Category Archives: Fables, myths & parables

Crests

Fables, myths & parables

Years ago my sister and I were swimming in the ocean as a storm was coming in. The waves were huge and powerful. It was nearly impossible to move from the near-region where broken waves grappled in churning knots, out further to where the wave dropped themselves in permanent quarter-ton suplexes, and further still to where we wanted to be, to where the curls were just beginning to form. Out there waves still had univocal thrust and could pick us up and carry us back over the violence and set us on the shore. But the closer we got to the break line, the harder it was to stand upright and advance. We would get knocked off our feet and thrown to the bottom, and washed back into the brown foamy shallows, our faces full of dirt and our bellies scored by sharp little shells.

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Where the water is deeper, it is more impersonal and disciplined. Out there, waves move through the ocean and the ocean feels the movement running through it. Each individual quart of salty water makes a patient circle like a rider on a ferris wheel, returning again and again to where it began.

But once the force of the wave hits hard ground, everything gets personal. The water at the bottom is smashed into the ground; the water in the middle loses its balance and begins to topple; the water at the top is overthrown and falls on its face. Here, water identifies with the wave and knows itself to be the mover. Every eddy strives to pull the rest of the ocean in its wake. A foaming brood of rivers coil, constrict, crush and swallow each other endlessly.

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Somewhere between the complacency of the depths and the ambitions of the shallows, where the waves touch bottom with the tips of their toes, there is motion that can move us. And when we are moved, it is the residual unified force of the deeper traditions, challenged by the dirty spasms of the everyday, to leap and push and bring order where there are too many orders.

Edenic seeds

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas, Judaism

A biologist held out two seeds, one in each hand.

“This seed in my left hand is a future tree. If you plant this seed in a sunny spot on fertile soil and keep it watered it will consume nutrients, water and sunlight and grow into a tree.

“This seed in my right hand is a generative principle. If you place this seed in a sunny spot, on fertile soil and keep the soil watered, through the seed nutrients, water and sunlight will congregate and organize themselves into a huge tree.”

“That I can accept,” said the biologist’s colleague; “but your claim that these seeds come from the two trees of Eden strikes me as unprovable, and, frankly, unscientific.”

The explorer and the settler

Fables, myths & parables

An explorer discovered a beautiful unsettled site at the foot of a mountain. He marked the spot on his map, and went back to the city for supplies. His plan was to establish a settlement there.

When he returned to the spot nine months later, someone had already begun construction. The explorer thought to himself, “Well, you might have settled it, but I discovered it.”

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We credit ourselves the truths we wordlessly intuit, but credit others only what they articulate.

The good gardener

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas

A gardener had a policy of treating all the plants fairly, giving each its equal share of water, sun, fertilizer, etc. According to this gardener, the plant’s health was its own responsibility, seeing that the plant itself was the sole variable in this situation. “Every plant is given exactly the same advantages, has the same opportunities. The good plants flourish and the bad ones perish.”

Iridescent irritants

Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics, Phenomenology

Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…

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A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.

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An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.

Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.

Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.

It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.

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Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.

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We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.

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We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.

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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.

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Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.

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Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.

Beyond deism

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas

Santayana: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

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An estranged couple went on a road trip. Fearing a meltdown they avoided the subject of where they were going. Instead they bickered about one another’s driving. “You’re driving too fast.” “Stop riding the clutch.” “You’re making the car lurch with your heavy brake-foot.” “You keep weaving into the shoulder.” “Your music is making my head throb.”

Whenever he got control of the wheel he headed toward Las Vegas. Whenever it was her turn she headed toward Vermont.

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America, founded at the height of the Enlightenment on the principles of the Enlightenment, puts its full faith in methods.

We’ve always been deists. We believe the clockmaker God, as witnessed to by our Founding Fathers, his philosophe-saints.

We believe in a holy trinity of systems: the scientific method, the free market and the system of government outlined in the United States Constitution. These three systems, operating by mechanical principles, automatically crank out truth, prosperity and goodness, respectively.

The mechanism can only be gummed up by the bloody subjective mess contained in human hearts.

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In politics we don’t talk about how we want our lives to be. At our best we talk about what policies are effective or ineffective, and at our worst we talk about what policies are innately good and innately evil. And then we measure key indicators of a success none of us have reflected on in the terms that matter: the quality of our daily lives.

In education we don’t think about the kinds of people we wish to cultivate. We argue about what educational theory is most effective in practice and which ones are pure theory and wishful thinking. Or we fret that we’re teaching our children excessive obedience or/and excessive disrespect for authority. We administer standardized tests to help us measure whether we’ve achieved our end-goal, which increasingly is defined by whether the students are scoring well on standardized tests.

In commerce, we don’t ask ourselves what the success and prosperity we pursue means to our lives as we live them. We especially don’t think about the bulk of our waking hours we spend working. The trials and tribulations of work-life will be rewarded in the after-work-life: little weekends and the big retirement. Each company sets success metrics, by which it judges how it is doing. How each company does is a tributary which flows into how the nation is doing. The better things go the better things are. The numbers tell us precisely how much better or worse everything is.

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Practical advice: If you don’t know the answer to the question “Why?” answer instead the question “What?” or “How?” Most people are more sensitive to texture than text, and will notice only that what sounded like a question was followed by what sounded like an answer

To really close the matter support your answer with quantitative measurements. Cover any question with six feet of data, and it will be as silent as if it had been put to rest.

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If we were each to lay out and clarify what we really value and need and we were to talk in good faith about practical possibilities would we end up despising each other more than we do when we keep everything private and hidden?

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Can a person who talks about an all-powerful invisible hand really be called a rationalist?

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians

Auditioning the scalpel

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas

A surgeon was considering the purchase of a very expensive scalpel, and decided to test it before buying.

He started with general-purpose knife functions. “This scalpel might be a special kind of knife, but it is a knife, after all, and it should function as a knife.”

So the surgeon sliced up an apple with it. Then he used it to whittle a stick into a tiny toy soldier. Then he made a wood engraving with it, tapping on it its handle with a small hammer, using its tip as a fine chisel. Then he used it to pry open a paint can.

The scalpel really did make an adequate all-purpose knife.

Then he tried to operate on a patient’s heart. He found it rough and imprecise. “I might as well be using a jack-knife. This confirms what I always suspected. Why pay for an expensive scalpel when a jack-knife works just as well?”

(“Besides,” he said to the nurse, wheeling the dead patient out of his operating room, “our surgery business has really been slowing down.”)

Eden retold

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism

Adam-in-Eden reached out and grasped knowledge as something that is grasped. At that moment he became simply: Adam.

He was Adam who lived in a place called Eden. He could live somewhere else, too. He could be Adam in another garden or in a desert or in a jungle or in a city. “Listen, I could live on the motherfucking moon,” said Adam.

He was as a god, mastering this new world full of objects with his new explaining, predicting, controlling knowledge.

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Adam forgot who he wasn’t, and so he forgot who he was.

He wasn’t exactly wrong about anything he thought, but he was never right enough.

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“Dude, I have knowledge of God. Don’t fuck with me. Me n’ God’ll smite thee. Just saying.”

Magic was the first technology. It wasn’t too good, but the rush was addictive.

Aesop’s fable: The captain and the oarsmen

Fables, myths & parables

The captain of a lost ship reasoned thusly:

“If I were at my destination I would no longer be lost. What separates me from my destination is distance. Distance is traversed through the rowing of my oarsman.

“If it is untraversed distance keeping me from my destination and the responsibility for traversing distance belongs to the oarsmen, it is obvious that my oarmen are to blame for our being lost!”

So the captain orderd his navigator and all his officers to report immediately to the galley. He called the oarsmen before them, rebuked them and had them flogged. Then every man, officer and crew alike, grabbed an oar, and together they sat straining in the dark, rowing and rowing and rowing and rowing across the distance.

A nonclarifying clarification of Birth of Tragedy

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Despite all appearances, the star of the Birth of Tragedy is Hermes. Hermes is implicated in the union of Dionysus and Apollo in tragedy, and is the primary object of the study. Further, Hermes is the subject of the study, the author.

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Imagine a herm with the face of Dionysus on one side and the face of Apollo on the other.

Such fusions are made possible by and manifest Hermes. Without Hermes, the realities of the world would be as numerous, as various and and irreconcilable as the myriad eyes of the giant, Argos.

A face is made possible by and manifests Apollo. Without Apollo, there could be no objects of intention: consciousness would dangle in a state of “conscious of…?” Even on the other side,  the question of “who is conscious?” is detached and unresolvable.

Hermes is the ethical face of Dionysus: the “outwarding” of what is purely “inward” (to use a common but misleading dichotomy), the inward being what would remain if one could subtract the sum from the whole of this reality we share and call the world.

Twos

Biography, Fables, myths & parables, Pragmatism

I used to feel ecstatic riding my bicycle, knowing that this beautiful, simple machine, powered by my own body, could carry me anywhere I chose. I could go to work, or I could pass right by work and travel all the way to Tennessee, or deep into the north. I’d fantasize about maintaining a secret storehouse with all the tubes, tires, chains and spare parts I’d need for a life-time. I’d be free forever.

Now I ride my bicycle and I know that with each bump the frame is gradually weakening. The chain and all the parts are slowly corroding and grinding themselves down against each other. The tires are unrolling themselves into the road like tape, leaving an invisible path of rubber particles everywhere I go. I will need to replace it, bit by bit, by pieces made by other people. Maybe someday no original parts will remain, and this bicycle will exist as a tradition. I am riding over streets made by people, to places valuable solely because of the people there. And what is going on in my body? It is corroding, sickening, healing, weakening, strengthening, replacing its own substance, but its terminus is inevitable. As I ride, I rethink and resurrect the words of people who wrote and died, and I think about living people. And the things I think and have rethought in reading are meant to be told – they demand telling – if someone can hear them.

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If humankind were to perish I’d want no part of what remained. We are in this together; and if we can learn to accept and love this inescapable fact (and stop trying to fantasize ourselves out of it), we can seize our freedom to make our time here together easier to love. Life is still vast.

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Space repeats itself in time. Each moment contains the entirety of space. Space and time repeats itself in each subject. Each subject contains the entirety of space and time. We are forced through time and we move about in space. What about subject, I and We? Can we “move” there? Have you moved or been moved in the interlapping being of an other?

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An admittedly weird digression:

Hermes was the messenger of the Olympian gods who moved infinitely quickly, at the speed of thought. What sort of messages do you suppose he transmitted? Facts?

Janus, the double-faced Roman god of doors, was related to Hermes, and I think he can provide us a clue. From Wikipedia:

Historically, however, Janus was one of the few Roman gods who had no ready-made Greek counterpart, or analogous mythology. We can find in Greece Janus-like heads of gods related to Hermes, perhaps forming a compound god: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In the case of these compounds it is disputed whether they indicated a herm with the head of Athena, or with a Janus-like head of both Hermes and Athena, or a figure compounded of both deities.

I enjoy the question of what divine thoughts moved through the split brain of Janus? Was it an inner dialogue? Was there a witnessing consciousness somewhere above or below? Was he of two minds, or one… or three…?

The paradox of good listening

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

In our content-glutted world, listening is exalted above speaking. There’s many people talking and few people listening.

Human beings are creatures of the foreground. We like to take the direct path. If few people are listening the solution is: Start listening. Right? Isn’t that a satisfying answer? Don’t you feel virtuous when you take the attitude of the good listener and let the other do all the talking? Don’t you feel charitable?

But let me ask you this: If you perceive it this way – that all honor is due the listener… are you really listening? Or, taking it from a different angle: when someone needs to be heard, is the need essentially one of needing some silent space and a friendly face? Or something else?

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The paradox: We listen to the degree that we value what is said. Unless the listener experiences the value of what he hears – unless he is genuinely grateful for what is being said – he’s not actually listening at all. Valuing doesn’t have to mean agreeing, it means valuing the shared being of conversation. A conversation of this kind has itself (as a shared whole) through its part-icipants.

The resolution: Start by refusing to listen to what you can’t value; but even more importantly, don’t speak what you do not spontaneously experience as valuable yourself. If it doesn’t move you saying it, it won’t move the other hearing it. Don’t say it, write it, sing it, paint it, build it, dance it. Wait attentively and openly for your vision to come to you from within or from without.

There is no shame in waiting. There is tremendous honor in waiting.

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Have you ever experienced the liberation of art?: a deeply persuasive presentation of a new way to be in the world?

Art that does not radiate a new existential possibility around itself is not art, but mere entertainment.

It does not matter if the art “moves” you emotionally, as long as you are moved within the same old world as before. That is mere sentimental jostling, and it seems like a big enough deal until you’ve experienced a true shift at the depths.

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Your universe is a planetarium. You look out into the starry, plaster dome and you see infinite space. You look at the projector at the center, and it is an object, furniture.

Oh, inverted world…!

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We no longer expect enough. But do not worry: desperation is on its way and it will liberate us from our drab satisfaction. Nothing but genuine intense pain can liberate. Until then vanity and fear conspire to imprison us in cozy complacence. I have nothing to say to someone who has never suffered and known the disorientation of despair.

I’ve always loved people in deep crisis, and also people on psychedelic drugs; both listen urgently enough to hear the radically unexpected.

“Lord we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven…”

Skepticism

Fables, myths & parables

Skepticism is the practice by which a thinker interrogates obviousness, givenness and assumedness until everything he “knows” falls apart in his hands. What can be done with the broken pieces of former truth?

For one kind of thinker the pieces become an exhibit of the nonexistence of truth. He breaks pieces into smaller pieces to renew his faith in factlessness, a willful refusal to know any particular thing as true. For another kind of thinker the pieces are disillusionment. He glues them back together into a recollection of the past, and makes skepticism taboo, and this is his faith, a willful commitment to know particular things as true. (For both truth is conceived as constituted of particular true knowledge.)

There is a third option. Actively do the breaking, but pause regularly and allow the pieces to reconstitute themselves. Observe as a gentle scientist, walking around like a sculptor – within, without and upon – the fluidly rearticulating shapes, noting everything, omitting nothing. Especially note the feeling of ethical freedom and ethical rebinding, and the influence of others.

David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College, again

Fables, myths & parables

I think maybe Wallace wasn’t really giving advice to those graduating students in that commencement address. It seems possible that he was pleading for mercy: “You might not understand specifically why I am how I am, but please allow your misunderstanding to be a compassionate story…”

Maybe philosophy is nothing other than a practical, factical attempt to make the fragile people at home in this world with us. We can make the world tough and habitable only for the tough… but then we will be surrounded by tough people and we might wonder why the world is so dull and flat and devoid of possibility. The best beauty is delicate. Enlightened strength is moved by fragility and sacrifices to it.

(By the way, do women understand that if they gain ascendancy in the world, men will become the beautiful ones? Women will have to learn the art of human connoisseurship. Until then they will be insufferable tyrants. Look at the ERA parades, and look at the average modern wife: Hell on Earth. This transition to female dominance has sucked and will continue to suck until it resolves and women know how to love from a position of strength.)

Spiritual anatomy lesson

Fables, myths & parables

(A semi-poeticization of Husserl)

It is too easy to confuse our biological anatomy with our spiritual anatomy, to confuse the physical site in the body where the spiritual intercepts kinesis (the body experienced from the inside). Our minds are accustomed to reflect on a world of particulars and objects, and spiritual entities defy comprehension in this mode of thought. (But not all modes of thought. I’m not a mystic or a romantic. Many apparently unthinkable things can be thought, if thought in the appropriate mode.)

The two major points of confusion: 1) the equation of spiritual mind (in German ‘geist‘ means both spirit and mind, and most of our religious notions come directly out of German meditations on geist) with the biological brain; 2) the equation of spiritual heart with the biological heart.

The spiritual mind is actually the negative space of the brain. The spiritual mind has the shape of the entire universe, inner and outer, and it orbits each of us, and leaps from each of us and dives back in like solar flares. It can also be viewed as a field of vision within which sights exist. The spiritual mind does not displace space like an object. In fact it barely exists except for where it cooccupies an Other’s mind and becomes transcendent We: a seeing-with-together.

The spiritual heart – the heart who breaks – only intercepts the site of the physical heart. It extends throughout the entire body, and then out into the world in twisting tendrils. That spiritual heart, like spiritual mind, displaces nothing, but barely exists except in cooccupation with an Other’s heart and becomes another dimension of transcendent We, a feeling-with-together.

When a heart is broken, one of these tendrils is severed, and taken off by an Other. The brokenness is the phantom limb of the heart-tendril, which continues to feel and ache. It cannot be rejoined; it cannot be touched and comforted.

It is dangerous to love authentically. Most of us refuse to be with an Other – another subject-as-such, another entire interlapping universe. We’d rather interstimulate with another across the membrane of space: a subject-thing we regard whole against the sky, a psychological thing-soul encapsulated in a skull and a chest.

It is dangerous to love, but love anyway. Do it again and again even if it kills you.

The world is not out there. It isn’t “within” you, either. It exists between us. (The physical world exists for us as a subset of the spiritual. When mystics speak of the illusory nature of the world, what they mean, or what they ought to mean, is that the physical world’s primacy as the metaphysical substance of the world is illusory. It is all made of spirit.)

We are all we have. We are all we want.

The luxury of skepticism

Fables, myths & parables

Once you’ve fully exercised your skepticism and called the contents of common sense into such doubt that common sense seems no better grounded than any other solidly constructed poetic vision you might find yourself tempted to experiment. If you’ve been able to walk on this surface for all this time without falling beneath, what other unlikely surfaces will hold you up?

However, standing in the boat and looking out on the water and speculating how it might bear your weight, trying all sorts of possible explanations and theories (does God solidify the water under each foot like a tiny boat? Does he hold you up by the scruff of your soul? Maybe there’s a sandbar under there? Maybe the water is frozen?) – that is not exercising skepticism. Exercising skepticism is testing the possibilities in ordinary day-to-day practice. I’m tasteless enough to call rational resolve’s practical follow-through “faith”.

What is truth?

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Some ways truth is established, practically:

  • In representing the contents of life in a clear, orderly and self-evident way. Truth = tidiness.
  • In accurately anticipating and influencing the future. Truth = security.
  • In bringing fragmentary facts home to a unified body of understanding. Truth = digestion.
  • In reaching agreements with those around you. Truth = home.

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On that last point, truth as home: Young philosophers love to believe they don’t need a home, that they don’t need to share truth.

Fact is, the philosopher needs to share his truth more than any other kind of person. Sharing truth is the philosopher’s job.

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The youthful philosopher (who seeks truth) is larval, just fry. He is aware only that he cannot share the prevalent truth. This is his point of departure. He heads off toward an oasis – his truth – he sees hovering on the edge of the horizon. He dreams of sitting at the side of his own pool, reflecting in solitude to his heart’s content. He drives at his truth, driven by idiotic instinct, just like a salmon drawn back to the head of the stream where he was born. Does he reach his truth? Yes, but not the truth he thought he’d find. He doesn’t find any oasis, but he certainly finds himself submerged in something cold and disturbingly fluid, and it can be summarized as something like: “My God, I don’t want to be alone here.”

Look for this form, and you’ll see it again and again. Wittgenstein slowly losing his mind alone in his house high on a cliff above Norwegian fjords; Nietzsche (who called his philosophical kind “hyperboreans”) living alone in Sils Maria; Christopher McCandless hitchiking to Alaska and dying there; and so on.

Anyone who goes out into true solitude and comes back knows three things for certain: 1) physical sustenance is nowhere near sufficient; 2) the power to coerce is the opposite of what is needed; 3) religion is not about magical miracles, but something more radically surprising.

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It doesn’t matter how tough or antisocial a human being is. A person in solitary confinement goes insane.

A philosopher who thinks too far can fall into plain-sight solitary confinement. He can speak with others, but he cannot make himself heard and he cannot digest most kinds of company.

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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

– Rumi