Dreams and Delusions

The first thing that occurred to me upon hitting the publish button yesterday, was "what about the Constitution?"

Recall that we were speaking of the necessity of ambiguity in order to avoid turning words and texts into idols. Wouldn't the leftist enthusiastically respond, "Exactly so! Which is why we cannot allow ourselves to be imprisoned in the unambiguity of a bunch of 18th century empenised people of pallor."

First of all, the leftist pretends to find ambiguity where there is none, in order to disingenuously "discover" his preferences there, such as government bans on free speech and guns, or the right to a dead baby, or compulsory racial and gender discrimination, or the power to impose a new definition of the word "marriage."

More generally, what is the difference between deconstruction and Raccoonstruction?

First, we must inquire into where language comes from. From the scientistic perspective, it must in some sense be continuous with matter, and therefore come from below.

Conversely, in our logocentric perspective, language is essentially an emanation of God; it comes from above, which explains, for example, how it is able to so effortlessly embody and transmit truth and beauty.

Those latter capacities become inexplicable in the bottom-up view. But that doesn't stop the left, because with truth out of the way, they have the opening to project power and desire into language, turning it into a form of domination. The rest is politics.

Note the interesting trick: through deconstruction we slip through the bars of language, only to be recaptured by something worse.

In reality, ambiguity is only ambiguous with reference to the providentially unambiguous. Thus, the ambiguity of the constitution, for example, must be interpreted in light of its more unambiguous reason for being.

When we are confronted with an ambiguity in the text, it must be examined in the con-text of its overall purpose, or that toward which it is designed to converge upon, e.g., to secure God-given rights that are anterior to the state. The ambiguity cannot be used as a pretext to deny the very purpose of the text.

In reality, language does span the entire spectrum of reality; the leftist is half right in his belief that it proceeds from matter to mind, but all wrong in failing to see that this is only possible because of a prior involution from intelligence to matter, or from God on down. To promulgate the former while denying the latter is to saw off the limb one is sitting upon while bellowing incomprehensibly at the tree. You know, tenure.

Remember, language is symbolic, and a symbol is something "thrown across." Thus, a symbol is a link between worlds. As a result, there are two possible errors: one redounds to what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, such that language becomes its own end instead of pointing beyond itself; it is rendered closed to transcendence. The other error is to open it up, but only toward the lower vertical.

Corbin's whole project involves opening language to the upper vertical, so that it may restore its highest purpose of "translating messages from a divine source."

Now clearly -- for it is axiomatic -- language cannot contain what contains it. Language can never exhaustively describe the world, for which we may literally thank God, AKA our ultimate Container. As Cheetham says, "only a tiny fraction of reality is ever accounted for in any theory of anything." Nevertheless, an ideologue such as Obama does not live in reality, but rather, in his theory about it. Nice theory. Wrong species.

You could say that the leftist is able to achieve a level of psychic comfort by relaxing in the safety and security of his own delusions. Why then are they so congenitally unhappy and agitated? Thomas Sowell provides a clue (via Happy Acres): to spend your life replacing what works with what sounds good is a recipe for misery, because reality always has the last word (because it is the first Word).

Theories are fine and necessary things, but they are tools, not houses. They allow us to "see things," but can "blind us to everything else" if we enclose ourselves in one. "If it's a good and useful interpretation, then it is easy to take literally, and then it becomes hard to continue seeing in other ways. That is why it's important to keep that dreamlike hesitancy and ambiguity as our primary mode of awareness. Useful interpretations are like tools, and we need to remember to put them down" (Cheetham).

Only you can keep the Dream alive! Or kill it.

With regard to the latter, think of the function of art, which is always a kind of living dreamwork: "the nature of any artistic activity, if it's valuable, is a journey and is of value only in so far as the journey... goes somewhere, comes back and reports what it has found there. Art is the report of a place, not an idea about something" (Kelly, in Cheetham).

Most contemporary art, since it has been barred from the high road, comes back with reports of the lower vertical. Thus, it is not art properly so-called, but closer to proctology or composting or necrophilia. It is simultaneously not enough and too much information.

Cheetham references Emerson, who wrote that "all symbols are fluxional" and "all language is vehicular and transitive," such that its proper function is "as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead."

Language can become frozen at one end or dissipated at the other, but it really needs to maintain a kind of fluidity and openness to what transcends us.

Only in this way can vertical murmurandoms annunciate themselves and be enfleshed in the womb of human language, and thereby illuminate the way up.