Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 38

The Clash of Being and Becoming

The church needs to recognize that things have changed and times are changing and people are changing.     [Frank Schaefer, former Methodist Minister]
Everything flows, nothing stands still.     [Heraclitus of Ephesus]
The trigger for this note is the first quote. A story in the New York Times this morning relates a conflict within the Methodist Church. Frank Schaefer, one of its ministers, was expelled for violating the rules of the Methodist Book of Discipline; the context was gay marriage. The Rev. Schaefer clearly voiced his own convictions, no doubt feeling that they are self-evident and should therefore command universal assent. But that is because we are now living in an age in which Becoming has achieved at least a temporary dominance.
Having been brought up in a tradition in which Being is the ultimate anchor and reference, I’ve found it odd that our times are so enamored of Becoming. It’s everywhere. It neatly matches the spirit of an Age of Progress. That age itself takes its inspiration from the theory of evolution—which seemingly provided, in the nineteenth century, a plausible alternative to explain Life, at minimum, and, by extension the whole of reality as capable of explanation without God. Heraclitus, who anticipated the rise of Hellenism by some handful of decades, gave Becoming its brief motto; he had no access to Darwinism yet, original or neo, but still believed that reality had always been, would always be, but never the same at any moment. Job One, therefore, is adaptation—and the early bird catches the juiciest worms.
I’m speaking here of fashions—fashions in thought. “Being” is associated with God, “becoming” with matter. Nothing wrong with becoming, per se, of course. It’s a matter of observation, another way of saying that energy is present and acts in Time and Place. No time, no change. My musing centers, rather, on the promotion of this concept to a very high rank. Why is that? Perhaps because in our current social life the transcendental is effectively silenced and mere motion and change have been promoted and are evoked to justify change. Cultural epochs are marked by one or the other side of this pairing; Becoming is king now, but we are moving toward Being again.
I think this because I am convinced that we’re now passing through what might be called an anti-Renaissance; the twentieth century represented an important segment of it. Therefore philosophers—Whitehead comes to mind and, for me, also David Bohm, the physicist, in his cosmological writings—are struggling in some way to reconcile Becoming with Being. But, such is our time, they begin by looking at physical reality first in their attempts at explaining the “mystery.” The mystery is consciousness, agency. They are headed back toward a comprehensive answer but do not quite arrive.
The curious thing is that Being and Becoming are readily reconciled if one begins with consciousness, with agency, the most fundamental experience all of us share. Trying to explain what we are, we discover a hierarchy in which Being is more fundamental than Becoming, hence on a higher plain. And even that which always flows and moves must first bebefore it changes and thus because something else that still is. Even the flux is, first of all, before it is transformed. Reason, which is irreducibly part of awareness, then leads us to add another dimension to reality beyond the three of space and time. And with a transcending dimension added, the conflict disappears. Bohm discovered an “unconditioned order,” read intelligence, as a complement to the “conditioned order,” read matter. Whitehead discovered an evolving God. Close. But we’re not there yet. Anti-Renaissance still has a ways to go.

Benson’s Apocalypse

About a month ago we learned, on Siris ( link ), that Pope Francis had made reference to a science fiction work, Lord of the World, written by Robert Hugh Benson, a British Catholic priest. The book was published in 1907! Well, that was irresistible. We had a copy of it within the week, and since then Brigitte and I read it together in daily segments right after lunch; Brigitte did the reading. We finished yesterday—and indeed, it was a tour de force.
Benson was a quite prolific and popular writer. He wrote science fiction (3 works), historical novels (7), contemporary novels (10), children’s books (3), devotional works (8), apologetics (10), plays (4), and other books (4) including biographies and a book of poems.
Lord of the Worldis a profoundly philosophical work—its story being the ultimate victory of absolute materialistic secularism the world over. That might suggest slow, weary reading. But the book was intensely suspenseful, quite a thriller, and we had a real job keeping from reading on and on, as rapidly as possible, to discover what happens next—although we already knew the end before we even began.
Benson was born in 1871 and died in October 1914, thus three months after World War I began. He’d lived intensely and had died young of heart failure. His prophetic gift was significant—but muted. He saw the future clearly in its essence, but not its tawdry nature. The future’s technology is smooth, clean, silent, and pleasing to the eye. He projected the triumph of materialism in every category—except the spiritual. The few great outbreaks of disorder that he shows carry powerful premonitions of, say, Nazi mobs. There is no sense of what we see now, the “war of all against all,” disguised as markets, free speech, and competition. The world’s a kind of physical paradise, its air-traffic almost silent, its ground-traffic underground, its surfaces soft and sound-absorbing. The conflict is all in the “sky”—as in Dürer’s image (shown elsewhere here ). Nor does he recognize that everything constellates its own resistance—in reality—so that the great tendencies he saw have not yet, and never shall, actually achieve victory. The reason for this, however, is explained in Benson’s brief prefactory paragraph:
I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as many others. But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt is quite another matter.
At the same time, the book has extraordinary insights into spiritual life—at the collective as well as at the individual levels. These passages in no way interfere with, indeed they heighten, the story-telling tension. Surprising subjects are touched upon, like the post-death vision of one of our favorite of four major characters that carry this story, Mabel Brand.
A most unusual book—weirdly modern, weirdly out of this world. The book produced some widespread reactions—because of its gloomy ending. This impelled Benson later in his life to write a kind of utopian work, Dawn of All. Needless to say, Amazon is flying it to us now—not yet on Benson’s famous volors nor yet on Bezos’ future drones—just by plane and UPS truck. We can hardly wait.

Messiah Down Through Time

With John and Monique we heard a rather exceptional performance of Handel’s Messiahyesterday at snowbound Christ Church in Grosse Pointe Farms, MI. The conductor was Scott Hanoian (a well-known musical figure here and nationally); the chorus was Christ Church’s own, 58 strong. Exceptional, also, were the program notes. They brought a bit of the history of this masterpiece and of its initial reception in Dublin, where it was first performed on April 13, 1742. Part of the notes holds this quote from the Dublin Journal appearing on the 10th and 13th:
Many Ladies and Gentlmen who are well-wishers of this Noble and Grand Charity for which this Oratorio was composed, request it as a Favour, that the ladies who honor this Performance with their Presence would be pleased to come without Hoops [hoop-framed skirts], as it will greatly increase the Charity, by making Room for more company. The Gentlmen are desired to come without their Swords.
Controversy surrounded the Oratorio initially because it was performed in regular theaters. And neither the places nor ordinary performers were thought, by some, appropriate to handle sacred texts and music. An anonymous letter-writer to a London paper, for instance: “I ask if the Playhouse is a fit Temple to perform it in, or a Company of Players fit Ministers of God’s Word.” We had a good laugh about that after the performance while dining at Grosse Pointe’s “The Original” Pancake House—until it occurred to us that much the same reaction might take place today if Hollywood got into this particular act.
In 1785, Abigail Adams was visiting London and attended a performance of the Messiah. She was quite as entranced as we were; she spent a guinea on the ticket; she thought that expensive but well worth it. So how much did she spend? Various sources on the Internet have done their best to inform me. A credible answer, translating Year1800 guineas into our current dollars puts a guinea at around $60. One thing certainly has changed. Prices have dropped. We only spent $25 per ticket.
The program notes also brought us the actual text of the Messiah. It turns out to be quite an amazing collation of biblical quotations from the Old and the New Testaments assembled for a particular context. This was the first time that we could listen while also clearly grasping what the voices actually said—and it gave this evening an extra dimension we’d never experienced before.

The Ins and Exes

It surprised me to discover that the word influence, as used today, originated in Renaissance times and arose from astrology. As Online Etymology Dictionary puts it, it meant “streaming ethereal powerfrom the stars acting upon character or destiny of men.” Before the fourteenth century, the word simply meant in-flow, as of water and such. Quite rapidly, in a cultural sense, thus by the mid-fifteenth century, it had come to mean “exercise of personal power by human beings,” thus the “influential person.” The emphasis in both instances is mine. I see this as the rise of the secular. What once emanated from the stars, and earlier still from God, had come to be something that emanated from humans—though not from all of them.
There is no such word as exfluence—despite its utility and nicely democratic aspects. We may not, as individuals, be very influential but we’re most certainly exfluential. I ponder that daily when I perform my first action of each morning on waking up. But those things that we all do, and quite regularly, like breathing and blinking, are not actions likely to be used as honorifics.
There is a sense in which secular times are an inversion of religious ages, and the word in question is a nice example of that. Influence once signified something coming into us, from on high; and now it means something that comes out of us and changes our environment. In has become ex. We retain influence in its old meaning only when describing that staggerer over there who’s “under the influence.”
This brief ramble had me next researching intuition. In my personal dictionary, certainly, the word has great significance. I think of intuition as knowledge flowing into me and, what with my not having done a thing, from a higher source. OED therefore surprised me again. In that word that prefix, in, actually means at, or on. And tuition has the meaning of “looking after.” Intuition therefore means knowledge acquired after looking at something—presumably with a bit of an effort. That amounts to “observation.” If that’s the case I’m not surprised that its origins go back to the mid-fifteenth century as well, from Late Latin. That’s not at all the model in my mind, namely a kind of heavenly whispering of vital knowledge or insight—the cognitive form of grace.
To be sure, Webster’s third (and last) definition of intuition comes close to my personal one: “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” Here again we have a pairing corresponding to contrasting cultural realms: intuition as a kind of grace, intuition as scientific observation. Fortunately there is no extuition in the dictionary. An extuitive individual might be a bore—unless he or she wrote very fine poetry.

Who Can Deal With Excess Complexity?

The thematic here is not all that new on this blog—but worth repeating. Not that such insights help in any sense at all—except the individual. When we are caught in a horrendous storm, it is reassuring sometimes to glimpse a few recognizable landmarks.
The motivation today is an editorial in the New York Times on the subject of ambiguities that surround the so-called Volker Rule. That rule, in a nutshell, is part of the Dodd-Frank financial law and restricts U.S. banks in the making of speculative investments on their own behalf. But it’s not the Volker Rule that interests us here but, rather, its extraordinary complexity—now that it is being implemented. Brigitte flagged the editorial for me with heavy commentary. In effect she said that complexity is simply swallowing us.
Indeed, having read the thing, I could not but agree. But as is often the case with me, I had a rather apocalyptic reactions to the thing. As I noted that reaction, the thought came that sometimes, certainly not all the time, the apocalyptic solution is the only one available. And we have quite excellent historical precedents for it.
The first of these is the Gordian Knot. That knot, no doubt, was the same sort of thing in ancient Greek times as the Volker Rule is for us today. And Alexander the Great dealt with it, metaphorically, by using his sword to disentangle it—with prejudice, as we used to say a few years ago. No doubt he wiped the slate clean and had his underlings start from scratch again, something that, alas, is absolutely necessary at long intervals in social affairs when things have become unworkable. The Hellenistic era, call it Ancient Modernity, is dated from Alexander’s death.
Our own era, Modern Modernity, can be dated from, say, the French Revolution. The Alexandrine figure of that time was Napoleon. He made order again—and that order then was copied by his friends and enemies, certainly in mainland Europe. He wiped away centuries of accumulated law in France and started again.
These are my landmarks. They give me a kind of futuristic hope amidst the prevailing vast confusion. Alas, it takes a single individual with genuine power to do what Alexander and Napoleon managed to do. No such figure is visible now. Therefore my use of that word, futuristic. To the old wisdom, “This too shall pass,” we might add a complement: “That too shall come…”

Hired Help

News comes this morning that the House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a budget that will be good enough until September 2015. So we were told by two papers that reach thishouse, the one with the lower-case h. Is that the end of the fiscal meltdown crisis? Well, the vote is still ahead.
Just yesterday Brigitte wrote as follows in one of her notebooks; she keeps up several, each on a different major aspect of our lives:
I have become more and more aware of how speculation is the major content of news reports:  “should, may/might, plans, expects, soon, near, suggests, etc.” are operativewords. Those definitive words “is/are, will, etc.” are used only in reports of little if any impact on any real action, rules, and described facts!
If House members and senators actually bless this agreement soon, we will be able to say that the hired help has finally gotten around to doing its job.
Yes, the paradox of democratic government. We the People hire the people we hope will govern us. But democracy is either unnatural or Janus-faced. Those hired in this way cannot help but think that they are now our masters—and free to spend their time quarreling with one another.
Truth  to tell, the news caught me by surprise. I made what might have been a very costly error recently. I bought a laptop (called “Tyke” hereabouts). Getting it up and running right has cost lots of time, money, and stress—enough so that all those mountain-sized public problems had entirely disappeared from my view. This is the first post composed on Tyke—whom I am constantly having to remind that it is the servant and I am (at least titularly) its Lord and Master.

Perplexed from A to Z

The words I have in mind are aghast, bamboozled, bewildered, flustered, rattled, uncanny, weirded-, and zoned out—all produced, in unalphabetical sequence, when I got to wondering about the meaning of bamboozled.  
These words are linked in turn to 1) ghosts, 2) baboons, 3) wilderness, 4) bustling around, 5) noise, 6) knowledge (its absence), 7) fate, and 8) drugs. My source for dispelling my perplexity is the Online Etymology Dictionary—except for the last two.
Aghast means to be terrified in Old English, the verb being gaestanwhich itself is derived from gaest, read ghost or spirit. The word is still very much with us, but ghosts are rarely involved. A quick search yielded two recent headlines: Was Norman Rockwell gay? Family aghast at biography; Kashmir Lawyers Aghast Over Conditions of Kishtwar Jail Inmates.
Bamboozle seems to be a word welded together from the Scottish word for “to perplex,” bombaze, and the French embabouiner, meaning “to make a baboon of.” The Scotts, here, seem to me to have the greater voices since, to be bamboozled, is to be bewildered—a word derived from the feeling of being lost in the wilds.
To be flusteredhas its origins in excessive activity—a kind of fuss, stir, or commotion. It comes from Scandinavian sources, as in the Icelandic flaustra,  “to bustle.” The word came to be linked to activity while being under the influence of drink—but that original meaning has been widened to being agitated by something which is never altogether pleasant.
To be rattled is to be distracted, by noise or commotion, thus related to being flustered. Rattled is what I always am when I see bright lights, men, and guitars and my flustered finger can’t find the mute button fast enough. Uncanny, curiously, is simply the state in which effective knowledge is denied us—thus when the supernatural intrudes. Canny is to be knowing and therefore careful; but if ghosts appear or strange noises rattle us in the dark—and we’re therefore aghast—why then, in retrospect, we’ll describe the situation as uncanny—because we didn’t know what to do.
Low on the list but not yet last, being weirded out is defined for me by our Dictionary of American Slang (DAS) (2007 and therefore, presumably, quite obsolete): it describes weird outas “To become or make hallucinatory or intoxicated; to feel a loss of reality because of a strange experience.” That’s the modern take. Back in the Long Ago weird meant fate, as in the Proto-Germanic wurthis. Then, as now, I would insist, what comes around and then goes around in turn is often quite enough to weird us out. And that isfate.
Zoned out? DAS describes that condition as “Intoxicated with narcotics: HIGH.” Yes. We are in Orwell age of 1984, where HIGH means LOW. And if you’re missing a word for confusion starting with C, confusionwill do. And if you’re missing an S, zoned out can also be spaced out—lifted high by the same fuel.

Sorting…

Yes, sorting. It’s almost certain that the order of reality we inhabit here is lawful in the sense that chemistry and physics rule. At best we can arrange it so that chemistry and physics shield us from what looks to us as random flux. But beyond arranging that which absolutely rules this world we cannot change a blessed thing. All of life—and not just ours—is engaged in this arranging and this exploitation; and the more efficiently it is adapted, the humbler its attempt to fit itself into available ecologies, the more it also resembles inorganic nature. It seems easier to be a bird or bee than to be a human.
It makes a contrast to compare a life lived as a simple herder—say of sheep in Mongolia, living in yurts—and one in which a bus, subway, and elevator deposit our bodies in a New York skyscraper where, managing computers bouncing signals off satellites, we communicate arranging vast inventories of, say, electronic parts, while our children study in places or are still just tended by nurseries or schools reached by similarly complicated transportation networks to meet cohorts of care-givers who, like us (hopefully) earned degrees and have the skills to do their jobs—not least CPR, say, should a maddened terrorist crash a plane into our 40-story highrise or the dozing driver of a train cause his cars to roll off an embankment into a preschool’s playground.
The contrast comes into full view when I assume that human life takes its meaning (let me keep it simple) from saving our souls. That should be possible whether we’re simple herders (Mongolian, Kikuyu, or whatever) or Moderns who form the cells of a Babel of Secular  Extravagance. The herder will have his tribal religion and traditions. We moderns will be sophisticated. But in which life is it easier to achieve the ultimate end? Which life is more centered on reality? In which are distractions minimized?
Our birth, of course, assigns the particular curriculum we shall be obliged to follow. You can’t grow up herding in Manhattan. But as consciousness grows, keeping things simple is always wise. And those of us living in Secular Madhouse would be surprised to discover just how complicated it is to make a living herding sheep. But the vast tundras are also empty and silent, most of the day—although  they won’t support a decent crop.

Only in Puzzles

In the USA Today crossword puzzle (Saturday last) appears the following clue: “45. Propel a gig.” It is supposed to produce a three-letter formation. That’s an easy one. In goes ROW.  


R



O



W


Trouble was, the upper horizontal word, 4 letters, was clued as “44. Unit of loudness.” And the lower horizontal as “51. Suffix denoting wealth.”  That ROW in 45-Down produced a whole lot of frustrated searching. There seemed to be no real alternative to ROW if the clue is read as referring to a verb. DECIBEL was too long for that unit of sound. Now as for that suffix signifying wealth—we both knew that that was a work-around. The puzzle’s author was left with a meaningless series of letters and thus found those letters in a suffix. Eventually we wrote in SONE for unit of sound —but that, of course, rendered ROW obsolete. And as for that suffix, it came to us that a “millionaire” might work.

S O N E

A

A I R E

These two answers worked splendidly with other words that came from above and continued below but left us no choice but to insert an A between the O above and the R below. Trouble is that “oar” is a noun and not a verb. But. The but in this case is that fact-checking is at least as important a task for crossword puzzle as for political editors—if not more so. So to the dictionary we go. Turns out that “to oar” is a transitive verb. I can “sing” without any further reference (intransitive verb). But I can’t simply oar. I’ve got to oar something—say a gig? And there is a further limit imposed. You can only “oar” in crossword puzzles. When it comes to the real world, the following verses don’t fit the bill:
Oar, oar, oar your boat,Gently down the stream.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,Life is but a dream.
It’s okay grammatically, if not otherwise. So we crossworded that word into the space erased and sighed a sigh of muted satisfaction.

Vivos voco...

A convoluted and amusing discussion had Brigitte writing in her diary a funny line modeled on the opening verse of Friedrich Schiller’s immortal poem, “The Song of the Bell.” We have two separate and complete “Works of Schiller” in the attic—but we now live in the latter days; thus instead of going up to fetch a volume from that these days frigid sphere, I went to get the poem, much more quickly, from the Internet. Alas.
Herewith the first verse in German and in English. The English version was produced by Margarete Münsterberg (slightly edited to bring it closer to a literal translation). The entire poem is available here (in German) and here (in English).
Fest gemauert in der Erden Walled in fast within the earth           Steht die Form, aus Lehm gebrannt. Stands the form burnt out of clay.      Heute muß die Glocke werden. Today will give the bell its birth. Frisch Gesellen, seid zur Hand. Fellows, lend a hand to-day.  Von der Stirne heiß Sweat must trickle now                  Rinnen muß der Schweiß, From the burning brow,          Soll das Werk den Meister loben! Till the work its master praise.            Doch der Segen kommt von oben. ‘Tho blessing comes from heaven’s blaze.
What struck us today was that the poem features a motto in Latin: Vivos voco. Mortuos plango. Fulgura frango. We’d both read this famous poem as children, later as adults. Each time new surprises await us. One of those, this time, was that motto. Translated it means: “The living I call, the dead I mourn, the lightning bolt I break.” Schiller used that motto because these words, once, were used as inscription on big bells themselves—either all three on one or one on each of three bells. The first symbolized Faith, the second Hope, the third Love. We have a case here of Schiller quoting the bell itself… The illustration, from Wikipedia ( here ), is the Bell called Faith in the Hoffnungskirche Berlin-Pankow. Close examination will show the words Vivos voco in the metal of this bell poured in  1913.
Endless discussion—perhaps a little too rich for a grey Monday morning—followed. Brigitte began with trumpets and speculated about the relationship of these two different instruments of sound in the context of religion and of culture. Eventually we came to a somewhat vague but satisfying conclusion. The trumpet, surely, was there before the bell, sounding with strident fury in the Old as well as the New Testament. And the trumpet will come again, resounding in the End Times when Revelations’ Seventh trumpet is finally heard. Meanwhile we have the siren. But as for the Bell, did it, perhaps, mark a geologically brief but a culturally meaningful interval when Faith was more triumphant—and raised on high—during the centuries of Christendom?