You Must Be Dreaming!

Yes, it takes all kinds to make a world. But what if the world only permits one kind -- as on college campuses, or in the NFM (non-Fox media), or in the billion-strong Islamic Terristan? Then if you merely want to be yourself, you're SOL.

"The world is like a giant shopping mall," said Bob, unable to think of a less banal description. Some stores interest us, while others are almost invisible.

First, notice how this differs from all other animals, who have only particular interests that are hardwired into their brainframe. The proverbial one-eyed cat sniffs around the seafood store, while the bird dog just wants to take my baby away.

By the way -- and I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this -- it occurred to me that one way to think about how Jesus could be fully God and fully man, is to compare it to how we are all animal and all man. Some tenured primates under the influence of 100 proof Darwinism think that just because we are all animal, this somehow fully explains our humanness. At the other end, some religious people think that just because we are human creatures, we can't really be animals.

But like Jesus, we have two natures in one person. A big difference, I suppose, is that these two natures can become fractured or perverted in man, so they don't function harmoniously. Indeed, one of the purposes of Christianity is to divinize our lower nature and bring it into harmony with the human. You might say that the animal must be crucified in order to be resurrected into something higher. As a matter of fact, I believe MoTT says something similar.

Bollas writes of our childhood "investiture of the world" with what Wordsworth calls the first Poetic spirit of our human life. Don't you remama that timeless time of infanity? I do, but not in any way that can be articulated with words. Rather, it is a felt reality, something prior to the words we use to describe it.

Indeed, "It is exceptionally difficult to capture the sense of place each of us feels within our world," the "dense textures of self experience that [bring] some known, but only marginally thinkable, recollection into being" (ibid.).

This is again the realm of Middle Earth that flourishes between the ponderable world and our own poetic sensibility. But that is where we always live: "We walk about in the metaphysical concrescence of our private idioms." Moving through this world "evokes states sponsored by the specific objects we encounter," such that "in a very particular sense, we live our life in our own private dreaming" (ibid.).

That might sound a little new-agey, but again, the work of creating a world takes place in the imaginative and resonant space of the In Between. This is one thing that leftists do not understand. In fact, their position is frankly incoherent, as they pretend to eliminate Middle Earth, reducing it at one end to a naive scientism, and dissolving it at the other into a deconstructionist tyranny of relativism.

For Bollas, "the human subject becomes the dream work of his own life," meaning that, just as in a dream, "we constantly endow objects with psychic meaning" and "walk amidst our own significance." But it's one thing to do this consciously and with insight, another thing entirely to imagine that everyone should or even can live in our particular worldspace. Strokes & folks. What is the American dream but the cosmic right to be different? And what is the leftist -- or Islamist -- nightmare but the obligation to be the same?

Here again, this is the repressive project of the left -- to shove everyone into their cramped little worldcage. But the human imagination always dwarfs any such confinement. It cannot be contained because it is the container.

The logocentric world is not made of objects or processes; rather it is made of language. The cosmos always speaks to man, for it is God's first revelation. But this is only the coondergarden. God successively reveals himself as man becomes increasingly capable of receiving and assimilating the message. The Arc of Salvation really begins with Creation; or, creation and salvation are not-two.

Danielou writes of how even our furriest of furbears found theirsoph "in a world which from its very beginning is a world of grace and sin" -- of vertical energies and alienation from them.

Danielou goes on to say that "an aptitude for religion is a human datum," which simply means that we have an innate idiom for it. We don't have to look for it. Rather, it will always find us, even if only with the objects of the world -- from the terrestrial landscape to the celestial skyscape. To paraphrase Danielou, these are like loans against future revelation. We can pay them back as God successivley reveals himself in the fullness of time.

Thus, there is "a word that God speaks to the whole earth though the visible world." Perhaps Joyce can shed some obscurity on the subject: if you are abcedminded to this claybook, what curios of signs in this allaphbed! Can you rede its world?

Well? Can you? Paul can, because "the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." Thus, "the whole cosmos takes on a symbolic dimension" (Danielou).

But again, that's not the end of the story, only the beginning. Subsequent revelations will occur in history and in man.

Or not, depending on the case. For, "what if I don't know which objects serve me? If I don't know, then my day" -- and my life -- "is likely to be a fraught or empty occasion" (Bollas). There are some people -- okay, many -- who "seem to have no sense of the day being a potential space."

Which the Raccoon calls "cosmopathology," in which case the mind is compelled to select idiomatic "objects that are congruent with unconscious illness," AKA mind parasites. In a free country, if you're looking for objects to reflect your soul sickness, you will have no difficulty finding them. For a drowsy man's dream is a wakeman's blightmare.