Metaphorically Speaking

I have spent quite a bit of time in this space talking about metaphors.  I've talked about how ubiquitous they are, about the great visionary biologist Michael Levin, for example, saying that "all science is metaphor!"  What does he mean by this?  I surmise that he means that in science we create models for reality that inevitably do not truly match reality, first because they are oversimplifications, and also because our limited senses wall us off from more than what they show us is there.  Thus, we picture every atom as a mini-solar system when in reality, if we had a microscope that could see into things at that scale, an atom would look like nothing of the sort.

And I have also talked about the mystery of metaphor-making.  If I say "faster than a speeding bullet" to people of a certain age, they will instantly recall the image of the TV Superman doing his thing "like a bullet."  It's embedded in our culture.  But how is it that we understand a metaphor when the first person to say it says it -- something like "she was the apple of my eye" or "Hitler and Stalin were locked in an unholy embrace in 1940?"  How is a beloved like an apple after all?  Did Hitler and Stalin actually embrace in 1940?  Our linguistic and logical architecture must be inherently fluid for us to understand in such instances.  (And note that to characterize an "architecture" as "fluid" is itself metaphorical!  It never ends.)

Metaphors were of course among the sharpest tools in Shakespeare's toolbox.  All the world's a stage, after all, and that world is your oyster, kid, if you just shuck it up rather than ... (never mind).  But I continue to argue without much company that Will routinely is forgiven for many such expressions that land with a thud upon the modern ear, and may indeed have so landed even in his time, but we are forbidden to say it.  Blow, blow, thou winter wind.  Thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.  Nor so chill as my Pomeranian after a hearty breakfast of Kibbles.

Shakespeare has his place, but there is no metaphor greater than the metaphor that is used to make fun of metaphors.  In this, the champion is not Monty Python or even the BBC's Philomena Cunk in conversation with an eminent scholar ("'I wandered lonely as a cloud.'  But clouds don't have legs!  How was Wordsworth allowed to get away with that stuff!?"). The champion is the late literary and cultural critic Clive James.  

In one of his memoirs, James recounts how he would spend his down-under summers as a teenager at the Ramsgate Baths, just southwest of Sydney.  The main object was to impress the girls with extravagant swimming and diving maneuvers, both for its own sake and to establish his place in a rather mindless local bloke hierarchy.  

There was one beautiful girl by the pool whom Clive would be the first to admit that he lusted after, but as it often is, the lust was purified by, filtered through, the kind of crush one can only experience at that precious and fleeting stage in life.  And one day, as he discreetly spied her from his towel, a single dark pubic hair found itself uncovered by her Spandex, "like the escaped mainspring of a pygmy timepiece."  

We can picture the pygmy examining the pocket watch he has taken from his victim before eating him; we can hear David Attenborough intoning this most creative image with solemn satisfaction.  Oxbridge, which set the gold standard for such things, nodded in approval.

 

Pointillism

I have been meaning for some time now to make a very important and precise point.  But I've forgotten what it is.  

Maybe a smear is more what is called for.  Like Silly Putty on the sidewalk, stepped on, on a hot summer day, by accident, distorting the Bazooka Joe image that I worked so hard to immortalize.

 

Another Major Milestone Met

By the grace of God?  And yet, the very approach of it seems to have muzzled my voice for a month.  

Having passed it, the question is obvious -- from here, wither?  If the question were to be posed to the little ones in my personal tribe, the answer given by their parents -- my children -- might be the same one that they would drag out for a beloved hound, long past "long in the tooth," just as I am if my dental bills are to be trusted. "It's sad kids, but we won't be seeing Grandpa any more.  He has been sent to the farm, where he can take walks in the woods, smell the flowers, and watch the sun set behind the green hills.  We will miss him dearly, but he is happy in his new home."

That one doesn't work so well for me, on this end of the kaleidoscope.  I see myself pretty clearly at this juncture.  Bearing in mind my acute physical and moral cowardice, I am sure that I will rage against the dying of the light when it comes, even to the verge of madness, unless and until I am able to see that the letting go of this crummy carapace represents a liberation, not a snuffing out.  You may put a pillow over my head, in other words, but I get the last laugh when I am able to just let it go and sing the body electric.

 

A Religion, or at Least a Philosophy, for Our Fractured Times?

About ten years ago, Lee and Steven Hager, wife and husband, published a remarkable book whose title tells us plainly what it comprises -- Understanding Gnosis -- Inside and Outside the Gnostic Gospels.  

As far as I know, the Hagers are not credentialed academics in the field of the history of religion, in contrast to, say, Elaine Pagels of Princeton, who brought the alternative gospels into fashion decades ago.  And yet they have written a most comprehensive and highly literate deep introduction to Gnostic thought that draws on many and disparate sources.  

They begin by admitting that there are various strands of Gnosticism that often are in tension, sometimes extreme tension, with each other.  The most important division is between an exclusionary and dualistic strain, where the elect can expect to find and experience the One, the Source, the Godhead, but others may expect not endless reincarnation, nor even the fires of hell, but not to exist at all after this brief life is over!  In the contrasting strain, every man and woman is one with the Divine and destined to partake in the Divine because, foundationally, the One is All There Is.  What makes it appropriate to characterize both of these schools of thought as "Gnostic" is that in both systems the knowledge that we are seeking is direct, experiential knowledge of God, not anything we can learn from books.  (The Hagers readily admit the paradox that notwithstanding they have devoted 400-odd pages to the task of at least pointing us in the direction of this experiential knowledge!)

Next, the Hagers examine the so-called "Nag Hammadi texts" that are the principal historical Gnostic sources, from a big-picture point of view.  Then they do a deep dive into those same texts, including the Book of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, and the Gospel of Mary, as well as sources that we may know only because they are referenced in texts that have survived, as they have not.

With this extensive background, the Hagers then explain the various formal schools of thought that we think of as Gnostic, including, for example, Hermeticism and Manichaeism, and how these schools, or most of them, came to be considered heretical deviations from Orthodox Christianity.

The next and penultimate major section of Understanding Gnosis highlights the extent to which non-Gnostic traditions share Gnostic insights, most especially the concept of oneness with the Divine, achieved via direct knowledge and experience.  This to me is the most interesting part of the book.  It draws into the discussion everything from the Greek/Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, to alchemists, to devotees of Carl Jung, to the Hindu Upanishads, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Sufi mysticism and even mainstream Christianity itself!

A subtle realization comes over one incrementally as one encounters through this part of the book the Gnostic resonances in all of these ancient and modern traditions -- Lee and Steven Hager are not just enthusiastic autodidact scholars of Gnosticism; they are adherents, devotees of the "Oneness" branch of it, eager for us to work it into our own lives as an all-encompassing personal philosophy and cosmology!  Indeed, the final section of the book makes this rallying of our spirits to the cause explicit.

What do I find personally appealing in the Hagers' Oneness Gnosticism?  Among other things:

• Its simplicity.  It needs and relies on virtually nothing by way of dogma.
• Its lack of judgment, rewards and punishments.  Like Roger Daltrey of The Who, we can embrace it and still proclaim "I've no need to be forgiven!"
• Its recognition, whether or not explicit, that the Christ embodies a higher level of divinity than that of Yaldabaoth or Jehovah, which are two names for the same flawed Being who is said to have made us, and made us in His image and likeness!  This is in contrast to Orthodox Christianity, which via various forms of sophistry attempts to obscure the obvious and fundamental differences between God the Father and God the Son as they are portrayed in the texts.
• A point closely related to the last.  My research into UFOs and related "paranormal" phenomena has led me to a place that seems to be populated by hyper-intelligent beings that are not uniformly benevolent.  These can be called "demi-gods," and they can rightly be called "demons" as well, so long as that word is not meant to imply a wholesale importation of the Biblical notion of Satan and his minions into ufology.  This in turn has led me to fear that upon our deaths we do not enter a land of light and love, but rather a realm of chaos and hostility (this, incidentally, not inconsistent with the visions we are said to encounter in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, except that for the Buddhists the demons are not real but illusory).  But the "Oneness Gnosticism" seems to say that we need not battle the demons for eons as part of our journey to the Source, because we partake of the Source even now, "mourning and weeping in this Valley of Tears."  According to this cosmology, we can, we do, leapfrog the Devil!
• A point made explicitly by the Hagers towards the end of the book.  The Eastern traditions often insist that when we graduate from the cycle of death and rebirth, we reunite with the Source as a raindrop falls into the ocean.  We lose every aspect of our individuality, what makes "us" us.  But further, the ocean into which we fall is an Ocean of Complete Nothingness.  This has always struck me as a terrifying conception of immortality, not less terrifying than the annihilation that comes with death according to our friends the strict materialists.  The Hagers plainly insist that in Oneness Gnosticism we partake of the Divine and and in the process relinquish our lower-case selves, but an upper-case Self, unique to us, always survives in communion with the One.

Here I should acknowledge the obvious.  We may choose our cosmology in part on the basis of its congeniality, but a cosmology is not more likely to be true just because it entails a happy ending for us; otherwise we might as well construct a new religion based on the experience of Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz!"

In any case, the Hagers do us a great service.  I now walk away from Understanding Gnosis convinced that Gnostic Christianity deserves to be considered canonical, and the New Testament as offered to us in our churches heretical, not the other way round.

 

Herzog's Chicken

No, not a recipe.  Rather, the famed and eccentric German film director Werner Herzog admonishes us to find an opportunity to stare directly into the eyes of a chicken, a live chicken, for in them as perhaps nowhere else one discovers an astonishing and terrible stupidity.

 

What Is Left, After That Which Is Ephemeral Has Been Permitted to Pass Away

 

The Same Fervor Under the Same Firmament

1.  80,000 at Fatima turn their eyes to an apparition in the sky and plead with God to have mercy on the people.

2.  More than 80,000, knowing not how otherwise to express their grief and their despair, spontaneously gather in the streets of Moscow when they learn of the death of Joseph V. Stalin.