FICTION TO ILLUSTRATE PHILOSOPHY
Using fiction to illustrate philosophy — or whatever the discipline is properly called when it subsumes everything else — is traditional and memorable. It is particularly useful when trying to explore existential structures in human beings, because narrative is a form of phenomenology. Westerns are both exciting and containers for a philosophy of life at a small outpost standing against a vast landscape, which is one definition of the “sublime.”
“The sublime is a moment or description of something deeply transcendent or awe-inspiring in a poem.” (A Poet’s Glossary)
“In simple terms, the sublime in literature is every instance where we reach a threshold of ambiguity.” (blog.homeforfiction.com)
By using the town half-built, a mere presentation, we acknowledge the ways science has joined the humanities because neuroresearch claims that we neurologically construct our versions of the world by creating a small replica of plugged-together systems in our brains, the result of our sensate bodies and experience.
The most difficult character to invent is the indigenous boy found sitting in the back pew with his lap top. This story is bringing me to the point of my argument, but he will need to be the sharpest version of it. I will not let him be a sentimental cliché as boys and “Indians” often are. I want this to be a contemporary boy in modern circumstances — which are often brutal — who represents the classic Joe Campbell basic forces of bending to the land without playing at anthropology.
The forces of technology and the new sciences which are Buddhist/Transcendental in their basic views will help us escape from the grip of resource empires and violent domination, the idea of Great Men defined by wealth and power.
Here’s link to an academic discussion.
Part of my goal in writing is to recover whatever it was that was lost when Theos/God was dissolved by human knowledge. The fluid chaos that resulted needs some “precipitating particle” that lets the new system gel out of our new existence, which it always does, but not always in a way we want.
Besides losing a parent avatar, we have lost our ability to feel the radical community, relationship to all being of which we are a part, factually connected among living beings by our basic twists of DNA, which move among us, between us, and beyond us in our fossils. As well, we have lost the empathy that would make material culture more than monetary advantages. so that beauty becomes merely popularity which is marketable.
So what makes this tribal boy, ejected from his family by a dominant “stepfather” and rescued from starvation and abuse by a cultural lover and patron, sit in the back pew of a fake church watching Notre Dame cathedral burn? Why is a near-illiterate boy able to feel concepts he cannot name, like the Holy Roman Church, or even Paris. Or is this a dumb idea?
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After the saloon fire when Clara had moved to using the church shell’s “vestry” as her bedroom and — hearing noises in the sanctuary — came out wearing as a housecoat the ragged silk preaching robe she found in a closet — she discovered the boy with long hair and dusky skin sitting in the back pulpit with his laptop.
Still sleep-muddled, she asked, “How did you get here? I didn’t hear a vehicle.”
“I walked. I walk everywhere.” He looked up and saw her in the preaching gown. “Are you the priest for this place?”
“This is not really a church. It has no congregation. It is not sponsored by any denomination or the Catholic church which is not a denomination.” She scratched her head, making her hair stand up more than before. “What are you watching?”
“It’s Notre Dame burning.”
“Impossible! Cathedrals don’t burn!”
“Look.”
“Turn up the sound.” It was a small group of instrumentalists with a tenor soloist — Bach, mournful and deliberate.
“It’s already happened months ago. They say it started from workers trying to do repairs. They say it was not one building completed long ago, but a lot of added-on stuff, not always very well done. Sort of like the Christians.”
“You make them sound like a tribe.”
“Well, aren’t they?”
“How do you know anything about the Christians anyway? Missionaries?”
The boy laughed. “Hardly.”
He had been too much beat up by his “step-fathers”, the sequence whose incomes let them stay until his mother got fed up with them or they lost their jobs. She was a hard and practical woman who loved her children but needed to keep them eating and had no way of making money otherwise. The interest payments from her Dawes allotment trust didn’t even amount to a hundred dollars a year. Tribal Christmas payouts, the same. Welfare asked too many questions. His mother taught her kids that if any cars came out to their cabin, they should hide in the brush, but few ever did. Some didn’t know the place existed at all.
But he snuck off to go to school, walking the several miles. This school was the usual state district but since it was on the rez and in the less populated foothills, it had a few conceits. For instance they assumed all tribal kids were natural poets. So they wrote grants to employ known poets for weeks at a time and produced little booklets. A certain kind of poet really liked signing up for this.
The boy never had any poems in these chapbooks because he was illiterate. The poet ignored that and since he had an excellent memory, he reeled off famous poems: Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling — corny old stuff. He was particularly fond of Whitman. One day his contract was up. By that time the boy understood that the poet was gay, though he didn’t really know what to call it — he was just “that way.” When the poet left, he took the boy with him, thinking he was so far from civilization he was probably safe, not infectious.
After a few years in various cities surviving in various ways, the boy was older, smarter, and finally realized that there is no such thing as inevitable. He walked off. By the time he got to the movie set town, he’d learned how to hustle but keep moving.
He said to Clara, “The poet would call this fire natural deconstruction.”
