Via Negativa

Often while working by myself on fairly mindless tasks, I have silent conversations with invisible friends. This morning, it was an evangelical Christian, challenging me to describe my religious beliefs. I was shoveling out the cross drains on our mile-and-a-half-long driveway.

I started out strong, saying that my current doing without overt religious belief is really a spiritual exercise, just as one may fast or go without sex. I assured my imaginary double that I’d like nothing more than to become a believer. In fact, I find many forms of religious practice quite attractive, from the ritualism of the Eastern Orthodox to the enthusiasms of Pentecostals and the quietism of Quakers. But it seems to me that if we are truly to give ourselves over into the power of a divinity who is beyond our imagining, the very first thing we should get rid of is any notion that we know what is best for ourselves.

“But what about salvation?” asked my imaginary interlocutor. “Scripture says we must believe if we are to escape damnation.” I replied that “scripture” says many things, some of which contradict each other on their face. But if one message comes through loud and clear, it is that the worst sin of all is to worship false gods, followed closely by attempting to construct images of the divine and invoking divinity for self-serving purposes. Bibliolatry thus constitutes an offence of the highest order.

We are commanded to love divinity and to love our neighbor – the two commandments are apparently closely linked. Nowhere are we commanded to love ourselves. Therefore, to pursue a form of salvation that does not include every one of our neighbors – which ultimately must mean every sentient being in the universe – would be to damn oneself. As long as a single soul still burns, we have a moral obligation to share in its torment.

At some point, my paper tiger of a debating partner accused me of believing in the heresy of deus abscondus, tantamount to the Nietzschean Death of God. I ventured that this might not look like such a heresy if one happened to be Jewish, Armenian, Rwandan, etc. But be that as it may, I said, I think what we are faced with now is homo abscondus. Forget about God – the entire dimension of the sacred has become invisible to most modern humans. We have become like the walking dead, ghosts in the machines. Some quite serious thinkers now look forward to the day when every bit of individual memory can be transferred to computers. When that happens, they say, we will have no further need for physical bodies. The machines will set us free; we’ll become immortal. I say, to hell with that!

Well, naturally my evangelical friend agreed heartily on that point. But a little later I began to needle him about the Christian predilection for making a virtue out of unpleasant work. “The only real excuse for hard work,” I said, “Is to remind ourselves of how delicious ordinary water can taste!”

I can’t remember any of the other points I made this morning, but you can be sure they were all pretty devastating.

Crap, I just realized I missed commemorating this blog’s six-month anniversary. It was yesterday, the 17th. Well, it’s not like I was gonna give it flowers or anything.

Yesterday I got my quarterly haircut. The haircut was at 10:30 a.m.; I forgot to look in the mirror until the next morning, when I took a shower. Geez. I guess I am getting to be that age when I truly don’t care any more.

For most of this week, a male indigo bunting has been attacking its reflection in the window right next to where I work. It’s kind of interesting to think that a lack of self-awareness could constitute such a grave handicap. Birds are far from dumb, but they do have their misprisions. I’ve seen robins, cardinals and towhees go to war with their reflections, but this is the first bunting. The odd thing is that his mate sits and watches, and when he’s off somewhere else (perhaps feeding the nestlings?) she takes over. Who knew that female passerines had such strong territorial instincts?

Though one wonders why they don’t compare notes about the intruder’s sex and color (she’s brown, he is of course indigo). Perhaps they have learned, like so many human couples, to avoid arguments. Or perhaps this whole thing is some kind of displaced aggression stemming from suppressed intra-marital conflict.

At least they don’t have to worry about forgetting six-month anniversaries. I don’t believe buntings stay together for longer than one season.

An extremely small spider just climbed an extremely long strand of web, going right past my nose. Good luck, kiddo! Don’t forget to write!

“The Five Nations could never control their world fully; they could never enjoy perfect security within Iroquoia, nor were they able to banish death. As a result, ritual torture and cannibalism – both by the Iroquois and by their enemies – continued throughout the seventeenth century. Indeed, the persistence of hostilities proved so frustrating to the Iroquois will to incorporate outsiders that the Five Nations resorted to the symbolic and actual consumption of enemies who consistently defied their expansive vision of peace.

“For the Iroquois, adoption was an important means of assuaging grief, replacing those who died, and maintaining population, especially in the face of epidemic disease. Men brought to the villages of Iroquoia as captives in warfare were candidates for such adoption, but they could also suffer a less happy fate: a kind of ritual adoption through torture, death, and cannibalism. In this practice, the Iroquois expressed a rage of bereavement, one that Deganawidah and Iroquois political culture sought to repress internally. The torturer thus found a release in subjecting the prisoner – an outsider – to treatment that today strikes us as extraordinarily cruel. While indulging in this violence, Iroquois men and women achieved psychic relief; they defeated their rage by devouring the source of it. And simultaneously, as they consumed their victims, they symbolically transformed them into kinsmen. Jesuit observers thought the Huron and Iroquois savage and cruel when they caressed captives with fire brands, commenting, ‘Ah, it is not right that my uncle should be cold; I must warm thee,’ or when they applied a red-hot axe head to a victim’s feet, saying, ‘Now as my uncle has kindly designed to come and live among the Huron, I must make him a present, I must give him a hatchet.’ In essence, Iroquoian people in this manner transformed the raw (foreign, hostile men) into the cooked (kinsmen), and then they ate them in the ultimate exercise of assimilation.”

****

“The sorcerer Thadadaho epitomized the dualism of good and evil, as did the cannibal Hiawatha. [The prophet] Deganawidah transformed each man, through magic and reason, bringing out the good and banishing the bad. The Iroquois similarly saw a dualism in power and in the effects of medicine and ritual. Orenda, a benevolent and protecting power, opposed utgon, the essence of evil, expressed by witches, disease and storms. Shamans or healers mobilized orenda against utgon, but the line between the beneficent and the malignant, between medicine and witchcraft, was easily crossed. Shamans might turn their abilities to evil, or normally benign rituals might become witchcraft if improperly performed. In the peace negotiations of 1645 at Trois Rivières . . . the Iroquois orator himself seemed the embodiment of dualism; in reply to an ‘ill-disposed Huron,’ he said, ‘My face is painted and daubed on one side, while the other is quite clean. I do not see very clearly on the side that is daubed over; on the other side my sight is good. The painted side is toward the Hurons, and I see nothing; the clean side is toward the French, and I see clearly, as in broad daylight.'”

Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1993)

From the Los Angeles Times:

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.

“We inspected a lot of chicken farms,” said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed “Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team” on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt.

Is it just me, or would that make a really bitchin’ name for a punk rock band?
(Thanks to Mark for forwarding.)