. . . .

Galesburg, Lake Storey, Geese # 1

***

Silence here doesn't tell well enough what the rest really looks like. Yesterday's work day started at 3 in the morning with a long email to students about event planning and prevention of dropped balls and another to Deanie about a self-designed major proposal on which I'd dropped balls of my own and other emails from students asking about thesis proposals and homework and appointments with me and a little more class prep and a glance at headlines and scarcely time to get in the office door before teaching, which took me right up to noon when my in-box was full again with documents to print and prep for the meeting at 4 and reading for the class I've been sitting in on at 2:40 three days a week and an exchange between faculty members about classroom renovation and all sorts of announcements about upcoming events, which I sorted and deleted as I could before writing to the events coordinator to ask for help with purchase order requests and running off to the publications office to pick up the mountain of submissions for the literary magazine which must be read and selected by Sunday night, forgetting, of course, to call the representative at our printers back, or to turn in a check requisition to the business office before rushing into class late, taking a few notes, and at the bell, returning to the office to find a panicked email from TSE who is visiting the college next week to call right away, which I did, taking 20 minutes from the 4 o'clock meeting to resend a flight itinerary and reconfirm with his agent that we did indeed purchase a flight, and somewhere in there to make photocopies of a few of his poems to distribute to the faculty per another faculty member's request before arriving late to the meeting across the hall, and sitting through the meeting, which took me up to nearly 6 o'clock, when I found D in the parking lot doing much the same as me and when I petted her new old dog, hugged her goodbye, then drove for home where I picked up a coat and drove off again to meet E and P for a bite, the first besides apple slices (thank you for apple slices) all day. Then home again, more email, a web search that turned up nothing, and bed.

***

And just now spent another 40 minutes (was it really?) responding to the question of classroom renovations. What you don't learn in grad school, the least of it is teaching.

***

From the comments below:

"The imagination is itself real, a part of reality. If I imagine (just to pick a random example) that I am a bird and can fly, I may be wrong, that may be a fantasy that has no correlation with reality, but my act of imagining it is a real act and exists as part of the total field of reality.

I'm not sure if the point is to "guard against fostering experiences that might distort my sense of reality," or to "guard against indulging fantasies that will potentially do violence to what is real," maybe not quite.

All of reality, all matter, is (among other things) a matrix of forces that act on each other -- gravity or electromagnetism, for example -- so that the universe as a whole is, in one sense, a field of various kinds of distortions. I think the point is to understand and perceive clearly (as clearly as possible) the distortions and fantasies when they occur, in order to make the necessary allowances for them in our thought and feeling and action.

This is maybe an extreme kind of hairsplitting -- I'm not necessarily disagreeing with what you're saying here, just perhaps preferring slightly different terminology." [L's response to my post]

Where do we diverge, L and I? I'm not sure we do. Of course the imaginative act is very real: art is a real thing, email is a real thing, responding to you as though I am making an imprint within this little window as I type is a real thing--all engaged and participating wholly in "the total field of reality" as acts, as movements. If not, creative acts would have no power to transform, subvert, revise, restructure, or enliven in any kind of real sense. But as it is, that transformative power is everywhere reflected in our cultural architectures as well as in the formation of individual consciousness. This is my point, exactly. Imaginative acts are not inert. They are not neutral. They are actively effective. They are biased, and most often profoundly self-interested.

And I'm taking a very broad interpretation of that term, too: imaginative act. One of the monks once suggested that to take pleasure in the coziness of warm morning coffee is to already be engaged imaginatively. --Not a bad thing, but recognizably already an imaginative act: and I couldn't work this out in my head for some time. I thought: coffee is real, pleasure is real, warmth is real, morning grogginess is real, they exist together, as I do with them, so what have I missed? And I felt a little defensive, thinking: why would you take my coffee from me?--you drink coffee! And I worried that gorgeous warm coffee right out of any sense of what Br T meant, into my own far reaching, deep stirrings of loathing for all needless (and even needful) forms of self-denial.

What I think he meant: denial of sensible pleasure is contrary to true realism. Again, body is that which I sense through that which has senses, body is temple, so for the seekers in monkland there is nothing productive in suspending the senses in doubt or in denying the experience of pleasure or pain. The point is that in the moment of experiencing that warm pleasure of coffee in morning fog, I'm then inclined to find this consolation satisfying in itself. I interpret it that way. I produce this consolation for myself, with my own means and towards my own end, as I do in all imaginative acts, in all artistic works, in craft, and in product-oriented labor, in which the end, purpose, goal, of the act is my own idea of it.

So there is a very important distinction for the monks between sensible experiences of real things and the imaginative acts which transform those experiences into consolations or traumas or even fantasies. Consolations and traumas and fantasies are personally constructed, are ideas--in an idealized sense--that I form emotionally and imaginatively (in real acts, yes) about real experiences. The warm cup of coffee in reality is not a consolation. I make the pleasure of it into a ritual consolation, possessively, self-interestedly, in the same way I might make a poem.

The consolation, the poem, is real, but what they present may or may not correlate to the reality of the experience. And you can see already how complex that presentation becomes. A psychological and physiological dependency on morning coffee is real, but that need was cultivated, created, through habit and a little work, and has now also become a distortion of what is really true: I don't need coffee to exist. There is nothing wrong in taking pleasure in coffee, but my growing dependency on it as a consolation is misplaced. Is unhealthy and disordered. Primarily because self-produced ends are self-limiting. I would be self-sufficient (I prefer my way to yours), but as it turns out, alone I am deficient towards my own end. I cannot grow and heal unless my dependency resides within a true other. Within a (not-idealized) friend. Within a Thou.

***

(Again, let me say that I'm not attempting to present my own speculations on the nature of the universe, but speaking from what I think I understand of the Brothers' Catholic monastic teachings, and I could very well get those wrong.)

***

fall: week four

Galesburg, Overpass #4

***

Again, just a little overwhelmed by details. And then my browser went wonky and acts as though it's my doing, which makes me not want to be here. I'm not sure it's worth talking about.

***

from the comments below:

"Love triggers a search for the One whom we cannot see--for I cannot see
love. I cannot love my brother if I do not know who he is--we've got to be very
intelligent to avoid hurting someone. " [my quotation, below, of Fr
Didier]

"Oh, but the key to loving someone is not to know him or her - it is to be
absorbed in them. True, it is a tricky proposition, for how do we maintain our
identity in the immersion? It's paradoxical - I suppose identity in difference
is the key here. Well, maybe I'm being too picky, but this knowledge thing is
problematic for me. Our knowing is finite and contradictory, just like our
senses. I think the faculty of love is exercised through other means. But maybe
Fr. Didier means a different kind of knowing..." [K's response]

***

There is, at the heart of the Brothers' mystical teachings, an emphasis on practical knowledge, which is grounded concretely in sensible experience. Experience always leads me back to my humanity, to my existence as body, which does, yes, remind me of my finitude, but which does also give me intelligent access to the world around me and the people in it. The practical realms of knowledge, art and ethics--or more concretely, work and friendship--are realms I learn through experience. Of course I can't know my friend thoroughly: she will always remain an unfolding mystery to me. But I can get to know her well enough that I can understand what might hurt her or what engages her or what she feels--these are all things I learn about her through an experience of her friendship, and this experience, if I am truly sensible of her as a person, makes me intelligent towards her and her concerns. If I am to immerse myself in her, lovingly, I cannot do it possessively, for then I am treating the friendship as though it is my work, my doing, an end I have proposed. Friends give themselves to one another as much as possible, but because we are distinct in body, mind, and spirit, this immersion can never be complete.

The point, I suppose, is that intelligence is linked to spiritual wisdom, but because body and spirit are one, intelligence cannot be exercised without the practical knowledge that body brings. This is one of the reasons why sexual union is considered sacred--why the body is a temple, etc.

What the intelligence receives through sensible experience will determine my sense of reality. My realism can become very distorted or disordered if I am inclined towards loving things and people ideally, imaginatively or emotionally, according to my own concerns rather than for what and who they are in reality. And despite my sense that I cannot trust my senses, despite the fact that I will often get things and people wrong, it is less a consequence of my experience tricking me than a consequence of my failure to be oriented towards the other. As much as possible, I want my interior life to correlate to reality.

The faculty of love is exercised through the intelligence, but the intelligence is informed by sensible experience--which of course opens another can of worms, for then I must surely guard against fostering experiences that might distort my sense of reality, as well as guard against indulging fantasies that will potentially do violence to what is real.

***

. . .

Galesburg, Overpass #1

***

"Faith provokes the intelligence--it triggers a deeper research." --Fr Didier

***

Or not. I can live faith as though I am living towards my dreams, my family meaningful enough, my work meaningful enough, my suffering shitty but meaningful enough, inasmuch as I share that common bond with those I love and in whom I place my faith, hope for the best, and cross my fingers that all will be well according to the barometer of achieving once more an equilibrium of feeling well enough, content enough, and strong enough. Where it is not enough, I have failed myself and failed those around me--in courage, autonomy, and emotional maturity--and where it is beyond my control, and where I react to it compulsively--rashly--it is merely my dysfunction, a psychological and cultural wound I can understand, describe, analyze, but cannot seem to heal between us, even after years of poking around in the darker parts of myself with an analyst, a therapist, a physician, a friend or two, my mother, for I would do it again: hold you--all of you--suspect against the greater meaning of my life, which I must protect at all costs, myself, my work, my family, which I conceive as my greater end--given there is nothing more--and against which you are othered in suspense until you prove trustworthy.

***

"Can my family be everything to me? My husband? Can another person be my end? It is a big question." --Fr Didier

***

"I hate talking with Catholics. They give you dogmas and tradition, but they're not thinking." --Fr Didier

***

"Before I can raise a family, a child, I would want to know what it is I am raising. Children are great seekers. They want to know. 'Why?' 'Well because.' 'Why?' Well, because.' 'Why?' 'Because, and that is all.' Is it right for me to lead my child to narrow his search? What are the consequences of closing down the interrogations? How do I love someone if I don't know what or who they [sic] are? Love triggers a search for the One whom we cannot see--for I cannot see love. I cannot love my brother if I do not know who he is--we've got to be very intelligent to avoid hurting someone. " --Fr Didier

***

. . . . . . .

Galesburg, Mobil

***

"If all that has happened on this planet is the fortuitous colonization of a damp stone by a chemical phenomenon we have called 'life,' then there is no case to be made for utility. If our myths and truths are only another exotic blossoming, the free play of possibility, then they are fully as real and as worthy of respect as anything else. Or if use or value in this demythologized context signifies the adaptation of creature to its circumstances, however gratuitous they may be, then even the universal human predisposition to create and value myths must be assumed to be a form of adaptation, therefore true in the sense and in the degree that these myths make an effective response to some exigency of being" (2).

--Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

***

Thinking of Z, missing, mourning.

***

. . . .

Galesburg, Boy with Dog #1

***

Two days ago, puzzling through, then reading through Philippe again, then yesterday overhearing from the hall outside my office a philosophy professor responding to a student who was pointing out that "being" has contingency, too, in its relationship to necessity. Eavesdropping has its own way of garbling things, but that is my question, too, precisely. A student's question. To which the professor said, yes, you're on the right track, and no one has a good response to this--except Christianity, where there is a man-God--but that is something else. And the student said something I couldn't hear and the professor wiped the board clean.

***

Tuesday: JM--when a novice began, "if Jesus always existed"--held up the eraser in his hand, and the novice fell silent, waiting. "Jesus Christ did not always exist," he said and turned to the board. "It's complicated being God." The novices giggled.

***

I've been told that I can either choose to understand the universe through the lens of contingency, relationship, difference, in which all things, all people, are always already reduced to realizations, positions, ideas, and to the possible, which is disengaged from the probable...

and in which all of my understanding is then channeled through an aesthetic lens, for this is what the possible involves...

and in which, all idea-things being equally possible, narrative is an impossibility...

neverminding that if I eradicate story, I eradicate families, whole cities, the migrant crossing the desert on foot with a gallon of water in his arm and a towel on his head...

OR

I can choose to return again and again to existence--"this is," "you are"--as a concrete reality, in which words are just that, complex and baffling in their way, but words nonetheless, and not the primary source of my understanding, or at least not the cloak I have made them out to be, but a veil through which something is both disclosed and concealed. I see through a glass darkly, but I do see...

neverminding that existence, "being," is also contingent, is also a relationship, is also, itself, an idea...

yet another articulation of the possible...

and only that...

but today beyond this point my head is dark, and I suppose it might end here, with a vacuum, with the starry nothingness that is either an absence or a presence/absence towards which, either way, all the earth groans and spurts and proffers.

***

For it is possible that the central question (the only question worth asking) is what kind of "literature" will I compose? --Which is the same as asking what kind of life will I live, since living is the same as composing. And what's wrong with that?

No no. It's not that the question-as-a-position is wrong, but that on its own terms it can hold no value, for there is no center. There are only facets. That is, that position, any position, as a position, is untenable. All positions are untenable.

And so it goes.

***

Father, I said, most people find meaning in raising their kids and doing good work. That's all. And he said, now you have a real question.

***

. . .

Galesburg, Wall #6

***

Taken up with school things. But still thinking.

***

"We understand then that a philosophy which rests upon inspiration and intuition, considering them as its starting point, can never be clearly distinguished from art and/or mathematics. It remains a philosophy in which the possible and relation are primary. This is what characterizes idealistic philosophies; idealism considers the possible as the primary aspect of reality (the concrete which exists is only a form of the possible, a realization limiting this possible, in short, an application or 'position')" (9).

--Marie-Dominique Philippe OP

***

fall: week two

Galesburg, Wall #4

***

from the comments below:

> "If I cannot touch (with my
> intelligence)" [quotation from my previous post]

"Reality beyond reality is a reality too far. It sounds like you're seeking out difficulty and creating it when there isn't enough for you." [anonymous comment]

***

Wait: I'm not presenting a complex personal cosmology I've just pulled out of my head.

All I'm attempting is to write through some of the teaching of the Brothers of St John (the Catholic monastics I've gotten to know over the last two years) and to look at it in light of some of the other stuff that is already in my head. The branches of philosophy that inform Catholic theology--Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.--are a lot less familiar to me than the skeptical traditions of Western philosophy, primarily because whatever I was exposed to in the literary field I chose (Enlightenment thereon) has long since dumped its interest in transcendent or substantial reality (Spirit) for the seemingly more interesting, more complex, more difficult, and more liberating problem of language (Letter).

I'm wondering what happens when you plug it (spirit) back in. Does it necessarily lead to an end of freedom? Does it lead to political narrow mindedness? To social prejudice? To a "school of quietude" and authoritative canons?

But all Christians believe in a reality beyond this reality--as do many mystics and practitioners of other faiths and spiritual traditions. That's nothing new or especially difficult. So I may not understand your question there. If you're asserting there is no God, or no transcendent reality, or whatever, and that I'm just a disgruntled person who wants more than this life offers--and if you're right--then yeah, I'm wasting good time on nothing. And I suppose you are too...

And all those beloved monks...

And yet, when you meet them and get to know them, it's very difficult to believe they are wasting their time. I say "you" but I mean me and all the other people who float around the monastery getting to know them, of course. If their practice is merely escapism, a poultice for a wound, a desire for a cure, I wonder why their escapism brings them so much serenity, why they feel fulfilled, when other forms of escapism can be so psychologically debilitating?

The Brothers' philosophy says the mind (specifically the intelligence) can discover a higher understanding of reality in a judgment of existence, that moment of wonder and awe when I understand that something exists, that "this is." That "you are." I don't yet understand what that means. And so I'm thinking (aloud). And it is hard for me, yes, but I don't think it is needlessly difficult.

On the other side of all this questioning is that simplicity too: "this is." "You are." Present tense. I'm writing towards that.

***

. . . . . . .

Galesburg, Wall #3

***

"And so, go down to the deepest point of your mind and think of yourself in this simple, elemental way. (Others will mean the same thing, but because of their experience, speak of the mind's 'pinnacle,' and of this awareness as the 'highest human wisdom.') in any case, do not think what you are but that you are."

--The Book of Privy Counseling, anonymous

***

first day of school

Galesburg, Wall #1

***

from the comments below:

“Maybe the only "real" crisis arising from this view is in friendship, for if I am isolated from myself and all the world by the dis-figurations of consciousness, I am isolated from you too. Putting aside the mystery of you as a person for the less mysterious limitations of my duping mind, our friendship is an approximation of friendship. Not more.” [quotation from my post]

"As harsh as this may sound – though it sounds harsh only because it flies in the face of social convention and social sentimentality – that is a valid proposition. In the end, aren’t all things of the world there for us simply to love (in the caritas sense)? I will always be a mystery to you, as you are to me. No amount of turning that over will change this fact. The point is to love, not to know." [K's response]

***

Yes and no. What I meant isn't clear in my original post: as it is with knowledge, so it is with love, if I've adopted a view "which, no longer distinguishing between idea and reality, cannot know real, existent man as he is ... [I] relativize him in reference to an a priori," as Philippe says below. I cannot love him or her, either, except in an ideal way. What I know and love is my idea of the tree, of you, of people in general, of painting--there is no distinction between the what and the who in this idealism, except in terms of how I might choose (or not) to prioritize them. That is, there is a kind of possessiveness in loving and knowing ideally, for the best I can do in these circumstances is to relativize things and people according to my approximating idea of them, which begins and ends with me and which is ordered towards my psycho-sociological concerns.

My understanding and my love are reduced to aesthetic relationships, then, figurations and disfigurations of accident. The mystery of you in this view, as it resides with you, becomes a non-question, something I might actually come to know and love if not for the mere barrier of subjectivity--which as it is, becomes an insurmountable problem stemming from the limitations of my duping mind and idealized representation. As L says below, "For me, the point isn't so much whether reality is really real, in any absolute sense (which it may or may not be possible for human beings to determine anyway), but that it is real *enough*."

This is what I am calling an approximation.

If it is the case that I can only know and love approximately, then all my love is really some form of eros, desire, in its various manifestations, which is not a terrible thing, and which is most often necessary in a general way (for I cannot really love "my neighbor" if I've never met her), but which can wreak havoc in intimate relationships between friends wherever it becomes clear that my approximation of you falls short. My approximations can be very complex, obviously, very analytical, and filled with references to our experiences together, but the barriers of signification are always between us, miscommunicating.

If I cannot touch (with my intelligence) the reality of you beyond this reality, I cannot love you in the love beyond love, which is caritas. In which I love you for you, not for or despite your qualities as I imagine them, and in which you will always remain a mystery--a "secret" as the monks say--not merely because my understanding is limited by language and ideas and approximations, and not merely because you are a wonderful accident of this world, but because you are a person who is sustained in a substantial reality of existence beyond accident. In this sense, then, you remain a secret to me that is always unfolding; we are not doomed to the isolating prison-house of ever aestheticizing one another and wishing we weren't. --Which is pretty close to the definition of hell.

***

All of this I say with a caveat: I am a toddler with a toddler's understanding.

***

My heart and thoughts are with Reginald Shepherd and his loved ones.

***

. . . .

Del Rio, Garden #5

***

I know I know. The mind "is merely the dupe of its own categories" and "all structures are unstable," and "the (sometimes) subjective nature of reality" is an affront to what you think I'm saying--and Derrida, and de Man, and Lacan, and all the rest. Don't think I didn't say the same to anyone in monkland who would listen. And they did listen, though they've heard it all before.

I did say the first hurdle is not God , but reality (and the "shoulds" of reality). You would have me qualify it, put it into quotation marks, account for what I mean when I use a term that is far too tenuous on its own terms to toss around like salad. I know. I asked the same of myself. Of them.

The short version is this: if I am convinced that the slippage between the real and perceptions of the real are too great to allow for more that a very warped disfigurement of what I am, what spiders are, what protons do, I may as well stay at home and read books. Or go to school and teach books. Or stay in bed and dream. Or blog. Or watch Buffy episodes on DVD release, and let the cancer become inoperable rather than give up smoking, and stay drunk in the evenings and write poems, why not, and stop short of marveling at trees, why not, and be done with the question. But I look on while some of us make an 8 billion dollar why machine in the search for dark matter. What am I looking to confirm if I believe I am beyond confirmation? I believe I am my own mind's dupe. I believe I forget daily I am not living in reality but within an infinite chain of unstable signifiers through which "the real," if there is such a thing, can never shine through. I believe objectivity is nostalgia. Substance is nostalgia. Soul is nostalgia. I believe this is closer to the truth than truth itself. "Truth itself" is ever a distortion, a suspension of disbelief, I believe.

***

Maybe the only "real" crisis arising from this view is in friendship, for if I am isolated from myself and all the world by the dis-figurations of consciousness, I am isolated from you too. Putting aside the mystery of you as a person for the less mysterious limitations of my duping mind, our friendship is an approximation of friendship. Not more.

***

What the monks say will not convince you. I am interested in what they have to say, it soothed me, but it did not convince me to hear it. I was drawn in by watching them live in attentiveness and reverence towards the world they touch. By coveting what I saw, which cannot be attained through an approximation.

***

"In such a climate of incessant, very tangible transformation, it is difficult to discover in human reality anything other than that which is subject to change, that which is relative. It is very difficult to discern that, at its root, the human intellect is made to go beyond such scientific and technical knowledge, to discover truth of another sort. In short, it is difficult to discern that the human intellect, where it is most 'itself,' is made to attain to that-which-is, existent (or existing) reality in all its depth."

...

"A psycho-sociological anthropology is thus elaborated which claims to be both exhaustive and philosophical. Man, in his proper reality, is considered only in his psychological and sociological aspects. Thus, in the name of a psycho-sociological anthropology which considers only man's behavior and 'existential situation,' the philosophy of reality (beyond the psychological and sociological aspects) is rejected; and the metaphysics of that-which-is, considered from the point of view of being, is deemed outdated."

...

"I know that some will object that to return to metaphysics is to return to the past, to be fixed in immobility, isolated from the modern world, and set outside evolution, for metaphysics immediately places us beyond the directly observable and measurable."

...

"Philosophy cannot be satisfied with describing what is seen and noticed. It cannot be satisfied with measuring observable reality. It seeks (and this is its proper task) to analyze an experienced reality and to grasp it in all its dimensions. It especially seeks to know man, who is not and cannot be a 'one-dimensional being.' This is what I would like to show--going beyond the objections, which stem from ideologies which, no longer distinguishing between idea and reality, cannot know real, existent man as he is. They relativize him in reference to an a priori." (2-5)

Retracing Reality: A Philosophical Itinerary, Marie-Dominique Philippe OP ("former Professor of Philosophy at Fribourg in Switzerland and founder and Prior of the Community of St John")

***

. . .

Del Rio, Garden #4

***

"There is a difference between evidence and certitude, if what you mean by evidence is fact, quantifiable or scientific fact," JM, yesterday, on the bench in the grass beneath fat clouds, blue sky, and the trees wagging their green heads above us.

And JJ in the downstairs classroom when I ask, are errors always subjective? "No. Errors in truth result when I have something in my head that does not really exist, so that a true search for the truth requires humility, an openness towards reality, other people, God, because truth is always greater than my knowledge. When I think I have the answers, I am closed. Pride is very closed. I should always be interested in new things. Truth is a conforming of my intelligence to reality. Therefore my own poverty in the search for truth is what is most truthful, for I want to conform my thoughts to what is really there."

***

Well what is to be done with "should," its wistful if-only, its staunch fist-wielding ought? Isn't it the first hurdle? The one implying on one hand, this "should" is a dream, and on the other, this "should" (of reality) is a dictator? And again I have lost my freedom, haven't I, am closed (like a fist) if I am incapable of the dream, or if reality is oppressive to me. And I do, I hesitate to say when and will in my "should" with any real assertiveness in case I am small-minded and wrong in my willfulness, now. It is better neither to hope too much, nor to hope that I do not hope for the wrong thing. Better to withhold or suspend to the end, as this "should" implies suspension too. A shadow. In case I have forgotten my suffering, others, all suffering.

***

Yet to suspend is to forget. They are not the same, no. But suspension requires more constant attention, more vigilance than I can always ever muster. So I forget. Why to hold suspect. Why to hold off. Why to hold. In fact there is no why, in actuality, as far as I can see. Only that my fist is closed on something dear dear dear, something I am myself saving for the day when I am certain I can at last let go. I hold myself up this way. By the bootstraps. And I walk around, hanging on.

***

As if I can.

As if I am more capable of holding this, myself, the arrival of "should," in suspension--and as if this suspension is my own doing, as if it is enacted in my refusal to act--than I am of thriving on acting in "should."

As if suspension is closer to freedom than action. As if suspension is more open than closed.

Ought, if-only, "should": it brings on a shudder, feelings of unreality, doesn't it? Should for what again? Yes, I agree, that's the rib.

***

I should conform my thoughts to reality in a true search for the truth. More: in a nutshell, that is love.

***

. . . . . .

Del Rio, Bird Cord Grill

***

from the comments below:

'For me it's not so much of question of whether (just to use the example here) "God is in the flowers" or "the flowers are in God." Or whether one wants to call it "the divine" or "the ineffable" (putting aside for a moment the more specific questions of "God" as such).

I don't really find a distinction between one and the other. I guess this is because, for me, mystical experience (for lack of another word) *is* essentially human experience. The question of whether something supernatural actually exists seems less important to me. It's real enough as a human experience, and lives as such in the world. (I know this is encompassing a lot with broad strokes.)

There exists, if only psychologically or emotionally, a fundamental tension between -- on the one hand -- asking questions about the *why* and the *if* of it, why we are here, why everything is here, if we and it are in fact here, or somewhere, and -- on the other hand -- not ever (at least during mortal life as we understand it) really *knowing*, whatever we may believe or think or speculate. The most fundamental dialectic, I suppose, in human consciousness.

I believe that the most profound creative impulses grow out of moments of contact with the not-knowing, the essential nothing or emptiness or unknown (or vacuum, to use a slightly scientific term). The confrontation (not necessarily in an aggressive or hostile sense, just the facing with intent) between the not-knowing and the passionate desire to know.'

***

But that's just it. That "if" is the supposition of "not ever really *knowing*"--and I am worn out and wary of this dialectic between the "why" and the "if." And if after clinging to the skepticism of "if" ("if we and it are in fact here, or somewhere,") as a way of asserting what seems most reasonable to me in a lifelong suspension of judgment, who can blame me for never quite seeing that the question of "if" isn't first about "we and it" nor about "here, or somewhere," but about "are," "is," being as such?

And I did hold this position, this suspension in "if," most of my life. But there is no articulation of "we and it" nor of "here, or somewhere" without the articulation of being, "are," as the verb implies. And if I am worn out and wary, it is because to respond skeptically to the question of "if" on the level of being--to assert that nothing exists, that nothing is sustained in existence--requires too much of me. It requires that I accept the dialectic on its own terms, putting aside "why," until I have demystified "if." Yet my skeptical suspension in "if" does not bring me to the brink of nothingness and invite me to fill it up with myself or something meaningful; rather, it explains that purpose, motive, love, work, art, identity, and community are ultimately meaningless, given there can be no "therefore," no "why" that can follow. So it is, my skepticism insists, "why" should succumb to the death of meaning, to the suspension of "if," rationally.

Which simply isn't the case. We operate on "why," everyday. But we only theorize about "if." To subject "why" to "if" in this way, as I did, is to so readily conflate skepticism with reason (mistaking one for the other) that the absurdity of annihilating "why" by way of "if" occurred to me only in the form of mourning. "Your life is what you make of it," a work of art, like everything else: sorry, but that's boring and lonely and meaningless as hell. I'm not that interesting on my own.

In exposition, it is easy to suggest that the barriers between knowledge and being are too great to counter, that questions of ontology are unproductive, but in the end, I'm not interested in an epistemology. In the end, my "passionate desire to know" and my confrontation with the "not-knowing" is a plea for my life, and for all the people in it, into the service of which I would place my epistemology.

And again, I'd say that to enter the discussion at all is to encounter the assumptions of dialectal thought all over the place, my own included, which makes for a minefield of inquiry. It is latent in binaries, oppositions, polarizations, expressions of "or." --I am not convinced, for example, that "natural" versus "supernatural" holds up on the level of experience. As you say, "mystical experience (for lack of another word) *is* essentially human experience," precisely because it is experienced. But at the same time, experience is, for me, rooted in the greater mystery of being, in the source of somethingness, so that human experience on the level of existence is arguably nothing less than "super-natural" because being itself lies beyond experience as well as within it. This is not an argument for the existence of God, but an attempt to demonstrate that dialectical thinking tends to fold on itself. It is designed towards synthesis, but is divisive from the start. Where I am tempted towards oppositions, towards prioritizing the exclusivity of "or," I might be better off prioritizing the inclusivity of "and."

***

"... water in water," yes, which implies an "and."

***

. . . . .

Del Rio, Dog #6

***

From the comments below:

'Anyway, I think that many people mistake or conflate the crowd mentality, the "mass" emotive response if you will, with mystical experience. In reality the experience of the true believer in the church flock is no different from that of the ideologue at the political rally. There are lots of theories that can be instructive in our piecing together of exactly how mystical experience occurs within an organized group religious context, but I think what it all comes down to is the energy of the group itself, not the WORD as I earlier defined. The energy of the group can be potent and uplifting, but it breeds dependency upon this group, its ideologies, and its rituals for the realization of this upliftment and the harnessing of that energy. Meanwhile, I can attest to having had far more fulfilling and life-affirming experiences alone and without the more fervent aspects of group ritual.

This is poorly thought out and I apologize, but it does beg the question: What then is the benefit of the group ritual and of the energy that is ganied from the group? Perhaps the group ritual has more value in the context of a more personal religious regime that fosters a relationship with the sublime independently of the group mindset - because, theoretically, in such a case the feeling of spiritual awakening would be something that has arisen organically from the individuals in the group outside of their grou ritual behavior, and has not been spread down into them during the course of a service which not only mentally but physically (see Huxley et al) makes them feel that they are tapping into something..'

***

Ya'll are jumping the gun a bit (as I wasn't going to write about the divine yet), but okay. Let me fall back on the old distinction between religious expression and/or experience and, well, God, or as you choose, the WORD, or (my preference) the ineffable--since I think most secular thought ("Huxley et al") begins somewhere with that distinction when it wants to point out that all mystical experience too much resembles other common human experiences. If there is only experience to go on, there is nothing supernatural that cannot be naturalized in exposition. That is, there is no natural reason to believe in the existence of the supernatural. So faith, I'd argue, is an act beyond evidence, beyond experience, and beyond expression. It looks beyond Nature and its order to an acknowledgment of existence, my existence, yours, all of this which is, and it strips it of its accidents and gazes towards that absence and says, despite that everything leads to nothing, I know You're there.

As K asks below, if we are to have faith at all, what are we then to do with it? "What criterion do we use to distinguish grace from madness? How do we practice genuine obedience?"

This is also the distinction (between religious expression/experience and God, or more simply, between the natural and the supernatural) I am keeping in mind as I write through these questions because I recognize I'm inclined to make the dangerous leap towards a dialectical argument or towards a defense of subjective relativism while I attempt to describe how my experiences have shaped my understanding of the divine. As I've heard said, superstition is the other guy's religion, so while I don't disagree with your pointing out pitfalls of the madness of crowds, and while I've targeted some pitfalls of my own, I'm holding in reserve a decision to believe, with Kierkegaard, that faith requires an "infinite resignation" and an "infinite movement," neither of which I am capable on my own.

To my mind, most of the rest, the "in which" of expression and experience--in the garden, in silent meditation, in the ritual crowd, in speech acts, in personal feeling, in the monastery chapel (which is always open)--resides within the sensible, aesthetic, finite world where those of us who would seek viable paths towards the incomprehensible infinity of the divine are challenged to remain confronted by what divine absence means: God is not in the flowers; the flowers are in God. The former ("God is in the flowers") is not entirely wrong, but it quickly leads to a distortion, a communion with things mistaken for God. The latter, however, is impossible to grasp. It is full of hope.

***

. . .

Del Rio, Dog #4

***

“The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”

***

from "The Withholding"

We became nondenominational. My mother, my brother, and me. In a family of non-practicing Mexican-American Roman Catholics. In which my father would remain fiercely non-practicing, Roman, Catholic, before divorcing my mother, watching his mother die of cancer, remarrying, and, when it became necessary for his second family to find a church, joining the Episcopalians down the street.

To be a non-practicing Catholic, as I was by the time I was eight, is to have had a claim made for you, in infancy at baptism, after which you may be exposed to the mass and catechesis only sporadically. If the claim becomes an identity rather than a foundation towards faith, it remains a prerogative of tradition that in my experience had little to do with God. For though baptism into the Church is a sacramental act of faith, the act preceded us, like heredity, like birthright. We had nothing to do with its happening to us. Often it is the grandmothers in non-practicing Catholic families who insist on the baptism of the family babies, so that with the deaths of the grandmothers and their matriarchal preservation of familial unity, the baptism relaxes its hold on the soul and allows itself to be transformed with time and with generational distance into something of an inconvenience that arises when a child is born and another sacrament by water ought to be gotten, if at all.

To have become nondenominational in this light, then, was to consent to be uprooted. To be severed from the non-practicing Catholic genealogical tree and grafted onto the limb of an everyman ministry that would have us discard the material designations of formalized religion—organizational authority, theological unity, doctrinal affiliation and tradition—out of necessity towards a free faith. “Nondenominational” was a faceless, nameless reiteration that attempted to elide a more specific identity—and to purify itself of that desire for identity, per se—as a reflection of its emphasis on spirit and its general distrust of the world of things. Hence the term “born again Christian,” which is not a tag nor a category nor a description of one’s membership in a particular religious community, but a personal and individual declaration of faith, a confession that marks the experience of spiritual conversion, even as it is declared in that moment.

***

. . .

The Withholding

[continued]

In my mind Isaac was a child when his father, Abraham, walked him up the mountain, bound him to the altar, and drew his knife to offer his son in sacrifice to God. Isaac was a child in my mind because I was a child when he was given to me in an illustrated edition of the Bible, which I read—alongside other books given to me, collections of nursery rhymes, books about insects and stars and animals of the sea—in the space on my bedroom floor between the bed and the set of windows that afternoon when the sun made a warm square altar of light to read by in solace.

I was in my father’s house. I was alone, transfixed on the passage again: Isaac’s father laid the wood for the holocaust on Isaac’s shoulders, he laid the wood in order, he laid his son on the wood of the altar and drew his knife.

The angel’s intervention didn’t interest me. The child’s mind, Isaac’s mind, understood perfectly well by then that the angel intervened too late. What is laid down by then brought Kierkegaard to his knees; how it is laid down brought Auerbach to speak of it as a work of tyrannical realism. Beauty on one hand, Terror on the other. But it remains a poetry that baffles the mind (a ram caught in a thicket by the horns) not because it is beautiful or terrible—even ordinary things can be one or both—but because it binds you to Isaac and because for Isaac there is no closure. For Isaac and for you there are nations: forfeitures of mythic proportions. Everything under the sun you think you know of fathers and of sons—of divine goodness, and of love, and ethics, and consolation—for an instant goes up in flame. “Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” What is at stake? Even the child’s mind (especially the child’s mind) responds: Everything I think I am is at stake.

The child understood that for Isaac’s father all trials point towards faith at all costs. That he, Abraham, had walked down off the mountain with his son to celebrate having lost and regained his son, infinitely. That forthwith he was also restored to his fatherhood infinitely, for this was a loss restored by the infinite God. That within this great promise he had been delivered over to the fatherhood of humanity’s myopic urge towards self-preservation and had triumphed. But for the child, the object of sacrifice, who never spoke to God directly, there seemed only an existence in sacrifice remaining, with the promise of returns infinitely deferred. The act of faith required of the father is a perfect and complete recognition of the impossibility of self-preservation. But the act of faith required of the child goes further, for he must place himself obediently into his father’s human hands. Those hands that without question laid the wood in order, prepared the alter, drew the knife, and halted only once the messenger appeared to Abraham. Such, then, is the purpose of the child as the child sees it: to endure the bereavement of his father, and along with his father, the bereavement of his father’s God. For the child there are many possibilities, all just causes he thinks to doubt, all indications of a lone devastating question he feels he must ever keep to himself: what if my father only thinks he is talking to God?

***

Del Rio, TX ... Joplin, MO: seven hun'red miles, five hun'red more to go ...

Me and Rom in the Baymont Inn again, our roadhouse.

***

The Withholding

“…he keeps Isaac only with pain.”
—Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling


With the conviction in mind that the difference between faith and belief is mostly opinion, and that opinion, at heart, is what motivates the faithful wayfarer, I visited a small monastery nestled in the farmlands outside of Peoria, Illinois, knowing that while I didn’t have the courage for a good fight, I was there to have one if the opportunity should only arise.

I sat on a metal folding chair in the semi-dark of the chapel and noticed the bare flagstone floors, the twenty or so low wooden benches where I guessed the monks sat during mass, the plain altar dressed in white cloth, and the incense still hazing the windows. No stained glass, and aside from the impressive carved wood crucifix on the wall behind the altar, no art. I waited for the prior’s return with a nervous sense of having been put off and a compulsion to get up, cross the threshold of the chapel, get into the car, and drive away. When I’d arrived on the grounds, I’d seen a few of the monks walking in the driveway, some in full gray habits, some in long-sleeved unadorned hoods that reached mid-thigh. All wore sandals, all wore their heads shaved within a quarter-inch of their scalps, all seemed quite young. Which was a revelation: I didn’t know until then that I didn’t know much about monastic life, and there seemed a lot to know.

I didn’t know, for instance, that at the time I was looking at the prior, the novice master, and their novices. I didn’t know what I ought to do next--should I not approach them? should I have stayed on the walk?--until the prior waved and gestured me towards a nearby picnic table where he greeted me briefly, shook my hand, and asked me to wait in the chapel. I was nursing an awkwardness--of being surely about to speak to this man in ways he would find ignorant, possibly offensive, but also, somehow, forgivable. I was trying to discard the thought and the anger that came with it. I felt inappropriate and hateful, self-conscious, absurdly so, and irritated with my feelings, and irritated with having put myself into the position of being someone a stranger would perceive as in need of forgiveness. The chapel grew dark as the sun lit the fields from the horizon outside, a red sanctuary candle burned near the floor below the tabernacle, and I wrestled with the senselessness of prayer and of feeling moved to move my thoughts towards God in whom I could find no reason to believe.

On the phone I’d told the prior only that I have some questions and that I hope someone might sit with me and respond. I didn't tell him there was also the burden of knowing which questions to ask. “Very good,” he said, without pressing. He gave me directions to the priory after arranging an appointment date, and I listened to his voice and tried to place his accent. By this time, I’d been on the phone with a local parish office making the same clumsy request, had been given the option of talking with one of the parish priests or—when I asked the woman on the other end of the line where she would go if she were me—of seeking direction with someone from The Community of St John, this place at which I’d arrived, after navigating through the voicemail prompts directing me on how to leave messages for various Fathers and Brothers, the prior, the vicar, the novice and guest master, the kitchen, the library, and after having left two messages, randomly, with two different Brothers, each of whom called back within a day and cheerfully pointed me towards the prior of the community, with whom at last I left a third message.

***

. . . . . .

"Derrida exposes the doubt that does not merely insinuate itself into faith but that in fact constitutes faith, for faith is faith precisely in the face of doubt and uncertainty, the passion of non-knowing. Violence on the other hand arises from having a low tolerance for uncertainty so that Derrida shows us why religious violence is bad faith. On Derrida’s terms, we do not know the name of what we desire with a desire beyond desire. That means that leading a just life comes down to coping with such non-knowing, negotiating among the several competing names that fluctuate undecidably before us, each pretending to name what we are praying for. For we pray and weep for something that is coming, something I know not what, something nameless that in always slipping away also draws us in its train."

***

. . . . .

Obstacles.

"If you're going to believe in narrative, you'll have to believe in that kind of God."

What kind of God is that? One in which mediation by way of representation--a theory of signs--is not a source of anxiety or a reason for skepticism. The Brothers are always talking about reality as though it is not only possible but necessary to know it. They live in a world (remember that world?) in which "you" really is you and not always only you's abstraction, not (already ultimately) an it.

***

I can't write about Lacan with any seriousness. I don't understand Lacan, and what I think I do understand, I find terrifying. And I find tyrannical. For there is no way out of the dream and The Real is no place you'd want to be anyway, could you be there to see it. Maybe you like it that way--to be deluded into being part Master of your own dream, the part where you enter denial, and believe the dream is real enough to see yourself as you see yourself in it. I used to like it that way. But if you don't like it that way, you can't dump Lacan like a sack of crap once you've entered into his sensibility--you can't just decide he's wrong without knowing how and where he's wrong. I mean, maybe you can. But not and talk about "reality" as though it's real, and accessible, and maybe not tyrannical, which is a possibility I'm now trying to consider.

***

I don't mean easily accessible. I never said easy. But the idea that art is sufficient, is all there is available in reality, even between us, between you and me, has worn terribly thin.

***

from the Annunciation Notebook, notes from JL's "Philosophy of Living Being"

"The seduction of my intelligence is that there is something infinite about it. But in the exercise of my intelligence--to think of a reality--there has to be experience. I cannot think outside of my sensible experience. The sensible quality of table is a formal abstraction. I've never touched a man. Never seen a man.

The unique character of intelligence is that it operates on abstraction.

I move myself in the midst of this diversity, and at the same time my intelligence touches something that is more than body, that the body itself cannot explain. This induction respects profoundly the relationship between diversity and unity."

***

. . . .

Reading for significance, for an exegesis into the history of a word as though it sheds light on what the word does now--is not what etymology is for, and is superstitious as all get out, so why not: "-stition," from Indo-European root, "sta-," meaning "to stand," with derivative forms indicating "a place or a thing that is standing," and which evolve to include such standing "things" as dispositions, states of mind, circumstances of existence, and from which we get "steed," "stud," and "stallion," as well as "prostitute" and "destiny" and a whole world of things standing in between.

***

"Super-stition," then, translates to something like "over-standing," as opposed to, maybe, "understanding," in which it seems (suddenly to me) that comprehension, agreement, sympathy, understandings, occur through acts of submission, a standing under, maybe even a standing down. To stand over, meanwhile, might mean to dominate, to impose, to conquer. I used to think "standing over" suggested "to worship what you've put upon a pedestal," and probably that's just as right as anything else I've said here, given that to love something in that ideal kind of way is to love it for your own idea of it, and not for itself. The monks are always saying stuff like that: "the more your intelligence resembles reality, the closer you are to the truth." Which in any case goes to demonstrate here that the overabundance in the word, "super," is its over-active fantasy life, the place in which the dreamer prefers the stations of the dream.

***

from the Annunciation Notebook, notes from JL's "Philosophy of Living Being"

"The danger of living in interiority is to reject the body: in order to become a contemplative I must put aside my body, that is the temptation. A lack of realism. I who see, I who love, have a certain lucidity of the interior experience of myself: 'I think therefore I am'--a certain consciousness of his eye. His I. I exist. That discovery of that I is through my vital operations, body, which is receptivity. A receiving from reality."

***

. . .

"Superstition": slippery slippery territory. One person's belief's are another person's balk, and so to attempt to define it as a term in use is to step into that place where subjective utility ends and the sucking muck (of me) begins.

And I think this far removed from the heyday and crisis of agnosticism, the term is less commonly charged with its political one-sidedness--its 19th century pejorative intolerant prejudice against other people's religions--and is more often now cast into the inertia of obsessive compulsive disorders or an affection for the well-established, long-respected church of baseball.

So no need to agree with me. I freely admit I'm only interested in that aspect of superstition that serves my own purposes: where religion meets poetry and cannot look back.

***

David Hume, from "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," where (religious) enthusiasm is rooted in a "violent" psychological mania, and where superstition, on the flip side of the same coin, stems from anxiety and depression:

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 melancholy 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 its predominant inclination, finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits. As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, the methods taken to appease them are equally unaccountable, and consist in ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or in any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends to a blind and terrified credulity. Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of SUPERSTITION.

***