Replacing mindless scrolling with reading. I think this has been… about halfway successful. I have to remember how little reading I was doing before the current push. I was reading, say, two pages of “hard” stuff, maybe five pages of Spanish; I think I’ve doubled that, and added in much “middle” reading, things such as Atkinson’s history, Jules Evan’s ecstatic experience book, Marshall Sahlins’ swan song. I am reading much more, and it is very rich and fertile reading. Really I think the main thing that remains to be done is not so much to increase the hard reading or the middle reading, but to swap out the scrolling (YouTube and Facebook “shorts” are particularly noxious) for music. The solutions to the other discontents, perplexities, and problems are not to be found in reading more intensely, or reading more widely. You’re doing that. It’s not going to give you people to pray with or sing with, and it’s not going to expose you to ecstatic experience. It’s just not. That’s not something it can do.
So there, you’ve just delineated it. You want people to sing with, people to pray with, people to dance with, and
You want to be inviting ecstatic experience in a responsible way (but not in a guarded way: the distinction is crucial. You can’t invited the Goddess only if she promises not to make anyone uncomfortable. I mean, you can; you do: but wondering why she doesn’t come, under those conditions, is idiotic.You know why she’s not coming. Get real.)
4 comments:
Here in the nearly Deep South (we're an hour's drive from Alabama), we've been going to a small, African-American church for a year. The pastor recently asked me to preach, but I demurred on essentially racial and historical grounds. But am I being honest? Or am I treating my time there as an ethnographer might? Or am I somewhere fixated on the fact that I can't transport us as her sermons do? Merton says this about the sermon in The Sound and the Fury: "The way [Rev. Shegog] presented it at the beginning of his sermon, he was not telling them anything: he was preaching to them as a white man. But now he is simply saying not only what they know, but what is present among them!"
But I have people I can pray and sing with. You make me realize today that this is remarkable.
How do you like The New Science? I got lost in some of the reports from the field (by Sahlins and others), but I like his theorizing. Something I read somewhere says that the book is largely humorless because he was writing it on his deathbed, and his disciple who completed the book couldn't, or wouldn't attempt to, reproduce his style fully. (At least his disciple did what was asked of him. Maybe he could preach at my church!) I'm dipping in and out of Sahlins's What Kinship Is . . . And Is Not to get the fuller experience.
I liked the Sahlins book! But I think that anthropologists have a tolerance for (appetite for?) repetition that I lack: it did a lot of saying the same thing over and over. I was most interested in how often the sense of invisible powers was transactional and decoupled from awe -- people berating their dead ancestors for not keeping up the deal ("i made the right offerings -- why is the fishing so lousy? You're such a jerk! See what kind of offerings you get from now on!") Made me realize that I was dangerously romanticizing and sentimentalizing my notion of what it would be like to live as a genuine animist.
And to your first question: we are just in a position in which it's really really hard to be responsibly authentic in these matters. I think I've made some progress lately in jettisoning the idea that anything *ought* to feel authentic, that I should be able to tell if something is right or good because it feels totally sound. Nothing in ordinary daily life is going to feel totally sound. The cracks run right through all of our structures of life and thought. I don't know how much of that is "because contemporary America," as people say nowadays, and how much is "because sin."
My search for authenticity comes out as, what would an indigenous culture, past or present, do? As far as how I put any of that in action, I . . . recycle. Why I think I'm an improvement on Rousseau, I don't know. And "indigenous" is a civilized category, so there's no North Star there.
"Because contemporary America" and/or "because sin" is my working dichotomy, too. In a way, they're similar: contemporary America will be judged by history, and sin will be judged at the last trumpet. Both forms of judgment are millenarian ideas, I think. To say that something will show up on the wrong side of history presumes a lot. What if the future doesn't go our way, and that future (as futures tend to do) writes history books? I mean, which "history" (i.e., which future)? A final judgment's got nothing on a presumed "rational" future as an Archimedean point. Still, my continuous cry for context with respect to current events depends on some sort of future. I admire these often-anarchistic hill cultures that use the political terminology of lowland states to construct a better present, or at least a better imagined future.
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