Philosophy/Religion – Page 37

July 20, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The bell tower in the blonde

You’ve heard of the blonde in the tower – think Rapunzel. This is a story about the bell tower in the blonde.

[A]n oversized portrait of German model Claudia Schiffer, promoting lipstick and shampoo from the French cosmetics company L’Oréal, wrapped the scaffolding around the 167-ft. bell tower of Germany’s best-known church.

Left intentionally in ruins after World War II, Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands as a testimony against war and destruction. But in 1999, cracks appeared in the bell tower of a modern church built next to the ruins. The church was on the brink of bankruptcy – so when an advertising firm offered to rent the scaffolding around the tower for the L’Oréal poster, pastor Sylvia von Kekulé agreed. Six months of the Schiffer poster financed the $298,000 bell tower restoration.

Curiously, this commercial expropriation of sacred space was necessary despite the federal government’s support of religion. And it’s becoming a trend.

Throughout Germany, churches are renting their facades for commercial messages. Supporters hail the development as an ingenious fundraising tactic. But critics argue the move dilutes the sacredness of churches.

I’m not sure “dilute” would be the word I’d use. Rather, some more fundamental paradigm shift seems to be at work here. For a parallel, I think we need look no farther than France where, five years ago, another supermodel was chosen as the new, semi-divine symbol of her country.

Laetitia Casta, of Victoria’s Secret and Guess Jeans (1994) fame, was named the symbolic representation of France’s Republic in the 21st century in a vote of the country’s more than 35,000 mayors in October 1999.

The French model became the first official Marianne, an embodiment of liberty, equality, and fraternity and other values of the Republic. The image of Marianne is everywhere in France, in patriotic artwork, and on all official documents.

The representation of Marianne most famous in other countries is that of the bare-breasted woman brandishing a flag and a bayonet in Eugene Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.”

Originally, the emphasis was on this mythical figure’s virgin peasant girl status – a Joan of Arc leading her people to victory. But attention gradually shifted to her breasts, and the people hungered after a goddess of more earthly powers.

“The Republic prefers an opulent, more maternal breast, with its promise of generosity and abundance,” explains writer/historian Maurice Agulhon, who adds that a pair of identically sized and shaped breasts are “an additional symbol of the egalitarian spirit.”

But can a living person really function as a symbol? From an anthropological perspective, I think it would be more accurate to view Casta in part as a sacred power object: an icon, fetish, or idol. At one level, her image does have deep symbolic value, satisfying Victor Turner’s definition of a symbol, in which “norms and values . . . become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values” (The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Cornell U.P., 1967). But at another level, Casta conveys an undeniable power to her devotees: the power of limited self-transcendence through masturbation.

This may seem like a trivialization of religion, and I suppose it is. But the worship of the human body is nothing new, unfamiliar as it may seem to those with mainstream Christian or Jewish backgrounds. Body and icon can become almost interchangeable in many traditions – including in Christianity, where, at least since St. Francis, mystics male and female have attempted to realize the imitatio Christi within their own bodies, through the reception of the stigmata and other miraculous transformations.

Body can become icon, but icon can also become a supramundane body, an axis mundi, a habitation for the divine. I think that’s what’s happening, in a very rudimentary way, with the bell tower in the blonde. Imagine the parishioners being called to service through the tolling of bells appearing to emanate from the throat or chest of an idealized female image, provocatively cloaking a structure with at least subconscious phallic associations. At this moment, the icon transcends its role as symbol and focus of desire – transcends desire itself, perhaps. As the psycholinguist Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy, Routledge, 1982) reminds us, sound possesses temporality and conveys power beyond what any image can achieve.

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. . . . By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense.

Since the practice of religion is largely a communal affair, the production of organized sound is invaluable for its harmonizing and unifying effects. Gods do not write letters; they speak. And what Ong calls the interiority of sound suggests another characteristic of divinity: the ability to animate the inanimate and to inhabit the already living. In the sacred dramas that are at the center of so many religious services and festivals, human beings may lend their bodies to the gods to communicate power or messages to their worshippers. The human beings so inhabited may also then receive a form of homage bordering on worship, no less than more permanent images made from stone or wood.

Music without words can be an especially potent catalyst of polysemic meanings. The divinely animated female icon beside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church mediated material/commercial and social/national messages. War and sex, peace and commerce were merged into a greater, synergistic whole.

The run-away popularity of the novel The Da Vinci Code, baseless as its claims to historical authenticity may be, suggests that contemporary, post-Christian Europeans and Euro-Americans may be ready for an even more radical return to pagan roots. The public celebration of a hieros gamos or sacred wedding was once a widespread annual event, considered essential to the earth’s continuing fertility and hospitality. Today, with anxieties about global change phenomena reaching an all-time high, especially in Europe, a reinvention of this ritual could go a long way toward calming public anxieties. Modern mass media could turn a sacred wedding into a cathartic and transformative event for millions.

One could well argue that the very public wedding ceremony of Prince Charles and Lady Diana did serve this function. However, traditional, nationalistic themes still shaped the ideological framework. A new, more unified Europe could benefit from a sacred wedding celebration with international, even cosmic connotations within a framework of planetary healing and reconciliation. For example, Laetitia Casta as the avatar of France could unite with a male – or possibly even female – hypostasis of Germany. The very thought fills me with a strange tingly sensation akin to awe.

July 18, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Thunder bear

The other night, toward dusk, I heard heavy footsteps coming down the walk toward my front door, and looked up from my computer just in time to see a black bear peering in.

I say “peering in,” but that’s not really accurate. What it did was, it kind of sidled up to the door and pressed its large and expressive nose against the screen for a few seconds, without looking directly in. No doubt if it had looked in, it would’ve had a hard time making sense of the jumble of right angled, brightly colored objects.

It wasn’t a large bear, just a yearling, and it didn’t stick around to visit. It was probably the same animal whose blueberry-filled scat I had discovered on the driveway that morning.

There isn’t much to say about such an encounter, really. But I was reminded of it this morning when I was awoken by a single, loud clap of thunder around 2:00. As I drifted back to sleep, I remember thinking something along the lines of, One side sings continual hosannas, the other side recites cautionary tales in a deadening drone.

What I think I meant was, every act is unique and unrepeatable – or so it seems to the angels. Against the angels I picture not devils but pedants, functionaries and technicians reminding us that the sun also riseth and vanity of vanities. But I may also have had some more private idea in mind.

I like the way black bears always seem to be grinning.

July 12, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Beauty and the beast

Graceful living in itself is a noble art: slovenly and neglectful of such things as I tend to be, I am full of admiration for those who can consistently convert the spaces where they live and work into places where the mind is engaged and delighted at every turn. I think of the descriptions I have read of Neruda’s house on Isla Negra, full of charismatic objects from a lifetime of collecting, the rafters covered with inscriptions from his many visitors. Somewhere he had acquired a taxidermist’s mount of an entire horse, and he set it right in the middle of the largest room – an example of flagrantly bad taste that never failed to appall visitors from Venezuela, he said in his memoirs. But given their national obsession with so-called beauty contests, I can’t help wondering: what the hell do Venezuelans know about beauty?

“I want a city of my own,” my friend L. said yesterday. She had been dreaming of a large barn that she could clean up and convert into an artist’s workshop. The point, as I understand it, is not to aspire to some sort of static perfection a la Martha Stewart, but to discover or create a space where one’s mood might shift with the movement of light across the walls and floor, a place hospitable to the mind’s eye. To have all the tools one needs, and nothing between one’s impulse to design and build and its realization. To move alone through such a space – and thereby, perhaps, to conquer loneliness?

. . . oh rosa seperada
del tronco del rosal despedazado
que la profundidad convertió en archipiélago,
oh estralla natural, diadema verde,
sola en tu solitaria dinastía . . .
(Pablo Neruda, La Rosa Seperada)

A city of my own: I think first of William Carlos Williams’ masterpiece Paterson, in which the river, the waterfall and the city of Paterson, New Jersey are merged into one, anthropomorphic being – the poet’s alter ego. But I had been thinking of Paterson anyway, as I hiked quickly through the ravines at Rickett’s Glen yesterday, a spot famous for its 22 spectacular waterfalls among the towering hemlocks and pines of an old-growth forest. For all his repetition of the maxim “No ideas but in things,” in all of the 250-odd pages of Paterson, does Williams ever once manage to convey any concrete impression of what the falls look, sound, smell and taste like? Do they ever rise above the level of self-consciously created myth and modernist symbol? Like the unicorn in the medieval tapestry that the poet invokes toward the end of the book, the Paterson Falls seem more of an object we are meant to admire than any real presence that might engage our senses. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti noted in a recent interview, shouldn’t we really be saying “No ideas but in beings“?

The sun
winding the yellow bindweed about a
bush; worms and gnats, life under a stone.
The pitiful snake with its mosaic skin
and frantic tongue. The horse, the bull
the whole din of fracturing thought
as it falls tinnily to nothing upon the streets
and the absurd dignity of a locomotive
hauling freight —
(William Carlos Williams, Paterson)

A city of one’s own: the parallel with the title of Virginia Woolf’s famous book got me thinking about the extent to which women might be able to achieve this quintessential male fantasy of the private workshop – the garage, basement or barn converted into just such a sanctum as my friend dreams about. Aside from artists, I wonder how many women do harbor dreams of this sort? For my mother, the woods and meadows of the square mile of mountaintop land she owns jointly with my father seem to be domain enough. Her 33-year engagement with this land has been both passionate and creative, yielding a stream of essays, articles and books. She frequently laments the absence of any interest in Nature among other women her age (mid 60s); most of her friends are younger.

A wind blew, from what quarter I knew not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so there was a flash of silver-gray in the air. It was the time between the lights when the colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in windowpanes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
(Virginia Woolf, a Room of One’s Own)

If the behavior of small children is any guide, curiosity toward the natural world is inborn. So I can only suppose that women’s feeling of alienation from Nature is a result of internalized social norms and values, such as the perception of the outside as dirty, messy and – above all, perhaps – dangerous. But might the success of this conditioning derive in part from the very impulse to feel at home in the world? Given proper knowledge and appreciation of the natural world, there’s no reason why girls as well as boys can’t grow up with a finely honed appreciation of that which resists our attempts to neaten up and exert control.

. . . Had I lived in rural England before the nineteenth century, I might have gone out on St. John’s Eve (June 24) in search of fern seed, especially those of bracken. I would also have carried along twelve pewter plates. Under the first bracken I could find, I would have stacked the twelve plates and waited until midnight. At that time, it was believed, the invisible fern seeds would pass through the first eleven plates and land on the twelfth.

The twelfth plate’s seeds would confer magical powers on me. I, too, would be invisible. Even better, I would understand the language of wild animals.
(Marcia Bonta, Appalachian Summer)

I began by talking about “graceful living”: to me, this implies above all a sense of balance and harmony. Artists and naturalists alike can teach us how to recognize the grace that already suffuses the world without our intervention. Between the garden and the wilderness, it seems to me, we need not erect a barrier as stark as the ring of fencing that encloses the unicorn in the tapestry. But if we value our sanity, we must resist the impulse to civilize and manage every square inch of the back forty. Here’s a poem by Wendell Berry that frames the challenge as succinctly and eloquently as anything I’ve ever read.

To the Unseeable Animal

My daughter: “I hope there’s an animal
somewhere that nobody has ever seen.
And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have walked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do no know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

(Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook)

__________

I see from Google that at least one individual claims that the aforementioned Rickett’s Glen harbors just such an unseen animal: the Rickett’s Glen Sasquatch.

July 9, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Back to the basics

I’ll be gone all weekend, so here’s a bonus post for today.

I’m reading Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung, by Richard Katz (Harvard University Press, 1982). This is a groundbreaking study of the central ritual of the Kung, one of the click language-speaking San peoples of Southern Africa (formerly known by the derogatory name “Bushmen”). They have attracted a great deal of anthropological attention due to their uniquely egalitarian social structures and (up until two or three decades ago) their sole dependence on gathering and hunting for survival. While we should be wary of romanticizing the Kung, as representatives of a way of life that was universal for Homo sapiens for 95 percent of its existence, and as inhabitants of the African savanna – the cradle of human evolution – they may have a great deal to tell us about human nature.

Such, at any rate, was the author’s assumption when he traveled to the Kalahari desert of remote northwestern Botswana in 1968. Though he spent only three months among the Kung as a participant-observer, he brought the training of a PhD in clinical psychology to bear, and he benefited from the insights of other team members in the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, especially Richard Lee (who also served as his interpreter) and Megan Bielsele. Rather than write the book immediately upon his return, Katz says, he decided to let the lessons percolate for over a decade. This also gave him the opportunity to absorb many of the other findings that came out of the Harvard team’s ten-year-long research effort.

Although I’m less than halfway through the book, I am very excited to find many of my own, pet theories about human nature seemingly validated. For example, long-time readers of Via Negativa might remember my holding forth on more than one occasion about the centrality of healing to religious experience. I’ve also been looking for ways to relate such experience with communal dancing and consciousness-altering festivals, which only in the last couple of millennia have been seen as profane activities. Katz writes,

For the Kung, healing is more than curing, more than the application of medicine. Healing seeks to establish health and growth on physical, psychological, social, and spiritual levels; it involves work on the individual, the group, and the surrounding environment and cosmos. Healing pervades Kung culture, as a fundamental integrating and enhancing force. The culture’s emphasis on sharing and egalitarianism, its vital life of the spirit and strong community, are expressed in and supported by the healing tradition. The central tradition is the all-night healing dance.

Four times a month on the average, night signals the start of the healing dance. The women sit around the fire, singing and rhythmically clapping. The men, sometimes joined by women, dance around the singers. As the dance intensifies, num or spiritual energy is activated by the healers, both men and women, but mostly among the dancing men. As num is activated in them, they begin to kia or experience an enhancement of their consciousness. While experiencing kia, they heal all those at the dance. Before the sun rises the next morning, the dance usually ends. Those at the dance find it exciting, joyful, powerful. “Being at a dance makes our hearts happy,” the Kung say.

Pace Mircea Eliade, the Kung have no concept of a domain of the sacred separate from the profane. “Like hunting, gathering or socializing, dancing is another thing they do,” Katz says. Crude jokes are common even when healers are deep in kia. “The earthiness of the Kung’s jokes is very much a part of their contact with the supernatural.”

The Kung do not conceive of a division between matter and spirit. God is a real person, and god’s home a real place. Both are described in detail as precise and intimate as in a Buddhist Pure Land visualization sutra.

The concrete reality of healing is acknowledged simply and repeatedly by the healers. Wa Na talks about the healers who used to travel at night in the form of lions of god; they were real lions, different from normal lions, but no less real. . . . Num really does exist. It actually boils, and it is painful. For the Kung, there is no philosophical distinction: experiences of healing are simply one other event, concrete and real, in their everyday lives. . . .

The reality of the unseen is captured in the phenomenon of num “killing” the healer, or of the healer “dying” in kia. I often hear: “You want num? Don’t you know it is painful and can kill you?” I learn what those who become healers must know. To “kill” is not simply a metaphor, a statement about the overpowering strength of num, a warning about the difficulty of getting it, a test of one’s desire to heal it. Although the Kung distinguish between final death, when the soul permanently leaves the body, and the death of kia, when the soul goes out but then hopefully returns, there is only one experience of death, and the experience is what matters.

Kau Dwa is teaching me that lesson as I struggle to maintain my Western notions of reality. “Kau Dwa,” I ask, “you have told me that in kia you must die. Does that mean really die?”

“Yes.”

“I mean really die.”

“Yes.”

“You mean like when you are buried beneath the ground?” I am struggling with my words.

“Yes,” replies Kau Dwa with enthusiasm. “Yes, just like that!”

“They are the same?”

“Yes, the same. It is death I speak of,” he affirms.

“No difference?” I almost plead.

“It is death,” he responds firmly but softly.

“The death where you never come back?” I am nearly at the end of my logical rope.

“Yes,” he says simply. “It is that bad. It is the death that kills us all.”

“But the healers get up, and a dead person doesn’t.” My statement trails off into a question.

“That is true,” Kau Dwa replies quietly, with a smile, “healers may come alive again.”

Death happens when the gods and spirits take a person into their own country. Thus, even though the Kung are famously peaceful in their relations with other people, their relationships with divinity are often quite agonistic.

An experienced healer can see the spirits hovering around the edge of a dance; they remain invisible to all others. After diagnosing the cause of an illness, healers may plead with the spirits to make the illness go away. . . .

Though the lesser god and the spirits may inhabit the darkness outside the dance because they enjoy watching the dance, the ever-present danger is that they will also bring sickness and death. The healer’s job is to drive them away, thereby preventing sickness from striking anyone. Usually the healers’ friendly overtures to the gods or spirits become more assertive. “Get out of here. You are a bad thing.” “Go chase yourself. You will not take this child. I will beat you.” Often healers yell out insulting or profane phrases to the gods and spirits. They scream at them, calling them “Big penis,” or “Elephant-penis,” or “You will shit,” or “Filthy face,” meaning a face covered with excrement. The healer often becomes aggressive, even violent, toward the gods, gesturing menacingly and hurling sticks into the darkness to drive away the spirits.

Katz rigorously avoids cross-cultural comparisons. For right now, I’ll follow his example, except to point out that the “gods” mentioned here are really only two, a greater and lesser divinity who seem to have a similar relationship as that between God and the Satan in the book of Job. As in many mythologies of indigenous peoples, the great god is more of a “straight man” and the lesser god is a trickster. They share the same name – a not uncommon situation in Kung society, where

The namesake relationship is . . . the most open, informal, and free relationship available in the society. This relationship between the lesser and greater gods allows for a full and varied set of interactions between them, including trickery and laughter as well as deference and obedience.

June 30, 2004September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Ring of fire

There’s been some very impressive blogging on the subject of desire recently, beginning with Coffee Sutras (also here) and continuing with Vajrayana Practice, Lekshe’s Mistake and A Line Cast, A Hope Followed. Each of these posts is a gem. I especially admire those who are willing to bare so much, to let themselves be seen as “human, all too human.”

In many ways, the question of what to do with desire is one of the central concerns of all religions. In Buddhism, with the presumption of reincarnation, overcoming desire becomes linked to the escape from otherwise endless suffering. In modern world religions in general, the salvation of the individual usually assumes a central importance, despite the lip service given to charity or compassion. Neither of these scenarios has much attraction for me, I’m afraid. To me, the quest for human perfection would be better sought through more pragmatic ends – caring for each other, building community, defending political freedoms, and the like. That is to say, through love . . . which can never, and should never, in my opinion, be divorced from desire.

Does saying so make me a Christian? I don’t know. I do know that that portion of the Bible held sacred by both Jews and Christians speaks to me as few other works of world literature ever have. (There are a few others.) Here is the climax of the great poem known as the Song of Songs (8:5-7):

Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

Marvin H. Pope’s 743-page translation and elucidation of the Song of Songs for the Anchor Bible series takes advantage of modern discoveries such as the Septuagint (the ancient translation of the Bible into classical Greek) and tablets from the 12th century BCE pagan Hebrew city-state of Ugarit. He renders the same passage as follows, with dashes to denote an elision in the text, and brackets indicating a poetically discordant later interpolation:

Who is this ascending from the steppe,
Leaning on her lover?
Under the apple tree I aroused you;
There your mother conceived you,
There she who bore you conceived.
Set me as a signet on your heart,
As a signet on your arm.
For Love is strong as Death,
Passion fierce as Hell.
Its darts are darts of fire,
Its flames — — —
Mighty waters cannot quench Love,
No torrents can sweep it away.
[If a man gave all the wealth of
his house for love, would he be despised?]

Pope tends strongly toward the reductionist, source-critical view that the Song of Songs is simply a pagan hymn for the annual “sacred marriage” fertility rite. I’m not sure it’s so simple; this interpretation requires us to assume that the compilers of the Tanakh were utter dolts, which I doubt. The Song’s inclusion in a fiercely Yahwist collection of texts suggests that the impulse to spiritualize erotic love carried over from pagan into orthodox Hebrew practice at an early date. (To this day, Hasidic couples attempt to “elevate” the sexual act through sacred love-making on the Sabbath. As I understand it – not well at all! – something akin to tantra, i.e. sacred role-playing, is involved. See here ).

Pope does agree with the Apostle Paul and many other traditional commentators that the line “For Love is stronger than Death” provides a sort of key to the entire poem. It seems that people in the ancient Near East used to celebrate funerals with orgiastic feasts, and ancient depictions of sacred marriage rites frequently depict a dog under the bed, chewing on a piece of carrion. So erotic love has been seen as a way of defying the power of death since very ancient times.

The problem with poems, from a scholarly point of view, is that if they’re any good they possess multiple layers of meaning from the outset. It is quite easy for me to imagine a devout Yahwist composing the Song of Songs, taking lines and verses wholesale from the folk tradition as would be normal for quasi-oral composition, and improvising passages that played skillfully and daringly with what must have been simply the dominant metaphorical language for love in the ancient world. What appears as a mishmash from different sources is in reality no more chaotic than, say, a good extemporaneous blues song, or a medieval Japanese renga (linked verse) composition. The shifting perspectives and alternating voices in the Song of Songs wouldn’t seem out of place in either genre.

More than that, the polyvocalic and montage effects may have been intended to suggest something about the realm and personality of the sacred itself. If God is not alluded to anywhere in the poem, that may have reflected in part a conscious intention to show what the godhead was not. Here, by way of contrast, is Pope’s translation of an Ugaritic text describing the behavior of El, the father of the gods, at a banquet:

El offered game in his house,
Venison in the midst of his palace.
He invited the gods to mess.
The gods ate and drank,
Drank wine till sated,
Must till inebriated. . . .
[El] drank wine till sated,
Must till inebriated. . . .
He floundered in his excrement and urine.
El collapsed, El like those who descend into Earth.

This is the kind of grossly physical, licentious deity that their neighbors worshipped – and that the Yahweh-worshippers rejected with fanatic zeal. The single most essential fact about this Yahweh was that s/he was above and beyond all priestly or mimetic control. We can continue to use old names (El, Elohim, El Shaddai) interchangeably with the new, because after all, as God reminded Moses at the burning bush, all names are suspect and provisional anyway. “I will be whoever I will be.” Any attempt to conceptualize Deity therefore represented a transgression against the very laws of Creation. The first of the canonical Ten Commandments forbids idolatry.

“Idolatry makes love impossible,” observes the gifted poet and Christian memoirist Kathleen Norris (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith). The commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself occur in close conjunction with the fairly arbitrary list of Ten, and many rabbinical commentators in fact gave them precedence. But however ordered, it’s clear that, as Norris suggests, statements about true and false forms of love lie right at the heart of Biblical religion.

All of these loves are interrelated: self-love is nothing if it doesn’t include the love of our neighbor, and of the God who created us all in the divine image. A measure of balance in these objects of our devotion is a safeguard against idolatry, which can give any of the three too much weight. We can love ourselves too much, but we can also love others to a possessive excess. And even religious devotion . . . can become an idol. We can become so focused on our love of God that we demean other people in the process.

In a way, it’s unfortunate that this observation, which would be fairly commonplace for anyone versed in Rabbinical Judaism, seems so revelatory in the context of the Christian tradition. I believe that the intense focus on hierarchy in the churches descended from the Roman Empire, as well as on thinking the right thoughts, conspired to make love compulsive, and thus impossible. I don’t think that the extreme mind-body duality of the ancient world would ever have had such a tenacious hold over the Western imagination were it not for this insistence on hierarchy, this idolatrous clinging to a violent and intolerant Lord not so different from the Ugaritic El – or dozens of other Near Eastern divine and semi-divine potentates.

Nor has this prejudice died with the “death of God.” Though it’s dangerous to generalize, one thing I find most objectionable about New Age thinking is the perpetuation of the mind/body or spirit/body split, in which the spirit is always “higher,” and human beings must “evolve” to a “higher plane” or “higher consciousness.” Sometimes one may hear about depth instead of height, but this inversion still presumes a rejection of the material/physical realm in favor of something else. Sometimes, too, this “something else” is described in quite materialistic terms – some form of “energy” or “aura” – that may be ultimately accessible to the instruments of modern science. How exactly then do matter and spirit differ?

Shorn of centuries of interpretation influenced by Roman intolerance, Persian dualism, Hellenistic misogyny and Egyptian neo-Platonism, and freed from the idolatrous and nonsensical notion of biblical inerrancy, the unique and beautiful anthology called the Hebrew Bible bears eloquent testimony to the struggle of human consciousness to escape its own extinction. This may not be immediately apparent. Apart from the youngest prophetic books, concerns about the personal immortality of the individual may be read into the texts that make up the Old Testament only with great difficulty. The primary concern of a great deal of the myth and history is with the survival of the corporate personality Israel, at once a man and a people. Jacob/Israel is not the first, the best, or the highest – he is, like his father, the second son, and he is surrounded and somewhat dominated by powerful women. In myth and in history, Israel remains locked in an agonistic embrace with a divinity whose own personality verges on the corporate, with various forms of separated entities deputized to assume a material form on behalf of the ineffable YHVH.

If the Hebrew Bible largely ignores the (to us) more familiar kind of immortality, that’s not because the desire to transcend the self wasn’t recognized. It’s simply because such immortality is really proper only to YHWH and (perhaps!) His chosen people. To aspire toward indefinite continuation on one’s own, as an incorporeal spirit, could only have been seen as an act of supreme blasphemy and self-idolatry.* Even Job, the great rebel, does not go that far. The worst he can do – and his wife urges him to it – would be to “curse God and die.” But he will die in any case, he knows that. His anger at God stems from the inexplicable and seemingly unjust termination of his descendents – and hence the erasure of his name – and only secondarily his own physical suffering.

The book of Job strikes at the heart of idolatry in more ways than one. William Blake was one of the few commentators to understand that the book may have intended a subtle attack on that form of idolatry mentioned by Norris, substituting solemn faces and patriarchal concerns about the survival of one’s “seed” for the joyous abandon proper to true worship. In Blake’s first engraving for the Book of Job, a patriarchal deity surrounded by seraphim has its counterpart below in the figure of Job, surrounded by his children, who hold books and scrolls on their laps. A dog sleeps under the table. By contrast, the final plate depicts a completely non-hierarchical universe, with the moon and sun to the left and right and the family of Job ranged in between, with lutes, harps, flutes and horns in their hands, jamming for all they’re worth. Job’s left hand is upraised like a conductor’s as his right hand plucks the harp strings. Sheep and sheepdog sleep peacefully in the foreground.

This may seem like a flight of fancy with little scriptural basis. But it’s telling that the one example we are given to illustrate how Job’s “latter end was blessed more than his beginning” is that, alone among his new descendents, his daughters are singled out for special attention (42:13-15):

He had also seven sons and three daughters.
And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Kerenhappuch.
And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.

Some kind of levelling clearly seems to be at issue here.

In the worldview of the Old Testament, love of God, love of self, and love of neighbor (which includes not merely one’s own tribe, but widows, orphans, even the naturalized alien) are indeed intertwined in one passionate knot. Certain psalms, as well as the Song of Songs and other portions of the text, suggest that self-transcendence should be sought in a form of love between God and human being in which a kind of equivalence may ultimately be achieved. For in true love, whatever the roles that passion might inspire, there can be no permanent inequality. “God is not indifferent to man’s quest of Him,” says the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (God in Search of Man).

He is in need of man, in need of man’s share in redemption. . . . The words ‘I am a stranger on earth’ (Psalms 119:19), were interpreted to refer to God. God is a stranger in the world. The Shechinah, the presence of God, is in exile. Our task is to bring Him back into the world, into our lives. To worship is to expand the presence of God in the world. To have faith in God is to reveal what has been concealed.

To reveal, but also to hide – in this world, with all its flaws. In the comic universe of the Song of Songs, concealment and revelation follow each other in dizzying succession. Who is seeking, who is being sought? At more than one spot in the text, scholars no less than the rest of us must confess to some confusion.

But that’s not from any vagueness, any airy spirituality. The poem overflows with concrete imagery and physical motion, the names of flowers and spices, people and animals. A coherent geography can even be teased out of it. Yet in this overwhelmingly material realm, “Love is stronger than Death.” We ascend from the wilderness to the garden, to the apple tree, to the spot where birth-and-death had its tragically illuminating origin in the taste of a wondrous fruit. Since that time, says the tradition, there is no going back to a simple living-in-the-present – except in moments of divine ecstasy. Wisdom teaches that we possess nothing; everything belongs to God, and everything must ultimately go back to God (literally, in the case of the Jubilee). Symbolic mutual possession, the exchange of rings or bracelets, is part of the divine game.

Marvin H. Pope’s exposition on the meaning of “passion” in his translation is worth quoting at length.

The term qin’ah is here rendered by [the Septuagint] as zelos and by Vulgate, aemulatio. Luther rendered Eifer, “zeal.” [The Revised Standard Version’s] retention of KJ’s “jealosy” was apparently influenced by consideration of the passages where the term qin’ah is applied to a man’s suspicion that his wife may have been unfaithful (Num 5:14, 29-30) and his venomous and vengeful rage toward her violator (Prov 6:34); cf. Ezek 16:38 where qin’ah is joined to blood and wrath as the reward of the adulteress. Yahweh is similarly provoked to jealousy and anger by Israel’s idolatries (Deut 32:16,21; Ps 73:58), and is given the title qanna or qanno, using the nominal pattern applied to professions, as designating one especially zealous or jealous . . . The term qinah, however, is used of emotions other than jealousy . . . It is clear that the word can designate a variety of strong emotions, anger, envy, jealousy, fury, and in the present context, the sexual instinct and ardor which is one of man’s [sic] strongest propensities.

The essential point here, I think, regardless of what spin one wants to put on it, is that the same word is used for God as for humans. This is what I like about the Bible: it doesn’t try to push uncomfortable realities under a pious rug, much less shy away from ambiguity and paradox.

“. . . The coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” What gives light must also give out heat. To become enlightened, in the Biblical view, is to endure great burning. Only thus can the waters of chaos and death be transformed into so much harmless steam.
__________

*This is actually my own theory, I confess. But it makes perfect sense, don’t you think?

UPDATE: I got the Blake analysis a little wrong. The source I was using showed the second illustration (the one with God above, and Job below) in place of the first. Blake’s actual first illustration showed the patriarch and his wife sitting under a giant tree, open books on their laps, children ranged to right and left, on their knees. So there is still a slight element of hierarchy. But more significantly, all the musical instruments are hanging from the branches of the tree. In this way, I think, Blake makes his criticism of the pre-trial Job explicit. The same tree is in the background in the last plate; I hadn’t noticed it in the other reproduction. The same sheep are in the foreground, but in the first illustration they are all asleep, whereas in the last one, the rams have their heads up. Also, the sun and the moon trade places: in the first illustration, the sun is on the left; in the last, it’s on the right.

How could I have missed that tree? For it is that, more than anything, that ties this in with the Song of Songs!

(Thumbnails of all 21 plates may be viewed here.)

June 25, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

To see the world in a uninucleate amoeboflagellate cell, and heaven in a plasmodium

Go to the slime mold, thou sluggard.

Canst thou draw out the slime mold with a hook?

Consider the slime molds of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

These are just a few examples of the many poetic and proverbial uses of slime mold imagery that you won’t find in the Bible – or any other classic sacred or literary text that I’m aware of.

That’s a shame, because these organisms challenge some of our most fundamental preconceptions about how life should work. And needless to say, faulty assumptions and unconscious prejudices constitute the most serious impediments to understanding – in religion no less than in science.

In theological circles, the experience of wonder – also known as the “holy shit!” moment – is recognized as a key step in the spiritual progress of every individual. Thus, by helping to advance general knowledge and promote deeper spiritual awareness through the circulation of fascinating scientific facts about slime molds, I may become eligible for the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities, currently valued at 795,000 pounds sterling. That’s more than $1.4 million in real money. So please be sure to link widely to this post. I need the dough.

I’m indebted to the Illustrated Guide to the Slime Molds, by Peter Katsaros, for much of the following information (though all the language and some of the spin is my own). Let’s call this . . .

SLIME MOLDS: Nature’s way of telling us we’re wrong

Slime molds are everywhere – at least in the Temperate Zone where most of you reading this probably live. They’re not microscopic (though a microscope is often necessary to tell one kind from another); some can get bigger than breadboxes. You, like me, have doubtless seen slime molds hundreds, if not thousands, of times, but either didn’t notice, or simply didn’t realize what you were looking at.

Don’t you feel chastened? I expect your mind is fairly reeling with the moral implications of this stark truth – not to mention all the obvious possibilities for metaphor and homily.

Breaking the mold

You want transformation, metamorphosis? Boy, do these suckers ever metamorphose. Forget about caterpillar into luna moth, soul into spirit, Big Mac into little Jimmy. Every species of slime mold progresses from an assimilative phase to a propagative phase: that is to say, they go from moving around and eating stuff to standing still and growing little stalks. From animal-like to plant-like – often in just a few hours if the conditions are right.

To me, this makes slime molds into potent spiritual symbols. Most sources I’ve looked at, however, employ the shopworn “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” analogy, which doesn’t even get the order right, for cryin’ out loud.

So what the hell are they? Good question.

One thing for certain is they’re not true molds. Molds are classed with fungi. The current scientific consensus (pace the introduction to the Illustrated Guide) seems to be that slime molds should be assigned their own kingdom, separate from Fungi (not to mention Plants, Animals, Protists, Monera, Archaea, Big Macs, etc.).

But that, of course, doesn’t really tell us anything. Classification systems are only really helpful if they can give us some inkling about interrelatedness, and at this point, where slime molds are concerned, inklings are in short supply. Here,if you’re curious, is the most recent attempt to make sense of slime mold phylogeny.

So you might say that slime molds break the mold. The classification of known species reveals what Professor Katsaros calls “a startling imbalance, to say the least” – which is about as much hyperbole as you’ll ever get from a trained scientist. “The common Ceratiomyxa fructilosa (and its forms) produces external spores, whereas all other slime molds discovered to date generate spores internally.”

Well, perhaps further research will uncover a few more species to join C.f., the lone extrovert. But then again, maybe it won’t.

There are slime molds in deserts, slime molds in forests, slime molds in the innermost courtyard of the Japanese imperial place. (That’s not just whimsy on my part. The former emperor was a self-taught slime mold expert who made a number of valuable contributions to the field. Unfortunately, future emperors will probably while away their considerable free time writing in their blogs. But you never know.)

Most slime molds don’t have common names, but one that does is Fuligo septica: dog vomit slime mold.

What’s weird is that “for reasons that are not yet known, slime molds are less abundant in tropical forests than in temperate forests.” Even weirder: unlike other organisms that speciate wildly from one bioregion to another, most slime mold species tend to have worldwide distribution. You’d think that would mean there’d be plenty of room for them to, you know, spread out, but no. Multiple species often crowd together during the propagative stage, with their fruiting bodies all jumbled together like college kids at a dorm room kegger. Distinct groups of species prefer different niches, but for some reason they don’t appear to be aggressively competing for those niches. How the heck is natural selection (let alone free market capitalism) supposed to function under such circumstances?

We don’t know what it is, sir. Permission to fire.

That is, assuming slime molds did evolve here, and didn’t just float in from outer space.

Yes, that’s right! Possibly the coolest single thing about slime molds is that, on the rare occasions when human beings do notice them, they are apt to trigger widespread panic and fears of an alien invasion.

The most famous such incident occurred in a Dallas, Texas suburb back in 1973. This may come as a shock to those of you accustomed to thinking of Texas as a bastion of skepticism, scientific inquiry and a welcoming, “live and let live” cosmopolitan spirit. But faced with an apparent invasion of huge, pulsating yellow blobs crawling all over their manicured lawns and even up onto their front porches, the panicky suburbanites called on the fire department to try and get rid of the things by blasting the bejeezus out them with a fire hose. (Well, I suspect that someone must’ve tried shooting them first, but surviving news reports don’t confirm this.) Then, when that futile act of resistance merely spread the invasion over a wider area, they prevailed upon the governor to call out the National Guard.

As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.

Fortunately, a mycologist specializing in slime molds happened to see a headline about the UGO (Unidentified Growing Object) invasion, and was able to get on TV and calm the public nerves. And that’s a good thing, because in the tense, Cold War atmosphere of the time, an escalating situation like this – especially in Texas – might easily have triggered Russian fears of a first strike, leading to an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles, thermonuclear Armageddon and the extinction of most multicellular life forms on earth – with the possible exception, one suspects, of the infinitely malleable and adaptable slime molds.

Plastics, son. Plastics.

Now, at some point in your education, you probably encountered the notion that Cells Are the Building Blocks of Life. This turns out to be an exceedingly poor analogy. In most organisms – including human beings – cells are far less static and less clearly differentiated in their functions than a child’s building blocks. (Ever hear of stem cells?)

But in this regard, once again, slime molds really push the envelope. Come to think of it, “pushing the envelope” isn’t a bad image for the behavior of their mobile, or plasmodium, form in general. The point is that, as our guidebook puts it,

A burgeoning plasmodium is one of the most puzzling structures known to biology. Beneath a thin outer layer it contains many nuclei but no cell walls whatsoever. Consequently, the plasmodium has been viewed as both a multicellular structure without cell walls, and a unicelled but unwalled structure possessing many nuclei.

True to (un-)form, infant slime molds – called protoplasmic motes – can form flagella seemingly at will, given sufficient moisture in the environment. Flagella, as you probably know, means “whips” – those little tails that some unicellular organisms use to move about. Of course, sperm cells have whips, too, which implies to me that sex is inherently kinky.

And speaking of sex, after a short while the plasmodium begins doing what many life forms do when they want to get bigger: it starts having sex. With itself. “The motes behave as sex cells and form paired unions (zygotes). The zygotes grow by undergoing a modified form of cell multiplication, by accretion of other zygotes, and by ingestion of bacteria and other microscopic nutrients.”

In other words, sex and eating are all sort of mixed up in one amorphous quest for survival – kind of like in an old blues song. And keep in mind that this is wholly separate from the later, plant-like reproduction by the release of so-called spores. What isn’t clear to me is whether true sex – some version of cross-pollination, the mingling of heterogeneous DNA – actually takes place. I suspect that this isn’t clear to the experts, either, which is why my sources blip over the subject.

At any rate: behold the mature plasmodium, chugging right along at about the speed of drugged slug. “Its jellied mass, frequently a bright yellow, features a conspicuous fan-shaped leading edge averaging several inches in extent, and diminishes rearward into trailing strands criss-crossed into an intricate network.”

But it’s doing more than just moving forward. It’s also doing a slow dance with itself. With the aid of a microscope, slime mold experts say, you can observe that underneath its very thin skin (“fragile integument”), the stuff inside the plasmodial mass flows back and forth “in a very slow cadence,” as Professor Katsaros puts it. Molecules are contracting in sync – something that happens every time you flex a muscle – apparently just for the sheer hell of it.

As alluded to earlier in the account of the Great Texan Unidentified Growing Object Incident, slime molds make hash of the mental categories One vs. Many. (In that respect – as, perhaps, in a few others – they remind me of God(s). But never mind.) A plasmodium quite commonly separates into multiple, discrete units and re-forms as it moves aimlessly about. So internal plasticity of function is mirrored by external plasticity of form.

According to a recent article from Smithsonian magazine available online, slime molds even “show a quality that could be called intelligence: chopped up and dropped into a labyrinth, they will put themselves back together and start to move, avoiding dead ends and heading unerringly for the prize–more food.”

At this point, those Texans start to seem a little less ignorant, don’t they? By all that is holy – a pretty large yardstick, really – slime molds just shouldn’t exist.

What else would you feed a pet slime mold than a mess o’ oatmeal?

But exist they do, and with a great deal of style – at least in their latter incarnation as plant-like sporophores. A stunningly illustrated article from my mother’s files, evidently ripped out of an older issue of Smithsonian (unfortunately undated), rightly calls these structures “spectacularly beautiful.”

They are prizes worth searching for, no matter how silly you might feel inspecting a rotten log, scrutinizing fallen leaves or carefully examining all the dead twigs around the melting edges of a mountain snowbank. . . . Your reward may be a three-inch cluster of iridescent purple balls, each smaller than the head of a pin, or a patch of diminutive red cotton candy on tiny stalks. Other fruiting bodies resemble miniature leather buttons or golf balls for Lilliputians. (Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, “Beauties from a beast: woodland Jekyll and Hydes”)

Some good color photos may be found online, such as at this page from the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Keep in mind, however, that slime molds are as plastic in their approach to coloration as in anything else. As the Illustrated Guide puts it,

Spore color in the slime molds ranges from colorless (technically: hyaline) to black. This feature has its value, but spore color is much the same in some widely separated genera, so it is usually of secondary importance in identification. Sporophore color is a much more useful feature, most often at maturity. For example, the frothy mass of white bubbles constituting an emerging Stemonitis plasmodium produces dark brown sporangia [globe-shaped structures]. What happens in between these light and dark extremes? The developing sporophores exhibit a series of short-lived tints on their way to mature coloration. These fleeting colors are attractive but not used in identification because of the many gradations involved. Many species show these fleeting colors.

So, if you notice some weird-looking stuff out in the woods and you want to try to identify it, you have two options.

A) Camp out beside it until it becomes immobile, sends up little stalks, grows balls, or what have you. Wait until it stops going through color changes. Then crack out Katsaros and hope for the best. “Many plasmodia remain completely unknown,” he warns. But he adds this helpful note: “The study of slime molds at the amateur level affords many opportunities for exploring new ground.”

B) If you’re serious, you’ll need to raise them and keep them as pets. The older Smithsonian article describes one enthusiastic amateur of decades past, Ruth Nauss, who maintained a slime mold menagerie for years.

She fed them ground oatmeal flakes, their usual diet in laboratories. When she went on vacation, she took the most delicate along with her, tucking them in with a ‘warm water bottle’ on cold nights. She withheld moisture from the hardier ones for several weeks before a vacation to induce them to harden into sclerotia, so she could leave them unattended. At the time she wrote about them, her oldest plasmodium had been crawling around in its dish for more than nine years.

And what is time, one wonders, to a creature of such amorphous identity? What kind of consciousness might attend a being for which forms and functions, shapes and colors, habits and habitats are so fluid? (I’m assuming for all living things at least minimal awareness, defined as the ability to resist entropy and respond to stimuli in a non-random way. I think the scientific evidence is pretty strong that consciousness exists along a continuum.) What is time or even life to a creature that, in its “spore” form, might exist for centuries?

Holy in the wrong

In comparing older sources, such as Katsaros, with some of the newer descriptions available online, I get the distinct impression that the focus has shifted from sporophore to spores. These “spores” are now viewed less as seeds whose purpose is to reproduce slow-motion blobs, as “uninucleate amoeboflagellate cells”: the original and archetypal form. According to this paradigm, slime molds only go through the whole plasmodia-and-sporophore rigmarole when they need to obey a divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply, or whatever.

But then, if you could ask sperm and egg cells how they feel about turning into human beings, they might be equally dismissive of that latter, derivative stage of their existence.

The Heavy Thought I seem to be groping toward here is something along the lines of “seed consciousness,” possibly to be understood by analogy with the Kabbalistic image of divine sparks scattered throughout the world as a by-product of original Creation. But I have the feeling we’ve already covered too much ground and played with too many weak analogies, not to mention bad jokes, for one blog post. My plasmodial crawl toward the rich foodstuff of the Templeton Prize will just have to wait.

June 22, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Fictions, useful and otherwise

1. Disclosure

I grew my hair long so I’d have a place to hide. But soon everyone knew me by it: That Guy with the Hair.

I took up smoking to disguise my nervousness around strangers, or in a new place. But then smoking stopped being cool, and the longer I smoked, the more nervous I got. And after I stopped smoking I found it so much easier to sit still. Only my head still pivots left and right to avoid unnecessary eye contact.

These days I wear my hair short, my shoes and glasses are rarely in fashion and if I have an option, I go for unmarked t-shirts. Wearing a message simply seems too stressful. I feel as if I have to live up to whatever image it projects. And shorn of individuating details, isn’t it easiest to see who we really are?

When I stopped trying to hide, I found I could almost disappear. All I have to do is don a different hat and I’m somebody else. It’s great.

I admit, I do still keep a bit of a beard. Disclosure has its limits.

2. Enclosure

I guess it scares some people to think that personality could be so fluid, so arbitrary: nothing more or less than a collection of traits and powers in a role-playing game. They get defensive: “That’s just the way I am!” No, it isn’t.

But if we aren’t who we think we are, then what might we be? And what about the danger of total conformity, the boundaries of the self dissolving?

Perhaps the best way to talk about this is to say that what makes each of us attractive is our originality, not our novelty. Our lives are not novels with clearly defined trajectories plotted in advance, much less compositions intoned by a chorus of Fates or angels. But neither are they random – that’s the hard part to grasp. Matter is inherently self-organizing. So is mind. Sometimes, these patterns appear to converge and strange things happen.

Our selfhood isn’t something opaque and closed off; walls are there merely to define a space. Like a garden or a temple animated with lights and spirits, odors and possibilities, music from many throats. We are unique precisely in the way that every position is unique and each occasion is irreproducible. An openness to the world – which is meaningless unless the option of withdrawal exists – entails a sort of gardener’s familiarity with, and fondness for, the details of the unique positions and occasions of which we are composed. Our integrity as individuals stems directly from this sense of tenancy, of stewardship. How could it be otherwise?

3. Closure

Ah, for a sense of completeness! But whence the current passion for the word closure? It reminds me more than a little of the obsessive focus on orgasms found in most pop-culture talk about sex. The underlying message is the same: At some point in the future, we will achieve satisfaction by living in the present. And in the meantime, our sentences will become, like, more and more indecisive? Definitive pronouncements about much of anything will come to seem more and more, you know, whatever. Though I guess an increased emphasis on seeking agreement isn’t such a bad trend – knome sayin’?

The game this time, I think, is the one with three walnut shells and a little dried-up pea. Save your money.

June 9, 2004September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The blossoming world

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur concludes his exhaustive (and exhausting) study of metaphor (translated as The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning, University of Toronto Press, 1977), as follows:

What is described here is the very dialectic between the modes of discourse in their proximity and their difference.

On the one hand, poetry, in itself and by itself, sketches a ‘tensional’ conception of truth for thought. Here are summed up all the forms of ‘tensions’ brought to light by semantics: tension between subject and predicate, between literal interpretation and metaphorical interpretation, between identity and difference. Then these are gathered together in the theory of split reference. They come to completion finally in the paradox of the copula [e.g., “is”], where being-as signifies being and non-being. By this turn of expression, poetry, in combination with other modes of discourse, articulates and preserves the experience of belonging that places man in discourse and discourse in being.

Speculative thought, on the other hand, bases its work upon the dynamism of metaphorical utterance, which it construes according to its own sphere of meaning. Speculative discourse can respond in this way only because the distanciation, which constitutes the critical moment, is contemporaneous with the experience of belonging that is opened or recovered by poetic discourse, and because poetic discourse, as text and as work, prefigures the distanciation that speculative thought carries to its highest point of reflection. . . .

What is given to thought in this way by the ‘tensional’ truth of poetry is the most primordial, most hidden dialectic – the dialectic that reigns between the experience of belonging as a whole and the power of distanciation that opens up the space of speculative thought.

I suppose most readers can intuitively grasp what Ricoeur means by “distanciation”: in less precise language, we can see that speculation and analysis presumes a distance between the thinker and the object of his/her thought.

In my notes on this passage, I expanded upon Heidegger’s metaphor for metaphor as a blossoming (which Ricoeur earlier had cited favorably). “The ‘flowers’ of our words – Worte, wie Blumen – utter existence in its blossoming forth.”

Probably neither philosopher was aware that this metaphor for the poetic word has an ancient pedigree in the New World, especially in Uto-Aztecan languages. However, in these mostly oral traditions, the reigning dialectic was between song and narrative, not poetic and speculative thinking. And the sung world was imagined to exist in tension with the no less “real” or sacred world of the stories. The world of songs is the blossoming landscape, an essentially static utopia, whereas the world of stories is glimpsed as a series of unfolding paths, “the inventory of useful landscape items that lie along the way traveled by beings of the creation time, and landforms on which they left their mark,” as anthropologist Jane H. Hill puts it (“The Flower-world of Old Uto-Aztecan,” Journal of Anthropological Research,” vol. 48, 1992, 117-144). Such beings, however, sing their thoughts in an eternal present of dream and vision. As in many ancient traditions, songs make the long ago blossom forth in the present. The explicit association of flower and song is very strong in Nahuatl, Huichol, Yaqui and Piman languages.

I wonder if we can propose the analogy that poetic thinking is to speculative thinking as flower is to fruit or seed. Poetic thinking, Ricoeur suggests, means “seeing things as actions . . . seeing them as naturally blossoming . . . Signifying things in act would be seeing things as not prevented from becoming, seeing them as blossoming forth. But then would not signifying things in act also be signifying potency, in the inclusive sense that stands for every production of motion or of rest?” Deciding in the affirmative, Ricoeur proclaims that “the task of speculative discourse is to seek after the place where appearing means ‘generating what grows.'” Pollination, fertilization, sex: it seems there is no escape from these primordial metaphors for poetic creation, even if the pre-modern analogy between sperm and seed was inaccurate.

Whatever the validity of Heidegger’s claim to have gone beyond Western metaphysics (which Ricoeur strongly disputes), his use of ancient metaphors (light, ground, home, way/path) does seem to license comparisons with non-Western and pre-modern speculative traditions. Here’s Hill again:

Among groups which exhibit the full development of the Flower World complex, the spiritual aspect of anything that has vital force or spiritual importance can be captured by referring to it as a flower or flowery. The Flower World is the realm of heroes in their creative aspect, and the spirit ways along which they travel are “flowery roads.” . . . In Huichol, the Flower World is the Wirikuta of the peyote hunt, the land of ultimate beauty, where the spirits of deer and corn are imminent and which is entered by human beings through a peyote journey. This pilgrimage involves a language of ‘reversals,’ in which the moon becomes the cold sun, dusk becomes dawn, sleep becomes waking, and the sacred peyote is called ‘flower.’

Here we might glimpse what Borges was getting at with his contention that “Life is a dream” transcended mere metaphor. But this also points toward the realm of the sacred clown and of euphemism in general. My final reaction to Ricoeur’s study is to lament his complete neglect of comic inversion and euphemism as a psycholinguistic basis for metaphor. If the vitalistic conception of reality, which Aristotle evoked with the term phusis, no longer seems tenable, we ought at least to be able to draw upon the insights of anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. Language and metaphor are the tools of a gathering-hunting species. In the hunt, in the conversion of other into self, we can see “the tension between identity and difference” at its most radical. The ancient covenant between human being and other being requires both inversion and conversion. In the Uto-Aztecan analysis, the mortal wound is seen as a kind of blossoming. The songs sung by hunters to their prospective quarry and by shamans to their spirit familiars are intended, first and foremost, to enchant, to beguile. Metaphor appears first as a disguise, a sacred mask. A systematic poetics should begin with this insight.

Ricoeur does attempt to link “the properly sensual aspect of the image to a semantic theory of the metaphor” in a very interesting section called “Icon and Image.” “Like the icon of the Byzantine cult, the verbal icon consists in this fusion of sense and the sensible. It is also that hard object, similar to a sculpture, that language becomes once it is stripped of its referential function and reduced to its opaque appearance. Lastly, it presents an experience that is completely immanent to it.” This description fits equally well the functioning of a mask or fetish.

Ricoeur concludes his meditation on icon and image with a consideration of “a phenomenolgy of imagination.” He cites Gaston Bachelard’s theory of image, not as “a residue of impression, but an aura surrounding speech.” Imagination can reach beyond metaphor – behind the mask –

because it follows the path of ‘reverberation’ of the poetic image into the depths of existence. The poetic image becomes ‘a source of psychic activity.’ What was ‘a new being in language’ becomes an ‘increment to consciousness’ or better ‘a growth of being.’ Even in ‘psychological poetics,’ even in ‘reveries on reveries,’ psychism continues to be directed by the poetic verb. And so, one must attest: ‘Yes, words really do dream.’ [Quoting from Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie]

__________

For more on aura, icon and image, see The art of living. For more on sacred clowns, see Houston, we have a problem… This post continues an examination of metaphor begun in Learning language, learning poetry and continued in last Friday’s post, Chasing shadows. See also The world of the riddle.

June 8, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Red shift

You know the expression, “I wouldn’t do x if you were the last man/woman on earth”? Well, for some time now I have been haunted by the image of that last woman. The lighting is abundant, and not particularly flattering. Minicams in every corner of the apartment record her as she dictates her thoughts into her audio blog, takes snapshots for her photo blog, writes about her feelings for her poetry blog. Everything is on the record. The only sad part is that nobody’s watching but me; everybody else is too busy doing the same thing.

Her name, I think, is Morn, though she goes by Dust Angel. Her trademark costume is a rather plain, sleeveless red shift. She believes fervently that the unexamined life is not worth living, though she admits that over-analysis makes her uncomfortable. Her favorite color is green. She is a Libra.

What else? Well, she appears to have a lover, a hulking tech support guy without any speaking parts. You might spot him occasionally looming over the mousepad or fiddling with the minicams for better angles – or for poorer in the event of sex, which is somewhat downplayed. Nudity is definitely part of the routine, though it verges on mere nakedness, an attribute of such existential acts as changing clothes, exercising or sunbathing on the floor. Morn does this every afternoon, curling up like a cat on a broadloom rug encircled by snaky electric cables and watched over by an odd assortment of mannequins and dressmaker’s dummies, vintage apparel draped on timeless hip.

The future has arrived, and it is boring. Where now is the vibrating ether so cherished by pre-war pulp science fiction authors? Ancient cover girls in skin-tight space suits now crumble at the touch, tragic victims of an acid overdose. Those child-women must’ve foreseen some such fate: their lips spelled unvarying o‘s of horror regardless of the threat, even from aliens as unlikely as the two pug dogs that live with Dust Angel. The poor things can’t even bark, are too dumb to hump a leg. They were bred to evoke the quintessentially feminine Japanese squeal ka-wa-eeee, which connotes approximately equal measures of lovability and infantility.

And which, in a way, describes the appeal of this particular eventuality, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, here we have all loose ends of the ballyhooed future at last tied up – or rather, cross-stitched. One veil for bride and widow alike, one screen for all media, like Alice’s looking-glass. It’s not like that movie the Truman Show where the guy is an unwitting star of the soap opera of his life, because in the first place there’s no drama per se, and in the second, the “star” is fully aware and in control of everything. She is like a god, really, a child who has the run of the nursery and will never grow up.

The ether alone knows how such harmony plays out among the spheres, whether it can even reach the ever-receding, ever-more-isolated celestial bodies that once made us grasp for something like an outer space, a red planet. At the speed of light, thinking becomes impossible. Time is a terrible gift to do without.

June 4, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Chasing shadows

Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.

Charles Wright, Appalachia (FSG, 1998)

For some time I’ve been chewing on an old bone of contention between artists and critics: is the image older than the symbol? I think yes. I remember Borges, not too long before his death, folded into his very tweedy jacket and staring sightlessly out at the fawning audience. The auditorium was packed for his evening lecture, which, he had said earlier in the day, he wished to be a discussion – but who was kidding whom? – about metaphor. Funny how an image stick in one’s head, the Chinese graduate student wrote in his spiral-bound notebook. (Penn State got them from the mainland even then; they stood out from other East Asian students with the bathroom slippers they wore everywhere.) Speaking through his interpreter, our honored guest discussed his favorite contention, that Life is a Dream. “But isn’t that itself a metaphor?” one of our more alert members of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts wanted to know. “No,” Borges intoned to the delight of many, who found said faculty member a little hard to take. “It is the truth!”

This would have been a scandalous notion had it come from anyone but the Great Writer. There was a bit of murmuring, to be sure. I remember murmuring something myself; I’m not sure what. “Freud have mercy!” perhaps, or “Pinch me!” But up spoke another of our champions to ask for an example of a poetic image with no metaphorical function. “Consider Japanese haiku,” said Borges. “‘The ancient pond. A frog jumps in. The sound of water.’ Where’s the metaphor?” “Couldn’t you say the entire poem functions as a metaphor?” “You could, but it isn’t necessary. The poem doesn’t have to mean anything.” Japanese – ancient pond, mean nothing, wrote the Chinese grad student in the seat beside me.

I am oversimplifying as usual; you don’t have to tell me that. Symbols and metaphors aren’t exactly the same. But I find it interesting to try and imagine how the brain of an intelligent, social, non-human animal such as a dog or raven actually works, how it might see the world. Because of course the one big difference between us and the others is their lack of a symbolic language. No abstractions! But dreams, memory, emotion, anticipation, basic reasoning power – they have all that.

Well, the image that sticks in my head is of Fred First’s one year-old dog Tsuga chasing – or perhaps attempting to herd – the shadows of butterflies. He also bobs for rocks. There’s something awfully darn metaphorical about a blogger’s dog chasing the shadows of butterflies. Is he a literalist, I wonder, or a skeptic? It is equally easy to imagine him saying: “The Butterfly listeth where it will,” or: “I don’t believe in Butterfly. I know what I see.”

But I’m just being clever, as humans are wont to do. There’s enough meat there already without any help from me.

The retriever pup
chases butterfly shadows
even in his sleep.

Butterfly’s shadow:
the dog’s nose goes wild
at the lack of odor.

Muzzle to ground,
his legs get ahead of him:
herding shadows.

Butterfly shadow
on the lawn shrinks, vanishes.
The dog digs for it.

Head under water
the golden retriever
keeps his eyes open.

On the creek bottom
every pale stone’s alive with shadows.
Delicious!