Solstice 2009

In Nov., around the middle of Scorpio, I gave a reading of St. John’s Rose Slumber as a gift for the dead. Then the semester got busy, and I am just now getting my breath back and stirring on the shore. Still, throughout this time, I was developing some thoughts about religion. I teach in religious studies and spend a lot of time trying to get at what the topic is.

After the reading and as part of trying to understand differences I find I have with other writers and my time, I began to think about my comfort with the context of religion in relation to what is almost a prohibition on speaking in religious terms or about what I’d call a “good in being”, a prohibition on valuing anything that is enacted by relentless recursive reflexivity.

In this post for Solstice 09, I reflect on this. Over in O Pure Contradition and The Anderson Sisters, I offer my journal notes and drafts towards a new piece “The Star of Araby” that weaves together sense I have of being a girl, Kabbalah notion of the Shekinah as daughter of God, memories I have of WW II and of childhood and thus of being in some larger story or process I catch sight of now and then.

“A Good in Being” and “A Problem Given in Being”

When you teach religion, you run up against the problem of 1) intuiting patterns across religions, 2) looking for a language in which to talk about those patterns. A common strategy is to adopt a Universalist perspective that assumes an actual commonality, and thus to use words like “the sacred” etc as a way of referring to some common truth. This, however, is already to have assumed too much. That is, it assumes the patterns are proof of an actual common term or structure. It assumes something about precisely what is at stake—what our relation to any sacred might be.

I use the language “Good” for a number of reasons. I like that the semantic field of the term allows slippage into, for instance, 1) “merchandise” and thus, more generally, value, 2) the thought that it it indicates our desire/erotic natures have some bearing in the relation, 3) some awareness of a difference and relation between putative “secular” and sacred topoi (Good to God), and 4) we are aware it is somehow plural.

Hence, when I introduce a term to suggest this pole of a religious relation, I speak of “a good in being” and then quickly gloss this as somehow “radical”. I am not merely positing a space holder. I am saying some things about the phenomena of the relations posed in religious discourse.

Now, when I speak in these terms, some folks are quick to complain that I am using evaluative language (good versus bad). I get this from people who understand Buddhism to propose an ethical neutrality and from people who have inherited an Enlightenment suspicion with religion/ethics and notions of authority. I know that this is a room you can live in a long time—seeing things this way—but for me its not an adequate posture. As a position, it requires I render out of myself any actual love I have in and for being. I have to suppress an actual interest, and I have decided I am more loyal to the interest than to its negation.

I sometimes feel that this idea of neutrality or equanimity—when used to suppress actual interest—actual does a violence to our ability to love and relate. The counter is that it gives freedom, but I think it can only be an imagined or hoped for freedom, an ethereal freedom, since I believe, given our sense bodies and mode of being we are, in fact—and I mean in fact—limited and at stake.

When I speak of “a problem given in being”, I mean we have multiple interests in relation to objects—a desire for mastery, freedom, a desire to care, and interest in sharing, a desire to be concordant. The tendency in Western thought has been to simplify desire. For instance, in economic theory, we are told people simply want to win/have more. All desire boils down to this, etc. I think a better case can be made that the problem is that we have multiple and at times competing desires. So I am more in line with Freud’s basic intuition here that we are conflicted or split in being.

People tend to manage the conflict given in being by a bifurcation made possible by proposing some second, etheric ground of being—it could be mind, spirit, logos, Brahman, etc. In this move, being—experience—is rendered or inscribed or interpreted in terms of a new difference between an inanimate or dead body and an animate, lit-up other. Generally, this second ground is proposed in etheric terms—it is not sensible, lacks form, etc.

Whether or not there is a difference, what has happened here is that a resolution of conflict has been proposed as possible on this second ground (sometimes opened out by ritual, or a poem, or as a painting or story, etc).

In this analysis I am not saying there is not a difference (a difference in desires, a difference made possible by sense and language), but that that difference has been rendered or fixed (I first typed “foxed”) into a strong categorical difference between one term and another.

Hence, the point is not that the etheric is an illusion and that only dead body exists, but that neither the etheric nor the dead body exist as such. When that bifurcation is undone, we are still here breathing, still held, in our conflict and difference. There is no collapse back into.

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A last note. Jehanne says that “in being” is the hard thing in all this. I am deliberately a little allusive here. I use a small “b” because I am not proposing some second or given Heideggarian ground. When students ask I say I mean “being here” or “being alive” as a rough way of locating a ground that is otherwise contested. That is, I accept an existential premise that our gestures into relation and our sense of self and world have a location whose limits and status has yet to be determined.
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In general, the Enlightenment suspicion of religion and posture that we shouldn’t make value statements (a strange posture by the way in an era where we are subordinate to commodity value) are aimed at protecting a person from authoritarian violence (and, in a sense, accepting a personal discipline so as to avoid responsibility for one’s own authorial violence). But, my sense is that there is no way not to impinge, a counter thought visible as early as the Bhagavadgita critique of the renunciate ethic. The latter text points out what the sharpest students always point out which is that non-action is still an action. Less obvious is a correlate, which is that thinking is not a different mode of being. We don’t escape being at stake in, being in relation to form, by imagining we have a relation determined by knowing instead of action. That contrast falsely characterizes both knowing and action.

In the same way, relativism or tolerance or a posture that takes no evaluative stance is still a stance, and one cannot escape impinging on another in this way. Rather, such a mode of thought, as many ideologies do, simply displaces the violence, the being at stake, the spectre of authorial power, onto the other.

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Finally, the posture that one should not hold notions of good and bad and so on is different from an appreciation or interest in being that takes on both good and bad tastes. These are not the same. The first assigns an equality to terms and effaces a felt difference (or warrant), the latter involves a decision to care for more than what one prefers. Most people who say they don’t believe in making value statements are not actually choosing to do the latter. They are often insisting on a total freedom to only do what they prefer.

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I discuss the issue of equanimity and relativism in notes I have posted at “O Pure Contradiction” when I talk about why I find a good in being. I’ll end here with a brief heuristic note about why I find negation an unsatisfactory posture in the end.

In a story I read in that Vine DeLoria edited collection of Native American writing, there is this story of “Singing Stone” who travels in the four directions looking for power/duration/a home. When he goes West, he goes down into a cave and keeps digging further and further back until he has no room, and he meets a little mouse who tells him he has to go back. The gloss on this is that its an allegory for this kind of thinking that circles back on itself until there is no space.

Another way of thinking of it is to think of the West as defined by the element Air (Libra) and thus when thought becomes cut off inside self and only has further reflexive moves because not otherwise moved by other forces.

There is a way in which one kind of modernism goes in this direction, at least for me.