Person and Personalia

I'm warning you ahead of time, this post didn't turn out as intended. It was mostly written yesterday, but was so discombobulated I couldn't bring myself to publish it. I did my best to get it back on the rails today, but I suspect it's still a brainwreck... 

Yesterday I learned a new word: personalia, which is "All the personal belongings, writings and information of an individual."

In keeping with the theme of the previous post, the cosmos must be God's own personalia, in that it apparently belongs to him and reveals information about his metacosmic personhood. Which is why for us the cosmos is a theophany, i.e., an appearance of God. 

But the appearance is not the reality, just as personalia are not the person. Then again, think about relics, autographs, and other memorabilia. Why do people want them? Evidently because they are personalia that are "closer" to the person than ordinary objects.

Do I have any memorabilia, and why? Let's see. I have autographs of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale... I have a book autographed by Terence McKenna... I have quite a few numbered limited edition jazz and rock box sets... a commemorative football from Superbowl XXXVII... I once had a showerhead that was used in Jack Nicholson's house (my friend's father was a plumber)... 

Some of these are more meaningful than others, but the common thread must be some kind of sympathetic magic, whereby "an effect resembles its cause," and through which "things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed."

So, by the Law of Contact or Contagion, I maintain a nonlocal relation to Sandy Koufax, Miles Davis, Joey Ramone, R.P. McMurphy, et al? Or, in the case of Terence McKenna, do I get a contact high?  

Personalia are, as it were, the vapor trails of the person, whether we're speaking of God or of man. This blog, for example, is my own personalia. Like the wind, the person is invisible, but not its effects. As I've said before, cut this blog and it bleeds Bob. 

Of note, this person-personalia relation works both ways, in a highly suspicious manner. That is to say, we spend a good part of our lives in search of objects (or subjects) which mysteriously reveal ourselves to ourselves. 

It is as if these are somehow our personalia before we encounter them. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bolls calls them "idiom needs," arguing that that

we spend our time looking for objects of interest -- human or material -- which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life -- perpetually "meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects." 

We never know if or when we will stumble upon an object or person that reveals ourselves to ourselves. Just as we create objects and artifacts, sometimes the objects create us, so to speak, for which reason we must be open to them -- "open souled," if you will.

The contrast is a refusal of development and self-invention, of open-endedness: the state of psychic stagnation. Bollas sees in what he calls the anti-narcissist a willed refusal to use objects for the development of his/her own idiom, and a consequent foreclosure of the true self. The result can lead to the core catastrophe in many of Bollas's powerful clinical vignettes..., being trapped in someone else's (usually the parents') dream or view of the world.

Hmm. Psychic closure and imprisonment in someone else's dream. How does one escape such existential sophication?

Alice Cooper.

Yes, you must be referring to his Caught in a Dream: 

Thought I was living but you can't ever tell / What I thought was Heaven turned out to be Hell

Perhaps he was singing about himself: in an interview, he recalled "the horrors of acute alcoholism and his subsequent cure, being a Christian." He's been sober since 1988, no longer caught in that particular nightmare. Instead, he lives in the benevolent dream of Christianity. You might even say that Alice was a defense against, and denial of, plain old Vince. And Vince is a moron:

If you're listening to a rock star to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night, and very rarely do we sit around reading... 

Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's the real rebellion. 

It seems the world is full of snares and keys, and don't confuse one with the other, for what you think is Heaven might just turn out to be Hell.

Thanks Cap'n Obvious.

Speaking of toxins and cures, we left off the previous post with Berdyaev's observation that "The Son of God descends into 'nothingness,' that is into primordial freedom," which "extracts the poison from freedom without destroying freedom itself."

This implies two kinds of freedom, and Christ's use of one to transform the other. Note that no coercion is involved, since this would be a mere denial or suppression of freedom as opposed to its transformation. There is a "liberating freedom" and an "imprisoning freedom," so to speak? 

More generally, according to Schuon, "The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart." Which reminds me of Dávila:

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

For

Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything. 

Like Alice, for whom

Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison. 

Suffice it to say that paradoxes abound in any discussion of freedom. In fact,

In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. 

For example, going back to what Bollas says above, we are free to discover the objects that determine us, so to speak. Somehow they precede us, in that it is we who have to freely discover them. Or in other words,

Freedom is not indispensable because man knows what he wants and who he is, but in order for him to know who he is and what he wants.

Let's hit the reset button and get back to Berdyaev's thoughts on freedom. Consistent with what was said above about the absence of coercion in transforming freedom,

The truth of Christ, which makes us free, does not force or compel anyone, it is not like the truths of this world which forcibly organize spirit and deprive it of freedom. The light of Christ enlightens the irrational darkness of freedom, without limiting it from without.

God does not compel, he invites: "The secret of Christianity, as a religion of divine-humanity, is just this secret of freedom," for it is "the uniting of two freedoms." 

Only the Christian revelation reconciles the two: only the religion of the God-man and Divine humanity combines God's freedom with that of man. Redemption is the deliverance of man's freedom from the evil which destroys it, deliverance not by means of necessity or compulsion, but by grace.

Thus the extraction of the poison from freedom without destroying freedom itself. Neat trick!

The freedom of the Son is that in which and by which a free answer to God is possible, a free turning to God. 

Still, we are always free to say No!, otherwise it wouldn't be freedom. Nevertheless, "The freedom of the Son is also the source of the freedom for the whole human race." Or better, the Son's eternal Yes to the Father is the principle of our own freedom, or something? Perhaps this is what the Aphorist means when he says 

Authentic freedom consists in the power to adopt an authentic master.

And that

The free act is rebellion or obedience. Man establishes there his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. 

So, Christ freely submits to human freedom whereby the latter is transformed? Am I getting that right?

I don't know, but we're finally done with Berdyaev. Time to move onto the next subject, but this post has gone on long enough, so we'll end things for now. How about an image for this post, Gemini?