From Here to Eternity

Well, that was an annoying post yesterday. Even Oriental Jazzman said I need to Tuck in that Loose Shirt, but that's the price one pays for dabbling in Voegelin. So let's move on and dabble in Girard. Again, we've been reading a compilation called All Desire is a Desire for Being, like anyone could know even that. 

The context of the book's title is similar to a distinction I made way back in the bOOk, between... Frankly, I no longer recall exactly what I said, but clearly, whatever I said will be an embarrassment to me today, so it will take a Brave Man to check, and is Bob brave enough?

Okay, I'll take the bait.

The Buddha was correct in emphasizing that a major source of human suffering emanates from attachment to the phantom-forms known as our desires.

Oh, so now you are presuming to judge my pal the Buddha?

Not exactly, but someone has to. 

The deeper point is this distinction between what I called "appetite," which, according to Oldbob, "arises from the natural self," and what he calls "the desire-mode of being," which "hypnotically roots us in the ephemeral."

As if you have transcended desire! 

Look, I like to think I live pretty lightly on the planet, not because I'm some kind of Gaia-worshipping science-denying jackass, but because the alternative just doesn't pay. It's literally a waste of timelessness, because the latter is all we have, and we only have so much. Infinitude is a finite resource!

Again, it seems man lives -- and always lives -- at the center of those four quadrants, two of which being horizontal, two being vertical. Depending on the mood, I define these in different ways, but let's tuck in the loose shirt and do so once and for all. 

Okay, between (↔) and ( ↕ ). Neither can be collapsed into the other; or, they can, but that's a deformation of Being. Past behind, future ahead, transcendence above, and immanence below. That's where we are, and always are.

None of these terms can ever by grasped by us, because we are in them, and they exist for us as poles of the tension in which we live. All sorts of symbols emerge in this space, some more differentiated than others, but none can be "final" in any static or systematic way. 

It is also important to note that when, say,  ( ↕ ) is collapsed into (↔), it is not as if (↕) is actually eliminated, rather, it just returns in a distorted manner, for example, vis a vis the stupid political religions that try to enclose Being and impose themselves on us. 

Now, one of the things that appears in this space is desire. For what? Anything and everything, nor does anything in this world (you will have noticed) satisfy it, so I suppose Girard is correct in saying that it conceals a desire for Being -- even for being God. 

Which brings us back to Genesis 3, which never actually goes away. Consider the fact that Adam and Eve -- like the restavus -- are situated in those four quadrants. They have a past, and like us, find themselves a-wake in the middle of a dream that is already in progress upon their awakening to it.

Again, man develops symbols to express the situation -- for example, that the Creator must have fashioned them from the dust of the earth, or that He yanked a rib from Adam's chest in order to fashion woman. 

Today we have more differentiated symbols, but to imagine that these have eliminated the mystery of origins is just silly. Future generations will chuckle at our crude expressions, just as we can chuckle at the thought of their "superiority" to us, because again, every finite being is equally distant from Infinitude and Eternity at any time. And if you don't know that, what do you know?

Continuing with Adam and Eve, they are obviously well aware of the vertical tension, hence God's warning about collapsing it. But desire, being what it is, impels them to go ahead and do it anyway, leading to expulsion and exile from the space in which we have our being. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Many stupid actions follow, and I read somewhere that the Bible as a whole comes down to a story of man's rebellion against God. What to do about it?

I don't know what kind of religion Voegelin professed, because he seemed to have a private one that he & the Almighty worked out betwixt 'em. But whatever else he believed about it, he clearly looked upon Christianity as a new and more differentiated symbolic expression of the Tension.

And with that, we'll pause and continue in the next installment.