Category Archives: Fables, myths & parables

The Star Grid

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

When I was ten years old I read an astronomy book which claimed that from a particular point in our galaxy one could look out into the night sky and see all the stars arranged in a perfect grid.

The idea of the Star Grid impressed me so deeply it became one of my dominant guiding idea-images.

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It is fair to ask: What if this idea is factually false? My guess is that it is factually false. However, this idea is not essentially factual but mythical, and this means fact is secondary to… something else… in the truth of the idea. The stars are the anchor point of an analogy, but the analogy was only the scaffolding of a way of seeing. Once that way of seeing was established the scaffold could be disassembled. Frankly, I care as little about the factuality of the Star Grid as I do about the metaphysical reality of the world of physics or of the existence of the so-called “historical Jesus”. As Black Elk said, after relating his tribe’s myth of its origin: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. ”

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Does any of this mean I disregard facts? No. I respect – I obey – facts within their domain. But the domain of facts is limited. I observe the limits of factuality’s sovereignty as scrupulously as I observe factuality’s laws within its limits (in the objective world, which is “Caesar’s”). Beyond those limits I observe the laws of meaning which belong to the subjective world. (Properly understood, the subjective world is essentially “inter-subjective”. A “subject” is best understood as a point of participation within a collective spiritual existence that sustains and exceeds any particular soul. Subjectivity is rarely understood, despite the fact that everyone knows their subjectivity best of all. Did I say “despite”? I’m sorry: because. There’s known unknowns, there’s unknown unknowns, but the biggest bitch of all – the one who took Rumsfeld down – is the too-emphatically-known known.)

Know what I mean?

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All this abstract crap is utterly practical and applicable to concrete life.

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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Joints

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

Truth does not accrete in a vacuum of ignorance; truth articulates from pre-existent, pre-articulate wholes. Truth does not extend outwardly; it intends inwardly. Truth resolves; truth cannot be constructed. Truth is not a machine or a story or a system. It is not invented; it is discovered and rediscovered.

The primordial truth is a crude, chaotic undifferentiated whole. Language divides the whole into finer and finer distinctions. Only in hindsight are we born on some particular day, on a bed, in a room, in a building, in a city. In actual fact, we are all born exactly at the same time, in exactly the same place, and we all say exactly the same thing about it: “waaaaaaah.”

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They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day we came.

– Edwin Muir

Reflection on the Moon

Fables, myths & parables

The Moon, the pseudo-Sun of the night sky, which derives its illumination entirely from the Sun it imitates, always shows us one face. The other side, the “dark” side, always faces away: like the back of one’s head when one looks in the mirror, or like the self when one reflects on who one really is, or like the status of a relationship or a situation when one regards it objectively.

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I wrote this in order to participate in the mythical existence for a moment. What was it like? I’ve trained my reflective mind to admit: I don’t know.

The flower arranger

Fables, myths & parables

The man and the woman met when they were students. Once or twice a month he would bring her a perfect rose. He would go from shop to shop, looking for one with a perfect color and shape with no blemishes on the petals or stem.

After they graduated and got married, he began giving her bouquets. At first they were conventionally perfect, but gradually they became increasingly eccentric. He began combining selections of flowers in unusual ways, in symmetries she had never seen, but which felt familiar to her.

After the birth of their child, he began arranging the flowers in front of her. He would dump a pile of flowers on the table and, without taking his eyes off her, he would arrange the flowers into a perfect unity, incorporating every one. She sometimes saw him steal flowers from the neighbors’ front lawns as he walked home.

At some point she realized that his flower selections, which had been growing more haphazard by the year, were now random. Some of the flowers were severely damaged and some were rotten–but he used them all, and his compositions gained depth and power. He would finish, and, seeing what he had made, she would cry without knowing why.

Toward the end of their life he would run his lawn mower over a corner of their wildflower bed, and create a bouquet from the clippings.