Archive for November, 2007
November 29th, 2007
Poets and mystics have always known that beneath the skim of the observable lies a schema, a web, an indefinable something, that ties us all together in ways that precede reason and our very “selves.” In other words, they have always known that the “autonomous self” is a phantom.
Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire uncovered more than a corner this “something,” and his eminent disciple and interpreter James Alison–Grow Mercy’s inspiration–gave us ways to speak of and begin to integrate this social-constructing-something, this unifying-like-principle-in-need-redemption into our faith.
Fields converge. Now, (giving scientific credence to Girard’s anthropological/psychological soundings) three Italian neuroscientists have lifted the hem high.
In 1996 it happened that a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma, Italy, were studying premotor neuron dynamics. They had run electrodes into a few individual neurons in a macaque monkey’s premotor cortex (in humans, centers for pain, empathy, language) to monitor neural activity as the monkey reached for different objects. The eureka moment came when one of the scientists walked into the room where the monkey was and reached out and picked up a raisin. As the monkey watched, its premotor neurons fired just as they had when the monkey had picked up the raisin. They were astonished. What they had witnessed was a sort of sympathetic, observation-driven firing of neurons. It had always been held that these neurons fired only in action. But after replicating the experiment many times and many ways they realized they had discovered something new. The team, Giaocomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi later named these mirror neurons.
Much has happened in a decade and the research is finally filtering down.
Researchers, using brain imaging rather than electrodes, have found human mirror-neuron systems more robust and numerous than those of monkeys and existing not just in the premotor cortex. (i.e. The inferior parietal areas, the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus, and the insula. David Dobbs)
What is the relevance of all this? Here’s a thought from V.S. Ramachandran, professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Director of Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California:
The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution is the single most important “unpublicized” story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
Of course mystics didn’t need proof, but neuroscientists may now be giving us cause enough to finally put the autonomous self out of it’s misery. And this is only one humanizing benefit coming out of this breaking discovery.
More to come…
November 26th, 2007
For an article inspired by a walk in the woods and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, check out “Articles and Essays”
November 25th, 2007
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Near the end of Georges Bernanos’ “Diary of a Country Priest,” are these words:
How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity…
The “diary” is an occasionally bucolic, sometimes strange and often tragic journey of a young priest who finally falls into this “supreme grace,” and discovers,
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I am reconciled to myself, to the poor, poor shell of me.
And that is the magic of the book. It reminded me, yet again, that a thousand messages, benevolent and conflicting, have formed a “me” that regards “me” with a mix of disdain and loathing, mercy and affection. To which side of this inner bearing I move–to self-hate, or to self-reconciliation–determines the health of “me” and the health of every one of my relationships. (Which is essentially the same thing, because, far more than I know, I am my relationships.)
The novel ends with these words. “Does it matter? Grace is everywhere…” Of course, if grace is everywhere, my fragile and occasionally desperate project of seeking approval from all the right quarters doesn’t matter at all. I can simply (simple is not easy), in all simplicity, resign myself to the grace that is here.
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A friend told me that this was Brennan Manning’s favorite book. And in fact, in the novel, the young priest is often called a ‘ragamuffin priest’ by his superior. No doubt this inspired Manning’s popular, “Ragamuffin Gospel.” A book that was vilified by Fundamentalists.
November 20th, 2007
They’re playing James Taylor in Starbucks these days. Always good to be reminded that “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Yesterday I bought a hot chocolate for a young man who obviously spent the night outside. He was in Starbucks occupying himself with a glass of water. Beyond the obvious incongruity of looking like you live outside, try sitting in Starbucks without a drink and see if you don’t stick out?
He sipped the hot drink through the topping then retrieved a straw to spoon the whipped cream into his mouth. When he spilled a few drops of chocolate he instinctively bent to lick it off the table top.
This morning I read about a place where everyone will have a home. A place where, we are promised, “there are many dwelling places,” and that, “if it wasn’t so we would not have been told (G-of-John).” A promise kept, regarding housing. How refreshing is that?
The day before that I read Jesus’ comment that we would always have the poor among us. Charge me with heterodoxy but remember who Jesus was talking to when he said this. It was of course the fastidious Judas. The cunning keeper of the books. Is it any wonder with people like Judas keeping accounts that poverty flourishes, that the poor remain?
It has started to snow. I watch as headlights round 109th and see a sudden swirl of luminous flakes brought into relief and mirror-ball the entire intersection. It’s early Tuesday morning but Taylor is singing “Steamroller” and I can almost imagine a dance breaking out under the new incandescence of Jasper and 9th.
What say?…one cold snowy December morning we beg or steal all the patio gas heaters, set them up on their poles all along the downtown streets and avenues, then call all the libidinous young men who always have sub-woofers in the trunks of their cars, give them only Taj Mahal CD’s to play, and take a conga-line to work.
(By the way, you can blame the snow on me, I wore sandals today.)
November 19th, 2007
Saturday, at the cabin, I listened to two Blue jays argue. They broke off only to fly to a new tree and a new perch where they took up the quarrel anew. Blue jays, or Western-scrub jays, which these could have been, are territorial and so I considered their argument exactly that. Eventually, on one tree, the argument resolved itself. A bilateral agreement was birdally enacted.
I share this little patch of ground with occupants I didn’t invite but were here long before I was. I take comfort in knowing they are welcomed here. I take comfort in the growing squirrel midden under the spruce and beside the old wooden-spoked wagon wheel. I take comfort and am warmed by the circle of fire built from the Black poplar that have changed form and now lie on the floor of the woods.
The smallest of arachnids as landed on my page. Smaller than print, the brown spider fits nicely inside a lower-case “o.” I lower my book and let her float to the ground.
It’s hard to imagine from my chair by the embers that the world is bleeding over unresolved territorial quarrels. But then, perhaps not. I have blood on my own hands. How often have I peered through hooded eyes to reach out and grasp a centrepiece or a moment not meant for me?
But somewhere there is liberty. Somewhere there is a fascinating freedom. But it is not within my self. It is in another. I am only and always set free by another. Someone outside of my rivalrous self. Someone moving beyond rivalry.
The Blue jays’ migration remains a mystery. One will stay far north and another will fly. Some will stay one year and leave the next. One will migrate on que–in season, and another will arrive. I like to imagine the jays’ migration mystery an elaborate system to keep themselves free of damaging ongoing territorial disputes.
November 16th, 2007
If it wasn’t for song sparrows in the blue spruce outside my office window, the clamour of this time of year with its special demands might do irreparable inner damage.
Thank you Lord for song sparrows, the Melospiza melodia, and their perky cheeriness and their many variations of vibrant trills.
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Song sparrows
November 13th, 2007
Since I mentioned Siegfried Sassoon in the last post as a kind of “anti-Flanders” poet, it’s only right I post a poem.
Survivors
No doubt they’ll soon get well;
the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ —
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights;
their cowed Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
Soaked in sarcasm…but he did have the right.
He was full of heady idealism when he enlisted at the outbreak of the first world war. And his early poetry pictures war as a noble enterprise. But when he got to the front, got to the trenches, saw the limbs and smelled the stench of violent death, and when his comrades and some of his family became casualties, he began to examine his adopted idealism and his poetry turned from a romanticization of the war to its portrayal in language with razor-edge reality.
His friend, Robert Nichols, another poet and soldier, quotes him as follows:
“Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.”
November 11th, 2007
Perhaps I wasn’t really listening, perhaps I too was caught up in a kind of collective amnesia over the evil of war that seems is at its height this time of year. Perhaps I was too caught up in the spirit of the poppy that sees any kind of detraction from the geist of this commemoration, or ritual, as treasonous.
But this year, upon listening to a reading of “In Flanders Field” I was repelled. Please understand, I hold no disdain, only sympathy, for the veteran who read it and I have only sincere sadness for the war dead the poem regards. And for the Canadian poet of “In Flanders Fields,” Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, (1872-1918), I hold no aversion, only a grievous sort of empathy.
Not so for the poem. It’s a disaster. It’s terminal message, a message we have enduringly embraced perpetuates our plague. (Just for the record John McCrae, for reasons known only to himself, threw the poem away. It was retrieved by a fellow officer.) It reads:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
While the living fight the wars, it is the dead that sustain war. Always the dead. We are manacled to the dead through errant patriotism, through a kind of Don Cherry vindicatory vision of justice, and through our inability to see our enemy as human.
The poem cries out…humans on our side have died, and they were not like those who killed them, they were like us, they loved and experienced beauty. And now, slaughtered in war, it is up to us to avenge them; up to us to “hold high the torch” and to “take up the quarrel.” (Quarrel?) And if we fail, “break faith,” the dead will have no peace.
The poem is mythologized blackmail. And we will always succumb to the lure of war as justified revenge no matter what the original “quarrel,” unless we begin to forget.
It is time for some selective forgetting. It is time to forget the spirit and message of this poem and insert some poetry from Siegfried Sassoon. Sasoon, also a decorated WW I veteran, exposed not merely the horror of war, but its meaninglessness.
Is it possible to have the dexterity of heart and mind to compassionately remember the war dead, without in any way honouring and legitimizing war? Well, not if we adhere to the message of ” In Flanders Fields.”
Unless we wish to remember war’s pointless destruction, the epithet, “Lest we Forget,” perpetually serves war. An open-eyed “lest we remember,” must be our new commemoration.
November 9th, 2007
In response to a welcome comment about my ailing writing mojo…
I say, blogger block is nothing like tennis elbow.
Repeatedly hitting that yellow ball with all the hard heat you can muster like some kind of banshee possessed Borg is sure to injure tendons and jeopardize a future in the court.
Serial blogging on the other hand can juice you up. Ideas domino and sometimes all you can do is write as fast as possible hoping they don’t disappear out an open window before you trap them on your screen. These are the flood light times.
But dark times don’t necessarily dull the edge either. Dark provides a different space and like the moonflower whose blossom opens in the evening and lasts all night, dark can inspire a magical crystalline beauty.
No, the thing that flattens the creative from blogging to badminton is living too long in the swamp–that sloughy semi-sleepless cycle of as-good-as-it-gets exhaustion that has you believing that life is a zero-sum game and left-overs are plums to be picked over.
Project revisited: So what invigorates, energizes, what gives you a sliver of new light. What opens a flower?
November 4th, 2007
Yesterday:
We’re in Montana’s, with its open beams and front end of a truck through the roof and all-you-can-eat ribs on Wednesday. Waitresses, some perky, some lazy, move through the general clamour with over-sized menus and over-sized plates of food. One cheerful server makes her way to our shellacked pine-plank table with its brown paper cover that is already being coloured on and asks about drink selections.
In this moment I watch my son with his daughter and her two year old brother and I think that he has decided somewhere and early on that he wanted to be a better father than the one he had. I’m pained and overjoyed at the thought. His ease with the kids and sense of play-fun and his never using the word careful is a delight to behold. And it uncovers in me an empty spot.
I’ve been absent for much of his growing-up years–his elementary and adolescent and teen years. Geography played a role. But also, my own sense of helplessness and fear and avoidance of memory and pain–much of it guilt induced–played equal parts.
I’ve not been a model father. Yes, I know, there are few model fathers. But learning fatherhood from my son, who has not had an easy first couple of decades and who has been in forms of trouble culminating at one point in his being the object of an “intervention,” was not, I suppose, what I’d expected. But there it is…and here in Montana’s I see it. I’ve seen something of life’s quotidian layers with its striations of strange moments and this comes as one more confusing and liberating moment.
Today:
As I browse the small book store in St. Peter’s Abbey, with it’s honour system purchasing policy, I consider writing my own Benedictine book; “Confessions of an Unfaithful Oblate.”
I’m afraid, even here at the Abbey, I pray and meditate best while walking behind the monastery along the easy maze of paths in the scrub poplar and hazelnut and dogwood, smoking a cigar. Today I notice life and death played out in all this under-and-overgrowth. I see what I take for a barb of sadness in a solitary Blue jay. And I see a bring-on-the-cold vigor in the Black-capped chickadees; all winter they will call out sweety-peety–a name I gave my daughter when she was old enough to walk in the woods with me. A name she still smiles at.
In this moment I realize I’ve come to the monastery to be confronted with my bits of infidelity. That is, my suspect self-discipline and shoddy time habits; ostensibly, my infidelity to live out a promise. Not a new thing for me. I need the paths and the walls of this place to square my life again. More, I need the fully-present presence of my mentor-monk to reassure me that I’m always salvageable and that my own odd reflecting presence adds something good back in.
Tomorrow:
Who knows what fugitive moments may be captured and held.
Previous Posts
Poets and mystics have always known that beneath the skim of the observable lies a schema, a web, an indefinable something, that ties us all together in ways that precede reason and our very “selves.” In other words, they have always known that the “autonomous self” is a phantom.
Front Porch Pictures
