Idol Making

Esther Muse wrote:

I am intrigued by the image of 'exercising a mental state of periphery.' You give the example of working a jigsaw puzzle (and I've seen you there), as well as your 'zone' in soccer. Is this simply a physiologic phenomenon, or does the state of periphery also play out in your human relationships?
Reminds me a bit of the scene in Patch Adams whereby the crazy old math professor holds up four fingers and says "how many?" The right answer requires looking beyond the obvious....

I’ve been stewing over this all day yesterday, and while doing chores outside in a foot and a half of snow this morning.  Lots of thoughts, but I know that none of them will be very satisfactory.  It’s not that I don’t have a very good answer that’s got me worked up, but because it raises red flags.  I think these red flags are personal, and very well may be applicable to me only, so my inclination was to try and not dwell on them and come up with something decent to say.  I tried toying around with different understandings of humor and how to reinterpret it through a periphery mentality.  I thought of viewing relationships as an art and applying the peripheral state as such.  I thought of sex and the unfocused state you get in when lost in your lover and pleasure.  I thought of ‘holy nites’ with the guys, drinking and smoking and pontificating without any real structure—sort of a feeble attempt at communal lateral thinking.  I thought of times when I’ve been angry at my kids.  Somehow, anger (coupled with self-control obviously) for me sharpens my mental abilities, and I find myself, at times, using my reprimand to explicitly and verbally make connections for my kids.  The connection between discipline and self-discipline.  The connection between hurting others and the insecurity within ourselves.  Between giving and receiving.  Between junk food and the quick, temporary high of hurting others.  Between real nourishment of both body and soul, where the pleasure is long lasting and builds on itself.  Probably the kids just avoid getting me angry just because they don’t want to have to hear some strange pontification concerning things they really have no clue about or couldn’t care less about.  But I can always hope something gets through.  Anyways, I thought of a lot of things, but none of them really had a spark.  I think I’ll have to let someone else answer for me.  But what did have a spark were my red flags, and I think that’s what I should write about.  I think I can draw more universal principles out of my own experience so that it is not just like reading a diary, so bear with me.  Couched in what I have to say will also be how I would approach answering the periphery question in relationships. 

Fractal:  an infinitely complex pattern that is self-similar across different scales.

We are so devastatingly good at making idols.  Analysis is quite prone to naming and defining things to the point we can box them up, give them a “body” and soon after worship it.  I am good at the analytical idol making, and I think I’ve come dangerously close to it in these blogs.  I have a history of idol making and C.S. Lewis was the one to help me recognize this fact.  In college--when my mind was exploding in great expanding leaps, when I was falling madly in love, when I could maintain hours of intense physical activity, intense emotional activity, and tried to maintain intense spiritual activity--I had an inkling of what I now label riding the edge.  I wanted every interaction with others to be intense, deep and if possible, to further my intellectual expansion.  I couched it in religious terms as ‘living in the Spirit’.   Only in my late teens and early twenties did I have enough testosterone and energy to even entertain the idea of remaining on such a high.  (I might not have done meth or cocaine or whatever, but I was a junkie on some very powerful stuff.)  This is not unnatural.  When the seed first dies and germinates, there is an explosion of growth.  Mentally, I had died to old ways of thinking and was exploding in new thought patterns.  It’s not too surprising, that the seedling might think its life will constantly consist in such rate of growth, but eventually, it has to slow down and grow at a more sustainable pace to become the great oak that lasts for hundreds of years.  As a side note, it might be worth remembering, that the growth is only rapid as a percentage of itself.  A full grown oak does a lot more growing than a little seedling, but in relation to its own size, the growth is relatively small.  Anyways, I made an idol of that growth, of that high, of that intensity.  When you boiled it down, I was a simple thrill seeker, even if my thrills were more meaningful than bungee jumping or a meth high.  In the end, I think I was saved by integrity.  I demand the honesty of integrity of those around me, and even more so in myself.  Let me revert to quotes again to make my point.  There is a great deal I no longer agree with C.S. Lewis about, but his keen mind was able to spell out certain things for me that still hold true.

In an essay called Lilies That Fester, Lewis writes:

                We all know those who shudder at the word refinement as a term of social approval…He who shudders feels that the quality of mind and behavior which we call refined is nowhere less likely to occur than among those who aim at, and talk much about, refinement.  Those who have this quality are not obeying any idea of refinement when they abstain from swaggering, spitting, snatching, triumphing, calling names, boasting or contradicting…Refinement, in fact, is a name given to certain behaviour from without.  From within, it does not appear as refinement; indeed, it does not appear, does not become an object of consciousness, at all.  Where it is most named it is most absent…

                …there are others who sincerely and (I believe) rightly think that such talk is not merely a symptom of, but a cause active in producing, that disease.  The talk is inimical to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists and to prevent its birth where it is unborn. 

[this is a little harsh, but if we keep reading, Lewis qualifies his assertions.]

                I do not mean that we are never to talk of things from the outside.  But when the things are of high value and very easily destroyed, we must talk with great care, and perhaps the less we talk the better.  To be constantly engaged with the idea of culture, and (above all) of culture as something enviable, or meritorious, or something that confers prestige, seems to me to endanger those very “enjoyments” for whose sake we chiefly value it.  If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear, see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy art at all.  We are calling up the desire for self-improvement, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt (from one group) and to agree (with another), and a dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blinding and paralysing distraction…Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry.  For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.  [my emphasis]  The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience.  The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought.

[you’ll have to excuse his diss on fantasy and Sci-Fi.  It comes as a surprise since he wrote that kind of stuff himself.  Maybe he was just criticizing that specific book in particular.  In any case, this next one was a key passage for me.]

                …In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside.  For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested.  I should have hopes of that boy.  Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books.  The organs of appreciation exist in them.  They are not impotent.  And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

                                The child whose love is here, at least doth reap

                                One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

[Okay, so I realize this may be very ordinary stuff for most people, but I needed to hear it back then, and to be reminded of it now.  Here’s a section of Lewis talking carefully about his ‘edge’.]

               " In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness.   I am almost committing an indecency.  I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.  We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.  We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.  Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.  Wordworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past.  But all this is a cheat.  If Wordworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.  The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.  These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.  For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

So here’s the rub.  We may want to live a life that contacts the dynamic that resides in the edges, but this truly only comes when we pursue other things for their own sake, not even for the grand purpose of that dynamic edge.  My problem has never been making the music or soccer or even the person the idol.  I never mistook them for the dynamic reality.  My mistake was to shift my attention from them to the dynamic reality coming through them.  In other words, to have deep intimate conversation because you want to ride the edge betrays the process.  It’s a slight, but devastating difference.  To do so would be to make that person an object to be used, (I suspect this is another form of idolatry) and they will slowly cease to be a vehicle by which you have access to an edge.  We cannot look at the source straight on.  We must look at it with the periphery of our pursuits, so to speak.  Remember it comes through our pursuits.  Elsewhere, Lewis does a fantastic job of showing that joy is the true mode of the process.  If you do not enjoy the person, enjoy the music, enjoy the sport, enjoy the book, enjoy the whatever, for its own sake, you’ll never have a sense of where the edge would be.  You would have eyes that do not see.  And ears that do not hear.  That would be like deciding “oh, this guy achieves a peripheral state of mind by puzzling.  I can’t stand puzzles, but I’m gonna train my brain to think laterally.”  Good luck, I’m afraid you would first have to learn to like puzzling, then you might have a chance.  But way back in one of my first posts I insisted that the sacred and the ordinary should not be separated.  This is because you can lose yourself in any normal endeavor, if you fully enjoy it.  This is what saved me back in college.  I truly did enjoy my friends, soccer, intellectual pursuit, even philosophy.  And when I started feeling them slip, feeling the life shift away from the center, in the end I was not willing to sacrifice them, even for the sake of pursuing ‘the edge’.  And in so losing the edge, allowing that direct pursuit to die, I eventually returned to the unadulterated process that in the end is the only way to access that dynamic reality.  Personally, I think this is religion's Achilles’ heel.  Almost by definition, is it mercenary.  But the reverse is also true.  Anything, pursued for its own sake can give us a chance of leading us to ‘god’. 

So when Esther asked about a state of periphery in our relationships, all my answers struck me as trying to describe the process directly—I was trying to make too much of a one-to-one correlation.  When I get in an equation mode to understand or direct an analogy, I know I’ve slipped behind the wave.  In fact, I felt dirty.  I trust Esther to know this, but I’ll say this just to have it out there; this had nothing to do with the question, but rather to do with my history and old patterns of analytical idolatry.  So here’s my lateral approach to a question on periphery:  Life is fractal.  The puzzle and soccer illustrations are examples of the periphery packed tightly into an action.  The compaction creates an intensity we cannot expect to maintain.  Even in puzzling and playing soccer, I go in and out of the mental mode—I haven’t, after all, reached some sort of enlightenment.  So, when I expand these illustrations fractally to relationships, I would say that a peripheral approach to life, to relationships, is pursuing things for their own sakes.  This can run the whole spectrum of intensity.  The crucial part is to pursue relationships because you enjoy that particular joy that comes with that particular person.  This is not mercenary, because as Lewis writes, “The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.”  In other words, if you compose or play or simply listen to a piece of music, the music does not exist on its own.  It is only fully consummated by your enjoyment.  We complete each other by delighting in each other.  That’s really all we need to know, because only when we are lost in the enjoyment of another person, will we find that we are indeed riding an edge.  Don’t think about it too long, acknowledge it, be thankful for it, then forget about it and go right back to enjoying each other.

P.S. I saw Patch Adams so long ago, I don’t remember the finger scene.

P.P.S. I’m planning on returning to the concepts of time.