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."

Random Thoughts VI

There are those among my friends who hold, some with a sense of envy, some with utter disdain, that I have lived my life unfettered by scientific logic, a condition that both camps deem irrational, definitive of madness. I think it an unwarranted charge. True, I do not understand the infinitesimal calculus. I am equally ignorant of quantum mechanics. Such ignorance is another of the many blessings granted me. But the unconscious has a logic of its own and grounds its elaborate reasoning thereupon. I am Who (I) Am. This is the definition of self  that places the ego properly in relation to the infinite, defines the scope of one's freedom, and permits the cognition of one's own soul. Contest my premises if you will but know that my syllogisms are sound.

And of that self, that soul (a pilgrim soul in a world of tourists) and its reasonings, what to say, what task ascribe to it, what question pose it? This perhaps at first: how best to dispute the primacy of the fact as sole constituent of the real world, of Reality?

It is an error to mistake ignorance for humility or humility for ignorance...and a greater error still to mistake either for fear.

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.

Memory is an impediment to love (and therefore love consumes all memory).

I had thought of myself most often as the central character in the fiction of my life, but there are times, more so as I age, when I am beset by the unhappy intuition that perhaps I am no more than a bit player in that particular drama, not Hamlet but Polonius.

Does it mean anything to speak of the scope of one's freedom, or is it the case that, genuinely understood, freedom is without scope, is absolute?

Politics is the communal expression of the mechanics of human will, be it free or bound, the aggregate of all the individual affirmations and denials in a given collective.

The Judgment is a come-as-you-are affair. You go clothed in all your virtues, all your sins (which is probably why your grandmother made such a point of insisting on the importance of always wearing clean underwear).

Random Thoughts V

All theories of social consciousness to the contrary, the split between the world and the individual is final and irrevocable, as exclamatory as birth.

Courage, at least of a spiritual sort, being perhaps more essential in this the "post-modern" age than heretofore, it becomes necessary to reverse the common dictum: the brave man dies a thousand deaths, the coward only one.

To meditate deeply on America, on what it means for one's soul to be American, requires a peculiar sort of stubborn patience, the sort that keeps one sitting silent and cross-legged in the stream of common consciousness, buffeted by ceaseless flotsam, the endless floating evidence of some far off catastrophe, some distant miracle, until perhaps at last light congeals to thought, thought yields to revelation.

This fragment bobs past: America is a purgatorial nation. It exists to purge history of its gravest faults. This is its glory, its honor, and its most grievous danger, the seed of its apotheosis and perhaps of its demise. Profoundly understood and profoundly undertaken, such a destiny might well merit for its people in their singularity an accelerated advance upward from the mud and in their congregation as a nation the laurel of a more humble exceptionalism.

Profoundly understood, profoundly undertaken...though perhaps the latter is predicate of the former...which would give new meaning to the notion of revolutionary struggle, America's natal genetic. How then best to undertake it? And what depth of understanding to glean from the undertaking?

There is no thought, however worthy, no cause, however noble, no prayer, however pious, no love, however timeless, no pain, however grievous, that does not merit at least one good laugh (..musings of the riant deity).

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: God's commandment to a benign narcissism.

On popular culture: Great art endures. All the rest merely persists.

Would that I could,

I would write a concluding verse,

A solemn psalm for Man:

A dirge of failed distractions,

A canticle of hope,

A just recessional...

A Parable

The Accident

The accident occurred at 7:45 AM in heavy fog on the remote and sinuous stretch of interstate that runs between Capon and Norristown. The truck, eastbound with a load of strawberries, swerved out of its lane to avoid a stalled car, jack-knifed across the road and came to rest on its side, Three dozen other vehicles following behind were involved in the subsequent chain reaction. The relative inaccessibility of the spot, in a valley deeply shadowed by towering hills on either side (you are familiar with the area?), and the sheer complexity of the accident itself severely hampered rescue and removal operations so that, by eleven, when the sun had burned away the last traces of obscuring fog, upwards of fifteen hundred vehicles, their engines off, their whistling tires silenced, immobile, stretched back toward Capon in a solid mass, as if frozen in a dream.

At first the stranded motorists were angry and restive. They could not be blamed for this. After all, appointments were being missed, delivery schedules disrupted, business meetings unkept, vacations delayed and all without a word of explanation to those waiting beyond the wreck, for, owing to the high surrounding hills, there was no cell service, no easy means of communication, no way of rescheduling the meetings or saving the business deals or extending the hotel reservations or reassuring the worried relatives. So there were shouts and curses and the broken roar of horns washing over the great line of cars like some gigantic wave smashing itself to pieces on a line of breakers, furious and frustrated at the impenetrable solidity of the obstacle in its path. The cars closest to the huge tangle of wreckage did not behave in this fashion, of course, as the drivers of these could see how serious was the matter, were aware that there were most probably dead and injured and that the mess itself, the massive interlocked metallic tangle, would take some considerable time to clear even after the human effects of the tragedy had been dealt with. These drivers, then, left their cars and did what little they could to give first aid until, an hour or so after the crash, the first medical units arrived by helicopter. The honking and the shouting and the cursing, then, came from farther back along the line, from those cars whose drivers, lacking insight, a clear vantage point, could know nothing except that they seemed irrevocably delayed.

In time this too stopped. Someone up front retained enough presence of mind to start a message on its way back down the line: a terrible accident, some serious injuries, road blocked, a long delay. Each driver left his car and walked back to inform the motorist behind him and so on, relay fashion, all the way down, so that within two hours everyone had at least this rough sketch of the event that had immobilized them. This seemed to quiet their anger and had the additional benefit of starting a flurry of conversations so that the motorists, accepting their impotence to dissolve this frustrating blockage, turned their attention instead to ways of occupying their time.

Some slept, reclining in the seats of their autos or searching out some shaded piece of grass along the roadway. Others, more active by temperament, organized impromptu football games or played a kind of lazy catch with bright plastic saucers. Lovers, some young, some not so young, walked hand in hand in the warm spring air, many of them barefoot, shirts off, pants rolled up to take the benefit of the sun. Older women gathered in small groups to gossip, commiserating with the poor wretches whose bodies lay trapped in the unseen wreckage ahead or exchanging stories about their intended destinations and their spoiled plans or worrying about their grandchildren, who must certainly by now be somewhat alarmed. Card games sprang up. Here and there someone lugged out a guitar or a portable radio and there were little knots of music up and down the line. People read books or magazines or newspapers and chatted and argued (for by mid-day the sun overhead had become quite hot). Some, who had been on their way to one of the picnic spots upstate when the accident stopped them, brought out their hampers and their coolers of beer and soft drinks and had their lunches beside the road or up on one of the small hillocks. Many simply idled about, irritable and disaffected. One old man died of a stroke and another, younger, of a knife wound, perhaps after a trivial argument or something of the sort. In this way the time passed.

By seven that evening the wreck had been cleared away, the road opened and people returned to their vehicles. The long line began to move, like some slumbering animal waking from a hibernation, and within an hour all conditions were normal again. Any impartial observer who had taken note of the day's events and who strolled now among the detritus of papers and scraps of food and discarded bottles and forgotten blankets or shirts or shoes might have been moved to conclude that this multitude of souls, these pilgrims stranded by an inexplicable caprice, had constructed in some dumb, instinctive fashion, a grotesque parody of what might be called a culture, a civilization.