Vorticism

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""The image is not an idea." In 1914, Ezra Pound names the tendency of certain avant-gardists in London: "It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name `vorticism.'"

Pound first used the word six years before, in a poem, "Plotinus":
"As one that would draw back through the node of things, /
Back sweeping to the vortex of the cone, /
Cloistered about with memories, alone /
In chaos. . . //
I was an atom on creation's throne."

Plotinus says (in the Thomas Taylor translation that Pound read) that the enlightened soul returns to its origin, which is a whirlpool. It is suspended in the center "from which the circle proceeds," and is in bliss, for "life in the intelligible world consists in the energy of the intellect."

Allen Upward, 1922: "The physical basis of a whirlpool is water, or water and rocks. But no combination of water and rocks will produce a whirlpool unless there is also present an energy derived from neither. . . It is on the question of energy that everything turns. The difference between a whirlpool and a pool is the whirl."

Pound wrote a note on the manuscript of the poem "Plotinus" that "the `cone' is I presume the `Vritta' whirlpool, vortex-ring of the Yogi's cosmogony." The idea comes from Yogi Ramacharaka...

"The gyres! the gyres!" Yeats exclaims.
"Things thought too long can be no longer thought, /
. . . ancient lineaments are blotted out. /
. . . / Empedocles has thrown all things about."

Empedocles said that, in the beginning, all things were formed by the forces of love and strife, and they were mixed in a vortex, some with more love in them, some with more strife, in infinite combinations.
Aristotle complained that if elements were united by love and separated by strife, how could they be separated into themselves in a vortex? Turning and turning in the gyre, how could things fall apart? Simplicius said that Aristotle didn't understand Empedocles at all.

The pool is not the whirl. The vortex of Empedocles' contemporary, Anaxagoras, is centripetal. In the beginning everything was one, and at rest for an infinite time, until Mind (Nous) put the great vortex in motion. Turning in the gyre, things became themselves, each containing something of every other thing. Then the Mind, like Descartes' God, withdrew to let the world be. Socrates complained that this was too materialistic and mechanical. Simplicius said that Socrates didn't understand Anaxagoras at all.

The Greek vortical theory of creation has its major poetic expression a few hundred years later in Lucretius. Chaos was eternally in a whirl of motion until the moment when (as Rolfe Humphries translates) "a strange kind of turbulence, a swarm / of first beginnings" combined and separated the elements into the stuff of the cosmos. Lucretius says that it all happened by pure chance.
According to Aëtius, when the universe was created by the vortex, and the heavier elements came together to form the earth, and the lighter rose to form the ether, "hook-shaped atoms" interlocked at the circumference to form a skin, like the caul of a foetus, around it all. The whole universe is still waiting to be born.

Yogi Ramacharaka writes: "Mind-substance in Sanscrit is called `Citta,' and a wave in the Citta (which wave is the combination of Mind and Energy) is called `Vritta,' which is akin to what we call a `thought.' In other words it is `mind in action,' whereas Ciitta is `mind in repose.' Vritta, when literally translated means `a whirlpool or eddy in the mind,' which is exactly what a thought is."

The first and still most important articulation of the philosophy of yoga is Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, probably composed in the 2nd Century. Its second line is four words: yogah citta vritti nirodhah. Yogah is yoga; nirodhah means to stop. Vritti is a whirling– the whirl without the pool.

Yogah citta vritti nirodhah.- Yoga stops the vortices of the mind.

While Yeats was writing A Vision in the early 1920's, Upward returned to the vortex for an essay called "The Nebular Origin of Life": "The outstanding characteristic of the cell is its cellular energy." This energy is derived from both the "chemical energy of its material constituents" and something else: an "organic energy" or a "living matter" that is the "whirl" of Upward's whirlpool. These whirls were created at the creation of the universe as things he calls "vorticells," fluid and ever-changing vortices of energy that evolved into life.

What was once imagined is now proved. Yeats' double gyres and Upward's vorticells turn into Crick and Watson's double helix of DNA three decades later. The primary basis for life is indeed a waterspout, the entwined snakes of kundalini energy, or the ones around the Caduceus, emblem of medicine.

Wyndham Lewis illustrated the vortex in the Vorticist magazine Blast with a teetotum, a cone with a vertical axis. Pound translated the title of the Confucian book, the Chung Yung (normally known as the Doctrine or the Practice of the Mean) as The Unwobbling Pivot. Every vortex has an axis, a tree, or even, in the Vedic creation myth, a mountain by which the Milky Ocean was churned and turned into the universe.

Blake: "The nature of infinity is this : That every thing has its /
Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro' Eternity / Has passed
that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind / His path, into a
globe itself infolding like a sun, / Or like a moon, or like a
universe of starry majesty. . ."

Edgar Allan Poe begins his "Book of Truths," Eureka: A Prose Poem, with the image of a man standing at the summit of Mt. Etna whirling around as quickly as he can to see at once, and as one, the sublimity of the panorama. Poe proposes his book to do the same, in a dizzying succession, for the "material and spiritual universe." By the end, he has invented, in 1848, the idea of the black hole. Due to the "vorticial movements" of "individual portions of the Universe," it is, as he says in italics, "excessively obvious" that everything in the universe will ultimately collapse into one entity, which he imagines as a sphere. All the stars and planets will be one, all people will be one, and everything will be one with the "Spirit Divine." The vortex is the end of time. T.S. Eliot, "East Coker": "Whirled in a vortex that shall bring / The world to that destructive fire / Which burns before the ice-cap reigns."

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"Pound... makes an attempt to justify the name, applying the vortex as an idea of the artist standing as an anchoring center to the swirling chaos of modern thought. Similarly, Pound's explanations lead us to a recognition of a sense of place within the initial conception of vorticism. Just as the artist provides the stable center of the personal vortex, so the city might be seen as the stabilizing center of the movement's vortex.

Lewis and the other vorticists make clear in their founding manifestoes in BLAST that the movement is intended to match the need for an art of a more ‘northern' climate rather than a ‘latin' one. This leads the imagination to ‘a mysticism, madness and delicacy peculiar to the North.' "

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"Pound, or part of him, wished to control the valuation of the materials he appropriated by arranging them in such a way that an immanent or ‘natural' order would be brought into being" (A Poetics 122). Pound's great achievement is his creation of poetry using ideological swatches from many social and historical sectors. His "complex, polyvocal textuality was the result of his search—his unrequited desire for—deeper truths than could be revealed by more monadically organized poems operating with a single voice and a single perspective" (A Poetics 123). Yet Pound's wish was ultimately to order these materials into a single vision for his readership:

"Pound's ideas about what mediated these different materials are often at odds with how these types of textual practices actually work in The Cantos. Pound's fascist ideology insists on the author's having an extraliterary point of "special knowledge" that creates…order." (A Poetics 123)

Poets like Pound and Olson created metaphors of speed, light, and energy for these scenes that pulled the reader's attention inward toward the poem—Vorticism, Imagism, and Projectivism unified the text with the reader. Pound's explanation of the Vortex demonstrates the relation of emotion and action: "Emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; & that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant dramatic qualities, & it emerges like the external original" (Pound, Selected Prose 375).

Bernstein believes that poems absorbing through what he terms "casual unity" do not work—they too obviously attempt to absorb through strategies of unity; they strive too hard to be "effective" and seem "phony or boring or uncompelling" (A Poetics 38).

Anti-absorption is

artifice, boredom, exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression, interruptive, transgressive, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured, fragmented, fanciful, ornately stylized, rococo, baroque, structural, mannered, fanciful, ironic, iconic, schtick, camp, diffuse, decorative, repellent, inchoate, programmatic, didactic, theatrical, background muzak, amusing: skepticism, doubt, noise, resistance. (A Poetics 29-30)

Antiabsorption not only shocks but at the same time pulls the reader back into the text by a combination of absorption and antiabsorption to increase reading: "This is an approach I find myself peculiarly attracted to, & which reflects my ambivalence (as in wanting multiple things) about absorption & its converses. In my poems, I frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable elements, digressions & interruptions, as part of a technological arsenal to create a more powerful (‘souped-up') absorption than possible with traditional, & blander, absorptive techniques…This is the subject of much of my work" (A Poetics 52).


This tactic creates dual points focusing the reader toward the center to interpret what Bernstein (with Forest-Thomson) calls an "image complex":

"Poetry is like a swoon with this exception: it brings you to your senses."

The oscillation of attentional focus, & its attendant blurring, is a vivid way of describing the ambivolent [sic] switching, which I am so fond of, between absorption & antiabsorption, which can now be described as redirected absorption. The speed of the shifts ultimately becomes a metric weight, & as the pace picks up, the frenzied serial focusing/unfocusing enmeshes into a dysraphic [sic] whole—not totality—an alchemical

"overlay and blending" as Piombino notes, forming what he terms a "combinatorial" or, in Forrest-Thomson's words, an "image-complex." (A Poetics 78)

This new kind of reading connects to Pound's use of speed, image, and ideogram. Bernstein makes it a point, however, to differentiate his style of absorption from that of realism's and lyric poetry's, indirectly suggesting that his poetic forefathers belong in this group. He underestimates his poetic and strategic (and therefore rhetorical) debt to Pound."
Changing how sentences are used in traditional prose modifies the novel through poetry. Pound wrote for much the same reason, to reclaim power for the signifier or meaning-maker."

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Pound wrote:

"The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."

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"At the time the Cantos were first conceived, Pound was just beginning to define Vorticism and its utilization of Imagism as a sort of building block for a new kind of poetics.

"Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind....Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units, or units of design....The difference between the pattern unit and the picture is one of complexity. The pattern-unit is so simple that one can bear having it repeated several or many times. When it becomes so complex that repetition would be useless, then it is a picture, an 'arrangement of forms.'" ("Imagisme")

Thus a Voticist "picture" is created from the patterned repetition of Imagistic "units". Yet, a "picture" is not the best way to describe a vorticist work, because the notion of movement, so crucial to the appreciation of Voticism, is stultified by the idea of a static image. Pound restores this movement in his notion of a Vorticist work as "a radiant node or cluster;...what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." (G-B pg 92)

This hypertext of Canto IV utilizes similar concepts of pattern-unit and vortex. The poem forms the vortex, the explanatory entries represent Pound's references, the "units" from which the vortex is constructed. More, the ability to "leap" back and forth between the poem and entry animates the vortex. The hypertext leap from poem to entry and back is like a single frame of a film, both conceptually and visually, since the appearance of the text changes in a visual flash.

Canto IV follows a progression of introducing concepts, overlapping them, and then recalling several previous themes in a single burst. The reader of the hypertext poem follows this conceptual accumulation in a series of referential flashes. At the moment of one of Pound's multi-referential bursts, the reader is simultaneously reminded of several of the flashing "leaps" explored, and, in uniting these flashes or "frames" in the imagination, a moment of "cinematic" conceptual unification is created. This is the animation of the vortex. This is not to say that this way of understanding the poem is not available to text readers, but simply that hypertext serves to underscore the simultaneity of the moments when time, space, and culture are united, through its swift and flashing exploration of implicit meaning in the poem.

But what would Pound say of this swiftness and ease? He certainly made little effort to index or footnote the Cantos. This was probably due to his belief, inspired by Ernest Fenollosa and Allen Upward, that words themselves carry a primitive power.

Fenollosa believed that "the sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning." Upward claimed primitive man possessed a more intimate connection with the divinity of nature, and that the study of the origin of words and language was a way to connect back to "old, drowned thoughts, hereditary thoughts...things you used to know and feel long, long ago." To footnote the Cantos, therefore, would only curtail the primitive power of the imagist references by creating pat interpretations. Pound was trying to refer to holistic concepts through the primitive power of the words and names themselves.

In the beginning of hisGuide to Kultchur, Pound explains the purpose of the book:

"Despite appearances I am not trying to condense the encyclopedia into 200 pages. I am at best trying to provide the average reader with a few tools for dealing with the heteroclite mass of undigested information hurled at him daily and monthly and set to entangle his feet in volumes of reference.
How does one harness vast amounts of information in order to be most useful to the limited human consciousness? As we have seen, Pound's Vortex may be a starting point for the creation of a model for such a system.""

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"In the article "Royalty and All That" Pound comments on attitudes toward tradition and reform in his elusive and metaphorical way. The meaning of "vortices" one can infer from the context draws on Gaudier-Brzeska's view of "vortex" as force, will, and consciousness, a kind of energy presented in a certain artistic form. Pound combines Gaudier-Brzeska's idea with his own notion of virtù in his definition of the "Vortex" that "every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form" (A Memoir 88).

He also remarks that "when the vortices of power and the vortices of culture coincide, you have an era of brilliance" (Guide to Kulchur 266). Here he promotes a combination of political and cultural forces in an artistically satisfactory unity and assumes that a vorticist is one who is able to present these two forces in an artistic form, and that "Vorticism" has just such a "constructive" capacity."

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"Henri Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1903, translated into English 1913) had argued that many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up. (14, quoted in Diepeveen 129)

And then there is the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a friend and great influence on Pound, who wrote in a letter, before 1915:

I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE
ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES,
I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY
WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED.” (quoted on 129)    *

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*In his thoughts on sentimentality and the Classical style in the Will to Power, it may be recalled, Nietzsche spoke of 'emotion' in terms of a clear and grand logic.

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"Pound “first used the term vortex in a letter to William Carlos Williams in December 1913 to describe the general literary-art scene of London,” but knew that the image of a vortex was the kind of concrete abstraction whose meanings spiraled out to envelope both the art scene, a “great silent place where all energy is concentrated,” and the art, “every kind of whirlwind of force and emotion.” Ideally, Vorticist art was a focused rendering of this “whirlwind.”

Pound designed the manifesto to imitate the violence and turmoil of a vortex. It set up self destructing parallelisms.

The manifesto attempted to jar the sullen “UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY” from their expectations, their “stupidity, animalism and dreams,” and wake them with the shock of “Chaos invading Concept and bursting it like nitrogen.”

The self righteous egotism at the center of the manifesto calls for an audience that will match the brilliance of the Vorticists. Pound, never shy in his own right, blesses the “genius among races,” the “hysterical WALL built round the EGO,” and “the solitude of LAUGHTER.”

Nietzsche describes these artistically dormant “human beings who…lie unconsciously” because their language has lost meaning (Nietzsche 878). The words are like “coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins” (Nietzsche 878). He calls for a reconstruction of the discourse that will produce a leader for the “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms.” Dull from overuse and repetitive exchange, the language is infected and reinfected with every use. The Vorticists attempted to inject the discourse with “madness and delicacy” (Nietzsche 878)."

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Brotherhood (1937) - 312:

"Swiftness of motion up to a certain extent furthers intercourse with the Subtle World. A vortex of movement, as it were, sweeps away the dusty envelope of the lower strata. Whirling dervishes, or the American Shakers, or Siberian Jumpers are based on such movements. And in this way they confirm to what an extent such forcible compressions of energy are inadmissible. The lower strata should not be surmounted with physical violence. The right way is through natural, spiritual ascent." [Agni Yoga]

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"Pound's poetic principles remained essentially imagist: sharpness of observation, economy of phrasing and organic rhythm. He successively refined his theory of the image and of its functioning, in the form: image > vortex > ideogram, until he reached a stage where he felt that language itself could be made to work presentationally, entirely free of discursive content in which the crucial catalyst is the vital world of intuition and to which he added his discovery of the possibilities of Chinese as a language which still worked, he claimed, to a significant measure, pre-discursively."

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"Nomina sunt consequentia rerum, and never was that statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the vorticist movement. Ah Ezra, always ready with a slogan. Then Lewis offered his definition: Think at once of a whirlpool...At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist."

In his catalogue for the 1915 Vorticist Exhibition, Lewis stressed “By Vorticism we mean

(a) ACTIVITY as opposed to the tasteful PASSIVITY of Picasso;

(b) SIGNIFICANCE as opposed to the dull or anecdotal character to which the Naturalist is condemned;

(c) ESSENTIAL MOVEMENT and ACTIVITY (such as the energy of a mind) as opposed to the imitative cinematography . . . “

So Vorticism was all about movement, energy and intensity of “significance” in vividly-realized physical objects.

It wanted to look not just at a single idea, but multiple meanings expressed by the same object - because one object doesn’t necessarily mean just one thing. It’s as if meaning borrows a physical shape, then abandons it, like putting on a coat, then taking it off, then putting on another different-coloured one. So Pound’s vorticist images “swirl, whirl, flutter, strike, move, clash and leap”, always banging into each other, a principle he embodies in his poem ‘A Game of Chess’, where the pieces continually collide with one another, forming new shapes and patterns with their movements. This board is alive with light; these pieces are living in form, Their moves break and reform the pattern: luminous green from the rooks, Clashing with Xs of queens, looped with the knight-leaps.
...it’s... a metaphor for movement within a highly structured set of parameters that are the game’s rules. As chess is one of the most ‘formal’ games ever devised, what better vehicle for counterpointing rapid and seemingly random movements? But note also how the pattern reforms after it’s been broken - Pound’s moving the pieces around but then putting them back in their places; he’s not transforming them into something else - rather he’s showing us what they can be while still being chess pieces involved in a formal game. Vorticism is all about potential."

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In astrology, the Vortexes are the dark light, nodes, the dark moon and black sun. Dutch astrologers focus strongly on these aspects.

The Apollonian/European project requires a kind of de-vortexing, a de-sublimation, a materializing of art. Architecture, temple-building, agriculture, fertility rituals, perhaps theatre, athletics/martial art and philosophy - art is to be employed as politics, as a politics of the self, of movement, of mass, momentum. Artworks to identify the human with the Earthly, with the Sun - countering the Alien Superhero cultus. A new religion must emerge seemingly spontaneously among the tastes of the emerging health.

How do we step into the eye of the storm and stay there, as the storm moves across the spaces?

Be the Eye.

The Vortex is also the Mandala-principle.

A meditative technique of Seeing to inculcate the eye of the storm within you...

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"It may be concluded that the mandala in its sacred dimensions is a centring
device for spiritual purposes. It is, in a word, a psychocosmogram; the human connects with the cosmic by centring on the 'divine spark' or essence.

It is a peering into the vortex of worlds within worlds within worlds... a Knowing Thyself...    


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Every knowledge is a plane.

Upon which you either climb higher to the heart of the sun, or descend below to the eye of the storm.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Ah yes, this is the generator in the deep. Shakti, "power".

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Evola wrote:

"Shakti's dance over Shiva's outstretched and still body. In this instance, immobility represents the immutability of the male principle. Western "activistic" axioms operated an inversion of the traditional idea according to which the true male principle is characterized by "being." This principle does not act, since it is sovereign and capable of generating action without becoming involved with it. Therefore, everything that is action, dynamism, and development, by virtue of not being self-sufficient, is said to fall under the aegis of the feminine element, nature, or prakriti rather than under the aegis of spirit, atman, or purusha. It is an instance of active immobility versus passive activity. The activist Western world has forgotten these truths, and it is therefore ignorant of the meaning of true virility." [Evola, The Yoga of Power]

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The Aryans placed a goddess in this root. The masculine principle is the transcendent whole, or the heart.

Evola wrote:

"According to an initiatic axiom, "You must not seek power; it is power that must seek you." In our tradition, power is feminine and seeks a center: he who knows how to give a center to this power through his own renun- ciation (hoping our use of the word will be understood) and hardness cre- ated by domination of his soul, by isolation and resistance—power is un- failingly attracted to such a person and obeys him as her own male. Just as water naturally forms a vortex around a pillar standing steadfast in its current, likewise, in a spontaneous way, an aura forms around him who, like a force that presses on and does not stop at anything, appropriates the way of being. Being is the condition of power; an impassibility (we could even say a frigidity) that does not look at it, is what attracts it. Power eludes desire for power, like a woman shunning the lustful embrace of an impotent lover." [Introduction to Magic]

So the Bindu / centre of gravity / "historical heart" is founded in the intersection of the male phallus as the cone-field, and the female vagina as the vortex-field:

The Sri Yantra:

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Lyssa wrote:

"The cone of power is used to generate an energy that projects itself into the mundane world like a bolt of lightening, where it travels to its target, irresistibly attracted to the imprinted magickal link like static electricity is to the earth, and similarly blasting the target with the full force of its latent charge. The cone of power is generated, imprinted and released, and what remains is banished, or cleansed from the circle, to eliminate any possibility for the power to rebound back to the sender.

So if it can be agreed that the Cone of Power is masculine, then what would the so-called feminine magickal energy structure look like? I believe that it would be almost exactly the opposite - instead of an upright cone, it would be a vortex spiraling down to a common singularity.
The vortex is used to contain energy and to amplify it over time.
A vortex is an energy field that is deeply centered and internalized, but when it achieves a climax, which it does in a similar manner as the cone of power through resonance, it produces waves of energy radiating out in all directions, profoundly affecting the target through multiple waves of force that gradually and completely alter the target until it completely complies with the will of the magician.

The vortex type of magickal energy is more subtle and deeper than the cone of power, which suffers from the single mindedness of being able to miss its mark. A vortex surrounds its objective with waves of force, and these are more instrumental in making more likely greater and dynamic changes."

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See also the third post in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Nietzsche wrote:

"The task of spinning on the chain of life, and in such a way that the thread grows ever more powerful - that is the task." [WTP, 674]

The increasing 'darkening' of the ring...  

"Tremendous years of recurrence" blessing itself... [WTP, 1067]

Nietzsche wrote:

"The world exists... it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away - *it maintains itself in both.* " [WTP, 1066]

The ER (the "closest approximation of the world of becoming to a world of being" [N., WTP, 617]) has the dual nature of both change and retention.

Heidegger wrote:

"The wind rests by changing." [Elucidations to Holderlin's poetry]

The feeling of being blessed is perhaps the intuition that we have been many vessels of recurrence...  the halo above the head, the crowned feeling - a feeling of having escaped a total death and being present here, unextinguished, still retaining something of the 'possibility' that was our former selves...
Consciousness has no continuity, but the blessed feeling may be unknown and undefinable of the retentive part that persisted. When mysticism speaks of "ananda" or "bliss" they rubbish it going into eternal/abs. being, but joy is Affirmative awareness or the re-cognition of that strand of aggressive assertion which persists in you as the possibility realized, in the chain of life.
All the configurations played out to end in the possibility that was you...
Affirmative Self-Re-cognition is a blessing/bliss.

(Not every strong awareness can turn to joy, or a blessed feeling. ) Hence,

FC wrote:

So being is the constant creation of broader strata of excellency, and every terrible revolution is the breaking open of such a new plateau.
The highest form of human being is not knowledge but affirmation, and true affirmation pertains to a perpetual increase of standard. This is what falling in love means - to realize what being, as a whole, must always embody - an almost unbearably beautiful explosion of itself into more of itself. Human relationships do not usually live up to the original vision that brought them about, but the humans that make it up are transformed in terms of the excellency they had set in the moment of their most proper affirming/being.

Satyr wrote:

How do we step into the eye of the storm and stay there, as the storm moves across the spaces?  

You asked the same question a different way before;

Satyr wrote:

What is balance then, when nothing is still?
It is this titter-tottering on the wave's peak, riding the wave and as such remaining unchanged in relation to it, before one falls over and is swept away."

Apaosha wrote:

The eye of the storm. Equilibrium. The one point of order in the midst of flux where all the multitude of competing impulses find balance and direction."

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