April’s Essay_Do you recall what was revealed / The day that Thinking died…?

American Pie Redux

In March’s Phrontisterion essay, which is entitled Sightedness, there is this statement about Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “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 This is precisely the problem in the “world” of Christianity, after all: that knowledge has been replaced by belief; and, at best, belief is subject to any All and Sundry’s uninformed, blind, interpretation.”

A Reader responded at some length to the premise of this idea. 

I liked your piece but felt like I had to take you to task on it… […]"For now we see through a glass darkly".  These are the words spoken by a man many years after his own blind eyes were made to see.  Before making this proclamation he also said, "For we know in part", acknowledging that for all of the enlightenment given to him, and acquired over the course of a lifetime, he remained, essentially, in the dark.  And is that not the real plight of everyman as clearly reflected in the literary treatises of the world?

What world literature demonstrates time and again is that everyman, in every literary culture of the world, has struggled with the question of - "what lies beyond the veil after the silver cord is cut?".  And ultimately, everyman must come to terms with the fact that this is just as unknowable as the question of "where did we come from?".  And so we see the writers of great literature puzzling over these great questions and illustrating both the questions and the struggles through the lives of the characters in their stories.  The endurance of these stories over time lies in their ability to resonate with a particular audience.  The real question about the stories may not be so much in whether they are factually true in every detail as it is about their ability to inspire the reader in a way that motivates him or her to strive to be something greater than the natural bent of his or her character.  The problem with the non-Christian world is the tendency to embrace those stories that affirm their natural bent and to reject those that challenge their own sense of self-goodness.

When considered objectively, the "Christian" narrative is quite different from the other narratives in the world which employ a device representing an appeal to some sort of divinity. The gods of world literature are fickle, selfish, narcissistic, and cruel.  While the same may be said for the portrayal of the God of the Old Testament, the Christian narrative is radically different.  Accept it as historical fact, or reject it as pure mythology, there is no denying that the message of the narrative is drastically unlike any other literary story in the world.  One may stumble over the essential premise that all men are sinners deserving of death, but God's answer to that problem is a narrative far superior to any other story ever written from the beginning of time.

It is the story of the Divine Person leaving His lofty and Holy abode in order to take residency in the humble state of humanity and then to take it upon Himself to pay the penalty that everyman deserves and thus free everyman from the condemnation that was the ultimate outcome of his humanity.  One may reject the idea that such a narrative is even necessary, but only in the world of Alice can it be denied that this narrative represents the highest form of ethical construction ever conceived, either before or since His time; the ethic which says that love drives a man to lay down his own life for another.

[One] may object to the premise that everyman stands guilty in the eyes of the Christian God and thus reject the free gift that he offers in the form of a pardon.  I personally find myself lacking the ability to rise to His ethical standard.

Gary Price: The Thinker

“Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?”

While I love the idea of an engaged readership, it is not quite clear that this Reader is actually “taking me to task” for any particular ideas from the Sightedness essay! Paul does perhaps says more universally and more eloquently with his “now we see darkly,” what my essay also expressed, with a perhaps poorer image, of the Christian Everyman’s self-ordained Protesting right to interpret the Writ, heedless of insight, sightedness, or competence; but I have no quarrel with Paul’s thinking, and, in fact, obviously side with his impression on this question. To be Uninformed is to be Blind in the truest sense of that word.

I also agree with the “uniqueness” point the Reader raises about the Christian narrative. However, it would seem that some of our conclusions clearly differ about possible meanings surrounding that uniqueness. The reasoning animal has the native right, as well as an inherited obligation to those who will come after, to ponder and consider the world around him – such is, at any rate, the premise advanced not only by the philosophical traditions of the pagan thinkers, but also by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and a long line Christian thinkers. Consequently, I do not consider the uniqueness of any mytho-narrative, and particularly that of the Christian tradition, to be a selling feature; because the Christian narrative has been constructed over long centuries by interested parties, and is therefore no longer either well-grounded in the Biblical texts nor propositionally neutral in terms of its historical value. Nor are the texts themselves, when considered in their own right as documents of history, necessarily competent & neutral records of historical events. Also, because it is possible to measure the Christianly constructed Narrative over and against the biblical texts, which activity renders any number of irregularities to thinking or to reason, i.e., paradoxes or irrationalities, it is becoming more and more apparent to Thinking Man that neither the Christian narrative nor the biblical texts make a particularly strong showing in the cold and unforgiving light of Thoughtful, Reasoned Day. Unfortunately. Because thinking about these matters would be so much easier were all the records of human historical experience clean and simple, and the Christian stories more reliant on the Biblical records.

We have made the case elsewhere that the Christian message (Jesus + Messiah), as a part of its historical inheritance, has neither intrinsic ethic nor worldview, both of which it borrowed, infinitely more from Greek philosophy than from Jewish religion. This reminder is relevant to our Reader’s question in a follow-up essay, “How is it then, that in this day and age, Christian sermons appear to be more structured as philosophical arguments? Why is it that sermons today sound more like persuasion than proclamation? Is it possible that Christianity has somehow lost its way by straying from the essence and structure of the original message?”

            It is clear that the Reader’s conclusion is that we should jettison all the highfaluting philosophical trappings of Christian historical theology, and much like Martin Luther of old, should return again ad fontes in order to refresh ourselves in the cool waters of the original “pristine” proclamation of the Jesus message. However, that “original” message is also itself, unfortunately, indelibly framed by the historicized and edited and philosophically informed interpretative traditions that religions have found for the biblical texts in general; and these doctrinal traditions invite us, unavoidably, to interpret the Message, which is far less pristine than many imagine, some through literalism, others through mythology, and still others through metaphor or allegory. Where does the “Truth” lay in that minefield?

           

"[…]And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died"

There are entire libraries dedicated to the study of the Judeo-Christian texts and teachings, and one will find ferreted away in the most obscure corners of those libraries all the research that is interested in the connections of Judeo-Christianity to Greek philosophy, Jewish religion, and other ancient Near Eastern religions and mythologies. The evidence is unanimous, both from the biblical texts themselves and without, that Christian doctrine and hence the Christian system of belief is the reasoning handiwork of human speculation. This evidence extends all the way up to the heavens themselves to embrace the profile of the Christian God -- He is a creature of whole-cloth philosophical speculation. This is not to say that there are no gods, only that they are constrained and therefore changed by our interpretive framings and filters. There is no pristine narrative fountain to go back to—all information, all data, is woven into the warp and woof of our understanding through our words… and transformed in and by that action.

            If this is in fact an accurate assessment of the way in which truth becomes truthful for Men, with all of the dangers and foibles that beset that way, then the Reader’s frustration will only increase by remaining committed to the method of trying to go back to some “original” message, which is suggested in a later essay:

“The central idea [of this essay] is simply that Christianity was never intended to be a philosophy. Philosophy draws from various sources of knowledge and employs the tools of reason and logic to ascertain truth. The fact is that the truth presented by the life and teachings of Jesus could never be arrived at by reason and logic. Even with the source of knowledge provided by the Old Testament scriptures, it required additional revelation in order for the disciples of Jesus to grasp the truth of who he was and what he was accomplishing. It was not reason and logic that revealed these things to the disciples, it was the divine revelation afforded by Jesus himself.”

[…]

“Perhaps it is well past time to rethink Christianity altogether and to begin divorce proceedings with the philosophical concepts which have obscured and corrupted the original message. The original gospel was meant to be proclaimed not deduced. And the followers of Christ were never instructed to develop cleverly designed arguments intended to persuade. Like the Dude, they were merely instructed to abide (John 15:4-7, 10, KJV).”

For these reasons and others, the Reader’s conclusion to return ad fontes is simply not compelling. The study of philosophy and religion would be so much more convenient were it really the case that we could simply open a Book, almost any book, to discover the truth about our past and ourselves. But things are never that easy, are they?!

            Instead, it seems that the gods have stepped completely out of the world… and that We Mortals are left alone to explain however we may, rationally and irrationally, the ostensibly closed-system vacuum in this existential puzzle-paradise we call Our World. This kind of study is not about what might truly have been Once Upon a Time in the youthful days of Man’s adventures in the world, but rather whether knowledge of those days can be deciphered by Us today with any degree of reasonability or reliability; and in this playing field all the available evidence seems to point to the factum that we are alone in the world—left to sort ourselves out, however we may or may choose, with the other co-inhabitants of this Place.

To return again to the idea of narrative “uniqueness,” and linked to that idea, the Reader also makes an appeal to the high ethical standards of the Christian God. Yet this, precisely, is what I do not have the sight to see. The rhetoric of faith has it that God is just; but can we really not “hear” the words of the Christian argument: that the Justice of this Christian God is to slaughter an Innocent Son of His, which act, magically, has some value, individually, for a world full of human failure. This is no act of Justice; and it is in fact and to the very highest degree, profoundly Unjust. Therefore, at the very least the interpretation that Christian Doctrine has given to this act must change. Even should I accept the historical death of Jesus, the narrative that reads this as an act of Justice is unacceptable to reasoning and just men. This is no justice that Men can divine, therefore it is not justice… just an irrational narrative that asks us to understand as justice an act that is not just, in diametrical opposition to the justice of one such as Socrates, which is clear and reasonable, and has the virtue of making the just man also the beautiful man.

            So it has long seemed to me that the Christian narrative must have taken a wrong turn at some point in its history to arrive at this conclusion about Christian Justice, which is no Justice at all, or at least not any type of Justice known to men who have been thinking about justice since the dawn of human history. My interest and the years of my study have always been dedicated to finding out where these types of thinking mistakes were made in the history of constructing the Christian narrative, and then to trying my hand at reconstructing a better narrative interpretation. Because for me it is to insult Reason itself to attribute to God, for example, a notion of Justice that is actually its exact opposite—an injustice. This is to render God irrational, and, by extension, the crown of His creation intellectually vacuous.

"And in the streets, the children screamed
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken"

Thinking died for Christianity on a summer’s day in Nicaea (in what is today, Turkey) in the year 325 A.D.

            Belief and the death of thinking… It is imperative that we do not simply rest in the authority surrounding the various ideas that we hold dear and in which we are persuaded to put our faith; but we must insist on putting to the test everything, both in- and outside our authoritarian belief box—our Truth, in order to determine whether our reasons and our reasoning are and remain equitable. It is only in this manner, after all, that we keep justice or rightness [Dίκη] in Thinking. In this respect I am much like the cultivated Greek of the 2^nd century transplanted into the 21^st century… I have chosen to take a stand concerning my Thinking Life using logismos, reasoned conviction, which is grounded in the archaic notion of phronesis or intellectual insight, and which is the rational basis for the ancient Greek philosophical virtues of courage, self-control, and justice. It is an interesting irony of history that these same Stoic philosophical virtues would be quickly subsumed into Christian Thought, except for the grounding virtue of phronesis.

            It has become a reasonable choice for me, then, that I would disdain the religious conception of pistis or faith, an inferior conception of “knowledge” derived from a platonic thought tradition, which embodies intellectual “blindness” in the sense that it is irrational and unexamined, and which, according to E. R. Dodds (Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 1968, 120ff), “was the state of mind of the uneducated [Greeks], who believe things on hearsay without being able to give reasons for their belief.” It is an unfortunate circumstance of history that the Apostle Paul would come to represent “as the very foundation of the Christian life” the idea of pistis instead of logismos.

            To sketch out briefly the lines of the history of an idea, in our West pistis would become the foundational or sine qua non virtue for framing religious belief, both among Christians and later Neo-Platonist philosophers. So it seems to me that we are in dire need of a new Reform; that it is high time we began to challenge again the statu quo of Christian arguments and beliefs that were, frankly, intellectually obscure and therefore barely plausible on the day the ink was still drying on the Council codicils—indeed, it still offends Intelligence that the Church was brazen enough to encourage thinking men, on pain of death, to accept “concepts” that were already defined as paradoxes and articles of faith in that day, and which today are simply unbelievable. In this New World of ours, Christianity must return to a different age, to an earlier day when logismos mattered more than pistis. The life of the Church depends on it; and if it does not happen, then in due course Christianity will take its place alongside other narratives for children and those of more simple faith as merely another variation on a Mother Goose theme, or as another moral tale that will eventually fade away because it does not make any sense. This was Nietzsche’s prediction.

            So at the Council of Nicaea, in 325 C.E., an authoritarian or authoritative “Truth” concerning the Christian message was codified, and Thinking died. Ever since, those who have not been persuaded by the details of the specific interpretative truth categorized at Nicaea have been systematically anathematized—sentenced to spend eternity in hell. And, yet, if truth be told, even Paul and his Thinking about the Cosmic Christ do not belong to post-Nicaean Christianity, if one may judge by the Pauline and distinctly non-Trinitarian gospel-kerygma he leaves behind in his first letter to the Corinthians (Ch. 15)–

“Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.”

After Nicaea, only the filters of Nicaean Christianity became the acceptable measure of truth about the Christian message, which puts Paul and many others I suppose, myself included, in pretty much the same rudderless boat at some 2000 years remove—hell-bound.

            Perhaps the Christ crucified was Paul’s idea of a skandalon, a stumbling block, or foolishness (I Cor. 1:23); it would seem, however, that he should have reserved that kind of tag for the resurrection, which is, if ever there was, an event of a mythological order in the fine narrative tradition of dying and resurrecting gods, such as Dionysius and Osiris. Men’s dying for one another is an act that is generous and beautiful in the world of human history; Gods’ dying and resurrecting, on the other hand, seems only to have echo in the world of legends and myths. Against the empirical and crushing weight of a world given over to material death and decay, the NT stories of resurrections, of Lazarus [Jn. 11], Jairus’s daughter [Mk. 5:35ff], Tabitha [Acts 9:36ff], and of Jesus himself, are simply too unique to belong meaningfully to real-time and literal interpretations without some sort of reasonable support from empirical sources. Such events as these are more at home in mythological time than in historical time; and their meanings are actually much more meaningful in that former realm of translation.

            Professor Ehrman, a Professor of Religious Studies, has suggested that new research is pointing to the fact that maybe Jesus was pretty sure he was a prophet, but that the texts do not support that he thought himself a god… “Did Jesus think he was God? New insights on Jesus’ own self-image. And so the intrigue continues and will not be solved here today.

"And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died."

To return again to the theme of uniqueness – imagine that, in a universe where planets all rotate in one direction, one day, one planet decides to rotate in the counter direction, only for one day. Then it becomes sensible again and spins merrily along in harmony with the other planets. Imagine, as well, that there is some witness of or evidence for this occurrence. This, one might argue, is a unique event—an historical singularity no less so than any mathematical singularity; and even if there were some record of its occurrence, every reasonable man would be absolutely in his right mind to question the “meaning” or “possible consequences” of such an unusual event. So it is with resurrections when they are literally read, and not read just as myths and metaphors.

            It is indisputable that such events as resurrections have mytho-meaning, but it is not so clear that they have much reasonable or inherent currency in a dimension, ours, which is dominated, saturated by raw empirical subsistence. This is the difference between the stories of resurrections when read by Jewish Pharisees, who were always literalists, and the same exact stories read by Jewish Sadducees, who were anything but literalists. In the first instance, one argues that the resurrection has empirical value, as real-time event, and in the second instance, one reads the resurrection as metaphor, as a spiritual transformation or conversion of the individual to a new life. From an interpretative point of view, it is simply not possible to make plausibly the case that the non-literalist interpretation of the event is not the correct (or the also correct) first reading.

           

So at the end of the day, it seems that my being “taken to task” by our Reader is actually related to the idea that I do not take a specific Christian stance concerning the questions I raise. Yet I cannot take this stance with such a flawed, yet I think perhaps fixable narrative. This fixing is the story of my scholarly life.

Simple Belief darkens the mind. Kierkegaard, in his essay “Every Good and Perfect Gift,” (p. 32), seems to allude to this passive darkness of the mind in response to this text from the NT book of James:

“’Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’ So they sat in their quiet sorrow; they did not harden themselves against the consolation of the word; they were humble enough to acknowledge that life is a dark saying, and as in their thought they were swift to listen to see if there might be an explanatory word, so were they also slow to speak and slow to wrath. They did not presume to give up the word; they longed only for the opportune hour to come. If that came, then they would be saved.”

In this redux version of American Pie, Do you recall what was revealed / The Day that Thinking Died…?

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].