Prospero's Books

Whither it goes

Chapter One of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of John:

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit (iii,8).

The field of chaos theory began with an almost identical observation by Edward Lorenz, that the nonlinear system we call weather is utterly determined yet utterly unpredictable. For the author of John, the Spirit, too, is a nonlinear system, far from equilibrium, on the very edge of chaos.

Shakespeare behind Bars

Last month, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I showed Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller's film Shakespeare behind Bars, a 93-minute documentary on a production of The Tempest by inmates in Kentucky's Luther Luckett prison. Four observations:

• A prison, by definition, is a "closed system," increasing in entropy unless it can draw energy from outside. The introduction of The Tempest into the lives of the cast brings such energy, allowing for growth.
• The production process shown in the film is a remarkable example of how living systems grow and evolve by moving from organization through disorganization to reorganization. (The very word tempest suggests the necessary slip into chaos, and "chaos theory" can be said to have been born in Lorenz's study of complex weather systems.)
• With so little to distract them, the cast members--during several months of production--study and "live" their roles at a depth I've never seen before, in students or in actors. Shakespeare's fractal complexity constantly repays this effort.
• As the cast members perform a play that centers on forgiveness and redemption, they collectively and individually struggle with those issues in their own lives.

Shakespeare behind Bars is one of the best half-dozen Shakespeare films I've ever seen. I recommend it highly.

Our breaking and slashing of God

Kester Brewin, at The Complex Christ, has been posting an interesting series of reflections on, among other things, the shift in power that occurs when hunter-gatherer economies are replaced by agricultural economies. From the latest in that series:

Bread is not the simplest thing to make. Leavened, it requires careful control of yeasts, and to make in any quantity, a good supply of grain and a means of controlled heat.

Wine requires more technology still. Large quantities of grapes need to be harvested, and these need proper storage to age and mature.

In other words, the Eucharist as we know it contains hidden within it symbols of our domestication of the earth and its resources and thus, connectedly, symbols of the domination of one life-style - settled food production - over another - hunting and gathering.

Perhaps this is benign, being so long in our history in the making, but I wonder if, in these times when our relationship to the planet is so fragile we might reflect on the Eucharist as a sort of lament for our abuse of the world, just as we might use it to lament for our breaking and slashing of God.

Mesh and share

From beliefnet, Archbishop Tutu on interdependence.

Make the path as you walk

Several years ago I sat in on a colleague's course in 20th century Spanish literature. The course pushed the limits of my Spanish, but it was worth the effort, in part because it introduced me to one of my now favorite poets, Antonio Machado.

Monday, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore quoted Machado:

Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.

Gore continued:

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures—each a palpable possibility—and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The cosmic dance which is always there

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

--Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

(Thanks to God's Politics for the quotation.)

       

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues

The best Christmas meditation I've read so far this year comes from Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of the Wi'am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre in Bethlehem, as quoted in the always inspiring Signs of Emergence blog:

Every homeless refugee, desperate for a bed for a night, understands the agony of Joseph of Bethlehem.

Every frightened teenage girl, pregnant and lost, comprehends the bewilderment of Mary.

Every executive, trying to reconcile commercial realities with moral imperatives, identifies with the local innkeeper.

Every working person, in a daily routine awakening to a sudden reverence for life, experiences the awe of the Judean shepherd.

Every ruler or intellectual, coming to the limit of human power, evinces the humility of the Magi.

Every tyrant who keeps in control by means of ruthless and harsh practices knows the insecure fear of Herod.

Every infant, born on the rubbish heap of a city slum, shares the indignity of the Holy Birth.

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues....

To dream all the time

Writer's Blog has posted this photo of a window display at New York's Henri Bendel. (Click the picture for a larger image.) The display is said to be inspired by a quotation from the French novelist Marcel Proust:

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Neither arbitrary nor absurd

Yesterday, after naming Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot as the Prospero's Books Book of the Year, I spent some time skimming the book again, especially the notes I have made in it. Here's a passage that stands in contrast with Richard Dawkins's portrayal, in The God Delusion, of religion and science as polar opposites:

. . . there were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there is order in nature (6).

Book of the Year

The second annual Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.

A few sentences from the first pages of the book (especially when read alongside this blog's description, at the top left of each page) may suggest why it was chosen:

About 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe--a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton--mystic, theologian, and alchemist--and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science . . . .

The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge." Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways. . . .

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains contains the secret rules on which the universe runs (4).

(The 2006 Book of the Year was The Museum of Lost Wonder.)