An author way older and deeper in... Dude.
Because our new, post-retirement lifestyle is so formless and enslackened, we're thinking of changing our approach to posting, so it's even more multi-undisciplinary.
We're on the cusp of 16 years of blah-blah-blogging, which sounds like a lot, but it's all just one timeless pneumagraph: the shutter opens with birth -- the second one in particular -- and closes with death. For some, anyway.
Back when I was a timebound clockjockey, I had to work around the structure of my servitude to the conspiracy, which necessitated writing first thing in the morning. But now there's no structure except for the natural rhythms of baseball season, the beer o'clock call to prayer, the daily hajj to the mailbox, etc.
As result, there's been a reversal of figure and ground, such that structure is the exception, abiding the rule. There's a lot more gazing out the window of time and onto the landscape of archetypal mischief and celestial goings-on. Sometimes it's a party. Other times a war. Or rather, it's always both. But it's never boring.
The point is, the membrane between here and there -- or this 'n THAT! -- has become much more permeable, so quiet murmurandoms wash ashore all day long. But they also float back out unless I take the time to pick them up out of the sand.
Is this all a bit circumnebulous? I guess what I'm saying is I need to strike when the irony's hot, and there's no longer any pattern to when that might happen. And if I don't do so at the moment, it's hard to reheat the vertical souffle. Even if I technically remember the content, it's difficult to recreate the melody.
Be assured that although we are pulling out of what you earthlings call "the world," we retain over-the-subjective-horizon culpabilities that allow us to drone on as usual.
Example.
Yesterday I was reading a book called We Hold These Truths, by John Courtney Murray. Some of it is dated -- it was published in 1960 -- but much of it is as timeless as.... as those timelessly self-evident truths referenced in the title.
Truth by definition is timeless, at least "at the top," so to speak. On contact with time, truths become relativized (and multiple), but nevertheless, any truth is grounded in the transtemporal Truth from which it derives its authority and demands our assent. A person of good will spontaneously assents to the truth. The bad guys make it up as they go along but still appeal to the very Truth they deny.
But the first duty of the intellect is to acknowledge and respect the Truth which transcends us. Which is why the adversary is described as "a liar from the beginning." Truth has no beginning, again, because it participates in the timeless. Only lies have a beginning. Truly truly, truth is anterior to time; it is with God.
This, I think, sheds light on our primordial catastrophe. Note that the "fall" is coeval with the Lie. The rest is commentary. For if the cosmos does not conform to the pattern of being< --> truth <--> intellect, then we are well and truly sealed in our own permanent stupidity: there is no exit from genebound animality and lifetime tenure.
Severed from being, the intellect is inoperative and even inconceivable. In other words, all knowledge, is -- wait for it -- of something. Moreover, our knowledge must be determined by this something. Our intellect is a passive power relative to being. If it isn't, then to hell with it.
Or, look at it this way: some people say modernity begins with the idea that I think, therefore I am. But a real principle, among other things, presupposes no prior truth or principle, and Descarte's principle presupposes a number of things, for example, logic and the capacity of thought -- which for him comes first -- to arrive at being -- which is second. How is this even possible?
It is not possible, because all the thinking in the world can't lead us to reality unless reality is there first. You can pretend thought is able to escape itself into reality, but it's really the other way around: reality flows into us, such that we are able to reflect upon it via thinking.
To assert that our thinking comes first is to steal God's thunder, but with no subsequent (en)lightning: it is to shut ourselves
in a solipsism from which nothing will enable us to escape. Modern subjectivism is, in the intellectual order, analogous to what the sin of the angel was in the moral order. The angel placed its ultimate end in itself...
Likewise, Descartes places "the terminus of the intellect within man" and thereby definitively closes "off the only route that leads to God. Descartes and Kant, the founders of idealism, are great, fallen intellects." Which is why their errors are so perennially popular: because they appeal to destructive nihilists, power-mad egomaniacs, and intellectual narcissists. Eight year olds, dude.
All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded. --Dávila
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