soft
but for the blankness
of the empty wall
near the bed…
with one lone nail
and a single belt of leather
near a leaning mirror
where St. Benedict hangs
from a chain
while I lay alone
and think of dad
dead on the floor
surrounded by emptiness…
it hurts my heart,
the irretrievable past
is gone like him
and the future grins
with an iron smile
filled with hunger
I am gut and stomach acid
mixed with killer adrenaline;
a spinning mad centrifuge
faster and faster to doom
like a crazy, out of control neutron star;
I am gravity,
I am entropy,
I am madness and insanity
bending light around me;
I am invisible and boundless
until the collapse…
then it all starts over again
I am gut and stomach acid
mixed with killer adrenaline;
spinning like a mad centrifuge
faster and faster to doom
like a crazy, out of control neutron star;
I am gravity,
I am entropy,
I am madness and insanity
bending light around me;
I am invisible and boundless
until the collapse…
then it all starts over again
there is an absence of Easter
upon the stony ground,
not a green blade lifts to the sun,
the breeze does not breathe
in this iron lung sky;
and if the cross is raised again
it is obscured by an uncaring,
crowded thoroughfare of passersby,
busy to get quickly, efficiently,
from the cradle to the grave
exclamation mark stands erect
as the excitement i do not have;
it is a proxy, an understudy,
a great and phony fraud
in partnership with the LOL and the OMG
who needs to feel
in the great and the real
when you have stand-ins,
grammatical soldiers
ready to take to the field?
i don’t.
it is
the dead of night
they say…
but they’d be wrong –
for darkest, deepest eve
is where the night belongs;
not dead
but caught in shadowed mid-song
the night, like quiet birds
takes flight, takes me along;
no it is not dead within the black,
there’s only heavy-lidded life,
there’s only sun that I now lack
in this not-so-dead night
with lots for me but little light
Philosophy is dead, long live philosophy.
That is to say philosophy is dying, having been wandering haplessly between the fronts in the thought wars between science and religion and been shot by both sides it now lays unnoticed and bleeding to death.
I say philosophy is dead, long live philosophy because humans are, by their nature, first and foremost philosophers. We will continue to be so long after the disciplines of science and theology “move on” past what they perceive as the discipline’s dead corpse.
The battle between science and religion has become so contentious of late that one feels as if sides must be chosen (wrong). The language of a hot war like this becomes increasingly inflexible to the point that there is no subtlety or nuance to either discipline any more and you are left feeling as if you must chose between one or the other.
Now, as it happens, both science and theology are branches of the mother of all knowledge – philosophy (literally meaning Love of Words/Knowledge). As such and like any good parent philosophy often tries to intervene between its angry brat children Science and Theology as they attempt to poke each other’s eyes out in fits of increasing rage and, like so many parents have discovered, both children turn their anger on gentle mother and tear her to shreds in highly emotional, illogical tantrums before turning back to one another.
The consequences of this battle are only now being felt in culture but the long term implications are profound and frightening. There is a fantastic opinion piece exploring these implications in the New York Times here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com//2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/
As science fixes its gaze on developing the “winning strategy” over theology it has begun to downplay and even discard anything that is (or even perceived as) relative in favour of the measurable and observable fact that is impossible to disprove. Truth is only what is measurable and observable. While the individual scientist may agree that there are true things out there science has not found – the culture of science in the ongoing thought wars leaves the audience feeling the former – that if it has not been observed and/or measured it does not exist.
Theology is relative according to this culture inasmuch as god is neither measurable or observable in a measurable way.
Unfortunately all sorts of other areas that philosophy once comfortably asserted as being reasonable but immeasurable absolute truths have also fallen into the pit of relativism – caught up in the gravitational pull of a demanding and inflexible argument.
Ethics and morality are now all relative and this has translated simplistically into – “I am the measure of what is good or bad, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical…and my power to assert my determination further determines my truth.”
When ethics and morality become relative there rises the need for people and people groups to accumulate power so as to implement and ensure the survival of their ethic. This leads to conflict. Conflict leads to war. War leads to death.
Is murder wrong? It depends. Is theft wrong? It depends? Is lying, cheating, raping, eugenics etc. wrong…it depends because there is no way according to the scientific method to determine and measure the ethic itself – only the consequences as they impact me.
On the flip side some theologians, or perhaps moreso – the average conservative person of faith, have become suspicious of the absolutism of science (which is ironic given their own absolute claims to the counter) and have begun to deny philosophy’s free thinking nature to investigate and ask dangerous questions.
“Do not ask questions…questions lead to answers and we already have answers, why do we need new answers?”
This leads to a head in the sand sort of posture that stagnates growth and in many instances leads to regression. The very attitude is counter to the great Protestant Reformer’s creed of “always reforming” – that is to say – we always rethink what we understand to be truth so that we might be open to truth we have yet to recognize.
I am not sure of the way back because unlike many of the generals dictating the strategy of this conflict philosophy is inherently non-aggressive in terms of asserting itself. We will see how things unfold but I for one hope for a truce and a reunion of science and theology under the guiding wisdom of philosophy.
bucket of pain
bucket of sad,
bucket of love,
bucket of rain,
bucket of lonely, fearful,
sometimes glad…
sometimes shame;
we are these empty things
being filled by the world,
being filled by ourselves,
how do we chose what we contain?
are we condemned and insane?
bucket of sad,
bucket of pain,
bucket of hope to remain
memory is a music of grey fog
with bits of light and colour
shining as shafts through broken glass
painting small songs in my mind
that I might sing in the darkness
I do not know how to be alone with myself. I do not know how to pursue solitude but I know it is a sacrament worthy of the people I love and admire most and I wish I knew their strength.
I have spoken and written extensively on the value of community but in truth much of that comes from my fear of solitude. I wanted to write about solitude but I am so poor at it I leave the rest of this post to those who know its value better than I.
“As soon as we are alone–…inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley
“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”
(Audrey Hepburn: Many-Sided Charmer, LIFE Magazine, December 7, 1953)
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”[The Minotaur]” ― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.”
― Mary Shelley
“I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next. ”
― Henry David Thoreau
“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” – Luke 5:15-16
“Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone.” – Matthew 14:22-24
Harnessing Chaos 