Gebara – Out of the Depths Chapter 4: Women’s Experience of Salvation
Thought #1
“Symbolically, human beings are heaven and earth … happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, joy and sadness…” (pp 109-110) all at the same time.
I love this. It brings to mind the philosophies of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus. He was deemed by many to be crazy-making in his theory of the identity of opposites … that opposites are identities of themselves. He uses examples of a road going uphill also being a road that goes downhill, and comments that the beginning and ending of a circle are the same thing.
I know, I know … all that duality-dissing I’m famous for is jumping to the forefront of my brain right now. Here’s the thing: Hot and Cold don’t necessarily have to be opposite entities … they’re just marks –in different places- along the scale of temperature. In fact, Hot IS Cold … when you’re comparing it to something hotter. I have two fish tanks and I keep them at a balmy 80 degrees so my sweet fishies can frolic under the illusion that they’re in a tropical lake. In the summer, I can’t believe how cold the water feels and worry that my fishes will have to hibernate or something to stay alive. In the winter, however, my fish tank literally steams. (I keep my wintertime house at a balmy 65 degrees because I’m really poor and I only have to pay for a sweater and a blanket one time instead of in ever-increasing monthly installments like a gas bill).
Hot is cold.
(Uh-Oh, but this is dangerous … it brings to mind George Orwell’s double speak: “War is Peace” etc).
(Also, incidentally, the 'promising personality characteristics' of Narcissism read like this: A tolerance of contradictions, A view of everything being an extension of one's own will, A tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent, and Being prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. Well ... I not only tolerate, but thoroughly enjoy and appreciate contradictions. I happen to think that everything in my world is created by and can be changed by me. I have a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent, and I believe in Santa Claus, Faeries, Mermaids and Tree-Spirits who charm our world with magic. I have also been diagnosed as a Narcissist. That diagnosis has also been heartily discredited by subsequent professionals I have spoken with - social workers, therapists and life-skills-trainers alike - but it's still there ... oooh ... I suppose my thoughts/research on Narcissism will make for an interesting post at a later date .....)
So ANYWAY. Human beings are symbolically everything as it’s represented along all spectrums. To me this sounds like the beginning of a beautiful argument for balance: When we recognize that we have all of everything in us (Anaximander’s “homoeomeries”) and that what we give emphasis to is what emerges from the inner vortex of these spinning bits, we’re totally empowered to choose who we are and how we view things and how we choose to CREATE our reality.
IF that is the case, we’re at choice to separate and segregate the bits however we will, and we can do that as a matter of establishing extremes, or as a matter of spinning equitable harmony. BUT even if we DO choose to follow the extreme path of black and white, we can never deny that there are billions of bits in glorious hues which we’ve simply refused to let emerge. FURTHERMORE, it seems a much easier, more fulfilling and more rewarding creation if we use some of ALL of the bits to make, instead of a road that is both uphill and downhill, a nice flat road that’s easy to travel.
Because this is a flow-of-thought journal sort of thing here, I don’t want to spend more time on developing/refining this argument right now … but, hmmm. What do you think? Where can this take us? What could it all mean????? (ha ha … the last question was just my humorous attempt to sound tacky).
Ah, but the road will be what it wants to be. One cannot force the road to be anything other than a road. Man's (and I use that word with ALL of its implications) attempts to impose regularity on the irregular, to foist an artificial reality on that which resists artificiality - nature - are always ultimately futile attempts.
ReplyDeleteAn example from my childhood: when I was very young, some enterprising soul determined that it would be easier to hike to the waterfalls above Aspen Grove (you know the place) if the trail were paved. So at who knows how much expense, they trucked smoking loads of bituminous sludge into the canyon and covered the trail with asphalt. Problem solved. Or was it? It turns out, it was just the beginning of the problems - maintaining the illusion of control was difficult because there were these pesky plants that kept pushing up from beneath the asphalt. They would cause great blisters and cracks, forcing their way upward and into the light. There were attempts to repair the asphalt, but the pavement would end up broken anyway. This effort against nature went on for several years - maybe as much as 20 years or more. But more recently, I noticed that the asphalt had been removed. The trail remained - it was just as easy to hike/climb as it has ever been. But the attempts to overcome and subdue have been abandoned. In a small but inexorable way, nature won. Whenever I think of this, my soul exults in the strength and innate power and glory of the world we live in... That same strength, power, and glory resides in each of us. It's a beautiful metaphor, I think...
Architecturally speaking, Le Corbusier and his contemporaries would have us believe that "less is more," stripping everything to it's absolute functional essence. Robert Venturi, however, one of the great post-Modern thinkers and architects, would have us believe that "less is a bore." Where Venturi and other post-Modernists went wrong was in their artificial infusion of contradiction. What ended up happening is a construct that is cold and distant, removed from any context that can be understood (unless explained). It had none of the simplicity and the complexity was forced and awkward. How much more beautiful are the works of the old masters - Michelangelo, Borromini, Bernini, et. al. These folks created spaces that were understandable, creative, beautiful, and simple. They can be perceived as being beautiful because they are beautiful. They can also be studied and comprehended on a deeper level as well. But these spaces are accessible to every person's mind and sense of pleasure. To me, that's the sign of a real master: without false or forced artificiality, and working within the parameters of nature and what the space wants to be, creating something that is beautiful and meaningful.
Ah, how I ramble! :)
Right! The road will be what the road is. That is one of my favorite ideas ~
ReplyDeleteI suppose, here, that I'm talking about those roads we have the privilege of creating ... you know: in the vein of "free will" and all ....
AND WITH THAT SAID: Yeah ...we Humans DO like to try to force order on things, don't we. I do it ALL THE TIME! Victorian decor, for example... leaves me CRAZY! SO MUCH STUFF! SO MANY PATTERNS! AAARRGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
(note to self: embrace the chaos. appreciate the chaos. find beauty in the chaos....)
Oh dear ... Scary. (and probably just the perfect step for me to take ...! :) )
Not turn your philosophical ruminations towards the light of God ... (ha ha ha ha)...but isn't all of this so obviously ridiculous that life absolutely *MUST* be suffering, as the Buddha taught, or an illusion, as others teach? Or completely stupid, as I teach?
ReplyDeleteYes, Liberty, you're right, hot is cold, which IS the same thing as George Orwell's doublespeak. It's all doublespeak, and it's all nonsense. Contradictions abound in the world because the world, as a whole, is a very silly place, that doesn't make sense because, as I believe, it isn't real. It's a construct of our imaginations.
I think most of what I'd been taught about life as a child has proven to be untrue. But I still cling to so much of it because I WANT it to be true, because I WANT life to make sense and be meaningful. "Hard work pays off in the end" - no it doesn't. In fact it rarely does. "The early bird gets the worm" - no it doesn't. More often the early bird paves a path so that the hawk of destruction can swoop down and destroy the whole worm farm and eat the early bird too (i.e. large corporations buying out small business, after the small business has toiled to prove a profitable model and establish a market).
And for that matter, what the hell is fashion and who decides the rules and qualifications for it? And how does it attract billions of dollars on a regular basis when it's all so ugly?
Silly, silly world.
We spend so much time trying to "figure out what life is about and what it all means" and the most obvious and answer and the only one that resolves everything is that life is silly and means whatever we decide it means. Sure up is down and down is up. Ok!
I think we enjoy the questions more than we care to have the answers.
I prefer the term organic to the term chaotic. Chaos implies no meaning or structure, while organic implies a will, a purpose, and a significance. I try to find significance and import in everything - and usually find it. It may not be what I was expecting, but that's even more delightful, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteBeerconomist - your thoughts remind me of Bob Marley:
ReplyDelete(Get Up, Stand Up)
Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!
We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time...
(I particularly like the last couple of lines. I believe that was originally attributable to Abraham Lincoln).
Ale'ing Chick: I get really caught up in the novelty of creating my life. It's a kick for the most part. Definitely, I have moments where it all FEELS as stupid as it IS, but, well ... I'm still here ......
ReplyDeleteYour comments about the fallacies of the aphorisms we humans are so fond of align with my thoughts exactly. I love this one: "Be careful what you wish for ... you just might get it".
Uh, ok ... why it that a warning?
So ... what is is all about? I dunno. Like you said, I don't worry so much about actual answers anymore ... I just like to play with the questions. The significance I assign is, indeed, irrelevant, and it's great fun when I encounter people who have assigned the same significance to the same ideas. It's also pretty fun when my ideas are so foreign to someone that they nearly have a heart attack in reaction to them. Ha ha! Taking themselves so seriously! haha!
I guess it's kind of like a party you're stuck at. You can stand around hating it, or just find/create something that entertains you until it's over. Hating it doesn't feel very good for very long. Heading straight to the wet bar and drowning in drunkenness is fun for a few minutes, but get really old. Wandering around listlessly is extremely boring. So ... I guess that leaves one to look for *something* that might be entertaining ... for me, it's playing with my thoughts and ideas and bouncing them off of what appears to actually *be* happening around me.
We're all free, as Leslie Gore crones, to recognize that "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to."
I wonder, when we finally die, how long (through the lens of hindsight) this life will appear to have lasted. I wonder why we keep coming back. 'Cuz you're right: where I can say it's delightful, I can also say it's a giant pain in my ass. Delightful is Dreadful. Meaning is Meaningless. Serious is Silly. And Life is Death. Whoa - this doublespeak stuff is pretty intense .... cool .......