Half-Glass Full: A Poem

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Half-Glass Full



Sure, I'm an optimist. Sure.

I support the President. I stand-behind

this administration and its decisions, the preemptive incisions of an inaccurate knife

into foreign political bodies, the preventative leeches and blood-letting getting the best

of diseased oil veins and the fame of this or that evil man, today's devil, starved of resources

and recourses to diplomacy--or better yet, hanged and dangling for the crows and gods to pick at. Sure.

I'm an optimist.

I give this administration the credit

-or-debit they're due, the smooth intoxication of the process, the noxious self-flagellation of a people

at the steeple of competing religio-corporate denominations, by which I mean monetary domination, by which

I mean natural free-market selection, that kind of election and the pervasive protection of this, our way of life,

our insecurity, our cure to most economic hiccups, the pick-up games of novelty and indulgence tapped into,

tapped out and the day's hard night just the soft flickering flakes of blue light in the ad campaigns and local ten o'clock news. Sure.

Sure, I'm an optimist.

I believe in saviors. I put my faith

in the one-man stands against any regression, against carcinogenic confessions of disappointment

or doubt, against the mounting unease of contextual drought, against the sluggish-fire liars spouting simplicity

and discipline and the keys to a heaven I'm already in, against the slight aggravation of anti-acronymic-mutation, the double-you

dot double-you dot jay dot dee like a legitimate question, a half-formed suggestion not just 'what would he do' but 'if it were me'...

I'm an optimist, sure, without comfort or coddle--

just a short, hard glass and a big fucking bottle.

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screech of dissonant/flowers

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More poetry in honor of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. And who better to celebrate the coming of spring than the (in)famous E.E. Cummings! The first poem is a moving, lyrical ballad, with Cummings' idiosyncratic twist (after all, "since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you"); the second, a tripping, crude and eager ode to the goddess Spring herself.


if everything happens that can't be done

if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one

one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we come who)
one's everyanything so

so world is a lead so tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now I love you and you love me
(and books are shutter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we

we're anything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one



spring omnipotent goddess thou dost

spring omnipotent goddess thou dost
inveigle into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous angleworm
thou dost persuade to serenade his
lady the musical tom-cat,thou stuffest
the parks with overgrown pimply
cavaliers and gumchewing giggly
girls and not content
Spring, with this
thou hangest canary-birds in parlor windows

spring slattern of seasons you
have dirty legs and a muddy
petticoat,drowsy is your
mouth your eyes are sticky
with dreams and you have
a sloppy body
from being brought to bed of crocuses
When you sing in your whiskey-voice
                                                                      the grass
rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

spring,
of the jostle of
thy breasts and the slobber
of your thighs
i am so very
                     glad that the soul inside me Hollers
for thou comest and your hands
are the snow
and thy fingers are the rain,
and i hear
the screech of dissonant
flowers,and most of all
i hear your stepping
                                      freakish feet
                                      feet incorrigible
ragging the world,

The Day I Heard

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Joining in the fun of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading, in honor of Imbolc, I'll be posting a few works of poetry and creative writing over the next week.

This first one is a bit of journaling from last summer, an early morning awakening in the quiet of an Acadia National Park campsite. Later that day, I received the call that my friend, Freddy, had died.

The Day I Heard

I heard the first bird of morning, the distant telling of the syrinx through the fog. At first there was nothing and I had been sure night would last forever, but the first bird knew--perhaps he was high along the mountain ridge, watching for the first lightening of dawn, or perhaps it was only that suddenly out of darkness, he slowly came to see his own form, the curve of breast, the quick twitch of a feather out of place in the black breeze, and that small moment of self-perception--that was how he knew it would be day again. He came to see himself, and that was how he knew.

I will never forget that sound--I promised myself, and yet I have already started to forget it. The charm and call slipping wet and nude from my mind, clumsy as a child's that cannot hold onto much of anything, but knows, only too well, the smooth surface of letting things go.

Is Christ Special?

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Continuing along my recent theological ponderings about polytheism, I return to a question that I've been asking myself for several years now. Growing up in a fairly open and religiously liberal atmosphere, I have always been exposed to religious traditions other than Christianity, and my identity as a Christian was based largely on a sense of inheritance (it was the religion of my father and his family) and community (it was the church I attended). Once in college and somewhat removed from these two aspects of my religious life, however, I began to consider the theological foundations for why I considered myself Christian. (Incidentally, though I've been meaning to write this entry for the past several days now, Cat's recent blog post "What is a Christian?" over at Quaker Pagan Reflections finally provided the spark of inspiration to do so. Thanks, Cat!) Until this point, a somewhat vague relationship with God as loving, watchful Guide and pervading, sustaining Spirit had defined my personal religious life; but I knew already that this particular spiritual attitude was not the sole property of the Christian tradition, but was held in common with several other Western monotheistic religions, with echoes and shadows in many other traditions as well.


Christian Theology as Something New?

So what, then, was Christianity about?

From a theological point of view, for me the answer seemed fairly obvious: Christ. That is, not the historical person of Jesus, or not only this, but the spiritual concept of the Divine manifest and incarnate in humanity, the loving sacrifice of God in order to demonstrate and reveal that love, and the role of Christ-the-Reconciler as the Bridge between the transcendent Father and immanent Holy Spirit in order to complete a Trinity of Divinity that resolves the paradox of union and uniqueness on a higher spiritual plane. Yes, I came up with that definition in college. I loved big words and complicated imagery. (Still do.)

But of course, Christianity does not have the monopoly on trinities, sacrificial dying-and-rising gods, panentheism, or love and Spirit, so I still hadn't really answered my question. And this is the point I return to today, in my contemplation of polytheism. For, if I acknowledge that Jesus the Christ just happens to be my "patron" deity out of many available Reconciler deities from other cultures and climes , then it is possible to argue that I am (and perhaps always have been), in fact, a polytheist who has a personal relationship with the Divine or Source through a Christ-based pantheon. On the other hand, if Christian theology actually offers something substantially new and revolutionary in the development of the spiritual life, if the figure of Christ is not "just another deity" but embodies a strikingly and essentially new way of thinking about our relationship to the Divine, then there is something more than just a label, heritage or common social institution underlying my Christian self-identity. If this latter is the case, it might even mean that I will remain "Christian" in essence, even if I build relationships with deities from non-Christian pantheons and cultures, as long as I continue to pursue a relationship with the Divine in a markedly or uniquely Christian way.

Which brings us to the central question: Is Christ special?

This, for me, is a different question from "Was Jesus special?" regarding the historical person of Jesus and my beliefs about him, as well as the beliefs of the Christian community at large. In the past, I have attempted to answer the question, Is Christ special?, by exploring my beliefs regarding the unique manifestation of Christ as Jesus-the-historical-person. I've struggled to articulate the necessity of believing that Jesus, unlike figures such as Buddha and other Savior deities of the past, did not attain to Christ-consciousness (or, that is, to a conscious embodiment of Divinity) but rather was the unique historical expression of that consciousness itself. Simply put, he was born that way--a paradox, or Mystery, both fully human and fully Divine. But this just seems to confuse the issue, since I'm not even fully committed to this belief. My intuition, instead, is to reply that we are all both fully human and fully Divine, and yet this statement seems to relegate Jesus once again to just another deity incarnate or, alternatively, an ordinary person who's attained to full Divine consciousness.

The real dilemma, for me, is whether or not the very notion of the Mystery of the Fully Human/Fully Divine paradox is not itself a unique contribution by Christianity to the evolution of religion, or whether this idea existed in pre-Christian times. When I ask, is Christ special, what I am asking is if the idea of Christ as developed and explored within the Christian tradition is a new way, and perhaps a more highly evolved way, of understanding our relationship with Spirit.


A Tale of Two Fishes

This question has come to the forefront again as I've been reading Emma Jung's and Marie-Louise von Franz's work The Grail Legend, which applies Jungian psychological analysis to the narrative(s) of the Quest for the Holy Grail. In their discussion of the material, they seem to suggest repeatedly that the beginning of the Christian Age (which corresponded with the Piscine Age, an age not of one but of two fish) marked a new revolution in religion: that of emphasizing individuation. The Grail legend, which suddenly increased in popularity after 1000 C.E., is a response to the ending age of the "First Fish," which was characterized by an unbalanced emphasis on the light and masculine aspects of Christ. This imbalance, absorbed into tradition as defining features of the collective Christian consciousness, resulted in an intensified conflict between opposites: light and dark, masculine and feminine, man and nature, Christ and Antichrist. To redress this polarity, a shift into the age of the "Second Fish," began--the Grail legend with its knightly Masculine seeking an elusive and often ambivalent Feminine was the mytho-poetic expression of this shift--in which these opposites were, ideally, to be reconciled on a conscious level in order to achieve greater individuation and a wholeness of Self.

This conscious reconciliation or re-union is distinct, they explain, from the unconscious unity existing in the "primitive" pre-Christian pagan religions, in that it allows for personal, and not only collective or communal, relationship with God. In their analysis of Perceval's adventure in hunting a white stag and returning with its head to win the love of a water nixie, they discuss the imperative that the "question of the Grail" (i.e. the question about the Grail's origin and purpose, the asking of which would heal the King and restore the land) lays upon the hero. "A mere regression into paganism would be equally meaningless, so that this state of suspension, this crucifixion of the animal soul and the agonizing conflict bound up with it, must be maintained until the growth of consciousness striven for by the unconscious, namely the question concerning the Grail, has been achieved. [p. 275, emphasis added]" In other words, once one realizes there is a question to be asked--once the tension between opposites has been recognized, which inherently points towards the question of their resolution--returning to the pre-sundered state is meaningless, if not simply impossible. This, in itself, is rather obvious, but the fact that the authors designate paganism specifically as the religion to which it would be meaningless to return is likely to cause some objection, if not outrage, among the modern Pagan (i.e. NeoPagan) community.


Pagan Possibilities

On the other hand, Jung and von Franz also seem to speak of Christianity and the Christian aeon with a certain amount of ambivalence themselves, as if, given Christianity's second millennium that followed the supposed shift to the age of the "Second Fish" and should have seen the resolutions of the first age's polarities rather than their exacerbation or intensification, they're not so sure the Christian tradition may be up to the task. (Keep in mind, this is my own impression of some of their more subtle statements, and I'm by no means an expert on Jungian psychology on this point.) When discussing the origins and development of the Grail symbol a thousand years ago, for instance, they write, "The return to Celtic and Germanic mythological material on the one hand, and to some apocryphal traditions of early Christianity on the other can all be explained psychologically by the same need: to complete the Christ-image by addition of features which had not been taken sufficiently into account by ecclesiastical tradition. [p.104, emphasis in the original]" But couldn't such a statement be just as applicable to today's alternative spirituality movements, many of which have modern roots in a reaction against Christianity's continued patriarchal, dogmatic and ecologically-ignorant attitudes?

The difference of course, as Jung and von Franz argue, is that the Grail is still an inherently Christian symbol, and the incorporation of other mythological material as an attempt to expand the Christian tradition, not reject it completely. Yet later, in exploring the occasion of Perceval (now acknowledged, at this point in the story, as the best of all knights) crossing the "Bridge Over Which No One Crosses," they write:

This is only half a bridge, but it turns round on its centre when the right hero steps on to it. Being only half a bridge alludes, no doubt, to the fact that Christianity permits only the one, light half of the transcendent function to become conscious but does not allow for the psychic law of reversal of all opposites (enantiodromia), which is surprisingly and frighteningly manifested in the turning round of the bridge on its own axis. It is precisely because of this, however, that Perceval is enabled to reach his goal. In doing so he walks back over the same half of the bridge, but goes forward towards the opposite bank.

This incident seemingly represents a regression which nevertheless leads forward, an impressive indication for modern man with his apparent turning back to a quasi "pagan" attitude which nevertheless does not lose the religious and ethical values of Christianity but broadens them through further progress. [pp. 280-81]

Once again, here we see an ambiguity: on the one hand, Paganism seems to be dismissed off-hand as a "regression" or at best a "quasi"-urge, while on the other, it is presented as offering solutions to the problem of Christian polarity and imbalance. As usual, the authors seem to imply that the only way "forward" is within and through the Christian tradition, but one wonders exactly why this should be the case. Isn't it possible, instead, for modern humanity to acknowledge the tensions and polarities brought into consciousness by the Christian aeon, and then more forward from these to a conscious but still essentially Pagan spirituality? (Is this possibility also on the minds of the authors when they write, "For in those days, unlike the present, the recognition of nature could have implied a dangerous loss of direction, because it would have seduced naive medieval man into the abyss in which he would no longer have been able to find his way. The primitive in him was still too close to the surface. [p.286, emphasis added]"?)


So... Is Christ Special?

We seem to have strayed far from the original question at this point. Indeed, it seems obvious from Jung's and von Franz's writing that their answer is an unequivocal, "Yes, the Christ figure as god-image within the Christian aeon is 'special'--it is a new development towards individuation within religion, one which cannot be ignored or abandoned without consequence." If they are correct (and I have no idea whatsoever if their analysis is confirmed or supported by archeological, anthropological, historical and sociological studies or not), then the question becomes: How do we respond to, reject or incorporate the unique aspects of the Christian tradition into our own spiritual lives?

My choice to identify myself as "Christian" hinges, in part, on the answer to this question, though in another sense it is only a small matter of semantics. Whether I choose to identify myself with mainstream Christianity in the future, the Christian tradition is already firmly established as a core aspect of my heritage and the shaping of my personal spiritual consciousness. Indeed, I know already that I will never be satisfied with any religion or spiritual path that does not have the capacity to bring into conscious tension the many polarities and opposites which the process of personal individuation requires; just as I will never feel comfortable within a fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity that refuses to reconcile or transcend those tensions, to unite Christ with his Shadow, the Anthropos with his Anima.

Happily, the path of Druidry--in particular that inclusive Druidry embraced by OBOD and AODA--do not demand an outright rejection of Christianity (OBOD even has a link off the mainpage of their website to an article devoted to discussing "Christianity and Druidry"). Instead, both of these Orders readily acknowledge the importance of all of Druidry's development throughout history, including the period of Mesopagan Druidry that was highly influenced by Christianity.

I feel as though I've finally come home!

Lacuna: Prophecy & Destiny

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A letter to my friend, Tom, after watching a show on the History Channel about the prophecies of Nostradamus... At some point, I promise, I'll stop making half-assed attempts at filling up this blog and will instead post something of substance that doesn't make me seem slightly off-balance. Luckily for me, I've abandoned all hope of ever seeming respectable or stable or anything else so boring. I have, happily, never shied away from considering the most ridiculous of possibilities. Who am I to say there's no Big Foot, no Area 51, no magic and no Apocalypse?

2012: Under-Going & Turning Over

I just finished watching a History Channel special on the "lost book" of Nostradamus, one that contains illustrations which often seem to closely correspond to his prophecies--and I have to babble about it for a second.

I once watched a special on the original prophecies themselves (on either the History or the Discovery Channel, I forget which) that really blew me away with N.'s accuracy (especially regarding Hitler, whom he predicted almost down to the name--Hisler, one letter off). But this special, unlike that one, struck me as oddly paranoid, Euro-/Western-centric and even somewhat racist. One image found in the "lost book" is of a burning tower, which reminded me immediately of the Tarot card, but which all the experts immediately connected to 9/11 and the WTC towers. That seemed, to me, highly unlikely, since the burning/falling tower has always been such a strong but generic image in iconography, especially Judeo-Christian iconography. The connection seemed more due to the obsession in recent years with 9/11 and its shock to the American mindset (which until then had been blissfully naive, to some extent, I think)... The truth is, 9/11 was, of course, a tragedy, but definitely a small one compared to on-going disease, famine, poverty, etc. in the non-Western and non-industrialized world, that we mostly ignore at our convenience. It also bothered me that the show kept referring to the "war with Muslims/Arabs" as if this were a real, literal war occurring right now, and not (as it actually is) largely a propaganda technique used by extremists on both sides to exacerbate violence and confusion. But again, my first introduction to Islam was through the beautiful poetry of its mystics, who embrace love and peace above all things, and through the startling power of the Qur'an as a "sacred text" of amazing style and insight (it puts the poetry of the Old Testament to shame!). I've never seen Islam as a threat, either to peace or to Christianity itself, and so it was odd and frustrating to watch the "experts" in this show take it for granted that even a metaphorical "Muslim invasion" (i.e. the introduction of Islamic culture into Western culture, which will of course result, at first, in tension and conflict) was inherently a horrible, fearful thing. It was also almost funny how much concern the possible dissolution of the Catholic Church caused these "experts." One image shows a group of women turning their back on the Pope (apparently, an image that particularly depicts our present Pope) while one attempts to take the staff, topped by a double-cross (symbolizing the Tree of Life), from the Pope's hand. They went on and on about how this might refer to the recent "embarrassments" of the Church, like the child molestation scandals, the continued repression of women in the Church, and the intolerant, racist remarks made by the Pope about Islam (things which I consider a little more dire and disgusting than "embarrassing"). At that point, I found myself saying, "Damn right! I hope the Church does dissolve!" That's when it began to occur to me, though it should have been obvious before then, that even accurate prophecies are filtered through the perspectives of individuals--the prophets themselves, as well as their later interpreters. There's no denying that events in recent times have been awful and may be escalating, but it seems that the fear- and hate-mongering the show's "experts" took for granted is exactly the kind of behavior that would exacerbate rather than mitigate those events.

At the end, they pointed to a series of very interesting images that seem to be about "the end of the world." It was very eerie that, using entirely Judeo-Christian imagery and astrological symbolism, Nostradamus indicated the exact same time of crisis (2012 and the two decades leading up to it) as the Mayan calendar and other predictive systems (including, according to one of my college professors, Chaos Theory). And based on the same astronomical event--the alignment of the earth, sun and the center of our galaxy (visible to the naked eye as a dark gap in the Milky Way between Sagittarius and Scorpius). But I've already spent a great deal of time thinking about the possible "end of history" that might occur then, before I'm quite thirty... and I'm not afraid of it. In fact, I'm looking forward to it a bit, as a time of possible revelation or realization in a very positive and growth-oriented sense, a turning-over (like when you turn over a rock and all the ugly things slither out from under it, exposed to the light--or when you cross the equator of the earth and toilets start draining in the opposite direction). If we're living through the twenty years of worstest Bad (1992 - 2012) right now, and yet still able to grieve trustfully and hope whole-heartedly, if we rise to that challenge now, then what have we to fear from the future?

I think about the strange world people live in--the world of technology and thoughtlessness and sensory bombardment and dehumanization and corrupt politicians--and how even within that world I am still able to cultivate a sacred space of humanity, connection, poetry and love... a space that does not seem so different from the kind of space from which Rumi, Christ, Buddha, Krishna and other ancient peace-makers spoke... and I can't help but think that we really aren't so different from our ancestors, that we share a fundamental humanity that cannot be so easily destroyed, and that any kind of turning-over in 2012 will be as gradual and subtle as it is tragic and frightening. After all, the Christian mythos from which fears of the Apocalypse stem for the Western world is the same mythos that locates the most important event in human (and possibly universal) history as the death of one obscure man whose sacrifice took centuries and centuries to gain any influence at all. Even when I was resolutely Christian, I always suspected that the End of Days event, if there was such a thing, would be similarly obscure to those living through it. Jesus supposedly says not to waste effort trying to predict when it would occur, but instead to be ever present to the world. Maybe that's because it's not only that we can't know when it happens, but that we won't know when it happens. Now, I'm not so sure I even believe in a linear model of time that such beginnings-and-endings assumes, which is why I can't help but feel like 2012, if anything, will simply be a turning-over, a point at which we begin to return to ourselves.

What does all that have to do with your sense of destiny? I don't know. But all my best and closest friends have had that sense of overwhelming drive and purpose about them. Maybe I'm just drawn to people with broad ideals and a sense of service towards humanity... But I think maybe, if we want to have a broad influence, in the end we have to cultivate a broad perspective. I know exactly what you're talking about, with your frustration with the powerful and the corrupt--all through college I struggled with that injustice. Have I told you my "where was I when 9/11 happened" story? Someday I'll have to tell you when we're face-to-face. But that morning, I remember the surge of anger at everyone, including my own country and its citizens and its media--it was like I could see all the consequences, the fear-mongering and escalating responses of violence, just spinning out of control from that one moment.. and I felt like there was nothing I could do to stop it. Sometimes I still feel like that. I think Raymond and I are the only people I know who cry about the world. For a long time, I thought I was the only one--sometimes, I just can't take it, and I weep over how small and futile the efforts of the best people seem in the face of so much war and noise (that line from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, always gets me: "What can men do against such reckless hate?"). Then the other week, Raymond told me that he's been crying about the world a lot recently, too. Sometimes, though, I think that's what it takes.

That's how I cope, to answer your question. I cry, and I offer my weeping itself as a gift to the Divine. I think there is a sacredness in tears--flowing water that can cleanse and heal, that can communicate the grief and love, both of which stem from my enduring ability to hope and to imagine a better world. And then, after I'm done crying, I get to work. I don't always know what the work is, but I'm always at it, I'm always feeling my way towards it. Not to be a complete nerd, but allow me to reference an episode of the television show, Angel, in which one main character is talking about the conflict between Fate and free will:

The final score can't be rigged. I don't care how many players you grease, that last shot always comes up a question mark. But here's the thing, you never know when you're takin' it. It could be when your duking it out with the legion of doom, or just crossin' the street deciding where to have brunch. So you just treat it all like it was up to you, with the world in the balance, cause you never know when it is.

That's pretty much how I feel. It's so clear that even the smallest of events can spiral out and affect the world, and since you never know which small event that might be, you always engage fully in every moment, you always remain present and treat every single instant as the instant in which the world could turn over.

Lacuna: Death & Afterwards

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Last bit of the Lacuna series, probably, as I already have some ideas for decent, proper blog entries in the works. This is something I actually wrote last January, after seeing a crappy Dateline (or some such nonsense) Special on "The Idea of Heaven" (which, of course, failed to take a non-Christian, let alone complex, approach to the topic).

Who Goes to Heaven and Who Stays Home

The question of what happens after the death of the individual human body is not so much an issue of belief in an afterlife, per se, as it is a question of the very relationship of an individual living being to the Divine (or God). The concept of a kind of blissful heaven into which a soul is "released" from the dying body (if the soul, while incarnate, has behaved and believed properly) is contingent on the notion of a Divine presence separate from and beyond the material world. The question of heaven is not so easily answered by someone who sees God as both transcendent and immanent, wholly Other and wholly Present, especially if this person studies not only sacred texts, art and poetry, but biology, physics and politics. After all, the lessons one might learn from biology and physics, first of all, concern the conservation of energies, the interrelated nature of energy and matter, and the natural processes of evolution, consumption, production, reproduction, etc., all of which suggest a more complicated and intricate interweaving of life on the material plane. And, for one who sees God within material existence, it is hard to avoid the question of why physical reality should be so complicated and beautifully cooperative, while spiritual reality is supposedly so dry, dualistic and simple-minded about reward and punishment. Add to this the study of politics (that is, the study of how human beings function as individuals within organized communities, and how those communities interact), which leads into further fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc. and one is faced with the obvious fact that dualistic us-versus-them theologies are almost invariably products of established and powerful regimes in which reward and punishment are promised to enforce a current status quo and balance of power, while many thinkers, visionaries, philosophers and progressives within such cultures implore their peers to abandon such small and restrictive notions of how we must relate to one another.

So how is a well-educated, intelligent human being--who attempts to be well-rounded and passionate about learning and growing in all areas of his or her life, including all his or her mental, emotional and spiritual sides--to answer the question of heaven? Life is of such complexity and grace, surely an after-life must be equally so. And even if we accept the traditional idea of heaven as the place to which one "returns" to union with the Divine, if the Divine is present within the material world, then this union must somehow take place within this very world in which we physically existent even while alive. Is it right to call this "reincarnation"? Not precisely, since this implies a single soul which evacuates the physical realm, only to return whole into a new body when it is conceived in the womb (or at some later point, depending on the particular theory). Even the Buddhist understanding of reincarnation is not so simple, as it is often explained with the metaphor of the flame which passes from wick to wick, so that the flame is of the same nature and source, but yet somehow a new and separate thing, not the same flame come loose of its original moorings and anchored again.

If we lean towards this view of reincarnation as a kind of recycling and reintegration of spiritual energies, what then becomes of the idea of individuality? For if our material bodies are not so blessed with a self-awareness as separate creatures, surely our mental, emotional and spiritual selves sense their uniqueness, rejoicing in it even as the prerequisite for a meaningful exchange and interrelation with other unique individuals and with the Divine as a whole.

[Clearly, this is so much a fragment as to end abruptly mid-paragraph, without giving writer (i.e. me) or reader (i.e. you) the chance to investigate more thoroughly the relationships among ideas of union, dissolution and individuality. This is partly because I got tired and distracted by the time I'd reach that point in my journalling, and partly because I didn't have any ideas where to go from there. Interestingly, the later mind-bit on the idea of "eddies" (which I posted previous to this entry) may give some insight into how to understand individuality of a non-material as well as a material nature. But I'll leave you (i.e. the reader) to ponder out those connections...]

Lacuna: Ego & Flux

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The second mind-fraction in the January Lacuna series, inspired by a discussion several months ago about the Buddhist concept of "antama," or "no-self" and how it might fit into a Cetic/Druidic worldview.

Eddy the Egoless Anatma

I have a friend who has this idea about "eddies." He explained, from a biological and chemical approach, that our bodies don't really have hard and fast boundaries as we normally think of them, but that chemicals, molecules and materials are constantly flowing in and out between "us" and the surrounding "outer" world--through our breath, what we eat, our skin, our senses, etc. This process of things flowing in, circulating "within" us and then being released again, creates a kind of eddy or whirlpool within the currents of energy and matter--not separate from the world but, just as you said, a concentration of it that gives rise to our notion of a physical self. I think the same idea extends in application beyond the physical.

Part of the idea of the eddy, though, is that we aren't just "part of the flow" but expressions of a concentration or movement counter to the "main" current. We don't simply allow everything to pass through us as if we weren't there at all. We are expressions of the processes by which the world meets and changes itself. We "take things in" and transform them--we breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, for instance--not because we are separate from the world or willfully making such changes, but because we are the very expressions of this moment of opposing currents meeting and interacting. The same is true of all expressions of existence--we experience them as wholes according to the realms of change and exchange that they embrace, and we can expand or narrow our understanding of these wholes through meditation on the relationships they involve (like the Buddhist puzzle, how many wheels and axles must you remove before a wagon ceases to be a wagon?).

I don't know enough about Buddhism to know if this is the same idea as "anatma." I have a feeling it's not... For one thing, my goal is not to overcome any notion of self and to "go with the flow" so completely that I might as well not-be at all; my goal is to continually evolve an understanding of the true relationships in nature and the various energies and manifestations of existence, so that my experience of "self" is precisely an experience of interconnection and union, rather than of separation. Does that make sense?

Lacuna: Religion & Politics

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Consider this a mid-winter cleaning.

For most of my life (i.e. all those years I was "in school"), the time just after the holidays served as a transition into a new semester. The projects and papers of the previous semester's classes were finished and turned in (for better or worse); the themes and (con)texts of those classes were, if not forgotten, at least rounded out in a kind of momentary resolution. January was a time for starting over again, kicking back and easing into the beginning of a new semester.

It seems that, though I'm no longer in school, my mental circannual rhythm is still adjusted to this pattern of intense exertion and then sudden rest around this time of year. Instead of feeling guilty about it, I've decided I might as well embrace it. So this is an intellectual lacuna, so what? That's not so bad. Some people's entire lives could be characterized as such. No need to fret.

Meanwhile, so as not to leave readers hanging, these next few posts will be a few random pieces and excerpts which I had intended, at one time or another over the past year, to develop into full-fledged blog posts, but never did. Think of these posts as "Ali Uncensored," with all the sloppiness of a widely-engaged mind.


Is America Ready for a [Insert Type of Religious Zealot Chosen by Church Leaders Here] President?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the concept of "Separation of Church and State" is about the separation of religious institutions from political institutions, in order to preserve the sovereignty of both in their respective realms. It is not about demanding individual government officials renounce all religious beliefs and behave in their public role as if they were all materialist atheists. If you'll notice, this is the very specific bent of Kennedy's speech--he denounces the imposition of religious institutions on the government and on the general public, but he never says that a religious or spiritual worldview is an inherently dangerous or unhealthy one from which to make moral or political decisions.

This is a subtlety in distinction that few people bother to notice these days, it seems. Religious believers themselves often assume that a religion is synonymous with its socio-political institution, rather than a worldview out of which that institution arises but which may also have other applications. They relinquish their capacity to act as thinking, moral agents so that, while in Kennedy's day a Catholic might have been able to make decisions about policy based on his beliefs without the need for priestly dictation, today believers not only want to learn about "laws of love" and whatnot while they sit in church, they want their priest to work out the complicated application of such beliefs and endorse a particular candidate or policy so that they, the believers, don't have to do that work for themselves. Couple this with the media-obsessed Information Age in which politicians are assumed to obfuscate and pander, and selling public policy and political candidates has become a matter of who can put on the most convincing act of sincerity and urgency, and you have a public making political decisions based on the illusion of "good character" instead of on the actual work accomplished and policies pursued. In such a situation, it's only natural that candor about religious beliefs is mistaken for a sign of honesty, as well as a covert message that here is a leader who, like the local minister or the Pope, is willing to do the work of moral decision-making that the public has given up.

This does not mean that all religious believers are inherently less intelligent than their secularist counterparts (this is, perhaps, the lie that has so convinced them they are not capable of making moral decisions themselves in the first place). It is perfectly possible for religious individuals to function as rational, moral participants in the political domain, making decisions that affect public policy without imposing on others the worldview from which those decisions were made--given that they are willing to do the work of analysis and application in the context of an infinitely complex and unpredictable world. The "fairy tales" of a given religious faith, however, are no more inherently ridiculous or a sign of intellectual weakness than are the "fairy tales" of Descartes (with his thinking ego eating its own tail, which gave birth to a worldview in which matter and mind are irrevocably severed) or of Locke and Hobbes (with their mythologies of the "State of Nature" in which man is an isolated individual whose only social connections are that of imagined abstractions imposed out of convenience or fear). If anything, perhaps, religious believers can attain to a certain intellectual honesty (if they try), because they at least acknowledge the roots of their worldview and continue to explore the myths and stories that serve as its foundation, whereas most secularists are so entrenched in their own worldview that they rarely revisit their own founding philosophies and mythologies, and instead think they can get away with making bigoted statements about large segments of the population without being challenged.

Liquids Not as Risky as First Feared

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This is not a poem, because who reads poems?

Remember when you put the single-serving coffee creamer in my hand, and I said it was small and cold and like your heart? But what did I say first? That it was good.

(Remember before we knew the same people and we had nothing to talk about? What did we say? Small, important things. In my dream, corn is very finely and expertly judged, and everything else is zero (zero = not corn). When did you say: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero? An old man talks about figs. The headlines read: Liquids Not as Risky as First Feared. According to you, our skin is bread, our quirks are corked quarks. I start a song in the dining room and when I come back you're still singing it. I step into the lobby and an old woman looks up, says, "It's raining, I'm eighty years old, I don't have an umbrella, I'm eighty years old, do you have a dollar, I'm eighty years old... it's raining." Shouldn't I give her everything I have? After that, I step into the rain, and laugh and laugh (and maybe I'm not done).

Remember the skin on the hot chocolate that cooled and cracked, and the light on it, and how you always intrude on my confusion as if you have a right to it?)

Before my hand was empty, and I ignored it at the end of my arm. The cream has weight and texture and shifts a little inside when I move. Back and forth. This is a compliment: your heart is like a little, liquid thing that sweats. It reminds me what hands are for.

Remember how you held the ice cube on my arm, and it cried and cried? There is no reason for it--we just do the things we are designed to do. Here's the heat, the cold, the open hand, the fig and the umbrella, the chocolate, the curdled cream. Here is Peter's thimble and the kiss on the knuckle you don't remember.

Write about that.