Keats’ Study and Bedroom (Photo/Theme: 16 November 09)

Amorella here at the last home of the poet, John Keats. The location is through the darkly painted door just to the right of the Spanish Steps in Rome and several flights up. Above the exterior door is a white marble plaque which reads:

Keats Shelley Memorial House

Acquired and Dedicated To The Memory

Of The Two Poets By Their Admirers

In England and America

Orndorff remembers four rooms, two in front and two in the back filled with books and varieties of small (some framed) remembrances of Keats, Shelley and/or Byron. The home was Keats’ though. If interested, give the place a Google.

I remember the narrow stairs, about four flights worth with literary and historical writings framed and pleasantly interspersed along the stair walls. Climbing those stairs was a very exciting and curious adventure.

I took two photos. The first was that of the library the memorial had set up. When I asked if it was okay to take photographs I was told by the young lady (from New York) in charge that I was not to use the flash. I tried to run through the new camera’s menu and I clumsily pushed a couple of buttons before taking one more shot, this one in the bedroom where John Keats’ died at age twenty-five. The flash went off anyway so that is the last one I took.

I was a bit surprised when Amorella wrote this as the particular theme for today’s posting: “I, Amorella, sensed the presence of Keats in the room where he died.”

Personally, I attempt to involve myself in the setting of a residence such as this, but I don’t remember tuning in a presence at the time. I have. Strongly so, sometimes. Even when I was young at four, five or six I would be in a room seemingly alone but ‘I quietly understood’ that I was not alone.

A non-material presence usually mentally projects itself as flat, running up the wall like an invisible window blind or folding itself down into four squares in the corner, to about the size of a penny or a dime only thinneranflatter, usually moving from or into the upper corner of a room. Shape is secondary to size and movement or no movement. Even if it appears ‘in an intuitive sense’ to be large it has never been larger than the wall in the room, that is unless it is already in ‘folds’ that I see as ‘conditionals’ more than anything else.

Of course I am really explaining the operation of my brain/mind intuitively (or imaginarily) in the action of such observation. The reasoning (weak or strong) has never varied in my lifetime as far as I can remember.

You think of a ‘presence’ as an ‘intuitively understood piece of non material substance’ – something that reflects a separate ‘consciousness’ not a mirrored one. In some ways, I am a product of that inner observation. A ‘presence’ in your mind is not necessarily a spirit or ghost, though you do see it as a separate ‘intelligent’ (a reasoning) ‘being’.

Looking at the photograph of Keats’ bed and death mask I detect a ‘centeredness’ projecting between the far edge of the bed and the table directly across from it. It is as if something hovers within the triangle of the end of the bed, the outer edge of the far table on the right, and the mask itself.

Amorella, I see nothing of the sort. In fact, the photo has only two dimensional qualities – that is, it is as flat as the computer screen. The picture appears as a wall painting to me, a small rectangle of painted tile. I do not see and did not sense a presence of the poet John Keats while in the room. It is one thing for me to have an over-active imagination, it is quite another for you to have one.

The room is where Keats died, the mask is circumstantial evidence of his death. The presence of Keats exists in the room.

Only in a causal sense, Amorella. It is unlike you to toy with reason. I do not see Keats other than in reference in the photograph. I do not see, sense, or have any intuitive understanding of the spirit of Keats in the room, then or now.

The picture that you took is as the death mask. You were in the room, now you are not. You are not present in the room yet the room is in your presence. I see this causal thought as a two-way street.

I do not.

You will find this is a difference between thinking while alive and thinking while dead.

Only if you write it in the remaining books as such, Amorella.

That is the point, orndorff. Consciousness and thought are not the same thing. Consciousness is as a room. Thought is the distance between two individual and causal conditionals within the room; otherwise, thought is as a telephone line unconnected to telephones.

I see a problem with using English here as it is too specific, too tree oriented rather than forest. Instead I will add (invent) words in the broken English of the Marsupials in the books. In reference to ‘consciousness and thought’ causalment (combination of a ‘causal conscious element’) will be as the telephone in your end analogy, and bridgenthought will be as a thought communicating something positive, reasonable, and/or meaningful from point A to point B.

Switch ‘causal conscious element’ to causal element in that the room is consciousness, it is already within the framework of consciousness.

Okay, a causal element (telephone at either end of the line) is a causalment. Bridgenthought (a thought of purposeful inner/intragalatic communication) stays as it is.

Good.