Teddy

Talk about timing…  I just finished re-reading Salinger’s Nine Stories a couple days ago.  Here’s an excerpt from the last story.  It’s a 10 year old genius talking.

                “Okay,” Teddy said.  He was sitting back in his chair, but his head was turned toward Nicholson.  “You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?” He asked.  “You know what was in that apple?  Logic.  Logic and intellectual stuff.  That was all that was in it.  So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are.  I mean if you vomit it up, then you won’t have any more trouble with blocks of wood and stuff.  You won’t see everything stopping off all the time.  And you’ll know what your arm really is, if you’re interested.  Do you know what I mean?  Do you follow me?”

                “I follow you,” Nicholson said, rather shortly.

                “The trouble is,” Teddy said, “most people don’t want to see things as the way they are.  They don’t even want to stop getting born and dying all the time.  They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice.”  He reflected.  “I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,” he said.  He shook his head.

Let me also re-blog Nate’s comment:

If I may paraphrase where I think we're on the same page and then try and finesse my language a little to see if the differences may actually be less than they appear:

The Creation Story is not a systematic metaphysic. It is a rhetorical tool intended to help people live better. The message has a historical/sociological dimension as well as a psycho-spiritual dimension. The historical sociological dimension is cautionary of "civilization and progress" (see Edward T. Hall for a great explication of how this ties into the idea of abstraction). The psycho-spiritual dimension is cautionary of internal abstraction, whether conscious or unconscious.

I buy the argument that this is what was "intended" by the story "as it was written" which is so much more helpful to me than how I was raised, linking The Fall to disobedience, pride, or Original Sin.

You argued that even if that's the case, there is still another side to the story, not explored in the Creation narrative, which should be cautionary of the Tree of Life. You illustrated the danger of Life with the brutality of nature.

This point was triggered by a slip of my tongue when I said that civilization was associated with violence, as illustrated Biblically by Cain's murder of Abel. I should not have said violence. I should have said "power/coercion." Yes, your chickens peck and hump each other. But the more civilized farmer rips their heads off and makes them into a delicious meal. Hamas lobs a couple bottle rockets into some parking lots. The more "civilized" Israel sets their world on fire.

So far, no disagreement, but let me try one here: you associated Life with the dynamic and Knowledge with the static. I think you put love on the knowledge side of the ledger. I think both trees might both be propulsive (if not dynamic). I think of biological evolution as being driven by Life. I think of technology, power, language, etc. as being driven by Knowledge.

Back to agreement now: as you say the propulsion of both trees is chronically out of balance, leading to extreme dissonance. If that's so, then we must somehow recalibrate. The way Jesus recalibrated was to subvert empire by calling its bluff and letting it expose its own rot.

Here's a link to a song I wrote about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyV-XMOa16s

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I like the power/coercion vs. violence distinction.  As a farmer, I may give a great deal less pain to the chicken than a predator does, but I have controlled all parameters of their life from day one to the day of their death.  If the chickens had some sort of free will, this would definitely be the more subtle but far more pervasive violence.  I think to extend this analogy to Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the real comparison is not just Israel’s ability to kill a thousand Arabs to their one casualty, but rather it’s their systematic coercion/power over the Palestinians’ daily life.  They’ve essentially (you might say poetically) embodied the Nazis’ spirit that continues to plague them, though maybe not as they expected.  They have made the Palestinians third rate citizens, stripped of them of basic rights from water to land to even movement.  The walls the Israeli’s have built around the Palestinian cage are far more violent than any chicken structure I’ve ever built. 

Here are my thoughts on love being on the abstract sign of the ledger.  This might be old school thought, but it still makes a lot of sense to me that love, (at least the kind that goes beyond hormonal, whether sexual attraction or maternal instinct—especially the more ‘un-natural’ love for the marginalized and the least of these),  is dependent on free will.  And when one exerts one’s will, I see that as on the abstraction side of the ledger.  Exerting will, for me is more than just following instinct or base desire without thought.  To exert will seems to involve abstracting what one desires and then manipulating one’s environment to accomplish whatever it is.  So when my wife and I are having a spat, I have to dig deeper than the immediate emotion and use my will to access what I abstract is the better tactic than lashing back like some cornered animal and hurting someone I love.  Clear as mud?

I still need to think more about both trees being propulsive.  My gut reaction is to refer back to my posts Sin Boldly and Gestalt.  I was trying to explain how I believe dynamic aesthetics drives scientific knowledge, particularly for the leaps into new paradigms.  Knowledge, it would seem, would run on that initial momentum of the leap, slowly and incrementally (and essential) filling out the structure of the new paradigm.  Chesterton’s madness is that logic locks us into whatever system we hold.  It is a force or power, you could say, but one for sustaining and building a lasting structure.  To use a concept I was just reading about in the New Yorker, the disruptive innovations, whether they are successful or not, are in contrast to companies that change incrementally.  And by definition, the innovations are not predictable by knowledge.  They are supposed to be inspired new technologies that change the playing field.  So language and technology, despite being a type of abstraction, could go in a vast number of different directions, but are propelled forward by certain aesthetics that crystalize and catch on.  However, 99 times out of 100 the innovation doesn’t latch on to anything sustaining and thus dissipates.  Sounds like evolution all over again. 

Power, however, makes me pause.  Especially power associated with coercion.  If the static does have a drive, or goal, transcending whatever paradigm it’s trying to sustain, it seems it would be coercion.  Systems, whether analytic, political, societal, religious, etc… are about control.  Somehow it seems maybe this drive for control is a static propulsion.  Certainly the message to let go and just be is as relevant in this context than it would ever be.

Am I pounding a dead horse yet?  Anybody else got another angle on the two trees?

And great song, Nate.