What does this have to do with religion?

My cats are useless. Being useless is not, in itself, bad. (Ralph Vaughn Williams once wrote an essay that landed him in much controversy in which he said the chief glory of music is that it’s useless. I understand that.) They’re not cuddly, they don’t catch mice (on the fourth floor of a mid-rise?), and they don’t “fetch” or play any kind of game. They are somewhat like my writing. 

A friend wrote in an email yesterday, “Your blog is sometimes confusing to me. Can I write that in safety?” I’d be surprised if anyone understood any of what I write. I hope what she meant is that she doesn’t want to jeopardize our friendship. My writing, like my cats, is most likely useless. 

My cats are sitting in front of some pictures in frames I have stacked on the floor. Either something is behind the pictures (a mouse?), or they liked knocking the whole pile over and want to do it again. They are useless. Joanie, who is usually at my feet when I’m writing, is watching picture frames. Chachi and Groucho, one of whom is usually on the chair beside me when I’m writing, are staring at picture frames. 

Go figure. 

My writing is, I suppose, my personal version of staring at picture frames. I started writing compulsively (OK, I didn’t realize it then, but looking back on it I know) when I got sober twenty-three years ago. I bought my first computer in 1988 to write my dissertation, and I’ve never looked back. The amount of crap I’ve written (and cannot throw away) is staggering. 

I’ve been staring at picture frames. The only reason I pretend I’m a scholar is to get material to write about. I teach college writing because it used to seem like something useful to do with writing. All my life I wanted to be a “writer,” so I wrote. But then I got drunk. It was a good substitute—and for other things, like making a living, learning to have relationships, and—most important—being oblivious to seizures. 

Am I or am I not hypergraphic? Or am I just a garden-variety (bad) writer hoping to accomplish something? Like a star-struck teen-ager headed to Hollywood to be rich and famous? My colleagues write books. They work long, hard hours at it. But their writing seems to be “work.” Publish or perish and all that idiocy. They could, I think, if they didn’t have their jobs, walk away from it. Oh, they might be curious and want to study and write because that’s what scholars do, but, as far as I know, they’re not up at five A.M. writing before they do anything else because it’s necessary to get the day started (and sometimes to keep it going). 

However, the question I really meant to think about this morning is religion. 

I read too much of the wrong stuff.

           …an increased tendency to report spiritual and religious experiences
          and beliefs (hyperreligiosity)… manifests either as a deepening of
          religious and mystical feelings, or as overt extravagant religious
          behaviour out of keeping with personal and societal norms….
          Religious delusions are also commonly observed….***

This article is about refractory (resistant to treatment) epilepsy. I dunno. But I still have ridiculous seizures. Sometimes. Staring into this ridiculous monitor causes something that might be a seizure. I have other lights around so the vibration is not all I’m seeing. Remember when computers had black backgrounds and gold letters? Mine were green. They said it would help. (Or were the normal ones green, and mine were gold?) 

What’s religious experience anyway? Is my religious tendency “increased?” Do I want so desperately to believe in a power greater than myself that I’ll do anything to create her? Why do I like High Church Episcopal worship drama? I make the sign of the cross when I absolutely do not believe that God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit is paying attention. Is my religious behavior “overt[ly] extravagant…or out of keeping with personal or societal norms?” Of course not. I’ve never seen an angel, and God has never spoken directly to me. I don’t have mystical visions. Lots of people are High Church ‘Piscopals.

Lots of people

My problem with religion is like any other skeptic’s: skepticism is not unbelief. So one goes through the motions of religious practice without believing in what one is doing (especially if one is an organist and has precious few other venues for performance.) 

I have no point here, by the way. You’re reading the musings I can’t not write. It’s time to make sure I have everything under control for classes today (Right! under control!). It’s time to exercise for thirty minutes. It’s time to vacuum the carpet? But I’m stuck here writing—not about just any old thing, but about religion. I want to know for sure that my constant daily hourly minutely prayers are being taken note of by someone, something, that I can make conscious contact with. I don’t think such an entity exists. But I keep praying, and putting up the banners at my church, and making sure the candles are lit and the music is ready. Why? Does it have anything to do with epilepsy? No. It’s normal skeptic-as-believer nonsense. I want to break away from it, but I can’t. 

“Spiritual advisors” tell me in times of a crisis of faith, one should keep praying, and the crisis will pass. OK. I’ve been praying since I was two years old, and the crisis has never passed. It has nothing to do with epilepsy. I’m chicken. If I give up praying and practicing my all-too-elaborate religion, something will happen to me. Religion is not the opiate of the masses. It’s their insanity. Why, after billions of years of life on this planet, after Lucy the Australopithecus who lived perhaps 3,000,000 years ago, after hundreds of thousands of years of history of folks like us, would God (or whoever dreamed this all up) suddenly reveal herself to the creatures she had made and then, after killing off a million years worth of them, “save” the ones who were left, and do it in a span of (perhaps) two thousand years? 

I know, I know, these are such sophomoric questions I should have answered them when I was a sophomore. I did. Or I should have spent my life searching (reading, sitting at the feet of gurus) instead of drinking, making music, and being wrapped up in religion. Now I have no backlog of Buddhist writings to help me find God. Oh well.

*** Wuerfel, J., et al. “Religiosity is associated with hippocampal but not amygdala volumes in patients with refractory epilepsy.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 75.4 (2004): 640+.

Adam Smith Abounds

When I play the piano or organ, I have the guarantee that I will not have a seizure. Or, if I do, I will not feel it. I will not be aware of it.

Yesterday and the day before, I spent six hours preparing a booklet in Spanish of Biblical meditations for Advent. I hate Advent. If there is a spiritual dimension to life (which, as anyone knows who’s read any of my recent writings, I am quite skeptical about), it is utterly destroyed in the month leading to christmas. This destruction is one of the greatest mysteries I know. And the fact that it bothers me is an even greater mystery.

I don’t get it. And I am not smart or disciplined enough to say anything about it that some one else has not already said. The supposed birth of God in human form (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” and all of that nonsense) ought to be, if one could really believe it, the single most frightening event since the first chemical reaction among H2O and other chemicals somewhere in the vast earth-covering ocean became one cell of what we, in our vast wisdom, call “life.” This terrifying possibility is reduced, in Texas at any rate, to a frenzy of bottom-feeding that totally ignores both the mystery of life and the awesomeness of the possibility that “God” became a living, breathing, yelling-obscenities-at-the-christmas-merchants-of-his-day part of the fabric of the “highest” form of the life that one cell started sometime in the last 6,000,000,000 years. And in Texas (I can’t vouch for any other place), even people who have never thought about the possibility that one cell (or maybe a trillion trillion cells all at once) sprang to “life” out of the liquid muck celebrate this season of “the Word made” flesh and are willing to go to the mat (or at least to the Supreme Court) to make sure that we call it “Word-Made-Flesh” season rather than what it is: capitalism run amuck season.

If my dad’s cousin sends me one more idiotic mass-email about calling this season “Christmas” instead of “The Holiday,” I will find him and personally. . . .

We, of course, have Adam Smith to thank for all of this nonsense. When he invented the “invisible hand” that guides our every move, he codified in one fell swoop the inviolable principle that “greed” (which is what the “invisible hand” is—not my idea, but I don’t remember where I first read it) will be the byword of our social contract—if, indeed we have one. Americans are convinced (as part of the ridiculous “metanarrative” under which we all live) that we have a written Constitution that determines the workings of our society (at least the “political” aspects of it), but everything we, as a people, do, say, and think, is controlled by the “invisible hand” of greed. Look at the so-called “economy” for the last two years. It has been absolutely in charge of our resources and thinking—including the “political” process that is supposedly governed by the Constitution—and everything else we do.

Even I, who refuse to own a credit card because those little pieces of plastic tie one without recourse to the “invisible hand” of greed, have not, as is obvious, been able to escape the insanity of Adam Smith’s intellectual nonsense.

Oh, silly, undisciplined, TLEptic me, I digress. Who first said that? Everything we do is a digression.

I spent all of this time making a Spanish-language booklet of Biblical mediations for the yearly orgy of Adam Smith-ness that I hate. I have good reason to hate it (except, of course, my more spiritually evolved brothers and sisters would tell me that I shouldn’t waste the time, energy, or spiritual capital “hating” anything). I am caught in a paradox from which I cannot extricate myself.

When I play the piano or organ, I have the guarantee that I will not have a seizure. Or, if I do, I will not feel it. I will not be aware of it. This is the time of year when friends most want me to play the piano or organ, I think because real music, made by a living, breathing human being—whether the Word was made flesh or not—is one way people can wrench themselves away from their abject discipleship to Adam Smith and at least pretend they live in some dimension other than greed.

So I am caught in the conundrum, the Catch-22 of wanting nothing to do with living in our social contract of greed but knowing the time of year when Adam Smith is most worshipped is the time of each year when I could, if I gave in to the temptation, be most likely to go for hours without any strange electrical misfiring in my brain.

So what’s wrong with greed? I don’t know. I made the foolish decision somewhere along the line that I don’t want any part of this greediness. The fact is, of course, that it may be my mental “disorders” that brought about my decision in the first place. Another conundrum. My Bipolar Disorder and my Temporal Lobe Epilepsy prompted my decision to try to avoid the feeding-frenzy of greed , but the feeding-frenzy accounts for the time of year when my own greatest delight is useful to other people and I can be freed from the misfiring of my own brain more now than at any time of the year.

The real paradox is that I spent all of that time, instead of playing the organ or piano, making a little folder of meditations for the season I hate, in a language I have to work much too hard at to understand or communicate in. I am part of a community who speak Spanish—at my church (the greatest paradox of all—I doubt I will ever sort that one out), and I was trying to give them a gift. As if anything I would give anyone would be other than a cruel hoax.

OK. I love that community.

The aspect of Adam Smith’s Gospel of Greed that most repulses me is that, in greed, any given community can smugly reject any other community. As if we’re not all descended from that same chemical reaction billions of years ago that resulted in “life.” Feeding frenzies are also hatred frenzies that “…express an imagined difference and sameness, elaborated from actual or apparent differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, class, or gender. The cultural work of representations of boundaries is to enhance the differences and make them a part of a community’s self-conception, or ideology. The symbols of community themselves are heavily invested in signs of difference no less than commonality.”**

If the “Word became flesh,” then it became all flesh, not just Anglo Americans who live on the plastic they can slide through a machine at Target or Bloomingdale’s. **

**Morgan, David. “The look of sympathy: religion, visual culture, and the social life of feeling.” Material Religion 5.2 (2009): 132+.

Sicilian Mariners

Twentieth-century philosophers (especially those who think about thinking and writing) have written incessantly about “metanarrative.” The first time I heard the word in a graduate seminar, I boggled my mind asking, “Why can’t they just say ‘the big story,’ or, as Most Normal Americans would say, ‘the big picture’?”

The word “metanarrative” is a big word academics made up to sound smart. It’s like “homosexual,” a ridiculous pastiche of parts from two languages slopping around in languages resembling neither of the originals. Trying to sort out meaning is as fruitful as trying to figure out which of my cats knocked the philodendron off my kitchen counter while I was out.

(Today my “thesis” is more obscure than usual. My personal narrative begins and ends in confusion. Read on.)

I entertain myself finding word origins. This is not for “academic” purposes. I like to try to figure out what people are saying in reality—especially if they don’t mean what they say.

Meta-: prefix meaning 1. “after, behind,” 2. “changed, altered,” 3. “higher, beyond,” from Gk. meta (prep.) “in the midst of, among, with, after.” Definition of the third meaning, “higher, beyond,” is “due to misinterpretation of metaphysics as ‘transcending physical science.’”

Philosopher/academics add meta- to:  narrative, 1432, from L. narrationem from narrare “to tell, relate, recount, explain,” literally “to make acquainted with.”

“Metanarrative” means a (story, telling, recounting) that’s “higher” or “beyond” some other story.

“Metanarrative” is the Greek “big” coupled with the Latin “to tell.” I (who live in total untidiness) think it’s an untidy way to invent a word.

(I’m getting to my thesis, but I’m like Johann Gottfried Herder; see below.)

The French aren’t much tidier. They use métarécit.

They’ve used the Greek meta-, and added to it the Latin recitare “read aloud, repeat from memory,” from L. re- “back, again” + citare “to summon.” We can take our pick, “the narration (of a BIG story)” or “the recitation (of a BIG story).”

Shall we look for “the BIG one that got away?”

The BIG one got away

One day the semester of that graduate seminar, I was walking across campus. It must have been close to Christmas time (or not). I was humming an old German (not Greek, Latin, French, or English) Christmas carol sung to an Italian tune (see what musicologists know?). I learned this carol in high school German class in about 1962. It came to me that I could change the words, and

      O du fröhliche, o du selige,
      Gnadenbringende Weihnachtszeit! 

became forever etched in my mind as: 

     Metanarrative, metanarrative,
     Gnadenbringende Weihnachtszeit! 

From a carol in praise of “joyful, holy, Grace-giving Christmastime” to a hymn in praise of the “Grace-giving metanarrative.”  (O du fröhliche has five syllables with the first syllable accented as does “metanarrative,” so the words can be interchangeably set to the tune). Most Lutherans in this country, since a hymn about Italian fishermen strays too far from the metanarrative of Lutheran piety, know the tune with the words “Lord, Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing.” Obviously Italian Catholic Christmas words would not do for Lutherans, but the bouncy (folk) tune from Sicily (named “Sicilian Mariners”) is too much fun to jettison. 

Greek, Latin, and Italian to German, English, and the universal language of the academy, to say nothing of Christian Protestant versus Catholic theology. Now there’s a METANARRATIVE! 

We each have a story we tell ourselves about where we came from—because we remember it, or others have told us, or we’ve dreamed it (or perhaps consciously made it up), or it’s what really happened. Yesterday I found myself in the middle of a group of people almost none of whom I knew. Most of them were related in some way—brothers, sisters, cousins of brothers-in-law, mothers-in-law of brothers. It was Thanksgiving dinner. The host had also invited a few of his friends. I was there because he is a kind and gracious and generous man (my narrative about him, whether or not he knows it, is part of his story). 

I was chatting with someone who was not a member of the extended family, but was obviously close to our host. I asked if she “had known him forever.” She said they were in college together. I don’t know how long ago that was, but more recent than my college days. “I guess that qualifies as ‘forever,’” she added. In the narrative of her life and the host’s life, it is forever. 

I, on the other hand, have known him for only about six months. Is that “forever” in his narrative? One might not think so, except he and I have similar stories, and we have experienced similar shame and misery so deep and change and recovery so dramatic, that, based on our differing but congruent experience of grief and joy, we have become part of each other’s narratives in way that even his oldest and dearest friends cannot be for him—or most of mine for me. 

One of the few (always and continually) joyful aspects of the story I know, invent, tell myself about my life (oh—go ahead and say it, my “metanarrative”) is the layers of meaning I discover, mostly through other people. 

A tune arises from anonymous Sicilian fishermen. Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German philosopher (he studied with Kant and taught Goethe) tears himself away from the frigid north of Europe and travels to Italy. When he returns to the Land of Luther, he remembers the Sicilian Mariners’ tune (1788). (He was my kind of thinker. He wrote to his wife, “I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy.” He helped sow the seeds of Sturm und Drang in Germany, the romantic wildness that probably describes my thinking.) Another German Lutheran writes words that fit the unusual meter of the tune. The song becomes a favorite German Christmas Carol. Lutherans in 19^th-century America learn it, and it becomes one of their favorites. In 1962 Gretchen Schutte, teaching high school German in Omaha, Nebraska, teaches the carol (she is German Catholic, not Lutheran) to her (mainly Baptist and Jewish) classes. I discover the tune in many places, including set to non-Christmas words in Lutheran hymnals. One day I think of it when I am pondering metanarratives.

A metanarrative is born. Oh, I know, I know. That’s much too trivial to be a metanarrative in the Jacques Derrida or Victor Vitanza sense.

This is an extension of my recent mediation on the problem of God. The problem, as I see it, is mixing all of this purely human stuff up into some kind of “forever-ness.” God did not introduce the Sicilian fisherfolk to the German theologian. God didn’t inspire the 20^th-century philosophers to add “big” to “story” or “narrative.” God didn’t bring my Thanksgiving dinner friends and me together. We have to believe those things, those “big stories,” in order to believe we’re alive and well and living on Earth. Derrida and his ilk might agree with me about that.

But then they go right on making up their own “metanarrative” about how the “metanarrative” is not real, and they get trapped into their own avoidance. The only true philosophers or social critics or academics are people we’ve never heard of because they are living on mountainsides contemplating the universe, not metanarratives. Or, perhaps, they’re carrying on Jane Goodall’s work unraveling the only metanarrative that matters.

The only metanarrative that counts

     One way to read contemporary philosophy of religion and philosophical 
     theology is to view it as a series of attempts to determine how God
     became a problem in the West. . . .Their arguments already seem to be
     part of a high modernity which has been deconstructed by end-of-
     ontotheology arguments which claim that the only appropriate
     language for God in the postmodern context is no, not, never.**

Anthony Godzieba (Associate Professor, Villanova University) ought to be ashamed of himself!  

I know how God became a problem in the West. 

God finally—after trying for millennia—became a problem in the West (dare I assume speaking  for myself is speaking for “the West?”) in a 1400-square-foot apartment on a street—lined with live oak trees so old they spread a canopy over the street for neighbors to walk their dogs, the Asian-American medical students’ families to meet and talk and the gay melting-pot Americans to meet to plan rendezvous—in Dallas, Texas, United States, North America, the West, Earth. 

A canopy of (graitude?)

“For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord.” Two-part, incipit an ascending octave leap on the dominant, the melody descending through the scale omitting the seventh. (I can write in the technical jargon of my discipline.) I have no idea when I first sang this as a blessing before a meal. 

The simple round is the gist of the Thanksgiving Eve sermon by the Rector of a large, wealthy, Episcopal parish in Dallas about the nature and need for Thanksgiving, We are to be grateful for what we have been given (presumably by God). 

The service was deeply moving, the “Noise of Solemn Assemblies” *** at its finest. The organ music was delicious. The choir sang Maurice Green’s “Thou Visiteth the Earth.” We sang the Thanksgiving hymns one might expect. I am emotionally and spiritually (?) engaged in services at this church (until the Creed when I either choke in grief or am enraged, and unable to say the words).  

All but the Credo

God became a problem not when Nietzsche announced his death (Nietzsche was myopic—he killed off only the Western god). God became a problem not with Heidegger’s convolutions; not with Kierkegaard’s grief—although that was close; not with Foucault’s Religion and Culture; not with Niebuhr, Faigley, Frankl, or Lyotard. Perhaps God became a problem with Baudrillard. 

God became a problem (and becomes a problem) each time a person (and then another, and another) discovers that the “metanarrative” (words invented by people in the above list are a problem) we have learned to be true (or we have assumed from infancy) is not. Life is not civilization, or theology, or good works, sociology, politics, love, hate, education, the economy, automobiles, wars in Iraq, or health care reform. And life is not “God.” 

God has worked up to being a problem for millennia. God tries to garner attention. God will, in fact, allow peoples’ lives to come unhinged, to be disasters, miserable, or intolerable. Or God will allow people to be happy, joyous, and free, to be billionaires, to have the power of the Presidency, to celebrate Thanksgiving in style and ease, and luxury. God allows these things (don’t go criticizing my theology—I don’t give a fig about theology; I report the facts as I see them) in order, now and then, to get one person’s attention. Each one who comes to the understanding that God is a problem has to do so alone. 

Discovering that the metanarrative, whatever version of it one has come to believe, is not true is one’s discovery that God is a problem. I can claim to have discovered this for the “West” in my apartment because, for me, the discovery is universal—it shakes my universe, so it must shake THE universe. And once discovered, the problem is never undiscovered. 

Discovering God is a problem means everything else is a problem. “For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord” is meaningless (or at least problematic). Why give thanks for something that does not exist. God is a problem for me because I for so long had all of my hope, my comfort, my understanding of reality bound up with God.  

My grateful admission that God is a problem does not mean I have concluded God does not exist. How would I know? It means simply that, this Thanksgiving Day I cannot trust the metanarrative, what Wikipedia (Hah! laugh at my scholarship) calls the “abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge.”  

I’m not throwing my lot in with Lyotard (although his work is clever) and the other “post-modernists.” They wrangle over metanarratives as surely as the ancient theologians who asked how many angels danced on the head of your hatpin. 

I don’t think about abstractions that explain history or knowledge. When my friends read philosophy in college and thought deep thoughts, I was learning organ music. I was drunk. I was trying to find sexual bliss. I read (and tried to write) novels. I can’t participate in discussions of Lyotard and Foucault (Foucault may have discovered that God is a problem). 

I grieve God as a problem. I am grateful for it. I assume that, if I live long enough (“what is life” is the first question one asks when one discovers that God is a problem), I may find some grace in the discovery. 

I do not want to over-emphasize the ways in which my body (mostly my brain) works differently than most human bodies. My twin disorders, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Bipolar Disorder, are perhaps not disorders at all. Perhaps they are the true gifts for which I celebrate Thanksgiving. They have forced me to understand God is a problem. Nothing is what it seems. Nothing is real. If reality is impossible to define, nothing survives when our bodies no longer participate in life on Earth. I am ill (but isn’t everyone?). One of my “illnesses” consists in a misfiring of brain cells that causes me dissociation, the physical beginning of my intellectual understanding that God is [unreal] a problem. 

Lately, I have been comforted, when I am overwhelmed knowing God is a problem, by the writings of Arthur Frank which I discovered in an article by Cristina Rocha. 

In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that people use illness narratives ‘to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she maybe going.’ He identifies three kinds of narratives—restitution, chaos, and quest. . . .Finally, in the quest narrative, ‘illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest.’ The ill person has an active role in it, as s/he finds a sense of purpose in the illness, and uses it to undergo transformation. **** 

Thanksgiving Day is a day for me to remember my gratitude that God is a problem for me. I am grateful to be on a quest.

** Godzieba, Anthony J. ”Ontotheology to excess: imagining God without being. ” Theological Studies. 56.1 (March 1995): 3(18).  Associate Professor, Villanova University; Editor of Horizons, the journal of the College Theology Society.
*** Berger, Peter. The Noise of Solemn Assemblies; Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America. New York: Doubleday, 1961. “Mainline Protestantism has always been in a symbiotic relationship with the middle-class culture, which is to a large extent its own historical product (after all, it is this type of Protestantism that has been a crucially important factor in the formation of American bourgeois civilization) and that continues to be its social context [in which people do not know God is a problem].”
**** Rocha, Cristina. ”Seeking healing transnationally: Australians, John of God and Brazilian Spiritism. ” The Australian Journal of Anthropology  20.2 (August 2009): 229(18).  Cristina Rocha is a staff member at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

We Plow the Fields and Scatter

 

 

 

 

quantum?

There’s nothing unusual here. Except, perhaps, and only perhaps, my perception.

 

epistemology:
ἐπιστήμη – episteme-, “knowledge, science” + λόγος “logos” – “theory of knowledge,” 1856; branch of philosophy that investigates the limits of human knowledge

ontology:
ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (neuter participle of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία, “metaphysical science or study of being,” 692; branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence.

If you want to think about the origins of the universe you can find enough resources to keep busy for the rest of a natural lifetime. Stephen Hawkings (Brief History of Time); Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and [absurdly] Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion);  “The Universe,” and “How the Earth Was Made” on the Discovery Channel; the journal Astrobiology (“Why is the definition of life so elusive? epistemological considerations,” by Serhiy A. Tsokolov; “Signatures of a shadow biosphere,” by Paul C. W. Davies et al; and hundreds more); the evangelical Christian geneticist Francis Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief).

I read stuff—too much—what I  comprehend I can’t assimilate with what I “know.”

One can learn some sort of cosmic plan is behind the universe and the development of “life.” Or one can learn the universe—including homo sapiens—is a cosmic accident. One can discover the theory of evolution is incontrovertible. Or one can read Texas newspapers and find out why it’s not so. 

I’ve already written about all of this stuff here, and about my life-long, somewhat erratic and contradictory thinking about epistemology, ontology, evolution, and why I could never in a thousand years get the hang of using an I-Phone. But this stuff has been on my mind again in the past few days. 

This morning  I realized I didn’t have studs my ear, unusual because I’ve had two in that ear virtually constantly since 1980 when I entered a relationship in which a public sign was required for people to understand its dynamics. I took them out last Friday to have an MRI on my poor brain. My neurologist wants to see it for himself rather than relying on 15-year-old scans He keeps mentioning surgery on the TLE spots. I tell him he can have the whole brain to play with when I die. That doesn’t end the discussion. I took the diamond and the sapphire out of my earlobe four days ago and forgot to put them back. I decided to find different sparkles to wear. Yes, I am too old for such nonsense. It’s probably “arrested development” from being in love with Yul Brynner in The King and I when I was eleven.

I went looking for other ear studs. I live 24/7 in what most people would consider an intolerable mess. Stuff is here, there, and everywhere. I knew the box of sparkles (all genuine, some ridiculously expensive) was in the top drawer of my antique high-boy (burled walnut inlays on light wood, original brass pulls circa 1879). In the drawer were three socks I can’t find mates for, two empty underwear boxes, two hand towels, the plastic bag my C-Pap mask came in, other pieces of clothing, family pictures in frames, Mom’s old red-leather New Testament, two lacquered boxes with lots of interesting stuff in them, a box with a dozen or so rings I’d wear if I could stand to have anything on my hands, two original Colt Studios photographs given to me by a friend twenty years ago (worth something in some gay second-hand store), and two watches and a cameo pendant that belonged to my late ex-wife’s grandmother. The box with the diamonds, garnet, and the other sapphire was not in the drawer.

The stuff of my life.

My life? Exactly what is my life? That is not an idle question or an epistemological dilemma. Friends tell me to stop fretting: it is not a matter of angst that we may be living in parallel universes or that quantum mechanics has opened the possibility that we are flying off in all directions at all times and the fact is that nothing is real or solid, and we just think it is. The epistemology of ontology. The knowledge of being. I have no (certain) knowledge of my being.

When I was a kid having daily seizures (I wish TLE seizures were visible—I might have had care before I was 38 years old), I began to assume, since nothing “felt” real much of the time, that nothing IS real. Heisenberg’s principle in my brain? I knew the more I thought about what was whirling in my mind, the less certain I could be of my position in time and space. I knew the less I thought about the dissociation in my brain, the more certain I was of my place in time and space.

An then one day I discovered that I will die. That set off a chain reaction of trying to figure out whether or not I was really alive or ever had been, and if I were alive or ever had been, what that meant for the rest of my existence and why it had to end, but at the same time how bizarre were all of those theories and beliefs about eternal life that filled the hymns I played (and loved) as a child.

There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way,
To prepare us a dwelling place there.
In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore:
In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

The beautiful shore?

So now I am old; I must, by law, sign up for Medicare within six weeks. Got it? 65 approaches. My recurrent theme, the dreadful awareness that it’s all going to be over almost immediately for me. It could happen today.

And then what. Whom will I meet on the beautiful shore? No one. Because the beautiful shore isn’t. Or is it? And if the electrons whirling around at a speed that only a quantum physicist can think about that make up what is commonly held by other human beings to be my body suddenly stop whirling in exactly the same way they are right now, and the electrons that make up my breath stop moving in and out, and that causes the sub-atomic particles of the electrical synapses that make up my awareness to stop doing whatever it is they are doing right now (or do I—or some creature I can’t even comprehend—imagine they are doing what they are doing), and my “awareness” of myself ceases, then what happens to all of these sub-atomic particles whirling dizzyingly around the matrix that I experience as ME? Don’t they keep whirling dizzily around without me? And do I go on to the beautiful shore, or does the illusion that is “me” simply cease to exist and no one and no thing and no subatomic particle is any the wiser. Except I am not even aware that I am not aware any more.

And my brother and sister are left to sort out all that stuff in my high boy bureau and get rid of all this stuff floating around in my apartment and my nieces get my diamonds and then the universe (if there is a universe) waits for their subatomic particles to stop whirling so it can have back all of its stuff. People and diamonds.

A student, with all of the hubris a Freshman can muster, assaulted me with Thomas Jefferson’s words, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” (Declaration of Independence). The student was “proving” to me, a liberal, and no-doubt communist academic, that the Declaration of Independence is—therefore, American society is—Christian. I had said the words related to “God” in the Declaration have meanings specific to the remnants of Enlightenment thought in Jefferson’s writing and have nothing to do with “religion.”  

There’s one small problem with calling on Divine Providence to prove that this is a “christian” nation. “Divine Providence” is an invention of the Puritans and has a very short history of relationship with human beings, at least as recounted in the scriptures of Christianity. She is not in the Bible (OK, eight times in the Revised Standard Version of the Apocryphal books). 

If you’re one of those people who believes Biblical inerrancy (or even one of those people for whom Bible-based belief is important, inerrant or not) you need to get over your dependence on Divine Providence.  

There. Sorry. That’s more hostile than I ever mean to sound.  I have my reasons.  

When I was a kid, our family made pilgrimages to Kansas City to visit relatives. One of my uncles had (has) a partner who earned his graduate degree in painting at the art school of the Nelson Art Gallery. We’d trek over to the museum for cultural education. On one of those visits—which I loved—I found Thomas Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” It was there on loan, I think (how could I remember that?). I had reasons to be attracted to the painting—a cute boy about my age, a blue suit to die for, and a vague sense that being painted by a famous artist would somehow insure immortality (I knew the painting came from the time of the American Declaration of Independence). My memory may be inaccurate. I may have stood in front of some other large portrait and somehow confused it with a later knowledge of the Gainsborough. I don’t know for sure, but a few years later I found out the painting was in Huntington Museum, and I went there specifically to see the boy in blue that had haunted some tiny part of my mind and memory since childhood.  

A mystery happened to me as I stared at that painting (or whatever painting it was) as a child. My mind and body moved apart from each other, as they first had in Mrs. Hall’s second-grade class—which may have been about the same time. But this time the feeling was not only OK, but I relished it, and a strange feeling of peace pervaded both my mind and my body, a feeling that I have had many times since, always unexpected, not always—but often—at the time of a seizure. It was like hearing Blanche Thebom. It was like the first time I heard a symphony play Beethoven. I had a fleeting moment of the peace two days ago when I attended the Latin American Music festival at TCU and heard a performance of “Festival” by the young Peruvian composer Jimmy López (and met him). I may have to drag myself back to Ft. Worth Saturday evening to hear Miguel Harth-Bedoya  (also from Peru) conduct Jimmy Lopez’ new work Lago de Lágrimas (“Lake of Tears”). 

But I digress (I usually delete hypergraphic digressions if I want to make any sense at all). The mystery of “Blue Boy.” Somehow I have hunted, waited expectantly, despaired of, hoped for that mystery every day of my life since. Often, the mystery and my epileptic mind seem somehow connected. But not always. Remember the Oregon Coast.  My religious experience(s).

Don’t, please don’t think about the often-described and “scientifically” studied connection between epilepsy (particularly the Temporal Lobe variety) and “religious experience.” What I’m thinking about is “Providence.” What I’m thinking about is that Providence has had nothing to do with my wandering into mystery. God did not send my family to the Nelson Art Gallery. God did not put Blanche Thebom in the way of my consciousness. My friend Janet, who has written about Miguel Harth-Bedoya and knows him, dragged me to Ft. Worth Tuesday evening, not the Holy Spirit—and certainly not “Divine Providence.”  

That is, without doubt, some kind of heresy to Christians, at least Evanglicals and Fundamentalists. The idea “Divine Providence” is an extra-Biblical idea born of the need to justify the English Reformation. And the Reformation, according to a growing number of scholars, invented “religion.” So the English Reformation is responsible for the idea “Divine Providence.” I have searched the Bible. It’s not there.  You may say a great many happenings in the Bible are providential,” (Easton’s Bible Dictionary of 1897, for example, lists dozens of them—all of which I looked up after my student’s attack—but they are interpolations of the idea of “Providence” onto passages that mean something else).  

“Divine Providence” is, as far as I can see, one of those made-up-out-of-whole-cloth ideas designed to differentiate between “us” and “them.” Belief in God’s protection for us necessarily means that God is not protecting them. And in order to know who the them is that God is not protecting, we have to get our theology very, very, very clear. And if you happen not to give your assent to even one small part of what we believe, not only will Divine Providence not protect you, but you are no longer a part of our “religion.”  

In early modern religious controversy… attention … focused upon those external, objective aspects of the lives of the faithful as it became an urgent matter to identify those crucial differences upon which eternal salvation was thought to depend. . . . specific creeds and ritual practices became the essence of the newly ideated “religion.” True religion now had less to do with sincerity of commitment than with whether or not the propositions to which one gave intellectual assent were true.***

How is this rambling connected? America is not a “Christian” nation because the colonists did not share the propositions of “religion.” All forms of Christianity are not alike (see the Glorious Revolution in England or the Culture Wars in the United States). Christianity is an “us” and “them” religion. And even if America is a “Christian” nation, I am growing increasingly weary of “religion.” Just as Divine Providence is a made-up (mostly political) idea, so is religion. I’m growing ever more bold in talking and writing about my “spiritual experience” (epileptic or not). True religion for me has to do with the sense of the numinous—the Blue Boy, Blanche Thebom, and the music of Jimmy Lopez. I’m tired of “religion” that  “…focuse[s] upon those external, objective aspects of the lives of the faithful…” ignoring the Blue Boy and Blanche Thebom, and Jimmy Lopez. Reality. 

The Composer

More about that soon. But for now, I want only to ask who outside religion has a job for an old organist/pianist who needs not to retire until he can get full Social Security benefits. 

…[trial and temptation] may disturb our preconceptions about what a ‘real’ life should be, if it is to display a “divine design,” as it was called in the Enlightenment era (and today primarily appealed to by neo-evangelicals)… the issue begins to shatter the modem religion of success and general progressivism, the remains of a Puritan providentialism. ****  

*** Harrison, Peter.  “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries.” Journal of Religion 86.1 (Jan2006): 91-92.
**** Gregersen, Niels Henrik. “Trial and temptation: An essay in the multiple logics of faith.” Theology Today, October 2000.

                   Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you
                   tightens— that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-
                   esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. 
                   .  . . .This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you.
                                                                                              —Pema Chödrön **

The Rocky Shore

Practicing “the way” (however one describes or believes in “the way”) has always been a difficult project for me. I’m a Northern European (a mixture of Irish, Scots-Irish, Saxon, and so on, if you must know) without a shred of patience for thinking that doesn’t come from wintry weather and hard rocks and stormy seas buffeting people around unless they hunker down and take charge of things (I’m pretty close, I think, to one of Garrison Keillor’s Norwegian bachelor farmers—are they gay? Except, of course, I am not at all a “take charge” kind of guy). So I am left with my Northern European genetics and socialization not working very well and disdain for any other “Way” that might help me navigate through my life. 

Twenty years ago, living on the North Shore of Massachusetts (north of Boson), I practiced Yoga with a gentle, spiritually evolved (I’m not being sarcastic) creature. If she was of Northern European extraction (don’t you love that word—we were “extracted” from some life-form), she had somehow managed to extract herself from it. My favorite place on the North Shore, however, on the ocean near where I lived—in case you want proof that rockiness is part of my heritage—was Halibut Point at Rockport (yes, that’s the town’s name). A place of such grand and solid granite extrusion next to the ocean that it was for a century until the 1920s a granite quarry and now must be a State Park because it is useless for any kind of development. Much of New England is built on and from this solid rock. 

Then I moved to Texas. All bets were off as far as spiritual evolution away from the granite of my heritage goes. The Lutherans of Texas have to hold onto their stony heritage just as Søren Kierkegaard and the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers did (do). And the Baptists aren’t much fun, either. Nor is anyone else. (How did the lovely, warm, inviting Winspear Opera House end up in Dallas?)  What’s the point? Here’s the point.  

A Shenpa Point

Since I was in second grade (about 55 or so years ago), I have lived, I think, in what Pema Chödrön might call the shenpa (if I understand her correctly—which is, I’m sure, a stretch). She doesn’t have the right example for me—very seldom does someone say anything to me that “causes [me] to feel a fundamental, underlying insecurity of the human experience that is inherent in [an]. . . .illusory world. . . .[because I] want to have ground under [my] feet.” I don’t need anyone else to say such a thing. I do it to myself. 

OK, I’m not getting all Eastern-Religion-ish on you. The example I’d use for my own shenpa is my 55 years of beating up on myself because of the seizures that make me crazy, and for which I have almost only negative language. But I live daily in a space where “…[shenpa] starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming [seizures], or anger at them, denigrating [myself].” You don’t believe me? The friend who first told me about Pema Chödrön pointed out to me that in my writing on Sunday past, I said that when I write because I can’t help it, I “1.hate myself for it, or 2. cry.” I’d have to check it with Pema Chödrön, of course, but it sounds a little like her definition of shenpa to me. 

Last night I walked to the Latino supermarket next door where I do much of my grocery shopping (that’s a non-Norwegian Bachelor Farmer thing to do, don’t you think?). As I was putting on my shoes and jacket to go out, I realized that I was in the middle of period of—of what, I’m never quite sure even though it’s been happening daily for 55 years. I felt somewhat the way I remember a hangover feeling (it’s been twenty-three years, so I’m not sure I remember correctly). My head felt stuffed with (what, cotton?), my eyes felt as if they were bulging from my head, my ability to stand up felt compromised even though I was standing quite normally, and the world surrounding my front door had an ambience of unreality. I didn’t like any of it. 

Outside, the temperature was cool enough to feel like a pleasant, gentle slap in my face as I walked to the market. 

The instant I stepped inside the market, the full force of what I years ago came to know as a seizure took over my mind. The market receded into a place outside of my reach, an unreality that (somehow the experience was—is always—connected) intensified the head-filled-with-cotton sensation. The lights (white florescent) also intensified and seemed to be moving everything in the store—except the noise—farther away from me. Can I ever explain the feeling that light is pulling the world away from me? I was somewhat confused, knowing that I had come to buy a couple of things but not immediately remembering what they were. I wandered a bit, assuming that eventually I would see something that would jar me back into proximity with the real world. That’s what happened. I needed trash bags, milk for my coffee, and ice cream. I found them, paid (speaking Spanish with the clerk who greeted me in Spanish because she’s one of the clerks who knows I like to try to screw my courage to the sticking point and speak in her language). 

On my way the one-quarter block back to my apartment, the shenpa hit full-force with the “spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming [the seizure], or anger at [it], denigrating [my]self.” Why on earth should I denigrate myself? Why should I be angry that, once again as happens nearly every day, the electrical display in my brain became a little annoying, a lot frightening, and somehow proof that I’m weird, bad, or unfit to be part of “normal” human society. 

Renunciation, shenluk, means turning shenpa upside-down, or shaking it up. The interesting thing is that there is no way to really renounce shenpa….In the Buddhist teachings, it’s really not about trying to cast something out but about seeing clearly and fully experiencing the shenpa. 

I know I fully experience the seizure. God, do I know it! I describe it pretty well, don’t you think? But what I am beginning to wonder about is whether or not I can learn to “[see] clearly and fully [experience] the shenpa, to observe it and know it and (oh my Northern European God, NO!) accept it so it simply is, so it does not pull ME down as it spirals down? Does that make sense? Not really to me. But the idea that I could observe both the seizure and my reaction to it and in that way take away its power. . . That may take some more work.

A Norwegian Bachelor Farmer?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

** All quotations are from: Chödrön, Pema. “The shenpa syndrome.”
http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/shenpa3a.php (accessed 17 Nov 2009).

It’s Sunday, and I’m supposed to be doing one of two things other than writing this nonsense. Getting ready to go to work (church) or,  more importantly, grading student essays. And here I am, stuck writing madly away and trying not to 1. hate myself for it, or 2. cry. I told myself falling asleep that grading papers would be the activity of the two hours I have before I have to leave for church. And here I am. Writing. Writing. Writing.

Re: what I wrote here and elsewhere yesterday: the last time I had a “religious experience” worth talking or thinking or writing about was this past summer alone on the Oregon coast. I cannot not write this now, but I hate having to do it.

Any TLEptic will understand without explanation what I am trying to say. I doubt that anyone else will. (If God were not missing in action, I could stop writing this and get to work doing what I need to be doing. H/she, however, has gone away somewhere, and I am left to my own devices here. The greatest gift I could receive would be an end to this hyper-writing.)

I was walking on Paradise Point beach at Port Orford. I walked from the parking lot to the end of the beach at the promontory of the end of Cape Blanco where the lighthouse is. The day was overcast (see the picture on the heading of this blog) and cold for August (cold by Texas standards, not unusual for the coast of Oregon). Three other people were on the beach, and I quickly left them behind.

As I walked toward the end of the beach (I don’t know for sure how far it is), I was drawn to the water’s edge, took off my shoes, rolled up my pants legs, and walked in the absurdly cold water. I had no thought of translating my experience into words.

I was not aware of having a seizure. In fact, I was rejoicing in the clarity of my mind, in the absence of the electronic firestorm that sometime takes place, I’m told, in my left Temporal Lobe. I was headed for the end of the beach behind the huge upright rock twenty or thirty yards out in the water (the tide was out). I couldn’t tell exactly how far it was because fog shrouded the Cape. I could see the flash of the lighthouse light, but I could not see the lighthouse, and I knew the lighthouse is not at the end of the promontory. I walked alone, absorbing cold air, salt air, clean air, breathing in and out, becoming more and more aware of every cell of my body, and reveling in gratitude (gratitude directed to whom or what I wasn’t sure) that I was alone in this unspoiled place.

As I walked in the edge of the ocean, the ocean began to extend itself out to the horizon. I know, I know, you will say that it already did. That’s what oceans do. But the ocean unfolded itself, rolled itself back as I watched. The undulation of the surf was exactly the necessary disruption of the view. The motion was not, as surf had always seemed before, an unending series of discreet waves crashing offshore a few yards and the foamy edges washing up around my ankles. The ocean was all one. I could sense the molecules splashing at my feet: H₂O. Everyone knows hydrogen and helium are the basic molecular building blocks of the universe. That doesn’t matter. Calcium—Ca, magnesium—Mg, sodium—Na, and dozens more.H₂O, Ca, Mg, Na sliding over the sand (silicon dioxide—SiO₂  here?), and foaming up around my feet. It was all one. I felt the hardened molecules under my feet and the molecules of and suspended in water. And out to the horizon, shrouded in fog. I knew the same molecules were pulsating together to make the waves, and the waves were conjoined with every other undulation of H₂O, Ca, Mg, Na on the earth in one unbroken moving, life-filled, mass that seemed to my mind to be an enormity, but is in reality a speck in the eye of the universe. All one, including the H₂O, Ca, Mg, Na of my own body, and my mind somehow made up of the elemental universe undulating as far as I could see. And I was the focal point of the entire experience and at the same time unconditionally insignificant standing as an elemental part of the reality of the one water covering the face of the deep. And whatever God is, God was. And wherever God was, God was there. And I weep this morning again for the joy I knew then and in the sorrow to know that one day I will simply be a part of the reality—not with a consciousness to love it and be sustained by it, but part only of the elemental structure. And all I could think of was “like a Mammy bending over her baby,”** and I knew whatever the force the idea the entity the reality that was heaving, surging swelling through the oneness I could see through to the mystery of the fog, itself part of the oneness, the reality was like a Mammy bending over me and I was at peace with myself and with the ocean.

That clarity of thought and senses comes seldom, too seldom, unexpectedly. I almost always have a preparation, an aura, a warning for such events which disrupts my certain knowledge of what happens. When it comes unexpectedly, I know I have “Put out my hand and touched the Face of God” *** (pardon me, John Magee for theft and anyone else for demeaning his words and turning them to sentimentality). 

Then he stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas –
He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed –
He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled –
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down….

….Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image. **

** Johnson, James Weldon (1871-1938). “The Creation.” God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Electronic Version. http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/johnson/johnson.html
*** Magee, John Gillespie, Jr. (June 9, 1922 – December 11, 1941). “High Flight.” Library of Congress, 1942.

"...from the lighthouse evermore..."

God.
God is.
God is not.
God is not kind.
God is not kind or helpful.
God is not knowable.
God is not.

Bipolar Preoccupation with Death
+Thoughts of death
+Feeling dead or detached
Emotional Pain of Depression
+Despair
+Hopelessness

Black Hole; Hubble Telescope

I dread mornings. I would give anything for a way to begin the day other than awakening to morning. Because morning means I must write. God (if God exists) is not knowable at 4 AM. The cats watch me make coffee (having given in to the necessity of being awake). They paddle off, back to their favorite places (they jockey for position—one always on the shelf above my desk) to sleep until it’s time for sane creatures to be awake. They know the sun salutation does not happen until sun up. I once practiced the sun salutation on the banks of the Amazon. 

I digress. God is not. God is not kind. God is not knowable. If God were, if God were God, surely I would not feel so lost. Adrift in a sea of unknowing and unjoying. I fear the end. The end of consciousness, the end of attachment to the real. “The Cloud of unknowing.” Not in a medieval sense of unknowing God’s will, but unknowing what I have experienced. Of unknowing whether or not I am alive. God has removed God’s self from me already, so the only thing left to remove from me is me. The ultimate unknowing and unjoying. I am overcome with tiredness at four/five/six in the morning and try to go back to sleep. I know for certain that I am alone. Utterly and grievously alone. The snowshoes cat will not let me go to bed alone, but will follow me there and insist on licking my nose. He will not cuddle, will not give me comfort. He needs no comfort. He needs only closeness. His cat-talk means something to him that I cannot decipher. 

Loneliness and grief are brothers. Each is my brother. I grieve the demise of my existence. I am told that the question of God comes down to the question whether or not I am alone in the universe. If I am not, God must exist. If I am, I cannot bear the sadness, the grieving of my life, your life—is your life like my life? Are we all “like the chaff that the wind blows away?” If my grief is real. If I understand what almost no one I know understands. If I admit something almost no one I know admits. If the fact—the inescapable fact—is that our religious comfort is an invention. If the end of my life is what it appears to be. If the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen of my body simply return to the soup of the stuff of the universe when I die. If the promise of eternal life comforts people who cannot look squarely in the eye the reality that they will die. “The seventeenth-century invention of religion established the intellectual horizons necessary for anthropological and philosophical inquiries into the nature, origin and purpose of the human predilection for trafficking with the supernatural,” says Matthew Day. (aa) “…Charles Darwin…and the problem of human uniqueness.” Oh, yes, the problem of human uniqueness. Not my uniqueness. No problem. But all of us together. Are we unique as a species? Are we different from my cats? The snowshoes will die. And the snowshoes will not—will he?—have some kind of eternal soul that will go on forever as Chachi the silly little cat. 

I rehash my grief and loneliness from the forever of the beginning of my conscious life. What other 30-something-year-old did I know (that was half my life ago) who read The Denial of Death (Ernst Becker, 1973). Friends thought I was crazy. We were in the whirl of graduate school, study, obsession with our musical practice, cruising the bars to find our husband of the evening. We didn’t have time to deny death. David W, may he rest in peace, warned me. “Stop reading shit like that!” I’ve been preoccupied for most of my life. 

We believe. No creature that does not have a religion is human. Period. That’s how the Europeans justified destroying the Aztecs, the Incas, the Tupinambas. That was the justification for slavery (the primitives of Africa had only superstition and not religion, so they were only 3/5^th human according to Article 1 of the United States Constitution). No creature without religion is human. Matthew Day explains it this way: 

When we consider the colonial discovery of religion’s absence. . .[it] looks less like a genuine anthropological discovery and more like a shrewdly Machiavellian line of political attack. By denying that a given indigenous population had a religion, the European agents of colonial expansion could simultaneously deny their full humanity as well: if religion was the sine qua non of human identity then any creature that lacked religion was, by definition, not human. (aa) 

Any creature that lacks religion is, by definition, not human.

Religion

I am not human. I lack religion. I am obsessed with religion—with the shapes and forms of my cultural religion. I am pissed off that my pastor is breaking the rules and substituting a lesson of her own choosing for the prescribed mandated inviolable fixed-for-centuries reading of the Proper scripture lessons for tomorrow. Worship will not happen. God will not show up. Jesus will not be known in the breaking of the bread. I will believe none of it. I crave to have it both ways: the religious paraphernalia must be absolutely correct because the religious ceremony will get us all to heaven. But there is no “truth” to any of it.

If the point of religion is somehow to help us deal with/help us prepare for/convince us of the inefficaciousness of death, then my deep and overwhelming religious experience is something other than religion. It is certainly other than faith. 

What is religion? What is it for? For comfort? assurance? For making one part of one’s community in a way that no one outside the religion can be? The Tupinamba, of whom I learned when I was on the Amazon, had a certainty of eternal life and a spiritual connection to their community that we high church Episcopalians and Lutherans can only approximate. We, of course, find it barbaric. In our denial of death, we find it barely (if at all) human. 

… for the Tupinamba, cannibalism was far from being a form of bestial rage. The victim, drawn from an alien tribe …. was led into the village in a solemn procession, he would live as an ambiguous kind of guest for many months. He took not only the house but the wife of a recently deceased Tupinamba warrior….and might even father a child with his new spouse. Finally he was killed and eaten. . . .he had the honour of being central to a reverent ceremony, surrounded by the formal assembly of the entire tribe, who ensured that every particle of his body was devoured. . . .The victim was physically and symbolically ‘incorporated’…. took on the identity of the dead warrior. (bb) 

Is this what makes one (or one’s tribe) human?

** Father John Claypool, Rector of Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
(aa)  Day, Matthew. ”Godless savages and superstitious dogs: Charles Darwin, imperial ethnography, and the problem of human uniqueness.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69.1 (Jan 2008): 49.
(bb)  Sugg, Richard. “Eating your enemy: Richard Sugg searches history to explain the phenomenon of aggressive cannibalism, following recent allegations from Iraq.” History Today 58.7 (2008): 22.

Tupinamba - not religion

Dave and Jon (Frederick Leighton - 19th century)

Yesterday I had an encounter with George W. Bush. Well, not an encounter—I saw neither the man nor much of his entourage. But his day-to-day activities interfaced with mine (love that jargon!).

What ego, you will say immediately. That I should think my activities are as important as those of the ex-President of the United States. Ha! I’m not going to say how it happened, because that would be telling too much in this public space about my day-to-day activities. As if that had ever before been a concern of mine.

The encounter presented me with food-for-thought: this guy in Greek mythology named Laocoön (Λαοκόων) was a priest and prophet in Troy. He tried to warn the Trojans about the Trojan Horse. That pissed off the gods, and they sent serpents from the sea to kill him and his sons off before the Greeks got into the city. So I was headed into my office, and a campus police officer stopped me and asked to see my ID and my driver’s license and said it was OK for me to go into the building because I was “on the list.” 

That’s what made me think about old Laocoön—and, on the periphery, Cassandra, (Κασσάνδρα, “she who entangles men”) daughter of the king and queen of Troy. Old Laocoön was killed by snakes. Cassandra had had her ears licked clean by snakes, which gave her the power to hear the future. Of course, Apollo, whose love for her was unrequited, fixed her: she could hear and tell the future, but no one would ever believe her, so she went crazy. These two, Cassandra and Laocoön tried to warn the Trojans that the Horse would destroy the city, but no one would listen to them. 

Don’t ask me why the officer at the door made me think of Laocoön. But that’s what happened. And Cassandra (Κασσάνδρα). I have to put my regular disclaimer here: I’m not comparing myself to either one of them; I’m not saying that anything I’m thinking about applies to me; I’m not a danger to myself or anyone else, especially W.. This is simply free association and the place to which my TLE mind guides my hypergraphic mind this morning. 

So I’m thinking about Greek mythology, which I do more than is healthy, most likely, and I wonder about this one officer sitting at a door checking people off “the list” and letting them in under the assumption that, because they are on “the list,” they are not up to no good. I had the word “psychopath” rattling around in my head. 

A couple of days before, I read part of an article that came up in a search of an academic database that I was doing for something completely unrelated, but I read it because the title intrigued me: “Deconstructing the Psychopath: a Critical Discursive Analysis.” I get a charge out of any title with “deconstruct” in it because I’ve never been quite sure what the word means—even after PhD seminars in “deconstructing” various things. 

The article had the following statement in it:
Split between those searching for organic causes to explain behavior and those who openly reject any and all causes of psychopathy, except those that are freely chosen, descriptions of psychopaths remain burdened by an inability (1) to explain psychopathy using the history and tools of psychoanalysis; (2) to distinguish psychopathy from other behavioral disorders and syndromes, such as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), attention deficit disorder (ADD), bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and schizophrenia, to name a few; and (3) by a legacy of catch-all descriptions of moral insanity dating from the nineteenth century…” (aa). 

Whoa! “…distinguish psychopathy from other behavioral disorders and syndromes, such as. . . bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE)…” BPD and TLE are “behavioral disorders?” I know they make people (me) do, feel, and write about weird things, but “behavioral disorders?” I beg to differ. And so, I think, does Aristotle (might as well bring in all the Greeks we can). He says, “Hence the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. But substance is actuality, and thus soul is the actuality of a body as above characterized” (bb). My soul is the actuality of my body which has the quirks of TLE and BPD. And Federman et al say that those things are “behavioral disorders and syndromes.” 

And the keeper of the gate at my office let me in without as so much as a by your leave (except showing my IDs).

But here’s the fun part. All of this worked itself around in my mind to the story of David and Jonathan from the Hebrew scripture. I have no idea how it happened. There was a connection at some point. In fact, all of this may have begun with David and Jonathan. I know I’ve got a commentary on I Samuel sitting on my bookshelf, and I remember yesterday looking up the story (without finding much more than the Sunday School version I learned half-century ago—they were bosom buddies and best friends and all that). Somehow I got from there to the article by Federman et al, and from there to George W., and from there to Troy, and from there to Aristotle, and from there to El Greco! 

You see, I did a quick Google search for David and Jonathan, and what emerged is another of those ridiculous Bible interpretation arguments between those who are certain the Bible proves the sinfulness of homosexuality, and those who think the Bible proves the sacredness of homosexuality. I’m not the least bit interested in that nonsense. Here are two URLs for anyone who wants to waste their time (cc). 

But I was interested enough in Dave and Jon to do a Google Image search to see what art they had inspired. Not very much. But I did a search for them with El Greco to see what The Greek might have done with them. And, lo and behold, I came across El Greco’s painting of Κασσάνδρα –the rest, as you might say, is history. 

Is my writing narcissistic regurgitation? Are the strange little vagaries of my mind interesting to anyone but me? I haven’t a clue. But as I read the above, I am intrigued by some of the list of “characteristics” of those with TLE redacted from the work of Norman Geschwind:  “circumstantiality (excessive verbal output), hypergraphia. . . .and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas . . .”  Self-diagnosis is, of course, dangerous, absurd, and mostly just stupid. But the wanderings in my mind from George W. to Λαοκόων and Κασσάνδρα, to psychopathy, to Dave and Jon, to El Greco and back to Λαοκόων, Κασσάνδρα and back to George W. are entertaining to me. If the wanderings are not interesting to anyone else, then why are you still reading? And if what they really amount to is undisciplined thinking, then why don’t all undisciplined thinkers write this kind of stuff. And why am I taking all this carbamazepine and Lamotrigine (which may cause a rash that can kill a person)?  Are my doctors quacks?  

(aa) Federman, Cary, Dave Holmes, and Jean Daniel Jacob. “Deconstructing the Psychopath: a Critical Discursive Analysis.” Cultural Critique 72 (Spring 2009): 36-65.
(bb) Aristotle. On the Soul (350 B.C.E.) Translated by J. A. Smith
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.2.ii.html#388
(cc) http://www.pleaseconvinceme.com/index/Were_David_and_Jonathan_Homosexual_Lovers;
http://mccanchorage.com/?p=165

Jerry (pervert) Prevo