Slave to the Beauty

Took some time to talk with Claudius for a while today.  He was bored on a long holiday weekend and we had time for a great chat.  One of the more interesting seeds that he sowed was the purpose of art and beauty in a life.

He gave a reference to a book he had been reading, about art and its importance.  Then I got jabbering and thus this post is here.

Music, painting, sculpture, and all the forms of art (Yes, even the not-well-done ones) should all elicit from us a reminder that the world is a beautiful place.  A great time we do not notice this simple fact.  If a piece of someone else's time can draw from us a recognition of the beauty, maybe for a moment we can turn away from the tawdriness and ugliness that we are so prone to obsess on.

I guess that I see this as a survival strategy second to none.  When you spend all of your time wondering what/how to eat and how to kill/maim transgressors and punish the guilty, you are surviving, but the only thing that truly survives is the meat puppet that carries you.  I would argue that you do all of those things out of necessity, as they allow your physical form to live.

The beauty that surrounds you, the slap of waves coming in from the ocean, the whisper of wind through the trees, the raucous cackle of a crow wheeling overhead are why you are living.  Art can give this to you in a small way when they aren't otherwise easily available.

Paintings and sculpture can show you a purity of form.  Music can elicit the sounds of beauty in your mind.  A simple hymn can allow you to briefly sense God.

Don't leave this essential out of your plans.

Silence and blindness

Went walking this morning, down to the red canoe and back.  Two reasonably flat miles through a quiet town.  Fishermen are out on the river.  Not too many bums out yet.  Four or five new for sale signs, lots of for rent signs.  Almost no traffic. 

What saddened me was that everyone that was on the streets with me (save the bums) had their iPods on and were tuned out. 

So this will turn out to be a further digression on music.  But this is more a digression on how it can be misused to blind us to the world around it.  As good old Claudius has pointed out so eloquently, good music takes some effort, takes some ritual.  But what is channeled through the white earpieces while you are out on the streets isn’t music.  It is a wall that prevents you from interacting with the world around you and vice versa.

When you wander the streets, trying to wall yourself off from the world around you, you become little better than the גולם.  You are an insular self, deliberately cutting your senses off in order to staunch and “better” control the information flow that is the world we live in.  You become insensate in the true sense of the word, substituting a rhythmic simulacrum for the complexity and subtlety of the world.

Think of all the little things that you do to prevent this interaction.  I am arguing that there are innumerable things that you do that are similar to this particular deliberate self-impairment.  One by one, these are things that you will have to root out.

Preventing yourself from fully seeing the world that engulfs you will keep you from sensing the subtle cues that will perhaps allow you the edge you need to live.

Maybe he was right.

Reprise:  Limitations on the Discussion

James Ussher made the remarkable statement that the world began sometime in 4004 BC.

This has been the butt of centuries worth of mocking, maybe even justified mocking. But let us turn this idea on it's head just for the sake of argument. Let us take the step of saying that that perhaps mankind came into being around 4004 BC.   There can be not proof for this, just a different way of looking at the problem.

I am not going to argue that the universe came into being in 4004 BC. I am not stupid. The evidence for the age of the the universe at approximately 13.7 billion years is too solid to ignore.

I will not argue that the earth came into being in 4004 BC either. I feel comfortable with the age of the earth at around 4.5 billion years.

Nor will I be caught into the trap that the bodily form that man inhabits came into being in 4004 BC. The bodily form that we use has been around quite some time, thank you very much.

What I will propose is that to be a member of mankind is to:

1. Possess a soul.
2. Have the same basic set of genes as >99% of the current human population

So what I posit as a working hypothesis is that the first ensoulment of mankind took place in a couple of folks in the middle east around 4000 BC.   The physical bodies (which we share >99% sequence homology with) prior to that time were for all intents and purposes, animals as they did not possess a soul.  From a straight biological point of view, we are of a common species with these "pre-men" and it would be impossible to differentiate them from ourselves morphologically, as the lack of a soul precludes them from being man.

This cannot ever be proven. Perhaps it is merely a facile argument to rationalize my personal faith. That being said I will work on this idea over time and add supporting evidence if I can find it and if I think of anything to refute it, hopefully I will be intellectually honest enough to include that as well.

It's Sunday Morning

A long labor day weekend, and I am getting used to the idea that there is nothing pressing. Mass is in a couple of hours and I am drinking coffee and trying to restart a diary. In other words, SSDD.

The war between faith and reason is ongoing in my head. Faith seems to tell me that there is a greater scheme to the whole shebang than just the crap that goes on in the world. Reason tells me that this may well be the whole shebang. Pascal's Wager is a great place to start. In a nutshell it says that if there is a God, believing in him will provide infinite gain upon your death. If you do not believe in him, then it will provide pain upon your death. If there is no god, who cares? With those premises, it makes no sense whatsoever to not believe in God.

What is the hardest thing about the faith is the ritual that attaches itself to faith. At what point does the appearance of morality intersect with the content of morality. Does showing up in church on Sunday really have an effect upon your mortal soul, or is it merely a way to keep people focused. Does the wager on god allow the key to heaven, or does a holy life led without thoughts of God lead to hell?