Philosophy/Religion – Page 28

June 22, 2006 by Dave Bonta

In the hallway of the ancestors

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

My seventh entry in the self-portrait marathon

My mother’s people gaze across at my father’s people in the narrow upstairs hallway of my parents’ house. It all seems amicable enough. Some were rich, some were poor, but most were somewhere in the middle. Both sides are dominated by people of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, with a little French Canadian and Irish thrown in. A discouragingly large number on both sides were teetotaling Methodists, but for all that, they don’t look any more sober than decorum required.

Aside from genealogists, most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about their ancestors. After all, we are descended from the disinherited and the violently dispossessed — or at the least, from people who believed in leaving the past behind. And we’re still that way, aren’t we? We think of our ancestors as forebears only, and believe them quite irretrievably dead and gone — perhaps to a better place from which they might occasionally cast a fond glance in our direction, but that’s all. They’re not expected to take an active interest in the affairs of their descendents, much less transmigrate back into the clan. Sometimes one of them might come back as a ghost, but that’s about it.

I think it’s important to remember how odd this belief about our ancestors makes us, how much of an exception to the general run of societies around the world. Combine that with our astonishing ignorance of history — even quite recent history — and I think it’s safe to say that we Americans are almost uniquely alienated from our roots. It goes along with our alienation from nature, I believe, and in some respects probably helps license the on-going commodification of what used to be thought of as Creation. In pre-modern Europe, the dead were buried in the churchyard at the center of the village, and had their day on the calendar (All Souls Day). Ancestor reverence formed a minor part of a complex system of traditional observances — including local saints’ days, rogations, feasts and fasts — which all together told people who they were and where they came from. Carnival rites linked bodily symbolism, both sacred and profane, with the cosmic drama of changing seasons and renewed fertility.

The Protestant Reformation did away with most of that, and the Industrial Revolution finished it off. The 19th-century bourgeois novel and 20th-century psychology invented the isolated, narrowly sexual and generally neurotic individual, and the Great Awakening and subsequent religious movements stressed a personal relationship with God or Jesus above all else. My Methodist ancestors seem, on the whole, content with this arrangement. They knew how to compose themselves for a photograph, wearing their Sunday best and meditating on eternity, or something else completely apart from daily life, for as long as it took the man with the box and the flash to capture their likenesses. They rest easy in their frames, smiling sardonically — if at all — at the thought that some lonely fool might someday long to re-enter those frozen moments.

May 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Becoming animal

chipmunk among Canada mayflower leaves

The other evening, my fifteen-month-old niece Elanor gave utterance to her first distinct, undeniable series of English words. They were animal sounds.

I had already gone down to my own house, worn out from a day of visiting, so what follows is based on my parents’ account. Elanor loves books – all books, even the ones without pictures – and as the adults talked, it seemed nothing out of the ordinary for her to sit on the couch with one of her favorite books on her lap, slowly turning the pages. It was a picture book for small children called Animal Sounds, which has foldout, cardboard pages, and for novelty’s sake, apparently, she was looking at it upside-down. Her grandpa was the first to notice that Elanor was imitating his pronunciations of the onomatopoeia in a low voice. “Ribbet! Ribbet!” she said as she looked at the upside-down frog. Then she turned the page to the lion cub. “GrrrrrrOWL!”

Dad signaled Mom and Steve to shut up and watch. It was no fluke. “Squawk! Squawk!” said the parrot. Another turn and unfolding of the complicated pages, and the baby elephant was clearly saying “Baroooo!”

tent caterpillars on a wild sweet cherry

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind.” And so it was. And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of each kind and all crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth.”

And God created the human in his image,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them.

(Robert Alter, trans.)

This is the notorious passage in Genesis leading up to God’s first commands: be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and conquer it, hold sway (radah). About this last verb, Alter notes that it is “not the normal Hebrew word for ‘rule’ […] and in most of the contexts in which it occurs it seems to suggest an absolute or even fierce exercise of mastery.”

Could we ask for a more explicit expression of the kind of anthropocentrism that has fueled our current environmental malaise? And yet the passage is not without redeeming qualities. Notice, for example, that wild animals and creepy-crawlies are given equal standing with livestock. This is consistent with other parts of the Bible, such as the 104th Psalm and the last chapters of Job, which explicitly recognize the claims of untrammeled nature. One can also see some irony in the account of humanity’s separate creation. While all other earthly inhabitants were brought into being through the utterance of spells – or prayers, if you like – the human is fashioned by reference to an image, as idols are made. This is brought home by the parallel Creation myth that begins a few verses later, in which God literally fashions the man out of clay, and simultaneously gives birth to the world’s first bad pun (“‘adam, ‘human,’ from the soil, ‘adamah,” as Alter puts it).

yellow mandarin

These thoughts were sparked by an entry in a new (to me) blog called everydayandeverynight.com, by Rabbi Shai Gluskin. According to Rabbi Gluskin’s post Shade Under Sun, the word tzelim, “image” or “idol,” derives from the word for shade or shadow, tzel.

We are idols made of flesh and bone, mere shadows of God. Certainly we shouldn’t be worshiped. Though not the real thing, we do share some of God’s qualities.

Taking refuge in the shade, safe from God’s blinding light we can look up and see the canopy illuminated. This illumination is akin to our inspiration.

We can, however, forget to look up. We may, like Adam, delude ourselves into thinking we can hide from God. The shadow then is no longer a protector from God’s blinding light, but a vice to run away [into].

I like the way Rabbi Gluskin grounds his interpretation in the arboreal imagery of spring. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, trees are explicitly recognized as a potential focus of idolatry, reflecting the historical competition of the Yahwist cult with the cult of the Asherim. In fact, in the second chapter of Genesis, the humans’ first openly idolatrous behavior is toward a tree.

a Baltimore oriole harvesting insects from young black walnut leaves

Let’s step back a few verses, though. In the first Creation account, as I mentioned, non-human animals are not shaped, but merely spoken into being. Given the primacy accorded to mindful prayer in Jewish tradition, wouldn’t this actually threaten to raise their ontological status above that of humans? Perhaps the original compilers of the Bible thought so, too, because in the second story, we see the order of (male) human and animal creation reversed – and this time, God fashions all creatures from the soil, and subcontracts out to Adam the job of giving them names.

But were these creatures, too, fashioned after pre-existing prototypes – are they “made in the image of God”? If God works the way a sculptor does, shouldn’t we expect him to project some element of his own identity into his work, like any artist?

gaywings, or fringed polygala

Of course, it would be absurd to accuse God Himself of idolatry. But he does seem to be actively encouraging Adam’s own tendencies in that direction, fashioning the animals one by one not only “to see what he would call it,” but also to see if any of them would appeal to him as a “sustainer.” When none seem to fit the bill, the female human is created while the male sleeps, almost like a sexual fantasy given flesh. The stage is set for idolatry, loss of innocence, fear and exile. Alter says,

The Hebrew ‘ezer kenegdo (King James Version “help meet”) is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means “alongside him,” “a counterpart to him.” “Help” is too weak because it suggests a merely auxiliary function, whereas ‘ezer elsewhere connotes active intervention on behalf of someone, especially in military contexts, as often in Psalms.

But the Psalms are directed toward God, are they not? Did the authors of this myth mean to suggest that in his yearning for a flesh-and-bone sustainer, Adam was already drawing away from God? His first recorded utterance is no psalm, but an impassioned poem to the woman – a naming-poem, a spell.

The language used for Eve’s creation, says Alter, is architectural rather than sculptural: the verb means “to build” rather than “to shape,” and “the Hebrew for ‘rib,’ tsela’, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.” (This imagery helps set the stage for the Tower of Babel story, perhaps. Or at least suggests that we should see the Tower as anthropomorphic, if not theomorphic.) The idolatrous impulse here is quickly realized with the entrance of the first non-human animal a few verses later. No sooner have we been told that the man and woman “become one flesh” and that “the two of them were naked … and they were not ashamed,” then the serpent appears to set them against each other. And the main descriptor used for the serpent, ‘arum, “cunning,” is a play on ‘arumim, “naked.”

Thus, guided by the active intervention of one of the animals Adam named, Eve “saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate.” The word translated as “lust” will appear often in the exhortations of the prophets, for whom lust and idolatry seem to have been closely linked.

blue-gray gnatcatcher on scarlet oak sapling

Eve’s first act is to look for her own ‘ezer kenegdo, it seems. Forget for a moment the millennia of moralistic and sexist interpretations based on the premise that the rightful place for righteous humans is back in some otherworldly version of that paradise. Forget the quintessentially priestly assumption that ignorance – unthinking obedience – is bliss. What the Genesis Creation stories really suggest is that rebellion is somehow intrinsic to created beings. A thing is no sooner named, fashioned, or dreamed up – a child is no sooner birthed – than it acquires its own personality, as every artist or parent knows. Self becomes Other, and Other then returns to open the eyes of the Self. The pivotal importance of the serpent in the Genesis story (the devil is nowhere in sight) almost bridges the gap between this and other tribal Creation myths, where animal tricksters also play central roles. By the time we get to Abraham and Sarah – let alone Jacob, Job and the Prophets – we find human beings capable of telling God a thing or two.

What could we possibly know that an omniscient God does not? Humility: the dawning recognition that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe. A sense of wonder. Without some measure of selflessness, is true empathy possible? The infant, godlike in her egotism, can hardly begin to imagine herself as another being; her squawks and chirps and cries are solely her own. Only with the growth of other-consciousness can she become capable of the imagination necessary for anthropomorphizing empathy. If – as eco-philosopher Paul Shepard asserted – it is the animals that made us human, could we not also say without any impiety that it is humans who taught a violent and amoral god how to be Good?

Photo from last year’s trip to the reptile zoo. See here and here.

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UPDATE: Steve tells me that Elanor had actually been saying “Woof, woof!” now and then for a month or so, and that the evening before her “reading” of the animal sounds book, she had added a second element to her vocabulary: “Tickle, tickle!” Make of that what you will.

April 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The way things are

It’s right there in front of you, that Shangri-La, that eternal spring.

I mean, how else would it keep finding its way into your camera? You click the shutter thinking that you’re taking a picture of one thing, and hours later when you look at the results, you see something more, like those double-exposed pictures that the Victorians tried to pass off as photographs of ghosts.

“I have a similar train of thought at peak of each season,” says the sylph, “a desire to stop the world for a geologic minute, a general sadness that it will pass.” Me too.

But the passage itself is so beautiful: that way-making, that semi-conscious inscription of memories in nerve-map and neural net, in slowly fraying muscle, in thinning bone. Heraclitus’ river, the one you can’t step into twice? Why not say that it is reborn each moment, like any stream or spring? The Indians of La Florida – the flowering land – didn’t lie when they told Ponce de Leon about a fountain of eternal youth. They couldn’t know that he would put a self-centered spin on it.

six-spotted tiger beetle

In my camera’s Shangri-La, green tigers stalk the numerous descendents of those wasps who long ago fell to earth and lost their wings. Birth alternates with death and joy with suffering, as in any divine comedy; only those for whom all distinction between individual and tribal existence is meaningless can escape death. And these immortals – too small to be glimpsed except through the finest optics – are running the show.

Welcome to planet Earth.

March 31, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

In praise of gray

When Natalie d’Arbeloff changed the design of Blaugustine this past October, I left the following comment in praise of her new backdrop color:

Gray – oops, I mean grey – is always my favorite sartorial choice, though of course it doesn’t look good on everyone. Here, it definitely works for me – or maybe I’m just happy to see such a color-drenched blog vindicate my belief that grey need not be synonymous with drab. One can choose greyness as a worthy destination in its own right, not simply as some compromise between the extremes of black and white – which are in reality never “pure,” but must always contain some slight admixture of grey if we are to perceive them as other than blinding light and blind absence of light. In a certain sense, we might even be justified in saying that it is grey that approaches “purity”: pure pigment, cosmic dust, the gray matter/mater from which all else emerges.

Natalie replied,

I wholly agree. It is a beautiful colour in its own right and sets off the primaries wondrously. A grey sky, for instance, makes other colours luminous. And there is an infinite variety of greys.

“I don’t know about wearing it, though,” she added. “You’ve got to be tall.” Like a beech tree?

Black and white are always relative; it’s contrast that delights the eye. Or so my experiments with photography have led me to suppose. The following picture of an old, weathered stump of a black locust tree is the only one here actually taken under a gray sky. I think it has a little of that luminosity Natalie mentions – though again, the contrast with the yellow and brown of the background seems to play some role in bringing that out.

As Pennsylvania’s numerous fieldstone barns and houses serve to remind us, gray works well in architecture. Paper wasps (as in the first photo above) might agree. I see more and more wooden houses painted various shades of gray, too, and have flirted seriously with the idea of painting my own house that color (it’s currently white, matching the other buildings on the farm).

One reason I chose my current blog template was the presence of this very light gray behind the main text column.* In books, too, bleached white rarely looks as elegant as a page with some color in it. To be gray, it seems, is to be sturdy and full of years. I think there might be something to that metaphysics of gray that I cooked up on the spot back in October, when gray November still loomed ahead, and white snows made luminous by gray skies.

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*Refers to my old site.

March 26, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Problems for a short course in divinity

Suppose you wanted to crucify a tree. Would you nail it to the ground?

Suppose you could undo some violent event of your choice. Could you recover the future as it had been before that break in time, so full of promise?

Suppose winter were all you knew. How would you explain the shape of a tree, the arrangements of its limbs, the gestures of its twigs? Would you ever assume such an outlandish thing as a leaf?

Suppose you’d been educated in the darkness, like a druid. How would you explain the effrontery of laurel, holding up its little, waxen effigies of shadow in broad daylight?

Suppose you could change position from one moment to the next, but you couldn’t change where you’d been. How would conversion be possible? If you left your past behind you, what’s to convert?

Suppose you planted each nail with the idea that it might set root…

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For more questions – and a few attempts at answers – remember to visit the Progressive Faith Blog Carnival, most recently at Blue Texas and Velveteen Rabbi.

March 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Deadhead

She shaved her head to get closer to God, she said,
prompted by a line in a song by a band called Nirvana.
Or maybe that wasn’t the reason, & she simply
thought of it afterwards, running her trembling hands
over all that smoothness. God. Congealed light.
Stones rounded to a shine by ceaseless contact,
saplings stripped of their bark, that arresting blank
that fashion models cultivate in their stare.
White, white, sing a song of skeletons that dance.
She had followed the Dead for five years, she said,
& every concert was different & amazing. It was a lesson
in how to be natural, how to just be there. God
speaks through our impulses. If I get pregnant
or get AIDS, she said, it was meant to be.
She read omens in the flight of birds or the fall of a leaf.
This morning I saw a tree’s shadow lying on the lawn,
perfectly still, & thought about her
for the first time in years. What does it mean,
this absence remembered in the sun’s angular wake?
Is she still alive? Is she being looked after by men
in white coats? It ought to be possible to tell,
I think, suddenly superstitious. I scan the sky
over the ridge. A vulture can follow a rumor
for hundreds of miles without flapping its wings,
as close to God as any appalling truth.

March 19, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Radiation

In revisiting a too-brief response to a comment from Maria about light (in reaction to Friday’s post on angels), I thought of radiation: a broader and more ambiguous concept than light. It came into my head because I had just been reading the headline story about new discoveries based on studies of cosmic background microwave radiation. After editing my comment, I remembered Sandra McPherson’s second book of poems, Radiation (Echo Press, 1972), and got it off the shelf. It begins with the following epigraph (translated by McPherson, I imagine, since no credit is given in the Acknowledgements). I hadn’t read this in at least five years, and was startled to see an idea I had thought to be my own (“we are what exceeds us,” e.g.) given such complete and eloquent expression. I don’t know the exact provenance of it, but as the online quote sites demonstrate, Paul Valéry was a brilliant epigrammatic thinker.

The color of a thing is that one which, out of all the colors, it repels and cannot assimilate. High heaven refuses blue, returning azure to the retina. All summer long the leaves hold in the red. Charcoal gobbles all.

To our senses things offer only their rejections. We know them by their refuse. Perfume is what the flowers throw away.

Perhaps we only know other people by what they eliminate, by what their substance will not accept. If you are good, it is because you retain your evil. If you blaze, hurling off sparkles and lightnings, your sorrow, gloom and stupidity keep house within you. They are more you, more yours, than your brilliance. Your genius is everything you are not. Your best deeds are foreign to you.

– Paul Valéry

March 16, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Magic 101

Do you believe in God? A lot of people consider this a meaningful question.

But how you choose to answer it, I’m thinking, tells me much less about your general worldview than your response to another, more basic question: Do you believe in magic?

I do.

Oh, not the Gandalf and Harry Potter kind where you wave a wand or utter a spell and achieve measurable, verifiable results. If that kind of magic could be shown to exist, it would become indistinguishable from any other science-based technology – and thus it would become boring. To me, at least. In any case, it would forfeit all claims to magic. Magic must be mysterious, or it’s nothing.

The kind of magic I believe in is, I suppose, virtually indistinguishable from so-called ordinary life on a good day. It’s the way things appear if they can be seen without some of the myriad barriers, veils and filters we use to project the illusion of a separate self. It’s the way things look under the influence of a bit of cannabis or a stretch of meditation: wonderfully strange, a little eldritch, perhaps, but beautiful in their profusion of possible meanings, their lack of clear boundaries.

Things that can’t be spoken of without in some way diminishing them would all be examples of what I’m calling magic. You know what I’m talking about.

I like to maintain that there are two basic kinds of thinking necessary to sane and healthy living: analytical thinking and magical thinking. The first is reductive, and partakes of the logic of discrimination, based on what Aristotle called the Law of the Excluded Middle: x can’t be both x and not-x. The second is dialogic and intersubjective, and involves one in a logic of participation.

One way of thinking doesn’t need to be wrong in order for the other way to be right, though seeing any given problem or phenomenon both ways at once will likely give rise to paradox, due to the inherent limitations of language. The urge to persist in creating symbolic representations uniting the two has given rise to myths and rituals, through which – as Levi-Strauss once noted – one tries to grasp the world as a synchronic totality. Thus, for someone with a religious mindset, like me, magical thinking ultimately prevails.

But I think it’s important to remember that minds come in many different varieties; a fundamentally analytic worldview can just as easily lead one to perceive beauty, order, and goodness. At root, the distinction between magical and analytical thinking may be an artificial one – who knows? I suspect that each may be the best antidote to too much of the other. To be human is to inhabit that paradox so succinctly voiced in the opening chapter of the Daodejing: “Free of desires, one observes secrets; having desires, one observes boundaries.

“These two are ultimately the same,” Laozi proclaimed. See what I mean?

Or is that just so much mumbo-jumbo?

March 7, 2006 by Dave Bonta

What is the via negativa?

R. S. Thomas knew.

VIA NEGATIVAWhy no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Found via Janus at the door. R. S. Thomas was the preeminent Welsh poet of the second half of the 20th century. He was an Anglican clergyman, an ardent Welsh nationalist and a conservationist. A discussion of the apophatic dimension of his work may be found here.

March 6, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The love that dare not speak

Brokeback Mountain‘s financial and critical success may well mark some sort of societal progress toward greater tolerance for sexual nonconformists. But does it really represent progress in our understanding of what true love might consist of – or does it simply reinforce widespread, materialistic views? I have yet to see the movie – and being a contrary sort, the more I hear how important it is, the more resistant I become. But I must admit I’m curious about whether it offers any real challenge to the popular dogmas about love, i.e.:

1. Love is a feeling of strong attraction toward someone or something.

2. The quintessential expression of love is in romance, which derives from the desire for sexual union between two individuals.

3. Sex is a pleasurable form of self-indulgence whereby we seek gratification through mutual possession. Unless directed toward procreation or sublimated in romance, it tends to become anti-social and/or debased.

4. The highest form of love involves self-sacrifice.

It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear that, though my opinions about non-standard expressions of sexuality are thoroughly mainstream,* I’m an arch traditionalist on the subject of love itself. Which is to say, I cling to what had been more or less the consensus view in the pre-modern period, at least among mystics, believing that:

1. Love is the practice of uncalculating generosity, thoughtfulness, and respect for the integrity of others.

2. The quintessential expression of love is in the friendship of equals, and derives from the impulse to learn, to give, and to share.

3. Sex in the context of love can be a joyful form of self-transcendence in which bodies are continually re-discovered and re-created.

4. The highest form of love involves immersion in timeless, selfless Presence.**

Once upon a time in America, homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name.” If those days are finally coming to an end, I’m glad. I don’t believe that sex and spirituality are as antithetical as many traditional religious teachers assume; I’m cynical enough to suspect that the main reason for organized religion’s hostility toward sex is the desire of religious authorities to maintain a monopoly on self-transcending experiences. (How else to explain blanket prohibitions against alcohol and drugs?) But I worry that an excessive focus on sex, whether by religious people or by secular humanists, simply reinforces reductionist views about love and sex, and plays into the hands of those who seek to profit through the trade in bodies. We must beware the advertiser’s shell game: Are you lonely and insecure? You need more/better sex! And here’s a short cut. Buy this product.

In place of the pre-modern mysteries of soul, spirit and original sin, we are now taught to believe in such abstractions as personality, intelligence and sexuality. I’m not sure this represents a step forward. In either case, we are made to feel helpless without the intercession of experts. To my way of thinking, “soul” and “sexuality” are equally vapid concepts, the only difference being that “sexuality” is even less poetic. The ideologues of the market are all too happy to have everyone buy into the idea of self as bundle of desires. You are what you want. If you’re not in tune with your sexuality, you must be unhappy and repressed.

Well, fuck that! I’m less interested in the love that dare not speak its name than the love that dare not speak at all. True communion is always wordless, is it not? Past a certain point, language becomes not merely extraneous, but downright obscene.
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*I.e. that homosexual behavior is natural for those with that orientation; that pedophilia is as inexcusable as rape; and that bondage/discipline and sadomasochism, while acceptable between consenting adults, is awfully silly and somewhat repellant in its celebration of power and humiliation.

**It may be unclear from the way I set this up that I don’t intend the two definitions of love presented here to be mutually exclusive. Obviously, the fact that we have one word to encompass so many different things can both help and hinder clear thinking. It can help to remember that what the Greek Bible calls agape and caritas are not as separate from eros as we like to imagine, and that eros in turn may often be difficult to disentangle from caritas, etc. It reminds us to keep the passion in compassion, so to speak. But obviously this multiplicity of meanings leads to confusion if we forget to distinguish between them, and allow the eros component to overwhelm the others.