Olvidado Rey Gudú

The Goblin and the Magician have been directed by the Queen to remove young Prince Gudú's capacity to love, since it constitutes an unacceptable vulnerability:

Then the Goblin very carefully took hold of the boy's head and blew on his forehead, which opened with the sweetness and gentleness of a flower. He did the same to his breast, and when the heart blossomed, the Magician deftly closed it up in a chalice, transparent but strong.

The boy's forehead presented dreams of horses, a great coarse red sun, a clash of swords, and a poplar tree rocked by the wind. "Nothing dangerous," said the Goblin. "Say, while we're at it, shall we take out anything else? Intelligence? Innocence?" Suddenly the Queen felt a great grief, and covering her eyes with her hands, burst into tears. 

"Enough," she said. "Enough. That's fine."

Well, I'm loving this novel. 

Hurry

It's going to be brute force for a while; forcing the solitude. Slowly, as if moving a huge weight, I close the laptop. At some point the mechanism (which I've never discovered) engages: the light clicks off when its face is an inch or two from its chest. It doesn't want to go. Beyond hearing, it keens and moans. It summons the dead, and they cluster behind me. How can you shut down the whole breathing world? What will be left if you do? A full hour later than I'd planned; now I am going to hurry to get my evening things done, setting up hurry for tomorrow morning, hurry for the day, hurry for evening, hurrying forever and never getting anywhere. Stop, you've got to stop, you old fool!

I woke this morning to surprising light. "The moon must be nearly full," I thought. I padded through the half-lit house -- I never turn on lights first thing in the morning, if I can help it -- and went to the window. There was a gleam in the cloud cover to the west: as I watched the full moon's disk slide into ghostly view, and recede again. It was gone, but the whole flannel of the western sky was soaked in moonlight. I could see well enough to start my day. Still: compromised by last night's hurry. Today will be hurried and incomplete, like all the other days. For God's sake stop, Dale. Get a grip.

But I hurried again to get ready, left my morning stretches and breathing undone, scrambled to get out of the house before the morning traffic. If I leave at 7:00 it takes ten minutes to get to Tom's; if I leave at 7:15 it takes half an hour. Long enough for even an aged fool, wagging his beard at the steering wheel, to realize that driving like this is madness, participating in the bonfire.

But it's the only piece of reality I have hold of, these mornings; I'm not going to loosen my clutch on it. I can sit there and work two hours. Real work. The rest of my day dissolves in a meaningless ebb and flow of hurry and avoidance, one driving inevitably to the other, both pushing toward a mindless stupor. Yeah. Whatever I was born for, it was not for this. 

I must go at it blind, my fingertips searching for any unevenness that might give purchase. I'm not special; I'm not alone. We're all doing this. You can hear the rattling buzz of the snare drum, if you listen for it; the beat of money pulsing through the economy, of coffee pulsing through the veins. It has its own agenda. Its fingers are delicately searching in turn for my weaknesses. Its fingers are not as strong as mine: but there are more of them, and they never rest. 

Believing In

C. S. Lewis was a glib son of a bitch, but he nailed it when he spoke of how disastrous it is to embark upon believing something "not because it is true, but for some other reason." The existentialist project as conceived by Camus strikes me as simply impossible. Certainly impossible for me. "I'll just decide that all people are important, and then they'll be important because I have decided they are important, and their importance will sustain my devotion to them --" No. No, the whole thing collapses under the slightest pressure. (for example, what the hell is important about some of these individuals? Not much that meets the eye.) For exactly the same reason, I am not going to be a Christian without a good reason, no matter how much a life of service and devotion appeals to me. (And I have always recognized that I am a servant, by temperament and inclination.) I would become a Christian simply and only because I thought it was true that Jesus was the unique human incarnation of the one God. Full stop. I'm not going to believe it because it's pleasant (and anyway, it's terrifying, if you take it seriously) or because it will make me mentally healthy. I don't know how other people are built, but I'm simply not built for that: I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I believe things that I think are true. 

Once upon a time I believed in the metaphysics of reductionist materialism. What's real are subatomic particles, and they bang into each other in deterministic ways, determining what the atoms do, and that determines what the molecules do, and that determines what cells do, and that determines what creatures such as us do, including -- somehow -- generating subjective experience and a sense of self, at some arbitrary threshold of neural complexity. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe free will is a delusion. Maybe subjective experience is a delusion: some people argue that, though it's a rather desperate move. I think it's more likely that what seems obvious is actually true: that we have intentions and make decisions. I suspect that even cells have intentions and make decisions: that mind and life are coterminous. This is I guess some kind of pantheism. It doesn't particularly leave me "believing in" God, which is a formulation that I suspect is self-subverting in precisely the same way as the Existentialist project. A God you have to "believe in" is not much of a God.

Nevertheless, my intuition is that there is Something to which one can orient, that you can know "where" it is as a blind man knows where the sun is, and turn towards it. (This is a METAPHOR, people. If you don't know what a metaphor is, look it up.) And that intuition is based partly on the surprising intelligibility of the world. It's weirdly explicable. It has rules it plays by, and we can figure some of them out. And, as the Stoics maintain, you can line yourself up with it, and swim with its current, in which case you will be happy (in an ultimate sense, not to be confused with gratified), or you can struggle against it, in which case you will be unhappy, unlucky, clumsy, and conflicted. This being so, the most fruitful thing to practice is orienting to this Sun. Listening for it.

This will distress those who insist that you must know what something is before you investigate it, which is to say most modern people most of the time. How do we know, ahead of time, that what we are orienting to is The Good (a.k.a God?) Well, we don't. But if you agree that we are not now exactly where and what we want to be, then you have to give yourself permission to look for where to go and what you would want to be, in places that are presently unknown. (Once again, this is a metaphor, Deal with it.) And it is actually not that hard to tell, most of the time, whether you are orienting yourself more properly. Are you more unified, more graceful, more at ease, more effective? Someone who is oriented more properly ought to be all of those things.