Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

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(and now for something completely different)

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already caught this, but it’s novel to me right now.  I was watching the season finale of Dexter on CBS and it dawned on me all of a sudden why, for all of the gore and sociopathy, Dexter seemed so familiar.  The plot, the character, are modeled on superhero comics.  In fact, not just any superhero, but an iconic and powerful one–Spiderman.  There are significant variations, of course, but the structural parallels are strong.

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This post has been brewing in my head for a while.  I keep meaning to sit down and let it out, but until now that hasn’t happened.  For all the time brewing, I’ve not had tons of time or energy to rework the underlying ideas, so take it for the rough piece of work it is.  It ends up a good deal more vague than I would prefer.

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The notion of magick in the Crowley-esque sense of the term tends to haunt modern polytheism.  Magick seems to run counter to the devotional elements we tend to see as properly religious.  Praising the divine seems to be one thing, plying the divine for favors quite another.  In general, both are seen as acceptable, but their relationship is a little obscure.

Crowley’s phrasing exacerbates the problem by making magick primarily a question of Will, of training the Will to exert itself over the world.  There are all sorts of qualifications here, since that isn’t the Will in the sense of ego, but Will in the sense of higher self.  And training the Will isn’t simply a matter of getting what you want but of moving in harmony with the higher Will so that you want what is proper to it. 

Still, this seems a bit different than the attitude that directs itself toward a divine presence outside of and beyond itself.  The importance of banishing, for example, points toward a defensive posture toward the world of spirit.  In more devotional frames, we tend to think that too much asking is a bit gauche. 

To paraphrase a friend, we have the sense that the gods have better things to do than just help us with some money.  What encounter we do have with the divine through devotional work tends to be received as an injunction rather than as a pact we must examine before accepting.

This pans out at the level of ritual, too, with there being two sorts of ritual, the sort meant to manipulate and the sort meant to praise.  The problem isn’t unique to paganism and we can see variations of it Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, and other traditions.  The question of self-worth gets posed pointedly in these discussions.  How important am I in relation to the divine?

I don’t work well in that magickal mindset and I suspect I’m not alone in that.  It jars with my basic reason for pursuing spirituality.  Yet I feel like not praying for things is equally problematic, especially since so much of my practice has to do with the sacredness of the world, not just localized in divinities ‘out there’ but in the world ‘right here.’

The approach I take is that praying for something is more than asking for some thing in your life.  It’s asking for the divine to enter into your life through that thing you pray for and giving your promise that you will nurture that spark of the divine as it enters that place.  The prayer does not end with the request or the granting of the request, but continues as we put that blessing to use.

We ought, whenever possible, to use that blessing to deepen our connection with the divinity granting it.  In so doing, we bring that part of the world into closer harmony with that sacred divinity.

I don’t think that’s solely an intellectual distinction, either.  In making requests in this way, it shifts the way in which we relate to the divine and very possibly changes how the divine responds to us.  It makes the self a point in the circulation of blessings rather than the endpoint of them.

My joy, my happiness, becomes an opportunity for shared joy.  I may manage and care for them for myself, because my self is the point of entry for them, but my self is not the measure of them.

Unlike Protagoras, I do not think man is the measure of all things.  I define my religiosity in great part by the notion that there are standards by which man is judged that man does not create.  The effort to reduce religion to man, to the symbols we create, to the movements of our psyche alone, undoes the movement of devotion so central to it.

This isn’t to do away with reflecting about who we pray to and for what.  But it becomes less a manner of caution (don’t make a bad deal, get cheated) than of care (what blessings can you make the most of).

So there is this beautiful passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in which he describes the orbits of the gods about the Good, each accompanied in train by the souls they have chosen for their retinue.  It’s a beautiful passage and, sadly, I don’t have a copy of the work ready to hand to quote. 

But I was always struck by how that seemed to parallel the notion in many African diaspora faiths that the orisha or loa chose heads.  The metaphor seemed nearly identical, right up to the notion that the orsha/loa were in turn oriented toward Olodumare or Bon Dieu, the greater Good.

So, let me share this little bit I came across in Simone Weil’s Intimation of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks:

The image of the man as a plant whose root penetrates heaven is linked in the Timaeus to a theory of chastity….This plant is sprinkled by celestial water, a divine semen, which enters the head.  In that man who continually exercises the spiritual and the intellectual part of himself…in him the whole contents of the head, including the divine semen, is propelled by circular movements like those which govern the rotation of the heavens, the stars and sun.  This divine semen is what Plato calls the divine being lodged with us, in us, and whom we must serve. (98-99)

How well this parallels the whole notion of initiation and worship in many of the African diaspora faiths!  It’s interesting to think of that in evolutionary terms, as indication perhaps that the two share a common ancestor.  If naught else, it’s interesting to consider in terms of parallel development.

In Straw Dogs, Gray quotes Schopenhauer from On the Basis of Morality:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (37)

It’s a good quote, I would say a ‘true’ fable.  But both Schopenhauer and Gray seem unable to crack open its hard outer shell to enjoy the meaty nut contained within.  They think Kant laughable, worthy of derision, for being so foolish as to spend so much time chasing after what was already his.

But imagine that this story is not in the mouth, the pen of bitter Schopenhauer, sitting, lonely, in his study with his dog Atman at his feet.  Strip away the cynical laugh he is having at the ‘old fool.’  Instead, imagine Kant telling this story, his wife at his side, in a warm drawing room, with an old friend fresh from the dusty road to Konigsberg. 

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Straw Dogs is one of the best works of skepticism that I have read.  I’m not talking about the tawdry I-don’t-believe-in-anything-but-science sort of skepticism, either.  This is the good ol’ Sextus Empiricus brand of philosophic thought.

Gray overstates more than a few of his points, over-relies on easy notions of natural selection, and tends to engage in the “you cannot have your cake, though I shall eat of it” problems.*  But there is a kind of cunning to all that which makes it clear that he knows this.  His style is reminiscent of moments in Nietzsche when he set outs, almost side by side, statements that suggest their own undoing.  There is a textual ‘wink’ and a sly smile behind it all.

Which brings me to what most impresses me.  The book is wickedly stylish.  Each section is, at most, a few pages long, containing tightly packed meditations that lay waste to many a cherished idol, revealing them to be, well, nothing more than straw dogs.  Each piece has been cut and crafted to say what it means and nothing more. 

The last work I read with this kind of care and craft might have been Adorno’s Minima Moralia.  The comparison is apt on many levels, too, when you consider the underlying pessimism and the easy way both have with quotation.  It’s sharp, cutting insight.

It’s inimitably British, full of easy-going pessimism and self-deprecating wit.  Sure, we humans may be headed for hell in a handbasket, but relax, we’re not really as important as all that.  Even when I don’t agree with the sentiment or the argument, I cannot but tip my hat to his presentation.

 *By which I mean that he criticizes several ways of conceiving history and humanity, while tacitly using them for his own rhetorical benefit.  For example, he dismisses the notion of ‘modernity’ as empty, a final shell for progressive morality, while making statements about polytheism being ”too delicate for modern minds.”  But, like I am about to say, there is a sense of deliberateness to that.

I’ve been reading fiction, a bit of a rarity for me.  In this case, it’s the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper.  It’s well-written and, for the most part, well-executed.  But it’s not really the fiction per se that has me thinking.

What I like most about the story is not the trappings of the fantasy genre, the great magical powers, the encounters with big, powerful beings.  It’s the smaller descriptions, the way she dwells on the magic that seems real to me.

Like the making of the Greenwitch.  She discusses the women coming together, constructing it, the sense of awe and power that is bound up with its creation and its sacrifice.  The construction, not the later appearance of it in full monster mode, touches on what is real and true to me in many so-called ‘polytheistic’ faiths. 

It’s the magic of time, of repetition, of an event that draws its past to itself, not revealing it as one great history of details, but as an affective charge, mysterious and true.

Which gets me to the question of unity, of the One.  I have a tendency to think of it in very material terms, like the unity of a brick, solid and unmoving.   Not just me, either.  The work of Parmenides, with its play of Being and Becoming, is very much about the struggle to come to terms with what the One is, along with a sense that what is one does not change.

Like the brick: it may be broken apart into the many, losing its unity.

But there are other unities that I want to remind myself of, through which I might ward away a too quick notion of unity.

Unities of fire, of water.  The way flames flicker dance, remain one even as they are in constant contact with each other.  The way water flows, in constant, moving, relation to itself, the way it is taken up in a greater movement.  Shore and ocean, air and ocean, in constant codetermination.  One and changing.

Then there are unities of time, of the fire’s spark.  The fires born of the sparks are ‘one’ through time with the parent fire, a unity of family and effect. 

And there is that unity of repetition, of the dense allegiance between events repeated over time, of the Greenwitch sort, where the unity is like a needle and thread through folds of fabric, a tugging that pulls moments into contact.

That’s a very difficult and often inchoate unity, where the One and the Many pull close and stumble apart.  There is no easy categorical description to be had, only an unsure naming. 

This is what makes sense and fills out a caution of blurring together a spirt under a single name.  The experience is too blurred to give any name full purchase, yet too personal for us not to struggle toward a name. 

It is a naming of prayer that does not reduce to the naming of a catalog.  It’s amorphous, one, many, like shadows moving on a wall, blending and separating.  A different notion, too, of truth, a truth of the calling, a truth judged by what it calls forth, by what responds to it.