Sunday, May 8, 2022
6:05 a.m. VE-Day, in 1945. A long, long time ago, in terms of experience. An awful lot of bad decisions since then, and some good ones. A world unrecognizably different even to those of us who came in immediately afterwards. Surely completely inaccessible to our children, let alone our grandchildren. And the world prior to the war? Everything becomes as hidden in the mists as our farthest past. Read Travis McGee’s occasional reminiscences of the ’30s that author MacDonald grew up in, or read Chandler or Hammett or any author of detective novels – or read Hemingway for the descriptions rather than the plot – and you get glimpses, here and there. Sam Spade routinely taking the streetcar, and hiring a car when he needs to go out of town. Little things. Bell pulls, telephones, whatever. I’m not going to put the energy into fleshing-out what I mean, but it’s there. People’s expectations were different; their perceptual strategies were different. They did not live in the same world we live in, nor do we live in the world our children will grow old in. There’s more here than I am teasing out. Maybe a little help from our friends. Maybe it’s their originating impulse.
I was thinking I might take the day off, but no need. Setting switches. Guys?
It will help you (any or all of you) to remember that things come to you wrapped in common sense. Some of the strangest things seem mundane until examined, or perhaps we might say until lived deeply and slowly and mindfully. Thus everything you know is a clue. Another way of saying that is, “Nothing is strange, but lack of thinking makes it so.”
Thank you, Will Shakespeare.
You might as well finish the quotation, for those who don’t know it won’t get the allusion.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It is a fairly well-known cliché, actually. And your point in twisting it?
The word-play adds memorability sometimes.
Okay.
Consider this: The 3D world you experience is mind-stuff, remember. Life is all a dream from a higher reality, a fluid expression in a slowed-down, separated-out form, of relationships. Therefore – we hope you can see why “therefore” – nothing can be inessential or accidental or meaningless. It’s all one thing, and that “thing” is all of a piece. Reality doesn’t come with loose ends, or spare parts, nor can it be a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle packed with a few pieces missing.
Remember the phrases we have summed it up in. It’s all one thing. It is only somewhat real.
The first of my unpublished manuscripts is “Only Somewhat Real,” as you know.
Yes, and that’s the title, too.
Very funny. Actually, it is sort of funny. I’m smiling.
Well, in consequences of the fact that the 3D is as we have just said, Everything Is A Symbol. At the same time, everything is what it appears to be, as common sense sees it. Both, not one or the other. When it seems to be only one, that is a reflection of the limitations of the perceiver. Sometimes – or rather, in some cases – it is only a passing limitation. In others, a more or less permanent one tied to the life. Either way, perception is one thing, reality is another, and the reality of the situation is, every aspect of your life exists in itself and can be seen as an indicator of unseen relationships or qualities.
Hemingway used to get terminally irritated by people who tried to see elements of his stories as symbolic, rather than as realities whose symbolism emanated from what they were.
Awkward phrasing, but yes, he did, for he sensed that the physical appearance is the grossest manifestation of things unseen. It’s why he considered himself Catholic, quite regardless of theological concerns: He saw that the material world is a radiation of the spiritual world. He wouldn’t have put it that way, wouldn’t have phrased it that way even to himself, but that’s what it amounted to. He saw that the world was holy, and that that holiness is everyday. Both.
I’m not sure I fully understand that. I know he was intensely sensory and intensely intuitive – two qualities that don’t always go together.
You should know!
I do. But I’m happy with this end of the spectrum, and it’s too late to change all those years, nor would I dare to, not knowing what leads to what. I wouldn’t risk losing this. But – clarify, please? The world being holy and the holiness being everyday.
It isn’t a choice! You aren’t confined to this or that. It is a deep flaw in your contemporary religious structures that they think you must choose between holiness or living in the world. Living is holy, and can be recognized as such, as soon as you take “holiness” off its too-exalted perch.
Thoreau said he’d worship the parings of his fingernails, if he could. I suppose this is what he was getting at.
You’re learning.
I’m also refocusing, because I get the sense I missed a possible connection a couple of grafs ago.
Sex is holy, not sinful. So is drinking, for that matter, or any other physical urge that theology has stigmatized as either evil or undesirable. The sins as we have described them have in common that they blunt your perceptions of reality, not that they offend some score-keeper in the sky. The virtues as we have described them have in common that they help keep your machine in tune so that you may see clearly and think clearly and feel clearly – so that you may have life more abundantly.
And we go wrong because we are the result of our ancestors eating the apple.
Well – eating the apple or not is always a decision you make now. Don’t put it entirely on your ancestors. As soon as you see that seeing things as good and evil is a choice, even if a choice made or ratified below the level of your consciousness, then you realize that you are free to choose again. And choosing again is exactly what free will is all about: It is living in the here, now, and deciding what you want to be.
And to hone in a little, on the world as itself symbolic –?
It’s just a matter of paying attention with various levels of your being. Your mind is more than any moment’s RAM can hold: Your extensions to “other lives” and to your surroundings assure that there is always your life to live, if you open to it.
Tempted to quit here with the rounding-off of that thought, though it is only 45 minutes. But looking back, I see that I began with a different question.
Not different, really. The underlying commonality is that any present-moment of reality may be seen as an expression of the unfinished business of the shared subjectivity, as allowed to manifest, and as shaped, by “the times.” To put it into more easily digestible form: The world you live in is always a stage for further improv. It is composed of the results of past actions and decisions in their inner sense, not merely in outer consequences. The world as it existed on VE-Day expressed what had manifested in the previous six years – and it also manifested what had been stirred up, even if unrecognized. More lasting than politics or ideological struggles or national competition, more constructive than primitive emotions as they manifested in the immediate aftermath of victory and defeat, less directly relevant when seen in the lens of what had been, and more relevant in the lens of what had yet to be addressed.
That is, the common-sense explanations of what was going on were not necessarily wrong. (Some were more shallow than others, of course.) but the common-sense explanation never captures all important aspects of life, because life is so much deeper than 3D experience, and is at the same time half outside it.
So there’s your hour. Call this, perhaps, “Reality and symbol.”
I may. Thanks as always.