Fixing the Rose

He knows the beauty of the rose
Painfully intense as it can be
Is not enough.
And so he fixes it
on canvas sacrificing
nearly every part of it
to give it what it lacks:
permanence.
It gets to stay.
It gets to be what it appears to be--
As though the lack of permanence were not what made it
Beautiful
to begin with.


And so the painting calms the rose
But does not fix it.

Let's begin.

On Childhood

It's not that we lost something in childhood that drives us back in search, but that we were waiting for something that never came.

On the Evil of Religion

Over the past few years—probably because I’ve been paying closer attention and not because it’s happening more often—I’ve been hearing more and more voices crying out against religion—against all religion, from the likes of Bill Maher to the intellect of Richard Dawkins. Religion is bad. It’s bad for us. We’d be better off without it. Belief in God brings misery. Spreading the word is just about the most anti-human of all acts. So much misery has been done in the name of religion that religion is a viral cancer. ISIS. Trump voters. The Westboro Baptists. Colonialism, Imperialism, Zionism. If anything good comes of religion that good is small and private and could never match the evil religion does.

It’s a pretty strong case.

But does that critique actually make sense? I don’t think it does. And this is why: religion is neither good nor bad. I’m not going to offer any heart-felt defense of religion. Nor am I willing to condemn it. People are good and people are bad. Bad people use whatever means is at their disposal to effect their bad ends. Religion has no power at all to stop them, nor does it have any power to promote their hate; it has power neither to effect nor resist the evil ends of the people that use it. This is an essential point. The haters of religion have their heads on sideways when it comes to religion. They think if they would only get rid of religion things would get better. At least a little better.

Things would not get better. In fact things would get worse, though I don’t credit religion thereby. Nazism was not a religious movement. Communism is even less religious than Nazism. Pol Pot did not answer to any god. Nor have any of the leaders of North Korea. Donald Trump is not religious (despite has shallow pretense). People don’t need religion to inspire them in their hatred. They have nationalism and racism and sexism and plain old paranoia. The number of insignificant differences among humans available to exploit as though they were meaningful is as large as the human imagination. Evil people will always have ways to appeal to hatred and desire to coerce their fellow humans into mass murder. There’s no more destructive force on earth at this moment than Capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about God.

People are good, and people are evil. And they’ll use religion if it’s available. And they’ll use something else if it’s not available. Do people fight more recklessly or more viciously or with less fear when they fight for God? Some may. Some almost certainly do. Not many. And on the other hand the number of people whose lives are enriched by their spiritual practice—whether or not they are theists—is almost beyond number. That doesn’t make religion good. People practice religion to become good. Religion isn’t by any means the only path to goodness. There are plenty of good atheists out there. Better a good atheist than a jihadists or a klansman.

Those who point to Osama Bin Laden or Pat Robertson and yell, “evil,” also have to point to the Dali Lama or Desmond Tutu. Religion didn’t make the former evil or the latter good. (The good ones humbly tell us there is good and evil in all of us.)

Evil people quote their scriptures to justify their evil. Good people quote those same scriptures to refute the evil people. The scriptures are not good or evil. People use the scriptures for good or evil.

The people who decry religion as evil always reason in the most shallow way. They assume the subject does not have to be taken seriously. Bill Maher dismisses Islam with a pinky wave by counting how many Muslims believe hateful things. That’s guilt by association. That’s correlation as causation. That’s a willful unwillingness to look into the real, historical causes of hatred. You can’t even ask the question of whether religion is good or evil without doing your homework. What is Islam? What is Christianity? These are not simple questions. They can only be answered by drawing circles around certain populations, circles that could be drawn with equal validity around different populations, based on beliefs or practices chosen by the one who’s drawing the circles. And your not-quite-arbitrary-but-absolutely-not-necessary circle will answer your question for you. Are Christians those who “believe the Bible” (whatever that means)? Are they the ones who accept the Bible as “the Word of God” (whatever that means)? Are they the ones who interpret the Bible correctly (as though there were such a thing, as though there were a single interpretation that covered such a vast literature)? And who decides which encircled group of religious folk do that when even those who call themselves “Christians” can’t? The one who makes that decision, the one who draws the circle, is the one who wants to approve or condemn Christianity and who will draw his circle around those people that enforce that interpretation to justify his condemnation or praise. It’s all done in the worst bad faith possible.

Is religion doctrine or is religion practice? And which doctrines and which practices count? And how do you know? How will you decide? On what basis will you draw your circles? There is no such thing as “religion”—not in the sense in which it would have to exist to be condemned or approved as such. It lacks the ontological or epistemological center and body it would need to have to support the statement that “religion is destructive” or “religion is good.” People use religion to destroy and people use religion to build. And if you are convinced that more destruction is done in the name of religion than construction—you may be right. I don’t know. That only means that in the on-going struggle of humanity over itself, goodness is losing. It means we are a species more bent on our destruction than our improvement or one whose destructive tendencies are more effective than its goodness. I'm not saying that's true. It’s easy to blow up a building. It’s hard to build a plane. Or a community. It’s easy to hate. It’s hard to love. Religion does not teach anyone to hate. Hateful people use religion to spread hate. Loving people use religion to spread love. The hate would get along just fine without religion. As for love, I’m not so sure.

The Meaning of Life (draft, part 1)

We can believe that the world is a text whose meaning the discerning reader understands and which all discerning readers understand in the same way and that all who fail to understand it thus (properly) are misguided for any one of a number of definable reasons from a lack of fundamental perspicacity (they’re too stupid to get it) to an accidental or nefarious being-led-astray (someone or something has tricked and deceived them). Or we can see the world as not a text in the first place but as something which simply is, which therefore is not put in front of us as something to be understand.

We can proclaim that the very notion of “understanding” is a problem, particularly when the thing to be understood is not a text. Language is the tool of understanding. And language runs into problems when it attempts to understand—to come to terms with, to bring into language—that which is not language.

We can represent the world with words. But there is no one, single, right way to do that. There is no full or final way to do that. We cannot bring the world to presence again which has never been present as such the first time. We can represent the world as a way of talking about the world. (If we could do this properly in words, we would not need music or painting.) But when we talk about our representation we are not talking about the world anymore. And the representation itself wasn’t exclusively about the world and didn’t represent it in its totality and didn’t get it quite right.

Even if we could get the world right in representing it, we’d also have to get the representation right by representing it—a rererepresentation. Let me get this right. Well I’ll let you, but you won’t manage it. My permission has never been lacking. And it was never what you needed.

We’ll never get over the inadequacies of language. And even if we could get a perfect language, we’ll never get over the inadequacies of perspective. The implication, however, is not that you stop trying. An imperfect representation is not a wholly false representation. An interested and partly blind interpretation is still work making. If there is no right perspective, no perfect or absolute perspective, there can still be valid or viable or useful perspectives. There can still be good perspectives. There can still be good language. Good for what?

Set you values and argue for them. Life is a value. No one deserves a life and no one deserves happiness. But we can decide that life and the greatest quality of life not for the greatest number but for everyone is the value. Everyone means everyone.

The first value has to be the earth itself. There is no place else for us to live. So earth must be as healthy as possible. The health of the earth should not be compromised. The question to ask is not “will this create jobs and thereby increase the quality of life for some people?” but “will this harm the earth? Will it lead to or contribute to the kind of destabilization that compromises the stability of the planet, its ability to sustain healthy live throughout its complex ecology?”

Right now we’re destabilizing the earth—with misguided fossil fuel use and exploration—not even for the sake of those jobs, which are just a corporate smoke screen, but for the profits of megaconglomerates, for the pockets of those who already have far more than they need. For greed. For power. For the basest animal out there. 

Further Speculations on Time and Eternity (unedited)

One of the most persistent facts about human beings as that they believe they have enough information to make accurate determinations about the state of being. We know enough about “the universe” or “being” or whatever we wish to call “it” to say what it is. The four elements and the four humors and the function of organs and the Linnaean catalogs and the crystalline spheres and human nature and the unconscious mind and the great chain of being and Oxfordian authorship have—along with endless other reapings—been asserted with such unquestioned certainty that it seems that intellectual hubris may be the fundamental condition of the human brain. Nothing’s ever tentative. Revelation, reason, and observation held the stool firm and level—until one of them rotted away. But even the loss of revelation has not been a problem. The stool seems still to be miraculously sound. There’s still nothing we don’t know—or if there is, it’s such a small bit it can safely be ignored. It’s just detail. We’ll get there. The grand unified theory, once we get it, will be the puzzle piece that reveals what’s at the end of that stick that guy is holding. Dark matter, dark energy—we may never know what they are, but it will be enough if we can measure their effects on the stuff with proper names. The puzzle is already essentially complete.

We’ve never not thought that the puzzle was essentially complete. We’ve never been right about this, but that’s never worried us much. We’re always right now.

Evidence suggests that this is a foolish position to take. Evidence suggests that we accept the fact of our lack of sufficient understanding of being—I’ll call it being. We know a lot beyond dispute. We can trust science to tell us what happens if we pump too much CO2 into the atmosphere. But the big picture we don’t have. We don’t have the first idea what reality itself is, what it looks like. In fact our best understanding is that “understanding” is itself a problem. Seeing, modeling, representing—everything is second hand, derivative. And there’s no way around that, not even with math.

We need the best models. But we need to understand that they are models, that the story always has a narrator, and the narrator is always part of the story.

So let’s speculate about time—which we know almost nothing about, despite Einstein’s advancement on Augustine. Does the past exist? If so, in what sense? Science has come up with some elaborate ways in which it would be, in theory, possible to get there. They are not practical ways, of course. We can’t actually do it. They involve things like the expenditure of massive amounts of energy in the field of black holes. But if the past does not exist, or does not exist like a room on the other side of the wall, then our trip back into would come up against unforeseen obstacles even if it were practical. To ask the question another way, is there such a thing as “now”? If there is, we know we’re not all in it, or quite in it or perfectly in it. And yet at the same time, in apparent contradiction, there be no way for anyone or anything to ever not be in it. Everything we see is in the past, however fractionally. We see what was. But we see it now. We’re behind a little. But the fact that the trace of the past exists doesn’t necessarily mean that the past itself exists. We see from earth distant stars that if we were in the vicinity of we’d know they aren’t there. But the trace of the past isn’t the past. We know that time passes at different rates under different conditions. But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as now. The twin in his speeding rocket ship goes out into the universe and comes back to find his brother is twenty years older than he. But how is that slowing of time to be understood in relation to “now”? Is it a short cut? Time passes at different rates under different conditions. But “now” is always now. Or is it? Do we know? Is there any way to know? Do we have to live with contradictory vocabularies due to the limitations of our evolved minds?

Or does the past actually exist? Nietzsche thought of time as a line in his myth of eternal return. (How seriously he believed in eternal return is disputed, but that doesn’t matter.) In infinite time and infinite space, the same conditions must repeat forever (he surmised). But he was still thinking of time as a line. If the past exists then eternity returns eternally not in a line but as a static fact, like a movie that’s always playing.

But how much like a movie then is it? The Purple Rose of Cairo. Is there any way to know that the past is set? If Einstein is right and we could go back into it if it were only practical, then we could change it. Then it can change. Then we should not say “the past has happened,” but “the past is happening.” If the past is a wave, we can change now, from the future, if we can alter the wave. Is there any way to know that we don’t? Is there any way to know in fact that this is not something done routinely, at every instant? Changing the past changes the future. But there’s no way to know that we are not constantly changing and being changed. The persistent sci-fi belief is that you don’t want to change the time line. But there’s no way to know that the time line isn’t in constant flux. And there’s no reason to believe there is a proper timeline. (The imperative to maintain the timeline is never fully thought out.) It’s not unreasonable to believe that every life exists for one fleeting moment, less time that it has taken me to type a single word, and that at the same time, every life is eternal.

The Full Weight of the Word

On Language: 

Jabberwocky vs. Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town: 

How we process sentences: Sound, syntax, "meaning."

My poetry students rarely have trouble with Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” They have a lot more trouble with E.E. Cummings’ “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town.” The former includes a large number of nonsense words, words which, in the dictionary sense, have no meaning. The latter has no nonsense words. But it does use words in unusual ways, both against the expected meaning (in the dictionary sense) or against the expected part of speech. Both poems tell a story.

My poetry students generally have little trouble paraphrasing the Carroll poem but a great deal of trouble with the E.E. Cummings. There is more than one way to explain this, but I think no matter how much weight we give to the fact that some of Carroll’s nonsense words have made it to the dictionary or to the fact that the students may have been exposed to the poem in one way or another in their youth, students would still always find Carroll easier to understand than Cummings. Virtually anyone whose virgin exposure to the two poems occurred simultaneously would find Carroll’s story easier to follow.

Why is this? Or to ask it another way, how is meaning processed? How do you “get” nonsense? Strictly speaking both poems should be nonsense. The dictionary won’t help you over your troubles with either poem.

Three factors seem to be at play here: sound, syntax, and “meaning” (narrowly defined as “dictionary meaning,” which I’ll distinguish from the more general sense of meaning by the quotation marks).

Carroll’s poem gives the student familiar syntax and suggestive sounds but strictly no meaning at crucial points. “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” We don’t know what kind of bird a Jubjub is, what a Bandersnatch is or what makes a Bandersnatch frumious. But we do have a sense of what kind of bird a Jubjub bird would be, what kind of monster a Bandersnatch would be and what would make it frumious. “Snatch” helps. And the sense we each have is probably pretty similar. The sounds themselves and the positions of the nonsense in the sentence create meaning despite a complete lack of “meaning.”

Cummings’ poem presents us with both overlapping and different problems: “someones married their everyones laughed their cryings and did their dance (sleep wake hope and then)they said their nevers they slept their dream.” It’s not hard for an experienced reader to take meaning from this sentence. But it’s nonetheless more challenging than it is with Carroll’s nonsense, harder still for students new to the study of poetry. Despite the lack of dictionary support for “Laughed their cryings” each word is familiar. And the familiarity it seems to me actually blocks the student trying to render the sense. But there is no such block in Carroll. And so the meaning flows out almost familiarly.

I doubt that any of this will meet much resistance from English teachers. Why it matters is this: What we processors of language do with Jabberwocky is what we do with language in general. Learning to read poetry is just learning to read period. Poetry often blocks new or inexperienced readers for at least two reasons worth thinking about: because the words are familiar and because the words are all presented with something like their full weight. In everyday language the looseness of usage and the ease of head nodding or shaking comes from the way that meanings are processed with an acceptable level of vagueness, the “you know what I mean” deployment. We can get away with not quite knowing what we want to say because our interlocutors are perfectly happy with processing as much or as little as they want, picking up on sounds and syntax and not really bothering so much with “meaning.” The trick with poetry, and a practical value of poetry for life, is that it trains readers to pay close attention to “meaning” in the production of meaning. 

When we're dealing not just with students but with anyone at any time, we're dealing with someone whose strategy for processing language may be more on the Jabberwocky level than the Cummings. They may be after a sense rather than a meaning. And people who go through life demanding nothing more than a sense from language do just fine, at least in conventional terms. They do well in school--particularly if their degree isn't strongly language centered, but often even if it is, since there are tricks to pretending to knowledge so successful that even the student thinks he's actually learning. They get good jobs. (They may become president.) They have as much chance at "success" as anyone. A lot of it comes down to luck and social supports, but you can't pick them out of the crowd. They are the crowd. But they struggle in the most important ways people can struggle. 

From Fear to Blood without Return

Irrational fear leads to

Irrational hate.

Irrational hate leads to projection.

(I don’t hate them. I’m the good guy. They’re the ones that hate me.)

Projection leads to imitation.

Imitation leads to hate projected back.

Hate leads to more hate.

Mutual hatred leads to violence.

Violence needs to more violence.

Once started violence is very hard to quell

And impossible to extinguish.

However cold it seems, all it needs to burst back into heat is

The match of irrational fear. 

Cover Art The Burzee Rose

Cover art by Dennis Anfuso

GOAAAAAAAAAAAAL!

At 55 I have a ready excuse I did not have at 20

For not managing to score the goal from the odd angle
on the penalty. Though I couldn’t do it then either.

If anything my chances now are probably better.

I haven’t lost anything in accuracy or stamina—just speed.

And I’ve had 35 years of practice. But they’ve seen me play

And so it does not surprise me when I put the ball down

And I hear a teammate say, “don’t try to shoot it.”

No it doesn’t surprise me, it just pisses me off.

So I shoot it. I was probably going to do that anyway.

It passes by the heads of three stupified defenders

And it’s already by the keeper and in the goal before he realizes
He should get ready to defend it. I have twenty missed shots

I know between now and the next time I manage this feat again
Plenty of time for the whole team wonder,

Why are we letting him do this? (For the record,

They’re not letting me. I got the ball. I put it down

And they’re too polite in this rec league of aging men

To do any more than mumble.) Yes, I’ll miss badly the next

Time I try this and many times after that. But for now,

Fuck you, I scored.

Mastering French

Some days I fear that at the rate I’m going I’ll die

Before I ever master French.

And then I think if that’s the race, and it’s more or less a photo finish,

What difference could it possibly make who wins?

And then I think, no one ever really masters a language.

The Carol of the Burzee Rose

In the forest of Burzee grows
The blood-red bloom of the Burzee Rose.

Honey fire scents the air

Drawing creatures everywhere.

Blooms like fists, wounding thorns,
With saw-toothed emerald leaves adorned,
It numbs the nose and draws the skin
To touch and bleed and touch again.
      It is a wonder to behold,
      A present from the days of old.
     Still it grows in deep distress
     And every year it comes back less.

In a time already near
No one left will find it there.
Children in the woods for fun
Secret lovers on the run 
Will miss the scent as they pass by.
Someday soon the rose will die.
            In the heart of Burzee grows
            The shrinking wonder of the rose.
            Find it, find it, while you may.
           The best things all will pass away.

Talk with 45*

“Millions of illegal residents of this country voted for Hillary. Otherwise I woulda won the popular vote?”

Oh, and how to you know millions of illegal residents did that.

“Between three and five million.”

But what is your evidence?

“And they all voted for her I didn’t get a single one of those votes.”

How do you know that what you’re saying is true?

“Why would an illegal alien vote for me?”

No, no, I mean, how do you know any illegal votes were cast?

“There are many many many people who are registered in more than one state. Sometime two, sometimes three.”

Are you saying that millions of illegal residents are registered in more than one state?

“You look at the roles. There’s dead people still on them.”

But wait, wait, are illegal residents pretending to be dead people or are they registering themselves illegally?

“Millions of them.”

Because if people are impersonating dead people, there’s just as much chance they’re voting for you as for her. In fact in the one known case of double voting…

“You know the real unemployment rate is over 40%? But under me in just two, three weeks—something like that—it’s come down to under 5%. The people love me. I would’ve won the popular vote if not for the dead people.”

But how do you know? What is your evidence?

“I ‘lost’ the popular vote according to the lying, dishonest press. If they were honest, I’d have won it.”

That’s how you know?

“That’s how I know. You’re not part of the lying, dishonest failing press are you?”

Are you surprised that there are still people in this country who think you have the judgment to be president?

“Of course. I’m like a smart person.”

In that you and a smart person are both people?

“40 maybe 45% before the election, less than 5% now. Hey, you can’t argue with the numbers.”

All His Tuneful Turnings

This life allows so few of its myriad pleasures to each of us.
A child in a grand, expansive amusement park with limited tickets
And only a few hours to use them knows exactly what I mean.
You can only read so many of the books you want to read.
And you know the more you read the longer the list grows,
And that in the end your list of unread books will be
Longer than it has ever been. You can only learn so many things.
You’ll never master the guitar. You’ll never be as fluent in French as you’d like,
Although there you may make progress. And your garden will never be finished.
Nor will your house. Most of the places on earth you want to see you never will.
And those you do manage to visit you will barely skim the surface of.
You’ll never really understand how refrigerators work. Or cars. Or calculus.
You’ll always be amazed that some people can read scores or equations and smirk,
Knowing you could learn to do that too, knowing that you never will.
You’ll never reach your potential in baseball. You'll never know how far you could have run.
And yet, if you are fortunate and persistent and can control your wanderlust a little
You can learn to do one thing well. There is time for that, though you may never
Master it. And you can love someone well and long enough to make her part of you.
Twice as many tickets, double the time.

Seeing As, part II

Part of "seeing" lies in the object. Most of seeing lies in the seer. If you don't learn to see differently, you will always be looking at the same thing, whether that thing is a cat or skyscraper or a star, whether it's a politician or a preacher or a war. Seeing differently is what metaphor allows us to do. All I have to do is call touch "the sight of my fingers" and I open a new world of seeing, a richer knowledge of the world. Learning a second language or a third does the same thing, since all languages are just new sacks of metaphors. Meeting other people accomplishes this as well, the otherer the better. A man among women, a straight among gays a white among non-whites. If you only know your mother tongue, talk to someone whose first tongue was not that. She'll draw from her native sack of metaphors. She cannot quite help it. The poorer her English, the richer you will be. Let the others in or you will atrophy. "Conservative" is a fancy word for fear.

No, You Don’t Have the Right to Think “What You Want”

I’ve been repeatedly told, “you can think what you want, I can think what I want. That’s everyone’s right.” But what does that mean?

It is a reference to a legal fact still current in America in principle. It means the government can’t put you in jail or take your property or in any way punish you for your thoughts. We don’t yet have Orwell’s “Thought Police.” But that’s all it means. People say those words to me to cut off discussion. This makes it useful to them as a wall. Let’s agree to disagree. You and I will never agree anyway. See you later.

People implicitly understand that what they think is who they are. They are comfortably being who they are. The prospect of thinking differently, of being someone else, or some different version of yourself is frightening. Even if it's a better one. People can feel so comfortable in their homes that they would rather stay in them than move even if moving is an upgrade, even if it eliminates everything about your current place that you've been complaining about for years.

The problem is you don’t have a moral right to think whatever you want, and you don’t have a rational right to think whatever you want. The phrase “what you want” references desire. And desiring and thinking are two different operations. Certainly in humans they overlap and confuse each other like two radio signals competing for some part of the band. But this should be seen as a problem.

You have a moral imperative (not a right) to come to the best conclusions, and you have a logical imperative to come to the most accurate conclusions. Morally you must think in terms of the good, logically you must think in terms of the true. Desire shouldn’t enter into it.

If you say “you and I will never agree,” what you mean is that you will never under any circumstances change your thinking. You may justify this offense against morality and reason by saying that it applies equally to both of us--that you will never change your thinking and I will never change my thinking either. But it doesn’t. If the evidence leads to a conclusion that is not the one I currently hold, I have an obligation to change my thinking. And I will do it. I’d be stupid not to. If you can show me where I’m wrong, I will change my mind. If you show me that what I’m eating is poison, I will stop eating it. If you can show me that the conclusion I have reached goes contrary to my values, I’ll change my mind. (I may also have to adjust my values.) If you show me that my moral conclusion conflicts with my logical conclusion, I’ll have a problem. But something will give.

Digging in your heels may be fine for desire. Dig in your heels and keep rooting for the Cleveland Browns if you want to. It is however suicide to thought. And suicide to self.

Knock Knock Knock

She was almost out of wood. The woodman was supposed to come by later. She needed wood for the winter and wood for the cook stove. Grandma was almost sure she’d told him so. She was almost sure he’d said he’d come. But had she really told him, or had she just meant to? She was down almost to whatever was left in the box of kindling she kept out back under the eaves. These were hard days. And the larder was nearly empty as well. The coldest autumn she could remember. She rolled over, pulling the counterpane unconsciously over her head. The woodman would certainly come. The woodman brought his ax down fast, chop, chop, chop. Chop chop chop. The wood was flying, knock knock knock, knock knock knock…

That wasn’t the ax of the woodman flying. It was someone at the door. Someone was knocking at the door, a very strong, firm, masculine knock.

Grandma tried to sit. But she was too tired or too ill. She wasn’t sure. The headache that had sent her to bed early was still faintly there, ready to wake up. And she had to blow her nose. That could mean sick, but it could be from the cold. She swallowed hard.
Knock knock knock.

“Oh, Grandma? Are you there?”

Grandma shook off the clouds of sleep as best she could.

“Is that you, Red?” she called, or tried to call, but her voice was thin and apparently didn’t reach the door.

Knock knock knock.

“Grandma? Are you asleep in your little cabin, in your little bed?”

That wasn’t Red. A friendly male voice. Perhaps it was the woodman.

“Just leave the wood outside,” Grandma croaked.

“Oh, Grandma, open the door. I have a message. A message from Red.”

No, it was not the deep, businesslike voice of the woodman. It was a male voice, higher pitched, but friendly. And it had a message from Red.

“Please, sir, do come in. The door isn’t locked,” Grandma said.

Knock, knock, knock.

All Seeing Is Seeing As

I cannot see myself whole, never as you see me, not even in a mirror. I cannot hear myself as you hear me, not even in a recording. None of my senses report myself to myself as you see it, and not everyone sees it as you do. I cannot get outside myself to look. This same limitation exists between humans and the universe, not just that we can’t see all of it, which is obvious, but that we are part of it, and cannot see it but as ourselves. We cannot get outside it to look at it. And if we did get outside, we would not have eyes.

All that we perceive is an illusion: color, texture, sound—make your list—these are manifestations of memory on the machinery of the body. They seem real to us like the sounds a Geiger counter makes in presence of radiation, sounds that radiation does not make, or the low sounds that elephants make to elephants or whales to whales are sounds we’ve never heard, no matter what they tell you. It’s all a kind of representation, the information we get on elephants and whales and stars and planets and our own elbows and the napes of our necks and the smalls of our backs.

All that exists is energy, stored in matter or released into radiating space. We ourselves are only energy. Our senses translate various energies to forms we can use. This is the creative impulse at the very origin of perception. There’s no way around it, and no need to lament. The failure is also the possibility of everything we can try to know. But we must recognize it. All perception is illusion, translation, and there is no “real” way to see. To say God sees the world as it is is to speak the truth by way of metaphor—and not just because God lacks our physical eyes but because “to be seeable” is not a trait of the universe, not a trait of anything. Not even for God.

We eek our way to an enlightenment we can never reach.

Is anything I’ve just said true? Who can say? These speculations rest of upon the unconfirmable foundation of language’s ability to sort out what I have just said cannot be sorted. The best things we can say bump up against self-contraction, self-deconstruction. If my senses cannot tell me what the universe is really like, how can my language? What is the good of reason? Reason leads me here, as far as I can go, uncertain that I’m anywhere at all. Milton’s Satan flies all over creation but never leaves Hell. Flies and flies and flies and never moves.

There is hope—never assurance, ever only speculation, but there is hope. The hope is this: hat certain experiences work in tandem with this best conclusion that can emerge from logical speculation to bump our being against being beyond illusion. It’s just a guess. The experience of art, the experience of nature, the Romantic intimations that Russell laughed at who should have known better. The experience of math to those who really know it, the experiences of these flawed senses, what Nietzsche himself despite his atheism experienced in music, whispers that beyond the illusion is a reality to which we belong. When you hear a succession of notes and you can’t process how they pluck the strings of your being or why mere physical energy would make this possible, you have to choose whether to accept the thing the energy called music is telling you or you have to reject it. And no matter what anyone says, nothing in any discourse or language or discipline can see to tell you which way you should go.

Right Answers and Wrong Answers

You know there are many wrong answers. You are assuming there is only one right answer. Why? You're assuming if there is more than one right answer those right answers cannot contradict each other. Why? You're assuming the right answer is a complete answer, an absolute answer, and all other answers are incomplete, finite answers. But if there are no complete answers but only partial answers then the competition may be fierce and the winner to some degree arbitrary, if there has to be a winner, which there doesn't.

On the Idea of Prophecy

First I don’t want to suggest I believe anyone can predict the future. At least I see no reason to assert that this is possible. There may be time at some other time to explore this question. But that's not my task right now. I'm not here interested in whether there is such a thing as prophecy or even such a things as God. I am interested in the idea of prophecy and the idea of God.

I think the question of prophecy is worth thinking about regardless of whether you believe in it. According to people who believe in prophecy (and it may be useful to remind ourselves that “predicting the future” was not the principle task of Old Testament prophets) certain people are privileged to foretell future events because God, who exists outside of time and therefore knows the future, tells them what’s going to happen. God, who has already "seen" the future, runs back down the path to give report. God does this in order to affect the present. The problem then is obvious: the future must be predetermined. (An insuperable paradox.) Everything is fixed and you can’t change it. Even if God doesn’t reveal the future, God knows the future and therefore our actions are not free and therefore we are not responsible for them.

The complications that emerge from this claim are legion on both sides and have been amply discussed for centuries because it’s such a wonderful puzzle and people like to ferret around in puzzles. You can work this problem out on both sides and wander down arteries and capillaries and rivers and tributaries and along branches and twigs for hours and hours thinking through the implications.

I don’t want to talk about those things. The problem as I see it that hasn’t been explored (as far as I know) is the problem of language. The way we have to talk about the past and the future and time in general, the way we have to envision God’s being outside of time as though time is an egg God could manipulate with his hands and see from every angle. This is homocentric thinking. We see the world as though the world were made for us to see it (the roses have the look of roses that are looked at). The physical and superphysical universe. But the truth is we literally don’t know what it means for God to “see” the future. We do know that there is no “future” for God. But we don’t know what that means or how that could be. So we place our eyes in God’s head and our way of being into Being itself. The fundamental problem that makes all the entertaining speculation about time possible is our inability to come up with the terms that would be necessary to actually explore the problem. There’s nothing that can be done about this. We can’t see what we can’t see. There are things we can’t imagine not because of the limits of our imagination but because of the limits of our bodies, our senses, our information inputs, and therefore of our language.

Tough Choices

—What’s that?
—That’s a plate of healthy food, a balanced meal. It’s not as fresh as it was, but it’s still quite tasty.
—And what’s that?
—That’s a pile of shit. Which do you want?
—I’m thinking.
—The plate of food will provide a healthy percentage of the vitamins and protein you need to get through the day. It’s a good solid meal.
—And the shit?
—It’s just a plate of shit. It smells worse by the hour.
—And what’s the orange fibrous stuff growing on it?
—No idea. Have you decided?
—Still thinking.
—Take your time.
—Is there a price difference?
—Same price.
—Really?
—Well one is a good sound meal and will keep you going for quite a while. The other will make you sick. In the long run, the pile of shit will be much more costly. But to get them, it’s the same price. I assume you’ve made up your mind.
—This is really hard. This is actual shit? I mean it’s not a metaphor. It’s something I could use in my garden.
—Well, it’s human shit. And there are some known contaminants. Likely to spread diseases. You certainly wouldn’t be able to eat anything that might grow from it. It’s a substantial risk even for flowers.
—I see.
—Look, I’d really like to move this along. I mean if you would just buy the healthy food, I could just toss this shit out. I don’t see why you’re having so much trouble deciding.
—It’s a hard decision. I mean, as you said, the healthy food has been out a while. It would have tasted better earlier.
—On the other hand it is edible and healthy. This shit is just shit.
—Well, you have point. All the same, I think I’ll have the shit.
—You’ll have the shit?
—I assume it’s good shit.
—No. No, it’s not. It’s not even good shit. It’s shitty shit.
—All the same I’ll have it.
—You’ll have it?
—Yes.
—For God’s sake, why?
—What?
—I’m sorry. I’m just confused. You could have had healthy food.
—That’s true. And I’m sure it’s tasty and nutritious. I even like almost everything on that plate. Not everything of course. It’s a pretty full plate. But most of it looks very good.
—It is. It’s among the best food we’ve ever served.
—Still, I prefer the shit. I mean I don’t know shit. But I don’t ever remember ordering shit before. It will be new. Whereas I’ve had vegetables and steak before. And really, I’m not in the mood for broccoli right now. I’m sure you understand.
—Not completely.
—Are you sure those are the only two options?
—We’ve taken the other options off the table.
—Well, that was a mistake. I’ll take the shit.
—The shit?
—Don’t be so judgmental. It’s my choice. My money’s good. I’ll take the shit. Who knows, maybe after a while, it won’t stink quite so bad.