Poetry and Philosophy

So, I've been reading poetry for the last year. It was an effortful, conscious decision. I went through the pedantic period, where I wrote horrible poetry, some of which I even subjected an open mike community to. And I still have all of it - printouts in dot matrix.

But I had made the decision to start accessing the noumenon - for those who don't have the philosophy (noumenon is Kantian for thing you can't know through the senses. Numenon is Otto for communion with the Other or the Holy) - and didn't have any better ideas for how to go about it than to try poetry. And I get caught in the numenous all the time with this. In fact, the physiology book I am reading right now, doesn't mesh with an idea of a noumenon at all. I expect that there actually is no noumenous reality. Inherited constructions and blank slate, for the win.

In any case, way back in the dark of time, I stopped taking Literature and Art courses and started taking Math and Philosophy courses. I loved formal logic, but I never was able to place it higher than common sense - the reason my philosophy department would not recommend me for a masters program in philosophy. (I love to tell the story of the famous logician who came to give us a talk on the truth value of referents to mythical(false) creatures - like unicorns. I was not popular for saying that the truth of the referent was independent from the truth of the pronoun, also a referent, of the actual, not real thing. This, apparently, is wrong, and I am burning in fire of Plato's cave, undoubtedly for being morally corrupt.) So, I suppose all was not lost in my intuitive side, although it was not anything I was particulary paying attention to.

I'm reading a book called The Fountain and the Furnace, by Maggie Ross. And I must say that whenever I complain that no one ever gave me the book that would explain things, I am in error. KN said, in my very first discernment committee meeting, that I reminded him of Maggie Ross, and I should read her. Then he promptly dropped out to go on sabbatical, and thus, all this fucking growth opportunity was born.

I have been drawn to tears and people who openly cry in the literature for some time now. This is unsurprising, I cry all the time, and it makes lots of people uncomfortable, but I was awfully old before I came across someone who sanctified those tears, made them holy and powerful. And now, I have found that this author who was handed to me on, basically, the first day, has written a whole treatise on tears. And I am barely into this book, when she says, intuitive people need to read philosophy and rational people need to read poetry (rational is a technical term, see above comments to referents). I do love it when I can see all those puzzle pieces coming together.

In completely other news,


I looked up Humanist Chaplains the other day, on the advice of a friend suggesting I be a secular chaplain. This is what google came up with. And while I know what humanist means, I thought it was rather sad or silly. Humanist is the ethical postion that people can be good without a god. My response to which is, first, you need to really reevaluate the concept of god you are walking around with, and second, good and bad don't make sense if you take the moral agency out of the equation, and where do we infer moral agency if not through some god - some organizing principle of all the morality humans are inventing left and right. Bears and bees and squirrels are neither good or bad, they are not in need of a moral system at all. Iterative self reflection and self creation (that physiology book I am reading), the thinking about thinking and thinking up better ways to think, that is the bread and butter of humanity, the nonsense that leads you to questions of power and whether your actions are moral. Bears do not consider the ethical implications of eating salmon, they just eat it if they can catch it.

Further, humanists believe there is only this life, and not a heaven in the sky. Interestingly, neither does early Christianity, given that they were all Jews, who had a one life philosophy as well. Jesus doesn't refer to judgmental beard in the sky or cloud floaty afterlife, either. The thing Jesus did was flip up the patriarchy by refering to judgmental God as daddy, not just as a father, but as the father of our youth, when we were not yet betrayed by our fathers humanity, when that all powerful was a comfort. And we are encouraged to live in that comfort, to make sure that our god is big enough to offer that comfort, and the beard just doesn' cut it on that score - for anyone except the infantile adult who is in a lot of denial (my opinion). Still, you must be able to hear the truth within the metaphor to be able to use it. The heaven Jesus speaks of is on earth, it is the perspective that this life can be morally good with a change of perspective, not that it will be perfect and peaceful in the simplistic sense (no war, no poor, no hungry, no orphans) but that it will be perfect in that we will see as God sees, that we will be saddened and horrified by what people do, but that their freedom matters. Their ability to choose, to be moral creatures, matters, and is God in that sense.

So, I am not sure I qualify as a humanist, since it feels like a rebuttal position, and I try not to define myself in negative terms (it does nothing for the self esteem) but I do still qualify as a secularist, if you use the term in the fashion of Gertz - practically the only book in seminary I found fascinating enough to buy from the exerpt we read in class. (Not the only good book, there are some that I still haven't read but that are life changing/game changing, so they tell me. I'm getting to them, slowly.) I'll talk about secularism later. For now, I need to go change the world, one scheduled meeting at a time.