March's Blogpost_Sightedness

Life’s melodies play themselves out through the Songlines of a spirited tango, weaving their airs for the benefit of dancers shrouded in blindness. This is a fundamental reality about Men in their World, and we must each of us attend to this challenge as we may.

           

So what does it mean to be sighted or blind? It is, after all, a rather famous question pointedly put to us all by the Jewish Son of Man: "Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?" (Mark 8:18), which couples nicely with his idea of the seemingly natural blindness of the self with respect to itself: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Mt. 7:3-4).

            There is an important instance of blindness in the life of Paul before he was the least of the Apostles. He was on his way to persecute Christians in Damascus:

3 As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; 4 and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" […] 8 Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; and leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus. 9 And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

At the end of the three days Paul recovers his sight and gets baptized into the new faith. It is up to the reader to determine how much of this story belongs to the world of metaphor, and how much to phenomenal history.

            Finally, the author of the NT book of Revelation puts a slightly different, more mystical and epistemological spin on the idea, using Hearing instead of Seeing to speak to the idea of our Receptivity, when he tells us, or perhaps it is more truly an admonition, that although the speech or meaning might be veiled to the Many, it is because they are “blind” and hear not: “Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (2:17).

            Neil Gaiman cleverly chose to mix these metaphors in his 2001 religio-fantastic novel, American Gods, when he wrote: “There's none so blind as those who will not listen.”

Is it not a familiar trope of the poets that among the sighted “There is none so blind as he who will not see…,” while many times the blind, after the fashion of the sightless seer, Tireseas, are gifted with sight—they just visualize their clarity differently? Similarly, in The Attainment of Happiness the Persian philosopher Alfarabi (c. 872-950/951) wisely reminds us about the wise man, the true philosopher, in his relationship to the state, that he cannot be faulted for those around him who simply will not be receptive to True Philosophy, who just will not see—“If after reaching this stage [of true philosophy] no use is made of [the wise man], the fact that he is of no use to others is not his fault but the fault of those who either do not listen or are not of the opinion that they should listen to him.”

Various Types of Non-Receptivity, and Famous Blind People in Western Literature.

            In his novel, The Trial, which was published in 1925, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) depicts his protagonist, Joseph K., as intelligent, but ignorant of, or blind to, the irrational nature, the truth, of his reality. One morning, totally ignorant both of his crime and of his accuser, Josef K. was put under arrest. K. could not grasp the idea that he was really under arrest, and he was sure that the officers who had been sent to his home had simply made a mistake, because he was absolutely unaware of ever having committed any crime, and he was ignorant of what charges might have been brought against him, and by whom those charges might have been filed.

            Accused, judged and condemned, although he was ignorant of the crime that he could have committed, or must have committed, K. had to be punished -executed- in order that the rightful demands of the Law should be propitiated. And yet, as is the case with every innocent man who must finally come to grips with the reality of his condemnation and the inevitability of his punishment, the night before his execution, and filled with perhaps a metaphysical, but otherwise incomprehensible consolation, K.'s last plea of innocence would be to reach out impulsively, blindly, to the heavens.

            In the person of Josef K., an Everyman who is judged, condemned and executed without ever having learned the nature of the crime that he was supposed to have committed, or the identity of his accusers, Kafka exemplifies the type of moral guilt that constitutes the heart and soul of the Christian ethic in the modern world. In the Christianized world, Everyman K. is held accountable for a crime that he inherited as an Adamic birthright. He stands as a man stands before the Christian God: guilty of moral trespass in the person of Adam.

In the Seventh Book of his 1850 poem, The Prelude, English romantic poet, William Wordsworth (1770-1850), tells the tale of a poet who, “smitten” by the sight of a blind beggar, puzzles through the various layers of sightedness and blindness, narrative and reality.

                        As the black storm upon the mountain top

          Sets off the sunbeam in the valley, so                     620

          That huge fermenting mass of human-kind

          Serves as a solemn back-ground, or relief,

          To single forms and objects, whence they draw,

          For feeling and contemplative regard,

          More than inherent liveliness and power.

          How oft, amid those overflowing streets,

          Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said

          Unto myself, "The face of every one

          That passes by me is a mystery!"

          Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed          630

          By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,

          Until the shapes before my eyes became

          A second-sight procession, such as glides

          Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;

          And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond

          The reach of common indication, lost

          Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten

          Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)

          Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,

          Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest              640

          Wearing a written paper, to explain

          His story, whence he came, and who he was.

          Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round

          As with the might of waters; and apt type

          This label seemed of the utmost we can know,

          Both of ourselves and of the universe;

          And, on the shape of that unmoving man,

          His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,

          As if admonished from another world.

Shakespeare provides us with a similar illustration of blindness, from the perspective of Elizabethan England, in the Macbeth, which is, obviously, a theatrical treatise on the psychological effects that accompany the sentiment of moral guilt. In the person of Macbeth Shakespeare sketches the portrait of jealous desire; and the tragic action of the narration is born of a fatal meeting in which Macbeth's slumbering ambition is aroused and spurred by certain ambiguous prophecies that are proffered by the Weird Sisters. The Weird Sisters foster a deliberate malentendu between the real import of their prophecies concerning the kingly ambitions of Macbeth, and the meaning that Macbeth erroneously attributes to those prophecies, because it is the witches' intention, led by Hecate, to cause Macbeth to be carried away by the criminal consequences of his blind ambitious desire.

            More than a simple exercise in morality, however, Macbeth is also a study in the different types of ambiguities that exist, or that can exist, in a world in which gods, and knowledge touching upon gods, are hidden behind an impenetrable cloak of obscurity. This is precisely the problem in the “world” of Christianity, after all: that knowledge has been replaced by belief; and, at best, belief is subject to any All and Sundry’s uninformed, blind, interpretation.

            When Macbeth arrives at the fatal rendezvous, he receives three predictions from the Weird Sisters. The first: "beware Macduff; beware the Thane of Fife"; the second: "Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn the power of man, for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth"; and the third: "Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him" (Act IV, Scene I, lns. 70ff, p. 781).  And just as Hecate had foreseen, once Macbeth was fully reassured by the apparent invulnerability "guaranteed" him by the prophecies, all the suspicion and doubt that had been tormenting him concerning his throne and Banquo's royal offspring vanished from his mind. He became completely blind.

            Confident that he was protected, if not blessed, by the hidden Powers of the world, Macbeth became as Macduff was later to describe him: "Not in the legions of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd in evils to top Macbeth" (Act IV, Scene III, lns. 55-56); for although the witches had assured him that he was shrouded in the "divine" garments of invincibility, Macbeth nevertheless took the precaution of having Macduff's family murdered in the absence of the general, (as per the oracle: "beware Macduff; beware the Thane of Fife,") in order both to ensure destiny's fidelity and his continued sovereignty.

            Macbeth believes he is protected by destiny's promise that he shall be invincible, "till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane," an occurrence that Macbeth naturally holds for impossible; so it is with astonishment and the beginnings of a profound sense of foreboding, that Macbeth receives a report that the impossible has in fact happened. For in a guard's account to the king:  "As I did stand my watch upon the hill, I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought, the wood began to move" (Act V, Scene IV, lns. 33-35).

            Macbeth listened to the guard's narration with a mixture of misbelief and suspicion; and in spite of a dawning mistrust concerning the absolute truth of the prophecies, he remains firm in the conviction of his "heaven-sent" invincibility. Because even if the other two prophecies should prove to be false, Macbeth is absolutely convinced that it is impossible to misinterpret the third prediction of the Weird Sisters, the prediction that guarantees that Macbeth shall not die from the hand of one born of a woman. Thus, when, in the course of the battle between Duncan's generals and the new king, Macbeth is at last trapped and forced into combat, he is brazen in his conviction that he shall be victorious: "They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, but bear-like I must fight the course. What's he that was not born of woman?  Such a one am I to fear, or none" (Act V, Scene VII, lns. 1-3). Girding himself up by this assurance, when he comes face to face with his foe, Macduff, Macbeth cries out: "Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born." And then, lo and behold, he receives Macduff's fatal response: "Despair they charm; and let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd" (lns. 43-45). When the "impossible" at last becomes reality, and Macbeth is finally and irresistibly confronted with the ultimate truth concerning the correct manner in which to interpret cryptic prophecies, he finally becomes sighted—he “beholds” and dies.

Perhaps the most interesting of the sighted blind in Western literature is the seer Tiresias, and there are several different narrative traditions that surround him. In book XI of the Odyssey, Homer has Odysseus call up the blind prophet from the underworld to drink of the blood of the sacrifice in order that he might learn from him how to win again to his homeland to see the day of his homecoming; and indeed, Tiresias is so sighted that, even blind and dead, he recognizes Odysseus before drinking the blood, a feat that not even Odysseus’ own dead mother could rival.

            In a more modern version of the Tiresias character, in The Waste Land T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) translates into London life of the early 20th-century, almost literally and exactly, the ancient poet/prophet of old.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back           215

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits     

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,         

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,    

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see   

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives  220

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,           

The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.           

Out of the window perilously spread        

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,            225

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.   

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs     

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—       

I too awaited the expected guest.   230

The Coen Brothers recast in their own inimitable style many of these ancient symbols and metaphors, and their human characterizations, in their 2000 film, O Brother, Where Are Thou? Everett, Pete, Delmar, escaping from a chain gang, hitch a ride on a railroad handcar that just “happens” along the tracks, being pumped by a blind man—a Negro seer who, although sightless, sees their perils and fortunes. This is a New World, southern translation of Tiresias: a blind man who has the “sight.” In this version of Odysseus’ Nostos, or homecoming, our fleeing felons, in need of financing, introduce themselves as a singing group to a blind man who works at a radio station, and who will pay them $10 per person to record their song in “a box.” The blind man does not see that there is a black man in the group, nor that their group does not have quite as many members as Everett represents. Then they journey on and run across Big Dan Teague, the one-eyed Polyphemous disguised as a ruffian traveling Bible salesman and highwayman, who will beat and rob them, much like Homer’s version does to the Odysseus of old.

Tiresias, the blind seer, was also deeply implicated in the Oedipus King story, which brings us back to the most completely and tragically blinded intelligence in the Western literary tradition: Oedipus, who became king.

            In Sophocles' rendition, the present king of Thebes, Oedipus, calls upon the yet living Tiresias to help in determining the truth surrounding the death of the previous king of Thebes, Laius.

Teiresias, seer who comprehendest all,
Lore of the wise and hidden mysteries,
High things of heaven and low things of the earth,
Thou knowest, though thy blinded eyes see naught,
What plague infects our city; and we turn
To thee, O seer, our one defense and shield.

Tiresias at first refuses to help, and tells Oedipus that this is truly an “inconvenient truth”; but Oedipus, the blind king insists and the prophet speaks out doom.

Thus then I answer: since thou hast not spared
To twit me with my blindness--thou hast eyes,
Yet see'st not in what misery thou art fallen,
Nor where thou dwellest nor with whom for mate.
Dost know thy lineage? Nay, thou know'st it not,
And all unwitting art a double foe
To thine own kin, the living and the dead;
Aye and the dogging curse of mother and sire
One day shall drive thee, like a two-edged sword,
Beyond our borders, and the eyes that now
See clear shall henceforward endless night.

In the original, pagan version of the Ecce Homo, Tiresias charges Oedipus, the man who had saved the City with his intelligence and courage, and whom the City had rewarded by making him king, with the crime of morally polluting the very City he had sought to save and to see thrive—so Tiresias:

            Then I charge thee to abide
By thine own proclamation; from this day
Speak not to these or me. Thou art the man,
Thou the accursed polluter of this land.

So when he is then finally able to “hear” that truth from the blind prophet, Oedipus pricks out his eyes, punishing them for their blindness, and thereby teaches us about sightedness (1370ff).

CHORUS LEADER:                   I do not believe
      what you did to yourself is for the best.
      Better to be dead than alive and blind.

OEDIPUS: Don’t tell me what I’ve done is not the best.
      And from now on spare me your advice.                                             [1370]
      If I could see, I don’t know how my eyes
      could look at my own father when I come
      to Hades or could see my wretched mother.
      Against those two I have committed acts                                 1620
      so vile that even if I hanged myself
      that would not be sufficient punishment.
      Perhaps you think the sight of my own children
      might give me joy? No! Look how they were born!
      They could never bring delight to eyes of mine.
      Nor could the city or its massive walls,
      or the sacred images of its gods.
      I am the most abhorred of men, I,
      the finest one of all those bred in Thebes,                                           [1380]
      I have condemned myself, telling everyone                               1630
      they had to banish for impiety
      the man the gods have now exposed
      as sacrilegious—a son of Laius, too.
      With such polluting stains upon me,
      could I set eyes on you and hold your gaze?
      No. And if I could somehow block my ears
      and kill my hearing, I would not hold back.
      I’d make a dungeon of this wretched body,
      so I would never see or hear again.

In Oedipus we can learn the lessons of hearing and sightedness, about their non-materiality, as we can learn about the Will to Hear and the Will to See.

There are many other wonderful stories of old that hinge on the idea of sightedness and blindness—the Greeks loved the point-counterpoint play between light and dark. There is, for example, Sophocles’ rendition of Ajax, the great young hero who fights with the Greeks in Troy. For reasons that Odysseus seeks to discover, Ajax has slaughtered all the flocks of captured beasts of the Greeks, as well as the guards who were watching over them—surely an act of folly. Odysseus discovers, in a conversation with Athena, that

ATHENA
            I threw down into his eyes
      an overwhelming sense of murderous joy
      and turned his rage against the sheep and cattle
      and those protecting them—the common herd
      which so far has not been divided up.*
      He launched his attack against those animals                      70
      and kept on chopping down and slaughtering
      the ones with horns by slicing through their spines,
      until they made a circle all around him.
      At one point he thought he was butchering
      both sons of Atreus—he had them in his hands.*
      Then he went at some other general
      and then another. As he charged around
      in his sick frenzy, I kept encouraging him,
      kept pushing him into those fatal nets.                                             [60]
      And then, when he took a rest from killing,                         80
      he tied up the sheep and cattle still alive
      and led them home, as if he had captured
      human prisoners and not just animals.
      Now he keeps them tied up in his hut
      and tortures them. I’ll let you see his madness—
      in plain view here—so you can witness it
      and then report to all the Argives.

Odysseus responds with compassion as he hears Athena describe how she brought upon Ajax a blinding madness in payment for his arrogance to the Gods, his impiety.

ODYSSEUS
            […]

      All the same, although he despises me,
      I pity his misfortune under that yoke
      of catastrophic madness. It makes me think                         160
      not just of his fate but my own as well.
      I see that in our lives we are no more
      than phantoms, insubstantial shadows.

This type of deceptive blindness, which is sent from the gods, occurs quite frequently in the Greek world, and is certainly already apparent and common in Homer (Iliad, Bk. 5).

As Diomedes prayed, Pallas Athena heard.
She put fresh strength into his legs and upper arms.                              140
Standing close by, she spoke. Her words had wings.

“Take courage, Diomedes, in this fight with Trojans.
I’ve put your father’s strength into your chest,
that shield-bearing horseman’s fearless power.
And I’ve removed the filter from your eyes
which covered them before, so now,
you’ll easily distinguish gods from men.
If a god comes here and stands against you,
don’t offer to fight any deathless one,                                                        [130]
except for Aphrodite, Zeus’ daughter.                                                        [150]
If she fights, cut her with your sharp bronze.”

Similarly, in the Prometheus Bound Aeschylus has the Chorus respond to Prometheus' boast that he has helped the mortals by stealing the fire from Zeus and giving it to men:

[545] Come, my friend, […] Tell me, what kind of help is there in creatures of a day? What aid? Did you not see the helpless infirmity, no better than a dream, in which the blind generation of men is shackled? Never shall the counsels of mortal men transgress the ordering of Zeus.

Illustrations abound. Let him with ears, hear, and eyes, see.

February's Blogpost_Waiting

1972

Much of our lives is spent just hanging around. Waiting, though, is a very singular occupation, and deeply deceptive; for there is a bustle of unseen, and certainly unobserved, action actually occurring behind the calm appearance of inaction.

The other night I dreamed about diving again… springboard diving—flying through the air with the greatest of ease, and all that jazz. I have had these dreams regularly for most of my adult life, and after all these years I still really do not know what to think about them.

            In these dreams I “feel” myself to be in an emotionally neutral state—there is neither necessarily any fear or anticipation or intimidation, although Lord knows that there were some dives I hated doing because they scared me, and others simply because I did not like diving from anything higher than a 1-meter diving board; nor is there exhilaration in these dreams—although I can still clearly recall some rare moments of body-soaring splendor associated with deliberately falling through the air and entering taut into the waiting arms of receptive, womb-like waters. 

            My body in these dreams is both subject and object, which seems to be a distinctly different entity from my watching and “feeling” mind-self, although these two, mind and body, are co-happening in the same exact space using precisely the same tools. This is Cartesianism at its best. My diving dreams involve me watching, as a detached outside observer would, my body falling through unoccupied space—but the observer is actually watching the action and anticipating the movement, unemotionally, from inside the plunging body.

            These dream states do not even seem to involve my body-in-motion as a process of an object succumbing to gravity, but rather, like Zeno’s arrow, my body is in a series of quasi stop-motion images where I observe myself at different stations or static moments in the stop-action motion picture of the dive. Where the true Outsider sees the split-second fluidity of action, the inside observer, poised in space, feels an eternity of inaction—of holding fast, of waiting. A fine phenomenological moment for a dream, I suppose; but our reflection here is interested in the question of the meaning of such dreams.

I was a fine-enough diver for the day: high school varsity athlete and letterman; MVP in my senior year; district high-point scorer; athletic scholarship to dive for a large state university; Olympic coaches—tout le biz, quoi. However, I knew even then that I was never going to be an excellent diver, because I detested competition—even in those days of my budding I was the hippy philosopher… I was in the game for the beauty of the experience rather than for the competitive win. It was obvious to me early on that I was never going to be the great competitor, simply because I had started diving too late. As I was going through some of the local diving camps as a high school hipster, those camps were being flooded by 10-year old kids who were already doing more complicated dives (i.e., with higher degrees of difficulty), and with much greater technical ability, than I ever would do.

            But I excelled in one area, anyway—in the air I was “truly beautiful to behold,” as Frank-N-Furter says about his newborn monster, Rocky. I was graceful; balletic; strong; …and pretty. So I was a young man who, although he had some natural grace and gymnastic talent to recommend him, was always going to be in the wrong competitive game simply because he started the sport too late.

At the very least, my dreams take me by the hand and lead me back into a reconstruction of body-memories and sensorial states; and this leaves me with a pleasant feeling when I wake up remembering. But this takes me no further along my path of trying to assess what these dreams might signify. I suppose it could simply be enough that I have some pleasure in the having of these dreams; but it seems to me there must be some additional meaning that my slumbering intelligence is trying to sort out through these body memories, which are becoming more and more remote from my waking reality with each passing day.

In the morning, as I was telling DAW about my dream, she immediately looked up dreams at an online dream dictionary, here, and discovered about springboard diving dreams the following meanings:

·      To dream that you are diving into clear water indicates that you have overcome your obstacles and setbacks. You have a new sense of confidence. Things are looking up. Alternatively, the dream indicates that you are trying to get to the bottom of a current situation or the root of your problems or feelings. It may also refer exploration of your subconscious. 

·      To dream that you are diving into muddy water suggests that you are feeling anxious about how you have handled certain issues in your waking life.  

·      To see others diving in your dream represents psychological and emotional balance.

·      To see animals diving in your dream suggest that are exploring your instinctual and sexual urges which have been previously suppressed into your subconscious.

As none of these seem to be the case with my dream (animals diving?...), we can blithely pass on, secure in remembering that, per Jung, ultimately only the dreamer can know the “truth” about his dream.

DAW found a second interpretative possibility for my dreams under the rubric, Diving Board (dreams):

·      To see or stand on a diving board in your dream indicates that you need to think things through carefully and thoroughly before you take the plunge. The dream may signal a new phase in your life. Consider the height of the diving board. The higher the diving board, the more significant and more difficult it is to take the next step and make the plunge.

This second possible interpretation proved a little more insightful, because I had this particular dream the night before my first class in the new academic semester. But I still have to admit that these cheesola dream interpretation Internet sites are not terribly insightful, even if, on occasion, their nuclear bomb approach to dreams may hit the platitudinous interpretative peripheries on a possible target of meanings.

Sometimes, most of the time in fact, my dreams are about the specific mechanics of a particular dive. Perhaps my favorite dive, and the one that occupies almost all my recurrent diving dreams, was the half gainer, which is to say, the reverse dive in the layout position. You leave the board on a forward approach, reach up and back, push your chest up into the ceiling, and let the dive “happen” until you extend for entry into the water—stretching from the tips of the pointed toes all the way to the joined fists over the head that try to reach down into the center of the earth. Not a high-degree of difficulty dive, yet difficult to make look pretty.

            In a pre-Olympic qualifying competition I once saw an excellent diver perform this dive with uncanny, quasi-military mechanical precision. I never saw such a thing – a true mechanical marvel, perfectly executed, worthy of a child of the mechanical revolution. And yet, although it was truly a perfect mechanical dive, it was not a beautiful dive by any definition. The dive was not lyrical, had no dancer’s soul to it… no imagination, no curve, no grace. It was simply a keenly executed, cog-type mechanism of a dive– a movement that was at home in the geometrical spaces of the world, like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, but which was not necessarily at ease, which is to say, beautiful, in those spaces. Myron’s s-curved Diskobolos was not re-presented in that day’s competition.

Vitruvius_left; Diskobolos_right

A beautiful dive is the back dive in the pike position, if the pike is done correctly, which is to say, with precision. However, the back dive in the layout position was another of my favorites because it is beautiful in the same way that the half-gainer is beautiful; after all, it is simply the half-gainer going in the other direction, starting backwards at the end of the board. The difference for me as the actor, on the other hand, was, to put it philosophically, entirely phenomenological. On the back dive my experience of time and of movement-through-space was much shorter than on the half gainer. Also, I could not “feel” myself in the same way – my visualization of myself laid-out and moving through framed space was somehow less visually complete.

            Again from a phenomenological point of view, the front half-twist in the layout position was perhaps, from my insider’s visual point of view and feeling, most similar to the half-gainer layout, except that I had the additional and distinct “feeling” that I was dropping down into the world from the very top of space… I had the entire area of the pool in my field of vision, right down to the little point of water that was going to suck me into its vortex at entry. Then, at impact, there was that stretch right to the bottom of the world, and the hard point of the toes that would suck any splash down with it into the vortex, leaving only a telltale bubbling at the surface – the only indication that a moving body had recently passed through that tiny point in space.

Sometimes, some of my diving dreams seem to focus on spatiality. During the half gainer, for instance, you leave the board going forward, stretch up to the ceiling and lift your face skyward, pushing your chest up and up and up. Then, just when the mechanic of the dive brings the body to the horizontal position, I have the distinct impression of seeing all of my body all the way to my toes, a view encompassing my entirety: extended arms, torso, legs, and pointed toes, and the water framing me as well… truly an interesting sensation. I remember, on one occasion during a competition with a local high school, I was doing this half-gainer layout and getting some great altitude from the board, and I had the impression, because the ceiling on their pool was so low, that my chest was actually going to scrape against it. I hated diving at that pool – it “felt” a dingy yellow and made me feel claustrophobic in the air. Diving taught me more about my interior spatio-emotional states than any other activity in my life.

Then there were the entries. A diving entry is made beautiful by stretching to fit inside Zeno’s infinite line, which, he mused enigmatically, stretched out endlessly along points between, and separating forever, point A and point B. The fists are joined together above the head in order to punch a hole in the water for the body to pass through, and the toes are pointed so that it would almost cramp the calves. It is at this moment that the waiting becomes most intense… because there is really nothing else to do but fall; you just have to do it beautifully. Waiting in a dive is really an explosion of focused activity, although there will be periods within the 1.4 seconds you are in the air when you simply do not move—nano-seconds of rock hard stillness. This time of inaction is necessary to create an appearance of ease, which hides the flurry of real muscular and mental activity.

I remember that my university had a swimming pool called Trees Hall. The main pool was 4-5 Olympic-sized pools “super-glued” side by side to make one giant pool; and the warm-up pool was just a simple, ordinary Olympic-sized pool in a smaller hall off to the side. The entire back hall of the main pool was glass, which meant that there were certain moments during a dive when, as if suspended in air, you could actually see yourself reflected in the glass. I remember two things from my time at Trees Hall. The first was that I was always cold. Perhaps it was the fact that one could see the snow or rain or simply the darkness through the glass, and then from inside the womb one got the feeling of the cold that was dominating the world on the outside. The other thing I remember is the 10-meter tower for platform diving.

            I freely admit that I do not care for high places… never have and probably never will. Anything above the simple household ladder is profoundly uninteresting to me. However, one does have to steel one’s mind to the discipline at hand, whether painting ceilings on a ladder or dropping 10-meters from a tower into some water, so I mounted the flights to the top of the tower – past the 5-meter platform, past the 7.5-meter platform, right up to the 10 meter platform. I remember standing on the edge of the platform staring off the tower, taking in the world that was unfolding itself to me at that height. Then I tried a simple swan dive in a layout position – very simple mechanically, with not a lot of thought and a great deal of body control. However, from the height of 10 meters, the time for the mechanism of this simple dive to happen is different from a departure at one or three meters. So came the over-rotation with Newtonian predictability… and an inappropriate physical impact upon arrival at destination.

            “Sh#t may happen” as a matter of daily course, so goes the expression anyway, but eternity happens in just under 2 seconds… in about 1.43 seconds, to be more precise, which is the approximate amount of time one spends performing in the space between board and water. Think about it, which I did after the fact, and for a very long time: the traveling speed of an object (my body) falling for just under 2 seconds + distance traveled (10 meters) + impact with a stationary surface upon arrival (H2O). Formulaically, this relationship would look something like this:

-10m = -1/2(9.8m/s2)t²
        t = 1.43s

Unfortunately, though, my particular experience on this occasion was not just about formulas. The most desirable arrival into the water from any dive normally occurs in the smallest possible space… in a straight up-and-down vertical alignment, whether standing up with toes pointed, or taking the impact through the fists, then the shoulders, then piking the body under water to continue pulling the surface water under with you in order to leave only bubbles on the surface. I, as an independently acting exception to either of these two more desirable solutions, had obviously opted for the over-rotated, full-body back splay from 10 meters. In what is perhaps the purest Archimedean experience of my life, in a Eureka moment, I grasped, I felt in all the spaces of my body, all the hidden forces of the world—from inertia to velocity, from momentum to acceleration, and, finally, torque. After the water that was displaced by the entry of the falling object that was me, slammed through my entrejambe from behind with all of its reciprocating and displacing force, platform diving ceased to hold any interest for me.

It is a truism of diving, and certainly of many another activity of life, that the higher one climbs, the faster one drops. The problem is not the fall, which we can make interesting or not, pretty or not, but one does need to have some care with the stop at fall’s end.

            When all is said and done, I am not sure that my diving dreams have any particular psychological significance in and of themselves, as gateway symbols to some other level of meaning about me or my progression through space and time. I think, rather, that these dreams constitute for me a sort of personal lament for a period of my life that is now relegated definitively to the past, a nostalgia for the beauty that, once, I used to know how to feel for myself, and to create for others, through my body. Those days and those gifts do not belong to my body-life now, but rather resurrect at night as dream-state memorials about the body that used to be mine.

            My creations of beauty now must be of a different order, using the different gifts I am able to discern and awaken in myself. The springtime and summer days of my outside, my body-me, are revolved; now it is the season for gathering that which was sown and for bringing the harvest to shelter. It is time, and world enough, for my inside observer, the mind-me, to set about, as though there were no tomorrow, any other Great Work that I might hope to accomplish.

In 1988, at the Olympic games in Seoul, the American diver, Greg Louganis, proved that he was indeed one of sport history’s more remarkable competitors. In the early rounds of the diving preliminaries Louganis injured himself by striking his head on the 3-meter springboard, requiring stitches… then he continued his performance to take the gold medal in the event. Louganis would win another gold medal in those games, in the 10-meter platform, and would take the Olympic Double gold in men's diving.

            Here is a short video of almost perfect body motion—at times perfectly motionless, waiting, fully occupied, as it falls through space. This is a must view for any definition of human loveliness and integrity; and in the midst and flurry of all the action, just watch him WAIT for the moment when the dive would “happen.”

The lovely GL in a compilation from the 1988 Olympic diving finals, for your viewing pleasure: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP20D5vQsmM].

January's Blogpost_Redemptions… Memories & Reflections.

When I was a boy it was all the rage for families to redeem coupons and green stamps. The dutiful because frugal American housewife of the 1950s and 60s cut out the coupons from the Sunday papers, and she filled the coupon books with the green stamps she got each time she went shopping. Then, the next time she went to the store she took in her coupons and redeemed them at the checkout for her merchandise, or she would send in her filled green stamps coupon book in exchange for some item from the company catalogue.

We have all also heard the expression “Redeem the time,” in the sense of – I really have to work hard to make sure I accomplish all that I wish to do before I have no more time to do it. In the world of my memories we acquired at a very early age our quasi axiomatic response to things like birthdays, and the wending of years wherein the old year gives way to the new, which is to suck the life even more desperately out of the present moment – to dramatically carpe the diem, because even a child knows that our Tempus is busy fugit-ing (tempus fugit) like the wind. It is a kind of “If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium” moment on the whirlwind tour of our life.

The sentiment of carpe diem, or of desperately consuming the present instant, has been diversely expressed by poets & wordsmiths. From Horace’s Latin ode (Ode 1.11, 23 BC):

You should not ask it, it is wrong to know impious things, what end the
gods will have given to me, to you, O Leuconoe, and do not try
Babylonian calculations. How much better it is to endure whatever will be,
whether Jupiter has allotted to you more winters or the last,
which now weakens upon the opposed rocks of the Tyrrhenian
Sea: may you be wise, strain your wines, and because of short life
prune long anticipation. While we are speaking, envious life
will have fled: seize the day, trusting the future as little as possible.

To the Apostle Paul’s (c. 5-c. 67) New Testament exhortation to the Ephesians:

14 for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said: "Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." 15 Be very careful, then, how you live--not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity [literally = buying it all up—redeeming the time: e˙xagorazo/menoi to\n kairo/n], because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is. (Cf. Col. 4:5)

To the Persian poet’s (1048-1131) urgent admonition in the Rubaiyat:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly—and Lo! The Bird is on the Wing.

To the somewhat deceptive sentiment expressed by Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) future Henry the Fourth:

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

To French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine’s (1621-1695) moralizing fable LA CIGALE ET LA FOURMI (YouTube version for children here):

La Cigale, ayant chanté
                  Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue.
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau (1).
Elle alla crier famine
Chez la Fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu'à la saison nouvelle.
Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant l'août (2), foi d'animal,
Intérêt et principal.
La Fourmi n'est pas prêteuse ;
C'est là son moindre défaut (3).
Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse (4).
Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.
Vous chantiez ? j'en suis fort aise :
Et bien ! dansez maintenant.

To a spare and oh! so pragmatic American translation of the idea in Benjamin 

Franklin’s (1705/6-1790) Poor Richard’s Almanack: 

#134. Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure. 

To, finally, the simply grand-motherly, unsourced and ubiquitous saying, which has nurtured us all from our toddling days:

 The early bird catches the worm.

There is more to this concept than simply meets the proverbial eye, however. Redemption is fundamentally a religious notion, and feels in fact rampantly Protestant in a Weberian work ethic kind of way – as in, let us transform or redeem what we must do as a chore (such as commuting to work – a task that is daily, banal, boring, etc.), into something that becomes a good in and of itself, and which we ought therefore to do! This notion of redemption is perhaps the earliest incarnation of multi-tasking; it is ancient paganism’s carpe diem translated into Protestant-ese. And as far as I can judge, the original and fundamental Christian notion, of redemption as an alchemical or moral transformation of the soul from a vulgar metal [lead] into a noble metal [gold], is a thought-gift primarily from the Apostle Paul to our Western intellectual tradition.

            Paul’s conception is quite distinct from the notion of redemption in the Hebrew Bible, where the overarching idea seems to belong almost uniquely to the idea that Israel was acquired as a ransom [lutro--, lu/tron; cf below], a bond or secured pledge held by the God of the Jews. This concept seems to have some connection in the Hebrew Bible to the idea that Israel comes into Yahweh’s possession by right of divine inheritance [cf. Aiken, Death of God, p. 6], and seems also analogous to some degree with the notion of Israel as the chosen One, as having been chosen out [e˙xairou/meno/ß--to take out, remove, choose, deliver] from among the nations, an expression or idea with which it is interchangeably translated in the English language editions. The notion of redemption in the Hebrew Bible does not generally seem to have a higher moral or metaphorical value.

            Likewise, the notion of redemption of any sort is missing, significantly, from Jesus’ teachings and discourses, if we may judge by its absence from the Gospel narratives in Matthew and John, nor is the notion important in the Epistles of James (brother of Jesus), Jude (another brother of Jesus), or the writer of Hebrews, who was clearly Jewish but not necessarily a brother of Jesus. Nor does redemption seem particularly to be a New Testament era Hellenistic idea, because it is absent from the writings of Mark (good evidence suggests M. was not Jewish), and Luke (author of the Gospel of Luke & the Acts of the Apostles), who was obviously a gentile and a native speaker of Greek.

There are three Greek words in the New Testament that seem to converge into this idea, which the Church Fathers, theologians, and later churchified folk will expound and expostulate as Christian redemption. The first word is the rather banal agoraz-- (aÓgora¿zw), which simply means to purchase or to buy… as in: I’m going to the store to buy some milk and toilet paper, does anyone need anything else? It is used this way, in a normal and commercial iteration, in the Gospels, by Paul, and by John, author of the Revelation. (Matt 13:44, 46, 14:15, 21:12, 25:9-10, 27:7; Mark 6:36-37, 11:15, 15:46, 16:1; Luke 9:13, 14:18-19, 17:28, 22:36; John 4:8, 6:5, 13:29; and also in I Cor. 6:20, 7:30; Rev. 3:18, 13:17, 18:11).

            However, Paul also uses this term twice in a more specific commercial way, in the very interesting and rich sense of the Corinthian Christian having been purchased from the slave market (I Cor. 6:20 & 7:23). The term is also used in this way in the Second Epistle of Peter (2:1), although the epistle is considered by most scholars to be of questionable authorship; and it is very clearly used again in this sense by the author of the Revelation (5:9, and 14:3-4), who may or may not have been the same John who authored the Gospel of John.­­­­­­­­­

            So this particular term, agoraz--, then, is not the sense of redemption that most interests us in this reflection.

­

There is a second Greek term of interest in this context of the Christian idea of redemption in the NT, which is lutro-- (lu/tro/ß --), in the sense of the ransom to be negotiated and paid for the release or redemption of hostages.  This usage, however, despite being quite consistent with typical Jewish belief abundantly manifested in the Hebrew Bible, is not terribly common in the New Testament, occurring only five times –in Matthew (20:28), Mark (10:45), Luke (24:21), Paul’s Epistle to Titus (2:14), and Peter’s first Epistle (1:18).

The third and final Greek term that is of interest to us concerning the question of redemption in the NT is exaireo—(e˙xairew), which, as we saw earlier, speaks to the idea of being chosen out from among, or perhaps more consistent with NT usage: to being lifted out from or delivered from a situation.

            This expression is certainly the most theologically textured of the three terms in the NT, because it is quite specific in scope and intent; it is also the most consistently Jewish of the three NT expressions. The image, of course, is when we are at the grocery store and we look at all the cantaloupes, as my Grandmother used to do, then we pick one up, thump it on the end, and if we like what we hear we choose that one from among all those on offer. If not, we put it back and repeat the process. This image is absolutely in keeping with the Jewish notion of Israel as the chosen One from among the nations, but its NT translation is in fact subtly different in meaning.

            The primary difference is quantitative. In the Hebrew Bible it is Israel itself, the national ethnicity, which is redeemed or chosen out; this idea/usage is confirmed in Luke 24:21, and Peter even goes so far as to write that those Jews of the early Jesus Movement were delivered from (using lu/tro/ß --) the “manner of life handed down from your fathers” (i.e., the Jews; I Peter 1:18). It is at this point in our reflection that the three different Greek terms start to become somewhat fuzzy and (con)-fused both in Greek and in their English translations, because in the other occurrences of the NT, Paul writes that it is the individual who is “chosen out from” or “delivered from” exaireo—(e˙xairew), the Law (Gal. 3:13, 4:5), which certainly seems to suggest a degree of fusion among these word-concepts in the NT.

In Christian theology systematically conceived, the idea of redemption falls under the scholarly rubric of Christology, or the study of the person and work of Christ. One of the questions in Christology, of course, is to determine how one is to understand the death of Christ—what is the purpose or usefulness or interest to anyone of a man/God Himself suffering and dying, as opposed to harassing maidens, like Zeus or Apollo, or to fighting in battles, like Poseidon “far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,” or to doing any number of other divine activities that have proved so tragically irksome to men in their world? And the big take-home idea is that Christian scholars have decided that the suffering and death of Christ is atonement – a repayment or reparation, if you will, for when Man, in the person of Adam, poached and purloined in the big Someone Else’s Edenic fruit orchard. In the Christian scheme of things, a man/God’s atonement or repayment for the garden-variety crime of Man is in fact the purchase price for human redemption. To hark back to our earlier metaphor: in this scheme Christ becomes the Green Stamp that, when redeemed for the merchandise in the company catalogue—i.e., moral acquittal for plundered apples, allows Man to be a player in this God’s divine Game.

            Just as a pure idea there are a number of ways to interpret and to give value to the Story of Christ’s suffering and death. For example, one can conceive of Christ’s suffering and death 1) as a moral example that Man should follow – that our lives should embody the value of self-sacrifice and the preferment of the Other over the self; or we can view atonement 2) as a demonstration of God’s love, an abstract truth that should teach us to be better humans (the Moral Influence theory); or one can interpret Christ’s atoning work 3) as a demonstration of divine justice (the Governmental theory); or 4) as a victory over the forces of sin and evil (the Ransom theory, which, by the way, was the most popular theory in the early church); or, finally, atonement can be conceived 5) as compensation to the divine Father for crimes committed against His Person (the Propitiation or Penal-Substitution theory). For the purpose of “cutting to the chase,” the dominant Protestant conclusion on this question is #5.

All of which brings me to the original inspiration for this reflection. In the 2004 film Man on Fire, directed by Tony Scott, the protagonist, Creasy, is a former CIA operative and Force Recon Marine turned despondent and alcoholic bodyguard in Mexico. His charge, a nine-year old girl who has, in the course of things, also become his friend, is abducted in Mexico City, which has a thriving “kidnapping-for-ransom” industry; and Creasy is seriously if not mortally injured during the girl’s abduction.

            So, to set the scene: Creasy is a man who absolutely knows that he himself can hope for no personal redemption. He is despondent and alcoholic because he has done very bad, unforgiveable, and therefore irreparable (i.e., irredeemable) things during his U.S. military career—an emotional/spiritual state of mind that is set up during a conversation with his former military colleague.

Creasy: Do you think God'll forgive us for what we've done?
Rayburn: No.

When Creasy then learns that his young charge, Pita, has survived the abduction and is still alive and being held for ransom, and despite his grievous injuries, he vacates his hospital bed to go on a killing rampage. In a conversation with the little girl’s mother…

Lisa: What are you gonna do?
Creasy: What I do best. I'm gonna kill 'em. Anyone that was involved. Anybody who profited from it. Anybody who opens their eyes at me.
Lisa: [Whispering] You kill 'em all.

Although the narrative of this film might, at first blush, have all the elements of a straightforward revenge tale, it is actually at this point that the story becomes interesting as a possible Redemption Story. We have already seen in the film a leitmotiv of kidnapping (holding in bondage) and ransom (redemption in exchange for payment or bond), which is certainly one of the traditional categories of redemption or freedom in the Christian myth.

            Yet we are left wondering at this point why a depressed soldier, who knows there can be no redemption for himself, nevertheless so deliberately sets out to sacrifice himself for this forsaken little girl who has become his friend. Should we read this as a form of efficient suicidal calculation – the exchange of one old and weary, fatally wounded body in exchange for a young child’s potential for life? Perhaps then it is just a tale of revenge… although the chances are excellent in this telling that everyone involved, including Creasy and the girl, will all end up dead? Somehow such an irrational outworking of a revenge tale is unsatisfying.

            In an interesting twist, Creasy’s friend and former colleague, Ray, does not read C.’s motivation simply as an act of revenge; rather, he describes C.’s actions as something higher and more beautiful, something more akin to art (YouTube clip here).

Rayburn: He'll deliver more justice in a weekend than ten years of your courts and tribunals. (…)
Rayburn: She [the girl] showed him it was OK to live again.

Rayburn: And they're gonna wish they never touched a hair on her head. (…)
Rayburn: A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece. (…)

Creasy is supreme in his desire, his absolute need, for redemption. It becomes logical, then, within the framework of the Western redemption mythology that frames Creasy’s story, that the focus and possibility of any redemption for him should lay both in his atonement (suffering and death) for the innocent child, as well as in his exchange/payment—he will become the desperately needed Green Stamp/bond to be redeemed for a kidnapped girl-child held in bond-age. So he exchanges his life for hers.

We certainly tend to read this act as noble, or at least beautiful. Yet what, exactly, is actually redeemed in the exchange of Creasy for the girl? Is this simply about the possibility of a younger person having (not missing prematurely) the opportunities that are afforded one by virtue of living through the days of a body’s potential life? Is this Story then just about seconds and minutes, days and weeks, months and years, passed in eating, defecating, loving, copulating, working, playing, crying, laughing, decaying & dying? Is this the redemption that C was looking for, that moved him? Creasy is going to die anyway from his wounds; so he is willing to sacrifice his dying body for the possibility of a young child having her life to live out? This ungenerous interpretation does not yield us a tale that is either noble or beautiful.

A redemption story is a new world Story, and far removed from the manly loyalties and loves that moved the greathearted Greeks in their world. Creasy’s idea of redemption is that we acquire debt in our lives that wants to be repaid; it is not so much a concept of economics, as it is a recognition that we do not achieve our lives alone, unaffiliated, and unaided.

            This is the problematic “rub” in redemption stories – that they necessarily put a burden on the Other, the Innocent Bond (Israel, Christian, little girl, etc.) who has been exchanged or redeemed; and, frankly, the Other could perceive this burden as repressive, an unsought for debt that s/he might eventually wish to or be able to repay, or not. So what might the redeemed life for the Other look like? Is it just the body living through its days like any other animal, moved neither by beauty or nobility? Or must the life now-delivered carry with it commitment to some or any particular cause? To Others? To some specific value? To Justice? To Generosity? Or is just living a normal body-life enough?

One wise Answer, at the very least, would seem to be that the redeemed life should take ownership of the “burden” of becoming the beautiful life, a life created as Art. The life in which the acts that accompany us through our days are beautiful…. Each in themselves, complete…

Let us work hard to redeem this new-born year.