This post is a reprise of the post for WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2009. I have added the pictures and the music video.
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
I am very happy Eco said it. However, I can't stop there because it is not only madness that attempts to interpret the enigma from our side. Sometimes it is a yearning of the deepest heart, and that creates when there is talent and skill, much of the greatest art. And in my experience, the penetration is not only one way. What I mean is, the enigma sometimes interprets me. When that happens it is not always terrible. Sometimes it is a new birth. When the music broke loose in me in the nineties so I could return to it, I feel this is what happened. After the turning point, the world is no less a harmless enigma, yet it is now married to the yearning I have had lifelong where once it was somewhere beyond me, and maddening for that, just as Eco says, terrible, demanding an interpretation which is impossible.
Is this also the force behind the experience of mothers and fathers who fall in love with their infant, that the enigma is delivered directly into their care, just as they once were delivered? Is this not as well the position of the mystic? Is this what happens in the best love making? This is as well, I believe, the best way to die, embracing the enigma.
That quaternity is the true cross found at the heart of the harmless enigma that is the world we live in.
***************************
I am an arrogant man, but I am a recovering arrogant man. I try for gracious gratitude, even though I think gratitude is beneath me. Practice. I am glad to have learned the musician's lesson about practice, even though I really think practice should be beneath me too. Can you imagine how embarassed I have been at times, getting caught in my arrogance? I am unfortunately not arrogant enough to avoid shame successfully. I am shame driven when I am smaller than fits my true heart. I have to keep my arrogance a secret from myself in order to function that way. Or else I must practice, practice, practice until I learn to live right sized.
Old Business
I didn't ask you
to help me, did not accept
graciously at all,
in fact I rushed off
as if I found something new
laying on holy ground.
A unique moment,
a unique new man was born,
that's how I thought then.
Now I know how this
is old business, common,
belongs to us all.
February 26, 2009 7:50 PM
I have to say, I smile deeply when I read this of you, "Can you imagine how embarassed I have been at times, getting caught in my arrogance? I am unfortunately not arrogant enough to avoid shame successfully. I am shame driven when I am smaller than fits my true heart. I have to keep my arrogance a secret from myself in order to function that way. Or else I must practice, practice, practice until I learn to live right sized." And then I recognize myself in this. It is my practice too. I just wrote those very words the other day, to learn just how small I am. I seem to oscillate on my journey, but I am staying small just a little longer as I get older. I'm hoping that one day I stick, know my place, receive it.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this is a human condition? This is, in part, what I referred to in the second last piece I posted, we, man. I deemed it a symphonic dissonance in man in my comments. I don't think anyone got it though. I meant that there is some elusive quality within us that keeps us from our own harmony. I don't quite understand it. I wonder if it is the condition of man, or if we willingly do it to ourselves, and I wonder the why of it too. But I suppose without it we wouldn't be so intrinsically flawed and therefore would not have the chance for growth in the same way that we have now. Perhaps we should be grateful for it, for all of our confusion, for our fight within ourselves. Our flaw becomes a machine within ourselves that moves us toward understanding. Without it we would stand still.
xo
erin
xo
erin
ha!
ReplyDeletei must have really meant xo!:)
Wow! ((Erin))...
ReplyDeleteYou hit the core question. Why is there a flaw at all? From this all sorts of challenges follow on.
So far I have not found a satisfactory answer and my own rebellion continues, although I admit the tempering process of my own life has taken the raw energy of it all and refined it so that I have now a certain grace. So while you and I question at this level, I am guessing I will not find the answer, if there is one.
For years now, I have known that one possible alternative is to accept that the question does not really exist, that what one really does is to grow beyond asking, but this possibility is even more distasteful than failure to find the answer to me. Recently I found a very old friend. In the core of his philosophy is a profound statement that we are enamored of the wrong tool. It is not that we should not ask the question but that we should accept that the answer is not a "knowledge" at all. The problem with knowledge is that it rests on ephemeral foundations, that information is not universal but local to man himself.
But when I say such a thing, having the capacity to actually understand this idea, there is in me a frantic resistance to being placed in a disconnect with the universal process in something so primary to me as my information. This means that the question doesn't go away, but just transforms.