Imbolc and the waning Wolf Moon
Monday gratefuls: Kate speaks her heart. Rigel starts eating again. The Monk Manual. Wind. And the weather it carries. Black Mountain. Maxwell Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Cub Creek. Shadow Brook. Waning crescent Moon. The stars of early morning. The heart that beats in my chest.
Points of joy: Kep eager for breakfast. Being with the Ancient Ones. Imagining more of Jennie’s Dead. Exhaustion after the new workout. Using the Monk Manual.
When I started on the post yesterday, it focused on art, religion, legend, mythology, fairy tales, folklore. Got distracted while writing and shifted away from my main idea. Back at it this morning.
My library has three full shelves of mythology and folklore, its historical context. Another two full shelves of books on art. Another two of religion and philosophy and poetry. The bookshelf immediately to my right has texts about the intersection of religion, philosophy, and the natural world. That represents an ongoing investigation for me, how to reconcile humanity to a sustainable presence on this earth.
Just to be complete my library also includes shelves of fiction, a full shelf of works on Lake Superior and its context, travel, gardening, the military, American and Western history, including a good deal on the American Civil War.
I used to think religion and folklore and legend and mythology and fairy tales occupied different terrain. Art, too. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve stripped dogma from my approach to religion, the more the boundaries disappear. Of course religion is this generation’s mythology. To be studied later in the classics department of a long away in the future university. Fairy tales and folklore and legend were the work of scientists, humans seeking patterns in nature, explanations for the forces that influence, shape, and sometimes take our lives.
Perhaps my immersion, my lifelong immersion, in these fields means that I reject the Enlightenment, at least in its empiricist modality. It might. The question. How can I find knowledge and truth in physics, biology, astronomy, geology yet retain a naive faith in the possibility of something all those disciplines cannot explain?
The new atheists like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have a flat earth attitude toward wonder, mystery, delight, whimsy. In their mean and stolid world only that which can be seen, measured, replicated has meaning. They are descendants of the logical positivists and the language philosophers. Perhaps the best expression of this attitude is Wittgenstein’s famous quote: “Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.”
Whether or not he meant it that way, most thinkers who want to discard the mantel of dogma and its many obfuscations believe he meant, if it’s not empirical, we can know nothing and say nothing about it. This follows from Kant’s understanding of the ding an sich, the thing in itself. Kant believed there was a reality, he was no idealist, but he also believed that since we could only know what our senses brought us we could never know that reality itself, just the effects it had on our eyes, our hands, our ears, our nose, our taste.
There is a bald truth here. Our sensorium equips us to navigate a world delivered to us through our bodies. We can learn a lot about this world by being very careful about what we perceive. Yet at the end of theoretical physics, at the end of cosmology, at the end of life’s study of itself, at the end of consciousness, we have only an elaborate construction based on empirical data. As we know, any specific instance of that construction is often wrong, because science itself proceeds through revolutions in thought paradigms as much as it does through the empirical method.
In Celtic mythology the world of Faery, the world of pixies, faeries, goblins, the dead, and the divine is The Other World. What a world it is. I’ve recently imagined it, in my underway novel Jennie’s Dead, as a vast and open land where old gods go after their followers abandon them. Where characters of myth and legend still have adventures. Where travel between lands may take thousands of years or be finished in an instant.
What an impoverished, skinny world the new atheists and their philosophical forbearers inhabit. I prefer the company of Aladdin, of Shiva, of Lao Tze, of Herman Hesse, of Zeus and Lycaon, even of Jesus and Moses.
My sense of wonder awakens daily as I do. The Lodgepole pines out the bedroom window sway in the Wind. The Stars twinkle and shine above them in a black early morning Sky. A Mountain Lion coughs far away. In the fall the strangled call of a bugling Elk might make its way here. I’ve just come from the land of dreams, another non-empirical realm, and my Other World senses are on high alert, having spent a nighttime tuned to the flashes of neurons, the pulsing of brain cells switching on and off.
Poetry sweeps away the cobways of linear thought, carrying the reader into the realm of aha. Of, oh, I see. Of distant caverns unimaginable to man. The room of the Raven exists first in Poe’s mind, then on the page, then in ours. But how does it exist, ontologically? If you say only in ink on paper, my how little you know.
I’ve traveled Russian cart tracks holding hands with the staret of the Pilgrim. I swam the waters deeper than the Mariani’s Trench with the Megladon. I’ve walked on foreign worlds and spoken with aliens. Harry Seldon and I together pondered psychohistory. I’ve played the glass bead game, gotten into a Louisiana bar with a bottle of Trublood in my hand. The Caliph and I entertained Jinn. Huck Finn and I tossed a line in the waters of the Great Muddy.
These eternal inhabitants of the Other World are our guides. They know the ancientrails on which we humans travel and want us to use them to our utmost benefit.
You and I were a speck of ohr during the obliteration of the ayn sof. We’ve traveled together and apart for billions of years, been part of so many things, witnessed so many others. When God is repaired, we may join up again and sit with Rumi, a jug of wine at hand, blessed to be in that far off land beyond right and wrong.
