Next Level One Cosmos: Anti-Blogging

Lately I haven't given much thought to the Sequel. Reader KC Steve suggests 

a book or essay setting out your Trinitarian theory of everything absent any of the aspects Gemini criticizes: the reliance on intuition, analogy and that otherwise lovable idiosyncratic style. Maybe also leave out the self-referential material and Joycean vocabulary. 

I'm guessing you have no interest in doing that and maybe you simply can't. But perhaps a great many, including your faithful followers, would like it. Even if they come to you daily precisely for the challenge of figuring out what the hell you're talking about.

I do have the interest: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is increasingly untethered from practicalities. An enduring and thus far insoluble problem has been how to structure it all. In other words, there's plenty of content, but how on earth is it to be organized? 

Could the idea of the Trinity as Idea of ideas serve as that organizing principle? Or would I get bored and distracted because I'm always trying to peer over the subjective horizon and engage with what I don't know? Knowing is boring. Unknowing is where it's at. La réponse est la maladie qui tue la curiosité. 

Don't be such a pompous ass. You don't know French. Just say The answer is the disease that kills curiosity.

I read somewhere that in the Gospel of John alone, Jesus poses some thirty-five questions, which reminds me something Rabbi Heschel said, that "We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers." Besides,

No answer can be more intelligent than the question that gave rise to it. 

Now, I am not bored, but I would be if I were some human jukebox cranking out my greatest hits. It reminds me of a scarce box set I recently acquired on ebay, Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel. Turns out that his musicians were also easily bored, so they decided to mix it up without Miles' knowledge and play "anti-music":

It was the drummer Tony Williams who suggested, “whatever someone expects you to play, what if that’s the last thing you play?” 

The reason was that after an entire year playing together their music had become formulaic, “exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do,” according to Hancock. The idea was to contradict the clichés: suddenly go quiet when normally they would hit a dramatic peak; push the intensity at the point one would expect the music to fade. 

It’s one thing to plan to deconstruct, another thing entirely to do it in the moment -- and trust yourself and your bandmates to respond creatively and not drop the ball.

In a perceptive review by the Oriental Jazzman, he observes that 

The performance is really good, but the first piece has a loud noise called “buchibuchi.” This noise is not included in the other seven pieces at all, so it may be a malfunction of the board. I'm very sorry. 

The monochrome photo of the outer box is better on the rice board. The jacket is cool, it is a little morbid. As a Miles fan I can't let go of both. In a sense, it is “sad sex.”

By the way, one word for those who were interested in mileage. For the time being, please experience the horrible of this live. All of this Miles Quintet are Acme. The listening side is also Acme.

I can't really tell the difference, as this band always sounds to me like it is skirting along the musical sweet spot between order and chaos anyway, which is right where I like it.

So, if the posts seem more chaotic lately, perhaps it's a result of anti-blogging -- deconstructing myself in the moment while trusting myself to respond creatively and not drop the ball. Just ignore the buchibuchi noise and sad sex, and focus on the Acme.  

It very much reminds me of something Storr discusses in his Solitude, in a chapter touching on three identifiable periods in the lives of creative folk. In the first period, one is still assimilating influences and learning one's craft, so "the artist has usually not fully discovered his individual voice." 

But as he "becomes more confident he gains the courage to dispense with whatever aspects of the past are irrelevant to himself." "Mastery and individuality are more clearly manifest," and "the need to communicate whatever he has to say to as wide a public as possible is usually evident."

I might have skipped that stage, as I don't think widespread popularity was ever in the cards for me. At any rate, I've long since communicated whatever I have to say to my increasingly selective readership. 

The third period is "when communication with others tends to be replaced by works depending more upon solitary meditation." The creator "is looking into the depths of his own psyche and is not very much concerned as to whether anyone else will follow him or understand him." Of Beethoven's late quartets, for example, 

Nothing is conceded to the listener, no attempt is made to capture his attention or hold his interest. Instead the composer communes with himself or contemplates his vision of reality, thinking (as it were) aloud and concerned only with the pure essence of his own thoughts...

For a long time, these late works were "considered unintelligible," as if Beethoven were "working toward some new idea or order of coherence." But now, folks who understand classical music think these works stand at the peak of his achievement.

Eh, I don't know. Much as I hate to admit it, you still make sense to me. Besides, you're not an artist, let alone a Beethoven, just a blogger. Take a deep breath. A little perspective, please. 

Back to our Idea of ideas. I recently read another book called The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, but I don't know if it moves the metaphysical ball any further down the nonlocal field. For example, we agree that the Trinity provides a conception of God

whose reality as a communion of persons is the basis of a rational universe in which personal life may take shape.

In other words, the Godhead is persons-in-relation, and so are we. That's either the biggest coincidence ever or pretty much what we'd expect if we are created in God's image. But it also accounts for a relational cosmos in which everything is interconnected with everything else. In short, it solves the problem of the one and the many, because God is always both and so is the cosmos.

Nevertheless, many theologians persist in emphasizing God's unity, and in so doing exaggerate his immutability and impassivity at the expense of his openness and relationality. 

Which I don't buy. For again, God is both First Cause and First Effect, the latter being none other than the Second Person of the Trinity. At risk of belaboring the point, God can by no means be cleansed of verbs. 

Indeed, the Son is the re-veberation of the Father, and the Incarnation is a kind of vertical prolongation of this reverberation herebelow. We don't just "participate in the Son," but participate in the Father's generation of the Son and the Son's return to the Father. Eckhart knows what I'm talking about, so this isn't exactly new.

"But what is at stake in the matter?," asks Gunton. Well, Aquinas says something to the effect that a modest blunder at the beginning leads to epic buchibuchi at the end. 

The question is, "What kind of world is it? Is it one fitted for the development of persons and personal values?" Or is it a fundamentally impersonal world such that we are but a persistent fungus on the body of matter, a morbid and monochrome rice board with a lot of sad sex?

if something other than the Father is the ontological foundation of the being of God, the world and everything in it derives from what is fundamentally impersonal.

For practical purposes this reaches all the way into vulgar politics, because

modern individualism and modern collectivism are mirror images of one another. Both signal the loss of the person, the disappearance of the one into the many or the many into the one.

All because somebody forgot about the Acme of the Trinity, which harmonizes these two polarities and ensures the proper rights of each.