Joe Biden: Not Just an Idiot but a Perfect Idiot

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot. -- Dávila 

Language must the last word in ambiguity and ambivalence and equivocation. And first.  Alpha and Omega -- of sense and nonsense.

Looked at from the luminous perspective of Helen's Bang, it is indeed All Good: upon her discovery of, and entrance into, the logosphere, she was, in her minervous wreckoning, the Happiest Child Alive.

And why not? You'd be happy too if you'd unexpectedly removed your blindears & dug your way out of an unocculated eyewitless foggus of soiliteary confoundment.  Humanness.  Didn't see that coming!  Or hear it. But she felt its scaly fingers, and that was enough.

But then she did a vertical eww!-turn and became a grazing herdcore socialist. Even-steven? Or something worse?  

It seems that a cosmos without language or consciousness is neither good nor bad, just nothing. Neither nether nor nothing ethereal. But introduce man onto the stage, and you'd better reach for your revolver because the revolution is about to eat you, and he who hesitates is lunch.    

So, what went wrong?  Not just with Helen, but with everyone?  Is it true that language was given to man in order to conceal his thoughts? Or in order to straight-up lie? Look at Slow Joe: says he's a Catholic. But he's really a Democrat. Effin'-stephen? Or a hatin' Satan?

In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.

The Catholicism of the left is the pretense of baptizing theses that have not been converted.

The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs.

Atop the bell tower of the modern church the progressive clergy place a weathervane in place of the cross.

Religion under the influence of the progressive clergy, instead of being the opiate of the people, is their poison.

So brief is the biblical gap between man and liar that we might well call these snakes Homo slipperyones. Man is created on page 2, but by page 3 he's already lying to God and trying to weasel out of responsibility.  

You could say this (o)urtext is about the creation of man.  Or you could say it is about man's creation of lying.  After all, there wasn't any, nor could there be any, falsehood prior to the appearance of man.  

Language is a vehicle or carrier of light.  How then can it possibly become the carrier of such haudible darkness?  How does it become what it isn't?  Before language starts running innerference for the prince of darkness, everything is what it is, not what it's not.  

Let's wind our crocks back to before zero. No, not 13.7 billion years ago, but up above to the timeless source of time itself.  How does nothink become somethink anyway, unless somethink was langlishing there all along?  

What happens when language vacates the head and begins running around the world unsupervoiced? Well, that's what language does.  The world is made of language;  or, rather, what we call "the world" is saturated with the stuff. The adversary knows this. Why don't we?:

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

Some people say there is no such thing as truth. We all them leftists. But if there is no truth, then there is no honesty. Convenient!  

We'll conclude for some reason with this bit of honestogod etymological mansense: man mind mental manners memo memento murmur memory monist mantra monster mania demented mentors & more!

Joe Biden: Not Just an Idiot but a Perfect Idiot

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot. -- Dávila 

Language must the last word in ambiguity and ambivalence and equivocation. And first.  Alpha and Omega -- of sense and nonsense.

Looked at from the luminous perspective of Helen's Bang, it is indeed All Good: upon her discovery of, and entrance into, the logosphere, she was, in her minervous wreckoning, the Happiest Child Alive.

And why not? You'd be happy too if you'd unexpectedly removed your blindears & dug your way out of an unocculated eyewitless foggus of soiliteary confoundment.  Humanness.  Didn't see that coming!  Or hear it. But she felt its scaly fingers, and that was enough.

But then she did a vertical eww!-turn and became a grazing herdcore socialist. Even-steven? Or something worse?  

It seems that a cosmos without language or consciousness is neither good nor bad, just nothing. Neither nether nor nothing ethereal. But introduce man onto the stage, and you'd better reach for your revolver because the revolution is about to eat you, and he who hesitates is lunch.    

So, what went wrong?  Not just with Helen, but with everyone?  Is it true that language was given to man in order to conceal his thoughts? Or in order to straight-up lie? Look at Slow Joe: says he's a Catholic. But he's really a Democrat. Effin'-stephen? Or a hatin' Satan?

In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.

The Catholicism of the left is the pretense of baptizing theses that have not been converted.

The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs.

Atop the bell tower of the modern church the progressive clergy place a weathervane in place of the cross.

Religion under the influence of the progressive clergy, instead of being the opiate of the people, is their poison.

So brief is the biblical gap between man and liar that we might well call these snakes Homo slipperyones. Man is created on page 2, but by page 3 he's already lying to God and trying to weasel out of responsibility.  

You could say this (o)urtext is about the creation of man.  Or you could say it is about man's creation of lying.  After all, there wasn't any, nor could there be any, falsehood prior to the appearance of man.  

Language is a vehicle or carrier of light.  How then can it possibly become the carrier of such haudible darkness?  How does it become what it isn't?  Before language starts running innerference for the prince of darkness, everything is what it is, not what it's not.  

Let's wind our crocks back to before zero. No, not 13.7 billion years ago, but up above to the timeless source of time itself.  How does nothink become somethink anyway, unless somethink was langlishing there all along?  

What happens when language vacates the head and begins running around the world unsupervoiced? Well, that's what language does.  The world is made of language;  or, rather, what we call "the world" is saturated with the stuff. The adversary knows this. Why don't we?:

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

Some people say there is no such thing as truth. We all them leftists. But if there is no truth, then there is no honesty. Convenient!  

We'll conclude for some reason with this bit of honestogod etymological mansense: man mind mental manners memo memento murmur memory monist mantra monster mania demented mentors & more!

Helen's Bang, Solid Stupid, and Perpetual Excitement

Sometimes the gap between Baader and Meinhof is nearly instantaneous: an idea occurs to me and I then immediately start to see it instantiated everywhere in the world.  

What I'm about to say isn't particularly deep. It's not a big deal. Just a little deal I want to disgorge from my head en route back to Helen's Bang -- which should obviously be the name of a punk rock girl group.  

Anyway, while scanning the headlines this morning I saw one about some fake professor at UCLA who wants to force us to give reparations to Latinos.  Okay. Whatever.  

The thought was this:  how incredibly boring these people are.  How can this be, given the joys and pleasures of the life of mind (let alone spirit)? If you are privileged enough to inhabit this world, and are bored, then you are not in this world.  This woman is proof -- as if it is needed -- that "There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures."

It reminds me of another aphorism or two ten, each approaching the question from a slightly different angle. The hard part is limiting myself to ten, but here goes:

There are no trivial things, only trivial minds. (AKA the tenured.)

With the categories admitted by the modern mind, we do not manage to understand anything but trifles. (The cost of ideology.)

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. (Philodoxers.)

Stupid convictions have the solidity of granite. (It's the other way around: granite has the solidity of stupid.)

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs. (Denying verticality is like clipping one's own wings.) 

Activism is the asylum for one who has nowhere to dwell and nowhere to go. (A boon to the stupid and boring.)

Activism burns without giving light. (Literally.)

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the other animals. (Literally.)

Transforming the world: the occupation of a prisoner resigned to his sentence.  (A boring way deal with to boredom.)

The political activity of the writer is the substitute for his exhausted talent. 

I'm a psychologist, so I know plenty of boring people with minds of granite -- who are intelligent and yet tedious.  Sometimes even the patients.

There is "intelligence" the noun; and the infinitely greater intelligence, i.e., the source or ground of intelligence to which the mind ought to be in conformity.  The adventure of life -- that which gives it its savor -- is the ineradicable tension between these.  If you are bored -- or boring -- it is because you have eliminated this tension. Or don't even know about it.

So the real question isn't how this idiot professor could possibly be boring, rather, how she couldn't be. Of course she is boring. Of course our trolls are boring.  Of course Barack Obama is boring. We'll get to him in a moment.

Every morning I receive a helpful email from the NY Times, which instructs me on the Correct way to interpret the news of the day.  For example, 

1. In the last few years, Republican voters seem to have become less willing to respond to polls. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, given Trump’s attacks on the media, science and other institutions.

You can laugh.  Or cry.  I encourage the former.  

Here's the next one, from the same helpful email:

Obama’s memoir gets a glowing review.

No! Really? Let me guess: incredibly boring man excites incredibly boring readers.

• The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing in the Times, says the book is “nearly always pleasurable to read.”
• In one section, Obama addresses his presidency’s role in Trump’s rise to power: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” he writes. “For millions of Americans spooked [that's only funny if it was unintentional] by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Okay, we'll bite:  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?  Looks like he or she has written seven books, each somehow more boring than the others.  Imagine how stupid one must be in order to write the following sentences:

--Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. (Move over, Ta Nehisi!)

--His language is unafraid of its own imaginative richness.  (Does that make it brave or oblivious?)

--Obama’s thoughtfulness is obvious to anyone who has observed his political career. (Assuming deviousness is a form of thought.)

--Think of the iconic image of Jesse Jackson crying on the night Obama won the presidency. (He puts the con in icon.)

--There is, from the beginning, a sense that he is above the muck of politics. (As Truman said, there's a name for someone who leaves public office wealthier than when he went in: a crook.  Except for Obama.)  

--His loving friendship with Michelle sparkles in its solidity.  (Someone needs to submit that one to the Bad Writing Contest, stat!)

Now, there's more to boredom than you might imagine. Back when I was in graduate school, I learned that when I have the experience of boredom in the presence of a patient, I should understand it as a form of counter-transference.  

True, some people are just boring, and that's the end of it.  But for others, their boringness is the end result of a complex process of active soul-deadening.   The boredom they induce is actually quite fascinating under the surface. A lot going on.

I could cite many examples from my personal life, but I want to protect the innocent.   Why are they so boring? What are they doing to themselves?  I don't mean to boast, because I think the same is probably true of any Raccoon, to the extent that he is permitted to be honest.  But no one could walk away from an honest conversation with me and say "what a boring, predictable, and conventional person!"

I am never bored.  Nor am I ever boring.  At least I don't think I am.  Of course, it's always possible that I could be like Obama, and think I'm the most fascinating person alive, when I've never actually even had an interesting or original thought in my life.  

I just sprung it on the wife.  She seemed puzzled, and then concerned.  Why would you ask that?  You're the most interesting person I know.  That's what I thought.  I just wanted to check. 

Again, this is not about me, but about the process -- the Raccoon process, which, if done correctly, should result in never, ever being bored or boring.

No time to get to the actual subject.  

Helen's Bang, Solid Stupid, and Perpetual Excitement

Sometimes the gap between Baader and Meinhof is nearly instantaneous: an idea occurs to me and I then immediately start to see it instantiated everywhere in the world.  

What I'm about to say isn't particularly deep. It's not a big deal. Just a little deal I want to disgorge from my head en route back to Helen's Bang -- which should obviously be the name of a punk rock girl group.  

Anyway, while scanning the headlines this morning I saw one about some fake professor at UCLA who wants to force us to give reparations to Latinos.  Okay. Whatever.  

The thought was this:  how incredibly boring these people are.  How can this be, given the joys and pleasures of the life of mind (let alone spirit)? If you are privileged enough to inhabit this world, and are bored, then you are not in this world.  This woman is proof -- as if it is needed -- that "There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures."

It reminds me of another aphorism or two ten, each approaching the question from a slightly different angle. The hard part is limiting myself to ten, but here goes:

There are no trivial things, only trivial minds. (AKA the tenured.)

With the categories admitted by the modern mind, we do not manage to understand anything but trifles. (The cost of ideology.)

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. (Philodoxers.)

Stupid convictions have the solidity of granite. (It's the other way around: granite has the solidity of stupid.)

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs. (Denying verticality is like clipping one's own wings.) 

Activism is the asylum for one who has nowhere to dwell and nowhere to go. (A boon to the stupid and boring.)

Activism burns without giving light. (Literally.)

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the other animals. (Literally.)

Transforming the world: the occupation of a prisoner resigned to his sentence.  (A boring way deal with to boredom.)

The political activity of the writer is the substitute for his exhausted talent. 

I'm a psychologist, so I know plenty of boring people with minds of granite -- who are intelligent and yet tedious.  Sometimes even the patients.

There is "intelligence" the noun; and the infinitely greater intelligence, i.e., the source or ground of intelligence to which the mind ought to be in conformity.  The adventure of life -- that which gives it its savor -- is the ineradicable tension between these.  If you are bored -- or boring -- it is because you have eliminated this tension. Or don't even know about it.

So the real question isn't how this idiot professor could possibly be boring, rather, how she couldn't be. Of course she is boring. Of course our trolls are boring.  Of course Barack Obama is boring. We'll get to him in a moment.

Every morning I receive a helpful email from the NY Times, which instructs me on the Correct way to interpret the news of the day.  For example, 

1. In the last few years, Republican voters seem to have become less willing to respond to polls. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, given Trump’s attacks on the media, science and other institutions.

You can laugh.  Or cry.  I encourage the former.  

Here's the next one, from the same helpful email:

Obama’s memoir gets a glowing review.

No! Really? Let me guess: incredibly boring man excites incredibly boring readers.

• The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing in the Times, says the book is “nearly always pleasurable to read.”
• In one section, Obama addresses his presidency’s role in Trump’s rise to power: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” he writes. “For millions of Americans spooked [that's only funny if it was unintentional] by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Okay, we'll bite:  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?  Looks like he or she has written seven books, each somehow more boring than the others.  Imagine how stupid one must be in order to write the following sentences:

--Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. (Move over, Ta Nehisi!)

--His language is unafraid of its own imaginative richness.  (Does that make it brave or oblivious?)

--Obama’s thoughtfulness is obvious to anyone who has observed his political career. (Assuming deviousness is a form of thought.)

--Think of the iconic image of Jesse Jackson crying on the night Obama won the presidency. (He puts the con in icon.)

--There is, from the beginning, a sense that he is above the muck of politics. (As Truman said, there's a name for someone who leaves public office wealthier than when he went in: a crook.  Except for Obama.)  

--His loving friendship with Michelle sparkles in its solidity.  (Someone needs to submit that one to the Bad Writing Contest, stat!)

Now, there's more to boredom than you might imagine. Back when I was in graduate school, I learned that when I have the experience of boredom in the presence of a patient, I should understand it as a form of counter-transference.  

True, some people are just boring, and that's the end of it.  But for others, their boringness is the end result of a complex process of active soul-deadening.   The boredom they induce is actually quite fascinating under the surface. A lot going on.

I could cite many examples from my personal life, but I want to protect the innocent.   Why are they so boring? What are they doing to themselves?  I don't mean to boast, because I think the same is probably true of any Raccoon, to the extent that he is permitted to be honest.  But no one could walk away from an honest conversation with me and say "what a boring, predictable, and conventional person!"

I am never bored.  Nor am I ever boring.  At least I don't think I am.  Of course, it's always possible that I could be like Obama, and think I'm the most fascinating person alive, when I've never actually even had an interesting or original thought in my life.  

I just sprung it on the wife.  She seemed puzzled, and then concerned.  Why would you ask that?  You're the most interesting person I know.  That's what I thought.  I just wanted to check. 

Again, this is not about me, but about the process -- the Raccoon process, which, if done correctly, should result in never, ever being bored or boring.

No time to get to the actual subject.  

There was No Bang and it Wasn't Big

That was a touching story about Helen Keller, but let's not get carried away. In fact, I subjected it to a quick blogside field sobriety test, and it was more than a little wobbly, and couldn't stand up on its own without nonlocal assistance.  

Let's stipulate that Helen's bang happened in the way she describes. What does it really tell us about the nature of things? What conclusions may we draw?  For even supposing it happened, we still must ask:  by virtue of what principle did it happen? What was its sufficient reason?  

At the very least, it can't finally illuminate the gap between animal and man, except insofar as it confirms its existence. It doesn't tell us how the gap got here, or why there is something on the other side.  True, she made the breakthrough from matter to spirit.  But in what kind of cosmos is this possible? 

First, let's find out what Percy concluded, since he's the one who brought it up. Way down aroun' that Alabamy well-house 

something extremely important and mysterious happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behaviorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper... or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.

Or in her case maybe a little worse than Hegel, in that she became a radical socialist.  

(Excuse me?  Cousin Dupree just made a mean-spirited joke that is unworthy of this blog -- something to the effect of "that makes sense.  To be a socialist you need to be as blind as a moonbat and as dumb as AOC.")

Hmm. I guess Dupree isn't alone:  "Keller claimed that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities" (Wiki). 

Jumping ahead a bit, I think we can say that man's "breakthrough" has been a mixed blessing from the start, i.e., since the nonlocal events depicted in Genesis 3.  

Please bear in mind that we are by no means just piling on the disabled lady.  Rather, we're trying to make a serious point, whatever it turns out to be. 

Interestingly, she called herself a Christian -- albeit the gnostic kind -- and was quoted as saying "I always knew He was there, but I didn't know His name!"  

Back to Percy. He suggests that "Helen's breakthrough must bear some relation to the breakthrough of the species itself, at that faraway time" when it suddenly dawned on our ancestors that they were thinking, communicating, and understanding.  

Well, yes: some relation. That's simultaneously saying too much and too little.  He says it "was something new under the sun, evolutionarily speaking." But that can't be the case, since there's no leaping allowed in vulgar evolutionism. 

Let's refocus: something remarkable happened to and with Helen, but what?  Percy gets a little closer to the correct answer when he discusses the "irreducibility" of its components, i.e., thing (sensory information about water), symbol (water!), and "Helen."   

Here again this isn't very helpful, for what is Helen, anyway?  What is a person?  

I'm thinking of Norris Clarke, who characterizes ultimate (trinitarian) reality as irreducible substance-in-relation.  This is the "with" I referenced in a comment on yesterday's post. Think about that one for a moment:  how does with get into an atomistic or mechanical or material cosmos? Matter isn't "with" anything.  I can be with it, but it obviously can't be with me (insofar as it is material, i.e., lifeless and mindless).  

For Percy, this space of meaning -- which he calls "Delta," since it is situated between Alpha and Omega --  is everything; it is "at the heart of every event that has ever occurred in which a sentence is uttered or understood, a name is given or received, a painting painted and viewed."

Okay, I'll bite: by virtue of what principle is Delta possible? Crickets. While Percy deploys Delta as a principle to interpret various phenomena, he doesn't explicitly interpret Delta itself in terms of something ontologically prior to it.  

But he was a novelist, not a metaphysician, which he proves with the following blunder: Delta is "recent":

Life has existed on the earth for perhaps three billion years, yet Delta could not be more than a million years old, no older certainly than Homo erectus and perhaps a good deal more recent, as late as the time of Homo neanderthalensis, when man underwent an astonishing evolutionary explosion which on the scale of earth time was as sudden as biblical creation.... The spark jumped, language was born, the brain flowered with words, and man became man.

Percy's heart is in the right place, but there so much wrong with this paragraph that I wouldn't even give him an F. Rather, I'd hand it back to him and ask him to think about it more deeply and rewrite it, because he's simultaneously close but a million miles away.

For example, if Delta were "recent" it couldn't be here at all.  He compares it to the suddenness of biblical creation, which is a category error of literally infinite magnitude, being that biblical creation is not a temporal event. It wasn't "sudden." Rather, it is vertical, relational, and ongoing; it's not "in the past," it is now. 

Analogously, one could say that this post suddenly came into being. How? Well, I typed it. With what?  My fingers. But what moved the fingers? Oh, don't worry about that.  Think of the analogy of painting a house. The house is painted with a brush, but you can't avoid the necessity of a painter at the other end by positing a very long handle.   

Percy suggests as much, saying that Helen accomplished in a few hours what stretches out for months in a normal child. But again, whether the time (or handle) is short or long, it still has to be attached to someone.  

We're almost out of time, but I hate to leave you hanging. What, in a sentence or two, is the correct way to look at this?  Nicolás, help us!

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.

Faith is not knowledge of the object. But communication with it.

To search for the “truth outside of time” is the way to find the “truth of our time.”

Truth is in history, but history is not truth.

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

The soul is not in the body, but rather the body is in the soul. But it is in the body where we feel the soul. The absolute is not in history, but rather history is in the absolute. But it is in history where we discover the absolute.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End

There are only instants.

Probably if we could put those together into a single ten-dimensional aphorism, we'd have a pretty good idea of what's going on.

There was No Bang and it Wasn't Big

That was a touching story about Helen Keller, but let's not get carried away. In fact, I subjected it to a quick blogside field sobriety test, and it was more than a little wobbly, and couldn't stand up on its own without nonlocal assistance.  

Let's stipulate that Helen's bang happened in the way she describes. What does it really tell us about the nature of things? What conclusions may we draw?  For even supposing it happened, we still must ask:  by virtue of what principle did it happen? What was its sufficient reason?  

At the very least, it can't finally illuminate the gap between animal and man, except insofar as it confirms its existence. It doesn't tell us how the gap got here, or why there is something on the other side.  True, she made the breakthrough from matter to spirit.  But in what kind of cosmos is this possible? 

First, let's find out what Percy concluded, since he's the one who brought it up. Way down aroun' that Alabamy well-house 

something extremely important and mysterious happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behaviorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper... or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.

Or in her case maybe a little worse than Hegel, in that she became a radical socialist.  

(Excuse me?  Cousin Dupree just made a mean-spirited joke that is unworthy of this blog -- something to the effect of "that makes sense.  To be a socialist you need to be as blind as a moonbat and as dumb as AOC.")

Hmm. I guess Dupree isn't alone:  "Keller claimed that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities" (Wiki). 

Jumping ahead a bit, I think we can say that man's "breakthrough" has been a mixed blessing from the start, i.e., since the nonlocal events depicted in Genesis 3.  

Please bear in mind that we are by no means just piling on the disabled lady.  Rather, we're trying to make a serious point, whatever it turns out to be. 

Interestingly, she called herself a Christian -- albeit the gnostic kind -- and was quoted as saying "I always knew He was there, but I didn't know His name!"  

Back to Percy. He suggests that "Helen's breakthrough must bear some relation to the breakthrough of the species itself, at that faraway time" when it suddenly dawned on our ancestors that they were thinking, communicating, and understanding.  

Well, yes: some relation. That's simultaneously saying too much and too little.  He says it "was something new under the sun, evolutionarily speaking." But that can't be the case, since there's no leaping allowed in vulgar evolutionism. 

Let's refocus: something remarkable happened to and with Helen, but what?  Percy gets a little closer to the correct answer when he discusses the "irreducibility" of its components, i.e., thing (sensory information about water), symbol (water!), and "Helen."   

Here again this isn't very helpful, for what is Helen, anyway?  What is a person?  

I'm thinking of Norris Clarke, who characterizes ultimate (trinitarian) reality as irreducible substance-in-relation.  This is the "with" I referenced in a comment on yesterday's post. Think about that one for a moment:  how does with get into an atomistic or mechanical or material cosmos? Matter isn't "with" anything.  I can be with it, but it obviously can't be with me (insofar as it is material, i.e., lifeless and mindless).  

For Percy, this space of meaning -- which he calls "Delta," since it is situated between Alpha and Omega --  is everything; it is "at the heart of every event that has ever occurred in which a sentence is uttered or understood, a name is given or received, a painting painted and viewed."

Okay, I'll bite: by virtue of what principle is Delta possible? Crickets. While Percy deploys Delta as a principle to interpret various phenomena, he doesn't explicitly interpret Delta itself in terms of something ontologically prior to it.  

But he was a novelist, not a metaphysician, which he proves with the following blunder: Delta is "recent":

Life has existed on the earth for perhaps three billion years, yet Delta could not be more than a million years old, no older certainly than Homo erectus and perhaps a good deal more recent, as late as the time of Homo neanderthalensis, when man underwent an astonishing evolutionary explosion which on the scale of earth time was as sudden as biblical creation.... The spark jumped, language was born, the brain flowered with words, and man became man.

Percy's heart is in the right place, but there so much wrong with this paragraph that I wouldn't even give him an F. Rather, I'd hand it back to him and ask him to think about it more deeply and rewrite it, because he's simultaneously close but a million miles away.

For example, if Delta were "recent" it couldn't be here at all.  He compares it to the suddenness of biblical creation, which is a category error of literally infinite magnitude, being that biblical creation is not a temporal event. It wasn't "sudden." Rather, it is vertical, relational, and ongoing; it's not "in the past," it is now. 

Analogously, one could say that this post suddenly came into being. How? Well, I typed it. With what?  My fingers. But what moved the fingers? Oh, don't worry about that.  Think of the analogy of painting a house. The house is painted with a brush, but you can't avoid the necessity of a painter at the other end by positing a very long handle.   

Percy suggests as much, saying that Helen accomplished in a few hours what stretches out for months in a normal child. But again, whether the time (or handle) is short or long, it still has to be attached to someone.  

We're almost out of time, but I hate to leave you hanging. What, in a sentence or two, is the correct way to look at this?  Nicolás, help us!

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.

Faith is not knowledge of the object. But communication with it.

To search for the “truth outside of time” is the way to find the “truth of our time.”

Truth is in history, but history is not truth.

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

The soul is not in the body, but rather the body is in the soul. But it is in the body where we feel the soul. The absolute is not in history, but rather history is in the absolute. But it is in history where we discover the absolute.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End

There are only instants.

Probably if we could put those together into a single ten-dimensional aphorism, we'd have a pretty good idea of what's going on.

It's a Funky Cosmos

Funk music is characterized by a "heavy emphasis on the first beat of every measure," AKA the One. 

There's more to it than that, of course, since writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and hearing is believing. Still we must ask: is there any relationship between the One of the Godfather of Soul and the one God and father of souls?

What a stupid question. Has it come to this, Bob?  Is there nothing more important, or even less silly, to write about?

Too late. We're committed.  There's no turning back. We've made the Leap and can only extricate ourselves by pushing (or being pulled) ahead.

What I want to say is that Oneness is everywhere, and is the basis of everything. If it weren't at the ground of the psyche, we could never find it. If there were no Alpha we could never discover or even suspect the presence of Omega (and everything between). And the moment we found it, everything changed. You could even say we became human. Which I mean literally.

In a rambling essay called The Delta Factor, Walker Percy meditates on the moment of this discovery.  

It reminds me of conversations I've had with my son about What the Dog Knows, or What Tuney is Thinking About. The answer is on the one hand nothing, but it is also inconceivable, because if we could "think like a dog" we would no longer be human, and vice versa. We can't put ourselves in the mind of a dog and still be there to experience what it's like to be her.

Why? What happened?  To us, I mean.  What created this literally infinite abyss between us and them?  Yes, there is of course continuity, but we're not talking about that; rather, the discontinuity.  All the best minds assure us that there are no leaps in this cosmos, whether we're talking about the leap from nonexistence to existence, existence to life, life to mind, or mind to something transcending it.  

But believing this -- ironically -- requires a huge leap of faith. As does everything else.  I have a note to myself somewhere... can't find it at the moment, but I stole it from Dávila anyway. It goes like this: 

There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap.

Here's a slightly more poetic version of the same truth:

Nothing important is reached simply by walking. But jumping is not enough to cross the abyss; one must have wings.

What I want to say is that only humans have the Wings of Slack to make this vertical leap. How high can you jump? All the way? Or perhaps not even get off the ground or out of the goround, like an earthbound secularist? 

Now, when we take a leap of faith, it isn't just into "nothing."  Rather, as we've pointed out on many occasions, a true leap will be guided -- or drawn -- by nonlocal attractors of various shapes and sizes.  Call them archetypes, powers, principalities, etc., but be careful, because there are also rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in low places. These are like vertical riptides, so make sure you're a strong swimmer before you just leap into the ocean.

It is only by the grace of God or something that I wasn't carried away by one of these.  I am reminded of another aphorism, that

Faith is what allows us to wander into any idea without losing our way back.

Example.  It wasn't all that long ago that I was a typical mindless ambient liberal. In order to be a liberal (by which I mean leftist), no active thinking is necessary, for the same reason a cannibal in a cannibal culture doesn't think about cannibalism.  Everyone does it. What's the problem?  And pass the ketchup.

I shudder to to think what would have become of me had I somehow become a "successful author" back when I was an ambient imbecile. Perhaps I might have eventually escaped, but it seems as likely that it would have frozen me in place -- like so many of my fellow boomers who haven't taken a new cognitive imprint since they were 18.

About the faith that allows us permanent children to wander around anywhere unsupervised.  That's another big subject, and slightly different from the point I am about to get to. Let's focus.

Those of you who have read The Book will recall that I posited four singularities, or Big Bangs, but these are fractals, as it were of a single bang -- emphasis on the single, i.e., the oneness. 

In wandering and wondering about an ultimate theory of man, Percy suggests that

There is only one place to start: the place where man's singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute.

That singularity is language.

Boom!  Or bang, rather.  If you are like me, the first thing that pops into your head is: In the beginning was the Word.  We will of course get back to that.  But first, let's leap into the singularity and check out its contours.  

Wow.  It's much roomier than it was being plunged into the neurology and buried in the senses of a mere animal. And the light!

Like anyone could know that.

What, are you blind?  Helen Keller knew it.  In fact she remembered the precise moment. We'll leave off today with her account of the Big Bang:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. 

I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -- a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me....

I learned a great many new words that day.... words that were to make the world blossom for me, "like Aaron's rod, with flowers." It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of the eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.

It's a Funky Cosmos

Funk music is characterized by a "heavy emphasis on the first beat of every measure," AKA the One. 

There's more to it than that, of course, since writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and hearing is believing. Still we must ask: is there any relationship between the One of the Godfather of Soul and the one God and father of souls?

What a stupid question. Has it come to this, Bob?  Is there nothing more important, or even less silly, to write about?

Too late. We're committed.  There's no turning back. We've made the Leap and can only extricate ourselves by pushing (or being pulled) ahead.

What I want to say is that Oneness is everywhere, and is the basis of everything. If it weren't at the ground of the psyche, we could never find it. If there were no Alpha we could never discover or even suspect the presence of Omega (and everything between). And the moment we found it, everything changed. You could even say we became human. Which I mean literally.

In a rambling essay called The Delta Factor, Walker Percy meditates on the moment of this discovery.  

It reminds me of conversations I've had with my son about What the Dog Knows, or What Tuney is Thinking About. The answer is on the one hand nothing, but it is also inconceivable, because if we could "think like a dog" we would no longer be human, and vice versa. We can't put ourselves in the mind of a dog and still be there to experience what it's like to be her.

Why? What happened?  To us, I mean.  What created this literally infinite abyss between us and them?  Yes, there is of course continuity, but we're not talking about that; rather, the discontinuity.  All the best minds assure us that there are no leaps in this cosmos, whether we're talking about the leap from nonexistence to existence, existence to life, life to mind, or mind to something transcending it.  

But believing this -- ironically -- requires a huge leap of faith. As does everything else.  I have a note to myself somewhere... can't find it at the moment, but I stole it from Dávila anyway. It goes like this: 

There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap.

Here's a slightly more poetic version of the same truth:

Nothing important is reached simply by walking. But jumping is not enough to cross the abyss; one must have wings.

What I want to say is that only humans have the Wings of Slack to make this vertical leap. How high can you jump? All the way? Or perhaps not even get off the ground or out of the goround, like an earthbound secularist? 

Now, when we take a leap of faith, it isn't just into "nothing."  Rather, as we've pointed out on many occasions, a true leap will be guided -- or drawn -- by nonlocal attractors of various shapes and sizes.  Call them archetypes, powers, principalities, etc., but be careful, because there are also rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in low places. These are like vertical riptides, so make sure you're a strong swimmer before you just leap into the ocean.

It is only by the grace of God or something that I wasn't carried away by one of these.  I am reminded of another aphorism, that

Faith is what allows us to wander into any idea without losing our way back.

Example.  It wasn't all that long ago that I was a typical mindless ambient liberal. In order to be a liberal (by which I mean leftist), no active thinking is necessary, for the same reason a cannibal in a cannibal culture doesn't think about cannibalism.  Everyone does it. What's the problem?  And pass the ketchup.

I shudder to to think what would have become of me had I somehow become a "successful author" back when I was an ambient imbecile. Perhaps I might have eventually escaped, but it seems as likely that it would have frozen me in place -- like so many of my fellow boomers who haven't taken a new cognitive imprint since they were 18.

About the faith that allows us permanent children to wander around anywhere unsupervised.  That's another big subject, and slightly different from the point I am about to get to. Let's focus.

Those of you who have read The Book will recall that I posited four singularities, or Big Bangs, but these are fractals, as it were of a single bang -- emphasis on the single, i.e., the oneness. 

In wandering and wondering about an ultimate theory of man, Percy suggests that

There is only one place to start: the place where man's singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute.

That singularity is language.

Boom!  Or bang, rather.  If you are like me, the first thing that pops into your head is: In the beginning was the Word.  We will of course get back to that.  But first, let's leap into the singularity and check out its contours.  

Wow.  It's much roomier than it was being plunged into the neurology and buried in the senses of a mere animal. And the light!

Like anyone could know that.

What, are you blind?  Helen Keller knew it.  In fact she remembered the precise moment. We'll leave off today with her account of the Big Bang:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. 

I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -- a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me....

I learned a great many new words that day.... words that were to make the world blossom for me, "like Aaron's rod, with flowers." It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of the eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.