on the inner aspect of life, the "inscape" -- the falling back on inner self to figure out what to do
"after the revolution" -- and before the next one. As the South African playwright, André Brink,
put it, this entails "a move away from the public stage and the large political arena in order to explore
the most private and personal experience, intimate landscapes of wonder or fear, uncertainty or quiet celebration."
In the wake of great external change, Brink says, there can sometimes be felt "a lack of resolution, a bleakness,
a weary introspection, even a hint of despair," but also can have an arts scene of "richness and variety,
... vibrant, inventive, imaginative and free."
To think about more for this essay:
- What is required by a human being in this inward stroke?
- To truly possess Satya Graha -- "truth strength," -- "Might over Right" : have to overcome
the delusion of Sattva with Transcendence.
Without this, people "in the Right" are mere "tree huggers" and"bleeding heart liberals"
etc., still in need of drawing from the source of the infinite strength of Right
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Imagination, After Apartheid: What It Is Like to Write After a State
of Siege
By André Brink
Sunday, December 7, 2003
Washington Post
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Twenty years ago, the South African novelist André Brink published
a collection of speeches and essays titled "Writing in a State of Siege," in which he spoke of the "special
responsibility" of Afrikaans writers living under apartheid and the ability of writing to become "a revolutionary
act in its own peculiar right." This Wednesday, Brink's compatriot J.M. Coetzee will receive the Nobel Prize
for literature, and Outlook asked Brink, whose novel "A Dry White Season" was the basis for the 1989
film of the same name, to discuss what it's like to write after a state of siege.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa
Brink asks this: "One question no South African writer can escape these days is:
After apartheid,is there anything left to write about?"