Category Archives: Fables, myths & parables

What is truth?

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Some ways truth is established, practically:

  • In representing the contents of life in a clear, orderly and self-evident way. Truth = tidiness.
  • In accurately anticipating and influencing the future. Truth = security.
  • In bringing fragmentary facts home to a unified body of understanding. Truth = digestion.
  • In reaching agreements with those around you. Truth = home.

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On that last point, truth as home: Young philosophers love to believe they don’t need a home, that they don’t need to share truth.

Fact is, the philosopher needs to share his truth more than any other kind of person. Sharing truth is the philosopher’s job.

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The youthful philosopher (who seeks truth) is larval, just fry. He is aware only that he cannot share the prevalent truth. This is his point of departure. He heads off toward an oasis – his truth – he sees hovering on the edge of the horizon. He dreams of sitting at the side of his own pool, reflecting in solitude to his heart’s content. He drives at his truth, driven by idiotic instinct, just like a salmon drawn back to the head of the stream where he was born. Does he reach his truth? Yes, but not the truth he thought he’d find. He doesn’t find any oasis, but he certainly finds himself submerged in something cold and disturbingly fluid, and it can be summarized as something like: “My God, I don’t want to be alone here.”

Look for this form, and you’ll see it again and again. Wittgenstein slowly losing his mind alone in his house high on a cliff above Norwegian fjords; Nietzsche (who called his philosophical kind “hyperboreans”) living alone in Sils Maria; Christopher McCandless hitchiking to Alaska and dying there; and so on.

Anyone who goes out into true solitude and comes back knows three things for certain: 1) physical sustenance is nowhere near sufficient; 2) the power to coerce is the opposite of what is needed; 3) religion is not about magical miracles, but something more radically surprising.

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It doesn’t matter how tough or antisocial a human being is. A person in solitary confinement goes insane.

A philosopher who thinks too far can fall into plain-sight solitary confinement. He can speak with others, but he cannot make himself heard and he cannot digest most kinds of company.

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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

– Rumi

Trees

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

When we walk on the forest floor, the part of the tree we are given at eye-level is the narrowest point, the trunk, slightly above the tree’s midpoint.

To see how the trunk spreads itself upward into the open light, we can simply turn our faces to the sky. However, to see how the trunk spreads downward, we have to dig with our hands, and come to terms with dirt and sweat. Tender leaves and delicate blossoms will not be found down there. This is where the tree braces itself against the weather and procures its nourishment. Below the ground, a tree is not fucking around: it is all business.

That’s one way to see it.

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Through a seed, the world organizes itself into a tree.

It is also true that a seed “grows” into a tree. We know what this means. But let’s not get carried away with the usefulness of our habitual intellectual devices. Objectivity is instrumentally useful (techne), but this usefulness is true in a certain limited sense; it does not make it “the truth”. To get closer to something like “the truth” we must acclimate ourselves to a different and larger mode of knowing, a mode where we consciously articulate meaningful order out of the whole: the profoundly chaotic world we have arisen and awakened within. What is this chaos, essentially? It is akin to being an infant, or waking up from a deep afternoon nap.

The amazing back-mounted collection

Fables, myths & parables

A man was carrying a large and teetering stack of objects on his back. It looked heavy, but more striking was the precariousness of it. He had it arranged so he could hoist it up to waist-level using his legs and arms, then somehow manage, through a twisting shift, to bring it around to his back. He succeeded in at least half of his attempts. Whenever he failed to pull it off, the load would collapse around him. Then he would have to painstakingly restack the whole collection and repeat his signature hoisting maneuver.

Obviously, then, he set it down as rarely as possible. He’d learned to sleep with the load balanced on his back. He could keep it all going for years at a time.

When he was younger and his body was stronger and his load was lighter he actively hunted out new objects for his amazing back-mounted collection. Now, he knew he could not accommodate a single new thing, no matter how light.

His life was now spent trudging from place to place, displaying his towering exhibit to the people. The people, however, were less impressed with the collection per se, than with the sheer immensity of it and the fact that the man could keep the whole crazy Dr. Seussian heap aloft and balanced. He was aware that for the majority who came to see him he was a mere spectacle, but he consoled himself with the belief that among the gaping crowd that there had to be a few genuine appreciators.

The only other person he ever encountered who ever obviously loved his collection, though, was a younger man he called the Pest.

The Pest followed the man around, talking incessantly and gesticulating enthusiastically. Within five minutes of meeting him the man realized with alarm that the Pest’s limbs were not entirely under his control, and his control diminished as his excitement increased. The man lived in constant fear that his collection would be upset in an especially spastic outburst of ideation.

The Pest constantly badgered the man about putting new objects on his already fully-loaded back. The man tried to be patient. He spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to the Pest that although the Pest’s objects (being empty) were relatively light, and despite their beauty and aesthetic compatibility with the collection, even the lightest and most exquisite addition would be one too many for a man with a burden as heavy and complicated as his.

Finally, one day in a fit of frustration the Pest attempted, without permission, to throw his objects (ornate boxes and cases and gold-embroidered sacks) to the top of the stack, and of course the whole thing tumbled to the ground. The last words the man said to the Pest were quiet and cold: “If you love your objects so much, stack them up on your own back and start your own collection. At any rate, get away from mine.”

Seed

Fables, myths & parables

By way of a seed the Earth and Sun organize themselves into a tree.

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Allah said “I was a hidden treasure. I wanted to be known and so created the creation.”

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(According to the Gnostics) Jesus said “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.”

The shame of the inexplicable

Fables, myths & parables

If Judas had not accepted his thirty silver-pieces, he would have been forced to admit that he could not explain his need to betray Jesus. It was precisely this inexplicability that Judas needed to eliminate through the elimination of Jesus, who is the embodiment of what matters and cannot be explained nor explained away.

But Judas looked too long. He saw and was unable to deny that his motives were only reflected on the face of the thirty silver coins, that month of little moons. He could not account for himself.

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We are ashamed of our unaccountable evil, but we are also ashamed of our unaccountable good. We are ashamed of the heart.

To constellate

Brand, Fables, myths & parables

Facts, or personal attributes, or elements – think of them as stars. Throw them into the sky and let each find its logical place in the heavens. Walk around and look out into them from different perspectives. See with unsquinting eyes what is there, adding nothing and subtracting nothing. When you find the place where they are most beautiful sit down and and trace out the constellations.

A way of understanding a situation; the spontaneous experience of a person; a brand; a design – what matters is constellations.

“Constellate”: ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin constellatus, from con- ‘together’ + stellatus ‘arranged like a star.’

The Star Grid

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

When I was ten years old I read an astronomy book which claimed that from a particular point in our galaxy one could look out into the night sky and see all the stars arranged in a perfect grid.

The idea of the Star Grid impressed me so deeply it became one of my dominant guiding idea-images.

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It is fair to ask: What if this idea is factually false? My guess is that it is factually false. However, this idea is not essentially factual but mythical, and this means fact is secondary to… something else… in the truth of the idea. The stars are the anchor point of an analogy, but the analogy was only the scaffolding of a way of seeing. Once that way of seeing was established the scaffold could be disassembled. Frankly, I care as little about the factuality of the Star Grid as I do about the metaphysical reality of the world of physics or of the existence of the so-called “historical Jesus”. As Black Elk said, after relating his tribe’s myth of its origin: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. ”

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Does any of this mean I disregard facts? No. I respect – I obey – facts within their domain. But the domain of facts is limited. I observe the limits of factuality’s sovereignty as scrupulously as I observe factuality’s laws within its limits (in the objective world, which is “Caesar’s”). Beyond those limits I observe the laws of meaning which belong to the subjective world. (Properly understood, the subjective world is essentially “inter-subjective”. A “subject” is best understood as a point of participation within a collective spiritual existence that sustains and exceeds any particular soul. Subjectivity is rarely understood, despite the fact that everyone knows their subjectivity best of all. Did I say “despite”? I’m sorry: because. There’s known unknowns, there’s unknown unknowns, but the biggest bitch of all – the one who took Rumsfeld down – is the too-emphatically-known known.)

Know what I mean?

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All this abstract crap is utterly practical and applicable to concrete life.

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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Joints

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

Truth does not accrete in a vacuum of ignorance; truth articulates from pre-existent, pre-articulate wholes. Truth does not extend outwardly; it intends inwardly. Truth resolves; truth cannot be constructed. Truth is not a machine or a story or a system. It is not invented; it is discovered and rediscovered.

The primordial truth is a crude, chaotic undifferentiated whole. Language divides the whole into finer and finer distinctions. Only in hindsight are we born on some particular day, on a bed, in a room, in a building, in a city. In actual fact, we are all born exactly at the same time, in exactly the same place, and we all say exactly the same thing about it: “waaaaaaah.”

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They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day we came.

– Edwin Muir

Reflection on the Moon

Fables, myths & parables

The Moon, the pseudo-Sun of the night sky, which derives its illumination entirely from the Sun it imitates, always shows us one face. The other side, the “dark” side, always faces away: like the back of one’s head when one looks in the mirror, or like the self when one reflects on who one really is, or like the status of a relationship or a situation when one regards it objectively.

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I wrote this in order to participate in the mythical existence for a moment. What was it like? I’ve trained my reflective mind to admit: I don’t know.

The flower arranger

Fables, myths & parables

The man and the woman met when they were students. Once or twice a month he would bring her a perfect rose. He would go from shop to shop, looking for one with a perfect color and shape with no blemishes on the petals or stem.

After they graduated and got married, he began giving her bouquets. At first they were conventionally perfect, but gradually they became increasingly eccentric. He began combining selections of flowers in unusual ways, in symmetries she had never seen, but which felt familiar to her.

After the birth of their child, he began arranging the flowers in front of her. He would dump a pile of flowers on the table and, without taking his eyes off her, he would arrange the flowers into a perfect unity, incorporating every one. She sometimes saw him steal flowers from the neighbors’ front lawns as he walked home.

At some point she realized that his flower selections, which had been growing more haphazard by the year, were now random. Some of the flowers were severely damaged and some were rotten–but he used them all, and his compositions gained depth and power. He would finish, and, seeing what he had made, she would cry without knowing why.

Toward the end of their life he would run his lawn mower over a corner of their wildflower bed, and create a bouquet from the clippings.