Prospero's Books

Be wanderers

In Sunday school, many of us learned a piece of Bible trivia--that the shortest verse in the King James Bible is John 11:35: "Jesus wept."

I was struck this week by another two-word Bible verse: Verse 42 of Barnstone and Meyer's translation of the Gospel of Thomas.

The verse evokes Gilgamesh and Odysseus, Abraham and Moses, the Buddha and Muhammad, Dante's Dante and Shakespeare's Pericles and Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Jesus himself. It resembles language of the Master Mason degree, repeated by Masons when they suspect that a stranger is a brother. It warns us not to become too attached to the material world. It charges us to be as the homeless on this earth.

The verse is spoken by Jesus. In some translations it is rendered "Be passersby." Barnstone and Meyer are, I think, more poetic:

"Be wanderers."

The walls of our memory palaces

From Joscelyn Godwin's The Golden Thread:

"Since most of us . . . are not expert in traveling the inner world of the imagination, we hang the walls of our memory palaces with pictures that others have given us. If we are fortunate, our parents began the process by telling us stories and giving us picture books that filled our imaginations with archetypal images of talking beasts, heroes, and heroines, far-off places, comedy and tragedy. Maybe they also brought us up in one of the richly imagistic religious traditions. We may have left its dogmas behind as we grew up, but its mythology is a trust fund on which we will never cease to draw.

"If we were unfortunate, our parents parked us in front of the television. And that is the measure of the gulf between the imaginal world of the poor, ignorant medieval peasants and that of today" (93-93).

Not a being at all

The opening sentences of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God, will certainly keep me reading:

We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. "That book was really hard!" readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. "Of course it was!" I want to reply. "It was about God." But many find this puzzling. Surely everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and that we really don't understand what we mean when we say that he is "good," "wise," or "intelligent." People of faith admit in theory that God is utterly transcendent, but they seem sometimes to assume that they know exactly who "he" is and what he thinks, loves, and expects (ix).

In proper relationship with no one

An example, from Brian Swimmne's The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, of how stories can illuminate systems, in this case how an ancient Greek drama can send a powerful message for today:

We can say that even though Oedipus was made king of Thebes, he did not actually live in the kingdom of Thebes. For to live in the kingdom means to live in proper relationship with the members of the kingdom. But Oedipus was in proper relationship with no one: he was the husband of his mother; he was the murderer of his father. And yet if anyone had asked whether or not he lived in the kingdom of Thebes he would think the questioner insane, for where else could he be? But in the deeper sense of his own understanding of his essential nature and role in Thebes, he was not a member of the kingdom; he was an abomination of the kingdom.

We too regard ourselves as living on Earth. But we do not live on Earth in the sense of living as members of Earth's Community. Both in our activities, as well as in our own understanding of ourselves and Earth, we are simply not members of Earth's life. We live in this split condition, thinking we are members of Earth, unaware that we are the destroyers of Earth (55-56).

A noble life within the Great Holy

"Conceivably for as long as three hundred thousand years, humans have huddled together in the night to ponder and to celebrate the mysteries of the universe in order to find their way through the Great World they inhabit. No matter what continent humans lived on, no matter what culture, no matter what era, the work of cosmology took place every year and every month and even every day--around the fire of the African plains, in the caves of the Eurasian forests, under the brilliant night sky of the Australian land mass, in the long houses of North America. There the people told the sacred stories of how the world came to be, of what the human brings into the universe, and of what it takes to live a noble life within the Great Holy that is the universe.

"I say that every culture did this, but that of course is not exactly true. For we contemporary humans do not. Modern humanity seems to be the first culture to break with this primordial tradition of celebrating the mysteries of the universe. When we learn about other cultures who do, we feel a sense of superiority or nostalgia, depending on our evaluations of such cultures. If we regard the scientific enterprise as freeing us from earlier superstitions, we look with pity upon these primitives who devoted so much energy to teaching fantasies about the universe. On the other hand, if we think that earlier or other cultures knew something important about the universe that completely escapes our ways of knowing, we are left with a sense of sadness that such experiences are not possible for us today" (9-10).

--Brian Swimme, The HIdden Heart of the Cosmos

Cosmos, Nature, and Culture

This weekend I'm presenting a paper in Phoenix at "Cosmos, Nature, and Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference," sponsored by the Metanexus Institute. I've just posted the paper, "A 'Mirror up to Nature': Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare," on this site. It's my first long essay that grew directly from writing I've done for this blog.

If you're a reader of this blog and would be interested in getting together with me in Phoenix this weekend, please let me know.

"Farewell lecture"

This spring, my colleague, Richard Turner, and I were asked to give "farewell lectures" on the occasion of our retirement from fulltime university teaching. Mine was about the transparency and opacity of language and the "cosmic" importance of stories. If you'd like to read my lecture, I've posted it on this site.

Brother Bloom

In April, I presented a paper at the Festive Board following a meeting of my Masonic lodge, Lodge Vitruvian in Indianapolis. In the paper, "Brother Bloom," I argue that Leopold Bloom, the central character in Joyce's Ulysses, is clearly a Freemason and that Freemasonry serves three functions in Joyce's depiction of him. I have posted the paper on this site, if you're interested in reading it.

We are as gods . . .

Forty years ago, in the fall of 1968, a remarkable publication appeared: The Whole Earth Catalog. Perhaps no other single resource has so influenced my thinking since. Its "Understanding Whole Systems" section was a direct inspiration for this blog.

Every issue of the Catalog carried this purpose statement:

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where the gross defects obscure actual gain. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, person power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Last week I was delighted to discover that the contents of the Catalog and its descendants are being archived at the Whole Earth Catalog site.

 

(Warning: Enter the site at your peril; you may not emerge from it for hours.)

The slow work of growth and death

I've just rediscovered "The Work of Local Culture," the 1988 Iowa Humanities Lecture given by my former University of Kentucky colleague and friend, Wendell Berry. The lecture is available online at the E. F. Schumacher Society site.

Wendell begins by describing an old bucket hanging on a fence post on his family's farm. He writes:

I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on inside that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is a microcosm of earth-making.

He continues:

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two.

This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

A couple of paragraphs later, Wendell returns to the bucket to help him make the central point of his lecture:

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account.

(Portrait by Robert Shetterly at AmericansWhoTellTheTruth.org)