POST:WASHINGTON POST-PREVIOUS POST,TOASTED

Hey Joe! Wattaya know? I just got back from the rodeo show. I took my show on the road, you see. And now I'm back. See. Any questions?

I was visiting my sister, who teaches at the University of Maryland, and she and Flo helped get me out Washington DC prior to the giant northeaster that hit the area yesterday. While flying back, I met some wonderful folks from the Chicago area, who were going to see a Chicago show, presumably musical, which purportedly represents an historic session featuring a jam with Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins; this was not unlike my comments from last week about the Traveling Wilburys, who played together for more than a year. So, John, there is some more pop culture here; happy for your comments.

Seriously, 2009 and this Christmas/new year season has been a watershed for me, as I hinted earlier in this blog. Subsequent events indicate that, as the year draws to a close, that which I have been seeking, and seeking to share, has only intensified. This blog does not represent just me but all the people that have brought us to this moment of communication. There is not a language on earth that I can use to even describe this, much less analyze it or control it. In addition, it has taken me 60 years to get out of my little boxes, as Pete Seeger used to sing, and to understand that something much larger than my understanding, reason, emotions, or will is involved here. The 3 pound brain that we all each have is in itself physically irreducibly complex. The added factors of billions of these brains any one of which represents the most complex organized unit in the known universe, attempting to communicate from vastly different experiences, genetics, and other influences even harder to define, makes it a genuine miracle that we can talk together and know one another at all. People that I thought I knew, it turns out I didn't know very well at all. Considering the complexity of just existing as a human being, I am not sure why I would've assumed that I even know myself, much less anyone else.

Existentialism is one modern way to evade reductionism and still retain materialism, but even with pure existence being philosophicaly affirmed, there are still many questions; many are looking for a third way between right and left, ideologies, and parties. We are constantly and often unconsciously searching for a happy medium or some third way which probably does not exist except at some locus outside of ourselves, it does not seem to be within ourselves, unless we count mere diversions as alcoholism, drug abuse, and apathy as, "alternatives."

Paradigm shift? New perspective? It may be something more than that and even more difficult to understand, much less accomplish.

But I do know that having spent time with my sister Catherine and watching her at home and at work, has given me another level of understanding of how little I understand another person, who is an unrepeatable singularity and not just a shadow of my own thinking or fantasy or dream life as sometimes artists and even physicians tend to think. Again, I can take only a fragmentary response to a Reality that is far bigger than any of us. C.S. Lewis once commented that if we really knew and could see the immense reality of the person next to us, we would be tempted to worship her or him as a god. But like the proverbial iceberg that sank the Titanic --( "even God could not sink this ship!" )-- most of our soul is under water and not seen; but even before we see the person we may run aground and sink on the unseen and unknown bulk we cannot begin to appreciate / perceive. This may be an aspect of why our relationships are so complicated and why they so often are ruined/shipwrecked. As Murphy's law suggests, the more complicated something is, the more there is to go wrong, the more often it goes wrong, and usually at the worst possible time. Corollary: if you fiddle with something long enough, you'll break it. The more interventions, as with mutations, the more of a monster you will have and not a hopeful monster whatsoever regardless of what Stephen Jay Gould may have thought.

Perhaps the best approach to these matters is the approach that the poet and the parable spinner are forced to take. The Canterbury Tales are certainly one of the first of many approaches- in the English language- to the problem in which we are forced to abandon artificial concepts and boxes in favor of individuals who will outlast the homes they live in and the monuments around them, but not the souls in the midst of whom they dwell. Bon mots, as Einstein said about Christ, are amusing but not pertinent to the enormity of the subject.

Not to trivialize matters, but to use some pop culture to make a point, Dr. Seuss said about Christmas, "it came without ribbons it came without tags, it came without packages, boxes, or bags. Christmas can't be bought from a store......... maybe Christmas means a little bit more." The younger we are, the less we tend to appreciate this; but as we get older, stuff on the material plane begins to shred and fray to show another dimension, a much larger dimension which we can more easily appreciate; or allow it to sink our ship by piercing our hull. Certainly the former scenario has happened to many "larger than life" people such as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Duke Ellington, T.S. Eliot and WH Auden and, as I just learned, Dave Brubeck the jazz artist who is the only artist I know who had a hit song in 5/4 time! The end of the year and the December season can be very difficult to endure but the opportunities to add a dimension of understanding may be unprecedented. Human beings naturally have ever marked time by seasons, occasions, anniversaries, festivals, birthdays, important dates in history, and so forth. That is in our nature. Indeed, we often use these cyclical days, dates, and seasons to plan for change, when on any given "ordinary," day we will tend to put things off as being too important to do without foreseeable contingencies. There are many theories of time and how we perceive it -- linear, cyclical, and infinite/without dimensions just to name a few. The Bible shows us linear time but also shows us that God is not limited to linear time. Science, prior to quantum physics, used and uses biblical/linear time to mark history, all very legitimately. But more recent discoveries suggest that just as God is not limited to linear time, neither is His physical universe. Reductionism however depends ironically, as does materialism, on the Biblical concept of linear time, coupled with cyclical time as marked by feast days and even returning miracles such as at the pool of Bethesda, where God/Jesus broke into his own linear/cyclical arrangement and reversed everything and broke every rule in order to heal one helpless individual who answered affirmatively to Him, "Yes, I do wish to be healed."

These are, again, fragmentary thoughts that are hopefully going to cohere eventually in my own mind and hopefully the individual who reads this will be able to connect their own dots given the points of light that I can see from here. We may be able to collectively see certain constellations if we cannot see the whole of the night sky any more than we can see patterns by looking directly into the sun. To me, if I appreciate what any given person is or has to say, even a single sentence or phrase could change my life. This is what happened to St. Augustine and probably to John Wesley and millions of others. If this has not happened to me yet, it would certainly be my desire and goal to undergo such changes in my 61st year and onwards. I hope what I'm posting will help some but I cannot begin to even appreciate much less summarize 2009 from this the limited location of this temple "of The Holy Ghost". Ask Him if true truth is your passion.