Saturday, September 03, 2005
11.~~~~~~~~~
Nothing is profound in itself but in the gaze that looks in a certain direction and finds no end. Looking into an open well that the light does not penetrate, you strain your eyes to make things out in the dark. After a lapse of time when you are patient, you can make out something dimly, but even so it seems you are gazing at nothing and everything at the same time. The dimness brings the imagination into play; you participate in what you see. You might try to convince others of something you think is profound, but you are only trying to arouse desire, or to find those who gaze in the same direction and can share the experience. We are fascinated most by questions that cannot be answered, whose every answer opens the door of the question further rather than closing it. The door comes off the hinges, then the jamb is removed, finally the wall itself is seen to be permeable. What is profound is what we most want to get inside of, and there we will find ourselves lost and yet strangely at home, searching and at peace at the same time. We want to get inside and then find ourselves engulfed, swallowed in the abyss.
The desire for depth contradicts the fear of helplessness when we are lost, when we feel that what is around us is harmful because we haven’t nailed things down. This is a fear men especially don’t like to admit; our job is never to be lost. Others around us want to make sure that every question is productive in a way they can follow. In order to accommodate them we will mask our gaze as the desire to understand and control, to come to conclusions that can stand on their merits without us. Or to satisfy our self-image that we “make a difference”, which means, to leave some valued mark on the earth before we die. But when our gaze into the deep does come to the point of conclusive answers it quickly becomes dull, bored, without imagination. Philosophy, religion, music, art, the academic world--what doesn’t succumb to this?
For some, the desire for revolution has been profound, for no one can tell us what would happen if people were to believe they could choose the shape of their world. Revolution has been a space of dreaming and adventuring, and will be again. A certain imagination is opened by the thought of this, a door no one knew existed until the French people opened it in 1789, not knowing where they were going. But to direct and administer a revolution demands one answer and must put an end to all questions, and eliminate those who would continue them. That is why successful revolutions like the French and Russian lose their depth and become, as everyone says, a mockery of their origins.
God too is a word that for a few still stands for the unanswered question, the search into depth. God is a word of imagination and myth, which means that an endless number of stories can be told, even contradictory, and they all work to point us to our depths, where we cannot recognize ourselves. To turn the word into the source of explicit answers for everything, from the beginning to the end of time and being, is to presume that no unanswerable question ever has a right to be asked. From this viewpoint it is foolish, weak, and even evil to have any unfathomable depth inside us that needs searching. All that depth is projected onto a Father who most of all will protect us from ourselves, the depth of self-knowledge. He will pave over the depths as if they were so many potholes, filled to enable the smooth flow of our traffic. To have such a God, which is the God of religion, is to look into a bottomless lake and see only our reflection. ¶ 7:17 AM
Nothing is profound in itself but in the gaze that looks in a certain direction and finds no end. Looking into an open well that the light does not penetrate, you strain your eyes to make things out in the dark. After a lapse of time when you are patient, you can make out something dimly, but even so it seems you are gazing at nothing and everything at the same time. The dimness brings the imagination into play; you participate in what you see. You might try to convince others of something you think is profound, but you are only trying to arouse desire, or to find those who gaze in the same direction and can share the experience. We are fascinated most by questions that cannot be answered, whose every answer opens the door of the question further rather than closing it. The door comes off the hinges, then the jamb is removed, finally the wall itself is seen to be permeable. What is profound is what we most want to get inside of, and there we will find ourselves lost and yet strangely at home, searching and at peace at the same time. We want to get inside and then find ourselves engulfed, swallowed in the abyss.
The desire for depth contradicts the fear of helplessness when we are lost, when we feel that what is around us is harmful because we haven’t nailed things down. This is a fear men especially don’t like to admit; our job is never to be lost. Others around us want to make sure that every question is productive in a way they can follow. In order to accommodate them we will mask our gaze as the desire to understand and control, to come to conclusions that can stand on their merits without us. Or to satisfy our self-image that we “make a difference”, which means, to leave some valued mark on the earth before we die. But when our gaze into the deep does come to the point of conclusive answers it quickly becomes dull, bored, without imagination. Philosophy, religion, music, art, the academic world--what doesn’t succumb to this?
For some, the desire for revolution has been profound, for no one can tell us what would happen if people were to believe they could choose the shape of their world. Revolution has been a space of dreaming and adventuring, and will be again. A certain imagination is opened by the thought of this, a door no one knew existed until the French people opened it in 1789, not knowing where they were going. But to direct and administer a revolution demands one answer and must put an end to all questions, and eliminate those who would continue them. That is why successful revolutions like the French and Russian lose their depth and become, as everyone says, a mockery of their origins.
God too is a word that for a few still stands for the unanswered question, the search into depth. God is a word of imagination and myth, which means that an endless number of stories can be told, even contradictory, and they all work to point us to our depths, where we cannot recognize ourselves. To turn the word into the source of explicit answers for everything, from the beginning to the end of time and being, is to presume that no unanswerable question ever has a right to be asked. From this viewpoint it is foolish, weak, and even evil to have any unfathomable depth inside us that needs searching. All that depth is projected onto a Father who most of all will protect us from ourselves, the depth of self-knowledge. He will pave over the depths as if they were so many potholes, filled to enable the smooth flow of our traffic. To have such a God, which is the God of religion, is to look into a bottomless lake and see only our reflection. ¶ 7:17 AM
