Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Unreliable Narrator–You

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Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to play with the post-modern idea of the unreliable narrator, a staple of certain literary fictions and now understandable to me.  The most unreliable narrator of all may be our Self, or, rather, the work done by our mind to create a self.  As we attempt to weave a coherent notion of our story–how this, what, let’s use Heidegger’s idea of dasein–this dasein came to be here now, we impose on our memories a logic, a sequence, a string of cause and effects that explain, as best the dasein can, how it came to be in this moment.

There are many problems here, but the one I want to focus on is the fungibility of our memory and what Kant called the a prioris of thinking:  space and time.  Our memory changes as we access it, as we put it into new contexts, as our understanding grows and that changes happens to a quanta that was shaped by the context in which we first had the experience, the understandings we had then and by the fog created by our senses, which, by design and necessity, edit our lived experience so we can utilize it.

On top of this string of memory altering inevitables are the a priori categories of space and time, mental constructs which our reason uses to make what William James called “the blooming, buzzing confusion” worthwhile to us.  We see objects in four dimensions, in a space time matrix that changes as we perceive an object, event, feeling, moment, idea.

(Henry and William James)

What this means to us is that our Self has the demanding and ultimately futile task of seeing the plot in our life, its why and its meaning.  Why futile?  Because we change as we touch it, not Heisenberg, no, more than that we change more than the spin or the location of memory when we touch it, we change its content and thereby change our narrative, which, as a result changes our Self.  This is always happening, every moment of every day of our lives.   Modernist literature like Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past was an attempt to give to us in written form this mutability at the heart of the internal project that is us.

As I said a few posts back, this is descriptive, not proscriptive and certainly not prescriptive, and it does contain one kernel of great importance. Since we actively construct our own narrative from the experiences we can recall, we can enter into that stream and actively construct our future.  In fact, unless we enter that stream with purpose, Heraclitus’s famous river, it will carry us along without our intention.

So, buckle up, strap on that orange life-preserver and take your seat in the raft that is your Self navigating the flood of your life.  It’s a thrilling ride no matter where it takes you.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, Third Phase

Destabilizing. And That’s OK.

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

A further extrapolation on the narrative fallacy and the self.  (see post below)  This notion, destabilizing as it is, makes sense to me. Which is ironic if you get the gist here.

It helps explain the existential panic I sometimes feel when my mood darkens, sometimes with a known trigger, sometimes not.  Yesterday was such a time for me.  When I have conversations about my work, Missing in this case, the potential for a seismic tremor heightens.  Of course, these tremors, unlike earth bound temblors, can produce good shakes and bad shakes.

Stefan’s careful analysis of what he felt worked and what didn’t, which I appreciated, especially in the detail and clarity which he offered so freely, unsettled me.  Geez, if this much still needs to happen and this is the 4th draft, what’s wrong with me?  WRONG.  OH.  I’VE FELT WRONG BEFORE. AND AHA THIS PROVES THIS OTHER TIMES RIGHT.  WHAT WERE THE OTHER TIMES?  UHH.  CAN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY, BUT THE FEELING, THE FEELING’S THE SAME.  ISN’T IT?

This went on as I drove away from his house.  I would remember the tell yourself this is a good workout, that you’re not tired article I read in the New York Times yesterday so I would tell myself that this was temporary, not anchored, that it was good to get feedback, that I was having a good day.  I had a friend who cared enough to be straight with me.  oops.  felt bad.  I’m having a good day, driving in the city.  There’s Knox Presbyterian, “living the obedient life”, yep, still conservative.  Need some tea, Verdant’s all the way over in Seward, but, hey.  The Teashop is just ahead on Lyndale.  Oh, good, I’ve never followed through on my writing, never got published, never tried hard.  Never. Never.  Never.  Never.  Here I am 66 and I’ve bounced from this to that.  Bad.  Wrong. Not followed through.  Old now and not ever going to follow through.  Always bad, wrong.  Wait.  There’s the Teashop.  I’ll buy tea here, not drive all the way over to Seward then have to loop back to Kramarczuk’s.  After the teashop.  Bought a half an ounce of tea for $25.  Stupid.  Hey, I can just loop around, no cars in the lane going the other way on Lyndale.  Oh.  Didn’t look behind me in my own lane, guy lets me go.  Maybe I’m too old to drive.  How will I know?  Bad.  Wrong.  

Finally, I talked myself into the moment.  Cut the loop.  The wind drove the golden leaves, the maple leaves, they are golden.  They swirl up in the air, blown high, come down.  Fall.  This is fall and it’s happening right before my eyes, as I eat this Italian sausage, which is not so hot, still I’m right in the middle of this wonderful seasonal transition.  I’m in this moment now, neither bad nor good, just here.  Part of another fall.  It’s come again, as it has come before and will come again.  And I will be in it, part of it.  Neither bad nor good.  Right nor wrong.  I calmed down, my center returned and the jaggedy feelings left my body, those tensed muscles relaxing.  

The feeling tone remained, like a bad taste, and tried to reassert itself, grind itself into the wormhole that is a certain narrative arc about my self. Finally, the arc I prefer, the one that lets me move forward, not get stuck, took hold.  I had woven my narrative around this temporary dis-ease and let it be.  Part of my life, yes, but not all of it.  Whew.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Writing

The Narrative Fallacy

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Samhain Bonfire, a bit more.

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Samhain                                                             Samhain Moon

Frank said as he left, “Casual gatherings.  Low key.  That’s what I like best.”  It was low key, but in its own surprising way, profound.

The bonfire stayed interesting for 3 hours plus, the last hour or so the result of the five four foot lengths of ironwood cut in the morning.  There will be a number more of those logs cut over the next few weeks as we prepare for the Winter Solstice bonfire on December 21st.

The calling of the ancestors to the circle worked.  When we finished, they stayed with us, entering our conversations, adding layers to the people gathered around the fire.  Our group of 7 grew by generations of Fairbanks and Charles’s and Wolfe’s and Perlich’s and Zike’s and Spitler’s.  Some of us called in our tribal ancestors from those days long ago before settlement of Europe and all of us gave a nod and a toast to the Tanzanian man whose y chromosome all the men share.  Mitochondrial Eve, too.  (Though I understand that picture has gotten more complicated.  But the idea is sound.  That woman and that man, far enough back to have entered all our DNA.)

Warren and Sheryl threw their names into the fire wrapped around logs from long ago cached wood for a barbecue.  When they did, sparks from the fire flew up toward the night sky.  Reminded me of Beowulf’s bier, where “heaven swallowed the smoke.”

More memories gather around this place.  It becomes richer with each event, especially with the crowd of ancients who filled it last night.  Some of their spirit will linger on, remembering us and being remembered.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Samhain Bonfire

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Samhain                                                             Samhain Moon

The first annual Samhain bonfire has happened.  Warren and Cheryl, Frank, Anne, Pam, Lydia and Jason, and Dawn came at various points.  I lit the fire at 6:15 and it was down to coals when we came in just now at 9:45.

We gathered as friends, chatting.  Then the ritual for remembering ancestors opened up the circle a good bit as we learned more about each other, and each others families.  It was a good night, ending in some rain.  I’ll write more tomorrow and include a few pictures.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home

Crossing Over

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Samhain                                                               Samhain Moon

Javier delivered three wheelbarrows of two-year dry oak.  I’ve cut up the ironwood and cedar, split and stacked them.  This morning I cut five four foot lengths off the ironwood’s branches and upper trunk.  They will not be split and will go on the outside of the bonfire. The heat of the fire will ignite them through the bark and they’ll provide a long-lasting flame.

Kate’s gathered together makings for smores, mulled cider and snacks.  She’s also drilled pumpkins with arrows, clever and cute.  She’s also found fall color napkins and plates.  We’ll have bottled water and a warming house, complete with crystal chandelier that used to hang over the piano.

The center piece of the evening will be the fire.  And I’m planning a big one.  We’ve had a wet week so the fire danger is nil.

Doesn’t sound like too many folks can make it. Andover creates a good deal of resistance for city folk, the distance a good ways for an evening out.  We’ve gone low key with this one anyhow, figuring we’d learn what kind of work is necessary to pull one off.  We plan a winter solstice bonfire and one for Beltane, too.  We may skip the summer solstice due to the potential for fire problems.

(welsh holy well)

Tonight the ancestors can move more freely from the Otherworld, as can the folk of faery. At least so my Celtic ancestors believed.  It is interesting to consider that Mexican and Latino cultures also celebrate a similar idea as do some in the Christian church.  The anthropologist in me says that means there’s something here, something the folk beliefs have recognized, perhaps in some precognitive way.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Samhain, 2013

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Samhain                                                                    Samhain Moon

Tonight is Samhain, also known as All Hallow’s Eve, and Halloween.  An abbreviated thick description (see post below for thick description) for this Samhain, in this place, 3122 153rd Ave N.W., Andover, Minnesota could begin with any aspect gathered in to this day and its night, but we’ll begin with the firepit.

Kate and I hired Javier Celis to finish a firepit begun several years before by me, worked on by brother Mark two years, but needing some finishing work.  Javier and his crew made the granite paving stones, from a cobbled street in Minneapolis, into a neat circle, lined the firepit with ground stone and put crushed marble around the outside of it.  They also laid down landscape cloth and thick mulch over the entire area, a former compost pile.

Kate’s family had a firepit in their home in Nevada, Iowa and we both enjoyed them at other’s homes.  The firepit hearkens back to campfires of native americans and pioneers here in the U.S., warming, lighting and provided heat for cooking.

The fire itself pushes back further to a fundamental separation between hominids and their close primate relatives, the domestication of fire.  Who knows how it happened? Embers from a lightning struck tree conserved overnight by accident?  A fire on the veldt which left grasses aflame and led to their use as early kindling?  This basic transition, an elemental moment, as essential to our future as a container for water, lives on in our fascination with fireplaces and bonfires.

Bonfires, especially, may be linked, probably are linked, to the fear of night stalking predators, meat eaters for whom human meant food.  So we feel safe around a bonfire, huddled around it, just a bit of the thrill left over when that thrill came from the very real possibility of death by fang or claw.

In the Celtic tradition, which we celebrate tonight, the bonfire had sympathetic magic at its core.  In the spring, on Beltane, the fire transferred its vital energy to the soil where it could quicken the seed and ensure a successful planting.  The opposite end of the year, Summer’s End, or Samhain, finds the bonfire a way of ensuring our warmth and protection from the cold and hungry months ahead.

My Celtic roots run through Ireland, the Correls, and through north Wales, the Ellises, and, perhaps, through County Kent, the Keatons.  The Correls came as potato famine immigrants in the late 19th century and we have no information about the Keaton immigration though it might have been in the same era.  The Ellises we know came here first in 1707 when Richard Ellis was put ashore by a greedy sea captain, sold as an indentured servant to pay his fare.  His mother had paid his fare in Dublin, Ireland where her husband, a captain in William and Mary’s occupying army, had recently died.

Searching in my own and the more general Celtic past led me to the Great Wheel of the Year.  It has gradually become a center point for reimagining my faith, helping me find the rhythms of the year and of human life as key sacred moments.  Thus it is, at least in part, that we go to our firepit this year, to build a bonfire and say the names of our ancestors, standing there around the universal symbol of human protection, warming our hands and waiting as the Great Wheel turns from the bounty of the growing season to the Great Rest of the fallow time.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Memories, Third Phase

Into the Weeds

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Fall                                                                               Samhain Moon

Additional on post just below.  There is a tendency in quasi-religious, new agey thought to condemn doing and promote being, especially being here now.  Nothing wrong with being here now, of course.  Especially since we really have no other choice.  This seems like a false dichotomy to me however.

Even in our doing we are being and in our being we are doing.  This is only to say that doing entails presence to the world and to ourselves, albeit in a different way from the semi-mystical state of being here now.  If you’re a fan of Zeno and his paradox, then you might craft an argument about never changing out of the now, but in other ways of explaining reality, even being here now is impossible.  Why?  Oh, the earth moves around its poles, through the sky and your body digests food, engages in symbiotic exchanges, responds to changes in temperature and light, shifts nourishment into cells and waste out. Change, that old black magic, has its hooks so deep into the universe we often never notice it, even when it moves with the speed of light.

However, if you go back to the observations I’ve been making about circular time, the repetitive nature of change, how it loops back on itself in predictable patterns, perhaps, yes, in more of a spiral than a bicycle wheel, but still Fall then again Fall, and Winter then again Winter, and Birth then again Birth, and Death then again Death, well, if you consider them, then the cycle from one now to the next is Now then again Now.  We’re never ever out of the now, yet we experience movement.

These paradoxes point to being and doing as a false dialectic, not poles resonating with each other like, say liberal and conservative or life and death or true and false, but as alternating ways to explain the same thing, our hereness.  As Heidegger points out, we are thrown into the world at a particular place, to particular parents and in a particular time. I would push that one step further and say we are thrown into each moment in a particular place, in a particular time, with the unique, particular body/mind that is you.

In each moment our particular response to the now has doing characteristics and being characteristics.  Perhaps another way to say this is that part of us is at rest while other parts are engaged with the now, acting on it or being acted upon by it. We do both at the same time, being and doing.

So what’s all the fuss?  It’s about attention.  When all of our very valuable attention focuses on the action or work or active play of  a moment, then we draw ourselves from the beingness of that moment.  When we focus on the beingness, we draw ourselves away from the doing.  But both states co-exist, no matter on which we focus.

The key move here is about attention.  We can and do shift our attention from different aspects of our life to others, from ourselves to the world or moment into which we are thrown.  If we spend all of our attention on doing, then we neglect the deeper, more reflective aspect of our selves.  Conversely, if we spend all of our attention on being, then we neglect matters necessary for our survival.

In the rhythm of your day, your year, your life, you can choose to attend to the activity, the work, the “what you do.”  This might entail lists or calendar marking or goals and objectives or satisfying layers of cloth or manuscript pages.  Likewise you can choose to attend to the beingness, the what you are.  This might entail meditation, silence, counting breaths, noticing plant and animal life at a close, intimate level.

The point?  What do you do, is a valid question.  So is who are you?  They might have the same answer.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Looking Backwards

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Fall                                                                            Samhain Moon

After a good morning with Ovid, I went out to humble myself with my chain saw.  As I’ve written here before, I’ve used chain saws since 1974, 39 years.  Long enough, you’d think, to learn not to put the chain on backwards, but I did just that this morning. When a chain saw blade is on backwards, it burns the wood, rather than cut it.  Took me a second try to figure this out.  Back to the bench.

Sure enough, the little pointy sharp things were away from the cut rather than toward it. This seems pretty basic, doesn’t it?  Well, it is.  After solving the puzzle, I turned the chain around, retensioned it and went back out.  Ah, like a knife through butter.

Cutting wood for our Samhain bonfire next Thursday.  This will officially end the growing season and as things look right now, we’ll have finished the remaining tasks in the garden by then.  We have flower bulbs to plant, garlic to plant and leeks to harvest.  With minor exceptions that’s the end of it until next spring.  Which, if the climate keeps on warming, may come soon after my birthday on Valentine’s day.  Or, as it did this year, sometime in June.  Hard to tell up here.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Around and Around and Around We Go

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Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

Interesting convergence.  In Ovid today I translated some verses about the silver age in which Jupiter created four seasons from summer, brief spring, winter and autumn.  After finishing this work, I went out and joined Kate, already at work in the garden.  Small pellets of snow fell.

(The Close of the Silver Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1527-35)

We went into the orchard.  Kate pulled back the landscape cloth around the remaining trees while I broadcast the fertilizer, sprayed with biotill and then worked them both into the top three inches of soil.  While she replaced the landscape cloth, I shoveled soil, mostly sand, back into two large holes dug by our energetic girls, Vega and Rigel.

At one moment I looked up at a tall Norway pine and felt a kinship with Ovid and those farmers in long ago Latium.  We had similar things to do at similar times of year.

The word annum popped up from today’s translating.  You know, I imagine, that it translates as year, but you might not know that its primary meanings are: a circuit, circular course, periodical return.  In one sense this is obvious of course, but that term we use frequently could orient us not to linear time, as we tend to use it, but to cyclical time.

When I say, I am 66 years old, we tend to think, oh.  Born 66 years from this date.  But that’s not what it really means.  It really means I have experienced a full year 66 times.  The year itself, if we’re true to its Latin roots, is not a one after the other marker of chronos, but a complete set, 4 seasons here in the temperate latitudes, finished and done with each winter, begun anew each spring.  Or whenever you want to break beginning and ending.

We then start over again.  Another year as we often say.  Yes, just so.  Another year.  This time in the next year I’ll be fertilizing the orchard.  As I have this year.  So that moment of apocalypse when the earth becomes changed and brand new?  Spring.  When the earth becomes desolate and barren?  Late fall.  Happened before, will happen again.  Amen.