Odysseus

A poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. For now, i abandon Odysseus to the backwaters of my consciousness only to return to him a year or so from now. I am not unaware of the audacity of taking on such a project. Tennyson's Ulysses is without question one of the greatest lyrical poems in the English language. I am not trying to copy Tennyson. Nor am i copying him in writing yet another poem whose title is the same: Tiresias. My project is much larger overall, and will thus inevitably consists of unoriginal parts. But to my knowledge, the whole is entirely original. It just so happened that Odysseus came easiest to me after i'd already written Diomedes, and Diomedes so happened to come easiest after writing Helen--a poem which is not, in the same sort of way, a recreation of Sarah Teasdale's masterpiece. Yet again, it just so happened that Helen came easiest after writing Menelaus, a character who, if my research is right, no one has written a poem about--save a small piece by Rupert Brooke. Thus some parts are original and some not. Both Tiresias and Priam are on their way, and Achilles has at least one stanza nearly complete. Still many more will are to be added to the saga. If i were to rank the four i have Helen remains the best piece, if not my Magnum Opus. Diomedes and Odysseus are about the same in ranking, though for different reasons, and Menelaus is last, though, ironically, i think one of his stanzas is the best i've ever written. In any event, i hope you enjoy, i know i did.

Odysseus

Perhaps I’ll cast my spell on you,

Dangle some luck or slow down time,

Or strike a chime, or throw the die,

Or better still I'll sing a rhyme.

Takes some talent to make believable

Make believe, but pretend is what i do.

So what if i tell a half truth or the whole,

It matters little what’s actually true.

For have we not known gods in better moods,

Tinkering our way back to the shipyards?

Say Muse, say we were to harmonize with a

Dripping of blood drops, not some cacophonous bards:

Who’d believe wondering and wandering were the same,

Or home is the cause of home ‘cause my mother said so?

That happiness is a kind of growing used to death,

And death caused by the hoping come off the alpenglow?

I wade the threshold between shoal

And crowd—where waters tease the sand.

Between pallor and pith, sea and seeing,

And what no dull mortal can understand.

To play at theologian with the gods;

Esteem them rightly but know them wrongly,

Aghast at the words and sacred songs,

At last to feel what’s been felt strongly.

That they are a sham,

And that so am I,

And that still we count the bodies with same

Poise, the same pace, with which we stack them high.

That my life and the sunrise circuit strive on ‘mongst,

The spangled and glittering cadavers deranged,

And this ditty is but the pause between the first

And second twitching of a leg half rearranged.

Farewell! And farewell again!

The battle’s won a retreat!

Now beauty’s out there, lost in twilight,

Among the councils of stars replete.

The current of this man concurrent

With fickle winds and fickle kings.

The reckless oceans and the wide azure,

Is quiet, is home, is the thing of things.

Religious and Non-Religious Sentiments

It's strange to be the only religious person in a religious theories class. This weeks reading of Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" proved particularly odd. Studying atheist after atheist eventually turns into good fun for we Christians immersed in the laicized community. In a way we are used to trying to strap on the consciousness of people whose ideologies and temperaments are fundamentally different from our own. We are the minority, and as such must adapt to the academic milieu. I think if one succeeds at true charity, he ends up being able to defend Freud's position better than Freud did. On my definition, charity not only thinks what they have thought and thinks beyond them, it feels what they have felt. Aristotle says that the mature mind can coherently manipulate ideas which are not its own. I think the same principle holds within the psychological realm. A mature psychology can feel sentiments which are not its own. A psychology which empathizes with the sentiments associated with atheism has succeeded not only in understanding atheistic propositions but the allure of those propositions. Everything else follows suit. The intuitions of the atheist, the creative relationship between fact and theory begin to have meaning. The positive or negative impressions toward religion--any religion--begin to have valence. When someone religious says something overtly religious, a Christian well versed in the sentiments of atheism can feel the anti-sentiments pique.

Whether this model demonstrates just how shaky my view of identity is, is another question--and one that needs answering. For now i'm curious about the blatant sentimental ignorance demonstrated to me during this week's class. Otto is explicitly clear: "The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no father; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feeling. " Otto goes on to give his famous account of the numinous. To my knowledge there is no greater account of it. Otto at times is so penetratingly accurate concerning it that i wonder how often he must have felt it. Much could be added and subtracted from his account, modified and what not, but it is an empirical/psychological observation unlike any other i've encountered. (I will not go into the details.)

What struck me in class, however, was the antagonism, the misunderstanding, the pure naivety concerning the subject. I sat dumbfounded at the inability of both the professor's and student's inability to access the content of the numinous. Some suggested that Otto didn't really think that the numinous was qualitatively different from normal sentimental experience. Some suggested that Otto did actually think that non-religious people could access the content of the numinous--why else would he write about it. Some simply threw their hands up in bewilderment.

In truth, it was only with the third type of person that i had any sympathy. It echoes Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak one must be silent." They at least recognized a category with which they had no familiarity nor possible access. It was like listening to a group of people talk about the experience of reading poetry who had never had the experience of reading poetry. They spoke of iambic pentameter and prosody where only reading a line of Thomas Hardy does the experiential knowledge justice. One does not explain Samuel Barber's Adagio for String with musical notes. You cannot abstract signifiers out of sounds. The only option is to press the play button or go to the concert hall. (Otto by the way uses the feeling of the sublime as one of his arguments from analogy. The experience of the Mysterium Tremendum is analogous to the experience of the sublime.)

It reminds me of Lewis' essay Transposition where "lower" feelings cannot attain to "higher" emotions. The meaning gets muddled. I do not doubt that there are atheistic sentiments with which i am unfamiliar. Likewise with agnostic. But it does not seem to me that they are qualitatively different from any other normal emotional state. They are accessible conceptually without actually having experienced the emotion itself. Additionally, they are, for me, easily experienced. "It's not" says Quentin from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Furry, "It's not when you realize that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it's when you realize that you don't need any aid." All too true given naturalism; all too akin to Nietzsche's passive nihilistic attitude. And all very accurate to the sentiments i've felt myself acting as a quasi-atheist.

But where the essence of a certain feeling lies in its very inexplicability, where only arguments from analogy suffice, where ideograms are substituted for abstractions, the atheist and agnostic--without religious experience--simply have nothing to say. Otto and I may assume the phenomenological possibility of inter-subjectivity to do it (and who doesn't assume the possibility of inter-subjectivity?), but Christian camaraderie, heck, Christian and Buddhist camaraderie often derives from mutual experience of the numinous object--whatever it may be. It is curious that here, in the realm of phenomenological experience, that the religious category of "Spirit" attains the superior conceptual status.

Sometimes a Man Just Needs to Write About What's on His Mind

Religious theorists like to answer questions surrounding the origins of religion. More often than not, it's in an non-falsifiable way. Freud makes the rather bold move of positing a pre-historical narrative. A group of sons killed their father, and, due to a sense of unconscious remorse, displaced that guilt of murder onto a Totem animal of some kind. The role of the father--protection-- thus became the occupation of the Totem. Sate the needs of the totem and the totem will sate the needs of the people. Later on within the evolution of this religious attitude, animism found the old Totem guilt re-displaced onto some kind of ghostly chimera. Mythological gods followed--slightly more abstract in nature--,and eventually the Immanent highly rationalized Yahweh (originally Jehovah) appears in the Semitic mythos. Add Christianity, Islam, and a tinge of Scholasticism, and what you have is a theologized, rationalization of a Deity figure, abstracted even beyond the capabilities of semantics (the negative differentia of Divine Simplicity). God is something so other He is not really something about which we can speak.

Nevertheless, for Freud, God still functions as a thing which cares for and protects, satisfies needs, and helps repress the original guilt, somehow sociologically (or physiologically?--Freud is never clear) latent within the collective mind. But even though religion or, later on, theodicy is therapeutic, they are incomplete therapy. In the way that a neurotic patient may hold some of his symptoms in abeyance via medicine, religions act as ephemeral cures. (Freud has a tendency to argue from the ontogenetic to phylogenetic analogy.) The disease remains, and only the only therapy is a recognition of, a naming of, a return and remembrance of the original event: the killing of the father. Once the causal event has meaning to the patient, healing follows via a proper ordering of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Once we, societies, know why and what we are repressing, we can begin to repress through the right modes viz. the scientific attitude. It's blatantly, and perhaps embarrassingly, akin to Plato's proper ordering of the desiderative, sentimental, and rational classifications of the soul found in The Republic. Health and happiness are caused through a rationalization of the internal man.

I could offer similar accounts from Weber, James, Jung, Eliade, Otto, Burkertt, Levi-Strauss etc. But my point for explicating Freud's account for the origin of religion is merely to demonstrate what sort of hoola-hoops thinkers are willing to go through to make sense of religious experience (at the personal level) and religious institutions (at the public level).

I find this need to construct a Weltanschauung a fascinating one. It fits, i think, into an impulsive category. It manifests itself as a need, a desire to be sated with "the thing which is the case." When we put the impulse into words, it comes out in conceptual form: but the event itself is not a concept. The phenomenon appears, furthermore, to be universal. I have never met nor heard of someone who does not desire to know--not necessarily even "the truth of truths", but any truth. If a disinterest in "what is the case" ever manifested itself in someone, i think i would be highly skeptical concerning the claim.

This impulse fits within the psychology of religion, or maybe more accurately, the psychology of Weltanschauung. We find ourselves with a need. From whence comes it? Christianity, of course, supplies a narrative to account for the impulse--not to mention that both Eliade and Otto (and even James) add their own religious models.

I don't know. Something about exploring these models feels--for me-- akin to the pleasure deriving from reading a poem or listening to a song. I wade in them like a man in an ocean, satisfied simply to explore the realms the current may take me. I realized upon reflection that this is the mode through which i construct my Weltanschauung. My methodology may appear a bit haphazard, and, i suspect, it is. Our current analytic tradition leaves us with the impression that schemas alone, logical validity, following premises to sound conclusions provide truths we may fearlessly adopt. Though in a sense i think this is right, i do not think it necessary to come vis-a-vis with truth. Too many people, normal people who don't blog about the Freudian fixations, construct worldviews on propositions they were told are true. Most people exist in a world argued from authority. To the degree that they adhere to truths, they do so because someone told them it was true. They arrive at truth by accident.

In the same sort of way, i have the impression that my methodological approach will place me in the position to acquire truth by accident. Coherency aside [or bracketed] and charity given, i think that to dabble is to know. More importantly it is to know a certain sort of thing. A long lost friend of mine once accused me of what he called "Tensionism." He was right then, and he is right now. The tendency to synthesize, to willingly suspend belief, the wish to eat a little bit of everything off of the buffet is really, in another sort of way, a construction of a Weltanschuanng. One object is to be full, the other object is to know "what is the case." I shall taste from the cornucopia of knowledge and be filled. The psychological dangers of such an approach take the form of dissonance and terror. The psychological advantages take the form of knowing a piece of truth in a way concurrent with the way someone else, fully engrossed in it, knows it completely. It is somehow, though not yet clear to me, related to Murdoch's definition of love--the extremely difficult realization that someone, other than oneself, is real. Additionally, it is related to James' account of hope standing in opposition to fear in "The Will To Believe." It is all a muddle, as one might expect from someone like myself. But i did not choose to see the world the way that i do; it feels, rather, like it chose me.