SILENCING MR. SKEPTIC
November 8th 2009
No sooner than I posted my last entry on Rumi’s story titled YOU NEVER KNOW WHY, my Mr. Skeptic said, “It’s good to make up stories and arguments that serve your point of view and make you feel better, but are they true? What about death? Is that a good thing, too? Does Rumi’s story really explain suffering? Can suffering be explained away? You can cite the afterlife, etc, but who knows? Perhaps life is a bitch and then we die.
I say Mr. Skeptic is good and has a purpose in the evolution of our spirits. “Spirit?” says he, “what spirit?
You know, it’s an old, old argument between faith and reason. It is the argument between what William James defines as the Tender Hearted and the Tough Minded. FBS, fortunately, makes it hard for me to carry on this argument. Perhaps, says Mr. Skeptic, you are just intellectually lazy and use FBS as an excuse?
I find relief in concurring. I will let him, and myself, be, knowing in my heart (I have no desire or energy to convince another) that my experience is as true of me as his is to him. As Einstein says, what is true of A is not true of B. And who is correct? Both, according to our Scientist Saint. Mr. Skeptic does not share my e/motion, nor I his. We can let it rest at that. Mr. Skeptic is too young for me, too impassioned about reason, and moving too fast for me at 61. At my age, I am entitled to my way of thinking and being. I have done my battling with him, and now am entitled to my peace and my subjective knowing that I am right for me. I don’t need to be right for him or everyone else.
It wasn’t always so. Mr. Skeptic had won several times and I had lain, wounded and dying in the battlefield. Conscious choice had become my nurse and ministered me back to health. I had to choose the imaginary over the material, the emotional over the logical, feeling over reason, the unseen over verifiable facts. It was Johannes Kepler, the 16th century scientist, hero of my play, Kepler Dreams, who taught me imagination’s unerring instinct to discover and uncover the truth. That character birthed me, too, and I made a conscious decision to take the leap of faith, leaving reason, alone, behind. I didn’t then know that reason and imagination, too, are the two seeming dualities which are two sides of the same coin. Where would we be without reason? But it must stay in its place and not take over our entire beings.
I must add as an aside that the play was never produced. For every success there are a thousand failures. Look at how many billions of sperm cells fail before one succeeds. Vanity makes me add that Kepler Dreams was, however, stage read at the Gaslamp Quarter theatre in San Diego, directed by Mark Hofflund, who was then director of the Play Discovery Program at the Old Globe Theatre. This again, is a an embarrassing, ‘not now’ story).
Where was I? What thread do I need to pick up in this tapestry and reweave? None. I am done with that thought and Mr. Skeptic and must carry on in a different, but related, direction. I think I will speak of Mr. Socrates instead. I have 500 words to do it in. I didn’t explain that my blags have been picked up by Sahara Time who wants me to do a 1000 word essay as frequently as I can for them. I am limited.
No, Socrates too must wait. I feel like musing on ‘limitation,’ instead, as far as FBS will allow. Actually, FBS, I am realizing, thanks to Mr. Skeptic’s pointing it out, is a great boon. I don’t have to overtax my poor, overworked brain. Like an old mare, she only wants some rest, and a restful way of being and thinking. She is retired, like Black Beauty at the end of his days, chomping the cud of thought and dreams on a grassy meadow by a lake.
So, just a brief abstract on limitation. Ah abstraction! I love it, together with limitation. If there were no limitations to this essay my blag would go on and on like long and tangled spaghetti, into the far reaches of space and be lost in it; All matter, all life, is limitation. Bodies are bodies because they spread this far and no further. Houses, plants, thumbnails, stars, ice cream are what they are because of limitation. Limitation is what unites us all. If a flower did not know its limitations, would we have flowers? Would we have music? All life is rhythm, and what is rhythm if not music?
I will end this essay by pointing to a marvelous book that I found in Payson’s library: The Power of Limits (Shambhala, 1981), by Gyorgy Doczi. Payson is so jealous of it he watches me carefully when I touch it. I have a habit of not reading, but eating books. I make them entirely mine, underlining words and sentences, leaving pencils in them that Payson has never tired of telling me, break the bindings. It is not an easy book to read, full of mathematics that are hard on my fuzzed brain. But I read those parts I can and understand, and skip the rest. Here are a few quotes from him:
“In our fascinations with our powers of invention and achievement, we have lost sight of the power of limits. Yet now we are forced to confront the limits of the earth’s resources, and the need to limit overpopulation, big government, big business and big labor. In all our realms of our experience, we are finding the need to rediscover proper proportions. The proportions of nature, art and architecture . . . They teach us that limitations are not just restrictive, but they are also creative.” And one last quote, which I simply adore: “The limitless emerges from limits.”
Posted by kamla Dec 19th 2009
