Sandy Hook School.... in memoriam

15 December 2012 -- Reflecting on the Sandy Hook School shooting, and about some of the "bright lights" out there who are trying to make the case that teachers could have minimized the tragedy had they only had guns.

 

For a reasoned analysis, and information, on the hysteria surrounding the Gun Control conversation in America, view the link to Rachael Maddow here.

Bellybuttons in the Lost and Found.

Sometimes we are just lost. Not necessarily in the “real” or outside world, but internally. It may be, though, that the Human Mind-Body comes equipped with its own built-in navigation system, in the form of the modest bellybutton, which can help us to get back home again if we just stand still long enough to pay attention.

The umbilicus, the navel, the tummy-button… the (seemingly) commonplace bellybutton, is actually much less anodyne than it might appear at first blush. There are in fact many denizens of the bellybutton world. There are innies, which, according to at least one source, may serve a variety of interesting purposes ranging from storage space (our own personal lint containment center…), to a handy way to tell twins apart (who’d a thunk?), to a drinking glass (don’t ask). Then there are outties, which also, according to the same source, express a diversity of functionalities, from trampoline, to microphone, to doorbell. Just for the record—it does seem rather clear that the hyperlinked source of this information is not really in the business of information, but rather of working through the ramifications of the 3^rd grade imagination and the one-track mind.

            That said, however, the belly button has not only been an inspiration for humor; it has also been a source of controversy.  In the throes of newfangled evolutionism, for instance, the nineteenth century understood that the bellybutton was central to understanding a great mystery about Adam and Eve. If Adam was like all men, and the Apostle Paul does remind us that Adam was our “father” according to the flesh, then Adam must have had a bellybutton; but this would also imply that he had a pre-history that is neither recorded for us nor suggested in the biblical texts, and which in fact even flies in the face of the Edenic narrative. Eve, of course, did not partake in divine equality and is therefore let off the hook; she could not have had a bellybutton of her own to contemplate because she was drafted from the rib of Adam. Unless of course she did. Imagine the nightmare for the Renaissance artists, who must have struggled with the idea of how to depict an Adam and Eve who looked like our human ancestors, but who were not, logically speaking, inalienably endowed by their Creator with all that our post-natal humanness implies.

            And then, of course, there is also the controversial viewpoint expressed by the Greek comedic poet Aristophanes who, in Plato’s Symposium, reached the epitome of his humoristic glory, and erotic insight, with his discourse on Eros. Aristophanes imagines original man as a sort of one-eyed jack, only plumper, joined in the middle with heads on both ends, who was prone to insolence toward and undue aggravation of the Gods. Says Aristophanes: when the Gods reached the end of Their collective rope with these tiresome human trouble-makers, Zeus directed Apollo to slice them all in half, creating a bunch of one-eyed, one-legged folk, each fully sexed and hopping around looking for their other half to rub up against, but, failing that, certainly willing to rub up against just about everything else. But this was only the beginning, of course, because the Greek Gods also seemed to be artistic in Their creative problem-solving with respect to humans (the problem was how and where to tuck in all the skin left over from the cutting and slicing of the original human); so reads the Jowett translation:

Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw tight, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.

And so the knotty (naughty?) history of the curious bellybutton began its meandering journey through the world of men.

The physical bellybutton, however, this very material center of our bodies, is not exactly the subject of this Reflection. Rather, what really interests us is the immaterial bellybutton, which constitutes the internal center, the North Star of our-Self. We reflect in metaphor, of course, for the Self is not precisely a thing, nor does it “have” precisely a center. There is no true center of the Self beyond the physical location of our bodies standing behind their very-physical bellybuttons at any given moment. Our Self is not defined by some “What” that is at our core, but rather by all the stuff that moves directionally away from, or toward, the locus “where” this body (center, ego, self) lives… everything is going in every direction to or from this locus, this ambulatory GPS point in the center. Yeats saw this metaphor-idea as a general truth about the world, which also necessarily tells the story of our bodies – that things fall apart; there is no center, and even if there were, it still would not hold.

            The model for this idea of the immaterial bellybutton, which was understood originally to be the bellybutton of the world, comes from highest antiquity, from the Greek omphalos, which was found in Delphi at the oracle of Apollo. Plutarch tells us that Epimenides of Crete, sage and epic poet (early 5^th century B.C.), “refuted the [original mythological] story that eagles or swans setting out from the ends of the earth met in the middle at Delphi, the so-called Omphalos): There was no Omphalos, either in the center of the earth or of the sea. If any there be, it is visible to the gods, not visible to mortals.”

            This concept went on to have a very fruitful career in the history of ideas with Mircea Eliade, the famous philosopher of religion, who, in a very Jungian theory, identified the immaterial omphalos of the world with man’s collective unconsciousness. This is not inconsistent with the greater Greek worldview, however, which saw the material world, the earth, as a physical type of dwelling, a physis, but the immaterial world that is created by the interpreting mind (Descartes’ later imaginando or the imagination), as an intelligible kind of dwelling, the kosmos, the world “seen,” then organized and tidied up by human thought and language.

So why are we interested in reflecting on internal bellybuttons? Perhaps just to give ourselves some perspective so that the next time we are throwing stones into a pond in our external dwelling in order to watch the concentric rings, we remember that with our mind’s eye we are actually also “seeing” that in those very physical rings the metaphor of our internal dwelling-life is also being writ, but just in a visible language. When we realize that Our Life, both material and immaterial, happens in the midst of concentric rings moving out away from us, then we also begin to understand certain organic relational truths – that things that are closer to us are inevitably more relevant to us, and why it is also and necessarily true that things in our more remote rings “feel” less relevant to us. To be sure, things remote to us are not in and of themselves less important, they are just ex-centric to us – more removed from our center, further away, less immediately imposing.

            It is also important for us to keep our Internal Bellybuttons turned on and tuned in for all sorts of relationships (personal, interpersonal, and other), because relationships are, well, relational or perspectival. There is no such thing as neutrality. Points of view, both for the philosopher and the psychologist, begin with the Self/I; then they expand to include the immediately surrounding environment.

The bellybutton, both as a material and then as an intellectual location of the individual, allows us to pinpoint our position within the cluster of relationships and gridlines that crisscross the map of our Life, to determine where exactly the Self is with respect both to the earth (physis), and to the world fashioned by our understanding (kosmos). On this very special map, however, there is no true and unmoving North Star; there is only us standing alone at a very odd Corner where the earth and the world intersect. This is the intersection of the Lost & Found, where sometimes we find the Self we seek, and sometimes we lose it; but the truth is that all the possibilities of our life meet and crisscross at that Corner.

            The bellybutton is the fulcrum of the individual’s mooring, the starting point at the interior of the circles from which he is able to see his world, and then to create it. The bellybutton therefore is as interesting as it is important. It is interesting because of the onion-skinned nature of our reality, which means that according to our Will and Whim we can flip, or invert, the various layers of interpretation and meaning. This is one reason why Art, in all of its forms and manifestations, intrigues us so; because both conceptually and materially, Art asks of us that we should apprehend truly, that we should actually see both with our body’s eyes as well as with our mind’s eye, the world as transformed, as turned on its head. Human perception of the material world is essentially a bellybutton type of experience, because it is centered upon and framed around the mind’s activity of reality-construction.

            We live in a rather curious moment of human history, a moment when the world has become small. The big, wide ‘World’ has been transformed into global village, which in turn demands from us that we very deliberately invert from the Self outwards, both philosophically and psychologically, the normative and natural order of embracing our world … where we are asked to include the Self rather as an integral piece of the surrounding world… where we are asked to consider a dissolution of the Self into the interests of the whole. Welcome to the Lost & Found.