No, Really, What if the World is Made of Aphorisms?

This line of thought was provoked by sentence in the preface to All Desire is a Desire for Being: "It's been said that the universe is made up not of atoms, but of stories." 

Of course, nowadays these stories are called "narratives," and according to the grand narrative of our day & age, there are no grand narratives, just the pretextual stories that mask the Grand Competition for Power.

In reality -- in addition to the one just cited -- there are so many irritating grand narratives and controlling myths that you must have a cast iron stomach to not want to vomit. They're everywhere, from the media and academia and pop culture, all way down to government. Who can breathe amidst such stifling repression? The dead, that's who. Or at least insentient. 

But that's another narrative. Ours is at once more analytic and integral, in that we want to pull it apart, down to its simplest components, and then reassemble the parts into a proper metanarrative with which no honest or awake person could ever disagree. Of course, we'll never convince the lofo NPC brain-eating Zombies. But that's only half the country. 

What's the alternative narrative to ours? Actually, there are two: you can throw up your hands and affirm that nothing makes any sense -- that we are plunged into a meaningless existence of total absurdity, for reasons we can never know, even supposing there were a reason.

I call that a Manly and Muscular Existentialism, and hats off to the person who believes and lives it, irrespective of where they are hospitalized.

The other alternative is to peacefully turn oneself into the Matrix, and to spend the rest of one's days living in one of those off-the-rack meta-narratives mentioned above. 

Coincidentally, I'm reading this lame book I picked up for a dollar at the library sale, a memoir by Bob Dylan's girlfriend after first arriving in New York when he was 20 (A Freewheelin' Time, by Suze Rotolo). Although she wrote it in her 60s, she's one of those terminal hippies who believes exactly the same things she did at 17.  

Imagine, for example, upon Mature Reflection, writing the following passage:

There was a fascination with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who had made the revolution in Cuba and were challenging the monoliths of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union, with their dashing, rebellious thumb-in-your-eye-plague-on-both-your-houses behavior.

No, they weren't mass murdering thugs, and besides, you have to break a few eggs if you're going to bravely stand up to the Soviet Union!

She herself was a red diaper baby raised by Marxist parents, and whose greatest achievement in life was the transition to adult diapers. She at once spends a lot of the book declaiming anti-communist hysteria, while being a caricature of an empty-headed communist hysteric.

Bob, why are you even reading this book by a commie bubblehead?

Eh, I thought it might give some insight into the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early '60s. It's doing that, minus the insight. 

More generally, this woman lives in a meta-narrative in which she is the Victim of everything from the Repressive '50s to Dylan's genius. I won't bore you with examples. Where were we?

A World made of Aphorisms. Now, Dávila gave his 10,000 aphorisms the ironic title, Annotations on an Implicit Text. 

I am stealing that, because what are the 4,000 posts but endless commentary on the Implicit Text I am always searching for? They started out innocently enough as commentaries on an explicit text -- AKA One Cosmos, the book -- but have long since become something else. Then again, perhaps not, because 

Every writer comments indefinitely on his brief original text.

Is that what I'm doing? Do I resemble that remark? 

The only claim that I have is that of not having written a linear book, but a concentric book.

Now we have two hints of what the Aphorist is up to, in that the text is implicit and concentric. What is this implicit thing at the Center?

Yes, let's explicate it. Let's render the implicit explicit.

Speaking of One Big Idea -- supposing I have one and have been beating it to death, not just for 17 years of blogging, but ever since I donned the Thinking Cap -- certainly this tension between implicate and explicate orders has been one of them. My doctoral dissertation involved the application of physicist David Bohm's theory of the implicate order to human metapsychology, but in hindsight, it's just another iteration of a more fundamental insight that....

It's been refined since then, but today I would simply say that human beings are always situated between the transcendent order above and immanent order below -- each direction extending to infinitude -- and there's not a damn thing we can do about it, except deepen it, both symbolically and experientially.

I read another book over the weekend that I picked up at the library sale, this one called Paths that Lead to the Same Summit, by a clinical psychologist whose lovin' parents gave him the handle Samuel Bendeck Sotillos. It is also not raccoomended, but there were some innarestin' passages, plus it was only a buck, so it's not as if I feel like the good lord gypped me.

The book is also the annotation of an implicit text, this text being the perennial religion and philosophy, supposing such a thing actually exists. Uppercase T Traditionalists, of course, believe it does exist -- in other words, that all orthodox religions are themselves explicit expressions of an implicit metaphysic. 

I go back and forth.

In other words, is Christianity the truth, full stop? Or is it true because it is in conformity with a metaphysical truth we can know directly via the nonlocal and uncreated Intellect?

Maybe a little bit of both?

I guess my favorite chapter was on Meister Eckhart -- actually, a book review of C.F. Kelley's Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, which I'm sure I myself reviewed somewhere down there. All I remember is that it suffered in comparison to my favorite book on the subject, which is Bernard McGinn's The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, which I do raccoomend.

The main thing about Eckhart is that, broadly speaking, he has the Right Approach, and it is as right today as it was 700 years ago. Of course, there are plenty of new age types who get Eckhart fundamentally wrong, and see him as some kind of dashing revolutionary who stuck his thumb in the eye of the Church, but we have no use for such a tendentious, agenda-driven nonsense.

Well, this post didn't get far. In the next one we will redouble our effort to explicate those aphorisms of which the world is implicitly made.

The most subversive book in our time would be a collection of old proverbs.