a further attempt at saying something meaningful

Feuerbach points out that our speech about God is really about ourselves. Theology is hard pressed to get around this observation. If that startles you, dear reader (or deer reader), consider this: even if you don't recognize this state of affairs as applying to you, certainly you've seen it in others (and they in you by the way). Zizek points out that, even as we are not able to exit our own subjectivity about God, so also we cannot really speak about others, without merely talking about ourselves. And here's the corker, Lacan would aver that we cannot even talk about ourselves. I point out all this to say that we can and must speak of God ourselves and others. We must be careful with our speech though: not taking it for granted; not assuming universality; and understanding ours and other's frustration at communication.

Jung, at the same time he is saying that God is a projection of ourselves, is careful to say we must avoid the "nothing but" - to write off concepts as "nothing but" - because even though things are subjective and interior objects, they are nonetheless real. What you believe about God or yourself or your friends or country originate in and struggle with internal states peculiar to you (for instance, you cannot Know my grief, I can only display it to you, and the same from you to me).; it is all marvelously real. 

Human beings and human cultures exist in symbolic worlds. Our bodies are colonies of bacteria, various organisms, cells that have evolved together symbiotically; our consciousness is not just in our brain but extensive throughout our bodies - though we fall into the illusion that our thoughts are just in our brains. Each of us, in our thoughts, is a nomad in place. We cannot explain consciousness nor our singularity in the vastness of space. We might imagine alien cultures as superior or friendly or threatening - but in reality they are probably as bad off as we are. We recognize our consciousness even as we see organisms similar to ourselves and we assume that they must be conscious too. If an organism or object doesn't move or signal in some way an intention, we might assume it is not conscious at all - even a flower, with all its beauty, if it were conscious could not signal it to us. 

merzbau

Living human document: 

Red

lots of red

I have opinions and sometimes I tell people, but a lot of times I don't talk to people. I have ideas about how to introduce art into the seminary environment - not at all they way they're doing it at Columbia. I say what I think they should be doing, but it doesn't resonate. I know that I don't bring it up correctly, even that my solution may not be the thing they want. Still, I just want to say here, the room is too pretty, too organized: Prayer/potter's wheel and creative area/display and dance mirror. I say rip all that stuff out - display work somewhere else; remove the prayer kitsch - creating itself is prayer. Everything in that room right now distracts from the act of creating; it's pretty and it's set up to fail.

Speaking of prayer kitsch - there are other spaces set up like this all around campus: comfy chairs, incense, "prayerful atmosphere", "prayerful books". Perfectly Victorian. I want to bring a cow patty in from the field and place it on the table; throw the furniture out on the curb; cover the coffee table with 100 demitassen of espresso (partially consumed). When I say prayer kitsch I think my reader must have some idea of what I'm saying. I'm referring in part to the whole industry in Christian publishing that offers up easily digested devotional compendiums that proffer pleasant thoughts for the junior league; there's a breakfast tray or coffee cup on the cover. There's incense and smells (someone somewhere read about how our cognitive faculties are spurred on by smell, so we've got smells in abundance - pretty smells). I think it'd be more authentic and prayerful for people to write their own devotional while they're sitting there; bring in a wheel barrow of red clay and mulch and wildflowers - cart it in yourself. Prayer kitsch is all pre-packaged, pre-thought out, pre-theologized mass produced, hands off, mind off paraphernalia and it all functions to clog up the pipes while giving the aura of having prayed. 

A room like this should be Merzbau. 

I embrace my delusions

This is the power of the signifier: that no matter which side I realize that another side thinks I'm stupid, or evil, or bound for hell, or shrugs the judgment of indifference - and that if I took up those opposing causes and became the UberIdealist, the UberFundamentalist, that those same reactions would still obtain. The signifier holds out the promise of being declared righteous which is summarily removed [through sleight of hand] at the same moment as it's position is accepted. 

Someone may say, "you write about this signifier a lot and I don't understand what a signifier is - or I don't see what the big deal is."  I can only remark from my own experience that people live their lives under banners, as it were: as Christians (who only selectively read the Bible and that in a kind of pre-interpreted way); as Patriots (who are anti-government and yet endorse government sponsored violence); as Rebels (who endorse conformity with society and the group); as FreeMarketeers(who endorse socialized arrangements for corporations). These are examples. Lacan says that the signifier swallows up the subject, from the inside out as it were; and you may have noticed this where a person talks about the Government, for instance, in great detail as to its faults, especially in group settings which are wonderfully inflating for the ego (but they cannot talk about themselves with any of the same clarity or objectivity - though, like the Government they also spend too much, abuse those under them, welch on their obligations, and seemingly make up rules arbitrarily to suit their disposition). 

The rule of the signifier is one reason perhaps that Jesus admonished "judge not or you'll be judged" or James in his letter opines "by the same judgment you use, you'll be judged". 

Anyway, I find it difficult to write about myself. To speak about myself. And most people would say the same. Perhaps it is embarrassing. Perhaps it reeks of egoism (though in context only shows how fragile the ego is feared to be). Lacan says that the end  of therapy is when a person can speak about themselves to another person - that is, that I, for instance, could speak about myself owning my own history as a series of choices I made, rather than events that happened to me.  It helps to be able to speak this narrative to someone who can hear it. Sometimes even friends are incapable of hearing this - in so far as they also cannot speak of themselves.

I am trying to find a way to carry on. Jung points out that what we see in our lives, how we judge the world around us, is more the projection of our unconscious desires and conflicts and an accurate assessment of reality. This was brought home to me be an article in the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/father-teaches-son-how-to-fly-into-rage-over-compl,33487/?ref=auto 

Father teaches son how to fly into rage over completely inconseqeuntial bullshit. 

The part I find compelling in this article is the mention of interpreting slow drivers and slow people in the check out line as personal affronts. 

I find this liberating.

My problem is an object relations problem: I want to please people and have them approve of me, even as I want nothing to do with them, as I anticipate their rejection from the get go, as it were. In doing so, I have no idea what I want - I cannot even say and it seems a moral imposition -  there is a bone in my throat at the thought of saying what it is that I want.

I speak and words fall out of my mouth onto the ground

I cry out that I need help

and cannot say what that help might be

Where is your faith, he asked

I had it just a bit ago

Here are some tokens of appreciation though

victory march

flag on a marble arch

I'm exhausted. I enjoy meeting people. I feel out of place. When I was very young, playing musical chairs, I often didn't make it to the chair when the music stopped. I feel that way - that I'm frozen, unable to move. I didn't understand the rules of the game I was compelled to play. I did as I was told. And then I was yelled at for just standing there. Then I was yelled at for being in the way. 

I don't know what chance or opportunity is out there. It's important that I make some money. When I say that people's eyes glaze over. They have no idea. I'm 50 and needing a job, if only to interact socially with people. I used to have this job scoring essays and math tests back in Durham. Its virtue was its intellectual challenge. People say that reading these tests is boring - but I feel the contrary: I find myself connected to these kids - even as they make errors or fail to develop ideas. Sometimes they would show great feeling and ingenuity. Sometimes the test question would be written poorly, so poorly that bizarre alternative answers would be admissible. These questions were usually thrown out when they didn't yield predictable results or were predictably misunderstood.

Atlanta doesn't seem to have work like that.

the signifying chain

more delusional ravings

Three dense drawings these last days. The top is a St John Baptist in the wilderness; the middle is a subterranean kitchen; the bottom is a Jesus in the wilderness. In the last one I've pictured Jesus, having built a lean-to for shelter, holding a long stick. I don't know why - I like the gesture. I like the thought that he may have played around in the wilderness, thrown some stones, chased after some local fauna.

When I titled this post, I thought I had more melancholy meditations on the absurdity of faith and the brevity of life and the necessity of love - but I forgo that. I could say that I wish I'd had more success in my art - in terms of business. I have the experience in my life of being the best read - thinking that that would find approval; I've been the most conservative; the most orthodox; the most charismatic [in terms of that kind of religious fervor]. When I was young, 9 years old, a minister's wife shamed me for my incorrect theology (now imagine that!) - so throughout my life I've done everything theologically correct; I know the venerated book better than the most rabid venerator. And it simply doesn't matter.

I now read Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek etc because they meet a need for my own intellectual and spiritual rest. I woke up one day and discovered that the faith of my youth (even the faith of that correcting minister's wife!) is heretical down to the core. Truly amazing.

What matters, of course, is love. There is a way to respond to the inchoate enthusiasm of a child other than making him or her feel small and stupid. There is a way of faith that exists beyond tendentious creeds and proof texting - and it is a way of seeing the humanity of each person, to get at the core of Christ's peculiar enjoinder to love one's enemies (the golden rule is common, but that statement takes the cake as being his alone).

I know for myself - I can't answer the question what it is I want. My whole life I've been inculcated to have others tell me what that might be. The fact is subtle. Lacan says that the frustration of the ego is that we've constructed it for another, an other that doesn't care - that doesn't exist. That's a lot of frustration isn't it. I may say that this is a product of growing up in a mill town - basically working class, where the attitude that prevails is of being told what to do. In some churches even it's a sin, the height of selfishness to "do just what you want."  And so, when I was asked what it was that I wanted to do in an interview for a chaplain residency I was caught off guard. I responded with some language about being in the team, doing what needed to be done. But I knew and he knew that I had no answer.

And that's what I carry with me each day now. This puzzle. Lacan locates ethics in this discovery of desire and not giving ground relative to it. Mark de Kesel posits that what Lacan's getting at is for the analysand to arrive at the point where she might act, can act, will act.

Deleuze and Guatarri locate the production of desire on a line of flight. A line of flight is a rhizomatic activity. Rhizomatic in that it remains firmly on the surface - giving in neither to the temptation of finding security in a large organizational hierarchy as well as avoiding the temptation of finding meaning bracketed into the certainty of small cells. The line of flight is creative when it seeks connections, fascist when it abhors connection and seeks its own destruction.

I'm sure I've left something out. Feel free to engage me. Perhaps we can help each other discover what our desire is, to find that line of flight.

I'm delusional

In  Ernest Becker's Denial of Death he comes right out and says that we create an illusion of purpose to do anything - that we can only make things and live life by believing that we will not die. Most people will admit that they're going to die - that all die and that they're no different - but their very mode of being denies it. The reality is that we don't believe we're going to die. 

Some days I have to work through this more than others: I need to convince myself that my life has some meaning and purpose.

When I was a child teachers and parents were fond of chanting bromides to the effect of how unique and special I was - as all children are averred to be. Jesus loves the little children. How special that infant bundle seems - even as he grows into that awkward little person: an air of singularity hangs over his head. Certainly some adults take the opposite tack - they feel their job is to take every one down a peg and sometimes they like to start young. For the most part I, and most people I notice who grew up with me are not too different - we grew secure in our possibilities. 

In truth the possibilities hardly meet the challenge of being alive, of justifying existence. 

We are barred subjects trapped on a signifying chain - as Lacan might say: our hopes and dreams are coupled with meeting the demands of The Other. An Other, by the way, who doesn't exist, but demands our castration (figuratively) all the same.

He's paraphrasing Ecclesiastes and St Paul for the un-initiated. (Why shouldn't St Paul be the first preacher of the death of God - when we become dead to the law, we are effectively dead and all obligations with that law's maker are dead too - that is: the Law is dead because the motive force behind it is un-manned, as it were, by Christ's death on the cross; that is: the actual death of the messiah testifies to the impotence of the Law, which is revealed to be a fortiori, an idol; and in so far as an idol, a testimony to its giver's absence.)

Mind you: I believe - and believe more fully than most. A curious trick of mine. I believe because it is absurd. Absurdity recognizes the delusion of life, of the chance occurrence of conscious life on this obscure planet. What is certain is that out of 107.7 billion people who've existed (according to a recent New Scientist where statisticians apparently calculate such things) each of us is a  drop in the bucket - there is no amount of money anyone can accumulate; no amount of celebrity or articles published or success earned that will stand up in the great flood of entropy and nothingness that is life. 

So I believe because it is absurd. Kierkegaard is succinct in Fear and Trembling that one hallmark of faith is that it is unspeakable - it doesn't make sense, and the moment you try to make it make sense, give it some plausibility, it is no longer faith. It is just sad.

Deleuze in Difference and Repetition remarks that each believer contains a  closet atheist and each atheist harbors a secret believer. This is Becker's point: there is no escaping the conundrum - we are delusional in order to live - cold rationalism leaves us with no point in living. We all have faith in order to survive - to continue working and loving and making and planning (perhaps the militant atheist is the strongest believer of all, even though he might deny it; while the militant religious person is the only true atheist - their ardor to act for God simply proves that that God is dead). A god who coerces belief through violence from that god's adherents upon infidels testifies to divine impotence - coercion through force (whether violent language or action) simply indicates the insecurity and impotence of the coercer. The violence may succeed in its coercion, but in doing so the faith of coercer and coerced is unbelief. 

Rene Girard tried to get this point across, as well as Hauerwas in his Peaceable Kingdom. 

I live it out, albeit imperfectly. The god of my own impotence is strong.

Some days I feel it stronger than others: there is no point! My work, my thoughts, my art - are all pointless activities; and so are yours. 

We may either act in love, which is creative, or act out of our anxieties, which is tied to the death drive. That is: we're either connective or disconnective. In connecting there is some small shred of relief from the prison of subjectivity.