cell913blog.com #76

 Attempting to live ‘in the between’ as this scribe put it in the last post, that is between the rawness of nature, ‘life eating life in order to survive,’ and some ephemeral, ineffable, timeless, and indescribable ‘deity’ or ‘transcendence,’ or ‘divinity,’ or ‘ekstasis,’ a Greek work denoting ‘stepping outside the norm,’ ( a satisfaction that goes deeper than feeling good) has been a constant tension in all cultures, religions and philosophies.

One of the most confounding aspects of this tension in a culture locked into a literal, logical, rational, empirical, sensate, language, perception, and ‘reality’ is that “Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under control of reason,” as Karen Armstrong writes in her introduction to her work, The Case for God (p. xiv)

Armstrong continues:

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the ‘limits of reason.’ Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be ‘definitively’ rational. It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts, and skins and reaches ‘resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness.’ (borrowed from George Steiner’s Real Presences: Is There anything in what we say? p.217) But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form-relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience. Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight. We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one. (Ibid)

Perhaps the ‘losing oneself’ in a ritual, skill or knack after constant practice might begin to illustrate a similar ‘ekstasis.’ A hunchback who trapped cicadas in the forest with a sticky pole never missed a single one. He had so perfected his powers of concentration that he lost himself in the task, and his hands seemed to move themselves. He had no idea how he did it but knew only that he had acquired the knack after months of practice. This self-forgetfulness (Daoist Zhuangzi) explained, was an ‘ekstasis’ that enabled you to ‘step outside’ the prism of ego and experience the sacred.  

People who acquired this knack discovered a transcendent dimension of life that was not simply an external reality ‘out there’ but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality which they have called God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. But it was impossible to explain it in terms of logos (appeal to logic and rationality). This imprecision was not frustrating, as a modern Western person might imagine, but brought with it an ektasis that lifted practitioners beyond the constricting confines of self. ……Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.                                                                                                                            op. cit. p. xiii-xiv)

Senator John McCain of Arizona was renowned for exhortation, ‘to dedicate yourself to something larger than yourself’! Probably, in his mind he was attempting to elevate individual Americans’ aspiration, motivation and commitment to a philanthropic, a social need, a project that would entail a significant contribution to the public good. While honourable, worthy, highly ethical and eminently memorable, there is a difference between his exhortation and the kind of transcendence that Armstrong writes of in the contemplation of the insoluble, within the deepest ‘level of being.’ One is not more ethical or moral than the other; the difference seems more akin to an ‘objective project’ larger than self, rather than a subjective ‘spiritual’ kind of experience.

In some way, pedagogy, persuasion, modelling and motivating generate McCain’s version of ‘something larger than self.’ No amount of pedagogy, persuasion, modelling and motivating can engender transcendence.

The bifurcation of reality into modes of perception and thought, one the one hand, rational and literal, and on the other ‘aesthetic, spiritual, poetic, and ‘right brain’ is another of the contemporary tensions in our culture that continue to attract observers. And as the ‘left brain’ rational, literal,  empirical mode of both perception and thought, as well as the interpretation of reality dominates, the implication of this dominance are legion. In medicine, for example, the ‘soul’ of the patient is extraneous to the case history, the diagnosis and the treatment plans that doctors and their staff prepare for their patients.

The rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctly modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as ‘creation science’ that regards the mythos of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. (Ibid, p. xv)

There is a kind of ‘certainty’ and objectivity and clarity to the literal, empirical whereas the poetic and imaginative and transcendent tends to be much more abstract, indefinite, uncertain, ephemeral, and thereby tends to be considered as less ‘real’ and certainly ‘less important.’ What are the facts?’ is a question bandied about in a presidential political campaign in which one candidate seems to depend on ‘alternative facts’…while another champions demonstrable, provable, measurable, literal, empirical data points.

One of the dark sides of the trend to conspiracy theories, in addition to their failure to meet the ‘smell test’ of literal, empirical accuracy, is that they tend to embody deep, highly toxic and even inordinately negative emotions, perceptions, images and the power of those factors, with impunity. How to hold such toxic perceptions, emotions and images to account, and the people who hold and spread their venom in an American culture addicted to the literal, empirical, legal, seems beyond the bounds of the public institutions.

The emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, however, illustrate a very cogent, poignant and visceral notion. In spite of decades or even centuries of training, education, normalizing and cultural embedding of the importance of reason, logic, the literal, empirical denotation of reality, there is always an inescapable ‘connotative’ aspect to reality….And ‘connotative’ exceeds ‘context’ the favourite word of contemporary pundits and reporters.

The dictionary definition of connotative reads: having the power of implying or suggesting something in addition to what is explicit…the subjective associations or feelings a word  (or image) brings to mind beyond the literal…

Ms Armstrong reminds us:

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence, and it was unwise to mix the two. Logos (‘reason’) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality….Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth’.

Today we live in a society of scientific logos and myth has fallen into disrepute. In popular parlance, a ‘myth’ is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, or fighting monsters, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behavior. (Armstrong, The Case for God, p.xi)

 Some might argue that contemporary conspiracy theories, like the one of immigrants from Haiti eating pet cats and dogs, resembles a myth. Actually, it would seem more likely to be a horrific image of fear, exemplified in Greek mythology by the Greek gods Deimos and Phobos, the gods or personified spirits of fear. Deimos represented terror and dread, while his brother Phobos was panic and flight. They were the sons of the war-god Ares who accompanied their father into battle, driving his chariot and spreading fear in his wake. As sons of Aphrodite, goddess of love, the twins also represented fear of loss. (from theoi.com

 The conundrum and perplexity and danger of another trump presidency, far from the danger of literally weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, and mass deportations of allegedly illegal immigrants, lies in the deepest, darkest, images of war, based on fear and panic.

Eliciting and evoking the secret, undisclosed, unaccounted for, unconscious and yet profoundly influential fears of his ‘cult’ as a mirror to/of his own deepest, darkest, undisclosed and unaccounted for and highly influential fears by the Republican candidate and his lackey on the ticket, seems not only deceptively simple and highly radioactive.

Reaching into mythos, as a potential (and certainly not definitive) narrative image that attempts to represent those  matters of logos (reason) that resist containment in and by reason, logic and the literal, may not offer a legal  case for prosecution. The imaginative, poetic way of seeing, however, does attempt  to render a path to contemplation of one of the most vexing insolubles, without having to rely on the medical, psychiatric or clinical psychology professionals.

 Framing rhetoric in terms of war, based on fear and panic, for the purposes of arousing a nation (or a sizeable portion of a nation) by an American candidate for president, while echoing a similar framing by another Russian despot, may offer faux comfort and security to a fragile 78-year-old. It does not and cannot escape the depiction not only of a national, geopolitical, and dangerously imaginal and potential military and political conflict within and without the borders of the  United States.

Looking through the “left-brain-left-eye’ without considering the right brain-eye perspective endangers both the framers and the framed.