SO WHERE IS ALL THIS GOING?

This is the path I trod so far, though “path” is not a good metaphor because I didn’t try to follow anything, it’s just that I often found footprints of those who were ahead of me.  But sometimes I do try to retrace the way.

The first thought I had this time was asking why all the books on worship, liturgy, etc. only considered the major “world religions.”  Who decided on which ones qualified?  By what standards? (One of the most recent explanations I’ve run across (it’s Karen Armstrong’s) was that these labels come out of the Axial Era (originally achsenzeit) which was retroactively defined by Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969), a German psychiatrist and philosopher who thought that the years between 800 BC and 200 BC were great pivotal times.

I looked that period up in one of my key reference books:  “The Timetables of History”.  What Jaspers meant was that Rome was founded in about 800 BC and stopped expanding about 200 BC at Hadrian’s Wall across Britain.  (Hadrian was the Roman Emperor who said, "We won't go any farther than this."  So what Jaspers was really considering pivotal was Rome without the Greek pantheon of gods: the Roman Empire, the model for the Roman Catholic Church.  And what he implied was that the Germans (like him) belonged to this Roman “classical age.”  In fact, the Germans thought they were replacing Christian religion with science.  We know how that turned out.  (Personally, I prefer Greece.)

Hadrian's wall

Also, between 540 BCE and 200 BCE, Afghanistan was invaded by the Huns, a word sometimes associated with Germany in WWI.   Pivotal is right -- like one of those revolving doors.  Jaspers ended up exiled to Switzerland with other thinkers who shared his pigeon holes and categories, reinforcing each other.  But probably the times were too intense for them to step out of their assumptions.  Neither can we, but at least we know that our thinking is ALWAYS controlled by assumptions that might or might not be warranted with evidence.

Ironically (as always) only Freud and Jung saw that under all the rational introspecting and fancy language was the great Unconscious.  Not even they quite understood that the great bulk of our brains is NOT conscious, much less literate nor even speaking a national language.  

I think Freud would have reveled in todays’ neuroscience.  He was trying to get at those dark limbic repositories of dreams, drives, experience and madness.  That he failed was only the limitations of his times.  At least he recognized how limited words are, even arranged into the rules and images of “axial” religion, when the emotional undertow overpowers everything else.  At least it forced us all to look harder, devise instruments, keep looking for what happens in the dark subtext.

Anthropology did a lot better.  In the same time period, more or less, people like Van Gennep and Turner were beginning to understand the power of metaphor in performance: song, dance, mimesis of events, masks, games.   At least it was a lot more fun.  At worst they were cannibals and ate anthropologists as well as missionaries.  This dramatic material made anthropologists wonderfully popular at upscale dinner parties, which helped fund their explorations. Shrinks make people nervous.

The two-generation Turners (dad with the three-part explanation of liminal experience and son with the technology that could see on a screen the dancing connectome that shows shifts of thinking) are far more important than any religionists.  They made it possible to pull the conversation away from the small privileged educated elite and put it back into the hands of tribal people where it had begun.  Now we can talk about world religions that are indigenous, ecological, liminal. 

What I’ve been after all along is how to get the connectome to shift from the ordinary to the sacred.  What cues the brain to perceive the sacred, which presumably is there all along?  It’s not a matter of words or temples or who-was-your-mama.  It’s not a matter of virtue or how much of a donation one makes to the needy.  But neither is it so supernatural that no human can understand or control it.  Something happens in the human that is an attunement, a receptivity.  Chemicals and electricity are part of it, but still not the key.  Maybe it’s emotion.

There’s irony in this line of thinking.  It put me out of my print-centered denomination and sermon-centered Sunday services.  But it was the experience of UU Leadership School that awoke the non-print concepts I’ve been working through ever since.   Finally I begin to understand the Blackfeet Bundle Ceremony as well as its substrate of relationship to the land.  More than that, I begin to see how to design experiences that are meaningful without having any allegiance to a particular historical institution or book.

And finally that brought me to Cinematheque, a group that pulls in boys at-risk who might be adept at print, well-read, able to write well; but also includes the boys from the street who grew up like Topsy (the little girl in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” who grew up as a slave -- a trafficked African-American -- “every which way.”)  The common denominator has been the image, sometimes a conventional still photo but more often a kind of woven set of images, possibly moving in a video, often combining colors in an intense and suggestive way.  They are in the visual language of the boys which requires them to learn the technical grammar of producing computer images.  They do it as though it were easy, just soak it up. The other great lingua franca of kids all over the planet is music.  Matching music to image is an art they easily master, but with all my education I can’t do it.  

The New Language is image and sound, but not necessarily words. That’s one barrier eliminated.  “Tell me about your life,” and you get a cascade of darkness shot with lightning; an Asian boy in a singlet dancing in a bare basement with a peeling radiator for a ballet barre; a skateboarder gliding down stairs across a plaza and somehow jumping a bridge to skate on the water.  I've watched some of these vids over and over.  A few of them are so indelible that I only need to watch a few times to have them etched in my memory.

The ones made in Europe were relatively conventional until a breakthrough during the Amsterdam days.  A boy said his mother, who had neglected and abused him, was a “cunt.”  One of the other boys, who was thrown to the street when his beloved mother died, objected to this.  

The argument continued through the making of a video that was not chronological, repetitive, emotion expressed in color changes, the spoken refrain (like a pop song) was “she was lonely.”  In fact, this vid took the group from Hollywood assumptions out into a kind of abstract expressionism.  The boys, who had divvied up the tasks among them, objected,  “That was way too hard!”  Pretty soon they were doing harder things.

By now the vids challenge comprehension with their tachistoscopic cascades, but the kids can understand them.  Their brains are trained in a way adults can rarely match.  I’m not sure an adult can really grasp the content either.  Should they?  

CATHARS IN THE MODERN WORLD

Now I’m far enough into “Love in the Western World” by de Rougemont to see what his strategy is.  And to stop reading.  He reminds us that he’s in his early thirties as he writes, which is relevant.  Basically, he is arguing that courtly love was a disguised heresy, in the sense that it was an evasion and justification of that evasion of the standing order in the 12^th century of Europe.  The Catholic world had gripped the continent, dominant, but had never quite eliminated the pre-existing Celtic world, which kept coming back -- in particular through women who had a much stronger role in the Celtic culture.  In that world women were assigned wisdom, resourcefulness, healing and creativity.  The kings, like Mark, needed the energy and sometimes the repair they could provide, but the women were heretical -- neither compliant nor conventional.

Most of the book is an accounting of a complex of heresies that still plague us (or save us, depending on how you look at it.  “Us” meaning Euro-Americans.)  Manicheism: the splitting of everything into good or bad; Gnosticism: the idea that all manifestations are illusion; and Catharism: the belief that this world was created by a bad god that one can only escape through death.  Rather than splitting the deity into God vs. Satan, this idea says God IS Satan, or how could He have created this world of suffering and injustice?

Passionate love outside conventional marriage stood for the lure of these heresies, that they were destructive but irresistible.  This was the era of cathedrals, paper, windmills, the compass, Marco Polo on the Silk Road, and the Hanseatic League of cities formed to protect trade.  The Roman Empire had collapsed.  De Rougement argues that the heretical ideas were sung by troubadors, protected from destruction by being outside convention and always traveling, pretending to just be entertainment.  Sorta like rock bands.  True love and all that.  But outrageous.

If we accept this idea, which disguises intellectual questing with sexual longing, then perhaps today’s Iseult will be the same sex as Tristan.  Or maybe a blue Pandoran.  Certainly music continues to have a heretical dimension.  The continuing disintegration we feel now is a continued loosening of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire.  (Saint Francis was a 12^th century figure, never ordained.)  The new ideas about the universe fit much better with Celtic notions about nature or even with Gnostic notions about illusion, since scientists say each of us lives in a constructed sensory analogue to what is “real” outside us.   So it becomes clear that today’s media narratives, TV and movies, are also “troubadorean” heresies, covering their true nature not so much with transgressive love (since there are so few transgressive kinds of love now) as with outright crime.

De Rougement was a man looking in the mirror, not searching for the eyes of a beloved.  Rather he was part of a movement looking for a political way forward in France between WWI and WWII, only their confidence that the standing order was wrong was their guide.  In short, despite the reputation of the French as tres jolie, he was more interested in theory than a romp in the hay.  But then, deconstruction is always like that, isn’t it?

We are so confined by Greek thought, for instance that love is of four kinds:  eros (passion, sex), philias (friendship, “affiliation”), storge (attachment, belonging), and agape (generous selflessness), that we keep using the four terms in slightly different ways instead of making new words.

Here’s an intriguing quote from http://polytical.org  

“If you don’t have words for something, you can’t talk about it. Why else do subcultures come up with new words like polyamory, metamour, compersion? Perhaps identifying different forms of love as genuinely different feelings, different things, not just different stages of love, would help us talk about them better.”  (Metamour =meta-amour, the person who is in a love relationship with a person you are also in a love relationship with, but not with you.  Compersion is the ability to shared a loved one’s joy at a loving relationship that’s not with you.)  Did you ever think of that before?

I’ve always liked Erich Fromm’s schema in “The Art of Loving” about relationship as two circles: separate; conflated as in one swallowing up the other; or contrasting in size; or overlapping to some degree,.  I like to think of that last as dynamic, moving between greater and lesser as the situation changes.

The heretical love we most need to talk about today is not the secret mutual obsession with a forbidden partner, or indeed any kind of love that hardens the boundaries of family, nation, religious category, or obligation into “us-versus-them”.  What we need now is agape for the “other” no matter how strange, needy, or dangerous they are.  The seeds of the heresy are there if we look for them: we need them.

An alternative that takes hold among the despairing is a return to Catharism: the idea that the world is evil, was created that way by a punishing God, and one’s pure soul can only escape by death -- maybe suicide.  Mass murder by terrorism, maybe by war destruction -- ways of identifying with God -- are the covert belief of many people who control society from underneath, occasionally bursting into the open, but also present as stigma, jealousy and resentment.  They try to force good.  I suspect it is behind the widespread withdrawal from citizenship that is undercutting democracy.  I was struck by the repeated sentiment in this little town when I urge people to attend council meetings:  “It’s broken and can’t be fixed.”  The people who show up have an ax to grind, often hatred of the leader.  They wish to save themselves at the expense of all others, forgetting that we are all part of one body.

The Urban Dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com  is a pretty good way to check out what people are really talking about and thereby reinventing words.  There is a huge category about sex, but only one definition for love: “nature's way of tricking people into reproducing.”  Cynical, nihilistic, and catharitic.

Here’s another useful word related to Catharism:  Catharsis: purification or purgation of the emotions (as pity and fear) primarily through art. a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release.  A little mimesis of suicide.  One would hope that a particular religious belief-system would provide effective cathartic ceremonies, but one could also go to the Wagnerian opera called “Tristan and Isolde.”  Or a person could “rock out.”  Or paint.  Greek drama aimed at doing this.

Abreaction is a word invented to describe the reliving of an experience in order to understand and resolve it.  Some insist that this should be done with a trusted other person.  It is the basis of much counseling and would suggest that testifying can resolve what one witnesses.  Now that we can directly observe what happens anywhere on the planet, formerly hidden because of distance or taboos or denial, we have an enormous need to revisit the traumas that still plague us all: genocide, slavery, trafficking, unjustified attacks, poverty, plague, famine.  The Cathars have plenty of evidence.

In terms of Tristan and Isolde, which is where de Rougemont began, we have clung to the idea of falling in love, helplessly and as if enchanted, which has been portrayed sexually, in the flesh, resolved only by death.  I won’t preach against that in itself, but I oppose the denial, the taboo, the refusal to resolve.  Not because it’s morally evil, but because it prevents further transformation.  Eros with snakes for hair.  It is amazing how we cling to Evil.  But what if it's an illusion?  Hello, Buddha!