Saturday, December 9, 2017



Afterthoughts and Fillers
By © Anton Vendamenc, 2017

3 The Senses as Embodiments of Religion

The greatest of expressions of religious feeling is music and poetry. Two of the greatest twisters of the sinews of the heart in the past were Sebastian Bach and William Blake.

One of the great problems with regard to religious feelng is that many people attempt to turn it into a white rabbit. That is to say, feeling is turned into something solid, like Heaven, the Garden of Eden, Paradise, Elysium, Arcadia, Heavenly City, and so forth. By turning religious feelings into a solid, we kill the appreciation of the Divine within ourselves. Can the Divine continue to exist as a white rabbit? The answer is “no”, because the nature of the living world is such that there should always be more subjects than one. If you and I are owners of a rabbit and we meet, each one of us is likely to insist that “My rabbit is prettier than yours”. If the rabbits were made of porcelain, soon one or both will lie smashed on the floor.

One may say that a melody and a poem are forms of objectification, and that consciousness necessarily trends toward objectification. Still, a melody and a poem are more ephemeral and physically less real as a porcelain rabbit. One can hear notes being played and words being read, but the sense of the divine is not represented by a certain painted idol, which is a step closer to the ephemral becoming an object. In other words, objectification proceeds by steps: from perception through the senses (hearing, sight) to becoming graspable by hand, which then shapes it according to the dictates of an ego that has little or no understanding of what it is about.

It comes to mind that one may also point to an overlooked sense: the sense of smell, of which humans have lost much, but which is elemental to other forms of life. In fact, smell may represent a greater sense of religious feeling, and is, thusly, superior to what Bach or Blake produced. This may be the reason why we are alive: smell makes religious feeling so immediate and real that we want to eat it or seek to engage with it through sexual contact. It is a way of objectifying without the use of hands. In short, we are what we smell. What we eat and copulate with sustains us in one way or another. This may be the reason why animals do not need humanlike consciousness. It may be the reason why the noses of immature minds—recruited by self serving governments to kill humans outside its incestuous circle—do not find the smell of corpses repulsive and keep returning to the battlefields until they in turn become carion.

I have always been impressed with the fanaticism with which my cats hunt, and after killing their prey (a word that is the very synonym of prayer) how they toss the dead mouse through the air this way and that, as if paraphrasing Blakes sentiments: “When the stars threw down their spears/ And water'd heaven with their tears:/ Did he smile his work to see?/ Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Indeed, I am horrified over the religious feelings of my cats (John Purr and Rumyancov) and amazed over the attachment and loyalty with which we regard our relationship. John Purr, a mix of Siamese and Angora, was thrown into my yard from a passing car with a suppurating leg that took a few months to cure. Rumyancov was rescued from a cold winter in the wood and brought into the house, for which he thanked me by claiming my house as his and shitting up every corner of every room. He got a thrashing, which he did not forgive by not coming near me for a year. Still, I let him live in the shed and fed him. Now he lets me pat him with my hands dressed in workmen’s gloves without biting my hands.

But I may be digressing.

I would like to suggest that languages, too, are created by a sense and sensibility that forms out of something like religious feeling. The howling of wolves is a good example of what I believe to be a proto-language arising out of religious feelings. In raga EC637, I write about anthropologist Pierre Clastres comments about the Mbya Guarani Indians of Paraguay. Writes Clastres: “The[se] pa’i, whom one is tempted to call prophets instead of shamans, give the astonishing profundity of their discourse the form of a langage remarkable for its poetic richness. We see in it a clear indication of the Indian’s concern to delimit a sphere of the sacred so that the language which articulated it is itself a negation of secular languate....” For example, these prophets call the pipe “the skeleton of the fog” and the fingers of God, Nanadu, “flowery branches”. The rise of the sun means the awakening of their language and with it the awakening of anguish and need to pray to the “inevitable ones”. But does not the failure of their prayers to connect with the Gods bring them frustration and after no response to their prayers a resort to violence? As Blake says of the Tyger: “Did he smile his work to see?/ Did he who make the lamb make thee?”

I have noted (in many ragas past) indications of a similar notion in the Latviyan language, my native tongue. Instead of discovering flowersy phrases, the phenomenon (shared by many other Indoeuropean languages) expresses itself through the so-called diminutive or endearing word, which can be brought into being through every noun and verb. A similar notion in English has been elimited and removed to the position of wisdom teeth. The latter are due to the violent incursions (using the written word as used by the media) of secular language into our subjective minds. For all practical purposes, the endearing word in English has been eliminated and left for use in personal names; for example: John < Johhny; James < Jamy; Ann < Annie; Barbara < Barbie. Even here the secular world intrudes by turning the endearment into a cutesy word that can be readily merchandised, re Barbie, Dolly, etc. As for the Latviyan language—it no longer exists as its original creators intended it. While the politicians fight for its existence, because the fate of the language is on every Latviyan’s mind, paradoxically the populist users of the language care not a whit about it, because in reality the language has been seized by commercial interests and no longer belongs to them.

The objectification of the word did not occur through poetry, but through law in the service of unconscionable trade and its ‘inevitable’ companion—unconscionable advertising. Like science, law can function only by killing the mind: if the law were to permit the mind to use the endearing word, subjectivity would be resurrected, and the entire codifice of law would fail.



(Next: A Populist Revolt in Virtual 'Paradise')

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