April 30th, 1976 at 8:30 pm
(1976)
How very queer it is, evening or night, out alone in a clearing, open for lake or meadow, sans house or car or implement, horizons cuffed by blackened pines. Alone, as if a hundred miles from man or road—yet have it all around you, surrounding you. A droning noise is up in the sky, you see the lights of a plane. Down behind the trees to the left lights break out, zip an inch, and break back into the black void again. Cars on an interstate. Suddenly off our ear to the right is the panicked whirr of a siren, making its tense, nervous race along roads hidden somewhere beyond the hill. Hidden roads and houses beyond the hill there. Shrilling siren making its way forward, nearer. Alarmingly nearer! How close will it get? Somewhere before us, somewhere lost in the pine forest there. And dimmer—dimming into the forest.
Yet how alarming it is! And very queer. Man all around—cannot leave us alone! We can't see Him; He closes in, though. Can't see, yet He closes in. Sounds of night. Like a cage tightening round us, ringing around the trees like the trees ring around meadow or lake.
Our stomach drops, and is queer.
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April 29th, 1976 at 4:00 pm
(1976)
Anarchy, it should have been said, is workable only in two places—Heaven (where they don't need it) and Hell (where they have it).
But in Hell is the civilized form of Anarchy—which in its extreme is some sort of Totalitarianism which no doubt had been preceded by some kind of tyranny-of-the-majority Democracy.
The Anarchy that Heaven would have, if only Heaven needed it, would be Natural Anarchy, which in contrast to the power-crazed civilized form is a no-power, hence no-government world. Everyone just does what they please and, because it is Heaven, there is no problem. Only they don't have such a Natural Anarchy in Heaven—they have God instead, and so don't need it.
Only now, imagine a Heaven in which God isn't God. He thinks he is, but isn't. Instead you have this Natural Anarchy. But also you have a great variety of opinions and beliefs. So that in Heaven you have not only Christians but Atheists, Buddhists, Moslems, Hindu, Agnostics, Stoics and so on. Those who in their life on earth collected together into religions and so on tend also to collect together after death, in Heaven.
The Christians tend to gather together around God, who it turns out after all is Jesus himself. So that the Christians all come together and recognize the true Christian doctrine in a grand brotherhood (though some are poor losers and refuse to believe God and go off on their own or join the Taoists or the Hindu; while others keep on with their own little interpretations of, say, the Trinity regardless of the direct teachings of God—it is 'their own' understanding of it, they say).
And of course there are the Atheists, some whom are philosophers, some whom are not and instead farm for a living. But no Capitalists or Communists or Bourgeoise—after all this is a story about religion and lets keep it small. We are in Heaven, after all. We want to keep the vicious elements out.
Of course, it is a strange thing about Heaven. It is still subject to the sun and stars and moon, and there is even a wind there—a blue wind at that. And it has trees and grass and plants and you can farm if you like. Or you can sit and listen to Jesus or Mohammed or Gautama Buddha philosophize and teach. You can lean back against a tree in the shade and just listen—or look up and see birds in fall flight across the sky, or peek down among the little blades of grass and see the little ants about with their lives—these are the ants that have gone to Heaven, so you needn't worry about being ant-bitten by them at all—for again this is Heaven and “all creatures that liveth upon the earth” live in harmony, and are very nice about it.
All in all it makes an interesting story, doesn't it?
Most interesting, however, are the farmer atheists—they farm their farms, plow and plant and weed and harvest and store, as if they were still alive on earth—as if they had never heard of Heaven. Heaven looks like earth to them, so some instinct tells them to live as if it was.
But it is an interesting story, this Heaven of Natural Anarchy.
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April 28th, 1976 at 8:00 pm
(1976)
The scientists and astronomers are wrong in wanting to be objective. They think of objectivity as some goal to be realized and subjectivity as the opposite goal, to be wisely shunned. It's simply not so. Men are men, forever tied down, destined, to being men. It is not possible ever for them to be anything but subjective. Objectivity is some conceptualized ideal—absolute, detached, abstract thought—thought without a thinker. To be objective you must transcend your body, your manness.
This is what the Logos God is, the purely objective God, no body, all spirit or mind. It is this Logos-God that the scientist would that he could be. His ideal. He wants to be beyond man—free of his manhood—mind without a body. Total objectivity.
This is why the theories and thoughts of these scientists come out so coldly, so calculated with death—because they are the very theories and thoughts of men who are trying viciously not to be men! Men trying purposely to be non-human—to state the world in non-human terms. They deny their own manhood.
So the earth rotates around itself once in 24 hours, revolves around the nuclear sun once in 365 1/4 days, once around the galaxy in so many billion light-years. Stars and nebuli become mental entities in mathematical relation, just as everything else is broken into atoms of energetic quarks that exist and relate solely conceptually. Indeed, it is the world of God. It is the only world a spiritual God could have—totally inhuman, alien, and sickly in its death.
Is the objective statement of life Truth? Is it true? Is the point of view of this creative Absolute God a more valid viewpoint than that of man? Obviously it is thought so.
But the Absolute God can only exist conceptually—abstractly—not physically or really. The same with objectivity. Same with Truth. Things are true only as they appeal to our mind and body in union, to our full manness, to our man-sense of the world about us. The farther we flee from this, abstract from this, the more we exile ourselves from our own thought, the more wretched and inhuman, falser, becomes our thought. It is dead thought, and portends dead life.
So that is what it is when I call true knowledge metaphorical, never factual. I don't mean that logic and rationality are useless—I don't mean that “we can never know”. But I mean we can't know in the “factual” sense we worship as science. We can only know in loose metaphorical sense—in symbolism—in symbolic imagery.
Because what is true is beyond words—beyond logos—beyond the process of reason. Abstraction cannot be true—because life is not an abstraction—was not created out of logos, but out of itself—because quite simply, concepts and qualities and mathematical relationships are smaller than life—are bound, crated, and boxed by it—and in themselves can't touch it.
But a man is more than his mathematical mind, just as life is more than qualities and concepts itself, a man is more than one little part of him, a man is alive, physically so, and knows his life in a billion physical ways—smelling is the way his nostrels “know” life, breathing the way his lungs “know”, seeing the “knowledge” of his eyes, touching his fingers or palms in the process of getting an “understanding”. The mind “knows” through words, with a metaphorical or symbolic knowledge. And the whole man knows through the whole billion pieces of his body—hands, feel, ears, arms, eyes, mind, sexual organ, stomach, lungs, shoulders, fingernails, and more than these, and less, and less and more even than that.
That is simply what I mean.
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April 27th, 1976 at 8:00 pm
(1976)
Atheistic Physicalism. It's not at all to be associated with Materialism. To the materialist, the things of the world are toys of his mind—to be played with. Man is literally God the creator—all material of creation is his to be recreated and used—amusements for his mind's creativity.
Contrawise, for the physicalist matter is not toy and subject for the mind—there is no mental creation, whether by god or man or beast. There is no sanctity, no sovereignty of the mind. It is the physical that is sanct, that predates the mind. Physical matter is self-creating, but it is not a creative agent or being since that implies a creating logos, a plan or ideal.
The atheistic physicalist denies any duality of mind and body, or mind and matter, and maintains that rather the mind is physical, and thought an outgrowth of living matter. It is in short another organ of the body, another sense, and does not transcend it.
Physicalism is atheistic and must be so, since there is no way for a god to fit it, if by god is meant something non-physical, also real. Non-physicality and reality are mutually exclusive, to be simple about it.
Unless, like a physical scientist, you define god as energy, as motion (which I include under the meaning of physical), in which case your God is interchangeable with matter (so scientists say), and in any case he is not infinite nor wise nor a being nor capable of being a Creator.
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April 26th, 1976 at 2:00 pm
(1976)
At first I was amused and superior about it—and glad it hadn't been a long movie, it wouldn't have been worth the time. It told me nothing I didn't already know, and didn't tell as much as I did know. And it was a little trite, the “They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” bit. It looked like a statement of the problem, but no answer—just—well they shoot horses, don't they?
But it made me think what were my real reactions to the movie as I saw it? —and I began to see a logical whole and symbolism to the movie—rather effective on me, at that. The movie had a vital symbol—the outside world of the sea. The sea and the sky and the cycle of sun.
As she held the gun at herself, caught on the threshold between one death and another—he stood there, calmly, at the same threshold. And seated in the audience, we were there too.
“The sea!” I cried out loud within myself. “Look! The sea!”
He was supposed to say that—that the answer was the sea. So that something would click in her, something would turn over, and she would suddenly see the sea and realize the threshold between the two deaths was a false threshold—that it had a solution. He ought to have realized himself that the sea symbolized the solution.
For after all he had come from the vantage point of the sea—he had seen it—before allowing himself to be swept into the dance circus. And even then, once, he had looked out and seen the sun setting over the sea, white, and the sea white. The circus man thought it absolutely silly that anyone would want to look at the sun setting white over any white sea—perhaps in an idle time, but not during something as important as the marathon, not during the serious business of life!
Brilliant! The all-important, all-consuming world of man symbolized by a marathon dance.
But he let the audience down, and to his share betrayed the girl—because he failed to access the things he had seen—he failed to draw up inside himself the perspective provided by the contrast between the busy tent world and the unbusy world of the sea. The circus was a tight little world created by the busy minds of men, and unleashed like insanity on the very men who created it. For the marathon was simply insane when seen from the view of the sea, just as the sea seemed insane from the view of the tent. Neither made sense in the context of the other: they were foreign to each other. The sea was outside the world of men, physically and mentally outside it, just as it was physically and mentally outside the littler kaleidoscope of the dance.
But tragically, he didn't realize this, didn't recognize it, as he stood looking out to the sea. And so his mind was caught in the mental “false position” of “death or death”—not realizing it was all an insane mental game that, like monopoly, one could choose to quit. Quit the mental life created by men, yet not the physical life that the sea was god to. How tragic—that he was too numbed by it all, too numbed to save the girl—to shout “Look! The sea! Look at the sea!” But his senses were chaosed and worn nub by whirl of the tent world—and this is why in the brief courtroom scene (so brilliantly interjected into the movie) he could simply only stand before the judge, unable to know what to say, unable to know how to act.
In reality, he stood before the girl, unable to know what to say, unable to know how to act—morally bankrupt in a sense—in a dead position. He was helping her to commit suicide, the suicide of life—in going along with her, her partner in the dance—an accomplice—and yet never protesting—never taking a stand on behalf of the sea for her. And so his holding the gun and pulling the trigger at the end was symbolic of what he'd done the entire movie to her—helped her kill herself. And so to an extent, helped all the others.
And how apt, too, that he shot her through the head—through the mind. For that was the scene of her conflict with the mental death of the tent world created by men. It was insanity and contact with it that killed the vital life of her mind—until she was in a perpetual checkmate. There was no solution to the insane death-life of the mental tent world—since she could not recognize the outside and physical-consciousness of the sea world.
So that it was a threshold between the mental death-in-life of the world, and the unknown, other-worldly unknown, of physical death. But in the known she was in checkmate, and so had no choice.
Only, if she had seen the sea, she could have toppled over the board, pieces and all.
He ought to have shown her the sea, they ought to have walked down to it until the noise of the tent was distant, down to the sea, for the sea was outside, and a larger, new world for bandaging the mind and healing it; and though they may have been poor, maybe hungry, maybe through the hate of men have starved to death, still they would have undergone it from outside, not a part of the din and marathon of insanity.
The movie, it seems to me, had a flaw in the phrase and title “They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” The comparison fails to ring true. They shoot horses when the horse in in physical pain by injury—when it is going to otherwise die a slow painful physical death. But the death people undergo exemplified in the movie is primarily and firstly mental—and any physical misery is consequence of mental post-mortem twitches. She shoots herself because she has been mentally checkmated; the other girl throws herself into the cold shower because she, too, is mentally checkmated; the old sailor runs himself to death because he likewise has suffered mental checkmate; and the boy allows all to happen about himself because he himself is in mental check, and in a mental frozen panic.
He comes out of the tent, looks on the sea, and hates it because he now sees it from the mental framework of man busy in his jitterbug marathons.
But a mental death, mental checkmate, is not a physical death. It is not the same situation the horse is in. The horse is going to die, nothing by meadow, sea, or sun will help. But the people have an escape—if they can recognize that the dilemma is false—that they can step outside, can allow the gentle healing of their minds, and worship the god in life outside, in the sea and the sun so white setting day after day to the restful sea.
Comments
April 25th, 1976 at 3:00 pm
(1976)
Strangely men have chosen a God that is the final extension of themselves as they define themselves. A God who is the ultimate idealized homo sapiens—the ultimate man. He is pure mind and not a bit of body, which is animal and vegetable; he is that part of man which conceives and loves and sees and has intercourse with only that which is non-physical.
For this non-physical is something we define ourselves by—we can think and reason, the animals and plants cannot—so therefore it is this reasoning and thinking part of ourselves that we worship in ourselves. We even make it into a God, and call it the Creator of the entire world and universe.
We give God credit for doing what we ourselves would do—create the world in our image. When God creates the world in His image, it is our image too—for he is our God, of our own sort. We are, short of angels (which are men who have died and thus have lost their bodies but kept their minds), God's best and favorite creature. We reason. We think. We create on our own. We are, in fact, almost God.
And why not? since after all the world he lives in is the world of our minds. We conceived him, and love him with a holy worship, and make him create the world we would have for us. He is our grandest conception of ourselves.
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April 24th, 1976 at 8:00 pm
(1976)
It is the man who doesn't know who searches. The man who doesn't have who grasps out and kills the thing.
It is man the homo sapien who must cut open the songbird to learn why it sings. He must know. He must know. He must grasp out to find out.
And so he “discovers” vocal cords—or whatever—”Ah,” he says, “I know how he sings—by these.” But yet he knew how before—by that. And still he does not know why. And a songbird is dead.
This is man as homo sapien. he doesn't know what life is (because he doesn't know how to know), and so he searches. And the search becomes more important than life itself, and is seen to transcend any single bit of life. And every search brings him farther from knowing and thirstier and thirstier for more search.
So that there is now a truth in paradox.
He who would know, shall never know.
He who searches shall never find but a necessity to search. He who grasps at things never will have them in his hands.
To know, you must cease trying to know; to own, cease trying to own.
To be a man, stop trying to be men.
The songbird's song is not for knowing, only to be heard.
The rule of life is not to construct rules: for to ritualize life is to kill it, or to turn away from it to something dogmatically not life. Just as when formulas and definitions and systems and rules are brought to the study of mathematics—suddenly you have ritualized it and no longer have it: instead of studying math you are now studying rules (or definitions or logos).
It is a popular game with us: to replace living things with rules.
He who would know will never know.
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April 23rd, 1976 at 3:00 pm
(1976)
“But look at me!” he cried. “I'm not a Christian—I wasn't then. I've never prayed to any God! Yet a miracle occurred—and I was healed from dying—saved from an incurable disease. And I'm no Christian.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” said the girl.
“Did it ever occur to you,” jumped in his former schoolfriend, “that the Lord has chosen to save your life so that you might through Jesus Christ be really saved—so you might find eternal life?”
“He must've miscalculated then.”
“I don't understand you—how can you say it was a miracle—and not care about it. You ought to be grateful to God.”
“I am grateful—but not to God or anyone—”
“How can you be so callous?”
“Easy. I simply don't believe there's a 'miracle-worker'.”
“You don't believe in miracles period!”
“Yes!. But you see, to me miracles are a thing natural to life—that no God has any part in.”
“They're not miracles then.”
“To me they are.”
“Don't go around thinking you're a Christian—because you're not.”
“No. I guess I'm an atheist.”
“I pity you!”
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