Phoenix

Creation accompanies destruction. As something old dies, something new is born. Even Scripture attests to this, saying, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”¹ The view of a rebirth or being “born again” is not unique to Christianity.² “For groups, as well as individuals, life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and be reborn.”³ The process of rebirth is that of reincarnation or reincorporation. Eucharist itself is a rite of incorporation, simultaneously a incorporation into the world of the Church and separation from the secular world. The perpetual return to these acts of incorporation lie at the heart of the human condition.

Cyclical time best shows incorporation and reincorporation. With a linear view of time, less has changed than one might think. Man, modern or primitive, is a creature of habit. Years, months, weeks, days-each of these comprise part of a forgotten liturgy. The perpetual cycles of time exhibit the clearest examples of the creation-destruction relationship in the concept of rebirth. A pagan conception of cyclical time posits the rebirth of the universe after an inexorable death-everything born must die, but then everything dead must be reborn. In Stoicism there is a “final conflagration of all things.”⁴ Tied up with this “end of the world” was the archaic concept of the mortality of the gods. Originally, Zeus himself had to be protected from Saturn. Only with introduction of philosophy did the Greek gods lose their mortality. As recently as the Iliad, the gods were subject to physical wounds as in the case of Diomedes who injures both Ares and Aphrodite.⁵ Through history and philosophy the gods eventually became the immortals.

The mortality of the gods is maintained in Teutonic mythology. Though they live perpetually, they are susceptible to death, and given a long enough time-line, they are fated to perish. But the death of the gods and their world is not the sacred moment, but the birth of the world in the cosmogony. Much of this primordial affinity for the Beginning and prophecies of destruction are apparent in Christianity itself. The Revelation of St. John shows the world torn apart before its regeneration: “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.”⁶ Whether literally fire or not, the heavens are torn asunder and heaven and earth are both destroyed and recreated. We have hints of what the next life might be like, specifically the Beginning. In religion, the “Future is behind us”⁷-the paradisaical Garden of Eden is the “sacred time” towards which liturgy looks and history progresses.

Even with the advent of linear time, liturgical time has persisted. Liturgy seeks to return to “sacred time”⁸ and to dwell in the holiest moments of history. The most blessed moments of the liturgical calendar are those of regeneration: Christmas, Good Friday, and especially Easter. Christmas marks the birth of God, Good Friday marks the death of God, Easter marks the resurrection of God. The liturgical calendar reenacts the historical events of faith: the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

Before each regeneration, there is a corresponding degeneration. Before Lent, there is Mardi Gras; before a wedding, there is a bachelor’s party; before the new year, there is new year’s eve. Though these are rarely endorsed by religious authorities, they remain ubiquitous. In some cases this “degeneration” is the pacification of demons or “Satan” but whether this behavior is “right” it is a pervasive phenomenon. Modern man continues to act mythologically even though he has forgotten his myths.

If the year is a microcosm of the cosmos, then the week would be as well. “Saturday” is most commonly attributed to the god Saturn, but according to Jacob Grimm arises instead from Saeteres-day, “the day of the insidiator.” This is a title of Loki, trapped until Ragnarök when he is freed and the world is consumed in fire. Thus, Saturday is the “mischievous” day of the week, even though modern man has forgotten the meaning of Saturday. The habit is maintained without the mythological context, even though “It’s a new week” is still very much employed. This is the source of “Sunday-morning Christians.” The new year and the new week, are both “fresh starts” and still experienced as special (if not “sacred”) moments by the most secular of modern men. The weekend remains a goal even to the most apostate: respite from labor and the beginning of a new week. The Sabbath as the day of rest establishes the new, pure, sacred time.

The holy moments of generation (and regeneration) are relived in the Eucharist, Christmas, and especially Easter. Cyclical liturgy seeks to inhabit Being itself, drawing as close to God as possible. The yearly cycle is part of this impulse which pervades all religions. Even the seven-day creation in Genesis leaves the Sabbath as an open day; unlike the others, it is given no end. Today is the Sabbath itself; Sunday is a microcosm of that cosmic Holy Day. “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.”⁹ As the man was not made for the world, but the world for man, so too was the sabbath made for man. After the process of creation, God rested-this is now. In Judaic tradition, the new day begins with the previous night, as the universe began with darkness. The new moon too begins with darkness, out of which light then proceeds. The entirety of human existence is the Seventh Day, the Eight Day is the end of this world and the beginning of the next.

Reliving the cosmogony continues as attempts to live close to God. People have the propensity for reliving holy moments as mere memories (memorials) but as participatory events (commemorations) such as new year’s celebrations of rebirth, seasonal changes, fertility rites, rites of passage, etc. The desire of human beings is the calm rest of Innocent Being, which can never be obtained in this life. Instead, the world follows the Heraclitean doctrine of “perpetual flux” or Siddhārtha Gautama’s “Fire Sermon”-always turning, always changing. The continual flow of the universe are perhaps the most frustrating aspect of human life. The static ecstasy (Becoming) of the human condition longs for reconciliation with ecstatic stasis (Being): “Everything is a Becoming, a flux without beginning (first cause) or end; there exists no static moment when this becoming attains to beinghood-no sooner can we conceive it by the attributes of name and form, than it has transmigrated or changed to something else.”¹⁰ This is the ultimate goal of all religions and the meaning of the image of the Phoenix: rebirth through fire, a return to Innocent Being.

The fires of eschatology are purgative flames which cleanse and regenerate degenerate beings. “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.”¹¹ As fire destroys, it simultaneously creates. The destruction brought by God is not simple destruction but rather a creative-destruction. The ultimate goal of the violence of God is true peace. To put it a more shocking way, violence is the double aspect of peace. Hate too, is the double aspect of love. If God did not love us enough to hate that which harms his loved ones, would that be love at all? Against a violent world, the Prince of Peace returns at the head of an army to judge the living and the dead.

The entire world of beings suffers from “original sin”-the diffuse “guilt of Becoming weighs equally on men and gods, understanding and compassion must be extended to the blessed as well as to the unfortunate.”¹² Existence itself is grace, perfectly unmerited since “merit” requires the prerequisite of existence. The gratuitousness of existence comes from Being, the gratuitousness of Being comes from God. As a gift obligates gratitude, so too does existence itself obligate gratitude to Being. Martin Heidegger claims that man is the “shepherd of Being”¹³ and therefore waits on Being. How much more should we not wait on the source of Being itself?

The ethical obligations of grace are the essence of dwelling in the world. Forgiveness itself allows rebirth by suspending judgment of actions and ending their consequences.¹⁴ By forgoing sins, we nullify them, allowing rebirth to those whom we love. The universal gratuitousness of existence should obligate universal love for all beings. The response to the gratuitousness of existence is not license to misuse it but liberty to use it with great care. It is not a matter of the “will to power” but rather the will to let things be as they should be. An abused gift is an insult to the giver and is both ungrateful and ungracious. The image of the Phoenix reveals the possibility of grace in forgiveness-and such profound grace deserves profound gratitude.

If all existence is universal grace, our forgiveness of others should be universal too: “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”¹⁵ Seven is a Judaic number of completion, and Christ says that we should not merely forgive every time, but universally every time.

Seven marks completion, but the eight day marks a new beginning. Eight marks the newness after forgiveness, and the grace of Innocence Being. The days of the week are seven, but beyond time is the Eight Day, the recreation of heaven and earth by fire. The separation of the wheat from the chaff is also the incorporation into the body of the Chosen People. But incorporation is also separation from all other bodies-wheat from the chaff. Infants are circumcised on the Eight Day marking the covenant (Hebrew, berith, “cutting”) which incorporated children into the chosen people by separating them from the rest of the world. An octave begins again on the eight note, a new week starts on the eight day. Dying to the old man in order to give birth to the new man is a process of incorporation and is reflected in the image of the Phoenix. Baptism serves a similar role, revealing the symbolic union of the individual with the Church body and mirroring the cleansing of sins. Though elemental opposites, fire and water both serve with this atoning significance.

The ultimate atonement to Innocent Being is union with God or theosis. But this is not merely a final “state” but an unending process. Theosis is the telos of man, but it is not a static state, but rather an ecstatic state. Man arrives at union with God and then proceeds to learn ever more of his maker. Man’s perfection is to pogress in the perpetual process of always drawing nearer to God. Theosis is not heaven, it is now. Time need not be anything more than the unfolding of eternity, perpetual, unending. In the richness of our ignorance is the beauty of the possibility of the perpetual revelation of God, drawing us always to greater appreciation. Only through process is progress possible. The process of time is required for the progress of Being.

It is a gross misunderstanding of time to say, “Only in time, time is conquered.”¹⁶ Time is never conquered, time is good. The resolution of time kills-for example, according to Aristotle the “happy life” is only called such once it is dead. The discomfort with the “infinite” (or Becoming) is the discomfort with our own incompleteness and also the indescribable Being of God. But this is the entirety of the human condition, on earth as it is in heaven. Theosis is both the state of union with God and also the ecstasy of always drawing nearer. Death marks a threshold at which we see God face to face and are reborn.

Birth, life, and death is the natural life cycle. The resurrection marks not merely birth (natality) or the denial of death (mortality) but rather the fullness of life (maturity). As Adam was born as a mature man, so Christ was resurrected as a mature man. The pediatric and geriatric stages of life are merely part of the life cycle. The promise of the Phoenix is not the “new child” but the “new man.” The reborn Phoenix does not learn again how to fly, but leaps instantly into heaven blessed with a body glowing golden, transfigured by the very flames of death which destroyed it. While death destroys the “old man” once and for all, it creates the “new man” once and for all. The fires of death are the very radiance of the Phoenix’s new life. The Phoenix marks our re-incarnation in the new heaven and the new earth, the atonement to Innocent Being.

1John 12:24, KJV.

2While creation always accompanies destruction, destruction does not always accompany creation (viz., the creation of the universe ex nihilo).

3Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 189.

4Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143.

5The Iliad,Book V.

6Revelation 6:14.

7Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (New York: Fox Duffield & Company, 1906), 151.

8Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion(New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1957), 68.

9Mark 2:27.

 10Ananda Coomaraswamy, Buddha And The Gospel Of Buddhism (Boston: University Books, 1964), 95.

111 Corinthians 3:13.

12Rachel Bespaloff, “On the Iliad,” in War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 77.

13Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 260.

14Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2^nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 237.

15Matthew 18:21-22. 

16T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1943), 16.

The Empty Third

Winter touched the earth. Darkness opened up and the womb of the night lay barren. The moon hid her face. But there was movement in a small farm along the deserted road. Blown away by dry winds, the topsoil had vacated its home. It gone, the aging man gave it no heed. The trees that were old could no longer age, the trees that were young had no youth.

From what I gathered, he no longer farmed, but he still worked the ground. I would only later see why. The house was empty, and we sat alone in its void. The stillness outside moved inside and sat with us. He apologized for the lack of water. In its stead he offered wine, the year of which I did not know and he did not tell, but it was past the fullness of time. Maybe years ago it had been ripe, but that time seemed very distant now. But I was thirsty and nodded a silent thanks to him as my teeth bit into the dry bread.

He and I sat alone with silence, a wordless nakedness. Few words were uttered. Our silence spoke enough. Its sound was almost rich and already powerful. How I came to the little shelter in the night was a journey between here and there, which has now transmuted into there and here. The truth is that I was lost, but where I was leaving and where I was going, time has hidden to this story. The years themselves have followed the origin and destiny into oblivion. Memory retains only the journey.

Suspense stayed both his words and mine. The unspoken letters hung in our mouths while their senses leaped into the air. The room was filled with the possibility of every word we had yet to say. In violation of the mood, I tried to relieve the tension by saying everything about nothing, but quickly found myself piously saying nothing about anything. Only when I ceased talking did the conversation begin.

The small house was dark, I never saw its color. No doubt it had its own hue, its own tone, but the moon was new and she claimed its colors for herself. The dim light from inside drew me from the isolated path for the night. It stood like an island—an island in an empty ocean. Standing out of the desolation of existence, it was alone, but still part of the earth. It struck me that man is indeed an island, but every island is contiguous, jutting out of the ground here and there, always connected but always distant. The lonely house stood, and there I arrived.

I traversed the pacific desert. The waters were parted and the waves were held beyond the edges of the world. Never knowing when the sea might return, I walked on dry land. I traveled always under the looming absence of my death, waiting for its parousia. In the clearing, there was the house. It would never have been my destination of choice, but as the fates might carry me, so I willed whatever might come. And there was the house.

I knocked on the door. Vague candlelight flickered inside the home. The scent of upturned earth was fresh upon the air. The door opened and the man inside, whose face I only saw darkly the entire evening, motioned for me to enter. The vagabond stepped across the threshold and the dweller offered him a chair. That was the scene: three chairs, two occupied by men, one occupied by an unfamiliar silence.

The loudness of the silence was not the mere absence of noise. The chair remained owned, though it no longer had an owner. This was the place of our silent discussion. It was not the topic, no. It was instead the center of our speech. The presence of the absence of some other person perhaps was the only reason the man had invited me inside. But I asked the silence whether my chair been empty before.

“It will be empty again,” I heard it say.

But what of your emptiness? I wondered.

“It is not mine,” it replied.

Is it mine?

“Yet it is not yours,” spoke the silence. Every time it spoke it might have been the voice of a man, or then again a child, or once more a woman. I did not know it, but it seemed to understand me.

I sat as a stranger in a strange place. I thought of a literary chair by a fireplace and crutch without an owner, but conversed most with the silence about itself. I did not know whose absence was present, but I sensed it in the emptiness between myself and the other. The silence resided in the space on the chair, under the ceiling, and all around us. Perhaps it was self-deception, but I thought that in the dim light I glimpsed an ethereal unity of myself and the stranger, whose guest I was. His form was blurred by the flickering candlelight and half possessed by shadow. My attention was drawn to the light, the single candle at the center of the table. From there light shone, and by it I saw something of the man. The light which revealed our faces concealed our backs from each other, which remained indistinguishable from the shadow which stretched over the barren fields, under the missing moon. So we sat like two men half out of water, or two halves of the same man facing himself. Which it was I could not say because I could not see.

Out the window even the moon was hidden in shadow. Only the dim light of the cold stars cast light on the world, which showed trees as darker cracks along the canopy, as if heaven were crumbling. The thin branches meandered like spiderweb fractures running up and out. If this was a struggle between earth and heaven, I could not determine a winner. But with the same strength it seemed that the earth supported the sky with its black pillars. At one glance, it supported, at another it struggled.

Who was the breath remaining on the chair? Whose body had it been? A child?

“Yes or no.”

A sibling?

“Yes or no.”

A lover?

“Yes or no.”

Which one is it? I asked.

“All is one,” came the silent words.

The silence spoke cleanly, not of mere absence, but of the presence of something once present and now nevermore. In the silence was something which had begun and ended, been born and died. But who was this silence? The man, too, whom I had nearly forgotten, seemed to be lost in thought, perhaps in the same thought.

The man’s dirt-caked boots rested by the door and his hat hung on the wall, but on my journey I had seen no life in the worn fields where grain had once been meant to grow. The fields were long dead and homes had decayed into houses which had crumbled into ruins. No one worked this land. No one even tried.

But my host did. His boots showed it and dirt slept eternally under his fingernails. This man worked the land alone. Yet I saw no evidence of production. There was no barn to be seen, no silo, not so much as a tool shed. There were no animals and the earth bore no fruit. Who was this man?

“A man,” replied the silence.

Why does he work the ground?

“He is a man.”

Someone had died. The ground had born fruit and it had died. The birds had laid eggs and those baby birds had died. The flame of the candle wavered in the cool house. The candle grew shorter as time passed. The candle too had been made and would be unmade. And someone, too, had died.

Something invisible had torn the fertile soil away and taken it elsewhere. To where, it does not matter. It might be as near as the next field, but there is never here, and here is always only where we are. The fertile soil was lost in the shadows, indistinguishable as the man and I were in the darkness. The wind might as well have been waves, eroding the island plot. Wherever the fertile soil was, it was not here.

The silence concerned me again. There had been a death, or at least an ending that had taken someone away. And maybe it was fate which blew away the man’s fertile soil and growing love. But fruit dies in order for a tree to grow. And yet I felt that this man had seen the seed die and waited—always waited—for its rebirth. Maybe it had been a son sitting in the third chair, or a wife, or a brother, or… All is one. Whomever it had been, that person was gone and no one had been reborn. The man waited. The flame shuddered. The wick shortened. The fire ate at the candle and created new forms. At every feast there is a skeleton. The painful process of creative destruction continued as it always had, always will, always should? This man had witnessed a bird fall into the fire, but the coals had long grown cold and there was no phoenix to be seen. He was left only with the pain of his burns. But he returned day after day, turning up the ashes, looking for a hint of life.

And so the chair remained without dust, and the field without weeds. The man preserved both the chair and the soil. Both were empty, but equally rich with possibility. That was why he continued to till, the same reason he continued to sit. He was a man, and so he lived as a man. Whatever his goals were, he tended their possibilities.

And then I realized. It was I who was sitting in the empty seat. The empty third had been there from all eternity. His missing love had been in my seat, and the empty chair had dwelt with them always. Unfilled, and yet suddenly familiar. I looked to the man, who too looked at the chair. Was he remembering the presence of another, now absent? Was the scene different for him with another guest? Who was the silence in the chair? It wasn’t quite a spirit or even the presence of a spirit. Perhaps it was the last breath of a brother. Perhaps it was the stifled laughter of a child. Perhaps it was the unio mystica of lovers. But again I remembered the silence: all is one.

Maybe the stillness suspended over the chair was between every human. The silence was not human, but maybe it made me human. Or perhaps it made a tree a tree, or a dog a dog, or a bird a bird?

“One,” said the silence.

The stillness was everywhere, between everything. And there I saw that the stillness was the between. Here and there were both within the stillness. I moved my feet within the emptiness in which I could hear my shoes roughly slide against the coarse wood only because of the silence. The emptiness held everything I might have done and everything I might do. It seemed like every possibility held within that sacred space.

“All is one,” came the words from the void.

In the light we are different.

“In the dark you are the same.”

The boots by the door were living. Their life tended the potential of the field, as the man tilled them, awaiting the possibility of growth. The man was a shepherd of hope. And the chair he preserved quietly. And here I sat, in his sister’s chair or his mother’s chair or his daughter’s chair. The empty chair remained. Or was it empty? I looked there and saw the wealth of possibilities: anyone might sit in that chair, anyone at all. It was not necessary that anyone sit, but anyone had the freedom to sit. The chair simply waited between the man and me. The chair sat silently, hosting this eternal silence.

I saw that the man was an craftsman, if such a word can be used to describe him. He was no common laborer, for he was no slave to necessity. But there he dwelt, working the ground always, teasing out its possibilities. The land there, even if all the other fields were abandoned, was ever the care of this single man. The potential for growth was cultivated carefully, even if actual agriculture never was seen. The chair too, the man cultivated—the possibility for it fulfilling itself always remained full in its emptiness. Or maybe its emptiness was its fulfillment, the openness to the possibility of fulfilling itself.

My eyes met those of my host. He smiled as if regenerated, but wearily, as though in the evening of life. He moved away to his separate room, and I to mine. The stillness followed me and I let it lull me to sleep, rocked gently by the sounds of possible waves, winds, and waterfalls. I slept as an infant shrouded in black.

I woke from a sleep filled with every dream I could imagine. Each dream and variation contained worlds of possibilities, entire universes to see and become. It was well before dawn, and I rose to take my leave early. I found the man sitting at the table in his chair, staring dimly at the empty chair. The room was only lit by starlight, and there was little to distinguish one thing from another. He said nothing. I said nothing. But we both listened. The words of the silence came again, and I knew he heard them too. It was the silence which made the two into one. Our humanity was hidden within the silence, the same silence which showed that the islands are, in truth, one. The sea of sounds obscures the truth, for it fills the basin of the sea, hiding the truth that every island is of the same earth, as every man is of the same humanity. Every man is an island, and no man is an island.

As I left long before dawn, the man extended his hand, with what might have been tears glittering under the stars: “Thank you,” he said as I crossed the threshold. Once again on the road, I continued to my destination, waiting for the dawn of a new day and the rich emptiness of the future. I believe I smiled perhaps all the way I walked from there and finally to here.

Tao

Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu

8

The best are like water
bringing help to all
without competing
choosing what others avoid
hence approaching the Tao
dwelling on earth
thinking with depth
helping with kindness
speaking with truth
governing with peace
working with skill
moving with time
and because they don’t compete
they aren’t maligned

Emptiness is the essence of possibility, as silence is the essence of noise, and listening is the essence  of language. The emptiness of the future provides the possibility for movement. This is the principle of inaction: preserving not only possibility, but the possibility of possibilities. This impulse is conservative, but never at the expense of the future.

In Red Pine’s (out-of-print) version of the Tao Te Ching, Ho-Shang Kung says:

“The best people have a nature like that of water. They’re like mist or dew in the sky, like a stream or a spring on land. Most people hate moist or muddy places, places where water alone dwells. The nature of water is like the Tao: empty, clear, and deep. As water empties, it gives life to others. It reflects without being impure, and there is nothing it cannot wash clean. Water can take any shape, and it is never out of touch with the seasons. How could anyone malign something with such qualities as this.”

The truth is that other elements can be used, because even the word “water” is drawn out of that primordial sea of being. Without language, there is nothing to distinguish things from each other (or even to perceive things). The flames of existence, as discussed in Gautama Buddha’s “Sermon on Fire” or as part of Heraclitus’ concept of “flux.” While elements such as fire and water might be made out to be “opposites” they are only so in words. More fundamentally, their ways of changing are all part of the fundamental  flux which comprises all of existence. Air moves, earth shakes, water flows, fire burns.

The best are like water
bringing help to all
without competing

Inaction is the Eastern way, and perhaps action is the Western way. An example of this would be simply in art: Japanese abstract art focuses on doing as little as possible in order to express as much as possible–sometimes only a single stroke. But what of art in the West? Thousands of strokes sometimes to say nothing at all. The West has certainly taken the path of directedness, and thus competition. This impulse to “higher” consciousness seems to be spreading to the East as well, for better or worse. Are the best like water? I think it is not that simple. The yin-yang is One, which means action and inaction are also united. How does this work? Perhaps it is like the Greek concept of kairos, acting in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right moment–a balance of action and inaction. Of course, Nietzsche abhors this concept of “waiting” in Beyond Good and Evil. While Eastern and Western thought may seem contradictory, it is only in words. When one must act, act without hesitation. When one must not, do not.

Inaction is undirected, responsive, virtually bestial. The East-West divide is peculiar, and while Jung finds his own explanation of their impulse, it seems to me that the West since Aristotle has focused on the ever-increasing brightness of knowledge. The East, even in its paths focusing on “enlightenment”  do so at the expense of “appearances” (maya) much in the way the prolific Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Buddha And The Gospel Of Buddhism says Plato’s cave allegory is essentially Buddhist: transcending shadows, attaining enlightenment, and returning to minister to the world bringing a new law. Ignorance of appearances is a “lowering” of consciousness. Taoism admits the root of all evil is knowledge, whereas the root of evil for Buddhism is ignorance. The two, as harmonized in Zen Buddhism, find that true knowledge is ignorance–not unlike Socrates’ maxim, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” Ignorance is the default of knowledge. With the birth of consciousness come the faults of knowledge.

The realm of conscious mind is definite and directed. The realm of the unconscious mind is indefinite and undirected. But this does not mean the unconscious  mind is impotent; quite the contrary, it is the source of potency. The conscious mind remains a static ecstasy whereas the unconscious mind remains in an ecstatic stasis,

It is the empty third between I-and-Thou holds the essence of language. This emptiness–or “void” which Ananda Coomarswamy says is used virtually in the same way as Western religions use the word “infinite”–holds power. As human beings exist between the poles of mortality (Heidegger’s concern) and natality (Arendt’s concern), the third alternative is maturity: the fullness of life, where mortality and natality are held in tension.

dwelling on earth

Taoism, according to The Book of Tea is the “art of being in the world” which is purportedly where Heidegger got his concept of being-in-the-world. I have my sympathies with both sides. On the one hand, I have half a dozen translations of the Tao Te Ching and have labored to learn (beginner) Mandarin Chinese. But I have also read almost all of Nietzsche’s writings and find myself most in line with existential phenomenology. Taoism does not seem far from this, and it affirms a nature as normative. C.S. Lewis, with whom I have little in common, attempts to incorporate the Tao into the concept of natural law in The Abolition of Man. This attempt falls short of what the Tao is meant to be, but is a movement in the right direction. Nature surely does not mean to us what it did to the Scholastics, but I have sympathies with rediscovering the earth as our home. In my opinion, the loss of normative nature has set up the world against earth in a destructive manner thanks to the likes of William of Occam, Francis Bacon, and Descartes. Seeing the world as problematic and introducing the natural-supernatural divide has cut off all access to God. Before, creation was seen as revelation of God; now, it is just a dead earth.

The Sanctimonious Poets
by Holderlin

Cold hypocrites, of gods do not dare to speak!
You’re rational! In Helios you don’t believe,
Not in the Thunderer or the Sea-God;
Dead is our Earth, so what fool would thank her? –

Take comfort, gods! For yet you adorn their verse
Though now the soul’s gone out of your pilfered names;
And if some high-flown word is needed,
You, Mother Nature, they still remember.

Friedrich Holderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1994 ), 17.

The environmentalism of our epoch is a desperate return to valuing nature again. Some of this comes out in the religious impulse in neo-paganism, trying to recover the mythic value of the cosmos. But I fear these attempts to “go back” will not work. We are beyond the intimacy of the gods and we cannot simply return to a “simple life.” In fact, as C.G Jung says, simply calling a life “simple” means that we no longer have it–in the same way as calling something “unconscious” means that we are no longer unconscious. Is nature to be redeemed? How is the religious impulse to be fulfilled in this age? Nature seems desacralized, God seems death, and we do not know how to live.

The radical mind-body dualism started by Plato and culminating in Descartes separates us from the earth and opposes technology and art (techne). We have lost sight of the Tao: the art of living has been replaced with the technology of living. How we can return to that, I do not know.

Mythos

In the beginning there was the Word.  By whatever speculative account you take, in the beginning there was the Word. How can this claim be substantiated? A simple thought experiment will reveal the priority of language: think without words.  It is, at least for me, quite impossible.  If all human thought is contained by language, then any record of “the beginning” would only be possible with language. This does not mean that the absolute “beginning” (such as the origin of the cosmos) was contained by language, but it does mean that anything we call a “beginning” is only a beginning by being named. Would fish name water? Would apes speak of the big bang? As far as we know, they would not.

No (particular) thing exists (ek-sistare, “to stand forth”) without being named. In the primordial sea of the cosmos, everything is One because it is not named. An animal only reacts because of symptoms–fear of loud noises, signs of agression, and so forth. While this is true, “wind” does not exist until it is named. There is nothing essential to distinguish it from mere “air.” Wind must be named first to be known.  Ignorance is the default state of all beings. Since thought is a prerequisite to cognition and language is a prerequisite of thought, language is a prerequisite of knowledge.

Knowledge is the first fault of beings. C.G. Jung notes in The Portable Jung that it is with the Tree of Knowledge that the first sin was committed.  Before language (or knowledge) there are no “problems” in the traditional sense. There is survival and the struggle of the elements, but there is not speculation about dilemmas. If problems exist, they are not major; if they are major, they kill. In Umberto Eco’s book Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, he says that, for pre-lingual man, “Being is not a philosophical problem, any more than water is a philosophical problem for fish.” But what of myths?

According to Gianni Vattimo in Art’s Claim to Truth, the philosopher “Aristotle reduces to the level of fable, of fiction, of arbitrary invention the original meaning of mythos, which instead referred to the indistinct unity of word and action.” When the god Odin brought runes to the people, he was venerated as a god. Whether or not this Odin was a historical human being or not, he lived like the gods and brought the Word to mankind. It is only proper that he be revered as a god. Thomas Carlyle, with whom I have serious disagreements, says in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History that this is why Odin was so quickly deified. This makes sense when you take a moment to think about it. Written word, and thus linear history was brought by Odin. Within a generation or two of his death, there were none left who actually knew the man. Thus, as the founder of language, the man quite possibly became a god.

Myths are only “invented” in the sense that they are found (invenire, “to discover”). They are not fabricated consciously, but burst-forth naturally as a response to the context in which human beings find themselves. After millions of years of evolution, human beings have remnants of their animal pasts not only in their bodies, but their ways of thinking. These biologically inherited patterns of thought (“archetypes”) are not thoughts themselves, but neither do we enter the world tabula rasa. As human beings, we have human inclinations–both physically and psychically. These “patterns of thought” orient themselves towards various things. For example, there seems to be an extremely strong religious “pattern of thought” which orients itself in a variety of directions. The most ironic of these is the dogmatic atheist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins’ theory of memes as organically evolving thoughts is very good, but has a major flaw. He relegates the conceptualization “God” and even the religous impulse to the status of memes.  The concept of the meme is useful, but if it applies equally to everything, it is essentially meaningless. The religious impulse does not have to be taught even though a particular theology might very well be a complex of memes. Richard Dawkins, by missing the entire concept of biologically (not culturally) “inherited patterns of thought” falls victim to them in ways I see few “religious” people. Dawkins is dogmatic and clearly has both the charisma, passion, and conviction of a revivalist preacher. He’s just preaching a different gospel.

Myths are organic, not artificial. This religious impulse automatically finds something to worship even if it worships atheism. The more real truth is that God, by being God, cannot be “proven.” But the non-existence of God cannot be proven either. A positive belief in the existence or non-existence of God is still faith. Denying this religious impulse often makes it resurface violently like a buoy forced to the depths and released. Recognizing our religious tendencies–even our evolutionary religious tendencies–is quite possibly a path to greater psychic health. Satiating the supposedly “superstitious” inclinations of our inherited bodies and minds might not be a bad idea. In fact, it might be the best of ideas. Demythologizing the world in search of a naked truth is well-motivated but misguided. Truth is never alone, and truth is never naked.

Einmal

To the Fates
by Holderlin

One summer only grant me, you powerful Fates,
And one more autumn only for mellow song,
So that more willingly, replete with
Music’s late sweetness, my heart may die then.

The soul in life denied its god-given right
Down there in Orcus also will find no peace;
But when what’s holy, dear to me, the
Poem’s accomplished, my art perfected,

Then welcome, silence, welcome cold world of shades!
I’ll be content, though here I must leave my lyre
And songless travel down, for once I
Lived like the gods, and no more is needed.

Friedrich Holderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1994 ), 7.

This poem means far more than my first glance  would let it say.  The concept of Fate has always been a fascinating topic to me,  almost to the point of obsession. I was raised in a staunchly Calvinist religion in which double-predestination was orthodoxy. For a long time, I used to consider myself a determinist–even to the point of expressing what I called “futilism” at the time. I have more questions than assumptions about those beliefs now.

Is a life good enough if lived once? Milan Kundera’s book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, propelled me to a more intimate understanding of the tension of being. All of the world exists as a tension between opposites, dark and light, heavy and light. In Kundera’s brilliant work, a German phrase recurs as a motif: Einmal ist Keinmal. An approximate translation is simply “Once is Nonce” which, in this case, means that to live only once is pointless. Unless something is repeated, it is unbearably light. Of course, the alternative, that your life repeats? That is unbearably heavy.  Holderlin answers Kundera’s question of whether living once is enough:

once I
Lived like the gods, and no more is needed.

To have lived like the gods, one has lived enough. To excel in the midst of the tragedy of human existence beyond the realm of mere humanity is to enter the realm of the gods and be remembered in memory. Immortality in poetry is not so far from a Christian paradise–to be forgotten by God is hell, the be remembered by God is paradise.  Fate, whether a personal “Providence” or reactionary “Karma” is unfathomable. Anthropomorphizing the unknown is a coping mechanism. Analogies about what we do not understand are superficial, but many times necessary.  One cannot choose one’s fate, so why bitch about it? The human element of fate is destining, but the fate of every human is death. Mortality is the human fate, and thus we speak in terms of afflictions as being “fat(e)al.”

Perhaps my life is perfectly unique, without any repetition, reiteration, or reincarnation. But the alternative is equally easy to say and just as impossible to prove: I live infinitely and impossibly precisely as I live now. But, as Nietzsche observed, opposites do not exist. This should be self-evident for anyone who has taken Aristoltean logic: A, therefore not (not A).  Even the word contradiction (“to speak against”) only exists in the realm of ideas and words, but within the realm of reality, it is impossible for perfect contradictions to exist. What does this mean, though? What of opposites such as dark or light, light or heavy? Behind all the analytical syllogisms and dissection of the world, they are One.  Dark is never called “dark” without light. Light and heavy is the most obviously artificial. For anything to be called “heavy” or “light” there must be a relational center and this is mankind. Even light and darkness are anthropocentric interpretations of the world because they are only a fraction–a human fraction–of the electromagnetic spectrum. But even there, the one cannot exist without the other. In the case of perfect light, we are blinded. In the case of perfect darkness, we are blinded again. Paradoxically, “light” alone does not allow sight, but also its absence.

Heaviness and lightness are measurements with man at the center. At least for me, that makes them less problematic. I realize that both are necessary. Heaviness is necessary for stability, lightness for freedom. For example, in zero gravity, movement is as impossible as movement on the surface of Jupiter. Only in the tension in between does anything exist. In the same way, repetition and uniqueness are not contradictions. Instead, we need both. Perfect repetition is tedious, but perfect uniqueness is alienating–both are boring.

Life contains themes and an infinite number of variations. We are thrown into a world in which there are always-already established historical, cultural, and cosmic conditions. There are set patterns, but there is also unset patterns. Thus, we live cyclical lives from day to day, week to weak, year to year, but always with variations. Life is fundamentally tragic and essentially musical.

Existence is gratuitous in the sense that it is a “gift.” Being thrown into the world clearly cannot be merited, because I did not exist to merit anything in the first place. Bemoaning my existence is foolish. It is a gift and every gift obligates a simple return-gift of gratitude as Louis-Marie Chauvet says in Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence. Existence is grace, even without a God. It is a “gift” even if it is from Non-Being. Because existence is a gift, it obligates graciousness–allowing more gifts to burst-forth. Graciousness is always preserving the possibility of possibilities. From this a new fount of ethics is found. Graciousness is not merely the categorical imperative or the Golden Rule, it is the source of both.

Then welcome, silence, welcome cold world of shades!

The source of noise is silence. The essence of language is listening.  The default state of the gods is hiddenness, and from darkess we emerge and to darkness we return. But having lived like the gods, we have lived poetically and been subcreators. Our lives are songs, and a good song grants us a smiling passage to the unknown.

And songless travel down

Having founded a song of our own, we have blossomed fully as the lily of the valley. Holderlin asks the fates for one summer–the fullness of life–one harvest to allow his poem to come to its ripeness and then, only then, can he go quietly.

One summer only grant me, you powerful Fates,
And one more autumn only for mellow song

While the important word here is One, the simple word “more” indicates the need for time for the poiesis to be complete.  One summer is the fullness of life, one more autumn is another year and also the end of life. Only by living as gods do we find our dwelling on earth. It is our kinship with the gods which makes our dwelling possible.

The soul in life denied its god-given right
Down there in Orcus also will find no peace;

If we cannot be as demigods or maybe even ubermenschen, founding our own worlds, what will we be but beasts? But with the advancement of consciousness, good and evil have become polarized. War is no longer seen as the state of nature, but as a path to justice. There is no intimacy of opponents, only the hatred of enemies. War, and with it the world, have become dehumanized and the gravest injustices have been committed. Heroes have died, but now the heroic has died. Poets recall traces of their holy presenece and we have forgotten.

To preserve or  conserve is to stand within the essence of something wholly unmerited. Art is a gift irreducible to costs of labor. The exchange which occurs before a work of art is not merely a market exchange but a symbolic exchange–an opening up of a world. Receiving a gift and recognizing it as a gift requires a level of maturity. Since when do children know they are dependent? By the time they reach adolescence, they know it and resent it. Hopefully by adult years, they have come to appreciate it with humility. Only this sort of humility can maintain the grace of the past not only for the future but for ourselves.