Metaphor

Beauty can be both macroscopic and microscopic. Ethics, by contrast, can really only be microscopic. But to the degree that we can bring beauty to the immediate, local and present, we encourage the ethical. Following an idea originally articulated to me by Bron Taylor who advises to step back to the point where the vantage point renders distressing things invisible and one is able to see the wider picture as a thing of beauty and rightness, I would phrase this as viewing the earth as the gods might from a distance, from outer space perhaps, and see her thusly in a pristine beauty. The pollution, the carnage, the greed become insignificant. If we can bring the gods-view, the view from a distance, to the immediate, local and personal, to the close-up, we might be able to diminish the ugly. That might be our moral task. With the perspective of the gods we might perform an ethical beauty and/or an aesthetic beauty in the here-and-now, and if and when so, we are ourselves then divine.

I’ve been watching and following the Wall Street protests. I think Chris Hedges’ “The Best Among Us” (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_best_among_us_20110929/) sums it up perfectly. From the idyllic enclave of the Midi, however, one can feel little more than powerless. It does become increasingly apparent that the ‘corporate coup’ has to end. Could the ‘Arab Spring’ be followed by an ‘American Fall’? And now the DC40 of the New Apostolic Reformation, through forty days of prayer, wants to replace Columbia/Libertas/Liberty with Christ and change the name of the District of Columbia to the District of Christ. For them, the Queen of Heaven is “a false goddess” who must no longer be worshipped. Columbia or Freedom is to be dethroned – as if that has not already happened in all but name.

Richard’s right-eye cataract surgery has turned out to have been not fully successful. He needs now to get the lens ‘re-shifted’. For this, it is a visit to Marseilles.

We had our two pagan ladies, Caroline and Amanda, the founders of Talking Stick in London, with us for nearly a week. They melded into the flow easily and were always entertaining. One day they decided to explore the lake but never got further than a bottle of wine in the village. For their last day, we went to the Plage de Pampelonne. At Aqua Club, I got to re-see Paul, the owner, after something up to two decades. St. Tropez afterwards was packed. It was a Friday evening, and the season had definitely not yet ended.

Just as Caroline was originally leaving London to come to us, she had been stung by a wasp. And just as she was leaving, while we were walking from the car to the bus stop, she was again stung – this time on her finger. I think this is called ‘playing with metaphors’. We make a significance out of patterned events. If we bring in the question of responsibility in connection with this, my current concept is that being responsible for an act of ethical beauty or one of aesthetic beauty renders the doer among the gods. True enough, the gods themselves as personified metaphors of nature are amoral. But they are also evolving – something that gods as gods do in a progressive sense. They might have the ability to move from an amoral status, which has a beauty in itself, to a constellation orbit of behaviour around an ethical centring point.

At least that is the question. I do know what I believe. I would guess that the proof of it would come with the world ultimately being reorganised along the lines of a divine model, the dynamic of the gods – what Caroline might call ‘energies’ or ‘powers’, Bron the ‘powers/movements of nature’, Deirdre and Andras the ‘earth spirits’. For me, they are simply ‘the gods’ – the gods in an expansive, not necessarily literal sense. But if we could collectively re-shape our world into something conforming to an ethico-aesthetic beauty, we will have ‘proved’ the gods. The responsibility for any of this always still rests with us.

The holy earth spirit models an image of what our future is desired to be. But so reviled is she in the current culmination of Western civilisation, so taken for granted as an unlimited resource there for the taking and without any bona fide consideration of meaningful consequences, that her very being is increasingly precarious. If Columbia, equally under threat, is the ‘Queen of Heaven’, the terra mater is the ‘Queen of the Here and Now’. Let us then have a re-modelled world as an affirmation of the pagan narrative, of the earth narrative, of the earth-spirit narrative, of the reclaiming narrative. Morality needs to be judged by the now perspective. The future can be no more than that of our children. What is it that we want for them?

Hedges speaks of serfdom. Though nominally different, serfs and slaves are essentially the same. When the ancients conquered a people, they did not have prisons capable of containing all their defeated captives. Instead, they often became slaves. Slavery is an alternate to imprisonment. If and when the bulk of us are all in prison, as Hedges and others might argue, then the model for improvement applies to each of us. This, like all our trajectories, becomes a metaphorical narrative. Collectively, this one concerning universal emancipation might just be the most important of all.

If I could sum up my entire philosophy in three words, that would be: metaphor metaphor metaphor. In itself, the calendar is a metaphor for the annual turn of the earth. This demonstrates that in addition metaphors have further uses and applications. So if a new cycle has been predicted by the Maya or not, the Aztecs or not, and supposedly a convergence of traditions, we might just seize upon this and make it our own narrative. Our approach need no longer be a dialogue/non-dialogue between rival and competing factions. It is time instead to write our own collective narrative. This is the very point when metaphor becomes narrative.

The Dominionist phenomena (Palin, Bachmann and who knows now who else?) will bring Christianity to a black-and-white confrontation. There is no compromise possible between Old Testament Christian militants and the original spirit of Christian compassion. Likewise, there is no possible accord between an Old Testament-type sharia and universal freedom and beauty. Richard interpreted my words ‘white’ and ‘black’ as racial, though this was the furthest from my mind. But could the confrontation be recast as that? I can see that for many Tea Partiers and the like, it could be or could become that.

The horror for me from the evangelical wing is its pompousness – its conviction from an established position. The irony is that the term ‘conviction’ is also applied equally to criminals. Conviction, therefore, may be seen as both condemnation and belief. Doesn’t that say it all?

I still ‘believe’, however, in my revered metaphors and wishing narratives. The gentle flow of the breeze is a physical expression of pure wishing. The unadulterated wish remains as the source of all. And each of our individual lives we seek to be the welcomed breeze that passes through and beyond.