It does. It needs to take up a lot of space and time in every direction and to want to know and to want to want and to labor, proliferate, multiply, from all the angles of its rooms and views. It is not a thing of tinkering; it is not a thing to sell. (--Though it is capable of whatever it pleases, prostitution, colonization, machinery, cleverness, heartbreak, i.e.) It is a thing of wishing, a plea, a little awe and trembling, some praise, some gratitude, some psaltering, some play by the foot of the master, some hubris too, some ritual unfolding of leaves. For me. So much so that invocation sounds like prayer to me--that I can't anymore hear it otherwise. And elegy too: prayer. Most poems, I suppose: surely all of my own. And maybe that's my fault for keeping my Milton close ever since. And maybe I am small-minded, would make sacred all the things around me that seem sacred because it is convenient for me, compulsive of me, and what's wrong with that is that I think I know better, was certainly educated otherwise in the great secular traditions of empiricism and enlightenment. But rather the repercussions of the sacristies I build all day while passing through my day than to stand in the crossroads by the mailbox waiting for a letter to move me--or for despair of one to keep me waiting. Keep me in doubt. I have done my waiting--(suspending judgement)--I have wasted time (on selective hearing). All of it, every second of it, is annunciation, not just sweetness, flight. So I would say, if it were mine to give, the world is your book--write it as you see fit. But it is not alone your book not my book or their book. "Of making many books there is no end," and so I had hoped you would see (I mean agree with me) what small petty weary work it is to get a word in a book compared to the first work of resonance. The great work is resonance.
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I thought it was work we would do together, resonance.
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Note to self: "the great work"--there is your hierarchy.
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"...religion is primarily about the obsessive-compulsive element in human nature enacting controlled scenarios that are supposedly the most important and most meaningful parts of life—but finally the defining material element of these scenarios is their empty ritualistic quality..."
And yet "arbitrary" seems incapable of accounting for the stubbornness of codification (and hierarchy). The hardwiredness of it--of compulsion, of obsession. Really do you mean to say the meaning of life is compulsion? Dark indeed. It's only a good argument for more Prozac nationhood.
--And I'm convinced that to wield the superstitious stick against the crowd is not subversive but deeply codified and profoundly canonical. Before Rome, right?
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Precisely Hume. “Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are…the true sources of superstition”:
The mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, proceeding either from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholic disposition, or from the concurrence of all these circumstances. In such a state of mind, infinite unknown evils are dreaded from unknown agents; and where real objects of terror are wanting, the soul, active to its own prejudice, and fostering is predominant inclination, finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits. --David Hume, "On Superstition and Enthusiasm"***
