"We Are Thrown Together with a Sprinkling of Stardust"

Good morning, world!

Today I bring you a blog post from the other end of the day, the beginning, to suitably beckon the fortuitous morning wonders tucked inside this day's dispatch.

Following closely on the heels of Kid Week, it feels appropriate that I should share some of Jostein Gaarder's remarkable work, intertwining lessons that introduce the basics of philosophy with suspenseful mystery stories. His best novels, Sophie's World and The Solitaire Mystery, are perfect gifts for children from eight on up, sharing, in the process, love of wisdom, love of learning, reading, love of story, love of language, literature.

I read about Sophie when I was straddling the ages of fourteen and fifteen, and then I followed up by reading about Hans Thomas when I was sixteen. I have been trying to finish Maya since seventeen. Even though that story has all the right elements that make his other stories work (and also tugs at me with its scenes staged in Barcelona!), I just couldn't get past the annoying presumptive attitude of the characters in regards to human evolution and human intellectual capacities (They're quite keen on putting people on a throne for their incidental part in bringing the universe consciousness of itself), as well as the droning scenes, pitting the protagonist against a gecko or lizard, which scenes just dragged on and on and on.

In any case, I still adore his writing. Having prodded myself to reopen his books, I feel as though I've been missing something critical, depriving myself, all this time by not reading these stories over again every few months, keeping their best-kept secrets always close by, much the same way I feel about a handful of other authors (a list which now includes Susan Glaspell, Eric Hoffer, Italo Calvino, Daniel Quinn, and Derrick Jensen).

The sad, disillusioned words of the father's character in The Solitaire Mystery make me think first that this trick shouldn't be so hard, but then, with fatigue pressing its fingers over my eyes and shoulders and neck muscles, I remember how difficult it really is to get out of bed in the morning, the fretting about all I have yet to accomplish draped heavily over my body, the assumption already made that this leaden feeling is normal and routine, the initial spark that proclaims, "Look out! This is mystery! This is flammable!," all but forgotten--this spark has usually faded to cold by the time I open my eyes. But, as I mentioned when I recalled I wanted to share this passage with you, it is never too late or never too much of a shock to splash some cold water on one's face and startle oneself into an alert, fully conscious state.

I challenge myself, having re-examined these particular scenes, to live that daily adventure-mystery and to wake up with a bang. Not too forcefully, I challenge you to do the same, as well.

...

From Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery (translated by
Sarah Jane Hails; pgs. 153-156 and 167-168):

"After the oracle had assured us we would meet Mama in Athens, we walked further up through the temple site and found an old theatre, which had room for five thousand spectators. From the top of the theatre we looked out over the temple site and right down to the bottom of the valley.

On the way down Dad said, 'There is still something I haven't told you about the Delphic Oracle, Hans Thomas. You know, this place is of great interest to philosophers like us.'

We sat down on some temple remains. It was strange to think they were a couple of thousand years old.

'Do you remember Socrates?' he began.

'Not really,' I had to admit. 'But he was a Greek philosopher.'

'That's right. And first of all I'm going to tell you what the word "philosopher" means...'

I knew this was the beginning of a mini-lecture, and honestly I thought it was a bit much, because the sweat was pouring off my face under the burning sun.

'"Philosopher" means one who seeks wisdom. This does not mean a philosopher is particularly wise, however. Do you understand the difference?'

I nodded.

'The first person to live up to this was Socrates. He walked around the market square in Athens talking to people, but he never instructed them. On the contrary - he spoke to people he met in order to learn something himself. Because "the trees in the country cannot teach me anything," he said. But he was rather disappointed to discover that the people who liked to say they knew a lot really knew nothing at all. They might be able to tell him the day's price of wine and olive oil, but they didn't know anything considerable about life. Socrates readily said himself that he knew only one thing - and that was that he knew nothing.'

'He wasn't very wise, then,' I objected.

'Don't be so hasty,' Dad said sternly. 'If two people haven't a clue about something but one of them gives the impression of knowing a lot, who do you think is the wisest?'

I had to say that the wisest one was the one who didn't give the impression of knowing more than he did.

'So you've got the point. This is exactly what made Socrates a philosopher. He thought it was downright annoying that he didn't know more about life and the world. He felt completely out of it.'

I nodded again.

'And then an Athenian went to the Delphic Oracle and asked Apollo who the wisest man in Athens was. The oracle's answer was Socrates. When Socrates heard this, he was, to put it mildly, rather surprised, because he really thought he didn't know much at all. But after he visited those who were supposed to be wiser than he and asked them a few intelligent questions, he found that the oracle was right. The difference between Socrates and all the others was that the others were satisfied with the little they knew, although they didn't know any more than Socrates. And people who are satisfied with what they know can never be philosophers.'

I thought the story had a point, but Dad didn't stop there. He gestured towards all the tourists swarming out of the tour buses far below and crawling like a fat trail of ants up through the temple site.

'If there is one person among all those who regularly experiences the world as something full of adventure and mystery...'

He now took a deep breath before he continued.

'You can see thousands of people down there, Hans Thomas. I mean, if just one of them experiences life as a crazy adventure - and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day...'

'What about it?' I asked now, because again he had stopped in the middle of a sentence.

'Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.'

'Do you think there's a joker like that here?

A look of despair now crossed his face. 'Nope!' he said. 'Of course I can't be sure, because there are only a few jokers, but the chance is infinitesimal.'

'What about yourself? Do you experience life as a fairy tale every single day?'

'Yes, I do!'

He was so forthright with his answer I didn't dare argue with him.

'Every single morning I wake with a bang,' he said. 'It's as though the fact that I am alive is injected into me; I am a character in a fairy tale, bursting with life. For who are we, Hans Thomas? Can you tell me that? We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust. But what's that? Where the hell does this world come from?'

'Haven't a clue,' I replied, and at that moment I felt just as much out of it as Socrates had.

'Then it sometimes pops up in the evening, ' he continued. 'I am a person living right now, I think to myself. And I'll never return.'

'You live a tough life, then,' I said.

'Tough, yes, but incredibly exciting. I don't need to visit cold castles to go on a ghost hunt. I am a ghost myself.'

'And you worry when your son sees a little ghost outside the cabin window.'

I don't know why I mentioned that, but I thought I had to remind him of what he'd said on the boat the night before.

He just laughed. 'You can handle it,' he replied.

The last thing Dad said about the oracle was that the old Greeks had engraved an inscription into the temple here. It said: 'Know thyself.'

'But that's easier said than done,' he added, mostly to himself."

...

"As usual I got up before Dad, but it wasn't long before his muscles began to twitch.

I decided to see whether it was true that he woke up every single morning with a bang, as he had claimed the day before.

I concluded that he was right, because when he opened his eyes, he really did look pretty startled. He could just as well have woken up in a totally different place - in India, for example, or on a little planet in another galaxy.

'You are a living person,' I said, 'At this moment you are in Delphi. It is a place on earth, which is a living planet at present orbiting a star in the Milky Way. It takes 365 days for this planet to circle this star.'

He stared at me intently, as though his eyes had to adjust to the change from dreamland to the bright reality outside.

'Thanks for the clarification,' he said. 'I normally have to work all that out for myself before I climb out of bed.'

He got up and walked across the room.

'Maybe you should whisper some words of truth like that in my ear every morning, Hans Thomas. It would certainly get me into the bathroom more quickly.'"

...

Keep reading: "We Are Thrown Together with a Sprinkling of Stardust"...

"Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"

My favorite Berkeley quote (all emphases in the original). Hoorah for the real, proper idealist, in the full sense of the word ...and for theology that can still stand up to our contemporary scruples. (For those who do not know, people often boil his philosophy down to "We are all just ideas in the mind of God!") I definitely think with heavy skepticism in most situations, especially those that instinctively make me feel uneasy (such as in a short interaction yesterday with a gutter salesman who was exceedingly schmaltzy, my uneasiness exacerbated more so when my grandmother did not seem "plussed" when he tried to sell her windows, too!, and imposed on the interior space of the house, when he was only expected to work on the gutters, outside!), but not like the skeptic in his Three Dialogues.

Philonous:

"Look! are not the fields covered with a delightful verdure? Is there not something in the woods and groves, in the rivers and clear springs, that soothes, that delights, that transports the soul? At the prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds, or of an old gloomy forest, are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror? Even in rocks and deserts, is there not an agreeable wildness? How sincere a pleasure it is to behold the natural beauties of the earth! to preserve and renew our relish for them, is not the veil of night alternately drawn over her face, and doth she not change her dress with the seasons? How aptly are the elements disposed! What variety and use in the meanest production of nature! What delicacy, what beauty, what contrivance in animal and vegetable bodies! How exquisitely are all things suited as well to their particular ends, as to constitute opposite parts of the whole! and while they mutually aid and support, do they not also set off and illustrate each other? Raise now your thoughts that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes ever known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! how magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be scattered throughout the whole azure vault! yet if you take the telescope, it brings into your sight a new host of stars that escape the naked eye. Here they seem contiguous and minute, but to a nearer view immense orbs of light at various distances, far sunk in the abyss of space. Now you must call imagination to your aid. The feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving round the central fires; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in endless forms. But neither sense nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though the labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art and force, linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought? What treatment then do those philosphers deserve, who would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should those principles be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this scepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of sense?"

followed shortly by:

"...To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind of spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite, omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it."

...to be continued!

Keep reading: "Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"...

Missionaries

I met some Mormon missionaries today on the walk back down to the house from the end of the trail, where I'd finished my run. I caught sight of them down the block before they approached me, initially hoping that if I didn't make eye contact and stayed on my (opposite) side of the street, they wouldn't approach me. Well, that proved impossible, perhaps our encounter even seems inevitable, since they were missionaries after all.

I decided to speak to them cordially, acknowledging their human-ness as with any other fresh interaction with strangers. I have a hard enough time as it is curbing my mean-spirited streak, attitude-heavy. Before they spoke, I contemplated making some mention, rather unpleasant and not even accurate or deferential (to indigenous spiritual practice), that I believed in and practiced the original Native American spiritual traditions already, and in their proper form, thank you.

They went through what felt like an excruciatingly long introduction (since I had already taxonomized them) about being from a church in town, missionaries from The. Church. of. Jesus. Christ......(excruciatingly long pause).......of Latter Day Saints. Did I have time, blah blah blah.

I came up with the following response (not my best, but afterwards I considered how I might respond in the future, and nothing nearly as cordial or fitting came to mind; for instance, "I am a student of philosophy and theology and have spent plenty of time studying questions of faith. At this time, I feel perfectly comfortable and content with my own spiritual experience and so do not feel I need to hear any new message. Thank you. Good day." And perhaps even one day, I could say "Actually, I've read The Book of Mormon" and then see what happens!): "Well, I'm not really in a position to hear such a message right now [I had hoped my disheveled appearance from finishing a jog would have spoken well enough for itself, such that they wouldn't approach me, for apparently being out of place and not near a home in which they could speak to me, yet somehow they weren't dissuaded], but I've met with groups of missionaries in the past [which was perfectly true]. Sorry."

Then the guy asking said to me (it really felt as though he were about to fall apart), "Do you at least happen to know anybody around who might be willing to hear our message?"

Not a regular resident of the area, I had to deny them this, but I offered that perhaps since it was a nice summer evening, and there were plenty of people out enjoying it, they would find someone who was. And I wished them a nice evening.

Another exchange, in which they asked if there was anything they could do for me (I found this a bit odd, off-kilter), a bit of grandiose gesturing from me dismissing this strange inquiry, and another smiley, breathy, "No, no, I just hope you enjoy your evening."

Missionary work was one of the first big turn offs for me from the Baptist church in which I grew up, and in an extension of that swearing off, a dismissal of all of Christianity as a whole, for a time. I have chronicled my spiritual journey elsewhere, though perhaps it's time to bring it back to the foreground here in my blog. Anyhow, my early inklings as a history and anthropology student instilled in me much guilt for living just past an old creek bed in a house where no house used to sit and tribes used to roam freely, and it also aroused much suspicion and disdain in my being when, at Children's Sermon, a special interlude in the service where the pastor spoke to the kids, who came forward and gathered round for stories, magic tricks, puppets, and all sorts of marvelous, enticing stuff, little pieces of cardboard were produced, which could be turned into little houses or plain boxes with lots of colorful print about religiously-oriented mission work in places like India, quickly-assembled cardboard piggy banks to donate to such abomination organizations.

This bothered me to no end. Did not the people of India already have Hinduism, a perfectly valid religion, to follow reverently in their land? (At this time, nuances about the populations of Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, and other spiritual minorities or sects in India did not have especial prominence in my knowledge.) In any case, it was a step on my way to being swept up with Daniel Quinn's writing, which wove together so much of the uneasy feelings I'd already developed about the trajectory and ambitions of this culture into a coherent, acceptable (to me) whole. Missionaries rely on archaic views of the Other and what exactly that other needs in terms of assistance in physical and spiritual nourishment, and otherwise.

There was a lot of interesting material in the most recent part that I read of If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways about several common misconceptions of reality tied to Christianity, old premises that don't hold up to scrutiny, a topic I felt pleasantly surprised to find Quinn addressing, as I've spent so much of my time since Ishmael learning about logic, partly to find how Quinn fits into the intellectual precedent as a writer not officially of academic books, though heavily grounded in the findings of biology, anthropology, history, etc..

Keep reading: Missionaries...

Reflections on Pacifism

A couple disclaimers: I've discovered that to reply to Derrick Jensen's premises alone presents some hefty work. I have a lot to say and quite the difficult time organizing how to say it. The university library nearby has a copy so I will soon look into the full scope of Endgame for myself, but other excerpts from the book are also available on the book's website. Since I have so much to say and have not found an easy way to communicate it, and also since I promised I'd be more consistent about posting, I'm going to pick the simplest and shortest of the premises and whittle away at that for you now. I don't have too too much to say about this premise, as I do about the others. I suppose as I read the book and see how Jensen expounds on these premises, I will have the ability to offer my response to the premises from another vantage point.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

I'd like to know exactly what Jensen intends to imply here. Does he mean to say that there are many different kinds of love, some mixed up, contentious, violent, conflictual, imbalanced, detached, overbearing, balanced, distant, unemotional, and on and on? When I sometimes indulge my cheesy side, I can still hear Edmund in the Mansfield Park movie declare, "There are as many kinds of love as there are moments in time." We can leap from disassociating love from pacifism to talking about domestic violence and other conflicted love/non-pacifism combinations. Would Jensen like to just hop on the bandwagon here and declare that love does not imply pacifism because a devoted husband can still turn and kill his wife in a rage, or vice versa?

Pacifism itself... Part of me definitely admires Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement; the long history of civil disobedience (connecting such figureheads as Jesus of Nazareth, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and their devotees); and the refrain of "Peace, love, and justice" that inspired so much enthusiastic protest and creative (though eventually it turned destructive, apathetic, meaningless, or ineffective) action in America during the sixties (with quite the lead-in from the fifties). There are some aspects of the hippie worldview that, in a certain light, on certain days, are pretty cool--groovy, even (My father and his students would like to bring back the word so there you have my little effort). However, I don't see violence as something to overcome, even as something to wish to overcome. I think the destructive impulse resides in each of us, and mostly, we just have to figure out how best to use that capacity, to understand why we choose to use it for whichever particular reason.

I did, in fact, at one point have little interest in hearing anything directed away from a goal of something akin to "Peace on earth (and mercy mild)." But then I read Ishmael, and just as the voice on the cover (Jim Britell of the Whole Earth Review) predicted, I would end up dividing my life up into the books "I read before Ishmael and those read after." Having read Ishmael, I saw everything I encountered through the vocabulary of concepts I had made acquaintance with in Quinn's work. Not only did I continue with a lifelong impulse to question everything (already enforced the same year I was introduced to Quinn by a reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"), but I questioned everything through an anthropological, evolutionary lens, with the unassuming but explosive question, "What kinds of other ways to live did and do Leavers have that get obscured by 'one right way to live' thinking?" at the forefront. Violence was certainly an integral part of life for every human culture, in some form, for, after all, even incredibly pacifistic cultures have to fend for themselves and survive somehow (broader discussions of violence and survival arise here - more material for later!). Hence Quinn's "erratic retaliator" strategy (Also more on this later; You can pretty much assume that any concept I introduce which isn't common knowledge, or on which my take isn't fully clear, I will note the instance myself and come back to it with explanations later, in future posts, eventually). So is this what Jensen is getting at? Pacifism is not the ultimate, the grandest goal for humanity as a whole (Why humanity as a whole would need a common goal is beyond me anyway, at least nowadays, this many years post-Ishmael), the greatest bit of "progress." Love and pacifism are not synonymous. You can have love as an ideal without getting it mixed up with pacifism.

He could have intended so much by this teensy phrasing. And in the end, he does imply a boatload. So what does he mean by it? I will let you know once I latch onto a copy of the book!

Keep reading: Reflections on Pacifism...