Tag: theology

Sunday September 3, 2017

Up step them, the members, and me, the leader of the Rubber Band. “We’re the members,” sing the members. “I’m the leader,” sings the leader. Why have I faltered (for there’s always a side door) when advised to read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”? The sky darkens and teen culture mutates accordingly. Next door at the bar, my theologian friend recommends that I read Deleuzian theologian Daniel Colucciello Barber’s book, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. What do we think? Is our aim to evaluate? Do we wish to classify worlds, or aspects of worlds, in terms of good and bad? At some point, the bartender leans into the conversation. He, too, recommends a book I’ve never read: Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B. When I arrive home from the bar, I read the Le Guin story, in part because my mind is racing, and I don’t want to soil these recommendations with unnecessary comments and presuppositions. Of course, I would walk away. A grifter god who demands of us a theodicy in exchange for luxury communism in the hereafter is a pathetic god indeed. Or no god at all, really — for the being we’ve imagined remains placed amidst scarcity, and subservient to a logic of exchange. Nature as pointless engine — garbage in, garbage out. Even when this grand “system of systems” invents for consciousness an imaginary telos of the not-yet, it does so solely to prolong its own dumb metabolism, its balancing act atop scales of cosmic justice, with its components all still bound to their crosses in the name of some distant whole. God is only ever an invented persona anyway, a voice by which the self speaks to itself. God are you there? Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Like the Judy Blume novel. Except in this case, God replies, quite convincingly, with Meet the Residents.

As the sleeve notes state, “Soon you too will whistle the merry tunes.” Let this day forevermore be a day for celebration of first contact. How are children able to invent for themselves imaginary friends? And when and why must that phenomenon cease? “Pure art,” writes N Senada, “can only be made without consideration of the outside world.” Nobody can do the boogaloo like me.

Sunday August 20, 2017

I release hold of my ego, or maybe I just re-leash it. Emails sound like military bugle calls. The gift of meditation and prayer. The black hole, the abyss that throws up memories. Churches are major structures of social discipline. They create prisons of doubt and fear. But ISAs are everywhere. Clues left behind in the minds of individuals. Drugs can help us release the devils from our brains. Massive criminal conspiracies. Have I mentioned that I became friends recently with a Marxist Baptist pastor? I am excited by the arrival of this figure on the world-stage. Churches remain giants; and as my friend said, “Theology never goes away.” Can churches be reformed so as to help usher in the Kingdom of God? It’s still cops and robbers — but maybe the robbers can act again as Robin Hoods. Perhaps religion is the staging ground for the launch of a new counterpower. We must re-approach the adults who believe the secrets, and for whom the spell has been cast. So many damaged people out there in our midst. Haunted by demons. Survivors of skirmishes in modernity’s and postmodernity’s culture wars. One needs to maintain a distinction, though, between art made for a trip (as a kind of tool or supplement), and art made to re-present in place of a trip. Play “Sensory” by Kill Alters, though, to illustrate reality’s defiance of the above distinction. And follow this with “Ego Swim” as the next phase in our sequence.

What a time to be alive, I proclaim, arms raised to the sky. And the illusion, I should say, looked many-eyed and sang back to me, clothed both in “The Holder” and Do Pas O’s “History of Comedy,” where the universe melts like taffy.

Fierce grotesques profiled as by Diane Arbus. One must command a choir of alternate personalities, each waiting to overtake the others’ transportive ecstasies. Eyes that reveal eyes within. All of us are angels with amnesia, living as humans in the void or simulation we call “embodied presence.” Some of us are pouring fondue on ourselves online. Which makes a lot of sense! Altering, leveling, getting THERE to THAT, begins with our behavior toward one another. It means placing productivity on hold midafternoon. Flip-flops descending a staircase. The world reverberates in affirmation when we allow ourselves entry again to the garden. Calm, deliberate enjoyment as one treats oneself to existence. Uncommunicative, reserved, and quiet, but filled with joy.