Three Cultures

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development.

     [Ali Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

I’ve used this quote as an epigram before; I saw it many, many years ago, used for the same purpose in Idries Shah’s, The Sufis, and it made an impression on me even then—pre-Information Age and all of that—because it refers to information and, in part, inverts the order of layers within a culture. In the modern view “self actualization,” as the last level is called in modernese (by Abraham Maslow discussing hierarchies of needs), is till at the top, but religious culture is viewed as something we’ve progressed beyond to reach the current pinnacle of secular civilization.

Hujwiri, a Sufi teacher, lived a long time ago—990-1077—and clearly had a very sophisticated view of culture, as expressed when he described the basic level as engaged in seeking information. That’s all that’s really possible—at the worldly level. What comes above it transcends “the world” as we usually understand it.

Got to thinking about this today as I was pondering Yeat’s poem, The Second Coming, in which appear those famous words, “the center cannot hold.” Yeats (1865-1939) belongs to elite culture if anybody does; and beyond most poets he was interested in matters mystical. And he saw the problem, to be sure. Worldly culture, even when he wrote that poem, in 1920, was already overwhelming the second layer for many people: religious culture. Yeats saw that as a great disaster because he saw no hope. The Second Coming he darkly foresaw was that of something beastly:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

Well, perhaps he failed to look far enough ahead—or his mysticism wasn’t deep enough. What he describes slouching towards Bethlehem to be born was modernity itself, not that which will follow its falling apart.

All this then led to another thought. If we look at Hujwiri’s categories, what seems to be clear is that the bottom and the top layers are always present—unless some plague or atomic war sends us back to hunting and gathering again; even that would leave one in place. Organized societies are a kind of necessary foundation for anything higher—except the elite culture at the very top. The elite culture is also always there; it springs from individual endowments. On this view, anyway, the middle layer, religious culture, is the most important. It provides social cohesion and is the vehicle by which masses of people can raise themselves, with the help of teachings and obedience (a despised word in this day) to realize transcendence—which is Job 1 in Sufi thought.

The Wider Feminine Dimension

If and when we marry, we gain a second mother. In secular language the added phrase, “in law,” signals that we live in an Age of the Contract in which the state, enforcing the secular nature of its culture, demands the right to permit us to marry. But in the greater realm, thinking now of Genesis (2:24), marriage makes man and woman “one flesh.” (I note here that that phrase is retained in all but two versions of every Bible I own; the Jerusalem Bible renders it as “one body,” which is equivalent; the Living Bible shifts the ground into the abstract and says “one person.”)  If we are one flesh, however, doesn’t the spouse’s mother also become our own?

This somewhat cumbersome beginning, however, is not really my subject. I’m just a tracing how I got to my theme. A post on Ghulf Genes and some commentary on it brought the Sibyls of old to the fore, again, and every time that happens, I always think of my second mother, as it were. Now this wondrous lady, long since departed, was as modern as any, a practicing dentist, married to an eminent economics consultant, an enterprising person who, in the chaos that followed World War II formed a business to make a living for her family. She came from the high middle class, with real wealth in her background. And yet… And yet she was also a strange sort of person with peculiar gifts, so much so that, ever since I got to know her—and the occasions were few because she lived in the then barricaded East Germany and we rarely saw her—I always thought of her as sibylline, oracular, chtonic, and original.

Now today my memories of Mom Elvira—and of the Sibyl of Cumae and her predecessors and her followers, of whom I view St. Hildegard of Bingen (the “Sibyl of the Rhine”) as one—reminded me of my (these days) entirely incorrect conviction that women and men are different. Not under “law,” mind you, not in the sphere of contracts. But in reality. And particularly in the religious realm, the feminine perception is altogether more encompassing, holistic—but largely influential above and below the huge but narrowly mechanical noise produced by the masculine approach—heavy on intellect, law, rules, dogmas, sin, trial-judgement-punishment-reward, heresies, fatwas, and all the bloody rest.

With the rise of the Age of Contract, the feminine dimension came under attack—so that the Reformation dethroned and banned the Virgin Mary—as also it got rid of images, colors, decorations in the churches and the temples—a basic expression of the feminine soul. It was Robert Graves, I think, who said that first the success, and then the endurance, of Catholicism had everything to do with Mary’s superintending presence over the Church. Women hold things together, men are ever at war—so that the Reformation produced an endless scattering differentiation until the Whole was thus no more. (Yes. The root of that word, catholic, is the Greek kata, meaning “about,” and holos, meaning whole. It is. It is about the Whole.) Yet, of course, the feminine is always inclusive. And in that process of inclusion, conflicting details need to be harmonized; and where the conflicts are particularly gritty, they must be transcended by love—even if that demands that intellectual precision is sacrificed to the greater cause of Unity.

Now the religious urge in us is really, fundamentally, about love. And when religion comes to mean conflict, be sure that the masculine drive to power has hi-jacked something and, the moment that drive succeeded, the holy changed into something else.

Among the males the poets know this. They have been blessed with souls in which something of the nature of their mothers has managed to rise enough to celebrate the Goddess.

Blank Simian Rote

A reviewer in the London Review of Books, Glen Newey, wrote in the March 2012 issue words I found refreshingly on point—although somewhat removed from the book he was reviewing, one dealing with human failures in the realm of statistical inference. Here is the passage that caught my eye:

Human existence is an acquired taste, and many of us get through it with the aid of what Vladimir in Waiting for Godot calls the “great deadener”. Blank simian rote—the round of feeding, grooming, ablution, slack-jawed vacancy—serves to block out tracts of time that might otherwise get colonized by anxious thought.

The first sentence is a bull’s eye, in a way. I don’t know Mr. Newey’s own stance on cosmology, but in mine that sentence is descriptive—because I don’t think that we belong here. And “blank simian rote” will bounce around in my own slack-jawed vacancy for a bit yet, bringing a little smile—as it has now for a few days since reading the phrase. I have this maddening habit of sometimes becoming aware of people’s ears when I watch TV; the situation is always one of intellectual exchange, interviews, or speakers behind a podium, usually on C-Span. The content is abstract, in other words, but I’m suddenly fixated on the ears. And yes, I am. I’m seeing a simian holding forth learnedly on some global subject of complexity. We find ourselves in bodies, sort of wake up in them. And when I watch little babies, it’s quite apparent that they’re surprised, baffled, and exploring what this thing is, meaning their little hands and little legs and toes. And the acquisition of the habit happens quite naturally.

Then it goes on for a while—make that decades—before a kind of reversal of that process begins. At minimum you notice that people have ears—and in the ultra-sophisticated world of abstraction and high technology, with ritual garments and blow-dried hair or sculpted coiffeurs more or less sublimating the underlying ape, only the ears remain as drastic reminders of what we are beneath the highfaluting reasoning that vibrates the air that the ears manage to detect and then to signal inward by incredibly sophisticated bio-technology until neuron servers make it audible to the mind—a mind that acquired a taste, as it were, for human existence—and then with age, is beginning to lose the habit. Because “seeing ears” is just the beginning.

Another of my symptoms, anyway, showing that the process is reversible, is when I hear of 70 or 80 or 90 year-olds praised to the heavens for their heroic fight, usually against cancer. And I wonder why it is so heroic to keep holding on, to the bitter end, when the ape just wants to lie down and die. My reviewer tells me why; they resisted being colonized by anxious thought. In them, evidently, the blank simian rote is still all right. The heroes are still hanging on; evidently they didn’t spend much time in thought and wonder, wonder about who they really are and what they’re really doing here. If they had they wouldn’t fight so hard when the end comes knocking on the door. They would’ve been waiting for Godot, not fearing the encounter.

A lifetime of thought, however, and not always anxious thought, either, produces insights that really help as the trip to the Garden of Simia begins to draw to its close. One can have a fair amount of fun, too—not least studying people’s ears. And, by the way, you can’t get away from them. Your own are there in the mirror to tell you that you too have a pair. Then, if you’re a man, you envy women who can hide them so well. Just checking on the spelling of the word “coiffeur” just now, I am looking on my screen, to the right, at a page featuring what is called Coiffeur D’Elegance. It shows five lovely ladies’ hairdos—and not an ear in sight.

Fallen Orchid

This orchid has a long and, for an orchid anyway, dramatic history. It was first planted in some kind of commercial garden and sold along with probably about eighty others to the operators of an office building in Southfield, MI called the Onyx Building. We had our offices there back then. It reached our own suite as a gift from the landlord—and every other office got one too. The orchid stayed in that air-conditioned space, with glorious views of a vast parking lot, until I drove it right across the Detroit Metroplex to the east side, and it has since then occupied this space in Brigitte’s bedroom window, growing from a quite small plant into this gorgeous thing. How old is it? It’s nine years old. I took this picture just the other day.

Faithful orchid—living against the odds. Orchids are air plants. They grow attached to trees or other sturdy growths in the tropics, and use these as a place to hold themselves. Their seeds are so tiny they easily float in the air; currents carry them high into the trees where they settle and then, growing, attach through so-called air roots. Our brave orchid is out of place. No stout tree to give it shelter. A stiff rod serves it, poorly, for support, with help from a bit of twine. It has some plastic butterflies for company. In place of a desired “jungle out there” it can only sense vast masses of brick.

It occurred to me, looking at this picture, that our orchid symbolizes the human condition too. We too are out of place—and live an odd adventure in a fallen dimension. The difference is that the orchid, being more innocent or stalwart than we are, takes it all in stride and simply thrives and blooms.

Meaningful Coincidence

Just yesterday I was reading in a book authored by the Portuguese philosopher José Antonio Antón-Pacheco some reflections on Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life. That reading immediately predisposed me to like Unamuno’s general view of reality. This morning I come across one of Unamuno’s poems on Siris (link) titled “The immortality of the crab.” And in following that up, I encountered  another take on that subject written by Mexico’s leading poet, José Emilio Pacheco. The two Pachecos are not, as best I can discover, related in any way—but that simply adds to the coincidence.

Not alone in the world, not among the poets, anyway—or poet-philosophers—in feeling kinship with the grass and with the crab, expecting to encounter them even on the other side...of the Borderzone. 

What Can’t Be Mechanized

The religious life is a good candidate. But when I think about that, I realize that the religious life is just one aspect of individual soul development. Learning can’t be mechanized either. My meaning for mechanized? I mean repetitive behavior, following rules, repeating formulae, willing the truth of doctrines as opposed, say, to penetrating to their core meanings. The worst kind of mechanization, of course, is tribal behavior—where the faith is just a label of belonging to an “us.”

Excessive use of abstraction is a particularly dangerous habit in those spheres where the genuinely human is the core—provided that my own conviction is correct, namely that we belong to a much more sophisticated, subtle, and free order as souls than we do as embodied souls. It is a mistake to think that people who belong to one of the great religions, especially those with lots of ritual, are uniformly following rites and nothing else is going on. As there are no two snowflakes that are identical so also no two Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists, or Muslims are identical either, or any two adhering to yet some other faith—or none; vast differences separate individuals.

To the contrary however, all athletes train the same way and underpinning all good bridges is genuine engineering functionally identical, whether in their design computers, slide-rules, or just plain reasoning and experience guide the construction. The physical and soul realms have radically different characteristics. The soul escapes all mechanical constraints; you can put the harness on, but it won’t hold the horse. That is both a blessing and a problem. If only we could find the magic phrase or the right sequence of motions…

There is a big difference between the channel that brings the water and the water that it brings. All religious battles are about stonework, embankments, depth, shape, decoration, and such—the engineering of the channel. Interesting subject, to be sure—but the water is the same in all and what it’s all about. But while the human body needs the ordinary water and knows precisely how to use it, individual reception of the higher water, Grace, is much more subtle and complicated. We thirst for it but don’t know what we thirst for. In that realm, where mechanics have no rooting at all, the process of development is invariably and damnably subtle. We have to develop enough as individuals—whether in a system or outside it—before it begins its work in us. It requires learning; but how that process actually takes place is a great mystery, despite vast Babels of learning applied to education all over the world—as, seemingly, we get ever more stupid.

Contrasting Cycles

EWTN maintains a website where mass readings for the day are shown for every day of the year (link). On that site, beneath links to the texts, EWTN also shows a daily quotation taken from famous Catholic saints, councils, or documents. Today’s quote comes from Pope St. Pius X:

Truly we are passing through disastrous times, when we may well make our own the lamentation of the Prophet: “There is no truth, and there is no mercy, and there is no knowledge of God in the land” (Hosea 4:1). Yet in the midst of this tide of evil, the Virgin Most Merciful rises before our eyes like a rainbow, as the arbiter of peace between God and man.

The sun is shining here, the vegetable kingdom’s already dressed for Easter Sunday. The secular mood is cheerful: the economy is turning around, good employment numbers will be unveiled at 8:30 Eastern time—and the WSJ laments the fact that the markets are closed today and hence the DOW and other indices will miss the full swell of investor reactions.

I am reminded of the differences between different kinds of time and their cyclings: the natural, the secular, and the transcendant. We live simultaneously in all of these, awarely or not. In the eternal dispensation the rules are very different. The darkest day, Good Friday, is immediately followed by Easter Sunday, celebrating Christ’s resurrection—an abrupt change we never see in the realms down below. Heavenly time is of another kind and order. It accommodates itself to our flowing time here by a cycle of recurrence.

The Unaging Soul

The difference between the body and soul becomes a matter of actual experience as we advance in age. Our bodies call attention to themselves as their functions slow and problems manifest. The unity of the two structures weakens. This arises one fine day when we pass a mirror and the reflexive thought arises, “Who is that old man?”—and the question, for a nanosecond anyway, is quite sincere. Then comes the time when the unaging soul becomes quite aware of the fact that it is now in charge of a huge pet that’s getting very stumbly. Those who’ve owned an aging dogs and nursed it to its end will know what I’m talking about. As with dogs, so with our bodies. When they’re young they need to be restrained—and the exuberant messes they create need cleaning up—and so with bodies as they age. And in that process, gradually, there is a genuine, visceral sense of separation. The reaction will depend on temperament and situation. Poor old body—on the one hand. Damnation! I can’t do that any more!—on the other.

Some might argue that the soul ages as well, but I’d dispute that. That it doesn’t is quite obvious to those whose inner vigor has always been high, but I’ve also seen quite old, decrepit people suddenly come alive, laugh and joke like children, tell stories in excitement, their eyes suddenly full of light—when appropriately stimulated.

Identification with the body comes naturally in youth, persists in maturity, and then becomes virtually impossible in age. When that identification isn’t allowed to break, the price is depression or, minimally, grumpiness. These are the lessons of experience—rather than the derivations of some theory.  Indeed you can make use of the experience to judge various theories.

The theories are largely built by people in their youth and their maturity. When we get old they have less force; experience has come to rule. That we have unaging souls underlies belief in the afterlife. It is dismissed as the wishful thought of people who can’t go for gusto any more, but that is pure baloney. Death with total disappearance doesn’t phase a person of my age—nor, I’d venture to add, most people, especially those who suffer debilitating ailments. Hey. Let it stop. And if there isn’t anything thereafter, so what? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The soul, however, isn’t all that sure that it will simply go out like a blown candle. Many people, indeed, hope it will. If it doesn’t, there is that uncertainty again that has plagued us all of our life.

But what has plagued us, all of our life, all arises from our physical dependencies, one way or another—our own and that of those we love and value: their bodies’ health, their children’s bodies’ health, their income, safety, on and on. What that unaging soul anticipates—beyond the body’s final pains—is the pain of separation from people we have loved and once more being reunited with people we haven’t seen for many decades now but who’re still there, we think, in the hereafter.