Friday, March 30, 2007

ἀγάπῃ?

"Samson went back to bed,
not much hair left on his head;
he ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed.
And history books forgot about us,
and the Bible didn't mention us;
and the Bible didn't mention us,
not even once.
"
--Regina Spektor, Samson



It occurred to me the other day that people say so often that the Bible is a love story above anything else.  This interested me.

Philosophers may sit down and write about life when they have not stood up to experience it, but I think my own subject should have a greater criticism levelled at it: I don't think that Theologians really understand the concept of love they feel the need to talk about so much.

I occurred to me at the same time as the above that it seems less and less likely those who wrote the Bible did, either.


THE THEOLOGY OF SLEEP

It seems like we were always asleep, love,
and in our bed the ages passed us by;
perhaps I was God and you were Mary
and our flock turned to Plato and Nietzsche,
left us curled and childlike: the peaceful dead.

Reading stories with your head in my lap,
amused and angry: "if I was their God,
they'd have left the Bible as it was!"
You laugh when you hear I sold the rights,
so desperate to be a starving artist;
"they should have stopped at the King James," you say,
but your hand is on my throat: I cannot speak.
Perhaps I am asleep.

I held you while you screamed into my chest,
helpless rage at news of Samson dead,
of David's child burning in his arms.
We had Bathsheba sobbing at our door,
wordless with her hands outstretched, begging,
begging for mercy or care: God has none,
and Delilah mourns her love, never told.

God makes the sun to stream in the windows,
but our eyes are dull with sleep and pain;
"it's so dark outside," you whisper sadly,
"and you never wrote a happy ending."
Your voice fades: "it was a love story, once."

Her son is dead - she will answer no more prayers.

Jesus wept; his Father only smoothes your hair
and whispers, "it was only a dream, love;

go to sleep."

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Some thoughts on Heroes, Part 1

Introduction and Religion

All the heroes are dead; long live the heroes of the age.

We seek a 'something' or a 'someone' in life to follow; if not to follow then at least to believe in; if not to believe in then at least to identify with. Where does it come from, this need to follow, to have faith, to be like? Why is so difficult to believe man to be 'the measure of all things?' Somewhere along the line mankind, ανθρωπος, 'He Who Looks Up' has lost the ability to gaze skyward and see only the sky; today there must be something there to fix their eyes on. Why?

The religious disposition (if so general a term can be said to exist) is very much concerned with such philosophical finding of objects in the sky. Christians march under their banners with their eyes 'fixed firmly on the Cross of Jesus'; Muslims try to live as exactly as possible in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad; Buddhists live the slow turning of the wheel, life into life into life with their hopes on far-off Nirvana. For all of them, the aim is something ahead, something only perhaps and possibly attainable, something - and this is vitally important - too big for the human mind to grasp unaided. Perhaps the luckiest are granted slight revelation, maybe a saint will strive a whole life for one crumb of uncertain wisdom, but why? What is it that makes people follow a star that they cannot see into a land that they cannot call home? For when people ask why religion has so little changing effect on the world, the answer is in how people follow: with their eyes fixed firmly on the cloudy part of the sky where they believe their star may be hid. How can a hidden star shine on the world; how can it affect change? In all the long history of belief in God, how many times could on possibly say God himself has intervened to change things? Miracles remain sparse and unverified, and if God is willing to show himself to the world, then he is doing it slowly and through his sad, fallible human vessels. How sad it is that so many religious people fix their lives on the unknown eternal when it is their God, if he exists, that has given them the potential to show himself to this world; to choose our own star to follow, different to the rest of the teeming masses of humanity. Though perhaps we all go by the grace of God and strive by his strength, nevertheless it is given to us to choose our path and venerate our creator by a life well lived. No 'certainty of heaven' for the truly righteous, no 'eternally elect' of God, no fundamentalist absolutes, for to the truly righteous comes the uncertainty of having to draw the map as they go. "I love those who do not know how to live," Nietzsche writes, "for they are the ones that cross over." If God truly loves anyone, how could it be those who put stock in eternity and so fail to affect change in their world? No, it is not them who are truly Christlike, trying Islamic, truly heightening their status in life, it is those whose constant devotion to the life that they live proves them to be wonderfully, awefully and perfectly human, on the road to becoming everything humanity was and should be again. It is these.

Friday, March 23, 2007

?

When I went to bed last night, most of the way to sleep already, I left myself the cryptic message "Bones, like bones." written on my computer screen.  I have absolutely no idea why.  Which probably means it was something really cool.

Drat.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

What They Don't Want You to Know

In order to understand Scoobydoobydooism you need to realize that everything is controlled by a synod made up of invisible undead Popes with help from the riders of the Apocolypse.
The conspiracy first started during the Battle of Hastings in Oolan Baator. They have been responsible for many events throughout history, including the French Revolution (it didn't really happen! All lies!).
Today, members of the conspiracy are everywhere. They can be identified by whistling through your teeth; they want to upholster MENSA and imprison resisters in France using Jimmy Swaggart's spare underwear.
In order to prepare for this, we all must undergo ritual Jewish cleansing. Since the media is controlled by Luke Skywalker we should get our information from Bush Administration.

Fight the power!


Thank-you, Val!  You are as ever, an inspiration :P

Saturday, March 10, 2007

'Look upon my works, ye mighty...'

This is the third time I've had this poem brought to my attention in as many days.  I wonder if someone is trying to tell me something.  If so, they've not been watching very carefully: I've already got the point.  Or the pointlessness, as the case may be.


Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Some thoughts on Hope

There are no easy answers anymore. As for hope, well: perhaps there was hope in the 70s, when people believed they could change things; perhaps there was hope – at least of a kind – in the 90s, too, when people thought “fuck it,” probably in those words, daring to believe that they didn’t have to care.

Things change.

The grim reality is that the age of freedom is over – the era of heroes is drawing to close – the world is slowly settling into the inevitable downward spiral of the mundane. As the age of Pisces, the age of Spirituality draws to a close, people who believe in such thing rave about the new Age, the age of Peace, of intellectual growth. Fools. The age of the fish was not only an age of religion and monotheism, but of belief; an age of faith. Slowly we strangle our capacity to trust with a noose of logic, and the consequences will be felt for centuries: till the end of the age, as it were, if not beyond. For humanity is slowly beginning to understand – or at least it thinks it understands – that ‘the heart is deceitful above all things,’ and is resolved to engage it as little as possible. Things are not to be believed until first proven, tested beyond doubt, justified ‘a priori’ with as little emotional involvement and possible. There is no room in this new age for instinct, for bias, no room for hoping against the odds or for leaps of faith.

Already the effects are being felt throughout society, though not always in obvious ways. Probably the most obvious sign is the decline of religion, especially those based exclusively on faith; why traditional Christianity has suffered so greatly in comparison to, say, Islam is precisely due to this – where Islam remains firmly rooted in action and consequence and practically. “Do this and be saved!” the Prophet proclaims, where the evangelicals have only “believe and you will live.” What use is it to ask for belief in the age of reason? Mainstream Christianity has become fatally disconnected from everyday cause-and-effect, from the modern predicament of blow and counter-blow, give and take. At the heart of things, this is why we are watching Christianity slowly die: because it is eternally rooted in paradox, Nietzsche’s absurdissimum of God on the cross, and above all the ultimate contradiction of grace. Christianity is based on the idea that God has let us off the hook simply because he desires too, and this is the idea that humanity is quickly going resistant to; God may forgive and forget as is his wont, but the acceptance of grace requires a belief that you are forgiven and a faith in the one forgiving you, two things that people are rapidly losing the capacity for. God may forgive and forget, but humans are slow to do both, and before long the word ‘grace’ will not only be connected inextricably with ‘paradox’ but also with ‘self-delusion.’ It is funny that, while people still seem capable of acts of tremendous grace, their ability to receive it is one of the first spiritual senses to go; perhaps one day we will be able to accept that it is just as blessed to receive as to give. Sadly, not even I am able to have faith in that.

Religion is not the only indicator of the world’s slow shift from the life-affirming to the willing suicide of the spirit, however – many things in life exist only through faith, and they too are feeling their energies wane. The divorce rate in the western world continues to rise, even as the marriage rate falls: not only do people lack the faith in one another – even in the ‘special someone’ or one of the multiple of them as it seems to be becoming – to believe that there will be better days after surviving the hard ones, they lack even the faith to try commitment in the first place. Marriage is just an experiment, a potentially costly flip of the coin that may or may not work out. How long before the casual sexual partner completely replaces the lover? Before the prenup replaces vows, lawyers replace priests, how long before the pragmatist has entirely killed off the lingering spirit of Romanticism? Love survives only in an environment of faith and hope; otherwise it is either lust or despair. How long before we take it for granted that those are all there is to be had?

Though at times it may seem like quite the opposite, the fabric of our society also relies fundamentally on faith and hope; without hope for the future and at least a modicum of faith in those who step up to the task of building it, how will we ever progress? Stagnation, at least socially, is the only outcome for a society that stops believing the future can be better: education, savings and pension plans, political activism, scientific research grants, entrepreneurialism – all these are entirely reliant on the people contributing to them having hope for what they will achieve in the future. If we lose that, or lose faith in the people who make such actions possible, what is the point? Why don’t we all just give up: curl up and die, or lose all now-meaningless restraints and behave exactly as we want to?
And of course, we do. From the alarmingly steep and consistent rise in mental health disorders to the growing weekend culture of binge drinking, drugs, random sex, violence, crime and whatever else appeals to the unrestrained psyche, society gasps out nihilism with every breath. The acts themselves are not the most worrying thing – every society has had its violently non-conformist, after all – but the way in which they are beginning to become the institutions of society, the frame into which people search for where they fit. Identity is no longer based around culture, religion, employment as it once was, but on cheap and transitory values. It may be old-fashioned of me to yearn for the ‘good old days,’ but it is easy to be sick of people whose lives are centred around getting smashed and/or laid at the weekend and talking about nothing else until it all beings the next week. Perhaps this is the origin of the midlife crisis: the slowly dawning realisation that living from day to day only leads to your ‘better tomorrow’ being the day you die, simply because there won’t be another one.

In none of this is there a solution for avoiding such a future. Why? Because there may not be one. There is no law anywhere that proves humanity ‘must’ survive; only our own amazing arrogance in believing our race will endure forever. The only real remaining question is this: will humanity realise before it is too late? It is never too late to begin hoping, certainly, and it is never too late to find something or someone to have faith in, or even become such a person ourselves. Only one thing is certain: humanity stands at a crossroads in history, because humanity is always at a crossroads in history – every day is a step down one road or the other, and every step has the possibility of being the one that takes us that bit too far; makes us that single second too far gone.
Perhaps that saddest thing is this: if today were that day, the first day of the ever-shortening span of our existence, would you even realise it?

Would any of us?