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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