y, way back in 1970, when I was in high school and filled with all sorts of dreams of anarchy and paradise on earth, there was a movie that was made into a short-lived sit-com called Logan's Run. In the sci-fi world where it took place, people lived in a vast bubble protected from the elements and all the pain of bee stings and sun burns and everything else. Life was ideal, because no one suffered - at all, because at the age of 30, a ceremony was held where they were lifted up to heaven in a shaft of light. Except it wasn't quite so. In fact, they were simply killed while high on whatever. Logan found out about this, and with his girlfriend, looking remarkably like a wealthy flower child, he escaped from the bubble. There they found a world that hurt, and a world that had been destroyed by a long-ago nuclear war. They made it to what was left of Washington, DC, where they met an old man for the first time. They were entranced. Here was this dingy old fellow with a white beard who puttered about the remnants of the national library, his failing memory and shuffling gate so amusing to them. Old age wasn't so bad! And so they returned, led a revolt, and exploded the bubble.
Into the real world they went, then, the same world that had erupted into global violence before. And the same world where old age is not a quaint novelty, but a very real and, eventually, uncomfortable stage of life. People my age, no longer young, look with dread at the ancients, now our parents, who become senile, ugly, incompetent and incontinent and then, by the miracle of modern medicine, are kept alive in these horrible states sometimes for years. We look at each other and think darkly - not us! Better to die! But I have seen the will to live. Even the ancient have it, with all their suffering and pills, until the last, faintest glow of energy finally dissipates. It is only then that they acquiesce to the big mystery. And so, I know, it will remain for most of us. Could Logan's domed world have a glimmer of compassion to it?
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, which simultaneously commiserates the last days of Jesus and the reality of death in life. In the Catholic Church, a cross of ashes is put on the foreheads of parishioners as the priest says, to each, "from ashes you are born and to ashes you go," or something very similar (there goes MY memory). We are reminded that death awaits us, as well as an afterlife, too, when Lent is done at Easter. But Logan didn't have Easter, nor any of the other beliefs and rituals. He only had his desire to live and his ignorance to protect him from the real world. The world before him was not any more evil than the world of his future. It is iis vicissitudes, its suffering and fears, that creates the worst of our violence. With Logan and his fellow followers, this will happen again. The world by itself offers no palliative; rather it is by thoughts of the mind and the inner life, of the heart, that give us reason to live in the face of a painful old age and a scary death.
So, in Gary Lachman's The Secret Teachers, we learn about the ways in which the Western world dealt with this perennial problem. I have just finished reading of the era of the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, beginning in seriousness about 200 years after the birth of Christ, and lasting until the final dismemberment in the 8th century. It was a time of confusion and warfare, of barbarian hordes and clashing ideologies. It was also the last of the Pagan era, where intellect gave way to faith, where brain gave way to heart, for the world had to be remade, to be re-understood by the masses, not just the intellectual elite. And so the West veered off into dogma, and quickly, into intolerance, for a religion built on belief rather than a foundation of thought could be easy pickings. As the late Medieval period went into its high phase, after the 9th century, the great Christian thinkers of the time filled in the spaces with what was left of the pagan intellectual tradition, culminating with St Thomas Aquinas's works that were based primarily on the Aristotle.
Thus the via positiva - the way of faith and ritual - was buttressed by the via negativa, or the way to God through meditation. The later is what informs Christian mysticism to this day, but it is still the way of faith that leads most in whatever religion - or lack of religion - is followed. The inward way is difficult, takes years and years, and does not always work. But the outward way always does, if only for the moment.
And so it is that the ashes are received on the forehead with the solemnity of death - but with the knowledge that we will somehow live on.
This is the way of the poet. Driving back from town a few days ago, a thin coat of powdery snow was blowing across the road, forming drifts even as I passed them. In their shifting form their seemed a beauty and truth, both terrible and wonderful, of what we are. It was not through intellect that this ocurred, but through heart, as if the heart knows something that ouir mind cannot. It is this, I think, what we call soul, and what must have made the first thinking humans understand that something more than mere living was afoot in life - something greater that perhaps only the wise men can grasp, but something that we can all know intuitively.
And we often do understand in this way, from the blowing snow drifts and the rolling waves. It is not from will-full thought, then, or abstract imagination that most of us know something is afoot, but through something in our environment that comes from something else and is written in our hearts. And so the ashes bring forth that knowledge, in what the ancients called sympathy of spirit, and by whatever ways we might think, we are still brought forth before a world that not only hurts, but teaches, if we are willing. Perhaps Logan will find his way after all. FK
Into the real world they went, then, the same world that had erupted into global violence before. And the same world where old age is not a quaint novelty, but a very real and, eventually, uncomfortable stage of life. People my age, no longer young, look with dread at the ancients, now our parents, who become senile, ugly, incompetent and incontinent and then, by the miracle of modern medicine, are kept alive in these horrible states sometimes for years. We look at each other and think darkly - not us! Better to die! But I have seen the will to live. Even the ancient have it, with all their suffering and pills, until the last, faintest glow of energy finally dissipates. It is only then that they acquiesce to the big mystery. And so, I know, it will remain for most of us. Could Logan's domed world have a glimmer of compassion to it?
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, which simultaneously commiserates the last days of Jesus and the reality of death in life. In the Catholic Church, a cross of ashes is put on the foreheads of parishioners as the priest says, to each, "from ashes you are born and to ashes you go," or something very similar (there goes MY memory). We are reminded that death awaits us, as well as an afterlife, too, when Lent is done at Easter. But Logan didn't have Easter, nor any of the other beliefs and rituals. He only had his desire to live and his ignorance to protect him from the real world. The world before him was not any more evil than the world of his future. It is iis vicissitudes, its suffering and fears, that creates the worst of our violence. With Logan and his fellow followers, this will happen again. The world by itself offers no palliative; rather it is by thoughts of the mind and the inner life, of the heart, that give us reason to live in the face of a painful old age and a scary death.
So, in Gary Lachman's The Secret Teachers, we learn about the ways in which the Western world dealt with this perennial problem. I have just finished reading of the era of the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, beginning in seriousness about 200 years after the birth of Christ, and lasting until the final dismemberment in the 8th century. It was a time of confusion and warfare, of barbarian hordes and clashing ideologies. It was also the last of the Pagan era, where intellect gave way to faith, where brain gave way to heart, for the world had to be remade, to be re-understood by the masses, not just the intellectual elite. And so the West veered off into dogma, and quickly, into intolerance, for a religion built on belief rather than a foundation of thought could be easy pickings. As the late Medieval period went into its high phase, after the 9th century, the great Christian thinkers of the time filled in the spaces with what was left of the pagan intellectual tradition, culminating with St Thomas Aquinas's works that were based primarily on the Aristotle.
Thus the via positiva - the way of faith and ritual - was buttressed by the via negativa, or the way to God through meditation. The later is what informs Christian mysticism to this day, but it is still the way of faith that leads most in whatever religion - or lack of religion - is followed. The inward way is difficult, takes years and years, and does not always work. But the outward way always does, if only for the moment.
And so it is that the ashes are received on the forehead with the solemnity of death - but with the knowledge that we will somehow live on.
This is the way of the poet. Driving back from town a few days ago, a thin coat of powdery snow was blowing across the road, forming drifts even as I passed them. In their shifting form their seemed a beauty and truth, both terrible and wonderful, of what we are. It was not through intellect that this ocurred, but through heart, as if the heart knows something that ouir mind cannot. It is this, I think, what we call soul, and what must have made the first thinking humans understand that something more than mere living was afoot in life - something greater that perhaps only the wise men can grasp, but something that we can all know intuitively.
And we often do understand in this way, from the blowing snow drifts and the rolling waves. It is not from will-full thought, then, or abstract imagination that most of us know something is afoot, but through something in our environment that comes from something else and is written in our hearts. And so the ashes bring forth that knowledge, in what the ancients called sympathy of spirit, and by whatever ways we might think, we are still brought forth before a world that not only hurts, but teaches, if we are willing. Perhaps Logan will find his way after all. FK
RSS Feed