Skim reading.

This month has been rather an odd one for me.  I have been writing a fair amount on here, viz. The Sermons of the Refuter blog whereas by contrast, I feel rather guilty to admit, I haven't managed to put together an article of any scope for my less personal, more pseudo academic blog Echoes from the Gnosis.  In fact I feel rather guilty, because after having started to write a few paragraphs/pages for Echoes a few articles,  after a few paragraphs, midway through I have just saved the document and not returned to it as writer's block (damn it!) would seem to strike me down midway through.  Despite having various sources, notes, plans, ideas, quotations in front of me, I seem to lose inspiration and just stop, dead in my tracks.  So articles are forthcoming, all is not lost; I just need my enthusiasm to return to the fore once again.  To my dear dear readers who follow both, please accept my sincere and humble apologies for such an empty June.  rest assured, I have a plentiful variety of themes and subjects that I am toying with approaching and sharing my thoughts but for now I feel in a state of abject numbness mentally.

My SAD seems to have subsided to a large degree.  This is mainly due to the improvement in the weather as today has proved to be bright, balmy and blue skied.  Part of me wants to leap into one of my books once again and read something thought provoking, or to increase my knowledge upon something.  But I feel withdrawn and still unfocussed which may or may not be due to a lack of good sleep over the last couple of weeks.  Even my dreams seem to rather tepid in nature which is most unusual for me, and from the little I can recall, they seem rather short lived whilst they are taking place and, by consequence, even shorter lived in my memory.

So in terms of reading material I have been reading short articles, and slim paperback books.  These have included a few of Jung's articles in Aspects of the Masculine, published by Routledge, as well as G.R.S. Mead's Apollonius of Tyana, Morton Smith's The Secret Gospel, E.M. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (for the umpteenth time) and Roger Sherman Loomis' The Develpment of Arthurian Romance.  All of them short, succinct books and entertaining reading and a suitable way to feel one is skim reading yet not. And one has finished reading something with q sense of accomplishment, moreso than one would feel from having read, say, Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer.

I have had a few strange little coincidences take place.  I considered writing a pair of book reviews, this time on something fictional, of Hilary Mantel's superb Wolf Hall and the sequel, which Bring Up the Bodies.  Yet by coincidence, I read mention of Bring Up the Bodies in another blog so I abandoned the idea, plus, as I have stated above, perhaps I am not in the best mood for reading (or writing) anything of considerable length at the moment.  After this, I did consider and toyed with the notion of writing a few poems once again, to take my mind off what was going on and well, to allow myself to be creative once again, and maybe to publish one of them on here.  However I started to doodle some ideas and out of my thoughts, a couple of handfuls of lines came to mind.  I have not published them here for they will seem an act of plagiarism.   And that simply is not the intention nor the case.  Either my subconscious was remembering the words or, for some unbeknownst reason,  my thought process resembled rather uncannily that of Edmund Spenser, as numerous motifs and ideas found in his Prothalamion were echoed in my attempts at writing poetry, even the reference to the weather, and the fragility of my mind at the moment.

To quote Spenser, rather than my comparatively mediocre doodlings:-

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air

Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play,

A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay

Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair;

When I whose sullen care,

Through discontent of my long fruitless stay

In prince's court, and expectation vain

Of idle hopes, which still do fly away

Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,

Walked forth to ease my pain