I recently saw the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor inside of a cave of all places. Truly amazing experience. The sound felt thicker in the air than a normal venue. I hear shades of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening album in their work.
I have repeatedly got lost in the muddle of abstraction. I once strongly felt that abstraction was the only pathway to answers/insights but lately being caught in the muddle of abstraction just as likely leads to stiff necks, headaches and greater or lessor degrees of anxiety. But such results haven't meant I'm totally giving up on abstraction--just trying to restrict the amount of my time I spend in the muddle and also spending increased time with poetry, music and nature.
Learning to live with/accept a high degree of uncertainty about reality is a real tough one for me
"Learning to live with/accept a high degree of uncertainty about reality is a real tough one for me"
You and me both. There is a letting go--a very difficult letting go, in my case--that becomes absolutely necessary if I am to continue and not shut down. The world will not fit, it seems, into our systems of thought. Yet, we seek understanding. All men, by their nature, desire to know says Aristotle.
There is a deeper knowing next to which all our systems are but straw. Poetry, music and nature are some of the best paths to this.
A poem by Saint John of the Cross comes to mind, regarding the term "Enlightened Dark Age": it describes the Original Fountainhead of light and being, where all creatures quench their thirst... "even though it's night time", as the refrain goes. It was turned into a beatiful, intense song by Enrique Morente:
Plenty food for thought in this piece; I specially like your proposal to study sacred chanting, ideally having been born within a living folk tradition. Those traditions are really the key, I think, as the song above perhaps demonstrates.
The song is fascinating. How much is the poetry of St. John of Cross part of the popular culture in the Spanish speaking world? Many in the Anglosphere would know the phrase, "the dark night of the soul" but not really know much or anything about St. John of the Cross.
I'd say the situation in Spanish speaking countries is pretty much the same. He is a very influential poet, so most likely if you're a writer or scholar you've read him, but popular culture nowadays is completely dominated by -gasp!- reggaeton. There are precious few surviving musical traditions, though, probably more in South America than Spain. And a lot of effort being made since a few years back to keep them alive... I sincerely hope they make it!
I hope so too. When I was in Ireland 20-25 years ago it was still alive. As an American I had never experienced that before. I grew up in the matrix of pop culture. I see the importance of folk traditions. This is pointed out in The Art of Loading Brush by Wendell Berry. His point being if we don't get the little things right--literally the art of loading brush into a cart--we won't get the "high culture" right either. Things start from the bottom up.
Yes! I happen to have complete faith in these musical (and poetic, dramatic...) forms. Mostly personal and non-scholarly observations I've made over several years have led me to confirm that the distinction between "high" and "low" culture is not that significant. High culture is just low culture with a fancy dress! But the opposite, of course, just doesn't apply.
I am pitifully non-musical, so far as making music goes, and this has stretched my mind in a good way. Thank you. I sympathize with the term “enlightened dark age”; this really speaks to our situation realistically. We are tunneling out areas of light, to share with other lights we might find in the tunneling. This has a hopeful but non-utopian feel to me.
Peter- I am still trying to figure out what I mean by the term. I have been slowly going through your posts and see you chronicle what might be a new phase of the Dark Age of the Enlightenment. This morning I read, "Can we Stream God through and App?", which serves as a perfect example. To invert the inversion to an Enlightened Dark Age is to imagine how we could possibly live differently. The Modern-->Postmodern-->Metamodern(??) trajectory is likely differently flavors/moods/emphases within the same basic project. Is there a real alternative? -Jack
Thanks for your comment on the God article. As for the modern, postmodern, and metamodern being different flavors/moods of the same basic project, I’m inclined to agree; and there will probably be even more flavors and moods than that.
I think what is coming after postmodernism is “therapeutism”. Okay, I just made that up, but it’s the idea that rather than focusing on the search for truth, we focus on making sure people are comfortable, and not hurt in any significant way, and taken care of. I think therapeutism is the logical mode of operation for the Machine, which can only govern successfully if there is peace and compliance. Politicians have always recognized this, but it’s only now, with various emerging technologies, that we can socially soothe and sedate people to a remarkably high degree and on such a mass scale. Paul talked about The Matrix in his last post, and my suggestion is in line with such a world. Who cares about truth when you can be happy, preoccupied with real or virtual comforts, with few worries? It reminds me of that character in the film (I forget his name, but you’ll remember him) who is one of the rebels but realizes he’d rather be plugged into the Matrix than living free and in truth.
Years ago, while I was focused on Buddhism, I attempted to read a massive book entitled, "Zen and the Brain". It ended up being way too technical and specialized. But I did walk away from it (and simpler books like it) is the very same sense of what you describe in your first post.
If a lifelong practice of meditation changes the brain in positive ways, why couldn't that be reverse engineered? Particularly if our metaphysical assumption is some kind of naturalism. In other words, if there aren't other, higher, ontological levels of being, engineering the brain for maximum "adaptation" would be all there is.
Of course as C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Abolition of Man, once we are there, who gets to decide what the best brain state is? Or what a human is in such a moral vacuum? And for what reason?
As you mention, the interest in a human being as a "hackable animal" may be just a way to obtain perfect compliance. As Cypher, in the Matrix, is it a trade many will make for a pleasurable life beyond any internal struggle?
Is a hackable animal--or rather a hacked human--still human? I don't think so.
This is the heart of the culture war. What is a human being? How we answer that determines everything else.
Zen and the Brain—I remember that one too. I also found it a bit dense, and never summoned the energy to read through it. My own falling away with Zen happened because it seemed to make no sense that one of the main goals of meditation was to shut down the discursive mind and essentially most of the brain. Spiritually speaking, why would humans be born and equipped with so many complex mental functions, like language, reasoning, memory, planning, etc., if the spiritual goal was to nullify them? It seemed that spirituality should in some manner include these various functions, and if anything bring them to fuller fruition, not by some technological means of course, but in terms of their role in a transcendent or spiritually transformed world.
“What is a human being?” It all comes down to that. I am not sure there is an easy answer; but surely the answer cannot be totally fixed and predictable. We are not mere animals (my apologies to the chimps who share 99.whatever % of our DNA and yet still can’t build a wheel or write a poem). We humans are, in so many ways, pattern disrupters; there is a certain fluidity, an inescapable fluidity, in how our lives express themselves and in how we tinker with the physical world; and yet it can be hard to separate which kinds of expressions and tinkerings are truly “human” and which are destructive. Maybe it’s impossible to make that clear discernment in a fallen world.
This is all good stuff Jack (and thanks for the shout-out.) I have felt the same for years. My current essay series is an insanely ambitious attempt to use what I suppose is abstract thought, of a kind, to understand the state we're in. Having been at it for a year now I've noticed two things, I think, which your post has prompted.
One is that this writing, and the research required, is proving genuinely useful for me in working out what is going on and what I think about it. Of course, it also reveals how much I don't know, but that is an endless revelation for any of us.
The other thing is that I think the ultimate goal I have is to write my way through it all. In other words, to use thought to render thought ultimately redundant. (I know this sounds quite Zen.) But I have a sense that a point will be reached at which silence will make a lot more sense than words, finally. It sounds like you might be talking about something similar. I wonder now if the words are necessary to achieve the silence. For some people, at least. It's how we get there.
Yes, I think I do understand what you mean by "writing our way to silence". I have been a reader of The Cloud of Unknowing for many years. I can't say I understood it all that well. I have been listening to the audiobook slowly and in small servings. Something is resonating in a different way. Words that lead beyond words.
In philosophy we fish for the truth; but I often think that words are the net and we are the fish. I keep getting landed in the boat and clubbed! When will I learn? Maybe a thousand times before I really get it.
I have to wonder whether we are all coming to the end of the Western philosophical project, i.e. The Dark Age of the Enlightenment. Whether Baudrillard and Derrida might be signalling this, whatever other purposes they are put towards. I am hardly qualified to say, but the western project does seem to have failed.
Is this what you realized in Savage Gods? A subtractive process that I too have experienced. A subtraction that adds something, something otherwise inexpressible? Yet the whole machine keeps spinning out new versions of itself, and I keep chasing after it and my own tail. Do I really think that *this time* it will work? I am not smart enough and there isn't enough time to figure out it in the way we would like, i.e. as a closed, rational, self-grounded system of thought. Really, is anybody smart enough?
Does a Civilization of Uncivilization even make sense? I think it does, though I am still trying to fathom what that could even mean, concretely. I am calling it an Enlightened Dark Age. Where we give up on History, Progress, domination, ideology and all the rest. Instead, as Meister Eckhart has it, live without why, and in the Cloud of Unknowing, in the deep and silent music of Being. I think that could be a good life, maybe even the best life.
I resemble this remark, but for me it's reading and speaking. The problem is that I'm the only one listening and this island lacks the food of community and connection.
I grew up in a middle-class, high church home in a midwestern college town. I was exposed to a lot of classical music, as well as the occasional Gregorian chant. I went to many concerts at the university, some a bit odd.
Even after Hendrix, Zepplin, Zappa, I was still drawn to, primarily, baroque music. I did follow some of the modern composers like Glass, but find myself listening more to Gregorian, or similar, chant.
I recently saw the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor inside of a cave of all places. Truly amazing experience. The sound felt thicker in the air than a normal venue. I hear shades of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening album in their work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze3A33Z9lp0&list=PLKEpm1-5j1YeW6qo-sql-decW6k_39c6a
Thank you. I will give it a listen.
I have repeatedly got lost in the muddle of abstraction. I once strongly felt that abstraction was the only pathway to answers/insights but lately being caught in the muddle of abstraction just as likely leads to stiff necks, headaches and greater or lessor degrees of anxiety. But such results haven't meant I'm totally giving up on abstraction--just trying to restrict the amount of my time I spend in the muddle and also spending increased time with poetry, music and nature.
Learning to live with/accept a high degree of uncertainty about reality is a real tough one for me
"Learning to live with/accept a high degree of uncertainty about reality is a real tough one for me"
You and me both. There is a letting go--a very difficult letting go, in my case--that becomes absolutely necessary if I am to continue and not shut down. The world will not fit, it seems, into our systems of thought. Yet, we seek understanding. All men, by their nature, desire to know says Aristotle.
There is a deeper knowing next to which all our systems are but straw. Poetry, music and nature are some of the best paths to this.
A poem by Saint John of the Cross comes to mind, regarding the term "Enlightened Dark Age": it describes the Original Fountainhead of light and being, where all creatures quench their thirst... "even though it's night time", as the refrain goes. It was turned into a beatiful, intense song by Enrique Morente:
https://youtu.be/z2q8qZJ4eo8
Plenty food for thought in this piece; I specially like your proposal to study sacred chanting, ideally having been born within a living folk tradition. Those traditions are really the key, I think, as the song above perhaps demonstrates.
The song is fascinating. How much is the poetry of St. John of Cross part of the popular culture in the Spanish speaking world? Many in the Anglosphere would know the phrase, "the dark night of the soul" but not really know much or anything about St. John of the Cross.
I'd say the situation in Spanish speaking countries is pretty much the same. He is a very influential poet, so most likely if you're a writer or scholar you've read him, but popular culture nowadays is completely dominated by -gasp!- reggaeton. There are precious few surviving musical traditions, though, probably more in South America than Spain. And a lot of effort being made since a few years back to keep them alive... I sincerely hope they make it!
I hope so too. When I was in Ireland 20-25 years ago it was still alive. As an American I had never experienced that before. I grew up in the matrix of pop culture. I see the importance of folk traditions. This is pointed out in The Art of Loading Brush by Wendell Berry. His point being if we don't get the little things right--literally the art of loading brush into a cart--we won't get the "high culture" right either. Things start from the bottom up.
Yes! I happen to have complete faith in these musical (and poetic, dramatic...) forms. Mostly personal and non-scholarly observations I've made over several years have led me to confirm that the distinction between "high" and "low" culture is not that significant. High culture is just low culture with a fancy dress! But the opposite, of course, just doesn't apply.
I am pitifully non-musical, so far as making music goes, and this has stretched my mind in a good way. Thank you. I sympathize with the term “enlightened dark age”; this really speaks to our situation realistically. We are tunneling out areas of light, to share with other lights we might find in the tunneling. This has a hopeful but non-utopian feel to me.
Peter- I am still trying to figure out what I mean by the term. I have been slowly going through your posts and see you chronicle what might be a new phase of the Dark Age of the Enlightenment. This morning I read, "Can we Stream God through and App?", which serves as a perfect example. To invert the inversion to an Enlightened Dark Age is to imagine how we could possibly live differently. The Modern-->Postmodern-->Metamodern(??) trajectory is likely differently flavors/moods/emphases within the same basic project. Is there a real alternative? -Jack
Thanks for your comment on the God article. As for the modern, postmodern, and metamodern being different flavors/moods of the same basic project, I’m inclined to agree; and there will probably be even more flavors and moods than that.
I think what is coming after postmodernism is “therapeutism”. Okay, I just made that up, but it’s the idea that rather than focusing on the search for truth, we focus on making sure people are comfortable, and not hurt in any significant way, and taken care of. I think therapeutism is the logical mode of operation for the Machine, which can only govern successfully if there is peace and compliance. Politicians have always recognized this, but it’s only now, with various emerging technologies, that we can socially soothe and sedate people to a remarkably high degree and on such a mass scale. Paul talked about The Matrix in his last post, and my suggestion is in line with such a world. Who cares about truth when you can be happy, preoccupied with real or virtual comforts, with few worries? It reminds me of that character in the film (I forget his name, but you’ll remember him) who is one of the rebels but realizes he’d rather be plugged into the Matrix than living free and in truth.
Years ago, while I was focused on Buddhism, I attempted to read a massive book entitled, "Zen and the Brain". It ended up being way too technical and specialized. But I did walk away from it (and simpler books like it) is the very same sense of what you describe in your first post.
If a lifelong practice of meditation changes the brain in positive ways, why couldn't that be reverse engineered? Particularly if our metaphysical assumption is some kind of naturalism. In other words, if there aren't other, higher, ontological levels of being, engineering the brain for maximum "adaptation" would be all there is.
Of course as C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Abolition of Man, once we are there, who gets to decide what the best brain state is? Or what a human is in such a moral vacuum? And for what reason?
As you mention, the interest in a human being as a "hackable animal" may be just a way to obtain perfect compliance. As Cypher, in the Matrix, is it a trade many will make for a pleasurable life beyond any internal struggle?
Is a hackable animal--or rather a hacked human--still human? I don't think so.
This is the heart of the culture war. What is a human being? How we answer that determines everything else.
Zen and the Brain—I remember that one too. I also found it a bit dense, and never summoned the energy to read through it. My own falling away with Zen happened because it seemed to make no sense that one of the main goals of meditation was to shut down the discursive mind and essentially most of the brain. Spiritually speaking, why would humans be born and equipped with so many complex mental functions, like language, reasoning, memory, planning, etc., if the spiritual goal was to nullify them? It seemed that spirituality should in some manner include these various functions, and if anything bring them to fuller fruition, not by some technological means of course, but in terms of their role in a transcendent or spiritually transformed world.
“What is a human being?” It all comes down to that. I am not sure there is an easy answer; but surely the answer cannot be totally fixed and predictable. We are not mere animals (my apologies to the chimps who share 99.whatever % of our DNA and yet still can’t build a wheel or write a poem). We humans are, in so many ways, pattern disrupters; there is a certain fluidity, an inescapable fluidity, in how our lives express themselves and in how we tinker with the physical world; and yet it can be hard to separate which kinds of expressions and tinkerings are truly “human” and which are destructive. Maybe it’s impossible to make that clear discernment in a fallen world.
This is all good stuff Jack (and thanks for the shout-out.) I have felt the same for years. My current essay series is an insanely ambitious attempt to use what I suppose is abstract thought, of a kind, to understand the state we're in. Having been at it for a year now I've noticed two things, I think, which your post has prompted.
One is that this writing, and the research required, is proving genuinely useful for me in working out what is going on and what I think about it. Of course, it also reveals how much I don't know, but that is an endless revelation for any of us.
The other thing is that I think the ultimate goal I have is to write my way through it all. In other words, to use thought to render thought ultimately redundant. (I know this sounds quite Zen.) But I have a sense that a point will be reached at which silence will make a lot more sense than words, finally. It sounds like you might be talking about something similar. I wonder now if the words are necessary to achieve the silence. For some people, at least. It's how we get there.
Paul-
Yes, I think I do understand what you mean by "writing our way to silence". I have been a reader of The Cloud of Unknowing for many years. I can't say I understood it all that well. I have been listening to the audiobook slowly and in small servings. Something is resonating in a different way. Words that lead beyond words.
In philosophy we fish for the truth; but I often think that words are the net and we are the fish. I keep getting landed in the boat and clubbed! When will I learn? Maybe a thousand times before I really get it.
I have to wonder whether we are all coming to the end of the Western philosophical project, i.e. The Dark Age of the Enlightenment. Whether Baudrillard and Derrida might be signalling this, whatever other purposes they are put towards. I am hardly qualified to say, but the western project does seem to have failed.
Is this what you realized in Savage Gods? A subtractive process that I too have experienced. A subtraction that adds something, something otherwise inexpressible? Yet the whole machine keeps spinning out new versions of itself, and I keep chasing after it and my own tail. Do I really think that *this time* it will work? I am not smart enough and there isn't enough time to figure out it in the way we would like, i.e. as a closed, rational, self-grounded system of thought. Really, is anybody smart enough?
Does a Civilization of Uncivilization even make sense? I think it does, though I am still trying to fathom what that could even mean, concretely. I am calling it an Enlightened Dark Age. Where we give up on History, Progress, domination, ideology and all the rest. Instead, as Meister Eckhart has it, live without why, and in the Cloud of Unknowing, in the deep and silent music of Being. I think that could be a good life, maybe even the best life.
I hope you are well.
-Jack
I resemble this remark, but for me it's reading and speaking. The problem is that I'm the only one listening and this island lacks the food of community and connection.
I grew up in a middle-class, high church home in a midwestern college town. I was exposed to a lot of classical music, as well as the occasional Gregorian chant. I went to many concerts at the university, some a bit odd.
Even after Hendrix, Zepplin, Zappa, I was still drawn to, primarily, baroque music. I did follow some of the modern composers like Glass, but find myself listening more to Gregorian, or similar, chant.