LIGHT THAT COMES ON A SLANT
For two decades I’ve been a bit of an anchorite in my shabby village home on the east slope of the Rockies. Others write novels and advertising copy that present their views, often marketable. But I’ve been out-of-categories, trying to get under or before them, “reframing” as the pop phrase goes, and ignoring others who don’t quite get it or actively oppose me.
I’m not quite academic, only religious in a pre-classified way, not quite literary, not quite an anthropologist, too random and personal to be a proper historian, and vitally interested in the new neuro-research that totally revises our understanding of human minds as they have acquired the pre-frontal cortex that was once removed by lobotomy when people were troublesome. This brain bulge above the eyes is the location of “humanism” which remains connected to our mammal/primate nature through “feeling”. it’s a matter of survival, not morality except as that supports our lives.
In my small seminary (3 and later 4 professors) attached to the U of Chicago Div School, it was customary to do a winnowing at the end of the 2nd of the 4 year program. I was told my fatal flaw was that I was all enthusiastic for major figures (like them, they implied) but became disappointed and opposed them. This was true and I survived the accusation only through luck and connections.
So now I’m all enthusiastic for Slant Books, which I found through an essay on snow by Robert Clark, beautifully written in a way I’d forgotten was possible. It was far away from the flickering pop posts on Twitter, but it was what I’d been trying to find through Twitter — and I did. Slant Books is defined by Gregory Wolfe, the editor, as “Christian humanism” which puts it sort of alongside what I thought Unitarianism was when I signed up for it. That is, Christianity is a “canon” of shared systems that once governed an unruly Europe and is now abused as a money-raising scheme and political engine. Slant Books goes back to the basics, the vitality and truth that the ideas once had.
It may throw me back out of my affections when they refuse my idea that “geology is next to theology” because I value a thing I call the geology of the mind — that is, the sedimentation, the igneous ideas, and the deep tectonics of science. If we leave behind the “science” of millennia ago, we must admit that they are quite different in modern technological and quantum mechanic terms. This means that even morality must move or (better) remove the palings that fence out what is immoral. They may not want to do that, which will turn me back to contempt and sadness.
The metonymy of a big humanoid as a way of addressing the unnameable unknowable is prone to corruption and conversion into a weapon because big humanoids have all the faults of humans. I leave this “part for the whole” strategy because of the realization — coming through DNA study — that all living beings share the same code. We are literally all related from bugs to elephants, weeds to roses and what seems like solid objects are actually dynamic processes that we see in pauses. This includes people. So the person you thought was “this” becomes “that” on their way to the “other.” Disconcerting.
In the Christian system (NOT the Old Testament) Jesus is seen as an intercessor who is both knowable (human) and able to somehow access the unknowable (superhuman). Modern technological people take science — the method, not the organized institutions — as their intercessor between the known and unknown. They don’t necessarily admit there is an entirely unknowable, but many do let it touch them and thereby turn to Christianity or Buddhism or some other body of thought about that predicament.
My “geology is theology” approach puts the planet itself in the Jesus role between what is humanly felt through experience and memory, and what can only be theorized. This means that DNA is the means of creation, a chemical water-bound code, rather than a big hand reaching down through the clouds. Though we are aware and potent, we cannot control mountains, climate, earthquakes and volcanoes. We are destroyed. But we figure it out and “take measures.” Until one day we too die and are remembered, hopefully with regret that we’re gone.
I’m so pleased that Slant Books exists, but also I’m daunted that “Christian humanism” is a kind of elite academic privileged pre-existing way to think. I opened up a video of Wolfe in conversation. The preamble is a tableau of whiskey and typewriter, the cliché of the troubled but brilliant male writer. Where’s my old lady coffee, cat, and computer? Wiped out by young maladjusted males on drugs? This vid addresses that: http://gregorywolfe.com/works/video/
or https://www.youtube.com/watch v=KJn4s4IhXjQ&feature=emb_logo
The vid is wittily called “How Many Publishers Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?”
This community of like-minded people gathered by Wolfe uses the word “ekphrasis” which I didn’t know. I realize that my book, “Bronze Inside and Out”, is as much ekphrasis as biography. The word originally meant description and thereby expansion of what is in a work of art but it can also be used to speak of the world. I used it to explain the material culture surrounding the creation of bronze sculpture.
Material culture necessarily depends upon describing things and seeing what they are for, what they mean. Thus the collections of indigenous artifacts lead one into ekphrasis. To some degree that’s what I tried to do with “12 Blackfeet Stories,” keying each off an artifact. My original training was in acting, which meant not just describing but inhabiting the world of a particular culture. The “Method” we studied was to recall a time/place memory that would take us to that context.
We are told that our brains are necessarily systematized through the sensations we experience and remember. A brain is a humongously intricate tangle of connections that are accessed by a kind of filing system of sights, sounds, tastes, and so on. Careful observation and inspired connections are what create any art.
I hope I will not become cynical in regard to the community of Gregory Wolfe and Slant Books. I had hoped to go forward but wondered how and this may be a path. There are attachments like this that have endured. U of Chicago Div School. Theatre. Blackfeet. The east slope of the Rockies. Certain persons beyond the palings.
