BEST OF (TENT) SHOW SERMONETTE:
I’LL SHOW MY REALITY IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS
OR REALITY SHOWS VS. THE GROUND OF BEING
Dr. Omed has been venting his spleen in other blogger’s comment boxes. Dick Jones (Patteran Pages) and Sam Mills (feral) have suffered my remarks very kindly, and Sam provides His Loveliness a second home when my PC or my software is fubared. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Forgive me my numerous sins of commission and omission.
Here is Dick’s post for October 4th:
“All art is abstract. Only reality isn’t because it isn’t art”. Emil Nolde
DISCUSS.
This quote has netted 23 comments last time I checked. One of my comments was:
"Reality" has suffered the same degradation and decay as "Irony."* "Reality" now exists only as fodder for the cameras of the Industrial Delusional Complex; dead soldier, starving brown baby, or spoiled celebrity, all feed the lazy eyes on the sofas of the world and support the feudal pyschopathy of the "Ownership" class.
Like I said. Vent. Spleen. I would slightly revise that last line to read:
…support the feudal pyschopathy of the Owners of the “Ownership society.”
“Reality” is one of those troublesome words, almost as troublesome as the word “love” (We’ll be getting to that). People tend to assume they know what the really real reality is, just as they think or rather feel they know what love is. People have no idea. I don’t mean that they have no idea what reality or love is; I mean they have no idea. Reality is whatever they see in front of them; whatever they choose to see. A lot of people have a TV or computer screen in front of them. Their reality, your reality, my reality, are all a combination of our perceptions and our creative apperception. The latter is the senior partner. We all have our little kingdoms of beholding. In our individual dominions our writ is absolute, but for the weather of the world, and the fruitful operation of chance.
Our reality is an artifact of our perception and self deception, what it is depends on how or through what we’re looking at it. To steal a phrase from Tom Stoppard, reality is its own alibi. Sort of like God.
From the ether I hear a question; something whispering this way comes: “So, what’s your alibi, Dr. O?” In the midst of the comment string appended to a bit of flotspam I posted to Sam’s Safe Haven for Broken Blogs, I generated a concise coda or creed that expresses my current alibi:
Many paths; one Way. The word may be god, but the word that is the word, the one word, the true word, the eternal word, as Lao Tzu said, cannot be spoken. It cannot be believed or disbelieved, because it is beyond belief. It cannot be acted because it is outside of action or inaction. It cannot exist or not exist, because it surpasses existence and nonexistence. As Meister Eckhart said, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Yet it encompasses us, and everything that was, is, can, or will be.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be passers-by." I have given a lot of thought to that phrase, to me perhaps the most important saying attributed to Jesus (certainly the most mysterious), as I have watched the terrible merciless beauty of "God's" creation and destruction go by as it carries me down the years to the terminus ad quem, the way station that is my particular destination.
Remember, I’m cherry-picking from my own comments (which is inherently unfair: click the comment string link above to read it all) but what I said made Meg feel besieged and invoke love as her defense, and also caused Sam to take me to task:
Doctor O, such responses as you give are analogous to flak bombs that deflect enemy radar. You quote and cite and lead astray while never addressing the issue at hand. All you say here is surely so. Who can say nay? Yet the issue is a professed lack of compassion which, as expressed, differs little from outright hostility toward an entire population of a region experiencing a dire emergency. So Lao Tzu me that, why dontcha?
My answer:
Sam, make that outright hostility toward an entire species, experiencing a dire planet-wide emergency due to its own collective bad behavior. A lot of us will have to die before the planet can get well again. That is not a wish, that is a fact.
There are many "me"s, the human personality is not unitary. One of me, out of the many, is an angry misanthrope. Having compassion for one's fellow creatures and loving one another as much as is possible is a great good thing, but we are not saved by our love and compassion nor can we save anyone else. All the love and compassion of the Human race put together is not saving the planet as far as I can see. What many people think of as compassion is a misapprehension of this waking world and its inhabiting spirits.
St. Paul at the end of Corinthians I chapter 13 says "Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love (agape'). I have no faith, and don't think we have much hope. That leaves love. I think detachment is more necessary to true love than compassion. Detachment is necessary to true love because true love is foolish, betrayed, hopeless, lost. True love is, as Galway Kinnell put it, "tenderness towards existence." The beauty of this world is without mercy, and I chose to live and love in it not only because it is beautiful but because it is merciless. I was not merciful 27 years ago when I lowered the barrel of the revolver from my temple and decided not to blow my brains out. Love is the most useless thing in the world, and the most necessary. Here's my combination: Compassion plus detachment equals love(agape'). Beauty plus the ruthlessness we call passion equals love(erato). Love(agape') plus Love (erato) equals Grace.
Sort of like singing Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I've heard Willy Nelson sing it that way.
Well, Sam thought I was still pumping blogiston on the fire, and posted a picture of a panda pissing up a tree to put it out. Among other things, Meg said:
Dr. O, I have to confess, and this is exceedingly difficult for me, that I don't really know what you were saying up there. It sounds like you see love and living differently than I do on such a grand scale that I can't quite wrap my brain around it.
Sam and Meg, I cherish you both. I want you to know that I expressed myself as honestly as possible without any intent of wounding either of you. The reason I am rehashing all this is because I have lived almost five decades knowing that the vast majority of people in this world, if not left breathless with giggles at the things I say, do, and believe to be important, interesting, and true, are either bored, puzzled, nonplussed, dismissive, or regard it as an assault on everything that's good and holy. Or it just makes their heads hurt. It’s always when I’ve said something that seems to me to be perfectly clear and straightforward that no one gets it. I might as well be a squid squirting ink.
I started writing in the first place because words failed me. Words could not carry the meanings, the reality of what I wished to express. Every poem succeeds if it succeeds through the failure of words that comprise it. The word that can be spoken is not the word. This is an important truth to me.
In my twenties, long before I was diagnosed as Bipolar, during periods of mania I would often wander about in what amounted to a state of religious or spiritual ecstasy. I literally had waking visions. I saw streams of color emerging from and returning into people like a stream of smoke from a cigarette exhaled and re-inhaled. I saw “angels,” numinous entities that would descend and inhabit trees or dance on telephone wires. When the moon was full I thought I could see the man in the moon talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and would try to read his lips. I saw other things I won’t talk about right now. Call them visions or hallucinations; neither term is adequate to describe the reality of the experience. To speak of these things at all diminishes the reality of the experience. Words fail. My blog is the one place I can have it my way, a place where I can make my stand. As I am a party of one, I have become an army of one, rhetorically speaking. I wage war with words on words. I commit poetry, satire, and parody, not pillage, rapine or murder. I leave the latter violences to the literal minded thugs which almost all creeds or sects no matter how high-minded contribute at least some few to the world. My words “are but warriors for the working day”
Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'dWith rainy marching in the painful field;There's not a piece of feather in our host-Good argument, I hope, we will not fly—
Shakespeare, Henry V
*Irony has been so abused, misused, and overused by so many of slight talent and suspect intents, that the rapier bequeathed to posterity by men and women of great wit has been pounded by the popular posterior into a timeshare of ubiquitous of infra-insincerity. Modern irony has become a kind of language infarction, a dead zone where advertising ghouls dig for their gold and faux-rimbauds go to sell their souls.
I’LL SHOW MY REALITY IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS
OR REALITY SHOWS VS. THE GROUND OF BEING
Dr. Omed has been venting his spleen in other blogger’s comment boxes. Dick Jones (Patteran Pages) and Sam Mills (feral) have suffered my remarks very kindly, and Sam provides His Loveliness a second home when my PC or my software is fubared. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Forgive me my numerous sins of commission and omission.
Here is Dick’s post for October 4th:
“All art is abstract. Only reality isn’t because it isn’t art”. Emil Nolde
DISCUSS.
This quote has netted 23 comments last time I checked. One of my comments was:
"Reality" has suffered the same degradation and decay as "Irony."* "Reality" now exists only as fodder for the cameras of the Industrial Delusional Complex; dead soldier, starving brown baby, or spoiled celebrity, all feed the lazy eyes on the sofas of the world and support the feudal pyschopathy of the "Ownership" class.
Like I said. Vent. Spleen. I would slightly revise that last line to read:
…support the feudal pyschopathy of the Owners of the “Ownership society.”
“Reality” is one of those troublesome words, almost as troublesome as the word “love” (We’ll be getting to that). People tend to assume they know what the really real reality is, just as they think or rather feel they know what love is. People have no idea. I don’t mean that they have no idea what reality or love is; I mean they have no idea. Reality is whatever they see in front of them; whatever they choose to see. A lot of people have a TV or computer screen in front of them. Their reality, your reality, my reality, are all a combination of our perceptions and our creative apperception. The latter is the senior partner. We all have our little kingdoms of beholding. In our individual dominions our writ is absolute, but for the weather of the world, and the fruitful operation of chance.
Our reality is an artifact of our perception and self deception, what it is depends on how or through what we’re looking at it. To steal a phrase from Tom Stoppard, reality is its own alibi. Sort of like God.
From the ether I hear a question; something whispering this way comes: “So, what’s your alibi, Dr. O?” In the midst of the comment string appended to a bit of flotspam I posted to Sam’s Safe Haven for Broken Blogs, I generated a concise coda or creed that expresses my current alibi:
Many paths; one Way. The word may be god, but the word that is the word, the one word, the true word, the eternal word, as Lao Tzu said, cannot be spoken. It cannot be believed or disbelieved, because it is beyond belief. It cannot be acted because it is outside of action or inaction. It cannot exist or not exist, because it surpasses existence and nonexistence. As Meister Eckhart said, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Yet it encompasses us, and everything that was, is, can, or will be.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be passers-by." I have given a lot of thought to that phrase, to me perhaps the most important saying attributed to Jesus (certainly the most mysterious), as I have watched the terrible merciless beauty of "God's" creation and destruction go by as it carries me down the years to the terminus ad quem, the way station that is my particular destination.
Remember, I’m cherry-picking from my own comments (which is inherently unfair: click the comment string link above to read it all) but what I said made Meg feel besieged and invoke love as her defense, and also caused Sam to take me to task:
Doctor O, such responses as you give are analogous to flak bombs that deflect enemy radar. You quote and cite and lead astray while never addressing the issue at hand. All you say here is surely so. Who can say nay? Yet the issue is a professed lack of compassion which, as expressed, differs little from outright hostility toward an entire population of a region experiencing a dire emergency. So Lao Tzu me that, why dontcha?
My answer:
Sam, make that outright hostility toward an entire species, experiencing a dire planet-wide emergency due to its own collective bad behavior. A lot of us will have to die before the planet can get well again. That is not a wish, that is a fact.
There are many "me"s, the human personality is not unitary. One of me, out of the many, is an angry misanthrope. Having compassion for one's fellow creatures and loving one another as much as is possible is a great good thing, but we are not saved by our love and compassion nor can we save anyone else. All the love and compassion of the Human race put together is not saving the planet as far as I can see. What many people think of as compassion is a misapprehension of this waking world and its inhabiting spirits.
St. Paul at the end of Corinthians I chapter 13 says "Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love (agape'). I have no faith, and don't think we have much hope. That leaves love. I think detachment is more necessary to true love than compassion. Detachment is necessary to true love because true love is foolish, betrayed, hopeless, lost. True love is, as Galway Kinnell put it, "tenderness towards existence." The beauty of this world is without mercy, and I chose to live and love in it not only because it is beautiful but because it is merciless. I was not merciful 27 years ago when I lowered the barrel of the revolver from my temple and decided not to blow my brains out. Love is the most useless thing in the world, and the most necessary. Here's my combination: Compassion plus detachment equals love(agape'). Beauty plus the ruthlessness we call passion equals love(erato). Love(agape') plus Love (erato) equals Grace.
Sort of like singing Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I've heard Willy Nelson sing it that way.
Well, Sam thought I was still pumping blogiston on the fire, and posted a picture of a panda pissing up a tree to put it out. Among other things, Meg said:
Dr. O, I have to confess, and this is exceedingly difficult for me, that I don't really know what you were saying up there. It sounds like you see love and living differently than I do on such a grand scale that I can't quite wrap my brain around it.
Sam and Meg, I cherish you both. I want you to know that I expressed myself as honestly as possible without any intent of wounding either of you. The reason I am rehashing all this is because I have lived almost five decades knowing that the vast majority of people in this world, if not left breathless with giggles at the things I say, do, and believe to be important, interesting, and true, are either bored, puzzled, nonplussed, dismissive, or regard it as an assault on everything that's good and holy. Or it just makes their heads hurt. It’s always when I’ve said something that seems to me to be perfectly clear and straightforward that no one gets it. I might as well be a squid squirting ink.
I started writing in the first place because words failed me. Words could not carry the meanings, the reality of what I wished to express. Every poem succeeds if it succeeds through the failure of words that comprise it. The word that can be spoken is not the word. This is an important truth to me.
In my twenties, long before I was diagnosed as Bipolar, during periods of mania I would often wander about in what amounted to a state of religious or spiritual ecstasy. I literally had waking visions. I saw streams of color emerging from and returning into people like a stream of smoke from a cigarette exhaled and re-inhaled. I saw “angels,” numinous entities that would descend and inhabit trees or dance on telephone wires. When the moon was full I thought I could see the man in the moon talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and would try to read his lips. I saw other things I won’t talk about right now. Call them visions or hallucinations; neither term is adequate to describe the reality of the experience. To speak of these things at all diminishes the reality of the experience. Words fail. My blog is the one place I can have it my way, a place where I can make my stand. As I am a party of one, I have become an army of one, rhetorically speaking. I wage war with words on words. I commit poetry, satire, and parody, not pillage, rapine or murder. I leave the latter violences to the literal minded thugs which almost all creeds or sects no matter how high-minded contribute at least some few to the world. My words “are but warriors for the working day”
Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'dWith rainy marching in the painful field;There's not a piece of feather in our host-Good argument, I hope, we will not fly—
Shakespeare, Henry V
*Irony has been so abused, misused, and overused by so many of slight talent and suspect intents, that the rapier bequeathed to posterity by men and women of great wit has been pounded by the popular posterior into a timeshare of ubiquitous of infra-insincerity. Modern irony has become a kind of language infarction, a dead zone where advertising ghouls dig for their gold and faux-rimbauds go to sell their souls.
1 comment:
Oooh, this one is back again. Well, Dr. O, I get you more now than I used to. And wouldn't take offense in the same way at all. But I tell ya -- I'd still scrap with you if I needed to, because it's fun, and I love you to bits!XOX
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