I know, yesterday's blog was one of those reaching for the stars through the stutterings of logic and analogy. It might sound that I think I know what I'm talking about, but "thinking" would be the wrong term to describe it. I sense it, and probably less so than an everyday illiterate tribal member from another time and place, who instead of logic used mythology, the stuff of all religions. That is the way the world has chosen to speak beyond itself since the beginning of language and measured thought, and for good reason.
Metaphor is the only bridge to a greater world that we have linguistically, and it was best used by the holy people of old, but now many no longer listen. If not invested from the start, the stuff sounds like gibberish, contradictions and fairy tales, and the authority of ecclesiastics becomes caustic. Instead, we have turned to art, to interpret for ourselves what truth the author or artist might have to convey. Still, we must be open to that truth, or it will pass us by as another tidbit of prettiness or foggy thinking, just like the mythologies of old seem so silly or opaque to us now. But it is there; not everywhere, but in anything that I would judge to be true art. I found it in a popular movie recently, "Interstellar," and I am finding it again and again in M. Rawlings novel, "Sojourners" :
"And after he had known all possible of this earth, he longed to know still others, to walk like a god the starry sky. The sky itself could scarcely satisfy, it was infinity for which he yearned, to be absorbed in it, never again lonely, the cosmos filtering through his conscious being, and he in turn returning to the cosmos his own awareness."
This from a book published in 1953, long before LSD and the big Eastern guru movement and the New Age; this, the character, an unschooled prototype, a 19th century farmer, the salt of the earth. From him we learn to look at nature for its beauty and its secrets, and to social life for the marvel of our own being, born as we are for certain expressions of the infinite. Here we learn what we are missing in our anxieties, in our worries and desires and ambitions. Here we learn that life itself is enough, as are each of us to the other, if we just let it in, if we just gave up our tortured self-centeredness and opened to what was both within and without us. Love, beauty, and as the seed within them, truth.
Once we see it in one movie and one book, we begin to see it in many more. These are our new mythologies, but they are telling us the same thing: that life is a mystery that is guided, that is vested with us and for us, although we can never fully understand. They are telling us that the wonder of it all is more than enough, and we as humans in living it become more than enough ourselves: whole, good, beautiful in our own right. They are also telling us that we are NOT what we should be. There is guilt in this, or danger and transgression, or however the culture or author wishes to express it, but it is our tale - that we COULD be enough but are not. They show us that it is all of ours, this tale, of how we got to this dark point, and how we can reclaim our true nature, both ours and all that is around us.
I would say that this, this message at large, is in all good works, by definition. There are many more such works out there than we often guess, the message hidden as it must be, for little is truly learned from pedantic lecturing, which cannot pinpoint the message anyway. It cannot be put in practical words; it simply must be coded. And just as we find it in more and more works the more we look, so we find it in our own lives, in the view out the window, in a visit to the dentist. Life is our metaphor, speaking as it does of something greater - of our walking like gods among the stars, of our conscious being filtering through the stars where we, in turn, give back with our own awareness.
Marjorie Rawlings, you got it right. From somewhere in the solitude of the soul, you found what we all find there, and it was good. FK
Metaphor is the only bridge to a greater world that we have linguistically, and it was best used by the holy people of old, but now many no longer listen. If not invested from the start, the stuff sounds like gibberish, contradictions and fairy tales, and the authority of ecclesiastics becomes caustic. Instead, we have turned to art, to interpret for ourselves what truth the author or artist might have to convey. Still, we must be open to that truth, or it will pass us by as another tidbit of prettiness or foggy thinking, just like the mythologies of old seem so silly or opaque to us now. But it is there; not everywhere, but in anything that I would judge to be true art. I found it in a popular movie recently, "Interstellar," and I am finding it again and again in M. Rawlings novel, "Sojourners" :
"And after he had known all possible of this earth, he longed to know still others, to walk like a god the starry sky. The sky itself could scarcely satisfy, it was infinity for which he yearned, to be absorbed in it, never again lonely, the cosmos filtering through his conscious being, and he in turn returning to the cosmos his own awareness."
This from a book published in 1953, long before LSD and the big Eastern guru movement and the New Age; this, the character, an unschooled prototype, a 19th century farmer, the salt of the earth. From him we learn to look at nature for its beauty and its secrets, and to social life for the marvel of our own being, born as we are for certain expressions of the infinite. Here we learn what we are missing in our anxieties, in our worries and desires and ambitions. Here we learn that life itself is enough, as are each of us to the other, if we just let it in, if we just gave up our tortured self-centeredness and opened to what was both within and without us. Love, beauty, and as the seed within them, truth.
Once we see it in one movie and one book, we begin to see it in many more. These are our new mythologies, but they are telling us the same thing: that life is a mystery that is guided, that is vested with us and for us, although we can never fully understand. They are telling us that the wonder of it all is more than enough, and we as humans in living it become more than enough ourselves: whole, good, beautiful in our own right. They are also telling us that we are NOT what we should be. There is guilt in this, or danger and transgression, or however the culture or author wishes to express it, but it is our tale - that we COULD be enough but are not. They show us that it is all of ours, this tale, of how we got to this dark point, and how we can reclaim our true nature, both ours and all that is around us.
I would say that this, this message at large, is in all good works, by definition. There are many more such works out there than we often guess, the message hidden as it must be, for little is truly learned from pedantic lecturing, which cannot pinpoint the message anyway. It cannot be put in practical words; it simply must be coded. And just as we find it in more and more works the more we look, so we find it in our own lives, in the view out the window, in a visit to the dentist. Life is our metaphor, speaking as it does of something greater - of our walking like gods among the stars, of our conscious being filtering through the stars where we, in turn, give back with our own awareness.
Marjorie Rawlings, you got it right. From somewhere in the solitude of the soul, you found what we all find there, and it was good. FK
RSS Feed