ruminations

The bottom drawing needs to be rotated counterclockwise. Sometimes things come out sideways and I don't catch it in the tiny thumbnails.

I love the top two watercolors, perhaps the simplest things I've done.

Blanchot, in Waiting Oblivion, repeats the phrase, which I misremembered later: the phrase - act so I may speak to you. I remembered: Speak so I can hear you.

I like both. I felt that what I misremembered was helpful for CPE.

So much of our speaking is framed such that we are unheard.

Do people really believe that they'll be heard for their rants. The the person being ranted at and the people being ranted among, are actually attuned, listening?

It feels good to the ranter. And certainly I've ranted plenty. And my ranting has done me no good.

The rhetorical tradition doesn't have a category for ranting. Nor bloviation - a wonderful word that depicts what it sounds like: imagine a fat jowled speaker, hand on chest, red faced, other hand gesturing wildly, the heat and light.

It's what I imagine CS Lewis was implying somewhere where he indicated that people become their sins, and in one instance describing someone has having become simply a complaint. I think it might be in the Great Divorce.

Speak in such a way that I may hear you.

Blanchot is like that. A writer engaged by a variety of French philosophers: Jean Luc Nancy, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. I'm almost certain that I'm going to pick up some new volume and someone else will be refering to him.

Blanchot and Celan speak to the issue of our relationality and silence and waiting.

I'm just beginning to read him myself.

Meanwwhile I'm picking up Rauschenberg and Smithson again, after years, both artists exemplifying association and entropy. Ah, to rediscover entropy after all these years: the principle that the work we create is deteriorating the moment we sign it.

How our world tries to live as if entropy did not dog our every move.

Yet even we wear out.

It is hard to grapple with, that one day I won't be here. Just like my mom isn't here, or my grand fathers or my mom's mom, and one day my dad's mom, my dad. My wife. Beautiful and smart.

Quick eyes under earth's lid - Pound writes about soldiers, but about any human being it would suffice to say.

Of course I just appeared in history as well.

A history where certain things had already happened: Babylon, Rome, Charlemagne, Lee and Grant, Washington and Cornwallis, the Devil and Daniel Webster.

I just happened, came to consciousness in the body of a boy growing up in north Georgia in the 1960s, speaking English, seeing with one eye, going to school and being miserable. Trying to piece together reality from fragments: why my dad was aloof, why we read these books and not others, why are we moving, why am I alone.

What a wonder it is to be alive. To breathe air and to feel the sand under my hands at the beach. To touch a branch and shake the leaves, listening to their rustling sound. What a wonder to see light touching a table in a dark room early in the morning, while even the cats are asleep.

How can it be that any of us may have this and then it is gone?

Ecclesiastes, Job, Lamenations, all testify to the early Hebrew belief that this life is all there is. The Psalmist writes, "the dead will not praise you" in more than one place. Only with Daniel in 165 BCE do we get an inkling of resurrection. Isaiah 26 as well - but what is that? 400 BCE may be, 3rd Isaiah. Resurrection and heaven: not Greek Ideas but Persian.

Christ turns the Psalmist's words aside with his assertion that "all live to God. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." Christ's words here have a hint of Berkeley to them: esse est percipi: the tree in the forest makes a sound because God hears it. God actualizes all our existenses by virtue of her creative omnipresence, infusing time and space in infinite and sinuous ways, we do not fail to Be and are held in Beingness by a God who is Being and Becoming along with us, behind us and before us.

Barth, Jungel, the reformed tradition, are great in emphasizing that the sole purpose of Believing in Jesus is that the most important thing about life after death is being with Jesus in the inter Trinitarian relations, the divine perichorises.

That Jesus is not a means to an end, a ticket to continued existence, where you get to meet great people and converse with them, play basketball with rejuvenated hall of famers, eat fried chicken with the family again on the old porch under the shade trees on the old farm while Rex cavorts in the yard and it's perpetually July 10th.

Jesus promises that we'll be with him. And he and the early church thought that that was a good enough reason for people to leave all, take up their cross and follow him.

This being the case - and it's the strongest case that can be made from scripture and from Jesus' words, it is astonishing the elaborate end of world scenarios and heaven as the apotheosis of free market capitalism memes running afoot.

Again, even in Revelation, the purpose of eternal life seems more to do with worship of God and nothing, not a shadow of a trace of a palimpsest, about self actualization, self realization. We'll be with Jesus.

What does that mean? Some 1st century wandering apocalyptic prophet, resembling a cynic, throwing out cryptic lines like "love your enemy" "the first will be the last and the last first". Victor Furnish points out that Jesus seemed to command love - he didn't inspire it - a phrase that grates on our need for the seamless hero, the docetic Jesus.

So this guy? Paul writes that we knew him in the flesh but now no more; now we know him by faith in the spirit.

Paul is not speaking of Christ in the vague way we might speak of someone being with us in spirit. Paul believed that Christ was physcially present and real, as real as he was or anyone could be. More so.

To me, this is where faith becomes difficult, but the most rewarding. Take away the projections, the wish fulfillment fantasies, and ponder a question without answer: a question that requires rephrasing at every step.

Yet I am drawn ever in. Great is the mystery of Faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Live in such a way that I may speak to you.

Speak in such a way that I may hear you.

Listen in such a way that emptiness is filled over flowing.