It might seem ironic before I am done here today, but I need to attend to two matters of "housekeeping" about the logic of this blog, matters that have to do with the care (and worry) with which we humans do anything.
"Aware, Away, Awry" is the skeleton of the conceptuality that I have sought to present in this blog, in contrast to my earlier blog, "Roused, Readied, Reaped," In "Roused, Readied, Reaped," I presented a conceptualization of the experience-life of humanity as best described in terms of persistent, overlapping, often parallel, greater-or-smaller cycles of experience. Whether of the reflexes of moments, or whether of the arc of an entire lifetime, I held that experiences can be described as stimulus responses followed by some terms of surging experience followed by exhaustion--that is, arcs.
In "Aware, Away, Awry," I hold that the preceding conceptualization is too simple as a description of our experience-lives, if only because the "arcs" that I describe are liable both to be disrupted (disrupted by experiences, however, that might be described as momentary arcs in themselves) and to be characterized only more-or-less as stimulus-responses. What seem to us to be "arcs" can often be in reality lunges of ourselves toward ill-defined and perhaps changeable end-points. For this phenomena I have used the term "tendrils," which seem to describe such stimulus-initiated instances of probing.
Retaining the underlying "Roused" basis, I have found it more valuable to emphasize the searching and perhaps tentative quality of our trying to address ourselves to our circumstances once we have become "Aware." Upon the basis of this retention, I maintain that human experiences must be viewed in the first instance as only by location and timing actually attached to a reality that we can determine. We are roused and we become aware, but this awareness must be charted then by us onto the predispositions we use to understand our experience-realm. The initial experiences, whether momentary or life-long, are at first separate from any contextual references--and from this I maintain that the idea of "natural" versus "supernatural" is fatuous.
Reckoning that our initial experiences of any phenomena are unbidden by us, they can at least benefit from the tentative presumption that they are untinged with moral or immoral connotations--they are genuine. Hench my blog-description admonition that we must always cultivate a closeness to the moments of awareness, if only because of the essentially genuine nature of our responses. In this my notions are unchanged, but I have come to realize that an optimal description of what I might call "experience-spates" must be even more nuanced than what I have at first described in this blog--that our "experience-spates" are "tendrils." In reality, they are possessed of a more complicated architecture.
Any "experience-spate" to which we are subject and then more-or-less invest ourselves (for that is what happens when something seizes some portion of our experience-lives) arises from initial stimuli that burgeon not by smooth addition, but by the aggregation of such stimulus-elements as at first to obtain such critical mass as to become apparent to us, and then to persist for such time as it is sensible to us, before finally dissipating. Our experience-arcs, rather than being describable simply as "tendrils" (though yet possessing the probing quality) might better be conceptualized as "seed-pods"(along their lengths.) We enter experience-arcs but tentatively, and then--as of a sudden--they obtain a portion of our consciousness, until they collapse. This business of obtaining and then losing a portion of our consciousness renders the experience-arc of more width of investment through the elongation of its middle than in its beginning or end. In this middle are produced (or not, or perhaps indifferently) whatever fruits might come of the experience-arc.
It is this arcing and eventually falling potentially fecund middle of any experience-arc that obtains the bulk of our attentions, of our cares. Whether we are gathering ourselves after shocks, or fortifying ourselves against perceived challenges, or struggling to persist through trials, our lives in their instances are characterizable by spates of concentrated attention, of concentrated investment. Not wanting to think of ourselves as weak, or to be so perceived by others, we tend predictably to imagine that we can incorporate our experiences into the building-up of more capable selves. We want to be creatures of accomplishment.
And, in the history of humanity, nothing has been more deleterious than this investment we make typically in the ostensible value of our achievements, rather than in the counter-intuitive investment we must make in being creatures attuned progressively to the paring-back of our conceits about our experiences. We are not properly creatures of accomplishment. We are properly creatures of care--of tending to that which is before us, and we are usually not using our available means to tend to that which is before us, but rather to tend to the maintenance of the conceit-schemes which are both our perverse "accomplishments" in themselves, and also our means of delusion about what we are meant to accomplish in our existences.
"Care" and "caring" are what we imagine are asked of us as burdens and imposed upon us as tasks. As such, "care" and "caring" are seen by us as virtues and virtuous tasks within the conceptualizations we have of our relationship to the divine. In the characteristic Christian conceit, Adam and Eve sinned and so brought upon us all the burdens of a fallen nature and of a fallen world--brought upon us our cares as a punishment for sin. Without ceding the moral high-ground to atheism, it is proper here to relate at least the framework of the generalized non-believer response to the Eden story. God says that Adam and Eve will die that day, and they don't. God punishes Adam and Eve--who cannot know yet of the nature of good and evil--for forsaking good and doing evil. The arguments, in the standard conceptualizations of life and death, are unanswerable.
However, the standard conceptualizations of life and death are merely--in the instance of such theological arguments--conventions held in general by the competing parties. Adam and Eve were alive, and then (hundreds of years after the "Fall") "died" at last. Of course (if the non-conventional idea of "annihilation" is not entertained) the very idea of "dying" is ultimately ludicrous in the Christian-versus-non-Christian debate--both the saved and the damned "live" forever. The ultimate puzzle of eternal life--rather difficult to prove or disprove on a debate stage--is as intractable as the notion of God's responsibility or not for humanity's depravity--and as silly to wrangle over in debate.
And so, as a matter of "housekeeping" and of "care," I will present a notion that I hope to develop further in this blog. "Death," as presented by God in the context of the Eden story, was synonymous in practice with "care"--a presumptuous presumption I insert here in place of any notion that Adam and Eve either escaped inexplicably the threatened "death," or experienced the theologian's "death of the soul." To be under the burden of care as a requirement, to be positioned by disposition in opposition to the required burden of care, to see caring as a burden in general and as a burden in maintaining one's self-image and world-view--this arcing seed-pod of rancid fruit, is, in short, death.
To have a life characterized by a burden of care is to be dead--as dead as anything else to be found in the realm of theology. To put aside what the world calls "life" in the embracing of care and caring and their attendant duties, is, in short, to be alive. This is the message of Jesus--this much, in practical effect, has at least been thrust by the Gospels into the view of Christianity. What is much less prevalent is the realization that this true notion of life--though so often voiced by the Jesus who referenced Genesis as a standard--is a notion of life presumed by the Eden story.
God is described in Genesis as wanting to create a good world for humanity, and wanting humanity to enjoy it. That which is fruitful and benign is good, and that which is barren and deleterious is evil. That the creatures of the progressively falling world ended up profiting often from each other's demise does not change this initial intention for good over evil--for surely predation is evil. There can be no other conclusion drawn from the otherwise inexplicable fact that a God demanding at last blood sacrifice began a Creation free of violence and carnivory.
God warned Adam and Eve--regarding particularly the Forbidden Tree--not from committing evil, but from becoming aware of the goods that must be fostered and the evils that must be combatted. They knew, of course, from the start that there were cares to be taken and duties to be performed, but--as in the burgeoning seed-pod conceptualizations I have offered--the incident of the Forbidden Fruit can be understood as the attainment of that critical mass of un-caring, of taking a short-cut to that which God would provide if asked. Every subsequent moment of humanity, every moment of our lives, can be understood as burdened by the thickened, usually evil-tinged bulk of the middle--care-laden--portion of any experience arc, until at last each falls away as our attentions or energies fail us.
To tend to the preserving of our lives is to be dead, and sorrowfully so. To tend to the pleading cares of our existence as a joy is to be alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment