Searching for God # 133

 The beauty of the world, human consciousness now thought, was “external” to the perceiving consciousness of it. Poets are the last reminders of this primal connection – what is called in literary criticism “the pathetic fallacy”. Northrop Frye, commenting on Blake’s image of the divide into male and female, as quoted in the last post in this space. 

Can the perceiving consciousness be integrated into, and an intimate part of, the beauty of the world? We have lived with, drunk in, absorbed, and come to believe that the subject and the object are, by definition, separate, different, opposite and opposed. Juxtaposed with the Christian ‘fallen human,’ in and through original sin, there seems to be no way to restore what Blake considered a ‘primal connection’. Is any imaginative speculation of reconnecting humanity to the beauty of the world mired inevitably in the literal, empirical and universal evasion, both psychological and spiritual/religious/ethical/moral, of anything remotely analogous to hubris, pride, arrogance and presumptuousness. Is this another ‘either/or’ into which our conventional, societal, normal, perception and language have dragged us for so long that by now we are fully embracing our own ‘alienation, separation, isolation’ from God, from the beauty of the world? And have we been left chasing our tail to perform correctly, appropriately, politically correctly, and legally/morally/ethically, as we have been taught and inculcated into its throes, not to mention building structures, systems, monuments and heroes to what we call justice, in what is really an obsession with ‘cleaning up’ a mess the origins of which are bottomless, like the deepest caves from the mythical Hades of our collective minds? 

Are we, then, engrossed in a futile and obsessive pursuit of our own part of the ‘beauty of the world’ as some universe completely separate from our existence, perception, attitude, and belief when it is inherent in our existence from the get-go? Have we been fed a diet of a divided world, Heaven and Hell, for starters, that fundamentally distorts the inescapable paradox of unity, androgyny, belonging, acceptance, inherent dignity and respect, and love and a full and indisputable ‘birth’ as children of God, made in God’s image, not only of original androgyny, but also of the implicit universal oneness? 

Do we have to ditch, abandon, trash or worse, ‘kill off God,’ in order to restore an original connection? Have we so embraced, drunk, absorbed, and drowned in the requisites of rationality, objectification, separation, alienation, isolation and the concomitant anxieties, desperations, perversions, obsessions, escape mechanisms, and zero-sum competitions, to prove our inherent worth? Especially on what has to be now, the odd perception, conception and attitude, that such unity with the beauty of the world has been our ‘inheritance’ from the beginning? 

Have we collectively, joined a world-wide rush to the ‘bottom’ of our least favourable, most desperate and most feared state, abandonment, in order to feel that we have solved the dilemma which is an inescapable and intractable perception of every human’s life, that s/he is really fraught with sin, really no good in the sight of some God and, unless redeemed in some sacrificial manner, analogous to the ‘sacrifice’ of the Crucifixion, we are condemned to an eternal Hell. A corollary that accompanies that sentence, is for the few who have ‘succumbed’ to the requirement of that sacrifice, is a promise of an eternal life in Heaven. What deity worthy of the name is either capable of, or even remotely interested in such a proposition? And yet, we have had two thousand years of such a conflux of psychic, religious, moral and ethical forces, demands, rules, and norms, all considered necessary because of our inherent evil. 

It is not a question of the guilt or responsibility of Adam or Eve, although we continue to debate, and even enter contentious conflicts over that question. Gender politics, while perhaps another entertaining pass-time, and certainly lucrative for those writing books to ennoble and uphold the feminist voice, cause and overcome the oppression men have inflicted for centuries, has a potential to obscure Blake’s image of the androgynous God and the original divide. As I once wrote to a couple of men who were fully engaged in the question of why men do not participate in formal psychological therapy in an attempt to investigate their resistance, and, ultimately find the paths to reverse that pattern: Does the rose have to apologize to the lilly of the valley for not being bell-shaped and white? Does the cardinal need to change to be more like the loon? Why, then, would we expect, or even wish, for men to be more like women? And the inverse, why would we expect or even wish, for women to be more like men? It is our distorted perception, and the belief in what is ‘normal,’ from a rational, and a literal/empirical metaphysic that generates such an energy. 

Dystopias, like The Handmaid’s Tale, based as it is on documented evidence of the horrors perpetrated by men on women, as Margaret Atwood has attested to whenever such testimony was needed and appropriate, serve as dramatic wake-up calls to both genders, after centuries of the despicable, yet considered normal, abusive attitudes and actions of men against women. Not incidentally, such horrors continue to this day, irrespective of the valiant, creative and explosive exposure Atwood and others continue to proffer. And, for many white Christian males, the subjugation of women, now dubbed the subduing of women who are expected to submit to their men, has reared its ugly head, in the halls and boardrooms of what is alleged to be the most powerful nation on earth. The suggestion in some quarters, for example, that women who need  an abortion should be convicted of a crime. The men, many of whom have raped their victims, however, are left out of the equation of how to regard and treat this ‘public issue.’ 

So long as the complete separation, alienation, isolation of the beauty of the world, and God, and Paradise, as different, apart and divided from the people of the world, the desperation to ‘correct’ the chasm will continue unabated. Whether we are subject or object in that equation, we are, irretrievably and terminally caught in a trap.....and although our imaginations continue to bridge the divide, in literature, fantasy, dreams, art, drama, dance, nevertheless, the world of those artists, their perspective, their life-style and their ‘outsidedness’ from the norms of society, a state of which few ever complain, remain alien, foreign, misunderstood, and even maligned as ‘foolish,’ ‘rubbish,’ often ‘outlandish,’ ‘irresponsible,’ and deemed unworthy of a life-choice for the children of high-achieving parents and family. 

What if, just for a moment, their foolishness and their foreign attitudes, perspectives and life-choices were at least as significant, relevant and leavening to the modern, contemporary Western life styles....and were the life-line that has the most promise of helping us restore a very different perspective and attitude of our relationship to God, the universe, Paradise and the beauty of the universe? 

This argument may seem specious to many, who have grown not only comfortable, but also convicted, of the need for the divide...now extended not only to the battlefield, the market economy, the academic research foundational funding applications, and deeply ingrained as the rationale for corporatism and capitalism. Nothing is off limits, in the pursuit of ‘dominance’ in business, in government, in international relations, and, nothing but the empirical evidence has meaning, relevance or significance in the medical arena, while the legal fraternity has begun to broach the ‘motivations’ and ‘circumstantial evidence’ in some legal cases. We exist in a physical, literal, empirical and nominal universe as allegedly comfortably compliant mirrors and lamps to a universe we have inherited. 

As mirrors, we underscore the rules of the game, that each and every action needs to be measured in comparison with other similar actions, that my salary for my work must be analyzed as fair or unfair depending on the list of variables of the person doing similar work under similar conditions. We expect to be ‘law-abiding’ whether the laws are based on reasonable expectations, deduced or induced by reasonable men and women charged with the design and implementation of those laws, as well as the ‘resonableness’ of those enforcing those laws. And we are finding that that expectation of reasonableness is not always operating among either or both of those groups, the legislators or the enforcers. 

We are witnessing the galloping spread of surveillance cameras, AI algorithms that enable our phones to capture our private conversations, while the cameras capture the public movement of millions of faces, now recognizable by those same instruments. And, who knows who currently ‘owns’ those images, and to what profitable deployment those images might be put, in the interest of those whose billions seem to have captures the playing field for the near and medium-term future, with or without our compliance, or even with or without our full access to the risks, dangers and security exposures we might very well all face. 

The divide has long ago left Pandora’s jar, releasing all the troubles of the world, leaving hope inside. As the first mortal woman, in Greek mythology, Pandora was told by the gods never to open the jar....and of course, overcome by curiosity, she opened it, releasing all the evils miseries, diseases, sorrows and hard work into the world, slamming it shut in time to trap hope before it could escape. (From AI) The human trait of curiosity re-appears in many of the myths we have inherited, as the debate continues over whether that trait is consistent with human hubris or merely a normal human trait. Control by the gods, however, is also a theme which reappears in many of the myths of our inheritance....and could it be that the Christian myth owes some of its DNA to these earlier myths? 

Perhaps, here in this space, as an octogenarian ‘fool,’ I am hopelessly in search of the kind of hope that remains trapped in Pandora’s jar....can’t blame a guy for hoping and imagining!