POUR OUT THE GOBLET

Now that "The Bone Chalice" has served its purpose and is empty, I will post it intact to one of the free hosts for academic work -- maybe both.  (ResearchGate or Academia.)  So far I've sent along a bit of thought about the new research on how minds work as well as a couple of papers about Blackfeet.  This practice seems to alert a lot of scholars outside the US, which is still in lockstep governed by universities and academic publishers.

"The Bone Chalice" began as my thesis at Meadville/Lombard Theological School that served as one of three "feeders" for the Unitarian Universalist Association, a merger of two denominations that happened in Portland, OR in 1961 and has struggled to understand itself.  In theory based on the idea that intelligent people should think for themselves, it substituted principles and sources for the conventional idea of unified dogmas/beliefs.  As time and research have gone forward, our understanding of human beings and their "place" in the world have changed drastically.  Now the UUA is a bit stranded between the social nature of "denominations" based on socio-economic similarities that bring people to an affinity, and the new unreality of Judeo-Christian culture based on folk science plus the need to share with other cultures like Islam.

In the first place of the symbol was the division between the container and the contained, which goes back to the martyrdom of Hus, a volatile dissenter who was contained by death, is simply an artifact of our grammar:  subjects vs. objects, an ur-binary that we escape only with Whorfian gerunds -- verbs set free.  (No chairs but sitting; no wind but blowing,)  The concept of the virtual is like a gerund, a reality that is unreal.  No god but godding.

Second was the idea that an individual human can "feel" but a group must have a stated "rule of law", "book of source", identity as entity.  The whole concept pre-supposes that the elements of denomination or religious grouping must be unitary even as it pretends to be plural.  Even if it is "plural", it is on the basis of a binary (theist/atheist of one dimension) or possibly a continuum that responds to one question in one dimension.

The new understanding of the planet no longer entertains a clear division between living and non-living, among plant/animal/microbe, or even time as a process, as opposed to a simultaneous phenomenon through which our perceptions proceed.  Everything is connected code.  Even the smallest variation counts and contributes: the snowflake, the grain of sand, the drop of water.  Every reiteration introduces variation and every variation opens new possibilities, even loss of a continuation opens new possibilities.  Time is always arriving and leaving.

Access to the perception of holiness, the ability to feel the difference between the sacred and the profane (Eliade) is located in the subconcious.  It cannot be "reasoned" into existence but only "felt".  But this cannot be discounted as stigmatized"emotion."  If we think of emotion as the conscious recognition the physical expression of that which already exists as a phenomenon coded and located in each cell of the flesh which then rises to recognition by the brain, then it precedes concepts and rules.  It is not the product of the cells of the skull (the chalice) but of the whole body.  The flame has escaped the chalice -- the division is no longer useful.  Maybe the idea of the flame-as-thought is a temporary conceit that only works when it represents conscious thought.

So what replaces this metaphor?  Perhaps music works with the person as instrument.  Maybe the DNA/computer code ideas are helpful.  Both approaches work with 19th century elements like machines and aesthetics.  Patterned dance and realistic art.  But more recently our understanding of the humanities has accepted the chaotic, the proscribed, the obscene, the unsuspected, the tortured.  Are we to accept the idea that these theories and creations can call up the holy, the spiritual?

This would break the link with proprieties imposed by the three Middle Eastern "religions" which may or may not be felt, even though they claim the holy when they are only authoritarian.  This may even break the principle of survival as ultimate purpose, since the idea of eternal survival is bogus to begin with.  

On a video Vine Deloria Jr. suggests the opposition between the indigenous and the Euro is rooted in the spiritual world versus the material.  At some point the Western world moved from geographic territoriality as the basis of importance and salvation to the idea of capital, money symbols of wealth.  It was all fantasy, but to those people it was taken to be real.  Instead of trying to understand what to do with their money-points that would be good for the world, help it to survive, they began to hoard until their money-points became more real than the world itself and therefore no longer related to the sacred.  Nothing was sacred.  

Religious performances were emptied, but the claim was that performing these dogmas would bring in more money-points.  This is the kind of assumption, which is often subtle enough to escape notice (fine architecture, prosperous members, educated leaders, long history) that I'm opposing.  It seems like reality, but it is illusion.  Worse, it is a mafia in plain sight, opposing the politics of the whole with a specialized version that only supports itself.  Like mafia, it is most powerful when the polity of the greater whole is broken or weak.  But all three are illusions.  Reality is an illusion.  No matter how powerful or persuasive the ideas of the holy might be, they are concepts that are transcended by the felt pre-conceptual, which somehow emerges from mystery.

We "know" that electrochemical patterns of rhythms and interactions in molecules, atoms, energy waves, are as far as we can reduce the elements, as humans can go, even with fabulous instruments.  As soon as a living creature loses the wholeness of its interactions, it disperses and its particles no longer interact.  Our awareness of the interval between birth and death is what makes us think humans are distinct entities apart from each other, even though the world proves to us that no one is separate, we are indeed islands that may submerge but our continuity persists even submerged, restlessly singing.  The goblet poured out.

A LINE OF THOUGHT

For decades I've been thinking about a body of theory that I call "The Bone Chalice."  Now I come to two realizations.  One is that I've posted so much and so often that it amounts to the equivalent of a very fat book.  The other is that the title won't work anymore.  At the time I chose it, the idea was that the experience of the numinous was a product of the brain in its bony container, but now I'm understanding that "religious/spiritual" felt experience is the result of  the whole body in its dynamic relationship to everything else over infinite time and space.

The link between my old title and a new one -- when I finally figure out what it should be -- is the human sensory capacity, both conscious and unconscious.  I still reflect on my list of performances and can now add the concept of "performance" itself.  In the meantime, if there are people trying to follow along over the years, I will list here the blog posts on prairiemary.blogspot.com that were about all this.

BONE CHALICE POSTS  (And related posts about “religion”) (but I may have missed some)

2007

3-29-07 Flesh: a Religious Paradigm

8-10-07 Fleeting but Ineradicable

2008

3-17-08 The Poetics of Liturgy

4-8-08 Wielding Power: The Essence of Ritual Practise

4-17-08 The Staff of Life

4-21-08 Religion as a Source of Behavior

5-6-08 Found Notes

5-9-08 The Management of Consciousness

5-12-08 The White Dress

5-13-08 Cassowaries

5-14-08 Take the Umeda for Instance

5-20-08 The Umeda: Deep Liturgy

5-22-08 Notes on the Way to Dawn

5-24-08 Crossing the Threshold of Worship

6-3-08 How to Throw a Umeda Soiree

8-30-08 Three Words:  Unity, Conscience, Meaning

9-30-08 Getting a Grip on God

10-1-08 The Ground of Being

10-2-08 Mapping the Virtual

10-5-08 Blackfeet Ingathering

10-11-08 The Uses of Liturgy: Theraturgy

10-26-08 Cannibalism or Communion

10-27-08 Part two

10-28-08 Part three

11-2-08 A Wedding of Life and Death

11-3-08 Reflections on a Rite of Joining

2009

11-19-09 Camille Paglia: Oh, Hello!

12-17-09 Religious Notes from Outside the System

12-24-09 Jesus the Apocalypse

12-30-09 A Recurrent Renascent Religious Source

2010

10-8-10 History of Liturgy

2011

9-13-11 Liturgical Stories

9-18-11 Binding Sound to Liturgy

9-20-11 Writing Grammar & Liturgy

10-4-11 Liturgical “Beats” and “Arc” AKA Elements and . . .

10-5-11 More Intense than Lyric Poetry

10-16-11 Grasping the Concepts

10-17-11 Poetics of Liturgy: An Appendix

11-2-11 Resisting Closure

11-6-11 The Molten Chalice Outline

11-8-11 Step Away from the Institution

11-17-11 Time is the Chalice

11-20-11 Fire

12-1-11 The Brain’s Workspace & Sources

12-3-11 Examples for The Molten Chalice 

12-8-11 Things That Persist

12-11-11 Dom Gregory Dix:  Liturgist

12-26-11 The Holding Community

12-28-11 Cupped Hands

12-29-11 Two Hands Clapping

2012

1-3-12 Prairie Liturgy

1-14-12 Consciousness

1-22-12 Exploiting the Apocalypse

2-7-12 Incarnational Liturgy

2-8-12 Liminal Neuro-Space

2-19-12 Community Liturgy

3-7-12 Can You Say That in Aramaic?

3-15-12 A Trout in the Chalice

4-3-12 Writing the Plan

4-23-12 This Time with Feeling

5-2-12 The Melting Chalice

5-5-12 Taking Barry Lopez at his Word

5-31-12 Structure vs. Communitas

6-3-12 Selling “Religion" That Isn’t Dogma

6-9-12 Felt Meaning

6-11-12 What Is Ritual/Liturgy/Ceremony?

6-12-12 A Liturgy for Combat Veterans

7-1-12 The Bone Chalice

8-3-12 Marvelous Mystery

8-19-12 “Reinventing the Sacred” by Kauffman

9-19-12 Round and Round We Go

9-26-12 This Might be Performance Arts Stuff

10-10-12 Making It Up As We Go Along

10-14-12 Liminal, Liminoid, Ultraliminal

10-16-12 Flow

10-18-12 Going with the Flow

10-22-12 Hermeneutical Phenomenology

10-25-12 Making Memories

11-3-12 What Was That?  Where?  When?

11-4-12 Swan Jookin’

11-13-12 My Theory of Everything

11-14-12 The Ravenous Brain

11-15-12 “What’s Wrong with You?”

11-16-12 “Mirror, Mirror, Are We Fair?”

11-18-12 The Flame in the Chalice

11-19-12 Follow the Dog

11-20-12 Smokeserpent

11-25-12 Just Rambling about Morality

11-26-12 Going to the Guts

11-27-12 Feeling One’s Insides

11-30-12 “Thingness”

12-2-12 The Human Particle

12-7-12 A Summary of a Convergence

12-9-12 Elemental Smells

12-26-12 We Witness for Each Other

12-28-12 When the Rational Suppresses the Emotional

12-30-12 Time for a Query?

2013

1-5-13 Do You Hear What I Hear?

1-6-13 Is a Brain Like a Sea Anemone?

1-9-13 The Seeds of Liturgy

1-13-13 The Sacred Moment

1-16-13 What Happens in Liminal Space

3-8-13 Bone Chalice 2^nd Query

3-8-13 Feelings Matter

5-5-13 Pastoral Counseling (CPE)

5-19-13 The Way 

6-2-13 The Sublime and the Apple

7-27-13 Holiness Is Not Religion

I'll have to go back and continue this list.  There are a lot more posts.  I must confess that I've loved this illustration, but I won't use it anymore.

A SUMMARY OF A CONVERGENCE

My reading of neuro-research, culture theory, and Alvina Krause’s 1933 thesis on creativity are converging on a new outline for my own manuscript: “The Bone Chalice.”

Liturgy/ritual are poetic, metaphorical ways of discerning, creating, and defending meanings strong enough to act on in our daily lives.  So they are an art form.

Art forms come from the “ravenous brain” that seeks meaningful patterns everywhere and -- if it finds none -- invents them.  The difference between art and liturgical enactments is that art is usually provisional, exploratory, and maybe transient, but liturgy is meaning that has been captured by institutionalized religion that will destroy variance in order to protect continuity.  It can be enforced meaning.

Liturgy must be constantly recharged and re-enacted, so to some extent art is allowed within the religious establishment.  Caravaggio can live a life outside of virtue so long as he keeps up the pretense of painting religiously admired subjects.   Torture can be tolerated so long as the agony is interpreted as a demonstration of faith.  Sex can be openly celebrated so long as it is seen as a metaphor for the erotic relationship with God.

When religious institutions are far too much of a mismatch to be compensated for by either art or theological apologetics -- as when priests become corrupt and lascivious -- then the establishment throws up a flurry of counter-accusations, moves to new populations, or just collapses.  Their best defense is wealth, so that’s their biggest vulnerability.  If the meaning of life is understood to be wealth, if it becomes clear that faith does not necessarily lead to prosperity, then one of the main supports of religious institutions is gone, then the search for meaning must look outside any established religion.  Wealth is not meaning and will not yield meaning.

Deep meaning in the brain is complex and much of it is pre-human and subconscious.  The concepts are there, but they are not recorded in words but rather in a consciousness best expressed as image and metaphor, defined as two images intersecting in thought.  Words may result or words may evoke, but words are not the real content of the deepest meanings.  If only words are valued, the deep meanings will cruise under the surface of consciousness like sea creatures, powerful but hidden.

Meaning is recorded in the whole body as sensory input from the environment.  This begins as soon as there is enough brain formed in the fetus to begin registering its floating world and move its rudimentary limbs.  As soon as this begins, the brain responds in its development to the sensory information.  The brain is built molecule-by-molecule, neuron/axon by neuron/axon, by forming relationships according to a plan always shaped by reality.  First and therefore deepest, sensory awareness is in binaries:  heat/cold, moving/stationary, dark/light, sound/silence, alarm/calm.  Much of it is transferred into the womb from the mother.

At birth the amount of sensory information explodes, which pushes the formation of input-managing nexuses for each sensory organ: ears, eyes, skin, nose, mouth.  These are “educated” and grow according to the pressure of the new engulfing environment.  But they are rarely, if ever, changed, partly because any of the potentially energized neurons at birth that are not used will die away, leaving the space they occupied open for more neuron growth specific to what is happening.  A Saharan brain does not need to think about snow -- it needs the brain space for sand and wind.   It has been proven that if a sense organ is missing, say, due to blindness, then the space normally allocated to seeing will be taken up by other senses, likely by hearing.

These levels of sense and pattern hold the deepest foundational meanings.  All cultures, no matter how resourceful, are built on these first concepts.  The saints who have visions talk about their experience in these terms, but also in terms of parenting: being fed, held, comforted, cleaned.  This is the next constant in human experience: enough care for the baby to survive.  The baby’s survival drive is the most basic urgency, with the goal of  achieving the homeostasic needs of the body:  to eat, to sleep, to excrete, to explore the body by moving.  But also to seduce by snuggling and to express distress by struggling.  That is, relationship is the second most basic task of survival and the source of emotion from the beginning.  A successful religion must produce both.

MEANINGFUL LITURGY must relate to these basic needs, regardless of whether they are explicit in the service.  Therefore, the liturgist ought to:

Explore the sensory information most valued by the congregation and what homeostatic (self-preserving) meanings they have, both for the individual and for the larger group -- possibly for larger categories like the nation or even the planet.

Find the limits of homeostasis: the symbolism of the worst destruction and the answering symbolism of how to preserve life.

HOW TO START:  First of all there must be delineation of safety: a place, a time, a shield of some sort that should provide privacy, belonging, familiarity (even habit patterns), and probably relationship with a person or persons or personifications.

Second must be focusing: the call to worship, the concentration on the moment.  Possibly there are words or actions: maybe a gesture, maybe an act like dipping fingers in water or lighting a candle or drumming or singing an anthem or processing.

These are the same ways that an artist begins.   But an artist may have an intention or at least materials in front of him or her, even if only a computer screen.  The artist has time to doodle, explore, wonder what would happen if . . .  let the mind free-associate in almost the same way as the hypnogogic state before falling asleep.  In short, let images rise up from the normally subconscious state.  They may need to be triggered by making a mark, creating a sentence, blowing a note, making a gesture.

The context of liturgy as most people understand it is pre-determined by the institution, but if we can tolerate the open moment, which most people might call “meditation,” then deep meaning may rise from the subconscious.  This might be easier done by individuals, but the Quakers and Buddhists have developed group meditation, each in their own way.

Human beings are defined by their responses to their environment, their ability to find the patterns that will preserve homeostasis.  The guides they invent from their material culture are called liturgy, ritual, or maybe just “art.” 

THE FLAME IN THE CHALICE

This is a Sunday post.  Let’s go to the metaphor of the chalice that holds the flame.  To remind you, it began as a symbol for the UU Service Committee, the “do-it” wing of the UUA.  Hans Deutsch, an Austrian artist, first brought together the chalice and the flame as a Unitarian symbol during his resistance and rescue work with the Unitarian Service Committee during World War II.  Unitarian Universalists today have many different interpretations of the image.  The one I like is that it honors Jan Hus, Czech priest and forerunner of the Reformation, who was burned at the stake for being stubborn about communion belonging to the people.  

But for “The Bone Chalice” I’m being simpler: fire in a goblet.  The fire is the brain and the goblet is the skull.  Life contained in death, if you like.  With more than a decade of experience in a foundry, I know the importance of a crucible if you are going to produce molten metal for casting.  A weak crucible means a break that lets the molten contents spill and chill into a shapeless mass of no meaning.  The strong crucible carries the metal in a “cradle” to the mold where it can be shaped into something of beauty and meaning.

The container for a congregational worship service in the Western world developed in the circum-Mediterranean countries, several thousand years ago.  We could begin with Jewish services after the time of sacrifices and at the beginning of written words.  The people came together in a safe place, prayed, read their scrolls, discussed them (brain fire), prayed again, and went home.  This is still our order of service both in Catholic mass and Protestant services:  Call to worship, Confession of Sins, Assurance of Pardon, Scripture, Reflection, Prayer of Blessing -- and Communion, which is not in Jewish services because it is a commemoration of Jesus’ sacrifice added to the end.

What is the container for an individual’s religious fire?  Prayer.  Meditation. Walking.  Sometimes starvation, thirsting, lack-of-sleep, self-whipping, cutting, long solitude, possibly drugs, sex, pain.  These latter practices are strongly tabooed and stigmatized by institutions in most cultures because they turn people away from institutions and because they can destroy individuals.  They change the body’s operations in ways that interfere with the body’s homeostasis and, because that self-regulation is disrupted, the individual can act (sensations in > processing > actions out) in ways that endanger the person and the society around him or her.

But people do this list (repeat:  starvation, thirsting, lack-of-sleep, self-whipping, cutting, long solitude, possibly drugs, sex, pain) because they work, quickly and intensely.  The trouble is that they are short-term, sometimes they are not reversible (suicide), and (if you survive) they can cause craving for repetition.

So what else is there?  When life is intolerable and no options seem to be on the table -- or bar?  There have been several suicides in the paper this past week, young men with families and jobs, good-looking, high school grads.   What was the problem?  Was it drugs or alcoholism?  That only pushes the question down the line -- what made them become users?  I’m willing to bet it was lack of meaning.  Their ravenous hunger was not met.  Their yearning for a lost life of hunting and gathering (oh, forget gathering -- that’s for girls, in the opinion of Montana boys) was not satisfied even if they actually were hunters and fishermen.  I suspect they were not and I doubt they were hikers or photographers, either.  Life ended with high school.  It had turned into a treadmill, going nowhere.  The homeostatic had become the humdrum.

You might scoff, but part of what I like about Valier and the whole Blackfeet rez is the number of dignified and constructive old men.  They are ordinarily quiet and peaceful, but they are protective.  Their chalices are whole.  The last of the WWII soldiers have gone on, but the Korean, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraqi veterans are still around.  We won’t run out of veterans very soon, unless we continue to leave many starving jobless in the streets.  Those men’s chalices have cracked.  Their fire -- the one in their brain -- burns too hot and consumes their hope.  Jon Hus was not a metaphor: he was a real living man who poured out his life into a mold of conviction, a sculpture of courage.  He didn’t die for nothing.

Veterans organize.  They help each other.  They reclaim the bonding of their shared service.  They distribute surplus clothing and blankets.  They sit together and talk in a verbal communion.  Salvation is often a do-it-yourself project.  AA, NA, ALNON, WW -- you know.  

So what I’m saying is that these sharing circles are chalices that contain shared human fire that has meaning, even the kind of deep meaning we call spirituality or liminal or ritual or bonding or something corny like love.  But as Alvina Krause the acting teacher, was CONSTANTLY saying, character is a matter of action.  It doesn’t matter how much emotion there is unless there is action.  A flaming chalice that won’t light a torch is not worth much.  It will not feed a ravenous hunger for pattern and meaning.

Today’s scripture may not be in words, but rather in images.  Not just poetic metaphorical images but also images from our many glass screens, big and little, moving and still.  By now many of them are cliches -- the little green sprout with the drop of water, someone silhouetted against a flaming sunset in Monument Valley, baby polar bears, and mountains mountains mountains until all the meaning is drained out of them.  Yet our hungry eyes search for the fire in the chalice.

When I was traveling for the Montana UU Extension Ministry (1982 -85) I carried a little chalice with me.  It was only a glass compote, but it was graceful and it held a candle.  I was serving small scattered fellowships, the kind I like best, full of stubborn people and often proud old men, in those days WWII veterans.  That was before another volcanic eruption of hubris swept the country.  These days I don’t light a chalice.  I smudge: sweetgrass on the kitchen stove burner after I’ve made coffee in the morning.  It is a displacement of the senses from sight to smell, a more primitive way to contact the universe.  Sometimes, even now, we hunt and gather.

MY THEORY OF EVERYTHING

MY THEORY OF EVERYTHING

(So far -- highly subject to revision, possibly momentarily.)

1.  Everything is code (pattern, structure).  The difference between non-being and being is that being is structured.  At that point it becomes energy.

2.  As Einstein suggested, matter is only coded energy.  I will begin with the atom.  (There are sub-particles but that's a distraction at this point because someone will start talking about Higgs Bosons and I don't want to.  Nor God neither.  The structure of an atom is a central nucleus (at least one proton and one neutron) in a shell that might be only one electron.  At this point we call the entities, when aggregated, "elements."  There are a limited number of them and there can be variations (isotopes) within them up to a point.

3.   Atoms can be clustered into molecules according to how the atoms stick together.  Molecules are described in a lot of different ways:  proteins, sugars, lipids, hormones, etc.

4.  Molecules somehow created one celled creatures, which are patterns of molecules.  The early versions had a nucleus of one strip of genes, which are codes, and a wall, a boundary that can create a gradient which is a source of energy.  The creatures can reproduce by "budding" or splitting.  We call this "mitosis."

5.  One celled creatures one day somehow ended up with a double strip of genes -- maybe a long one broke in half and doubled back.  Now the one celled creature can come up against another one and they can take down the boundary (the cell walls -- one celled intimacy) enough to unzip a double gene strip into two and swap half so that now each has a new code that will make a new structure-creature.  Or the one-celled creature might totally swallow another one-celled creature so that the smaller one becomes a little colony inside the big one's cell wall and produces energy for the bigger cell.  (Mitochondria)

6.  Pretty soon the one celled creatures became multiple cell creatures.  The ones that didn't have code and structure that were successful simply died.  The ones that did (by now we can call them eukaryotes) persisted and complexified and struck up partnerships with other eukayrotes.  (Entrainment, concatenation, complexification, evolution).

7.  After a zillion years of this sort of thing, we have mammals and then human beings.  A human being is a complex colony of eukaryotes that have specialized to the point of not being able to survive on their own.  (Remember Loren Eiseley who tripped on a hot sidewalk one summer day and apologized to the red blood cells streaming from his smashed nose and cooking on the pavement?)

--------------------

8.  So now we come to the human brain: stacked, packed and wrapped.  Starting at the top of the spine and proceeding -- all above the neck -- is a series of organ parts with the earliest and most primitive brains at the bottom (the reptile brain), going up to the mammal brain, and finally the most human part of the brain which is the outside rind or covering that wraps all the rest, with the most advanced and recently developed structures at the front behind the forehead and the top sides -- the very places most likely to be damaged by butting something.

9.  The parts of the brain each shelter or include specialized small structures, specialized cells, and special abilities to network with the rest of the brain through codes, which operate through direct contact (long extended axons of the individual neurons that can extend for remarkable lengths, like maybe a yard, the way fungal mycosilia filaments  join tree root hairs and mushrooms for beneficial purposes, symbiosis) or by messenger molecules that travel in the fluids of the body (hormones) or by brain wave variation.  In fact, there are two organs that generate brain waves, which are a time structure as well as having peaks and speeds and so on.  The heart rhythm is independent but affected by the brain rhythms.  The brain waves operate something like that circling line in radar that reveals things as it passes.  Brain waves vary all the time, but one of their major purposes seems to be concatenation, entrainment, the coordination of whatever is happening in the other structures.   If brain waves get out of rhythm and lose their pattern, the result is a seizure.

10.  The brain cannot perceive anything that is not coded.  The cells cannot feel, hear, see, taste or smell.  They deal only in the electrochemical processes that they support.  Each organ of perception has to be accompanied by a little center of translation from vibration to code (hearing), from molecules to code (smell and taste), from lightwaves to code (seeing). If something goes wrong with the coding center that means of perception is either distorted or eliminated.  If something can't be coded, it is not perceived -- light waves too long or short, for instance.

11.  There are two realms of perception: inside the body and outside the body.  The function of both is to maintain homeostasis.  The world impinges on the creature through sensations, the coding centers send the information "up" to the eventual final processing which results in action or not-action, which IS an action.  Homeostasis is whatever allows the creature to survive.  If actions help with that or don't interfere, they persist.  If they don't help, the creature is damaged or destroyed.

12.  Inside the body code is created also in the interest of homeostasis:  hunger, fear, rage, desire, comfort, sleep.  We call these codings "emotion."   They may be the product of the autonomic nerve network, a special system that maintains breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and circulation of fluids.  Another coding system is that of hormones in the fluid systems of lymph and blood.  The mechanical management of blood is a very active system: it is what is perceived in some instruments that observe the brain, because active cells cause blood to go there, and it is one contributor to sexual arousal, engaging either the spongy cells of the penis or the spongy cells that enwrap the vaginal tube.  (This probably contributes to getting a good "seal" for the transmission of seminal fluid, but also is coded to the brain as intensely pleasurable.  IF the coding system is working.)

13.  The basic mantra for the brain and for homeostasis is "code in/action out."  In between is a system of sorting code information into patterns that eventually rise to the level of "meaning."  Some meanings are not conscious, while others are or can move in and out of consciousness.

---------------------

14.  Consciousness, particularly consciousness of the self, is the pressing question of the moment.  It appears to be on or off, but it can also be semi-consciousness or barely subliminal consciousness (what comes to consciousness in dreams or hypnotism or creativity or free-association).  Experiments prove that even unconscious patterns deeply control the functioning of the brain which is only code and can only manage code through finding or creating patterns.  Without pattern there is no way to decide on actions.

15.  There are also many kinds of consciousness that we might call "moods" or "states."  Parallel to the way we learn about the brain through lesions that knock out various spots that reveal their function by being missing, there are conscious or barely subconscious states that control our emotions via depression, hyper-function, dissociation, elation.  The same code can be handled differently in the brain according to this mode of working, but we don't know how or why.  Neurotransmitters seem to have something to do with it.

16.  Voluntary control of consciousness can sometimes be produced by actions -- exercise, facial expression, supplying something that is lacking as in the case of hunger or relief from discomfort.  We say, "Cheer up"  and "Walk it off."  Or we can find something to do that produces "flow," which happens when the tasks exactly match the skills of the person, which is a kind of homeostasis.

17.  The voluntary control of focus is an important precursor to many actions.

18.  Involuntary actions are controlled by the subconscious which is why they are not voluntary.

19.  Memories are created both by actions and by sensations.  They are encoded in some way that attaches them together.  Daniel Bor, in his book "The Ravenous Brain," calls this "chunking, which I find rather inelegant.  I'd rather say "clustering."  Little bits of code combine into larger bits of code -- evidently indexed by the accompanying sensations -- and then into still larger bits of code until they reach the level of meaning.  

20.  Once a cluster has reached the stage of meaning, it is conscious and can be handled rationally, which is a way of managing code.  The more the brain has accumulated code for many things, the better able it is to manage meanings.  A good scientist would recommend a constant consultation with the real world to check meaning with the codes that give us "reality."  A good artist would recommend a constant consultation with one's inner world to discover the emotional meanings and associations of code.  These things are both conscious and subconscious.

21.  Social homeostasis depends upon learned codes of behavior, beginning with babyhood when one's actions of crying or thrashing cause response from caregivers.  If no code that causes emotional and sensational accumulation in the baby comes in, the baby will die as surely as if it had not been fed or had been exposed.  Later in life behaviors that mesh with others will mean better chances at survival but there are many ways to mesh besides conformity.  (Later, gator.)  The deepest code structures/frameworks, which are the ones that are the ones foundational to all the rest concern dark/light, cold/warm, held/dropped, breath/suffocation, pain/comfort.  These are the sensations that the saints describe after an interval of ecstatic and liminal brain consciousness.  They are deep enough to be shared by all mammals, but the latter cannot add the higher brain meanings of complex structural thought.

22.  Social homeostasis is supported by relatively recent forebrain evolution (spindle cells, mirror cells) that allows transpersonal vicarious communication.  When we witness someone else's movement or emotion, we don't just recognize it -- our bodies and brains show very subtle mirroring in our own selves.  This is the basis of some art forms.  Again, this is deep: mammals, esp. domestic mammals can "read" our emotional states but they cannot imitate our movements, except for primates.  However, domestic animals whose use depends upon communication -- like dogs or horses -- can predict and participate in behavior, often perceiving far more subtle signs than humans can.  Whether this could be called vicarious is open to question.

---------------

23.  The brain, which is a organically based process of code management leading to action, is protected and confined by a bone bowl or globe.  A brain, I am saying, in its bony holder is like a burning fire (using oxygen) in a chalice, as in the Unitarian symbol.

24.  A brain that supports meaning at the "liminal" or sacred level is governing homeostasis as much as breathing, which is often a metaphor for "spirituality."  Exactly what it is remains mysterious, but we know how to manage it to some degree, mostly with metaphors that have gathered or clustered many rich sensation codes and meaning codes into a complex that helps us keep surviving.  It is not a morality, though morality is also an indicator of homeostasis, but morality is "whatever works."   Liminal sacredness is what tells us our highest meaning and gives us our deepest courage when survival is at stake.

SWAN JOOKIN'

As a little kid, maybe primary school age, my family bought a “painting” to hang over the fireplace.  It was from Monkey Ward where my father was working because it was wartime and there were no tires or gas for his field work.  This was considered a Major Decision.  Most of our art was cut out of magazines by my mother, who put them in dimestore frames, except for a fine oil still-life of geraniums, a copper kettle, and a ceramic hen.  My mother’s aunt was an accomplished artist.  After long and solemn discussion, we bought a print of two swans on a pond which I “knew” was Laurelhurst Pond in the Portland park where our family had picnics.  It was a symbol of family, tranquility, safety and Wordsworthian nature.

When I was older, I became enamored of Anna Pavlova who is closely identified with a dance called “The Dying Swan.”  It’s full of pathos and delicate, doomed fragility -- a flower that cannot bloom for long.  I was about as ethereal as a Jersey cow, but that was the attraction, wasn’t it?  Thanks to YouTube, you can check it out.  The pallor, the hollow eyes, the fluttering tendril arms.  Very Goth. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxewIq7DG3A    

Then there’s a slightly healthier version with a more recent ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya.  She’s still Russian and we see her at first feeding real swans, in case we’ve forgotten what they are like.  She’s beautiful and effective, but not so pathetic.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-AMH_Woywg&feature=related

Here’s the one that dumps everything on its head:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9jghLeYufQ    This is called “jookin’” (not “jukin”) and is a kind of dancing that has developed in the street to include things like hip-hop and a lot of unnamed personal styles of whole-body dancing, mostly done by young urban black men.  How Lil Buck knows about the dying swan is beyond me.  He has to know only pond swans, ornamentals, both black and white.  Maybe it was the movie about the neurotic little ballerina who had to be violated to make her an adult (meaning sexual.)  

Lil Buck is not just a street boy anymore.   From Wikipedia:   “Lil Buck practices a kind of dance called jookin’ which started in Memphis, Tennessee. His technique and that of other dancers who dance in similar styles have been lauded as "iron technique." Lil Buck leads a dance team called New Styles Krew. “

But I want to keep thinking about the swan.  A subject of mythology (Leda and the Swan) and films (go to imdb.com and you’ll find Grace Kelly practicing to be a princess (1956) and a reality show about an ugly duckling using plastic surgery to become beautiful  (2004) for which you will need to know fairy tales to get the proper background.  Fairy tales from the northern parts of Europe throng with swans.

Back to YouTube.  I found music I have never heard before by a band called SWANS:  “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8RS12lVGUI    It’s intense.

Half a century ago on the high Montana prairie we hunted geese every fall, going out in the pickup over the swelling, wind-beaten grass among the frozen pot holes left by glaciers millennia ago.  One year there were swan permits and we bought a permit, but only winged our swan.  On foot it fled over the prairie with us plunging breathless after it.  When we caught it, we were bitten hard, bashed with the cruxes of its wings like cudgels.  But we captured it and took it home to study.  I’ve preached about this and written about it.  The actual bird with its smells and sounds and big flapping feet, its gaping mouth and blobs of shit.  It would have loved the music of the band called SWANS.  In fact, when I listen to the music I hear that big bird’s heart beat, its hissing, its clangouring will to live, though it was technically a mute swan, not a trumpeter.  Sort of Zen Wagner.  Triumphant and transcendent at once.  Swans go up in a rope to the sky.

We ate it.  It was as good as any Canada goose.  It had been in the freezer and in order to thaw it, I had to shear it with scissors -- I couldn’t pull the feathers out and they were effective insulation.  Swansdown really is that soft and fluffy.

Grounded literally, nourished by the land but always seeking to escape up the sky or burrow into the earth or glide across the water -- I see spirituality as being just like this.  My material culture is mostly circumpolar, since that’s where I’ve been all my life.  But for the past half-dozen years I’ve watched the urban Cinematheque boys dance along the Seine, in cobbled alleys in twilight, on paths in boreal forest.  They don’t dance their hearts OUT -- they dance them IN.  Alone and together.  Hip-hop, jookin’, bounce, B-boyin’, Crip Walk, Clown Walk, The Dougie, Jerkin’, Krumpin’, Lockin’, Poppin’, Electric boogaloo, Strobin’, Tuttin,’

When people begin to moan and groan over the death of civilization and the rotting of culture, I laugh, because they just can’t see it.  The new aristocracy is survivors.  Ultimately that’s what all the religious tropes are about:  survival.     Michael Gira writes, he draws, he propels the musical group called SWANS along a trajectory that might or might not include major success.  Michael Gira, when asked what inspires him, says,  “Fear of death.”  He doesn’t do cute or elite or class.  He ain’t forgettable, baby.  Whatever happens, it’s earned.

Culture is the means, not the end.  I suspect that Anna Pavlova would love Lil Buck and spend time trying to learn how to do what he does, laughing at the impossibility.  It’s more of a challenge to love SWANS, but Yo-yo Ma crosses cultures with his cello all the time.  The Grace Kelly swan proved that being a princess will not keep you safe.  The “Black Swan” ballet movie was mostly jerking off, which was why it was a bad survival strategy for little ballerinas.  For real swans?  Migration is the secret. 

As for that other Black Swan guy, the Lebanese quantifier named Nassim Talleb, I think he might join me in the idea that the ultimate anti-fragility is spirituality.  The more it is pounded and twisted and threatened, the richer and denser it gets.

MAKING IT UP AS WE GO ALONG

NOTE:  This is not a commercial blog meant to accumulate popularity or income.  I’m getting mild complaints from people who say they can’t understand what I’m talking about.  It’s not my problem.  This is “thought jazz.”  Sorry if it’s not your thing.

The conclusion I am coming to in my pondering of liturgy for the manuscript I call “The Bone Chalice” is that the real importance is in the structure: the shifting into the state of mind that is liminal and then back to the ordinary.  The necessity is to cross the threshold, but what will take the specific person across might be quite different from one to another.

Most of the writing about liturgy I’ve seen has been about the content and because most of the liturgies are “scripted,” that is the norm.  Some people find it hard to step outside of words to the language of bodily expression.  In fact, whole cultures ignore bodily expression.  Maybe it was the influence of religious “books” or maybe it is the influence of science with its emphasis on reasoning in papers.  Recently both have been guiding a return to non-verbal communication -- not just away from the spoken word, but away from all words.  Today’s religious books include “Centering” or “Be Here Now” or “Focusing.”  Today’s science is neuroscience about things like phantom limbs or memory.

In the acting books I’m reading (Krause as notes, Press as Ph.D. thesis, Downs, Benedetti, Mason) there is attention to structure, esp. idea structure which is UNDER/BEHIND words, and also a recurring distinction between denotation and connotation.  Denotation is what the word is according to the dictionary.  Connotation is what the word is according to the artist.

I say “horse.”  You know the animal I mean and probably have a mental picture come to mind.  That’s denotation.  Then, in a great looming cloud around that animal in your mind, arises a host of meanings, emotions, depictions, memories, depending on what horse means to you.  That’s connotation.

The management of those connotations into a clear structure of meaning is what the artist does, whether it is Deborah Butterfield welding up bits of scrap or the marvelous play featuring a horse puppet or the news story of the fine race horse that had to be destroyed.  I saved the following story:

Simon Pope, What Cannot Be Turned Aside, 2012 © the artist. WAKEFIELD.- 

A new film by artist Simon Pope opened at Yorkshire Sculpture Park/ What Cannot Be Turned Aside is an exploration of how we negotiate access to land and the strong impulses at play during this process. The work features a horse and rider from West Bretton walking together across an open field near the former gallops on Longside, which once staged an annual horse fair. Visiting artist in 2010/11, Pope’s practice often involves walking, the act of being together, the spoken word, and the subjective notion of memory. 

The categories of denotation/connotation are not separate -- they co-exist as two interwoven dimensions.  Denotation has a specific content.  Connotation does not and will vary among individuals and cultures.  Denotation is controlled, specific, defined by someone, but connotation is “emergent.”  It comes by itself and though it can be guided, it cannot be very narrowly controlled.  Each has its advantages if used properly.  An excess of either can diminish meaning.

People who cannot perceive connotations (and there are more than you think, because they copy the reactions of those around them to avoid detection) are often baffled by arts and humanities.  One might think they are “Apollonian” and just want more structure and cleaner thought, but that’s not the case.  People without connotation perception are flat, more like zombies.  They are not like crazy people, who are FULL of connotations, but more like people who have suffered the kind of forehead trauma which cancels empathy.  My brain-damaged brother could sit by the hour reading encyclopedias and old anthro texts.  But he could not tell how anyone was feeling when they were right in front of him.  He could not “see” as much in other people as my cat could.  (Of course, the cat didn’t much care, but then -- neither did he.)  

One of the difficulties I struggle with in this project is that every denotative religious word is loaded with connotations.  The purpose of most of the relevant words IS to carry connotations that will evoke emotion and allegiance. (God, love, hope.)  Many of the words I need to denote specific defined aspects of the creation of liturgy simply don’t exist EITHER as connotations or denotations. The concepts barely exist.  Scientific terms as well are having to be invented as factors are teased out.  Some of them are medical terms, which are very much defined, while others are provisional terms for hypothetical brain functions, as yet unproven.  

There was great excitement about the idea of the two halves of the brain being “assigned” the emotional/creative versus the analytical/factual.   Many book titles ensued.   It would be easy to assign the denotation/connotation paradigm to the two sides, but it would be inaccurate -- not least because the interactions of the parts of the brain turn out to be MUCH more complex.  There are a lot more things to consider than right-half versus left-half -- for instance a whole vertical sequence.  What a neuroscientist might mean would be molecular and electrical changes that record in some mysterious fashion the sensory circumstances of any given moment.   Memory in ordinary living is suffused with connotation: scents and sounds, beloved faces.  An entirely different vocabulary. 

Memory is necessary for both denotation and connotation but in different ways.  For instance, ambiguity is the friend of connotation because it leaves so much room for the individual to add meaning.  But denotation needs to be bright, crisp, sharp.   Laws are denotations and when they do not meet this standard, that makes trouble.  Poetry is connotative and rests comfortably in print or spoken words that might have double meanings.

Religion can be either one.  I’m thinking maybe liturgical structure should be denoted in print and action, but content should be connoted, meant to be evocative.   Structure holds content.   For the congregation to take some action, like rising, action needs to be denoted clearly to avoid confusion.  "All rise." "Those who are able may rise."  What rising might mean is connotative.  It could be an act of respect, obedience, solidarity, wishing to be counted, “rising to a point of order.”  When I go to the Town Council meeting and the mayor calls for the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, I know what is expected of me.  If I did not rise, it would have connotative meaning.  But if I go to Catholic mass, not rising with the members of the congregation could be interpreted as respect for the boundary between the members and the nonmembers of the congregation.  I am NOT expected to do what the members do.  I may NOT take Communion.  Context matters in connotation.

If “God” is defined too closely or even depicted, it can be a denotation that courts idolatry and projection -- connotations.  The danger of denotation is that it can be legalized, set limits, even though both the meanings of the actual word and the connotations of whatever is meant can change over the years.  Stigma is a connotation.  Pointing to it is a denotation.  We play little games with the differences, both in and out of the religious context.  But they are often games unrecognized, crude and damaging.  We should stop horsing around.