An Autobiographical Note

  

Indentured (as are we all) to the implacable exigencies of material existence, I served a long, happy, satisfying, productive and profitable employment at the Cleveland Museum of Art, ending as its Director of Facilities, in which role I assisted in the institutional navigation of its complex and compelling re-imagining. Simultaneous with that social effort, I pursued several equally compelling private endeavors. I was for several years the cartoon editor of Eschatology Today, the renown (and too little referenced) journal of end time speculation. I sat for a number of years on the board of Escuela Oscura y Tragica, the highly regarded Life Preparatory Institute founded by distant relatives of Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, and professor of classical Greek. I still serve on the Collections Committee of the Museo de los Pecados de la Humanidad, the Institute's cultural  outreach center in Sonora, California. I was a contributing editor to Elucidations: A Compendium of Profundities for All Occasions, winner of the 2006 Writers' Forum Bukowski Bar Tab Award. An amateur gardener, I regularly contributed articles to West Virginia Hill Country Horticulture and New Age Gardening.

Upon my retirement from the Cleveland Museum of Art I was honored to be named Managing Director of Say What?, the litero-technic collective founded in the early 1970s by my esteemed mentor and teacher, the late Alexander Burnbridge (see this blog of 27 September 2014). Working across media disciplines under the umbrella of what we call the Cassandra Project, we are presently engaged in assembling Burnbridge's voluminous notes, drawings, film and video clips, wire frame sculptures, and musical fragments for theremin and baritone recorder --- what he referred to collectively as his "plastic intellections and psycho-active assemblages" --- into the "instantaneously accessible multi-loci simultaneity" that he predicted would only become comprehensible in the last decades of the twenty-first century. Determined both to affirm that prediction and to best its timeline, we hope to present it by 2026 as a "symphonic perturbation" under Burnbridge's own working title, The Big Whirly: Life As Ontological Theme Park.

Sustained in my private life by my wife, my son, and my cat, I age quietly, watching the changing of the seasons, listening to the music of the spheres.    

     

Some Meditational Seedlings From Recent Readings

"I find myself daily less consumed by the reality of the world as it is and more and more convinced by my dream of the world as I believe it to be." Ourio, Boris. The Wheel of Purgation and the Sins of the Fathers. Chicago: Connectivity Press, 1967. Print.

"True art can always and only do this one, single thing: make perceptible to the eye, the ear, and the mind the position and the progress in time of all that is common to the human soul, tracing the arc of a divine evolution, affirming revelation." Ourio, Boris. The Wheel of Purgation and the Sins of the Fathers. Chicago: Connectivity Press, 1967. Print.

"The poor and ignorant are the raw material for the creation of a new reality, one that ruthlessly eliminates them both. Capitalism in the service of aggressive materialism is the compulsive force in the evolution of that reality." Wroth, Ruth. On the Third Day: A Generational Discourse. Kent: Inversity Littlepress, 2009. Print.

"It may be true that the world ever belongs to youth; age, though, is ever its financier: in the realm of Spirit as in that of economics, progress is always the result of sound investment." Brakwynd, Reverend R. Hamilton. Pep Talk: A Collection of Sympathies. Minneapolis: Agape House, 2009. Print.

"In what ways is it acceptable to direct the progress of evolution? Is such manipulation even possible, or is the very thought itself so tightly tautological --- for by definition evolution is the direction of man, both as object and as actor --- that it winds itself into a whirl and dizzies? This is the root dilemma of our history: we find ourselves moved to reconsider the wisdom of remaking man's consciousness, questioning our moral fitness for the task even as we undertake  it with ever accelerating rapidity." Paschem, Donna N.  "Resuscitant Disconsolations." Stasis and Statute Dec. 2008: 64-73. Print.

"I am a passivist and as such stand in quiet opposition to all the rabid activists of the world. Passivism is the necessary counterweight to all the sound and fury that surrounds us. I sit without stirring, at once caring and uncaring, my mind's eye fixed on what I know to be a distant glimmer of the divine, as I watch the world play out in much the same way as my cat watches, mesmerized, the video aquarium I display for him on my computer screen." Kingsley, Fischer. The Insolence of Science and the Futility of Art. Toronto: Periwinkle Co-operative, 2012. Print and Kindle.

A Brief Meditation On Current Events

My parents cautioned me to avoid to the strictest extent possible for as long as possible these things in this world: doctors, lawyers, and conversations about politics or religion. Advancing years make the avoidance of doctors increasingly more desirable, increasingly less possible. Casual observation and brief reflection effectively demonstrate that in America our lives are enmeshed by lawyers, despite any and all effort to decline formal commerce with them. The profusion of pundits throughout all media is proof that not only is any caution against political conversation more honored in the breach than in the observance but that the consistent disregard of that caution constitutes a materially profitable industry.

That leaves conversations about religion.

Appropriate certainly in Sunday sermons and schools of theology, perhaps also in self-help groups, spiritualist covens, and psychological coffee klatches, such conversations are deemed to have little substantial merit --- apart from the obligatory nod and timid lip service paid to "shared values" --- in the national discussions of a society inviolably committed to the separation of church and state.

That is, until the mounting pressure of events drives thought toward reexamination.

Which brings us to the current situation, to Islamic extremism, to the rise of the Isilian calumnate, to the terror born of an illness in Islam, to a publicly declared and brutally elaborated ideology so opposed to any conceivable understanding of the nature of God as to constitute not a faith but a slander on faith, a blasphemy against both reason and belief.

To characterize the evolving conflict as a "war on extremism" is to ignore the central fact of its religious specificity and by so doing to cripple the national ability to confront it. To consider it from a historical perspective fundamentally as the eruption of an abstract political force onto the world stage is equally debilitating. What we are now observing in its nascent stage is Islamic extremism. It is political Islam, the imposition by force of sharia theocracy. The religious qualifier is genetic of the phenomenon and essential to our understanding of it. To refuse that qualifier admittance to our thought and to our speech is to render thought empty and speech mute.

It is insufficient to deploy in opposition to such a religious consciousness merely the vapid theologism of a "coexist" bumper sticker, regardless of how fundamental the value of tolerance is to one's understanding of existence and to the social structure of one's nation. Let me walk with you and see the face of your God that I may show you the face of Mine. Tolerance may begin there. All may undertake such a pilgrimage. But all on that long ecumenical walk must recognize in what they see something familiar, each to his own soul  and all to that shared by all souls, regardless of the angle or acuity of one's particular vision or of the distance from which one looks. And all must reject the absolutely unrecognizable, the absolutely alien. Faced with abject depravity we can't all "just get along."

I acknowledge that our culture makes the requisite conversation difficult. What we call freedom is perhaps the highest of our spiritual values, and it is possible only in the lee space between political and religious authority, precariously suspended between Church and State and entirely accountable to neither. A cabinet level Department of Theology is anathema to us, a Presidential Commission on the Nature of God a logical impossibility, yet the absolute absurdity of such specific concepts cannot quite negate the validity of the intuition that underlies them, that in the current situation, faced as we are with a threat of mutating magnitude firmly grounded in a particular understanding of the divine, a countervailing understanding consistent with the nature of our freedom is essential to our reason, our sanity, and our defense.

Carl Jung wrote "Consciousness is the cradle of the birth of God in man." Read as a compressed expression of the notion of individuation, the unfolding of the soul unto a single, unique self, the thought points to both  process and direction. But the God spoken of here is largely a concept without content, unrestricted by gender, doctrine, or dogma, in a sense recognizable only to a single, specific soul. It appears more as an experiential moment, an epiphany perhaps, the culmination of an arduous journey of growth, an individual elaboration that at last separates a given psyche from the undifferentiated roil of a larger antique psyche, the common inheritance of humanity. Looked at in this light even the agnostic and the atheist gain full admittance to the discussion. The current situation can be approached purely psychologically, in a cold scientific frame of mind essentially devoid of theological content: a vicious god is a pathology.

Teilhard de Chardin admits of a similar reading, though here the process is more specifically religious, the movement of consciousness teleological, directed toward the unfolding unto a specific model of personality, indeed toward a specific personality itself. Still, both Jung and Chardin --- and, I suspect, a multitude of other psychological and religious pilgrims of all valid faiths and disciplines --- see the process fundamentally as the navigation, intimately individual yet immanently communal, toward a distant and anonymous light, the endpoint of evolution. But for us as individuals to acknowledge the communality of that navigation we must be convinced that we move toward the same beacon, however intensely or dimly perceived. In the individual case contemplation suffices to chart the arc of the journey; communally only conversation can assure us that we travel in a single direction.        

Individually and communally, whether the language is of the soul and religious or of the psyche and scientific, all faiths must confess their sins, all psychologies must confront their illnesses. To contain the sort of heresy we here detect, the cancer of the psyche we here diagnose, requires that we begin by sketching the outlines of health, by admitting to an acceptable understanding of the divine only those attributes of God that propel us, whether speedily or haltingly, toward the same light. The effort cannot be limited to our doctors and our theologians alone; that would constitute not a conversation but an indictment. It must arise as well in the depths of the Muslim soul and be spoken aloud across the entire ummah. Failure means metastasis. And metastasis leads by steady and certain steps not toward evolutionary apotheosis but rather toward apocalyptic calamity.

Let me converse with you and hear the true voice of your God that you may hear the true voice of Mine. All hope of tolerance begins here. It is therefore imperative that we begin. He who has ears to hear let him hear...

In sha'Allah.

Neural Twitches...

...the same being transient excitations in search of durable understanding...

All convergent journeys begin as parallel paths: a chord derived from the study of Renaissance perspective.

Ambition is the insatiable desire to be in two places at the same time.

Atheism is a way station on the road to faith.

Logically, perpetuity is the borderline between duration and eternity. Duration cognizes a segmented time, perpetuity time's persistence, eternity it's abolition. The world lives in duration and aspires to perpetuity, which, from a certain perspective, is a fair definition of purgatory, or at least a psychologically valid experience of purgatory.

Economically speaking, the soul lives in the rounding errors of what the world considers profit.

Coinage: "Psycholotics" (The exploration of the unconscious of a given polity undertaken through the observation of the manifestations of its constitutional dynamic.)

   

It is my belief that the journey through ultimate confusion ultimately leads to ultimate clarity.

Doubt is not the negation of faith so much as its surest evidence.

"I am fascinated by the notion of parallel universes, individual parallel realities, syncretistic mentation, convergence and the dynamics thereof, and einsteinian thought experimentation, all experienced as fundamental psycho-religious phenomena that, it seems to me, offer the best hope of properly focusing the problems of free will and the mechanics of proper education, allowing for the resolution of bad choices, and responding to the conditional question, What if death is not the end?" (page 347) Burnbridge, Alexander Particle and Wave: A Navigational Guide to the Practical Transit of Light. Minneapolis: Templar House, 1946. Print.

First principles of the discussion:

There exists a reality which we can only meaningfully call God.

"You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body." C.S. Lewis

I think it true, as the old writers of faith understood it, that God is the author of history. I think also that they may have missed the mark in thus understanding His authorship as the work of an historian when perhaps it is better conceived  as the work of a writer of fiction, an elaborate interweaving of character and plot.

Random Thoughts VIII (With Notes and Elaborations)

(Elaboration 1.01)

Psychologically speaking, being elected to govern in America is very much like being commissioned to teach a common language at the University of Babel. E Pluribus Unum. We've got the "Pluribus" part down pat (no one can say that Americans don't understand diversity). It's the "Unum" we seem to be having trouble with.

And for us the only possible bedrock principle of that unum? That we acknowledge as our common creed a faith at once the most profoundly religious and least dogmatic, least denominational of all of history's endless fumblings toward the divine, a faith as blind as our yearning for justice, as directional as our understanding of hope. Freed by our insistence on the absolute necessity of an authentic self, a singular soul wrested from the clamor of the social mass, we deploy the right to a will thus won to navigate toward a distant and anonymous light, the endpoint of evolution.

By itself reason is insufficient for that navigation. Proceeding as it must from fact to fact, building thereupon to create still newer facts, reason unrestrained and untempered can yield only its own endless self justification. It can have no object but its own infinite elaboration. Ultimately tautological it produces only classification and hierarchy. Thus, while giving every impression of movement, it is essentially static. It is movement we seek and insist upon, a genuine change of state, a birthing into the world as new creatures, remade of our freedom's victories. And reason of itself neither guides us nor propels us there.

Slowed by resistance, stung by doubt, gutted by indifference, I am become cautious of heresy --- rational, religious, or scientific --- and therefore often plead either ignorance or humility. But truth external to me intervenes: it is an error to mistake ignorance for humility or humility for ignorance...and a greater error still to mistake either for fear. And so I too am thrown into tautology. To save my self my thought must spin, as does a dervish.

An individual journey, then, not of itself grounded in hierarchy, in acceptance of the consensual order, but in the aggregate of all such journeys --- which aggregate is properly understood to be simply the whole of history, its substance and elaboration through time --- revelatory of an innate hierarchy, an innate order, neither discoverable nor describable by reason alone.

Science --- reason --- has brought us to this point but can carry us no farther.

Referential Note:

"Do I believe in mortality? I've looked in the mirror every morning for more than sixty years and every morning the evidence is there, successive, stark and indisputable. So of course I believe in mortality. It's death I don't believe in." (Page 92) Prattlesham, Herbert Displaced Souls:Convalescent Conversations On Theories of Finality Atlanta: Prescott Press, 1979. Print

(Elaboration 2.0)

How then do I understand the Christ? As the sum of all the innate, unrealizable aspirations of our common consciousness, the coda to all our immemorial dreams, the teleological tautology. Asked to explain this understanding, to detail its meaning, I cannot. Understanding is primal and individual, explanation secondary and communal. Thus I can point to the words as experience only, I can say only that the words themselves are the meaning, that the meaning palpitates there, that the meaning luminesces there.

Proposed, A Corrective Thought for the American Consciousness:

Capitalism is not a religion, economics is not a theology, competition is not the proper fundament of moral law, and neither greed nor penury is a virtue.

At its deepest, music is the consort of the art of silence, the negative space defining mute thought, the figure-ground reversal of contemplation.

What we understand as action --- the effect on reality of pure will absent individually ascribable material intervention --- becomes possible (specifically, most properly, perhaps only) at the intersection of wisdom and intent.

The structural disadvantage under which all secular government labors is that it must by its nature function as though there is fundamental truth to the notion that you only live once, whereas in actuality the most one can properly say logically is that you only live one life at a time...and for certain deeply matured souls even that last misses the mark.

Preamble to An Overdue Confession:

As with so many of my contemporaries (and so many of our offspring) I am a creature of the 'sixties, shaped by upheavals in a pacific common consciousness birthed in renunciation of its antecedent history, the horrors of our fathers' wars. Forming a community of thought contraposed to the culture of our nativity (a community based perhaps as much on youthful hormones as on youthful ideals) we proclaimed our identity as the generation of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll." In my own case, energy and time being constrained, the deeper exploration and fuller allegiance  was limited to but two of the three. As rock and roll was the easier to abandon --- and for me the infinitely less interesting --- the choice was not a difficult one.

Random Thoughts VII

Referential Notes:

"Of itself, knowledge is worthless; hunger for understanding...and thence to wisdom." (page 37)

"Be mindful, therefore, of all the doleful battalions, formed on trust and love, fearful that their anguish be in vain, angry that it could ever be so, deployed for profit, consumed by time, vanished and unrewarded. They are a chorus, as in Sophocles or Euripedes, intoning a dirge of solemn memories, a litany of lamentations. Theirs are the delphic voices, foreseeing and forewarning, theirs the Dies Irae." (page 42) Tisth, A.R. Ancestral Admonitions: Symbolism, Serenity and the Psychopathy of History. Portland: Singularity Press, 1964. Print.

Marriage is largely a therapeutic exercise. You judge yours to be successful when at long last you arrive at a point where you are, all things considered, more or less whole, more or less content, yet unable for the life of you to figure out just who cured whom and of what.

(Elaboration 1.0)

Psychologically speaking, being elected to govern in America is much like being commissioned to teach a common language at the University of Babel. E Pluribus Unum. We've got the "Pluribus" part down pat (no one can say that Americans don't understand diversity). It's the "Unum" we seem to be having trouble with...

...and for us, for those of our mind, the only possible bedrock principle of that unum? That we acknowledge as our common creed a faith at once the most profoundly religious and least dogmatic, least denominational of all of history's endless fumblings toward the divine, a faith as blind as our yearning for justice, as directional as our understanding of hope. Freed by our insistence on the absolute necessity of an authentic self, a singular soul wrested from the clamor of the social mass, we deploy the right to a will thus won to navigate toward a distant and anonymous light, the endpoint of evolution.

We are the children of a too rational age. Blinded by the Enlightenment, seduced by its goddess, awestruck by the liberties it birthed and comforted by the material wonders it has produced, we find ourselves nonetheless savaged by reason and confined by its science. Reason by itself is insufficient for the navigation we have determined to undertake, inadequate for our polar star. Proceeding as it must from fact to fact, building thereupon to create still newer facts, reason unrestrained and untempered can yield only its own endless self justification. It can have no object but its own infinite elaboration. Ultimately tautological it produces only classification and hierarchy. Thus, while giving every impression of movement, it is essentially static. It is movement we seek and insist upon, a genuine change of state, a birthing into the world as new creatures, remade of our freedom's victories. And reason of itself neither guides us nor propels us there.

In Memoriam

    It is with deep sadness and profound  appreciation that I note the passing of Alexander "Rebbe" Burnbridge, S.J., Ph.D. (1932-2014). The first of three children born to Samuel Burnbridge, an artisanal cheese maker and itinerant crop duster, and Rebecca Harlston Winslett, the estranged daughter of a Boston cooper, he showed early promise as an ahistorical thinker and antinomian poet, publishing his first important monograph, On the Incongruence of Discourse, at age eleven and his first collection of poems, Tiresias's Navel, a year later. At age fifteen he was the youngest scholarship student to attend the august University of the Americas, completing a grueling dual major in epistemological confluence and moral hygiene before continuing his studies in Rome. Following a brief psychiatric interlude, he returned to America and went on to take advanced degrees in metaphysical aeronautics, structural dialectics, animal husbandry, and botany. In the course of a lengthy post doctoral sabbatical he labored to produce the four works of his epic magnum opus (re)Evolutionary Biotics:

        

      The Angry Angels: The Theology of Irrelevance and the Destiny of Ants

      Particle and Wave: A Navigational Guide to the Practical Transit of Light

      The Inconsequential Wilderness: An Interior Cosmology 

      Sea Serpents, Sand Dunes and The Immemorial Now: A Book of (sub)Verse

   

     On his subsequent return to public participation, he went on to found the first of several successful companies, Say What? a litero-technic collective dedicated to the immaterial engineering of flights of fancy. Late in his career he served as a forensics investigator in the Courts of Canon Law. He left us, poorer for his passing, earlier this year, peacefully, after a long battle with existential loss.

     He was the greatest and most noble of all my teachers and mentors, and I honor him with this: "It was strange. I never understood a word he said but I always seemed to know exactly what he meant."